In 2020, I met Nick Oredson, a skilled facilitator who specializes in working with trauma and abuse. I started talking to him about the abuse, harm and harassment I’ve encountered throughout my life at the hands of men, specifically, and the damaging impact it’s had on me. To my surprise, he didn’t flinch – he just took in what I had to say and validated my experience. This was astonishing to me because in my experience, whenever I attempted to speak to men about abuse or demeaning behavior, their response has typically been to diminish my feelings or its impact, shout out in some kind of strange rage, or clam up completely and retreat to silence. I’d never had the experience of a man simply listening and taking in my perspective, until Nick. In time, I began to ask him questions about why men behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. No topic was off limits. He would access what he referred to as the collective male consciousness of shadow masculinity that all men are taught to adhere to, in order to answer my questions as best as he could. We jokingly referred to it as our ‘Ask a Dude’ sessions and I found them so helpful that I suggested he should set up a table on a street corner somewhere with a sign reading “Ask me anything about men” so women could come to him with their baffling questions about men.
That’s how this podcast started. We are a group of 3 women and we come together with a list of questions for Nick to address. This is not rehearsed. He has no idea what we will ask.
Ask A Dude – 3 women, one guy – where we get real answers on subjects most men aren’t willing to talk about.
Episode 1, Part 1: Gender violence, men and their feelings
Books mentioned: "Believing" by Anita Hill
www.sacred-truths.com
In 2020, I met Nick Oredson, a skilled facilitator who specializes in working with trauma and abuse. I started talking to him about the abuse, harm and harassment I’ve encountered throughout my life at the hands of men, specifically, and the damaging impact it’s had on me. To my surprise, he didn’t flinch – he just took in what I had to say and validated my experience. This was astonishing to me because in my experience, whenever I attempted to speak to men about abuse or demeaning behavior, their response has typically been to diminish my feelings or its impact, shout out in some kind of strange rage, or clam up completely and retreat to silence. I’d never had the experience of a man simply listening and taking in my perspective, until Nick. In time, I began to ask him questions about why men behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. No topic was off limits. He would access what he referred to as the collective male consciousness of shadow masculinity that all men are taught to adhere to, in order to answer my questions as best as he could. We jokingly referred to it as our ‘Ask a Dude’ sessions and I found them so helpful that I suggested he should set up a table on a street corner somewhere with a sign reading “Ask me anything about men” so women could come to him with their baffling questions about men.
That’s how this podcast started. We are a group of 3 women and we come together with a list of questions for Nick to address. This is not rehearsed. He has no idea what we will ask.
Ask A Dude – 3 women, one guy – where we get real answers on subjects most men aren’t willing to talk about.
Episode 1, Part 1: Gender violence, men and their feelings
Books mentioned: "Believing" by Anita Hill
www.sacred-truths.com
EPISODE 1, PART ONE: ASK A DUDE
Emmy Graham: In 2020, I met Nick Oredson, a skilled facilitator who specializes in working with trauma and abuse. I started talking to him about the abuse, harm and harassment I’ve encountered throughout my life at the hands of men, specifically, and the damaging impact it’s had on me. To my surprise, he didn’t flinch – he just took in what I had to say and validated my experience. This was astonishing to me because in my experience, whenever I attempted to speak to men about abuse or demeaning behavior, their response has typically been to diminish my feelings or its impact, shout out in some kind of strange rage, or clam up completely and retreat to silence. I’d never had the experience of a man simply listening and taking in my perspective, until Nick.
In time, I began to ask him questions about why men behave in certain ways in certain circumstances. No topic was off limits. He would access what he referred to as the collective male consciousness of shadow masculinity that all men are taught to adhere to, in order to answer my questions as best as he could. We jokingly referred to it as our ‘Ask a Dude’ sessions and I found them so helpful that I suggested he should set up a table on a street corner somewhere with a sign reading “Ask me anything about men” so women could come to him with their baffling questions about men.
That’s how this podcast started. We are a group of three women and we come together with a list of questions for Nick to address. This is not rehearsed. He has no idea what we will ask.
