From Wounds to Wisdom (Previously the Mental-Hell Podcast)

FWTW S3E05 | Why Most Men Are Emotionally Stuck—and What It Really Takes to Heal: Mighty Brad

• Barbie Moreno • Season 3 • Episode 5

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In this powerful episode of From Wounds to Wisdom, Barbie sits down with Mighty Brad — a self-development coach, content creator, and founder of The Mighty Tribe. Diagnosed with depression at 13, Brad’s healing journey didn’t begin in a therapist’s office—it started on YouTube.

Now, he leads a growing movement of men reclaiming emotional maturity, spiritual depth, and conscious masculinity. Whether you’re a woman trying to understand the men in your life—or a man navigating your own awakening—this episode delivers hard truths, tender wisdom, and tools for inner evolution.

🧠 Topics:
   The hidden emotional cost of being “the strong one”
   Why most men struggle with emotional intelligence
   Inner child healing & breaking father wounds
   Masculine vulnerability & relationships
   Creating safe emotional spaces in young men


📍 Chapters:
    Intro: Who is Mighty Brad?
    Depression, Anger & Early Awakening
    Why Therapy Didn’t Work for Him
    Building a Brotherhood of Men
    Inner Child & Father Wounds
    Masculinity, Emotions & Romantic Love
    Fun, Creativity & Redefining Healing
    Final Wisdom: Small Steps that Change Everything

 GUEST INFO: 📲 Follow Brad:
‪@mightybrad‬ YT
@MightyBradOfficial IG, X
🔗 Visit his Website: skool.com/themightytribe/about

🎧 Listen on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | Amazon: From Wounds to Wisdom
🔗 Learn more: www.barbiemoreno.com

KEYWORDS:
young men and mental health, emotional healing, healing masculine wounds, inner child for men, depression recovery, male coach, nervous system healing, trauma-informed podcast, men’s emotional health, Barbie Moreno, From Wounds to Wisdom

Season 2
Unraveling the Mind: From Mental Struggles to Inner Strength.

SPEAKER_01:

At 13, he was diagnosed with depression. At 16, he was dismissed by therapist. And by 18, he was coaching men in their 40s through their darkest chapters. Today on From Wounds to Wisdom, meet the young man who's redefining masculinity one soul at a time. Let's dive in.

SPEAKER_00:

And that started my coaching practice about a year and a half ago, and it's been a blessing so far. I've worked with over 80 guys to help them transform their lives. But those small wins and actually showing yourself that you're making progress and feeling like you're doing it as well is one of the most important pieces to creating the life for yourself that you desire. Thank you so much for hosting me. I'm super excited to have this conversation.

SPEAKER_01:

Likewise, likewise. Thank you for coming on. So, Mighty, tell me about that.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, that was uh just the I actually came up with that when I first started my YouTube channel when I was 18. Um, and that was actually the first name that came to mind. And I thought to myself, maybe it sounds a little bit cringy, maybe it's weird. Yeah, it's really the brand name most people call me, Brad.

SPEAKER_01:

Very nice. Well, I know that um through our previous conversations that you generally target a male audience. Is that accurate?

SPEAKER_00:

Yes.

SPEAKER_01:

Okay. Tell me, I know that we talked about you had insecurities, but kind of give us a summary of like your story and what made you start doing the work that you're doing today.

SPEAKER_00:

