Photo by Robert Zunikoff on Unsplash

Grief is the remarkably complex process of adapting to an important loss. If there’s one thing I’ve learned in the aftermath of my wife and daughter’s deaths, it’s that there’s always another layer of the onion to peel back. It’s as exhausting as it is enlightening.

What I Thought I’d Resolved

The stark truth about both of their deaths is that I couldn’t save either of them. I was the main man in their lives and I was sworn to protect them. I did everything I knew how to do and they’re both dead. That’s a damn tough pill to swallow. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll be gagging on it for the rest of my life.

Guilt is a familiar bedfellow to anyone who’s lost someone they love. You tell yourself that if only you’d been a better, smarter or more loving person they’d still be alive. It’s an all-too-easy trap that keeps the griever chained to a past they can never change.

I’ve had moments of crushing guilt since Chloe died. How could I not have seen how much her mental health had deteriorated? Why was it so hard for me to listen to my wife when she was telling me there was something very wrong? What made me believe so many of the lies she told me?

At the same time, being a great dad was, and is, the most important thing in the world to me. I know I did the best I could to be there for my kids. I tried my best to create the kind of relationship with them where they would feel safe coming to me if their world felt like it was crashing down.

It didn’t happen with Chloe.

I’ve thought and talked about all that in excruciating detail. I’ve written about it, talked to my wife about it and made it the focus of quite a few sessions with therapists. In the three years since Chloe died, I’ve gotten to a good place and released most of the guilt I was carrying.

Then last weekend happened. The fucking onion must be peeled.

The Message

I have a complicated relationship with my younger brother. I won’t bore you with all the details here but suffice it to say we’re very different people. Until last weekend, he hadn’t mentioned Chloe a single time to me. Literally not one word.

I asked him about it last year. I was curious about what kind of thought process would lead someone not to check in on his brother after his daughter’s death. I sent him a carefully worded message about it. I wrote in a way to minimize the chances of him getting defensive.

He responded with, “If you needed something from me you could have asked.” Ok then.

Then out of the blue, he sent me this message:

I was surprised he messaged me, but I was astonished by my reaction. I felt like a grenade went off in my chest. I’m not an angry or violent person at all and I wanted to put my fist through a fucking wall.

It took everything in me to send him a semi-coherent response. This is where we left it:

I couldn’t calm down for almost four hours. My body was vibrating with tension and explosive with pressure. I wanted to tear my own skin off just to change my fucking state. My wife had to talk me off the ledge and I’m grateful she’s always by my side.

Navel Gazing

At the same time, my eighteen months of Somatic Experiencing therapy has given me the capacity to be much more present with what I’m experiencing — regardless of how uncomfortable it is. In the midst of the extreme discomfort I was experiencing, I was able to be curious about what was happening. I found it fascinating and wanted to explore it further. What was this about?

The first thing that came to mind was that maybe I did still feel guilty. It seemed like a likely culprit considering the substance of his message and the reaction I was having. I’ve always been open to the idea that guilt still lingers under the surface but was reasonably confident that I’d resolved most of it.

I figured it was also anger at my brother. He has the emotional development of a box of hair and here he is, deigning to impart his unearned opinion on what I should or should not be feeling? Fuck you. Where were you for the last three years? Or the many years prior to Chloe’s death?

I also knew that in his own socially awkward way, this was a bid for connection. He was trying to help me.

That made things more complicated. I felt some level of guilt for having no interest at all in turning toward this bid. Rebuffing this offer of “kindness” feels in conflict with my values in some way. I try to be a kind, compassionate and empathetic person. But I had zero confidence that if I had this conversation with him I wouldn’t completely lose my shit on him. I pictured him explaining his screwed up, full-of-holes reasoning and was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from unleashing all the hurtful, judgmental things I think about him. Not trusting my ability to control myself is unsettling.

Lastly, there’s grief that this is what my relationship with my brother has become. We used to be quite close but our lives have gone in very different trajectories. I don’t see any chance of things ever being different. I’m usually able to accept that but this brought any lingering pain right to the surface.

Walking into the Darkness

A few days later I had an appointment with my therapist. I was looking forward to bringing this up with him. As I did, I found myself getting worked up all over again.

He listened to me and when I was done he said, “A reaction like that to someone else is usually about something that’s unresolved in ourselves.” I figured he’d say something like that and I was looking forward to unpacking it with him. As much as one can look forward to discovering more ways he’s screwed up.

Then he said something that was a punch in the gut. “You show me clearly in every single session that you have a tremendous amount of unresolved guilt about Cindy and Chloe’s deaths. I’ve been waiting for the right time to bring it up and this feels like that time.”

Fuck you, onion.

He started telling me about Carl Jung and shadow work. He explained how much of his own work he’d done and how disturbing and terrifying it can be. He also made clear that understanding and integrating is the path to peace, healing and joy.

Let’s go, therapist man. I’m here for it.

He asked me to imagine having that conversation with my brother. He told me to place my brother at a distance in my mind that felt safe to me. I started with him on the couch, across from me in our living room. That was way too close so I banished him to my back door. Too close. How about the back yard? He ended up all the way across the yard in my mind’s eye.

He encouraged me, as he always does, to stay present with what was happening in my body. What happened next started to feel like a mushroom trip. My brother doesn’t look well in real life. In my mind, in that moment, all his features became exaggerated to the point where he looked like a menacing, evil clown.

And somehow, I had the awareness that I was looking at myself.

What happened next shocked me. A volcanic sense of hatred welled up inside me. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life. It was dark and vicious to the point where I scared the shit out of myself. My face was contorted in rage. I wanted to strangle my brother — myself. Somehow, I knew he represented me. What the fuck?

We debriefed the experience and I felt like I’d been run over by a truck. I was emotionally and physically spent. I stumbled upstairs and told my wonderful wife that I needed to lock myself in the dark basement by myself for the rest of the night. Thankfully, I was too tired to be disturbed.

The Gift

It’s been a week since that session and our next one is in a week. I’ve felt quite a sense of calm and peace this week. It’s not clear to me how or if it’s related to the work I began last week. What I do find surprising is that I haven’t been able to connect back to that sense of hate at all in the last week. I find it so interesting that there’s something so dark and important within me and my logical mind can’t find it.

As I grow and heal, I’m learning the limits of my logical mind and I’m a more whole person because of it.

When I’ve shared the message from my brother with people, the most common reaction is something like, “What an awful thing to say.” I don’t see it that way at all. He gave me a huge gift, perhaps inadvertently. His message led me to a door that I need to walk through to continue healing. It came to me at the right time and in the right way to allow me to see it clearly.

Three years ago I couldn’t have had that therapy session. I wouldn’t have been able to stay in the room with what came up. The therapy, the writing, the willingness to keep looking has built the capacity to be present with something that dark without running from it.

This is what healing actually looks like. it’s not the absence of pain. Pain will always be a part of our human experience. It’s building enough of ourselves back up so that when the next layer appears, we’re able to square our shoulders, stiffen our spine and face it.

Whatever’s next, I’m here for it. I can do it and so can you.

The onion waiting to be peeled. Healing demands we do.

If you recognized something in this story, there’s a reason.

I’m building a program called Leading Through Loss. It’s structured work for men who are stuck after loss and know something is still in there but can’t find it on their own. Not therapy. Not a group. It’s a map of how you’re protecting yourself and someone to help you read it.

I’m opening it soon. If you want to know when:

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You’re sitting at a table in a room dimly lit by a single lamp. It’s close to midnight and everyone’s long since gone to bed. You’ve just finished your fourth double and you’re praying for sleep. In other words, it’s a night like any other.

The calendar on the wall reminds you of what you already know. The third anniversary of your son’s death is bearing down on you. Again. You didn’t know it was possible to miss someone this much.

You’ll put your fist through a fucking wall if one more person tells you that you “need to move on.” How can you get on with your life when the person you were sworn to protect is permanently locked in the past. You failed them once. Leaving them behind means failing them all over again.

That’s never going to happen on your watch. So you pour another drink in the name of honouring your boy and hate yourself for doing it.

You’re not broken, weak or failing at grief. You’re loyal, and loyal and lost can look exactly the same.

What Nobody Tells You

The loyalty isn’t a conscious decision you’re making. It’s one of the by-products of the operating system that’s been guiding your life like an invisible hand. The loss didn’t create it but it did supercharge it and it’s been running that way ever since.

You don’t bond with people you care about by talking about your feelings. You do the things that need to get done. You show up for them when things are hard. Your bonds with them get wired into you at a biological level. It’s that deep.

Here’s a term you can forget about as soon as you read it: vasopressin bonding. It’s driven by a hormone that activates during shared stress and challenge. Every time you faced something hard together, or for them, it made a deposit that told you this person was more than just loved. They’re essential like safety and oxygen are essential.

Their death doesn’t make the wiring disappear. You keep looking for what your program tells you is necessary and you keep coming up empty. It’s like waking up every day and remembering you’re missing an arm.

It hurts like hell every time it happens.

The grief isn’t just emotional. It’s neurological and the protection system that formed around it isn’t weakness. It’s your brain trying to hold onto something it spent years learning it couldn’t function without.

It’s not a conscious decision when your protection system kicks in. It’s automatic and unseen. It’s a set of rules your mind assembled without asking you. You’ve got rules about what you’re allowed to feel, what moving forward means and what kind of man you are.

These rules feel like love and function like a cage.

And now the system that was built to protect the bond is protecting the grief instead. It keeps you frozen at your post. You’re numb, checked out, and feel guilty when you don’t feel like shit.

That’s not weakness, even though it feels exactly like it. It’s your protection system doing its job.

The problem is it never got the memo that the emergency is over.

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The Decision You Don’t Remember Making

When you lost them, something in you made a decision. It wasn’t a conscious decision you sat down and thought through. It’s more like a system update that happened in the background while you were busy trying to stay standing.

The decision might have sounded something like, “As long as I’m not okay, they’re still real.” Sometimes it goes like, “My pain is evidence of how much I love them.”

I can remember thinking, “I hope if she’s looking down, she sees how much I’m hurting so she knows I will always love her.”

Grief changed from a natural process that follows a loss to evidence that what you had mattered. It became proof that you’re not the kind of man who just moves on and replaces or forgets people. You’re still honouring them as you’re still bearing the crushing weight of the cross you’re carrying.

When they died, you drove a flag in the ground. And you made an unconscious promise to stand guard over it. You've been at your post ever since, faithful and exhausted. Moving forward feels like moving away. And that feels like betraying them and betraying the man you need to be.

You’re still doing what needs to be done. You’re going to work, paying the bills and showing up the best you can. You’ve been standing guard at the flag ever since. You’re not doing it because anyone asked you to and at some rational level you know it’s not helping anyone. But leaving your post feels like the worst thing a man like you could do.

You call it tired, stressed or going through the motions. Your family calls it checked out, isolating or even addiction.

What it actually is, under the surface is loyalty. Fierce, costly, completely unconscious loyalty to the person you lost and to the man you were when they were alive.

How it Keeps You Stuck

The protection system running underneath all of this isn’t invisible if you know what to look for. It shows up in four specific ways.

It keeps you from fully engaging in your life. It’s not that you don’t want to. You might want it more than anything. But every time you start to care about something, the system pulls you back. It’s like the Death Star’s tractor beam in Star Wars. You can’t see it but you can’t break free from it either. You know what used to matter but you just can’t seem to get there. So you stay checked out and keep going through the motions.

Your system is protecting you from having to answer a question that feels unanswerable: who am I without them? Their death didn’t just take them from you, it took the version of you that only existed in relation to them. Father of. Husband of. The man she believed in. The man his kid needed in a specific, irreplaceable way. The system keeps you frozen partly because moving forward means stepping into that question without an answer. That void is the most terrifying thing you’ve ever faced.

It makes guilt the price of every good day. Your system has a hard and fast rule that feeling ok means forgetting. Every moment of pleasure sets off an alarm. Even not feeling like shit for a few minutes can trigger it. The guilt isn’t irrational. It’s the system enforcing its own logic. It’s making sure you’re still paying what’s owed so it keeps the accounts balanced.