Ask A Dude - three women, one guy – where we get real answers on subjects most men aren’t willing to talk about. This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham.
Emmy: This is Emmy Graham with Sacred Truths and today we’re doing “Ask a Dude” podcast and our ‘dude’ today is with Nick Oredson; hi Nick, welcome!
Nick: Hi everybody, it’s great to be here.
Emmy: And we have a panel of three women who can ask anything they want. First, we have Heather, hi Heather!
Heather: Hello. Good to be with you guys.
Emmy: And we have Deborah,
Deborah: Good afternoon.
Emmy: And myself, Emmy. So, Nick to get started here, all of us have a bunch of questions to ask and you so graciously agreed to answer these questions, so I’m going to turn Heather first and see what her question is.
Heather: So, I’ve been reading a couple of books, one is Anita Hill’s new book, Believe, which is a, I’m just starting it so I don’t exactly know, but she’s been studying various forms of violence against women since she went through what she went through with the Clarence Thomas hearings all those years ago.
And one of the, I guess the premises of her whole project is that making structural changes in the law, in the way courts operate, in the way that society at large holds people accountability, that that can actually be one effective method of, let’s say in reducing violence against women. including things like, sexual harassment.
And it’s tempting to ask, “Do you think that can work?” But I find myself unwilling to accept the answer of, “No, like no, structural changes can’t work” and so I’m going to say, ‘yes they can’ but which ones,,, how… what do you see the role of those kind of structural societal level changes. What role do they have or are there any that stand out to you as really likely to be effective or ineffective, that kind of thing.
Nick: Yeah, so that is a really good question. And how I think about it is that any policy that stops perpetrators is good. And the second piece to that is that
all perpetrators need to be stopped, without any questions, like that just needs to happen in any way possible.
And I don’t believe that policy as it is or as it could be could stop what’s happening by itself. I think, it.. absolutely, anything to stop all perpetrators immediately. Yes! Great.
Without any understanding of why that’s happening, just stop! So, yes, agree!
But I think that to actually address it fully, there needs to be a different way of raising our boys. The way that we raise our boys has to be completely overhauled.
Because my experience as my being raised as a boy was infused with misogyny. I mean that was just part of that experience of being raised as a boy in the environment that I was raised in. There was an unpinning of misogyny just woven into that experience.
So, I think misogyny is the engine of violence against women, and so, unless that is addressed, I think we have an incomplete solution.
I think that’s starting to sort of sounds like a policy position, sort of, so I don’t want to talk in those terms necessarily, but that is what I’ve experienced and that is what I see as the engine of violence against women. That is quite a foundational piece of how our entire culture is built around misogyny.
And so, that’s what I experienced and that’s what I witness. Just how we raise our boys is an essential piece in how we address that.
Deborah: So, Nick, I think you’re absolutely right. The way we raise boys, the way we raise girls, children altogether make a huge difference in everything. Sorry, that was obvious. What specifically…I’ve read a few books on this and we don’t let boys cry, we don’t let boys feel. After a few years they stop crying, they stop feeling,
And then we ask them to cry and feel later in life, and they’ve lost the ability to do so. Can you suggest maybe 3 to 5 specific things we should do differently in raising boy children that might help.
Nick: In my experience as being raised as a boy, as a man, whatever we’re calling it, one of the things that would just manifest in my experience was that
violence equals authority. There were a set of social norms that was unwritten that I was expected to fulfill and when anyone strayed outside of those criteria, there was violence. That was how those social norms were maintained and violence was the source of all authority.
So if I strayed outside of what I was supposed to be as a boy, there was violence there to bring me back in there.
And so I think that would be #1 for sure is to do away with the idea that violence equals authority because that is an incredibly unhealthy thing, I think, to teach our boys, or anybody, really, wow! For sure that.
So that authority comes from self-knowledge, authority comes from love, authority comes from our connection to our community. Our authority is given to us by the people who depend on us. There’s lots of other ways to look at how authority is defined.