When I was 13, I was diagnosed with depression clinically. They put me on medication for a little while, just dealt with that for about three years straight. And then when I was 16, stumbled on a few general self-development YouTube videos of yeah, you should start making your life better, get in the gym, focus on your mental health. So I stumbled upon a few of those when in the midst of me just going to school, coming home, playing video games, going to sleep, doing it all over and again, uh, really remaining in that depressed cycle. Just a few components and ideas from those videos made me think to myself, I should probably incorporate some of this. Maybe it'll help me finally find some direction and purpose in my life. And so it didn't matter if I, someone in my class when I was 16 asked me, Hey, what'd you get on the on the test? And I said, I got an A plus. And they go, Oh, I got a B. Like that's so good that you got that. I would feel nothing. Right? It's like there's no sense of accomplishment. So I had always felt disconnected, and that also I think contributed to me kind of viewing the world a little bit deeper when I was younger. The work itself got obsessed with psychology, philosophy, spirituality, studying all these different practices and then experimenting with them for the last six, seven years of just continued that. And then when I was 18, decided to start my YouTube channel and start really posting on social media, and then started my coaching practice about a year and a half ago. And uh, it's been a blessing so far. I've worked with over 80 guys to help them transform their lives, whether it's guys in their they're were a little bit younger than me, 18, just feeling a little bit lost in life, to guys in their 40s who are going through a divorce, struggling with uh job transition, whatever it is. So we'll kind of dive into every component of life, and uh it's been an absolute blessing so far to be able to uh do the work that I do and to have it resonate with people and me being myself such a young guy doing it.

SPEAKER_01:

So let's go into the age thing. I I hear you talking, and then I think to myself, well, that's not a normal teenager, right? Um, most teenagers are not reflecting on their spiritual development and looking for ways to get out of depression through personal development. Generally, they're they would turn to drugs or alcohol or being disobedient or whatever the case may be. What do you think made you different?

SPEAKER_00:

So I was definitely disobedient. Um, I always had a problem with authority. I hated the school system, I hated having teachers and I hated being tell told what to do. But where it started for me was on a foundational basis for my parents. My dad is the most honest person I've ever met in my entire life. Um, a lot of us say that we don't lie and we're honest people. My dad is almost incapable of doing such things. So I kind of got that from him and uh the the honesty piece, which is kind of I think a little bit of that when I was depressed for a few years, like it kind of clicked in my brain of something's wrong, something needs to be fixed, and I need to look at the reality of the situation, that nothing was gonna change if I didn't change anything. Like when I was 16, and then it was that that video by a creator named Elijah Long that still makes videos to this day, just talking about the realities of life, what most people are struggling with, the risk people aren't willing to take, and that's why we're all so miserable. Um, and I was realizing I'm not taking any risks, I feel very stuck. I've the awareness was there that something always felt wrong. That was all I knew. And I didn't ever believe that there was something that was right. I didn't know how to get out of it, I didn't know how to transcend things, and it was just like I gotta try some of the stuff. And then once I tried a few things, I was hooked.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you get pushback because of your age with older people?

SPEAKER_00:

People who are not interested in self-growth, yes. People are interested in self-growth, doesn't matter to them. In terms of people in my personal life, when I started my coaching practice, it was your how could you be a life coach? How could you tell people, you know, guide people you haven't experienced any of this stuff? Shifted me to actually when I started my coaching practice, I'm only gonna work with guys who are like 18 to like 24. It's like come in my comfortable ball field. Then as I started my practice, I would find myself getting a call booked in with somebody who was 30 or in their late 20s or in their 40s and 50s, and guys in their 40s and 50s were having open conversations with me. I have found a way to tap into such a creative part of my brain that I've met in that most people, no matter what age, have not tapped into. There's so many of us that we've never fully soaked into what we actually want to create for ourselves. The client I'm actually working with that's in his 50s is now rediscovering, building up his uh practice for physical, like gym and yoga, spin classes, stuff going back to school to become a teacher, per se, right? And he worked as uh in a job for 25, 30 years that he didn't enjoy. And now I'm helping him make that transition out of that and tap into the more creative spirit is just helping him see components of himself that have existed ever since he was five, ten, fifteen years old. He just lost track of. All of us are emotional beings. Guys and girls in their 30s, 40s, and 50s are still having these emotional experiences and letting them overtake them. How much of like lack of self-control, lack of awareness of yourself and of other people do you need to not have to get to the point where you've lived for 50 years and you're still completely disconnected from these things? What I've noticed specifically for men is that we've never been taught how to manage our emotions. We've never been taught how to interact with them in any sort of way. We're told to be men, to man up, and as a result of that, we disconnect ourselves from our emotional experiences. We tell ourselves we can't cry, we can't integrate anger in a healthy manner. And so what is what happens? This comes out in for some men very ugly ways, uh, within self-inflecting things on themselves, as well as in the darker sides of like romantic relationships, where it actually turns into something like abuse, or even if it's not to that, like severe neglect of somebody else. And it only makes sense because if you've unconsciously neglected yourself for your entire life, how could you ever hold the space for a woman or somebody in romantic partnership to have to hold space for them if you've never done it for you? Well, essentially a part of the work that I do is helping us rediscover ourselves to start to interact with these things that we've been ignoring for so long.