It turns the pain into evidence.There’s a belief underneath all of this that convinces men the depth of their grief is proof of the depth of their love. Which means if the grief eases up, the evidence starts to disappear. The system protects that evidence like a lion protects his pride. If the pain fades it means your love will fade with it. What does that say about the love you had for them? Your protection system will never let you find out.

It turns the loss into your identity. You’re the man who will carry it forever and honour what you’ve lost by staying broken in it. Those stories you tell yourself about yourself have a vital job. They keep you from becoming someone you can’t respect. You’d rather die than become the guy who moved on too fast and loved too little.

The trap isn’t the grief. The trap is what the grief has become.

Somewhere along the way, without you noticing, the mourning stopped being something you were doing and became something you were being. It stopped being a response to the loss and started being your entire operating system.

Here’s what I want you to see: honouring someone and standing guard at their memory are two different things. The flag was never the problem. The trap is confusing the flag with the mission. You’re guarding something that doesn’t need guarding from people who aren’t threatening it. And the cost of that guard duty is your life.

The flag you planted was an act of love. Staying at the post is an act of self-hatred.

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Knowing Isn’t the Same as Free

The person you lost would not want this for you. You know that, brother. People have said it to you and you’ve said it to yourself. And then you poured another drink to make it all go away. It never does though, does it? It never fucking does.

Knowing it and being free of it are two completely different things.

Knowing it is information. Being free of it requires you to understand what’s actually forcing you to stay at your post. It’s the long-standing beliefs your system telling you how to deal with this loss. You’re in an abusive relationship with them. They whisper that they know what’s best for you while they’re sticking a shank in your side.

Most men never see those beliefs clearly and so never question them. They just feel the weight of them and assume that’s grief. Or that they’re pathetic. That’s just how it is and it’s who I am now.

Hear me now.That’s complete and utter bullshit and you need to see it for what it is.

You can’t feel your way out of your protection system. The system isn’t running on emotions. It’s running on assumptions that you’re not aware of and so never bothered to question. You can’t willpower your way through them. If you could have you would have done it already. You can’t wait them out or hope they go away. You have to see them so you can understand what they’re protecting and why.

That’s a different kind of work than processing feelings. It’s more like diagnostics. You need to find the code that’s running the machine and reading it clearly for the first time.

The Question You’ve Been Avoiding

It won’t give you the whole picture. But it will show you where to start looking.

Ask yourself what would it mean about you, and about them, if you started to feel okay?

Don’t answer it quickly and don’t answer it the way you have been since they died. Sit with what actually comes up, no matter how uncomfortable it is. And it’s probably going to be almost intolerably uncomfortable.

Whatever comes up isn’t grief. It’s the assumptions underneath the grief. It’s the foundation of your protection system that’s been running without your permission.

That’s the loyalty trap and seeing it clearly is the beginning of the way out.

The Way Out

You’re never going to be the man you were before. That man is gone and you know it.

But the man on the other side of this isn’t a lesser version. He carries the loss while he moves forward. He honours who he’s lost by living in a way that would make them proud, not by standing guard at a post that doesn’t need him anymore.

The way out isn’t through the emotion. It’s through the map.

Leaving your post isn’t betrayal.

It’s your next act of love.

If this landed with you, there’s a reason.

I’m building a program called Leading Through Loss. It’s designed to help men create the map. It’s a structured process for seeing exactly what’s keeping you at the post and where it comes from.

It’s not therapy. It’s not a support group. It’s diagnostics , the same kind I described above, done properly, with a guide.

If you want to know when it’s ready, put your name below. No pitch. Just a notification.

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Photo by Eleni Afiontzi on Unsplash

Grief is the long, complex and painful process of adapting to a loss that upends everything. You don’t think the same things. You don’t feel the same things. And you can’t do the same things.

You feel like a different, lesser human being whose life has been frozen at the time of death. You can’t move forward and you might not even want to. Moving forward seems like leaving them behind. Every option feels like hell so you might as well choose the one that keeps you closest to the person who died.

The problem is that you’re no longer really living and you’re hurting the people who didn’t die.

Something is terribly wrong and you know it. You can’t name it and you’re not sure you want to. But it’s there. It’s everywhere. You’re isolating yourself from your family and friends, because it’s better than dumping your shit on them. You’re driving around for a half hour rather than coming straight home from work. You’re numbing your pain with all kinds of things that you know are making it worse.

Most men don’t call that grief. They call it stress or being busy. More often than not, they knuckle down and call it nothing at all.

But here’s what’s actually happening. The part that’s really keeping you stuck didn’t start with the loss.

It started long before.

Present & Absent All At Once

Here’s what most people get wrong about a man after a devastating loss. They see how hard he is to reach and think he’s checked out or doesn’t care. They might even think he’s move on much more easily than should be possible.

Usually, they’re not true. He’s protecting himself. He’s trapped in something he can’t see clearly enough to escape.

Picture a guy who’d never miss his son’s football games. Now he hardly shows up at all. It’s not because he doesn’t love his son. He loves him more than life itself.

But since the loss of his daughter a few years ago, he’s barely holding it together. It’s taking everything he’s got to keep a lid on the explosive emotions that are eating him alive. He’s terrified that if he shows up to the games, he’ll fall apart in public while he’s surrounded by other families. And if that happens, he’ll humiliate himself and his son.

That man isn’t checked out. He’s protecting himself.

And if you’re honest, you know exactly what that feels like.

Maybe it’s not football games. Maybe it’s the one-word answers you give your wife when you can see her reaching out. You know you’re failing her but you’re terrified that if you open up, you’ll fall into a pit you’ll never be able to climb out of. That if that happens, you’ll be responsible for destroying what’s left of your family.

Your behaviour makes complete sense once you look deeper and see what it’s protecting.

The problem is the price. The same walls keeping you from falling apart are also keeping you from the people and responsibilities that give your life meaning. You’ve got the brake jammed to the floor at exactly the moment you most need to move.

Facts Written in Blood

Underneath every protective behaviour is a worry. And underneath every worry is an assumption that justifies it. It feels less like an opinion and more like a fact written in blood. You see it as an obvious truth about how the world works, what people are like, and what you deserve.

Your assumptions might look like this:

• If my kids see how broken I am, they’ll stop feeling safe with me. And I’ll have failed them in a way I can’t undo.

• If I let people in before I’m ready, I’ll say something that damages those relationships permanently.

• If I allow myself to feel better, it means I’m leaving her behind.

Take a second with those. Do any of them sound familiar?

If they do, it isn’t because you’re weak or damaged. It’s because you’re human. Belief systems act like a filter on reality. Your brain uses prior assumptions, values and expectations to make sense of the world because there’s far too much going on to evaluate everything from scratch. Those belief systems don’t just help you navigate reality. They distort it.

And here’s the question worth sitting with: where did those beliefs come from in the first place?

The Operating System Older Than the Loss

The loss didn’t create them. It cranked up the volume on them.

Almost none of the beliefs driving your life started with the loss. They were already there, shaping how you moved through the world, long before any of this happened.

You already knew what men are supposed to do when things get hard. You’re weak if you show people the emotions you’re feeling, or even acknowledge them to yourself. You owe the people you love strength because they’re depending on you. If you break, everything breaks.

They didn’t start with the loss. They’ve been passed down through generations. They’ve been reinforced by the men you’ve modelled yourself after. They’ve always been a part of you. They were just waiting for something big enough to bring them fully to the surface.

Your loss was that thing.

Which means this isn’t just about grief. It’s about a decades-old story you’ve been telling yourself about what you’re allowed to feel, who you’re allowed to be, and what moving forward is going to cost you.

And here’s what that means:

You can’t grieve your way out of your belief system.

You’re not just carrying the loss. You’re running an operating system that makes carrying your loss unbearably hard. That system was installed long before they died.

The grief work and the belief work are not the same work.

Finally Seeing it Clearly

Most men who do eventually ask for help focus on the loss itself. Talking through and processing it matters. But for a lot of men it isn’t enough because the loss is only part of what’s keeping them stuck.

What actually moves the needle is being able to see the full pattern in front of you. When it’s laid out clearly, you get past “I’m isolating myself.” You can see what you’re doing, what you’re afraid will happen if you stop, and what belief underneath it you’ve been treating like a fact for twenty years.

Something important starts to change when you can see that map. Not because the grief disappears. You’ll carry it in one form or another for the rest of your life, and that’s the truth nobody tells you. But grief that’s running your life and grief that’s simply part of your life are two very different things.

What changes is that you can finally see that you’re not broken.

You’re protecting yourself from your worst fears coming true. That protection made sense at one point in your life. It may have been the only option you had. But you’re not that same person anymore and those beliefs can be examined, questioned and released.

Instead of them having a grip on you, you can have a grip on them.

That’s the moment men describe when they talk about feeling the earth shift under their feet. It’s not the grief magically lifting. It’s seeing, for the first time, that what was keeping them stuck wasn’t the loss itself.

It was an old belief system that the loss turned all the way up.

And that’s something you can actually work with.

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This is Personal

I lived this pattern for years after my first wife’s suicide. I drank every day for almost five years after her death. I was harming myself and harming my family and couldn’t admit it to myself.

I didn’t realize I was drinking to avoid the pain I needed to face. I didn’t know I was in pain. I thought I’d put her death behind me. But I couldn’t stop drinking, no matter how much it was costing me.

I couldn’t imagine a life that wasn’t worse without booze. I wouldn’t be able to socialize with people unless I was half in the bag. People wouldn’t even like the sober Jay. And if I told my wife I needed help, she’d know I was lying to her all those years when I said I had everything under control.

Then I stopped. And the complete opposite of all those beliefs came true. I remember walking the dog, thinking, “I completely made up every one of those beliefs and they kept me in prison for years.”

That’s the moment. Not when the grief lifted. When I finally saw what was underneath it.

I’ve heard almost every man who does this work describe a version of that same walk. They’ve experienced a different loss, hold different beliefs and are stuck in a different prison. They all have the same realization and almost always say the same thing at the end:

I didn’t realize how much of this was already there before the loss. It’s been running my life for as long as I can remember.

The grief is real and so is the love behind it. But the beliefs that they had to carry it alone, that showing it would cost them something, that moving forward meant leaving someone behind were more ancient than the loss.

If you’re reading this and something about it feels true, I’m building something for you.

It’s a focused process that helps you build exactly the kind of map this piece describes. It’s not therapy or a support group. Its a structured way to get clear on what’s actually keeping you stuck. You’ll uncover the patterns, the protection, and the beliefs underneath it all.

It’s almost ready. If you want to know when the door opens, raise your hand.

Send me a message

Or drop a comment and I’ll make sure you’re the first to hear about it.

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In Part 2, we’ll define what real masculine strength actually looks like.

In Part 3, we’ll examine what it would take to build something our sons would be proud to inherit.

Photo by Alexandra Voinova on Unsplash

The Lie We’ve Inherited

Most of us look at the state of the world and feel betrayed. Leaders lie to our faces without consequence. Naked aggression passes for leadership. Loyalty to our tribe becomes more important than seeing the truth. We’re pitted against one another while the machinery that rewards this behavior keeps doing what it was built to do.

At the center of many of these systems, generation after generation, are men. Why is that? The easy answer is that there is something inherently destructive in masculinity. The harder answer is that we inherited a definition of strength and never stopped rewarding it.

No generation sat down and collectively voted to glorify force over wisdom. We simply kept elevating the same traits regardless of where they lead.

Every culture trains its boys in what earns them status. We learn quickly what gets applause from our fathers, our friends, and society at large. It’s the men who never back down. The men who dominate the room. The men who protect their tribe at all costs. The men who hide every emotion except anger.

We call it strength, and it earns us the respect we crave. What earns respect gets imitated. What gets imitated gets rewarded. And what gets rewarded gets pursued. Status becomes the scoreboard that tells us we’re winning.

Over time, that admiration has hardened into systems that determine who holds power and how they wield it. This is how a culture manufactures its future leaders. It is less about conspiracy than applause.