Not letting boys cry is kind of like this bludgeon, kind of this blunt instrument that’s used just in a really destructive way with boys, and it’s happening less than it’s used to.
But not just letting them cry but communicating to our boys that emotions are essential information for our health and well-being. Our emotions are the way that our psyche tracts how well are our connections with the people around us.
How healthy our connections are in our immediate family and community. So we’re getting information through our emotions about all those connections, so it’s not so much, yes, certainly, not hammer them for crying but also teaching boys what emotions are and their value and how important they are.
I think that one of the channels I picked up on, I learned through osmosis, once again, no one sat me down and said “blah, blah, blah,” this is how it is, I just got this information, was that somehow, power, was some kind of zero/sum game. Where someone else’s power, if someone else was in their power, that was somehow threatening to me, or if a woman was in her power, that somehow was some weird threat to me. So in order to maintain my power, I had to maintain power over other people.
So power was strictly relational; it didn’t have an internal locus, and that was just a very weird thing to learn, somehow, I had that notion that power was relational, and then it just took a lot of work as an adult to just realize that wasn’t true. You know, I’m around other people who are in their power, I feel great, I feel better when I’m in my power. Other people around me feel uplifted, there’s isn’t some weird like limited resource that everyone has to grab, it’s just weird.
And for sure that. An understanding of power and how important it is to be in your power and what a gift your power is to everyone around you. It’s just awesome.
It’s not something you’re stealing from other people. So, for sure that.
Emmy: I want to speak about the men who are already men, they’re not boys, they’ve already gone through that. These are the men who say,
‘I don’t hit my wife, I’m not a violent guy, I’ve never hit a woman,’ but they’re still violent and they don’t even see it. I’m talking about violence through verbal control, there’s lots of ways men control women in a way that feels violent to me
And take a woman’s power or try to stop a woman’s power.
Can you speak for what we can do for men now who don’t even recognize how they’re contributing to the violence?
Nick: That’s a …that’s a really tricky one because when I talk to men in whatever context. Sometimes I’m talking to men who are in crisis for one reason or another, and for one reason or another however they are handling things, their living system is failing. And so the feedback loop: the wife has left them, the kids won’t talk to him, they lost their job. They’re in some kind of crisis. And so when someone’s in that position, it’s a lot easier to talk about these things.
About: “Hey, maybe you could try some things differently, and you would get a better outcome.” So they’re motivated because they’re getting bad outcomes.
So, they’ve had the 5th relationship in a row fail. And so they’re saying, “Why is this happening? I’m a good guy, what’s wrong there?” So there’s possibility for some conversation there.
But for anyone who is still getting rewarded, and that’s the other piece to this. The way things are rewards men heavily. And so if they’re in the middle of receiving tremendous social reward for how they’re behaving and maybe the person they’re with is miserable but doesn’t leave them, and they’re just looking at this flow of rewards coming in, that’s an incredibly difficult conversation to have as to what to talk to them about because they’re not even asking a question.
And so, that is a tremendous challenge for me because that is an arena of tremendous harm. The men, they’re not committing crimes, they’re not getting caught. They’re not getting any signals saying they’re doing anything wrong. But they’re inflicting tremendous harm just in how they’re being.
And so I don’t have a good answer for that. I know where I can have had successful conversations. That’s a tough one.
Emmy: Can you describe for me what you mean when you say, “Men are getting rewarded.”?
Nick: Well, if the feedback they’re getting is financial success, career success, and social status, those are the rewards there are here in this set up that we’ve got.
So, if they’re receiving positive feedback being rewarded through these three channels, that’s what I mean by ‘being rewarded’, and I have never had a successful conversation in that space because they’re not, they’re like, “What?” There’s nothing telling them that something is wrong.
They’re like, “Well, this is great, why would I change anything??”
It’s a tough conversation, I wish I had a better answer in that one.
