The Boy Must Die

The Boy  Must Die

Not a physical death.

A release. A release of the habits, patterns and beliefs that served you as a child but are now keeping you small as a man.

In this episode, José Alejandro goes deep on one of the most important and least talked about conversations in men's work: the psychology of the uninitiated boy and how he's formed, how he gets stuck, and how he ends up running the life of a grown man who has no idea he's still in the driver's seat.

This episode traces the full arc. From how early wounding creates the belief systems that follow a man into adulthood, to the traffic jam in adolescence when boys seek their edge without healthy containers, to the specific ways the wounded boy shows up in a man's leadership, relationships and sense of worth.

José breaks down the difference between boy psychology and man psychology across every domain. Love, power, pain, discipline, visibility, service. And makes the case that the shift between the two isn't about age. It's about initiation.

And he closes with what initiation actually does. Not a ceremony. Not a single dramatic moment. A break in the psyche that doesn't kill the boy but lets his behaviors go to die. So he is no longer in the driver's seat. So the man can finally arrive.

In this episode:

• How early wounding creates the patterns that run a man's adult life
• Why adolescence becomes a traffic jam without initiation
• The African proverb that reframes everything we think we know about brotherhood
• The full boy vs man psychology breakdown across love, power, pain, discipline, visibility and service
• Why reactive independence is just as immature as codependence
• What initiation actually does and why no course, book or podcast can replace it

This episode is for you if:

• You keep hitting the same patterns no matter how much work you do
• You lead well in public but struggle in private
• You're still waiting to feel worthy of the love and success you already have
• You sense the boy is running things and you're ready for that to change

"The boy must die. Not so you disappear. So you can finally arrive."

Connect with José: Newsletter: josealejandro.co/newsletter Free Resources: josealejandro.co/resources