SPEAKER_01:

Do you find that a lot of them repeat patterns from their past, from their from their parents? And how do you work with them on that? If that's a case.

SPEAKER_00:

I think our relationship with our parents affects our relationship with ourselves, with friends, and very specifically with romantic partners. I work with a lot of guys who they had a very poor relationship with their dad or their mom, or maybe they didn't even have one of the parents. And we can see how these little things show up in our relationships, and even a conscious recognition of a lack of love we receive from somebody seems to keep showing up in our relationships when we pretend it's love. For example, one of my clients that I work with uh had gotten divorced after being married for quite a few years, his wife at the time was very encompassing of the poor relationship he had with his parents, and all of the neglect that his parents gave him showed up there. She showed him care, affection, provision. And because there's a component unconsciously in his mind that thinks that because this is the way his parents treated him, there's a component of love like that that must exist. Even if consciously he says to me, which he has many times, like, I know like I don't deserve this, right? It's like consciously you do, but your subconscious does not. If you're you have a really good relationship with your mom or a really good relationship with your dad, you'll find that in your romantic relationships, there's certain components of them that you really liked that just seem to naturally show up in your partner. When you brought up were brought up with decent to good parents, you're already unconsciously connected to those things. So in your romantic relationships and dating experiences, you are automatically attracted to those types of people. And also, especially with the people who haven't had a good relationship with their parents, they find themselves very much attracted to people who treat them very badly. There's like, of course, the healing process around that with recognizing this consciously and setting certain boundaries internally for yourself. I'm gonna challenge them on it, tell them why I think it's wrong and how I feel about it, and see if they can hold the space for me. If they can't, goodbye, next person. Because if I'm gonna build a life with somebody, there needs to be something real that's interactive here. But of course, a lot of guys don't know how to interact with that because they never experience anything real with somebody else or within themselves. If the inner work isn't done, like most people never find their person, or they find somebody who they think is their person and it ends in divorce, as we know from the statistical standpoint of the United States, most over 50% of people get divorced. So these are things we have to recognize in order to start to interact with these things and gain a deeper connection with themselves to even understand like what does that entail? What is what does the work work require that I have to do and kind of soaking into that reality?

SPEAKER_01:

So you embody what you teach.

SPEAKER_00:

100%.

SPEAKER_01:

Where do you bring fun in with your clients? How do you teach them about fun and what do you do for fun? Because it can't always be like all of this, right? Like it can't always be self-improvement, it can't always be it's gotta be you gotta have fun in life.

SPEAKER_00:

Playing the drums.

SPEAKER_01:

I'd love to follow up with you with after you have children.

SPEAKER_00:

Oh man.

SPEAKER_01:

It's like you see the world in a very different way in that aspect, and you learn a lot. Um, so that's not something we can really talk about yet because you don't have children. But tell us, give us a tool. Just a tool that people can take with them.