If humiliating your opponent is celebrated, humiliation becomes the goal. If certainty earns admiration, critical thinking and humility become weaknesses. If loyalty outranks all else, truth becomes negotiable in order to defend it. War-making does not begin with weapons. It begins in what we teach boys to admire.

For generations, we have confused dominance with strength. The system continues because too many believe this is the natural order of things.

That’sthe lie we inherited.

The Monster-Making Factory

Incentives are not moral statements. They are signals that tell us what behavior will be rewarded and what behavior will be punished. Human beings are wired to adapt to those signals. It is what keeps us safe inside a tribe.

For most of human history, belonging was a matter of survival. Acceptance meant protection and exile meant starvation, exposure, or death. We evolved to be highly tuned in to status and approval. We to notice what earned respect, to mirror what dominant members valued, and to suppress traits that threatened our standing.

We’re still wired that way. We may no longer fear wolves stalking us in the night, but we still fear social exile.

The wiring is ancient. The systems delivering the signals are modern. When the signals reward dominance, aggression, and blind loyalty, those traits become the path to power.

Cultures aren’t shaped by what they claim to value. They’re shaped by what they consistently reward.

Men have been in charge for a long time. Which means men have largely shaped the rules for what earns status and what gets punished.

Men have also disproportionately occupied the most competitive and violent hierarchies in human history like war, high-stakes politics, and corporate power. Those environments reward aggression, risk-taking, and dominance. Over time, those traits became tightly linked with how we define masculine success.

The factory runs on incentives.

The traits that earn entry to the top are admired at the bottom. The man who dominates gets promoted. The man who never questions authority is labeled loyal and dependable. The man who protects the tribe at all costs is praised as strong.

Over time, status becomes the highest authority in the room. It stops being a signal of competence and starts being the thing men organize their lives around.

Advancement, admiration, and belonging become the measures of success. Whatever earns status is treated as strength.

No conspiracy is required. The system reinforces itself. It rewards a certain kind of man, puts him in charge, and lets whatever rules him shape everything and everyone beneath him.

When dominance, blind loyalty, and aggression rise to power, they shape policy and institutions. And when force becomes the highest virtue, aggression is inevitable, and the cost is eventually paid in blood.

That’s how the factory makes monsters.

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A Minion in the Machine

I didn’t grow up immune to any of this. I learned the same lessons most boys do. Mask your weaknesses. Hide your insecurities. Turn disagreements into zero-sum games where someone has to win, and make sure it is you. Show anger if you must, but never vulnerability.

I learned that dominance wins arguments. Winning made me look confident, and I thought confidence would earn me respect. If I was able to defend my tribe in the face of challenge, I wouldn’t have to consider that it might be wrong.

No one handed me a manual and walked me through it step by step. I watched it modeled and rewarded, over and over.

And it worked. My career progressed. I earned respect. I convinced myself I had cracked the code to being a successful man.

In time, I began to understand the cost. I was hurting people by bullying and talking down to them. I was hurting myself by ignoring the thoughts and feelings telling me I was acting like an asshole. I was destroying my ability to lead people while still clinging to my identity as a leader.

After enough painful failure and reflection, I saw that I wasn’t just caught in the system. I was helping keep it running.

I didn’t question the signals or resist the incentives. I kept doing what earned me status. I was more concerned with impressing men above me than being honest about what ruled me.

That’s how the factory survives. It’s not only because of the men at the top, but because of men like me who never stop trying to impress them or question the definition of strength they are trying to live up to.

The real question is not whether we are strong. It’s what our strength answers to.

Masculinity Is Not the Enemy

Masculinity is not inherently toxic. The crisis we are living through is not a crisis of masculinity, but of masculinity governed by status rather than integrity.

Status itself is not evil. Men are wired to seek respect. Hierarchies are not new. The desire to progress, to achieve big things, and to build something meaningful is not the problem. Status can signal competence and reward excellence. Healthy cultures recognize and honor men who build and lead with integrity.

The problem begins when status stops being a signal and becomes the master. When status becomes the highest authority, a man’s strength stops being anchored in integrity and starts being traded for approval, promotion, power, or belonging.

Masculinity clears land and builds cities. It works through the night and does the most physically demanding, dangerous jobs. It stands between danger and the people it loves. You find it on oil rigs, in mines, in sewers, and in the places most people would rather not go. It carries crushing weight because someone has to carry it.

The drive to build, to protect, to endure, and to sacrifice are not defects. They are strengths. But strength must answer to integrity rather than the approval that fuels the factory.

Masculinity is powerful, and anything powerful can be corrupted. Without character it dominates others without remorse. Without self-mastery it becomes power without restraint. Without integrity it becomes twisted, turning on the very people it was meant to protect.

That does not mean healthy masculinity is harmless. A man governed by integrity is capable of force. He fights when something worth protecting is threatened. But he doesn’t fight to impress or dominate other men. He doesn’t escalate to defend his position. He fights only when it is necessary and he stops when it is no longer justified.

The answer isn’t softer men. The answer is stronger men. That means men strong enough to restrain themselves, strong enough to choose integrity over applause, and strong enough to carry responsibility without being ruled by status.

The problem isn’t masculinity.

It’s masculinity that seeks status at the cost of integrity.

What Rules You?

Every man answers to something.

You claw your way up the corporate ladder because you’re ambitious. You stick with your tribe, even when it doesn’t feel right, because you’re loyal. You refuse to back down, even when backing down is the best move, because you’re strong.

Underneath all of it, something else is ruling you. For most men, it’s the need for status.

Status isn’t evil. Everyone wants to succeed and be respected. Wanting capable men to see you as capable is normal. The problem starts when status becomes the God you worship.

A man ruled by status escalates when he’s challenged because losing publicly is an intolerable risk. He defends his position long after he knows he’s wrong because backing down feels like weakness. Weak men are low status men. He protects his tribe without question because exile feels more dangerous than dishonesty.

He tells himself he’s being strong but he’s being ruled.

Discipline isn’t the answer. Many powerful men are disciplined. They wake early, train hard, and work long hours. They build companies, lead people and command rooms.

But discipline in service of status only makes you more effective at the wrong thing.

A man ruled by integrity shows up differently.

Integrity means your strength answers to something higher than applause. It means you don’t twist the truth to protect your position. It means you don’t defend your tribe when your tribe is wrong. It means you don’t escalate to avoid looking weak.

Integrity can come at a massive cost to what we’re taught is important. It can cost you an important promotion. It can cost you membership in the groups that matter to you. And it can cost you the approval of people whose approval matters to you.

It’s a cost too many men are unwilling to bear. The dividing line isn’t between strong men and weak men. It’s between men ruled by status and men ruled by integrity.

The factory didn’t begin with monsters. It began with ordinary men chasing status. And it will keep elevating the wrong men until ordinary men decide to answer to something higher.

“There’s evidence everywhere in our lives that the way you’re thinking is completely fucked. And here you are again, overreacting for the five thousandth time. If you had any fucking sense, here’s how you’d look at this…”

I’d just stood there and listened to a thirty-minute, rage-filled monologue from my wife about how leaving the toilet seat up proved I had no respect for her as a woman. How could I call myself a father to daughters if I so clearly hated women?

This time it was the toilet seat. But with bipolar hijacking her mind and body, there was always something that justified her total dysregulation.

And objectively, she had left a trail of wreckage behind her. She’d spent us to the edge of bankruptcy more than once. There were infidelities. Rehab. Locked psych wards. Homeless shelters. It was like being one of those guests on Oprah where people watching think, “That could never happen to me.”

No one could fix her and she couldn’t fix herself. She’d seen every professional, tried every program, and swallowed every pill they pushed. Things only got worse.

I saw myself as the last line of defense. If no one else could help her, maybe I could reason her into sanity. Maybe if I just explained it clearly enough, logically enough, forcefully enough, I could change the way she thought.

The irony? I couldn’t even apply logic to myself.

I kept trying the same strategy over and over, even though it never worked. In fact, it made everything worse. I blamed her for the fact that I couldn’t get through to her. It never occurred to me that I was part of the problem.

Blaming her only made her feel more alone, increased my frustration and made me angrier. In the end, I stopped being able to see her as anything other than a crazy person who was wrecking our lives. And that guaranteed that I’d try the same thing the next time she got upset.

Why Men Reach for Tools

When someone we love is in pain, we see a neon sign screaming “Problem to Be Solved!” You see her crying and you feel intense pressure to do something to make it better. Your reaction isn’t random.

When we see someone we love in distress, our own stress response kicks in. It’s a survival strategy that takes over before we realize what’s happening.

We become less tolerant of uncertainty and more focused on control. Action lowers anxiety faster than uncertainty does. Doing something feels better than standing there helpless. Helpless feels pathetic and dangerous.

Men know the best defense is a good offense. So we reach into our Man Toolbox and get to work.

We provide detailed and completely unwanted analysis of the situation to help the other person “think more clearly.”

We correct their thinking because we think logic trumps emotion. Logic is black and white and male, while emotions are messy and female. The holes in their reasoning are obvious to us, so we “helpfully” point them out.

Often the solution seems right there in plain sight. If they’re too upset or irrational to see it, someone has to point it out. And that’s what they came to you for anyway, right?

There’s also a cultural layer most men don’t understand. From a young age, men are trained toward the kind of support that fixes, protects, and handles things. We’re taught to do something concrete to improve a bad situation. Being useful and competent is one of the highest expressions of manhood.

Anyone who is a man, or loves a man, knows we’re not great at dealing with tough feelings, whether they’re ours or someone else’s. When they show up, we don’t have much practice, and it can feel intolerably uncomfortable.

It’s so common, smart people have come up with a term for it: normative male alexithymia. It basically means men aren’t great at identifying and putting words to what we feel. You can forget the term now, if you haven’t already.

It doesn’t mean we’re defective. It means no one showed us how.

So when someone we love is angry, sad, or grieving, we reach for the tools we were given, whether they work or not (they usually don’t).

• Logic

• Solutions

• Perspective

• Timeframes

• Plans

You can call it helping. But stop for a second and ask yourself: who is this really helping? Fixing often calms you down faster than it helps them. It lowers your anxiety. It gives you back a sense of control. It protects you from feeling helpless. It doesn’t do much for the other person except make them more upset.

The person in pain doesn’t need you to fix yourself by fixing them. They want to feel seen, understood, and safe. No screwdriver is going to do that.

This isn’t about men being cold or heartless. It’s about doing something feeling a hell of a lot safer than standing there not having a clue what to say or do.

Why Fixing Feels Like Love

If competence and usefulness feel like manhood, helplessness feels like failure. It challenges our identity as protectors and providers.

We tell ourselves that if we can solve it, we’re not powerless. If we’re not powerless, we can still be useful. And if we’re useful, we still matter. We’re not just talking about anxiety anymore. We’re talking about our sense of self-worth.

But it goes deeper than that. When someone you love is hurting and you do nothing, it can feel like you’re abandoning them. Doing something feels like fighting for them. And that’s what a loyal protector does.

Hard emotions are brutal because they can’t be solved. They can’t be argued into submission. You can’t negotiate them away for someone else. You can’t reason someone out of experiencing them.

When you’ve tried everything you know how to do and none of it works, it feels like you failed them. Fixing feels like love because you’re confusing action and effort with devotion.

Sometimes fixing isn’t about easing their pain. It’s about escaping yours.

What Fixing Actually Sounds Like

It rarely sounds cruel, although it certainly can. It sounds reasonable to you. It sounds like offering something practical they can do right now. It sounds like a guy who’s just trying to help. At least, that’s what you tell yourself it sounds like.

Read through this list:

1. “At least they aren’t suffering anymore.”

2. “They wouldn’t want you to live like this.”

3. “Staying angry won’t bring him back.”

4. “You have to move forward.”

5. “Time heals all wounds.”

6. “Everything happens for a reason.”

7. “Just focus on what you can control.”

8. “Look on the bright side.”

9. “You’re overthinking it.”

10. “You’re taking it too personally.”

11. “Don’t let it ruin your day.”

12. “Calm down.”

13. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

14. “You’re being irrational.”

15. “Crying about it for another half an hour won’t solve anything.”

16. “You need to be strong.”

17. “Other people have it worse.”

18. “You’ll laugh about this someday.”