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So there comes a time where the boy must die and the man must emerge. And when I say die, I don't mean a physical death, although sometimes it does require physical challenge to go through this initiation. When I say die, I mean a release, a release of old habits, patterns, beliefs that served that man as a child, but are now keeping him small, letting go of codependency and of the rebellious independent self and an honoring of the responsibility required in a man's life, in a man's community, and in the world. And it's a shift ultimately from selfish desire, self-centered action, to being of service and greater purpose. And this is not a concept, this is necessity. This is what initiations are all about. And it's the conversation that most men never have because they don't even know what it means. And we're going to talk about that today. I'm Jose Alejandro, and this is the initiated path. So to understand why the boy must die, why the boy's psychology must die, we must we we have to understand how he was created, how that psychology was created, right? So humans are probably the most codependent mammals on the planet when we're first born. We literally need our parents for everything, specifically our mothers, for literally everything, or we die. We need to be fed, we need to be sheltered, we need to be clothed, we need to have our asses wiped and our diapers changed, or we die, right? Or we become extremely traumatized for a good amount of time and then we die. And really that makes us self-centered. So for good reason, because survival literally requires it. And because everything is about us, we also make the absence of love about us. So when care disappears, we think it's our fault. When love is inconsistent, we decide that we are the problem. And these early experiences, these early childhood experiences literally shape everything. They create our belief systems, they create our paradigms, they create our coping mechanisms, they create our patterns of behavior that help us manage our shame, manage our fear, manage our doubt, manage our discomfort. And every single one of these things follows us into adulthood, into leadership, into relationships, into our bodies. So our somatic bodies literally take the shape of these experiences into our work. The wound that a boy carries becomes the lens that a man sees his entire life through. So when a boy grows up without the love that he needed, for example, he becomes a man who questions his worth and struggles to love himself. He sees love as something to be earned. He performs, he pleases, he constantly tries to win approval, secretly fearing that if he stops, he's going to be abandoned. He takes everybody's emotions personally, and when someone's upset, for example, he sees it as his fault and he tries to fix it rather than simply being present. Maybe this sounds like something that you've done in your relationship. Maybe your boundaries a week. Oftentimes a boy's boundaries a week or the boy's psychology in a man, in a man's mind, in a man's body, in a man's life, uh has weak boundaries, has a fear of losing love, struggles to say no or stand up for himself, apologizes constantly, even when he's not at fault, as if shame is really the default setting. So his voice is constantly repeating, his inner voice is constantly repeating that he's not good enough, that he's not lovable, that he's not worthy, even when he's surrounded by love, even when he's surrounded by love, he feels alone, he feels unseen, he feels misunderstood. And unconsciously, a boy will expect his partner, his work, his success to heal him, to complete him, to love him the way that he needed to be loved as a child. Think about that. So, how much of what's going on in the world right now, the things that we look down upon, the things that really break our hearts, the things that are destroying the earth, the things that take advantage of people who can't defend themselves, the things that we see in politics, all of it, how much of that is caused by boy psychology? So, yes, more responsibilities, more uh the stakes are higher, more people depending on on us as men. But really, internally, we have a boy psychology that's running the show. So it's like uh a little boy crashing two cars together because he didn't get what he wanted, or a little boy crying and pouting because uh he he didn't uh get the food that he wanted to eat. You know, it might not look exactly the way a toddler would throw a tantrum. However, the psychology is there and it comes out in very unhealthy ways that impact our community and the world around us. Now let's talk about the traffic jam or the bottleneck in adolescence that leads to this situation I just described. So when we reach adolescence, something begins to shift. We start to seek autonomy, we start to challenge authority, we start to test limits, we start to establish independence any way that we can by pushing against the boundaries that the world around us has imposed on us for the sake of our safety since we were children. And how our lives looked like before adolescence starts to determine how this plays out. So we start to lie, we start to talk back, we start to rebel against our parents and their rules, and in more extreme cases, we start to drink, we start to do drugs, we we become promiscuous, we engage in behaviors that can actually put us in real danger or our lives at risk and lead to consequences that oftentimes are irreversible or make an impact in our lives that are pretty significant. Now, less privileged uh boys can oftentimes turn to street life, more privileged boys oftentimes you know again to college and turn towards fraternity hazing. Today, uh many because of social media, does it matter what uh demographic or what really uh uh financial status these boys are in, what they're doing is turning into turning towards the manosphere. Now, hopefully none of this is permanent, right? But ultimately, without initiation, that traffic jam makes it a more perfect permanent thing in in a boy's life that that really leaks into his adulthood. So without initiation, it could lead somewhere very dark. So there's an old African proverb that says, the child not embraced by the village will burn it down just to feel its warmth. Now we might read that word embrace as showing love, like hugging someone. But what they actually mean, I think, and the way I've heard it described was that embrace means to initiate, because to initiate boys is to truly embrace them. It's to bring them in. It's to say, you belong here, you have a role, you have a responsibility, you matter to this community. Without that embrace, without that initiation, the boy is left to find his edge alone. And he'll find it because boys always do, men always do. They they will find their edge. For example, there's a story about the juvenile hawk and how uh once hawks are able to fly, you know, how um they're in the nest, and there's that moment where they decide to jump off the nest and they're ready to really spread their wings and fly. Well, there's a story in Native American in Native American culture that talks about how the juvenile hawk flies up into the sky as high as it possibly can in order to