SPEAKER_00:

Start with one component at a time, start with the smallest step possible. Before one of my clients, he came to me and he came to me, he's like, How do I get up tomorrow and go walk? And I'm like, Whoa, whoa, we're not there yet. Like, let's just get it down like an hour and a half, right? It's like, and like what's also plaguing there? Like, why can't you get up? Like deep diving into the deep mechanisms. Where's the disconnection? Where's the fire? So I think when that that initial reflection process, famous businessman online has a great quote that I love, which is you've already achieved goals uh that you thought would make you happy. It's great to strive. It's but when you're so obsessed with the goal itself and nothing everyone talks about it's that you're about the journey, not the destination. It's about both. Uh, but those small wins and actually showing yourself that you're making progress and feeling like you're doing it as well is one of the most important pieces to creating the life for yourself that you desire.

SPEAKER_01:

And with that guy that you were talking about who takes three to four hours to get up in the morning, I would say, what are you avoiding?

SPEAKER_00:

In what capacity would you mean?

SPEAKER_01:

Because if it's taking you that long to get up, you're avoiding something. There's literally no way that you would take that long to get up unless you're trying to avoid your day, you're avoiding your life, you're avoiding what you have to do, you're avoiding work, you're avoiding, you know, just yourself in general, right? But to take that long to get up means that you're trying to push something off, you're trying to avoid something. So even just looking at like, you know, something like that, like asking myself, watching TV, what part of my life am I trying to avoid?

SPEAKER_00:

Depends on you as an individual, how you're feeling. And of course, asking yourself those initial questions, which you beautifully highlighted, which is like, yeah, if I'm watching TV, it's like, where am I disconnected from myself? Where what am I avoiding? And it's just for myself, it's like when I pick up my phone and start scrolling, what am I avoiding? Oh, I'm avoiding that, right? Because you don't just pick up your phone to scroll to do it, right? It's because you're avoiding something, um, because you're procrastinating. And then you have to question. Or you're trying to that's what I did with video games when I was younger, is like uh reality feels so dull that this is the only way I can feel like I'm leveling up. This is the only way I can feel something. Um, and so social media and our phones do a great job at making us feel something, but they don't ever do an even decent job at making us feel connected. The group that I run and the coaching practice that I do, it's I have some in-person clients, but it's mainly online. I've got Guy in New Zealand and Canada, all of the US. Like it's like we wouldn't have been able to connect if the internet if this online stuff didn't exist. So that's of course, is like where's the consumption disconnect and where can I start to consume more things that uh are genuinely serving me?

SPEAKER_01:

So, where can people find your information so they can consume it?

SPEAKER_00:

Oh, absolutely. So, YouTube, YouTube is a lot of the longer form stuff. Uh, it's gonna be Mighty Brad. Uh, there's some podcasts on there, and I've been doing a lot more sit-down 20, 25 minute uh sessions of me just having a conversation about whatever concepts coming to my mind. Occasionally some snippets that I actually take from some of the work in my coaching practice, uh, usually blurring out the actual uh words from my clients, but just some thing, the concept that I'm talking about. And then Instagram is would be the best way to reach me. Shorter form content or just ask me a question personally about something you're going through, would love to just give you some quick tips about anything that you're looking for. Um, and that's gonna be Mighty Brad official. And then, of course, I'm on the other platforms like Snapchat, Twitter, Mighty Brad to reach me there as well.

SPEAKER_01:

Beautiful. Well, thank you for coming on the show and giving us um all of the great intellect that you have. And most people don't fascinate me, you fascinate me, so that was cool.

SPEAKER_00:

I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01:

Yeah, we appreciate you, and I will put all of your contact information in our um description, and hopefully people connected with you will reach out.

SPEAKER_00:

Awesome. Thank you so much. You asked some brilliant questions, and I I had so much fun having this conversation.

SPEAKER_01:

Like I think you're gonna be able to do it. If this story spoke to you, let's keep the healing going. Visit BarbieMoreno.com for my online course, Awakening Your Worth in Healing Energy Sessions, one-on-one coaching, and your free healing guide. Your next step is waiting.

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Barbie Moreno

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