19. “Other people have figured this out before. You can too.”

20. “Can we not do this right now?”

21. “They’ve always acted like this. How can you still get upset when they do it again?”

22. “You’re hard to be around when you’re like this.”

23. “Why don’t you just [insert unwanted advice here].”

24. “If you won’t go talk to them, I will.”

25. “So let me get this straight. You tried the same thing that didn’t work the first time. And you’re upset it didn’t work again? What did you think was going to happen?”

Be honest. How many of these have you said? How many have been said to you?

Drop the number in the comments.

While you’re at it, drop another number in the comments. What percentage of the time did it make the other person more upset?

Now read that list again. Not as the person who said it. Read it as the person who heard it.

• The way you’re thinking and feeling about this is wrong.

• I want this to be over with so we can get back to normal.

• You’re being unreasonable or irrational.

• You’re a failure for not being able to sort this out yourself.

• I don’t understand what the hell you’re talking about.

• Fix it so I don’t have to deal with you.

• Make this less uncomfortable for me.
  

Is it any wonder they get more upset?

It doesn’t matter that you’re not trying to judge or dismiss them. It doesn’t matter that you’re trying to restore order to something that feels chaotic.

When someone is upset, they don’t need order. They need to know you’re actually trying to understand them.

When you jump straight into fix-it mode, it doesn’t land as support. It lands as correction. And correction feels like rejection. Rejection always hurts.

It doesn’t matter if you mean well. Good intentions don’t erase the impact of what you’re saying and doing. They just make it harder for you to see the damage while it’s happening.

When Fixing Breaks the Relationship

At first, it just feels situational. You’re trying to help. They’re not responding the way you expected, so you double down on the only thing you know how to do. They shut down, you agree to disagree, and you both move on with your lives.

Then it happens again. And again. And again. Before long, something starts to change. They stop feeling safe and supported and start feeling managed and corrected. They begin to feel like a problem you’re trying to solve instead of a person you’re trying to understand.

So they stop talking. Not because they’re done feeling, but because they’re done explaining themselves to someone who doesn’t seem willing to hear them. They decide it’s easier to keep it to themselves than to keep defending themselves.

Meanwhile, you’re left feeling unappreciated and confused. You start to feel rejected, like nothing you do is good enough. You’re doing everything you can to help, and somehow you’ve become the bad guy. What the hell happened?

This is where resentment takes root. You resent them for rejecting your effort. They resent you for rejecting their experience. Neither of you set out to hurt the other, and yet you both end up hurt.

Over time, vulnerability starts to feel unsafe. You’re both worried about getting burned again, and neither of you wants to go first. Instead of talking about what actually matters, you talk about tasks and logistics. The relationship still functions, but something vital is gone. What used to feel alive now feels like a model of efficiency and emptiness.

All because fixing felt like love, and doing nothing felt like failure.

That’s exactly what happened to Cindy and me. Her mental health made everything more volatile, but her experience was as real to her as mine was to me.

We stopped being able to talk. Any strong emotion turned into a fight. Every issue exploded into conflict. I was trying to win and she was trying to survive. We both felt misunderstood and attacked.

The two young people who once couldn’t get enough of each other became enemies living under the same roof.

This Was Never About Logic

Hard emotions don’t need to be corrected. They need someone who is willing to try to understand without shutting them down.

Pain will never calm down because you argue with it. It doesn’t magically disappear because you expertly explain why it doesn’t make sense. Pointing out the holes in someone’s experience won’t make them hurt less.

What makes it easier is realizing that you’re not responsible for making it easier in the first place. And all it takes is you having the strength to sit on your hands and listen.

Fixing is about taking control of the situation. Support is about letting go of control so you can love them how they need to be loved in the moment.

The first is about you trying to make yourself feel better and the second is about loving them. They aren’t even close to the same thing.

What To Do Instead

If you want to try something different, it’s not complicated. It sure as hell isn’t easy. In fact, it can be unbelievably hard, especially when they’re upset with you.

Don’t correct their emotions. Don’t offer a solution unless they ask for one. Stay in the conversation longer than you want to, and as long as they need you to.

When you feel the urge to explain, defend, or fix, just stop.

You need a pattern interrupt. It’s something you say to yourself that keeps you from reacting on autopilot. It creates a little space between what just happened and what you’re about to do.

The one I use is simple:

Being effective is better than being right.

Being effective means actually getting the outcome you want. In moments like this, the outcome isn’t winning the argument. It isn’t solving the specific problem. It’s strengthening the relationship.

If I focus on being right, I’ll do all the things we’ve just talked about: correct, argue, explain, fix. And it will almost always make it worse.

The second thing you can do is simple. Say, “That sounds really hard.”

And then shut the fuck up.

It will feel like you’re doing nothing. You’re not. Sticking around when you can’t control the outcome takes more strength than winning the argument ever did.

This isn’t about men being broken, cold, or mean-spirited. It’s about us using the only playbook we were handed. We were taught that fixing things is strength, and sometimes it is.

It’s just not the right strength here.

The real courage is standing in the pocket when you can’t fix it. It’s choosing connection over being right. It’s choosing to listen and understand instead of trying to solve.

It’s the most important relationship skill that we were never taught.

If you’ve made it this far, you don’t get to pretend you don’t know.

If this hit home, I’m running a live workshop on February 28, where we’ll go deeper and actually practice what this looks like in real conversations — especially when emotions are high and your instinct is to fix the problem.

We’ll walk through real scenarios, and learn a simple model that will help you show up better in every emotionally charged situation you face.

If you want to stop repeating this pattern, the details are below:

When Good Intentions Turn Into Fights

February 28 from 1-2:30 PM EST.

Register Here

I wrote a short guide that lays them out called 10 Realities Men Run Into After Loss (and No One Warns Them About)

Grab It Here

I tried to write this essay on the third anniversary of my daughter’s death.

I told myself I would turn a brutal day into something meaningful. Something intentional. I planned to write an inspiring piece about the lessons I’ve learned since losing her.

That’s not what happened.

Instead, I spent the day on the couch, stuffing my face and feeling sorry for myself. Which, ironically, is one of the lessons grief has taught me.

Grief does not care about my plans.

Nine days later, I finally feel ready to come back to this. Not because I found clarity or closure, but because enough of the fog has lifted to tell the truth without pretending it’s inspirational.

When the Pedestal Collapsed

Humility has never come easily to me, especially when it came to parenting. I’d convinced myself I was an exceptional father, whether that certainty was earned or not.

My arrogance only grew once I started running a business coaching other dads. They sought me out and paid me for my wise counsel. I happily gave it to them, and to be fair, it seems to have helped a lot of people. Before long, my identity was tangled up in being the dad expert.

Meanwhile, back in real life, I was busy judging friends and family for their parenting. I noticed their lack of discipline and bad behaviour. I kept score and also offered a lot of unsolicited and unwanted advice.

And here’s the real kick in the gut.

Every single one of their kids is still alive. Mine died, plagued by mental health issues, and almost killed four other people driving drunk and stoned.

I can’t imagine a more violent way to be ripped off a self-built pedestal.

It’s not that I was a complete asshole. I had grown. I had learned to keep my mouth shut. I’d mostly stopped telling people what I thought they should do. But the arrogance didn’t disappear. It just didn’t make it to my lips as often. I still believed I knew what was best and spent a lot of energy stopping myself from saying it.

That meant I wasn’t actually present. I was too busy fighting myself.

Not anymore.

The “dad expert” couldn’t save his own daughter. And the parents I silently, and not-so-silently judged? Their kids are mostly fine. At the very least, they’re still breathing.

I understand now that I don’t have a clue what’s best for another human being. I don’t even know what’s best for myself half the time. I don’t see that as a failure. I see it as a gift.

It freed me from the burden of thinking I’m supposed to save people.

The war inside me is over. I’m more curious and empathetic now. If someone asks for my opinion, I’ll offer it. But I’m no longer attached to what they do with it.

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Mindset Has Its Limits

I put down the bottle for the last time on August 30, 2014. A few months later, I finally started grieving my first wife’s death. Almost five years after she died. Grief helped me dismantle the victim story that had kept me a slave to the past.

Realizing how wrong I’d been about grief forced a bigger reckoning. If I was that wrong about something so important, what else had I gotten wrong? The answer turned out to be a lot.

I plunged headfirst into personal development. I read everything I could. I started a business. I set massive personal and professional goals. I became obsessed with my own growth.

And I drove myself half-crazy in the process.

Nothing was ever enough. The targets had to be higher. The plate had to be fuller. If I didn’t have six-pack abs, I thought my life was falling apart. I was generally optimistic and positive, but I was making everything harder than it needed to be.

I knew I hadn’t always been this way, so I went to therapy to figure out what had happened to me. I learned some important things, but not much changed.

Then my daughter died.

I approached her death the same way I approached everything else. I decided I was going to win at grief. I told myself I’d royally screwed it up the first time, but this time would be different.

Within a month, I started writing a book about grief. Not long after, I had to stop. I had no capacity. I lived with near-constant anxiety. There were moments when I was genuinely afraid I was losing my fucking mind.

I used every tool I had. I did everything I knew how to do. I told myself I would leave no stone unturned. I only used empowering language. I committed to facing whatever grief wanted to show me. I went on retreats. I did guided psychedelic journeys. I went back to therapy.

I wrote. I made videos. I tried to help as many people as possible. I focused the full force of my mind on healing and moving forward.

And for the most part, it helped me not make things worse.

But it wasn’t enough.

I didn’t have unlimited capacity to weaponize my mindset. I still found myself depressed, exhausted, and wracked with anxiety. Again and again.

Eventually, I turned on myself. I started to believe I was weak. If mindset was the answer, why couldn’t I get my shit together? I had moments of real panic wondering if I was stuck with this broken-down pathetic version of myself.

That’s when I learned about my nervous system.

I discovered Somatic Experiencing and began to understand what had actually been happening in my body. I realized I’d been living in a state of chronic hypervigilance for nearly fifteen years. Like a fish that doesn’t know it’s in water, I had no memory of any other way of being.

For months, dropping out of my head and into my body felt terrifying. My mind was where I managed my experience. It gave me the illusion of control. Staying there felt safer than feeling what was actually happening. I knew it wasn’t working, but at least it was familiar.

Before this, I dismissed body-based work as woo-woo nonsense for weak-minded people who couldn’t think their way through problems. Why would you bother meditating if you could be out doing something productive?

Now I know better.

There are things you will never out-think, out-frame, or out-discipline. Some pain doesn’t need a better story. It needs presence.

And sometimes the strongest thing you can do is stay in your body when every instinct you have is screaming at you to escape it.

Strength Requires Help

I used to tell myself I was the rugged individualist. Someone who didn’t need help. Someone who could muscle through anything and bend the world to his will.

I told myself that story because I loved the way it sounded. I even convinced myself it was true.

I raised my kids through their mother’s mental illness and suicide. I was a single dad for much of that time. I kept functioning, producing, and caring for my girls. In my mind, that made me a winner who could tackle anything on his own.

Except it wasn’t true, even then.

I borrowed money from my parents and friends when my wife spent us to the edge of bankruptcy. My mom moved in for months at a time to help me take care of the kids. I drank far more than I admitted, trying to survive another day.

Even so, I clung to the idea that I was different. That I was uniquely able to face these challenges for good.

Chloe’s death shattered that lie for good.

There are some burdens that are far too heavy to carry on our own. If we try, we don’t become heroes. We get crushed.

I’ve relied on my wife far more than I’m comfortable admitting. Without her love, encouragement, and boundaries, I’m certain I would have been swallowed by addiction. Even with her beside me, I’ve stumbled. More than once. I’m grateful she helped me pull back before I did irreversible damage.

When my first wife died, I had no male friendships where I could be honest. Now I have a band of brothers who are unequivocally in my corner. They show up, they call me forward, and they lift me out of the pit. I still hate asking for help. It still feels like failure. I do it anyway, because it works.

Most unexpectedly, I’ve become open to Christianity.

I find the teachings of Jesus profoundly relevant and comforting. Believing that my wife and daughter are together for eternity brings me a desperately needed sense of peace. And looking to God as a source of strength and a loving partner to walk with me gives me the strength to get back up when I’m on my knees.