test its limits. And it goes so far to the point where it runs out of oxygen, it passes out and starts falling down, falling down, falling down, and right before it reaches its death, it wakes back up and starts flying again. And it continues to do that until it identifies just the limit where it can fly as high as possible without passing out. Men do the same thing, boys do the same thing. But here's the thing without healthy containers, uninitiated men end up initiating other men. And this is where we see the gangs, we see the hazing, we see the hypermasculine cultures built on domination, men following the loudest voice in the room, even if it's pain in a louder voice, or the most confident man in the room, even if it's pain in a louder voice. Right? So all of our ancestors knew the importance of transitioning a boy into responsible and integrated leadership, into a responsible and integrated man. Why? Because it was a matter of survival, the community depended on it. So they created a break, a structured intentional threshold between the boy and the adulthood. Now, in modern society, we have lost that. And what we have instead is a traffic jam in adolescence where generations of men are stuck between boy and manhood, not because they're broken, but because no one ever showed them the threshold, showed them how to cross that threshold and supported them in taking on the responsibility that an adult is required to take on in order to help the community thrive and continue to move forward. No one held the container, no one guided them through, and as a result, what we end up with are boys in grown men's bodies with adult responsibilities who are leading selfish lives rather than lives of service. Now let's talk a little bit about the boy in a man's body. So I mentioned earlier that we are born codependent, and that's a matter of survival. It's the most beautiful thing to see a baby being nurtured and taken care of by his parents, by his mother. But a boy in a boy's psychology in a man's body looks very different, right? So the boy is oftentimes full of noise. It's a lack of understanding of himself and his true purpose that is running his psyche. It's a lack of ownership and responsibility, it's a constant seeking of validation from others, which is oftentimes simply a projection of his desire to be approved of, to be seen, to be loved, the same way a toddler does. He hides behind false pride and fake confidence. He finds role models who sound the most confident, even when that confidence, like I said earlier, is just pain in a louder voice. He manipulates because he thinks he's really the center of the world. He makes everything about himself. And when things don't go his way, he tends to lie, he tends to cheat, he tends to take, he tends to try to bend the world to his will. Now, oftentimes we call this behavior evil, we call this behavior toxic, but the truth is that it's just child psychology. Think about that. Yes, there's such a thing as toxic behavior, but oftentimes it is an unhealed childhood wound in underdeveloped psychology that is being projected out into the world by an adult. So this is the boy's codependency and reactive independence, passing the ball back and forth. So I mentioned that as a child we are codependent as an adolescence, and as a teen, we start to try to establish independence in a reactive way. That's part of our developmental process. But oftentimes when we don't have an initiation, we are bouncing back and forth between the toddler and the teenager. Swinging between needing others to complete us and pushing everyone away, uh, trying to prove that we don't need anyone, which is really the opposite of what an independent person does. So so much of a boy's desire for independence is actually a reaction to fear. It's a reaction to fear of being codependent, fear of being controlled, fear of being defined, of being used, of being manipulated. And ultimately, life is about becoming interdependent. So when we look at the stages of development, we start as codependents, we become and find our independence, but ultimately we are meant to be in community, and community is interdependent, so sovereign and in community with others that help us thrive. Now there's a great book by Stephen Covey called Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. He wrote something in the book that has always stayed with me. So he says independent thinking alone isn't suited for independent interdependent reality. Independent people who do not have maturity to think or act interdependently may be good individual producers, but they won't be good leaders or team players. Why? Because life by nature is interdependent, and interdependence is far more mature of a concept than anything else. So the boy swings between codependency and reactive independence. The man, the mature initiated man, lives in interdependence. He knows that he cannot grow alone and that his strength is not diminished by needing others, that real power is inhorted, is is shared, and that the most mature thing that a man could do is let himself be held, challenged, and witnessed by other others in his community, and understand the responsibility that he holds and how he moves and the impact that everything that he does or doesn't do has on his community and the generations to come. Now I want to talk about the differences between the boy psychology and the man psychology a little bit more, and I want to be very clear. I should have said this in the beginning, but we're not trying to get rid of our inner child. So a lot of the work that I do with men is in actually reconnecting them to their inner child and their innocence and enjoying life again and bringing some of that just vibrancy into their lives, so it's not all about enduring and all about getting things done and achieving goals. But when we talk about boy psychology in this context, what we're right what we're really uh recognizing is that oftentimes the boy psychology, the codependent or the reactive dependency of the adolescents, is in the driver's seat. And what we want to do is really initiate ourselves into maturity, into responsibility, into integrated manhood leadership. And we do that by taking the boy out of the driver's seat of our psyche and putting them in the passenger seat and then developing the adult psychology so that we can take the driver's seat and guide our lives accordingly while the inner child is sitting in the car with us, enjoying that journey. So I'm gonna share these not as a judgment but as a mirror because most men carry both. So the work is in becoming aware of which one is driving the vehicle. So a boy thinks love is something to possess and conquer. He is caught up in external measures of success and validation. He seeks love as a replacement for what he didn't receive as a child. A man knows that love, like everything else, is a responsibility. So he chooses to give love rather than search for where to receive it. He is not afraid of opening his heart. Number two, a boy seeks power over others or gives his power away entirely. So this is the concept of power over or power under. Both are out of fear, both are out of shame, and oftentimes he needs to prove himself or he collapses. A man owns his strengths