Stop making things worse–sort yourself out first

Reactive emotions are the horse shit in the garden of your life

Nothing makes the abstract concrete like survival and reproduction. My wife and I have been together for almost a decade, we married three years ago. Last summer she decided it was time to start trying for a kid. Until then, the idea of becoming a father and having a baby was exciting. But when it became a tangible, visceral possibility, I froze.

My resistance was as surprising to me as it was upsetting to her. I was downright bamboozled. My choice to press pause on the baby thing surfaced a lot of difficult material that we’ve both been working with over the past year.

It’s hard to express the experience of your body telling your mind to fuck right off. The internal mental conflict was like overwhelming confusion-drenched aporia slathered in rage. And my body felt like a blast furnace every time I approached the topic. Why did having a baby freak me out so much? I think it goes back to lessons learned through experiences with death.

Rewind four years. Within a sixteen month period, all three of my grandparents died, my great uncle died, and doctors found a tumor in the center of my fiance’s father’s brain. A week after our wedding my father-in-law passed away.

It was around the same time that I stumbled upon Buddhism and meditation. One of the first books I read was The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. I read parts of it to my father-in-law during his last weeks of life. The look of calm acceptance on his face as I read is still vivid in my memory.

I also started a daily meditation practice around then and found an amazing meditation teacher to work with one-on-one. Since then I’ve been trying my best to ‘sort myself out,’ to make the most of the insane privilege I have received: the ability to draw and expel breath on the only planet our species knows of, capable of supporting human life.

Being alive is a bloody miracle, and it comes with a great responsibility. I just happened to be humbled enough by suffering to recognize that when I did. So I made the decision to stop living my life as a passenger adrift in the undertows of helplessness, complaints, entertainment, and distraction. I just could not bear to keep struggling forward through the overgrown weeds of my suffering, choked by emotional reactivity. Something had to change.

“The practitioner discovers — and this is a revolutionary insight, whose subtlety and power cannot be overestimated — that not only do violent emotions not necessarily sweep you away and drag you back into the whirlpools of your own neuroses, they can actually be used to deepen, embolden, invigorate, and strengthen [awakening mind]. The tempestuous energy becomes raw food of the awakened energy of [awakening mind]. The stronger and more flaming the emotion, the more [awakening mind] is strengthened. I feel that this unique method of Dzogchen (a direct approach to the natural state) has extraordinary power to free even the most inveterate, deeply rooted emotional and psychological problems.” — Sogyal Rinpoche, The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying

After a year of reading dharma and meditating, I was able to switch out of 24/7 survival mode. After repeatedly (and silently) admitting to myself what a horrorshow I’d let my life become, I learned to focus on and start to take responsibility for the things I had agency over.

I also practiced how to stop obsessing over the past. It continues to be a process of recognizing that my escapism, self-victimization, and constant unconscious blaming were the only strategies I had to survive suffering for a long time. Pain is sometimes so deep and so overwhelming we become numb and oblivious to it over the years. When self-pity or self-hatred come up in reaction to this acknowledgment, I label it: ‘opinions about myself,’ not facts, and let them go too.

The flip side of that lesson was to learn to stop wasting my time, energy and attention focusing on and trying to fight generalized abstract systems, groups or structures I had zero control over. Quitting grad school helped a lot with this. I’d been trained since my mid-twenties to write persuasive, logically sound arguments that blamed society, capitalism, the mass media, the patriarchy, the Church, my family, or one socially constructed group or another for the biggest, baddest problems that I could perceive. When I discovered Jordan Peterson’s ideas a few years later, his diagnosis of the ideological possession that plagues today’s Humanities departments brought me a lot of peace.

With the help of my meditation teacher and a small community of fellow practitioners, I made it my mission to take responsibility for and transform my suffering, instead of continuing to trundle through life as a reactive, alienated, spaced-out victim.

First I focused on managing my finances and career. After dropping out of grad school, I’d found a job, and started to dig myself out of debt. Two years later I turned my attention to physical health, sleep, nutrition, and fitness. Today I’m in the best shape of my life–and just getting started. Last year, the baby thing kicked off my efforts to re-focus my energy and attention on my relationships–with my family, my marriage, and myself. Adding new life to this planet is a huge, difficult, meaningful responsibility and I want to do it right, to the extent that I am able.

Last week, my wife got back from a three month meditation retreat at Blue Cliff Monastery in the Catskill Mountains. It’s been a spacious summer, and I used the space (emotional, psychological and physical) to investigate my conduct as a husband. To really sort through what I was doing, thinking and saying that was contributing to the difficulties in our relationship.