Heather: So there’s these external rewards of status and material benefit, but
if we just go granular, and be like, what does it feel like to someone to be mean, or hurt someone, (laughs in astonishment and surprise) like, what’s going on there? What’s going on inside, that I’m not having like an internal kind of punishment by just how bad it feels to treat someone like that.
Nick: That’s a great question, and what I’ve encountered is that (what I’ve experienced and what I’ve encountered), is that 100% of the focus of my upbringing, and with other men I talk about with this was oriented around an external focus.
It was a 100% just a blank about what’s going on in here. It’s not so much not being able to connect with emotions. It’s not even knowing what emotions are, like not actually understanding that there is such a thing as emotions that are happening here.
Just to say feelings, which would be a bad feeling that would arise, quite naturally, from causing harm to another person. We’re heavily wired as social creatures to depend on each other. We’ve evolved for millions of years as Hunter/gatherers,
high level of interdependence, so if you’re causing harm to the people close to you, that’s a really bad thing in that kind of environment where everyone is depending on each other, and so we developed feelings to tell us, to guide us.
But, my experience, was that that whole system was just shut off, and it was just numb.
So, with that external focus being so intense and survival driven, like the ability to get expertise in something you can exchange for money, that’s the only thing there is in my experience in the guys’ world. That’s everything or you’re just going to die if you don’t figure that out.
And feelings, feelings are just some weird distraction that needs to be ignored at all costs.
That’s a pretty intense system, that’s a pretty intense way to go through things, but that’s kind of how it was, that’s how I experienced it. So when, there’s a discussion with someone who is like, “What’s wrong, I don’t feel good,” or they’re coming in in crisis and kind of saying, “I don’t even…..”
They need a lot of coaching around just the idea that’s there’s something there to even notice. So they can be causing all kinds of harm and these signals are just being blocked. Completely. And I think that’s kind of…that can be hard,
How can you go through life cut off like that, but that’s what I saw there.
Heather: I’m just really curious. What it’s actually is like, and maybe what it actually feels like, maybe that’s not the right word, but what’s it’s like to be a person standing there saying something really mean or aggressive to your kid or your partner and watching them, their like face fall, watching them tear up.
I get that it’s a lack of empathetic or connected response, I get it’s a lack of that, but what is it? Like, what does it feel like to be that body, that person?
Nick: So, yeah, that’s a great question. How I think of it is it’s a narrative. So, what I’ve encountered in that space when I’ve actually talked to men who are doing things like that. They’re operating in a narrative that women fill this role in this household, and if they stray from that role, it’s my job to put them back into that role. And violence is okay in that situation. It’s okay to use violence to maintain that social order because if that social order breaks down, it’s chaos. It’s chaos and everyone’s in danger, everyone’s going to die some catastrophic thing will happen if the social order breaks down.
So that the violence is a tool, and sometimes necessary and even regrettably necessary. They might even have a story in their head, “I don’t like doing this what, but I have to. Something has happened, the social order is threatened. I’ve got to do what I’ve got to do.”
That’s what I’ve heard people report.
And the same with the children. The children have to follow a certain set of social rules. They need to stay in those guardrails and if violence is necessary, then that’s what needs to happen, and it’s “Okay”, because the alternative is chaos and the social order breaking down like literally everybody dying, like that is so dire to have that system break down and that’s unacceptable.
So there’s not a connection to feelings, there’s just this narrative that has to be maintained, and that’s the man’s job.
Heather: It almost sounds like they have to be…they can’t feel if they need to perform that function. If they going to need to hit your kid, you have to be, in order to maintain order, you have to be cut off what it feels like to hit your kid.
Nick: Yeah, I don’t get too much… I trying to think about this just on a practical level, what helps, what doesn’t, what works, what doesn’t, what kind of conversations are effective and what kind of conversations don’t work. But, for sure you could make that argument, that the lack of feeling is essential, an essential part of that ability to do that.
Emmy: I just want to follow up on what you said about “It’s their job”. I’ve used those words as well in my own experience when I’m being shut down by a man in any situation and what it’s what I would call emotional abuse, verbal abuse, shut down, yelled at. It feels like, the sense that he feels it’s his job to do that to me.