and his weaknesses, he's not afraid to empower others because he knows that he loses nothing by doing so, and his focus is on honoring his truth and embodying his power as a gift, not a weapon. Three, a boy avoids pain out of fear, or he runs towards it just to feel alive. He either numbs or he courts danger, and there's no middle ground. A man knows that the only way out is through. He knows that he's not meant to endure pain, he's meant to walk into it, to sit with it for the sake of the things that matter most to him. And he knows that there's no growth without grief. I'll say that again. There is no growth without grief. So he embraces the fire as a thing that forges him and his ability to show up for the vision and the life that he's calling in. Then we have number four a boy focuses on discipline for the sake of control. Without it, he feels shame. Without it, he collapses into numbing and avoidance. And a man focuses on self-leadership and mastery. Everything that he does is a prayer. He's devoted to his purpose, he does everything with devotion, which really means discipline with love. Not control, but devotion. Not control, but containment. Five, a boy defends or over functions. So really, a boy uh participates in shame avoidant behavior because you can avoid shame by trying to defend, so one one-upping others, or you can avoid shame by one-downing others. So he protects himself by one-upping or one-downing, making everything about himself. A man owns his failures, knows his weaknesses, takes responsibility for his impact. He doesn't blame the world for where he stands in his life. Next, we have a boy is afraid of being seen or demands to be the center of attention. Either way, it's about him. Again, like I said, boy psychology is very self-centered. A man is not afraid of revealing who he truly is. He doesn't aim for perfection, he aims for excellence, he makes himself visible for the sake of his mission and the people that he serves. And last but not least, a boy is ultimately self-serving. A man is in service to something greater. And here's the one thing that sits beneath all of them. A boy uses his power to take, a man uses his power to serve. And the difference between the two is not age, it's whether he's ever had the courage, the guidance, and the support to face himself, to face these wounds, to take responsibility for them. You may have heard this, it's not your fault that you experienced the childhood you experienced, that you have these wounds or these traumas or these paradigms and these patterns that are, or these protective mechanisms, right, that are revealing themselves in your life today, maybe sabotaging your life. But it is your responsibility to take ownership of them, to do the work, to heal them. A man has a healthy balance between humility and dignity. He is connected to his heart and he isn't afraid to be soft because he also embraces his strength. He is dangerous but not a danger. He honors the masculine and the feminine within himself and around him. He has reverence for women, for nature, for other men, for elders, for children. He is not trying to dominate the world, he is trying to serve it. So, how do we transition from boy psychology to man psychology? Let's talk about initiations again. Now I want to speak directly to you for a moment. So if you recognize yourself in any of the things I shared the performing, the pleasing, the hilo confidence, the reactive independence, the love, that you're still waiting to feel worthy of. Just take a deep breath and give yourself some compassion. I know I felt myself inside. Of these, um, it's why I call this the initiated path because there's always something new that reveals itself. We are works in progress, and compassion is the number one thing that we need to offer ourselves because otherwise, you're just shaming the boy, and that is boy-like behavior, right? The man notices what's currently alive, and notices and recognizes where he needs to take responsibility and step up to the plate, take ownership, do something that can support him in taking responsibility, whether that's finding a mentor, a coach, a therapist, a resource, right? A book, a weekend retreat, something that could support him in healing and taking responsibility for this edge, right? And I know uh for me, some of these things still reveal themselves, oftentimes not because I haven't worked on them, but because I'm growing and I'm working towards a bigger life. And by bigger, sometimes I just mean deeper. It doesn't necessarily mean more. Um, and as we work towards a bigger life, as we work towards our vision, these parts of ourselves are gonna reveal themselves in different ways. So, 2020, I did my wilderness rite of passage. It was an incredibly powerful experience that helped me really transition um out of a lot of those boy-like behaviors that were sabotaging the vision that I was stepping into then. The last six years have been incredibly beautiful and powerful because I was able to step into more responsibility, and now I'm stepping into something else in my life. And I feel like my 30s, I'm 34 now, I feel like my 30s are really bringing just a new uh a new quality of experiences, and there's a lot that I'm claiming for myself, and therefore I'm feeling called to do another rite of passage this year in order to leave behind another set of behaviors that maybe served me the last six years, but no longer serve me today. So I share all of that because as the person who's communicating all of this, um, I still have you know these parts of myself revealing themselves in different ways. Now, what you do get to ask yourself is are you willing to face yourself? So if anything I shared triggered you, if anything I shared revealed some of those boy-like behaviors, and just recognizing that it's not a character flaw, but it is your responsibility. And it's just a reflection of the boy who never got the initiation he needed, but it's never too late to cross the threshold or to cross the threshold that you're at today. So the path does not care how old you are, doesn't care how successful you are, doesn't care how long you've been on this journey called life. It only asks one thing are you willing to face yourself? So the answer is yes, you're already on the path, hence why you're listening to this podcast. Join my newsletter at josealejandro.co slash newsletter, tap into the free resources, practices, frameworks at josealejandro.co slash resources. There's an incredible uh quiz called the Leadership Edge Quiz that helps leaders and has helped many med identify their current edge of leadership that's keeping them plateaued and reveals the bottleneck around their impact, their income, their intimacy. Um so take that quiz, it's free. You get a free initiate uh leadership initiation guide after that gives you uh some action steps that you can take in order to cross that threshold. And if this episode spoke something to something in you, share it because the man who needs to hear it probably won't find it on his own, but you can put it in front of him, and that is initiation in action. So you don't be you don't become initiated by accident, you become initiated by choice because initiation is a path. See you next week. Peace.