What do I think about my wife–as my wife? What do I think about myself as her husband? What do the stories I repeat in my mind say about her–and about me? Do I believe them? Do I act on them as if they were facts? What kind of language do I talk to my wife with? Do I use blame and judgment to try and manipulate her? Do I hear her when I’m listening? Does my behavior align with what I say want? Do I know what she wants? Do I know what I want?

As I reflected on these sorts of questions, I started to recognize some of the specific reactive emotional patterns underlying my thoughts, speech, and actions. While these reactive patterns operated, they clouded my mindset and co-opted my logic to justify their own existence. A life governed by reactivity makes things worse than they have to be.

At first, the patterns were subtle, barely perceptible, noticeable only in the ways I treated other people. As summer passed, they became more obvious. As I started to uncover their roots, I started to see them everywhere, in myself and others. Now they are difficult to ignore.

Clumsy language use, unmindful behavior, and mental gymnastics conspire to generate a very confusing dynamic in my relationships that results in me avoiding owning my shit. The proliferation of reactive patterning, like unattended weeds over many years, created ripe conditions for this fundamental confusion.

The truth is, I’ve come to see that I have unskillful ways of being in relationship with people in general–not just my wife. Although I want my marriage to be a nourishing source of mutual support and joy, despite my best intentions, I’ve been making things worse and contradicting this very wish. That’s not the kind of situation I want to bring a baby into.

“You should rather be greatful for the weeds you have in your mind, because eventually they will enrich your practice.”–Suzuki Roshi, Zen Mind Beginners Mind

Survival and reproduction are at the root of every human being’s biologically grounded conditioning. There are observable intersexual dynamics, the strategies men and women act out (with or without conscious awareness) to survive and reproduce. Survival mode doesn’t have to be triggered by mortal danger to our bodies, it can be (and was often in me) activated by deep, suppressed emotional pain or psychological trauma. Overcoming that was the first part of my journey. Tapping into and experiencing my innate reproductive drives has more recently been my focus. A man’s conditioning is different than a woman’s because his body has a unique function, composition and purpose from hers. That is where red pill theory fits in.

The first time I was introduced to Roosh’s writing I rejected it flat out. I told the friend who showed it to me that he was a sexist bigot and I seriously questioned our friendship. It was only a year and a half later, when the pain I was experiencing in my relationship with my wife became so acute that I gave Roosh another shot.

As I read through Bang the first time, slowly, my outrage eventually simmered to anger, which settled into shame, and eventually I was able to recognize the truths of intersexual dynamics described by a guy who’d devoted a large part of his life to observing, experimenting and validating sexual strategies. This lead me to /r/theredpill and /r/marriedredpill, No More Mister Nice Guy, and www.therationalmale.com.

Being married, I’m not looking to pick up women, but the fundamental principles of intersexual dynamics apply to any male-female relationship. So I started to practice positive masculinity: asking for what I want, being direct about my expectations, leading through action, staying composed in the face of emotional reactivity, etc. Since I started practicing things I’ve been learning from the manosphere, my wife tells me she feels much more freedom and space to be feminine. She says she feels safer and more at peace in our apartment, and greater confidence in depending on me. We’ve still got some ways to go, but the changes are real, and they are amazing. When I stopped crowding the feminine roles and responsibilities in our marriage, and focused on unapologetically listening to my masculine drives, our relationship started to balance out.

“If men and women are clinging to a politically correct sameness even in moments of intimacy, then sexual attraction disappears. I don’t mean just the desire for intercourse, but the juice of the entire relationship begins to dry up. The love may still be strong, the friendship may still be strong, but the sexual polarity fades, unless in moments of intimacy one partner is willing to play the masculine pole and one partner is willing to play the feminine. You have to animate the masculine and feminine differences if you want to play in the field of sexual passion.”–David Deida, The Way of the Superior Man

In the following series of posts I’m going to own and unpack how a situation like mine came to be, dig into what reactive patterns are and how they work, and share ways of taking responsibility for the things you can control (thoughts, words, and actions) and show how they’ve helped me transform pain into joy and contentment. I hope they help you too.

I’m bound to make errors, and mistakes in the way I describe my experience and the things I’ve learned, I’ve not mastered any of this stuff. Whatever mistakes and misrepresentations are my own, and I am happy to discuss or answer for them. Everything I’ve learned over the past four years I have to thank my meditation teacher Paul for his guidance, support and friendship, and my wife, family and friends for the space, patience and understanding they’ve offered.

And really, at the end of the day, this whole blog is just me doing my best to piece together the wisdom that my father’s father acted out in his backyard garden throughout his life. You can’t grow delicious tomatoes, hot peppers or grapes for red wine without a rich bed of horse shit and rotting compost. Love you nonno.