I must be stopped, I must be controlled, I’m way out of line. So I just want to verify that I’ve experienced, that’s how it feels to me on my end.
Deborah, do you have a question?
Deborah: I do have a question, but I also have a follow up to your follow up. There’s an amazing play called “Big Love”, that has nothing to do with the TV show of the same name in which a character who is a soldier has an amazing long monologue about how men are raised and men are trained. And the monologue is powerful and beautiful. And he talks about as a soldier he is taught to go far from home, being in extraordinarily dangerous situations and kill people because that’s how war works. And then he says then men are expected to come home and hold the babies and be sweet to their wives after they’ve just seen horrors affected upon them and by them. And the play talks about we ask too much. We want men to be two completely different things and of course people’s minds can’t fathom both options. So, I think, maybe, well, I’m not sure this is true, but we’ve been told that men compartmentalize their thoughts and their feelings better than women. We don’t have to have that conversation right this minute. But, if I needed to compartmentalize so I could do my job, which is run my home or keep the children in line, or win the war, then I’m going to do that at all costs, particularly if we bring it back to it’s the rewards that the man then gets, social, Nick you listed three: Success and
Nick: Social, career and money.
Deborah: Thank you. Social, career and money. And if I want those rewards, then I’m going to do what I need to do what I believe I need to do to achieve them. I’m going to focus on one of those or several of those that are meaningful to me especially if they contradict something’s in that small voice in my head that might just sort of bubble up and say, ‘this is wrong’ or ‘this isn’t right’ which is different. But I think men are taught to focus and not listen to that internal voice.
Nick: Yes, that has been my experience.
Deborah: Well, I do have different question if we’re ready to move on. I have a very different question and I’m trying to decide the best direction to ask this question. It’s a tad personal but I think it’s germane to all of us. The other night,
I said to my sweetie, “I love you madly!” and my sweetie said, “I love you.”
And I thought, ‘not madly’?
And so I was thinking about is that a language situation, is that an emotion situation?
And then I recalled one of my students transitioned from being a female to a young man and became one of the happiest young men I’ve ever known. And I said one day, “What’s the difference? How does it feel?” (because I was really curious).
And my student said that as a female person she didn’t feel things very deeply, but she found she could explain her feelings eloquently and articulately and to every nuance.
And what he said, as a man, his feelings are much much bigger, much stronger, more powerful but somehow, he had lacked the ability to explain them.
And, I’m really curious, if that’s a function of testosterone, if that’s what happens in people who were born men or that perhaps men have feelings that can’t put into words particularly if feelings were squished out of them when they were tiny.
So that when my sweetie didn’t say ‘madly’ that didn’t mean a diminution of his feelings but maybe in his mind, the other three words were plenty and it didn’t need embellishment.
Can you comment, on I guess, feelings, articulation, clarity of thought, enormity of feelings, and why it’s so hard to get men to talk about romantic moments?
Nick: Awesome. Thank you. Boy, that’s such an interesting question, man, and I think the difference between what effects as a man, my physiological relationship to my feelings that’s inherent based on chromosomes and testosterone, vs the ways that I was socialized to relate to feelings.
Yikes! I don’t know! I wish I had a good, amazing answer there. I think that, if someone who had transitioned back and forth, even that, I mean, they’re changing their hormonal structure, but they’re still stepping into a different set of social roles. So, I’ve read accounts of people who have transitioned back and forth and those experiences. And it’s fascinating!
A lot of it is about expectation and that’s all (about) social roles. I don’t have any experience with that contrast like, how to tell from a hormonal standpoint or a testosterone standpoint, how that impacts my relationships to my feelings.
Jeez, I know that I feel feelings intensely, and when I talk to other men who have done whatever, either didn’t get heavily socialized out of having feelings, they were raised in some environment that didn’t have that in that way, or have done a lot of work. That is a universal expression that men feel feelings intensely.
But whether that impacts how, I wish I had a better answer. How you could figure out what that difference was outside of social roles and how people are socialized.