I don’t know where my faith journey will lead me, but I’ll follow it wherever it goes. I’m in a Bible study with some of those men I mentioned earlier.

Right now, it’s my most important daily reminder that I don’t have to carry this cross alone.

I didn’t write any of this because I’ve figured grief out.

I wrote it because I’ve learned some important lessons, and learned them the hard way.

There’s freedom in no longer pretending that strength means doing it alone, that mindset can solve everything, or that I know what’s best for anyone else.

This episode is about what happens when a family loses a son and a brother to suicide after a long, exhausting fight with mental illness.

In this episode of the Man Down podcast, Jason sits down with , a husband, father of six, and technology leader who lost his 23 year old son, Nathaniel, in April of 2024.

For nearly a year before Nathaniel died, Eric and his family were living inside the chaos of severe mental illness. Hospitalizations. Diagnoses. Psychosis. Constant fear. Constant hope. Constant exhaustion.

They were still fighting for him when he died.

This conversation covers:

• Watching your child unravel while doing everything you can to help

• Living inside the mental health system and realizing how broken it is

• The shock of losing a child to suicide while trying to protect younger siblings

• What it does to a marriage, a family, and a father’s sense of identity

• The moment life resets and the old version of you disappears

• Why grief forces a man to re-evaluate what actually matters

This is a brutally honest conversation about parenting, helplessness, guilt, love, and how a man keeps going after the unthinkable happens.

This episode is for:

• Parents navigating mental illness with a child

• Fathers carrying grief they do not know how to name

• Leaders trying to show up while their personal life is wrecked

• Anyone learning that you do not go back to who you were before

If you have ever felt like your life split into a before and after, this conversation will feel familiar.

If this episode hit close to home, the 10 Realities Men Run Into After Loss (and No One Warns Them About) guide goes deeper.

Grab Your Guide

Photo by Son Do on Unsplash

Self-respect doesn’t vanish overnight. It gets chipped away by the ways we think, talk, and act after a devastating loss.

Most men don’t notice it happening. They’re still working and handling their responsibilities. From the outside, it looks they’re keeping it together in the face of overwhelming challenge.

Every choice to lie, rationalize, or manipulate seems small on its own. You know it’s wrong because it feels terrible, but you tell yourself tomorrow will be different.

And then tomorrow is exactly the same. Before you know it, you’ve become someone you hate, and that, your family barely recognizes.

Here’s where it starts.

1. You lie about how you’re actually coping

You tell yourself you’re just “blowing off steam,” but you hide how much you’re actually drinking. You drink at lunch, on the way home, after people go to bed, and make every one a triple. You do your best to make sure no one sees it.

You say you’re just tired, but you’re really hungover from the night before. You get up early, push through and hope no one notices and bad things have gotten.

You delete browser history, clear apps, or wait until everyone’s asleep before you scroll or watch porn. You know exactly why you do it that way.

You tell people you’re fine but your private habits tell the truth.

And you know it.

2. You work yourself into the ground and call it responsibility.

You bury yourself in work because it’s a way to feel in control of something. There are clear expectations, measurable wins, and you can leave the emotional mess of your life behind.

Your family gets whatever energy you have left. If you have any left at all.

You know you’re choosing work over them. You know it’s causing them even more hurt.

You just don’t know how to stop.

3. You break commitments to yourself and pretend they don’t matter.

Every day becomes a cycle of making and breaking promises to yourself.

You tell yourself you’ll slow down. You’ll get your temper under control. You’ll handle things differently next time.

And then the next time comes and nothing changes.

No one knows about these promises. Except you. And every time you break one it costs you.

4. You take it out on the people who didn’t cause it.

You hold it together everywhere else. You don’t have a choice.

Then you walk in the door and unload on your grieving family. The slightest things set you off. You say things you regret and that you can’t take back. You scare the shit out of the people who are trying to love you.

You wouldn’t accept this behavior from another man who wanted to date your daughter.

You hate that you keep accepting it from yourself.

5. You beat the shit out of yourself and call it accountability.

You replay everything leading up to their death in a never-ending doom loop.

You blame yourself for things you couldn’t control. You convince yourself that if only you’d been better they’d still be alive. You tell yourself this is your fault, even if it makes no sense.

You think you deserve your self-inflicted punishment because you failed.

And yet it will never bring them back. It’s just ruining the life you have left and you can’t find a way to let it go.

6. You avoid hard conversations because you don’t trust yourself anymore.

You know what needs to be said, but you can’t bring yourself to say it.

The words are right there, but once they’re out, you don’t get to take them back. You’re afraid of what will happen if you admit how bad it really is. People will see you differently and you’ll just be making them carry your baggage.

So you keep it to yourself. You tell yourself you’re being strong. You tell yourself you’ll deal with it later. In the meantime you keep busy and stay useful.

Avoidance feels safer until you realize you’re losing respect for yourself because of it.

7. You manipulate the people you love when they confront you.

You don’t own it when your partner or your kids call you out for your anger, your drinking, or your work hours

You rationalize it by telling them they don’t understand the pressure you’re under. You minimize by pointing out lucky they are they have a man in their life who cares enough to try. And you turn it around on them by making them feel crazy for even bringing it up.

All you care about is “winning” the moment.

Afterward, you know exactly what you just did.

8. You turn moments of “breaking down” into proof you’re pathetic.

You torture yourself for crying, snapping or shutting down. The words you use reinforce your failure. Crying is “breaking down,” feeling scared is “being a pussy,” and being overwhelmed is “falling apart”

All you see is weakness, failure and a loss of control. You see something embarrassing and instead of giving yourself a break, you pile on the shame.

And torch whatever self-respect you have left.

You’re not alone if reading this was like looking in the mirror, or it sounds like someone you love.

There is a way to stop this from continuing and start rebuilding some self-respect and showing up better for your family.

I’ll be sharing something practical for that shortly. If you’re interested in hearing about it when it’s ready, send me a message and say “me,” or reply to this email.

Photo by Yap on Unsplash

“Listen up, man. Everyone around you is on the verge of falling apart and you’re the only person holding this family together. You’ve always wondered how you’d show up when the shit hits the fan. Well, this is it. No one is coming to save you.”

Grief is hard for men to recognize because it rarely looks the way they expect. It doesn’t often look like lying on the floor in the fetal position. Quite the opposite, in fact. It looks like output. They work more hours, take on more responsibility, and stay in constant motion.

From the outside, it looks like resilience. The people around them marvel at how quickly they’ve gotten back on their feet after such a devastating loss.

It looks like leadership because it’s leaders who make decisions, keep things moving, and absorb the pressure so no one else has to.

It gets mistaken for strength. After all, only a strong man could take a hit like that and still show up every day for his family and his company.

These are the qualities that men are told make men. That’s why it goes unquestioned.

Hyper-Productivity as “Coping Well”

Productivity doesn’t just help men survive grief. It earns them approval.

The pattern is predictable. They work longer hours, take on extra projects and make themselves responsible for solving everyone else’s problems. They stay useful, decisive, and stoic because breaking down is not a fucking option.

To everyone else, this looks like strength. People say things like:

“I’m blown away at how you’re holding it together.”

“I’d never be able to do what you’re doing.”

“I hope my son never faces tragedy. But if he does, I hope he handles it just like you.”

They mean it as praise and it matters because it tells him he’s doing grief right. It feels like a lifeline preventing him from falling into a pit from when there’s no escape.

What no one says is that this version of “strength” works because it keeps the grief locked down and out of sight.

This isn’t just anecdotal.

Research on grief and stress consistently shows that men are more likely to cope through action, responsibility, and problem-solving. After loss, men are more likely to increase work hours, return to work quickly, and throw themselves into tasks. It’s not because they aren’t grieving, but because action is where they still feel functional.

In other words, this isn’t men doing grief wrong. It’s men doing grief the way they were built and trained to survive it.

Work gives the pain somewhere to go so no one else has to deal with it. Responsibility turns the pain into something people respect.

Externally, he’s performing but internally, he’s falling apart. And as long as he’s producing, no one questions what it’s costing him.

Why Action Feels Like the Only Option

Left to its own devices, grief feels everywhere at once. It’s unpredictable, invasive, and impossible to get your hands around. It crashes over you without warning and takes up more space than anything else in your life.

Action feels safer because it gives grief rules. When a man stays busy, his existence has structure. There’s a schedule to complete, a list to knock off and a next thing to handle. That structure creates predictability and predictability creates the illusion of control. At some level, he knows it’s an illusion, but it’s still miles better than the alternative.

Work is a place where effort still equals results. You do the work and something gets done. The math still works. It can feel like the only thing that still does.

That’s how grief turns into a job you never clock out of.

It’s when he stops that he realizes how exposed he is. The memories he’s been running from are right there waiting for him. The guilt, regret and helplessness overwhelm is mind and day. He’s forced to make direct contact with the exposed wire of the loss itself.

He feels out of control, like he’s failing and that everything is falling apart. So he drags himself back up off the floor and keeps moving. It doesn’t fix his grief but at least it keeps it at arm’s length for another day, hour or minute.

It feels like relief. Until it doesn’t.

Work gets him through the initial shock. Being needed is what turns it into a way of life.

Being Needed Becomes the Drug

Men don’t just work more after loss. They make themselves indispensable. They become the one who handles what the people around them can. They solve the problems, manage the details, and shoulder the burdens that no one asked them to take on.

It’s not as simple as they’re avoiding grief. Being needed gives the pain a purpose. It turns into a sense of duty. You don’t leave your position just because you’re wounded. You check the perimeter. You keep watch. You make sure everyone else gets through the night.

He’ll hold himself together so he can hold everything else together. That’s the deal with the devil he makes, often without realizing it. If I’m useful, I don’t have to be broken. Responsibility doesn’t take the pain away, but it takes the focus off it.

The problem is that he’s still carrying the weight of the loss on top of carrying everyone else. Getting back up when he takes a knee takes more and more out of him.

Eventually, his legs give out and he ends up exactly where he’s been running from.

Why Even the People Who Love Him Can’t Stop It

It’s not that no one wants him to slow down. Often, the people closest to him are desperate for it. They want him present with their pain instead of trying to outwork his own. They want him back.

But wanting him to slow down and being able to stop it are two different things.

His output is rewarded in ways that matter. Bills get paid. There’s food in the fridge. The lights stay on. He keeps things moving at work. That pressure doesn’t disappear just because someone loves him.

At home, pushing harder looks like distance.

But slowing down looks like collapse, and collapse feels like adding another tragedy to the one he’s already trying to survive.

So when the people he loves beg him to ease up, he doesn’t hear care. He hears that they don’t understand the pressure he’s under. He hears that they don’t understand he’s the one keeping the ship afloat.

When he keeps going, it’s not because he doesn’t care. It’s because this is the only way he knows how to keep everything from blowing up.

Over time, that gap turns into resentment. She feels shut out and scared she’s losing him. He feels cornered and out of options. The one thing he knows how to do isn’t working. And the world keeps rewarding his competence anyway.

So the spiral continues.

As bad as things are, stopping still feels more dangerous than pushing through.

When the Wheels Come Off

This is where the bill comes due. It doesn’t happen all at once. It’s like maxing out a credit card. At first the payments are manageable. Then the interest stacks up, and the options disappear.

Grief is the same. It shows up as exhaustion so complete that sleep doesn’t fix it and time off seems to make it worse. Everything sets him off. He snaps at people he loves and hates himself for it later.

At home, he’s there in body but his mind is a million miles away. He’s quieter, he isolates himself and seems impossible to reach. He spends more time in the garage, drunk, or doom scrolling the same stupid shit he’s watched countless times.

He was never great at expressing his emotions but now he barely registers as human. He knows something’s terribly wrong. He’s fighting a losing battle and it’s terrifying. He doesn’t know what to do about it without risking everything falling apart.

He stares at the shell of a man in the mirror and asks himself, “I’m doing everything I’m supposed to do. What the fuck is wrong with me? I’m going to lose everything.”