I don’t know how to do that, I wish I had a better answer for that, but that’s a really important question: What’s inherent in the physiology versus what’s taught.
So I wish I had a better answer than that.
Deborah: Well, you mentioned social conditioning and social expectations and again I’m thinking of my student who had never been a man -
Nick: Right.
Deborah: -and was raised by glorious loving parents who accepted this extraordinary young person as they came which I thought was such a blessing.
And the student, a theater student, and in that environment, there’s a whole lot of fluidity on who behaves in what way, when, and how. So in some ways it seemed like a test case, of in a comparatively unrestricted upbringing and current environment.
His report was, “I can’t describe the enormity of my feelings suddenly.”
I’ve just never forgotten that conversation and the look on his face which was this sort of joyous embrace of life that had no words.
This is an articulate young person who could talk about all kinds of things all day long, but suddenly lost the ability to talk about feelings.
Heather: Wouldn’t that be funny if the big secret is that men have much huger feelings (laughs) than women actually?
Deborah: But fewer words to describe them. (imitates a man) “Yeah, I feel, I feel good!”
Would be hilarious if it really meant “I feel transcendent and my soul just rose to the heavens to embrace God.” (Laughter)
Nick: I like that. I like that idea. There it is, right there, that’s data. We can take that experience, and that report, and there it is, we’ve got a report: and so let’s...that’s a working theory. And I think that I can report is that I don’t have a life time of practice talking about feelings.
I have this last maybe 6 years where that was even something that I would even think about talking about.
And that’s emotions or feelings as this idea that that’s something in my body that transmits important information to me. Before that, all I had were reactions: mad, sad….yeah, those are emotions, mad, sad, scared, they’re important but there are not an enormous level of nuance there around the continuous flow of information about how I’m doing and I had no understanding of that and no ability to talk about that. There was no ability to talk about feelings as something that was important that I needed to pay attention to and articulate clearly, that was just an alien concept.
If I got mad, all it was, was endure it until it ended.
If I got sad, scared, same thing. Scared, same thing. It was something to kind of be endured and just kind of wait it out and hope it goes away soon, not something I would look at and say, “Whoa! this is important, what’s going on here?”
Emmy: Which might be why, if a woman feels upset or sad, the man feels he has to fix it to make it go away.
Nick: Sure, that’s a classic. Yes. One possibility there is that in a situation where there is a man raised in the way that we’re talking about where feelings are this kind of confusing, messy sort of nuisance, and actually threatening potentially because it’s like, actually, “If I have feelings, I won’t be able to do my job!”
And it’s actually threatening.
It’s a slippery slope, if I start having feelings, next thing, who knows, I might be out on the street.
So for someone where that is the underlying idea that not having feelings is essential to survival basically, or essential to my well-being, or my ability to do my job, they see a woman having emotions, well those might make that guy real uncomfortable real fast because that’s referencing something inside of him that is dangerous, that is threatening and so, we got to get some “fixit.”
“We got to get the Fixit fire extinguisher and blast that with some Fixit, ‘cause we can’t be having that around here ‘cause I’m gonna freak out.”
Deborah: Might there be a sense that feelings are contagious, and if my wife is emoting all over the place and there’s weeping and there’s Kleenex, “Oh my gosh, what if I start feeling that way, what if I catch it?”
Nick: For sure, that’s a great way to think about it. The neuroscience is that the mirror neurons when you are around someone, whatever they’re doing, that’s activating the exact same systems in your body, so that way, yeah, anything going on neurologically is literally contagious. So, for sure that could be a whole host of very uncomfortable things coming up for that dude in that situation and just (Sound effect of unraveling). Yeah.
Emmy: This is Sacred Truths with Emmy Graham with music by Lemon Music Studio at Pixabay and with special thanks to our ‘dude’, Nick Oredson.
This concludes Part 1 of Episode 1 of “Ask a Dude”. Please join us for Part 2.
Please visit our website at www.sacred-truths.com.
Thank you for listening.