He’s starting to realize what he’s tried to deny for way too long. Busyness doesn’t resolve grief. It delays the reckoning. He’s forced it underground, where pressure doesn’t dissolve. It silently accumulates and always finds an exit.

When it does, it’s never pretty. It shows up in his body, his temper and the damage to his most important relationships.

When the Applause Finally Stops

At some point, and inevitably, cost becomes too great to hide and the praise runs out.

His body gives him warning signs he ignores until it won’t let him anymore. His blood pressure is through the roof, he constantly feels like he wants to puke, and his exhaustion is so total it takes everything to get out of bed.

His relationships are stretched to the breaking point. Sure, there are the dramatic blowups but it’s also the accumulation of missed moments, short answers and unspoken resentments.

He convinces himself he’s failing and the hatred directed inward always gets projected outward. Men tend to express the hard emotions as anger and that’s exactly what happens now. It gets directed at co-workers, his kids, and the people he loves most.

One day, he doesn’t recognize himself. And neither does anyone else. That’s when the language around him changes. The same behavior that was once praised as strength starts getting labeled.

He goes from being dedicated to a workaholic. Duty becomes avoidance. His resilience turns into him being emotionally shut down.

He used to be “impressive,” and now he’s a problem.

No one mentions that this is the natural outcome of exactly what he was rewarded for. No one acknowledges that the discipline, endurance, and self-denial were encouraged when they were useful.

When the applause evaporates, the expectations remain. Despite the pain he can no longer run from, he’s still supposed to perform, provide and keep his shit together.

Only now he’s doing it under suspicion instead of admiration. As if he wasn’t isolated enough before, now the only thing that kept him going is gone.

What’s left is an exhausted, confused and grieving man who’s wondering how doing everything right led him straight to hell.

Why This Pattern Feels Like Strength

Of course being hyper-productive feels like strength. Men are wired for action and trained to fix the problems in front of them. They’re taught that endurance is a virtue. They want to make things better for everyone else and God forbid they make them worse.

Hyper-production fits that rulebook perfectly. It looks disciplined, and responsible, and like a man doing what a man is supposed to do when things get hard.

There’s nothing weak about pushing through pain. Pain is weakness leaving the body, right? There’s nothing soft about putting one foot in front of the other when everything inside is screaming at you to stop.

That’s exactly why this pattern is so convincing.

It doesn’t feel like avoidance. It feels like character.

When everyone around you confirms that by praising, relying on and rewarding your effort, it becomes almost impossible to see the difference between surviving and healing.

This Was Never About Work

The turning point doesn’t have to be when he finally breaks. It can be when he recognizes the pattern.

When he finally sees that the drive to work harder wasn’t proof he was handling grief well. It was proof he was trying to survive it the only way he knew how.

That realization doesn’t have to bring shame or guilt. It can bring a monumental sense of relief. It becomes easier to see that there was never anything “wrong” with him. Relief that the exhaustion, anger, and numbness weren’t personal failures.

They were signals that all the doing had become a shield. And that healing doesn’t start with more effort, more discipline, or more grit.

It starts with understanding what all that effort was protecting him from in the first place.

It was never weakness. It was loss and the pain he never gave himself permission to face.

This is only one of the ways men get blindsided after loss. There are others, and no one warns you about them either.

I wrote a short guide that lays them out called 10 Realities Men Run Into After Loss (and No One Warns Them About)

Grab It Here

Grab your Kleenex. Or if you’re feeling especially macho, get ready to pretend there’s something in your eye.

This episode is not about staying positive or pushing through.

It is about what happens when a man spends years fighting to see his kids and then gets diagnosed with a very aggressive form of cancer while that fight is still ongoing.

In this episode of Man Down, Jason sits down with Adam Cousins, a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt, husband, father, stepdad, and cancer survivor.

For more than a decade, Adam was locked in a family court battle trying to have a relationship with his children. Years of limited access. Years of missed time. Years of showing up and being told it still was not enough.

Then, in the middle of that fight, he was diagnosed with a fast moving lymphoma and thrown into months of intense chemotherapy.

This conversation covers:

• What it is like to fight for your kids for years without resolution

• Hearing the words “you have cancer” and realizing you have to fight for your life while you’re fighting for your kids.

• Going through aggressive chemo while waiting on a court decision

• Grieving children who are still alive

• The toll this kind of loss takes on a man’s identity

• Why shutting down feels safer but costs you so much more in the long run.

There is no redemption arc here. No clean ending. No motivational spin.

Just a real conversation about endurance, grief, anger, and what it takes to keep showing up when life keeps taking things away.

It’s also a beautiful love story that shows what most men know, but don’t say enough: We’re immeasurably better when we have someone who loves us walking arm in arm with us.

This episode is for:

• Men dealing with serious illness

• Fathers who have lost access to their kids

• Guys who are holding it together on the outside

• Leaders who are realizing strength is not the same as silence

If you have ever felt worn down by a fight that never seems to end, this episode will hit close to home.

If this episode hit close to home, the 10 Realities Men Run Into After Loss (and No One Warns Them About) guide goes deeper.

Grab Your Guide

He’s sitting alone on the couch, squinting in a pathetic attempt to bring the picture on the wall into focus. It’s the two of them laughing, back when it was possible to feel happy. She’s been gone for over six months and it’s still there, a constant fucking reminder of how much better things used to be.

There’s an empty glass half-glued to the coffee table by spilled whiskey. The light in the kitchen is the only one on. The kids cried themselves to sleep again because they missed Mommy. And the one parent they have left is self-destructing just one floor away.

He knows he’s falling apart and has no idea how to stop it. His phone is face down on the table. He already knows who he could call. He’s got guys who care about him. They text every once in a while and say things like, “If you need anything.” Which he hears as, “Call me if you’re too weak to get your shit together.”

He flips the phone over and, for the fifteenth time, types the first few words. “Hey man, I’m not doing great.”

He stares at it, reads it again, and deletes it. He tells himself he doesn’t need to drag anyone else into his mess. Talking about it won’t change a damn thing anyway.

So he pries the glass off the table and pours himself another drink. It’s the only way he can sleep without being tortured by the nightmares. Eventually he staggers to bed alone. A few hours later he’ll drag himself out of bed, plaster a smile on his face for his kids, and do it all over again.

He’s not weak. He’s trapped between needing help and believing that needing help makes him a failure.

I’ve been there. Screaming in my head that I needed help and being too afraid to say the words out loud.

If you’re a man who’s struggling, people will tell you to “reach out.” Easier said than done. What they usually skip is how that actually feels.

It doesn’t feel brave, strong, or noble. It feels weak and humiliating. How could admitting you can’t handle your own life feel any different?

That feeling isn’t a sign you’re broken. But it sure as hell feels like it.

So you do what you’ve always done. You buckle down and push harder at work. You drink yourself into oblivion to shut off the noise in your head. You doom scroll until your thumbs cramp up and your eyes are bugging out. You watch so much porn that it turns into another way to hate yourself.

Somehow you still convince yourself you’re managing. The alternative is admitting you’ve lost control of your life. That scares you more than the damage you know you’re doing to yourself.

Most men don’t avoid asking for help because they don’t know they need it. They avoid it because the cost to their identity feels too high.

From the time you were young, the rules were clear, even if they were never explicitly spelled out. You learned by watching your dad like he learned by watching his dad. Your job is to protect, provide, and preside. You handle your shit and fix problems. You do not become someone else’s problem.

Self-reliance wasn’t optional. It was the price of respect. And there’s more going on here than culture or conditioning.

There’s biology at work too. Testosterone pushes men toward independence, action, and status. It makes them prioritize solving problems over talking about them. They’d much rather do something than sit around feeling helpless.

That wiring is useful when the threat is external. It turns against you when the problem is internal.

Grief. Trauma. Addiction. Depression. Chronic stress. These aren’t enemies you can overpower. They don’t respond to force, effort, or willpower. You know this but you don’t know what else to do.

When a man asks for help, it doesn’t just break a social rule men have lived by for generations. It feels like tattooing the proof that you can’t handle your shit on your forehead.

Of course it feels awful. The pain isn’t evidence you’re weak. It’s evidence you’re pushing against something ancient and ingrained.

Here’s what most men are never taught:

There’s a difference between handling what’s yours and trying to handle everything alone.

Handling what you can keeps things from falling apart.

Refusing help means they eventually will.

Dealing with everything alone costs you your sleep, your patience, your relationships, and eventually your health. You’ve already lost so much. Now you’re putting everything you have left at risk.

It doesn’t matter if you agree. It’s reality.

If this is hitting close to home, listen carefully.

You don’t reach out after you feel strong. You reach out when keeping it together is costing you more than you can afford.

The voice in your head will mercilessly go for the throat. It’ll try to convince you you’re weak, embarrassing, and a failure. It’ll tell you that other men are able to handle this and you should be able to handle it too. Believing it is making a deal with the devil.

You won’t be able to shut it up. That doesn’t mean you’re doing something wrong. It means you’re choosing to fight the programming that’s squeezing the life from you.

Some problems don’t respond to force.

You’re not kicking addiction on willpower alone. You’re not living with devastating loss indefinitely without it taking a toll. You’re not lone wolfing your way past childhood trauma.

If you think you can, stop and look at yourself in the mirror. How’s that been working so far?

This is where things usually get worse, not better.

What you don’t deal with doesn’t disappear. It shows up as anger, wrecked relationships, and problems you pass on to your kids without their consent.

This isn’t a warning. It’s cause and effect.

And if all that isn’t bad enough, here’s one more kick in the gut:

Asking for help won’t feel good afterward either. You won’t say it right. You might feel stupid after you blurt out the words. There probably won’t be a magical feeling of relief. And the other person might say the wrong thing or say nothing.

You may walk away thinking, That didn’t fix a damn thing. That’s normal.

You’re probably asking yourself why the hell you’d bother doing it. Here’s what reaching out actually does:

It gets you out of your own head. You can make almost anything make sense if you leave it rattling around in there. It interrupts the spiral where your worst thoughts sound reasonable because there’s no one there to challenge them. It puts another set of eyes on a situation you’re too close to see clearly.

It doesn’t solve the problem. It gives you traction again. And traction is the difference between digging yourself deeper and finding a way forward.

Reaching out isn’t a solution. It’s a step toward getting your life back together. Strength isn’t pretending you’re fine. Strength is doing what needs to be done even when it costs you your pride.

This isn’t about becoming a different kind of man. It’s about being one when it actually counts.

This is the moment.

You can hate it. You can resent it. You can feel ashamed the whole way through.

Do it anyway.

If this made you uncomfortable, that’s probably the point.

Here’s a short guide I wrote called 10 Realities Men Run Into After Loss (And No One Warns Them About).

It lays out what loss actually does behind the scenes when you’re dealing with a loss. and why grinding through it backfires.

No fixing. No speeches. Just a clearer picture of what you’re dealing with.

Grab It

Get up. Go to work. Handle your responsibilities.

Don’t fall apart. And absolutely don’t make it anyone else’s problem.

In this episode, Jason sits down with Tom Golden, a therapist who’s spent decades working almost exclusively with grieving men, to talk about what actually happens to men after a major loss.

And why so many guys feel like they’re doing grief “wrong” when they’re not.

This isn’t a conversation about sitting on a couch and talking about your feelings.

It’s about why men tend to grieve through action, work, thinking, building, fixing, or being alone, and how that can either help you heal or quietly wreck you if you’re not paying attention.

In this episode, we talk about:

• Why most grief advice wasn’t built with men in mind

• Why silence doesn’t mean you don’t care

• How staying busy can help, and how it can become a way to hide

• The pressure men feel to look strong even when they’re falling apart

• Why asking for “help” feels weak, awkward, or flat-out wrong

• What healthy action looks like, and how to tell when you’re lying to yourself

• Why grief comes in waves and why “back to square one” is bullshit

• How men actually support each other when it’s real

• What to do if you love a grieving man and don’t know how to reach him

Tom shares stories from real men who found ways to carry their loss without numbing out or blowing their lives up — not by talking more, but by doing things that actually meant something.

If you’re a man who’s been hit by loss and feels off, flat, angry, tired, or disconnected, you’re not broken.

You might just be trying to carry something that was never explained to you.

And if you care about a man who’s grieving, this conversation may help you stop misreading what you’re seeing.

No clichés. No “man up” bullshit. No pressure to be someone you’re not.

Just an honest conversation about how men actually deal with loss, and what helps instead of hurts.

Here’s where to find more of Tom’s work:

Tom’s Substack:

MenAreGood Substack

MenAreGood offers a sharp red-pilled contrast to the default negative cultural views of masculinity.

By Tom Golden

Tom’s Website

Understanding Masculine Psychology:

X: https://x.com/trgolden

BOOKS

The Way Men Heal https://amzn.to/4qIx9Aa

Swallowed by a Snake https://amzn.to/2mGdmkm

Helping Mothers be Closer to Their Sons https://amzn.to/45FfGQM

The cemetery receded in the rearview mirror with what I thought was my former life. It’d been six days since my wife Cindy died by suicide. As I looked over the heads of my little girls, I thought, “That chapter is over and it’s time to move on.”

If only it were that simple.

At the time, I told myself grief was something that only plagued the weak. Real men, like me, were the ones who carried it. The world didn’t stop turning because my wife died. I had girls to raise, bills to pay, and a life to rebuild. Crying on the couch about the past...

From the outside, it looked like resilience. I loved hearing people marvel at my “phoenix from the ashes” story. It fit perfectly with the kind of man I thought I was supposed to be. It helped me convince myself that my heroism was real. It also made it easier to believe the lies I was telling myself, and anyone who’d listen.

Behind the mask was a different story. I drank by myself at lunch. I drank on the way home from work. And I drank myself to sleep.

Somehow, I believed I was thriving. I had a great job. I was a loving father and husband to my new wife. As if that wasn’t enough, I’d made it through hell and emerged victorious. I’d earned the right to drink and no one could tell me otherwise.

It took years for that story to unravel. The helplessness and self-hatred metastasized into a constant dread that overwhelmed my denial. People stopped believing my lies. Finally, I did too, and put down the bottle for good.

Instead of feeling better, I felt worse. Sobriety forced me to confront the shame and guilt I’d been avoiding over the things I’d said and done. I relived the pain she and I had experienced with no way to look away. I replayed her last moments in a doom loop I couldn’t escape. I wept at her graveside as I mourned all that we’d lost.

I didn’t know what was happening to me and worried I was losing my mind. My wife looked me in the eye and said, “It’s grief, Jason.” Despite everything I believed about grief, I knew she was telling the truth.

I’d been avoiding it for almost five years without ever realizing it. Not because I was unaware, but because I was committed to a version of manhood that couldn’t tolerate the alternative. Grief had been there, patiently waiting until I was ready.

For the first time, I understood what grief actually is.

I had believed it was something you indulged in if you lacked the discipline to keep going. It was something real men didn’t have time for. I was wrong.

Allowing myself to grieve changed the direction of my life. It helped me reframe the past, not by minimizing what I’d lost, but by seeing more than tragedy and victimhood. It refocused my attention outward, toward other people. In time, it made room for the idea of a future again.

I didn’t know how fragile that future was.

Thirteen years after Cindy’s death, I lost our nineteen-year-old daughter Chloe. She died and almost killed four other people driving drunk and stoned. Her mother’s suicide left wounds she never recovered from. The same mental health issues that destroyed her mother eventually took my daughter. It was like living through a nightmarish version of Groundhog Day.

This time, I told myself things would be different. I was sober. I knew I couldn’t outrun the pain. I had language for what I was feeling, and a willingness to face it, come what may.

In other words, I thought I could “win” at grief this time. What I’ve learned has helped. After a few months of hardly being able to get out of bed, I gave up on the idea of winning. But I knew it wouldn’t break me.

Chloe’s death confronted me with a kind of pain I didn’t know was possible. Losing my wife had left a scar I’d learned to live with. Losing my daughter tore it open again and left a much deeper wound.

I couldn’t save two people I loved, and I’ve had to come to terms with that. I still haven’t figured out whether I’m the father to one daughter or two. I’ve wrestled with feelings of helplessness watching my younger daughter grieve her sister. I’d give anything to take her pain away, but I can’t and healing demands I accept it.

The hard-earned experience from my wife’s death has helped me navigate my daughter’s. I’ve been able to be more intentional about not making things worse than they already are. But it hasn’t spared me from the immense pain of losing her.

Experience hasn’t protected me. It’s helped me be more honest about what I was facing. I don’t waste energy pretending I can manage this loss the way I tried to manage the last one.

I struggle mightily at times. I’m just less likely to shame myself for it. Asking for help can feel like weakness. I do it anyway. Some things that used to be easy remain much harder than they used to be.

Grief doesn’t make you better at grief. It makes you more aware of its demands—and takes away the illusion that you can muscle your way through it.

That was true when my wife died. It was true again when my daughter did.

I no longer think grief is for weak people. I know it’s the price we all pay for loving someone deeply.

In the end, allowing myself to grieve hasn’t changed what I lost. It’s changed how I live.

If this hit close to home, I put together a short, free guide called 10 Realities Men Run Into After Loss (And No One Warns Them About).

It doesn’t try to fix you or motivate you. It explains why everything feels harder than it should — and how to deal with it without making things worse.

Grab it if you want it.

Get It Here

Here’s how it went down….

I was shocked awake at 11:45 PM to a pounding on the door and voices calling my name. They sounded like they were coming from inside my house.

I staggered downstairs, still doing up my pants as I rounded the corner. Three cops were standing in my front entrance. I remember thinking I should do a better job of locking the door in the future.

I recognized them because my first wife, Cindy was a cop. Her boss told me that I probably wanted to sit down and guided me to the couch.

"Brother, there’s no good way to tell you this. Cindy’s dead.”

“What happened?”

“Suicide.”

A few minutes later, after a round of “I’m sorry”, they were gone.

It was just me, my sleeping daughters, and some very kind older ladies from Victims Services staring at me awkwardly and offering pamphlets. I asked them to leave a few minutes later.

After Cindy’s funeral, the only interactions I had with the Ontario Provincial Police were from administrative staff. There was no shortage of forms to fill out, after all. Once those were done, we were done.

Oh wait, that’s not entirely true. Five years later, after discovering her work bag in the back of a closet, they were nice enough to return it to me.

Fast forward fifteen years and it seems things might be finally changing. Cindy was honoured in a meaningful and emotional ceremony on the OPP Suicide Memorial in late 2025. And I noticed something else I’d long since given up on. The senior leaders there seemed to care.

A few weeks ago, I received a note from the manager of their workplace wellness programs. He told me the current Commissioner of the OPP asked that I provide input for the Line of Duty Death project team. The LODD project focuses on ensuring comprehensive support, coordination, and resources for families and members affected by a line-of-duty death, while also strengthening internal processes to provide timely and compassionate assistance.

I said yes.

It’s not because I think participating will fix what happened to my family. My daughter is dead, largely due to her mother’s suicide. Nothing can fix that.

I’m also not interested in relitigating the past. I’m interested in learning from it.

I want to help the organization and the families who make it up move forward. I want to help make the future better than the past.

After a line of duty death, the problem isn’t only grief. It’s that the world the family was living in no longer works the same way.

When humanity is needed most, bureaucracy takes over. Processes are initiated. I’s are dotted and T’s are crossed. Tasks are completed. The most important thing is that the case is closed.

Meanwhile, the family is left living with wounds that no process can close.

Most systems are built for people who are functioning normally. Death upends that. It changes what people can handle, how they think, and how much energy basic things take.

Yet the system assumes families are capable of exactly what they are not. They can’t remember complex information or chase down follow-ups when something stalls. Someone who can barely get out of bed in the morning is not going to advocate for themselves when something doesn’t feel right.

So they suffer in silence. They wonder what happened to the organization that told their loved one they were part of a family when they joined. They stare at the wall, trying to understand why no one seems to care.

And eventually, they give up. Not because they stop needing help. But because they stop believing anyone is paying attention.

I’m going to tell them something else too.

It’s hard to receive support from someone you don’t fully trust. For many grieving families, the organization does not arrive as a neutral presence.

It arrives burdened by history. Too often that history includes years of harm, injury, and feeling expendable. In many cases, it also arrives after the loss of a person who was already broken by the job.

They were taught as a fresh-faced recruit that policing was not something they did. It was who they were. That identity was reinforced again and again. In training. In culture. In loyalty tests.

And then, when they could no longer perform. When the injuries accumulated. When the stress took its toll. They were sidelined, marginalized, or unceremoniously pushed out.

They lost a hell of a lot more than their role. They lost their sense of who they were and why they mattered. They didn’t bear that cross alone. Their family carried it too.

By the time death comes, the damage has often already been done.

In my case, when Cindy died, I thought I wanted nothing from the OPP. I didn’t want their support. I didn’t want their calls. I didn’t want to hear their name again.

But fifteen years later, when I found out she was being honoured, I cried in a way that showed me how much I had been holding in.

The OPP didn’t disappear after Cindy died. But whatever was left of relationship did.

What remained was efficient, professional, and transactional, and inhuman. That structure communicated something, whether it was meant to or not.

It told me that this part is over.

That’s what I want them to see.

Completion closes tasks. Families need continuity.

Continuity does not mean constant attention. It does not mean endless involvement or impossible promises.

After a devastating loss, people already feel like the world has moved on without them. When the system does the same, it doesn’t just end support. It confirms that fear.

Peer connection matters. Because hearing “I’m here with you” from someone who has lived it means more than anything written in a binder ever will.

Some information makes sense later. Not in the first days and weeks, when nothing makes sense.

A single point of human continuity can matter more than a dozen well-designed processes.

Here’s what it’s like to hear your loved one is dead. Not in clinical terms, but in human terms. It’s like being hit with a taser. Everything locks up. Your body stops cooperating. Time stands still. Your vocabulary is reduced to, “Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.”

You’re no longer capable of functioning the way the system assumes you are. And yet that is the exact moment we begin handing people information, decisions, and responsibility.

One principle matters more than all the rest:

Continuity over completion

And I’ll ask them to consider one question every time they design something new.

Are we choosing continuity or are we choosing completion?

I don’t know what they’ll do with that.

But this isn’t about helping one family feel less abandoned. That’s not nearly good enough.

It’s about making abandonment impossible by design.

In this deeply honest conversation, Jason MacKenzie sits down with Chris Coulter, founder of The Mentor Well and creator of Lifeline Parenting Workshops, to explore what life actually looks like ten years after the suicide of a child. Together, they move beyond platitudes about “healing” and into the lived reality of grief: how it reshapes identity, relationships, parenting, leadership, and purpose.

Chris shares the story of his daughter Maddie. He talks about her kindness, humor, and fierce independence…and the devastating ripple effects of her death. He speaks candidly about guilt, shame, anxiety, and the long, uneven process of learning to stop trying to become the person he was before loss, and instead accept the person he is now.

This episode is not about quick fixes or inspirational soundbites. It’s about what actually helps over time.

In this episode, we explore:

• Why grief doesn’t “end,” and why that doesn’t mean you’re failing

• The nervous system impact of traumatic loss and how it shows up years later

• How parenting changes when a child is struggling with mental health

• Why teens stop talking to parents and what actually helps reopen communication

• The difference between “fix it” conversations and “feel it” conversations

• The hidden cost of advice-giving, and the power of listening instead

• How mentorship can support teens in ways parents often can’t

• Where mentorship ends, and when professional mental health support is essential

• How purpose can emerge from loss without erasing the pain

• Why remembering a child by talking about them and sharing stories matters more than people realize

• The tension between telling hard stories and not overwhelming others

• What grief teaches about compassion, leadership, boundaries, and meaning

Chris also shares how his work with The Mentor Well was shaped directly by what he wishes his daughter, and his family, had access to during her darkest moments. His approach focuses on emotional intelligence, lived experience, and creating safe, non-judgmental spaces where young people feel seen and heard.

This conversation is for:

• Parents navigating a child’s mental health challenges

• Anyone grieving a devastating loss

• Leaders learning how to hold compassion and accountability at the same time

• Those wondering whether purpose is still possible after everything changes

If you’ve ever felt like grief rewired your brain, lowered your capacity, or pulled you into a life you never asked for—this episode will help you feel less alone.

About Chris

Chris Coulter is the founder of The Mentor Well and the creator of Lifeline Parenting Workshops. After the loss of his daughter Maddie, Chris committed his life to helping teens build emotional strength and confidence, and helping parents better understand what their children are carrying. His work centers on mentorship, emotional intelligence, and prevention—supporting families before crisis becomes catastrophe.

If you want to explore this further, I’ve written a short guide called The Loss Inside Change.

Photo by Julius Drost on Unsplash

One of the most difficult, misunderstood and unseen effects of loss is how much it kneecaps a person’s tolerance. For everything. What used to feel manageable, or even enjoyable becomes like crawling uphill through a mudslide that’s trying to drown you as it drags you down to the valley bottom.

From the inside it can look like this:

The quiet conversations in a coffee shop are like a chainsaw screaming in your head. Regular work demands drive you to want to quit your job, sell everything, and disappear into the woods. The only thing that stops you is you know that would drive you nuts too. You find yourself fantasizing about a world where the standard uniform is a potato sack, if only to avoid spending what little energy you have left choosing a shirt in the morning.

Life might look largely the same on the outside as they fight valiantly to maintain the appearance of having their shit together. But every invisible demon they wrestle takes a toll on their mind, body and soul. Their strength is siphoned, one previously normal moment at a time.

Something fundamental has changed, and most of us are still expecting ourselves to function as if it hasn’t. We rarely recognize it for what it is. Instead, we explain it away as personal failure: burnout, fragility, impatience, a lack of resilience. People start wondering why they can’t handle what they used to, why small things feel monstrous, why their reactions seem out of proportion and uncontrollable.

Every difficult moment is labelled as a step backward into the hell we’re trying to escape. The conclusion is as understandable as it is dead wrong: something is wrong with me. The self-judgment is easier to believe than it is to understand and admit how much your loss has upended your former life. The one you want back more than anything.

I’ve seen this play out in my life in countless, unpredictable ways. One that stands out is a party I attended with my wife at our next-door neighbours’ house. They’re the kindest, gentlest women in their early sixties you could ever hope to meet. They’re earthy and weird in the most charming ways.

They opened their home to about twenty-five people. The music was soft, the energy gentle, nothing even remotely loud.

Meanwhile, the walls were closing in on me. The music was pounding in my ears, and I was pretending to have a conversation while fighting the urge to run home and hide under my covers. The fight didn’t last long. A few minutes later, I stood at the window of my second-floor bedroom, trapped like Rapunzel without the hair, watching people enjoy themselves next door. Loser is not strong enough a word for how I felt.

That moment wasn’t unique. It was one of the first where I understood how deeply I’d been affected by the loss of my daughter.

I understand better now that there was, and is nothing wrong with me. Although I still have to remind myself. And in the hardest moments, I need to be reminded.

These moments aren’t harder in any objective sense. They’re harder because my capacity to stay present without spiralling in ordinary situations has changed. It’s not a failure of will. It’s information. Loss changes how much the system can safely manage at once, even when our fake smiles and “I’m fines” look the same from the outside.

And once I could see it in myself, I started to see it everywhere else.

In the parents who tell me their patience has been railroaded by a hair-trigger temper. In the employees, leaders and business owners who no longer care about what they used to be passionate about. In the relationships that dissolved because maintaining them took more than people had to give. In the dread of knowing life will throw you another curveball you’re sure you can’t handle.

From the outside, nothing about these situations looks much different. The roles are the same. The expectations haven’t changed. Life, to the people around us, still looks mostly intact. What’s changed is how much it takes to muscle through it. There’s less room for uncertainty, meeting expectations and the incessant demands of other people’s needs.

And, so what?

Kids still need to be raised. Bills still need to be paid. And the pain still needs to be managed. So people turn inward. They push themselves harder. They tell themselves to toughen up and do what needs to be done. They feel weakness oozing from their pores and they convince themselves everyone else does too.

The maelstrom inside their minds blinds them to the simpler, even more unsettling truth: Loss has changed what it takes to live your life. Most of us are still expecting ourselves to show up the way we did before and punishing ourselves when we can’t. It’s a fool’s errand that keeps us stuck in the quicksand of the past.

There’s no fix offered here. Just a more honest way to see what’s going on. Sometimes that’s enough to stop making things harder than they already are.

If you want to explore this further, I’ve written a short guide called The Loss Inside Change.

This space is for men who’ve been hit by a huge loss and are still expecting themselves to keep going like nothing really changed.

You’re still getting up. Still working. Still handling your responsibilities.

So from the outside, it looks like you’re fine.

But shit doesn’t work the same way anymore. We push anyway. And it costs us.

Most men aren’t told what this actually does to you. You’re told to stay strong. Keep it together. Don’t make your problems someone else’s.

So when your head isn’t as sharp, your patience is gone, or everything takes more effort than it used to, you don’t stop to ask why. You just take the blame.

So you push harder. You shut up. You stop explaining. What’s the point?

Who the hell would understand anyway?

We’re not going to dump this on the people who already need us to be their rock.

And when that doesn’t work, we put up walls and suffer in silence.

A lot of what gets called burnout, anger, checking out, or screwing things up isn’t weakness. It’s what happens when a devastating loss kneecaps a man and he and keeps pretending it didn’t.

Unexpected Ways Grief Shows Up For Men

Not understanding it has wrecked far too many of us, and caused us to harm the people we love.

Here are some counterintuitive grief shows up for us:

• Becoming more decisive and less wise at the same time (it’s a great combination)

• Ruining anniversaries/milestones ahead of time so at least you get to control the pain when everything else feels uncontrollable.

• Becoming hyper-competent and productive in one area while falling apart in others

• Being more patient with strangers than with your own family.

• Feeling pissed off, tired, and off your game for days then realizing it was grief all along when the sadness crushes you.

If this sounds familiar, nothing is “wrong” with you.

But you are responsible for understanding it, so it doesn’t cost you your work, health and the people you love.

It’s Not Just About Death

Death is one way this happens. It’s not the only way.

When work screws you over. When the marriage changes or falls apart. When the plan you were working toward goes up in flames. When the people you counted on aren’t there anymore.

Life keeps moving. There’s no point in crying about what can’t be changed. So you knuckle down and deal with what’s in front of you. You do whatever it takes to keep putting one foot in front of the other.

This work exists to call that out.

It’s not to fix you or give you a pep talk.

It’s to lay things out clearly, help you stop lying to yourself and give you practical ways to handle what you’re actually dealing with.

You don’t need to read everything. You don’t need to agree with everything.

If it pisses you off, leave a comment and say so.

If something here hits home for you, or makes sense of a man you care about, it’s doing its job.

I put together a short, free guide called 10 Realities Men Run Into After Loss (And No One Warns Them About).

It explains why everything feels harder than it should — and how to deal with it without making things worse.

Grab it if you want it.

Grab It Now

And if you’re someone who loves a grieving man, I’ve put together a short course that will help you love him when it’s hardest for him to love himself.

Support a Grieving Man

In the three years since my daughter died, I’ve spent countless hours trying to force certainty into a world where it no longer exists.

My thinking swings between the philosophical, where I ask myself who the hell am I now, what do I believe, where am I even headed, and the deeply physical urge to punch a wall when clarity once again refuses to show up.

Then there are the moments that aren’t abstract at all, when I’m simply flailing around for something solid to grab onto so I don’t get swept away in the storms that only grief can conjure up.

I guess in some ways, this story is about the stories we’re told.

Grief as the Great Disruptor

My wife is German and has regaled me with the terrifying fairy tales of her youth. I grew up on Cinderella, where if you just hang on long enough, life will make things right. She grew up, on her dad’s knee, learning that life will hurt you whether you deserve it or not. Often, survival is the victory.

I’ve joked with her that the Germans, being typically efficient, are killing two birds with one stone by combining a little child abuse with teaching important life lessons. Of course, what they’re really doing is showing their love by teaching their young the importance of resilience.

Continuing with the theme of horrifying fairy tales, experiencing a devastating loss can feel like being trapped as the main characters in Hansel & Gretel.

One day, life is hard, but at least it’s understood. The next day, the people and structures you relied on are gone. Grief feels like being abandoned by a world you trusted. Even if it sucked, it was familiar. And now?

I don’t know if I’m the parent of one kid or two. What I thought was my life’s work doesn’t seem important at all. My stamina and ability to produce work are nowhere near what it once was and I’m starting to wonder if it’s ever coming back. The sense that I can protect the people I love, my primary job as a man, has been kneecapped.

So many of the things I thought I could count on are gone. I’m living in a level of uncertainty that can feel intolerable. Life looks a hell of a lot more unpleasant when you’re worried about a boogeyman around every corner.

Why We Seek It

Our brains aren’t built to make us happy and comfortable. They’re built to keep us alive. And the biggest threat to our survival is…uncertainty. There’s that fucking word again.

Not having a clue what to expect activates the same systems in our brain as a physical threat. Our lizard brain takes over and we shift into fight, flight, or freeze. We react by doing things that make sense in the moment but that often cause us, and the people we love, long-term harm.

The most destabilizing uncertainty is realizing what’s never coming back and having no idea what will replace it.

Grief shatters your sense of order. Grieving is everything we do in response, whether it’s healthy or destructive, to try to restore it.

Share Leading Through Loss by Jason MacKenzie

Welcome to the Pain Factory

I entered the latter part of 2023 as the Warden of Fucking Upsidedownville, a prison of my own construction. There was only one inmate, who happened to be me. It’s the place where no one comes to visit and the place I couldn’t leave.

I obsessed, like Rain Man with a box of matches, about how in one, nightmarish six-week period, I was going to experience a whole lot of unwanted firsts. What would have been Chloe’s twentieth birthday, our first Christmas without her and then the first anniversary of her violent death.

I knew they were all going to be terrible because…I needed them to be. If I could predict the pain, it couldn’t ambush me. It was something I could count on when I felt like I couldn’t count on anything else. I picked up a stake, walked into the future, drove it into the ground and then held on for dear life.

As the days clicked over, my dread grew like I predicted it would. And in some perverse way I craved it. At least it made sense when nothing else did.

When the days finally arrived, I felt absolutely nothing. I’d spent months stockpiling dread, and somehow even that ran out. The days that were supposed to hurt couldn’t even be relied on to do their job.

That was year one. Year two, turned out to be…exactly the same. Can a grieving dad not catch a break? Just one? All I was asking for was to be able to predict something. Anything.

I’m writing this five days after the third birthday without my daughter and once again, I’ve narrated myself into believing I could outsmart grief. And once again I’ve been proven wrong.

I’d been feeling good the weeks leading up to her twenty-second birthday. My wife and daughter were home from their trip to Australia. The work I’m meant to do and the impact I’m now meant to have is becoming clearer to me, and I’d just gotten back from a trip to Louisiana with some truly wonderful men.

When my wife asked me how I was thinking and feeling about Chloe’s birthday I replied with, “I think it’s going to be Ok. I feel like I’m in a really good place.” I actually meant it.

What happened next? Chloe’s birthday was the hardest, most painful one yet. It figures.

I could handle the grief. I did. What made it worse was the frustration, disappointment, and anger that came with being wrong again.

The grief hurt. But the expectation that it wouldn’t multiplied the impact.

There are so many ways to make grief more difficult than it already is. I’ve done them all and somehow keep discovering others.

What I’ve learned, for the fiftieth time is that grief doesn’t much care about your plans. It doesn’t respond to dread, doesn’t reward optimism, and doesn’t follow the script you write for it.

Healing won’t come from getting better at forecasting pain. It’ll come from stopping the forecast altogether. It’ll continue to arrive unannounced, and I’ll continue to do my best to let it hurt when it hurts.

And I’ll keep reminding myself that I can handle whatever shows up, without narrating it into something worse.

If this piece resonated, I’ve put together a short guide on how unacknowledged loss shows up inside change, and how to respond when things feel harder than they should.

You can download it here:

The Loss Inside Change