Episode 158: Why Men Struggle with Emotions (and How to Fix It) – Transcript

In this episode, Jennifer sits down with Owen Marcus founder of MELD and a pioneer in men’s emotional intelligence, to explore how emotional fluency is transforming leadership and relationships. Owen shares how men aren’t broken—they simply lack the tools to express themselves authentically. Listeners will discover why vulnerability is a strength, how nervous system regulation improves communication, and why traditional self-help often fails men. With his R.O.C. Formula—Relax, Open, Connect—Owen offers a roadmap to connection, resilience, and success. This powerful conversation is a must-listen for any Business Owner or leader ready to challenge outdated norms and embrace a new model of empowered, emotionally aware leadership.

Transcript

Jennifer: Hey, hey, a brand new episode of the Happy Productive Podcast is about to begin. It’s time to be inspired by simple and actionable solutions for you and your business. If you’re an established entrepreneur, or just laying down the first brick of your future empire, the mantra is the same, we will flip any failure into a positive and use it to our advantage.

This show is all about turning coal into diamonds. With the right plan and mindset, anything is possible. I’m Jennifer Dawn, your host, business coach, and founder of Best Planner Ever and I’m here to help you achieve all your ambitious goals. Success is closer than you think. Let’s do this.

Hey, hey, everybody, welcome to a new episode of the Happy Productive Podcast. My guest, Owen Marcus today. I’m so happy, you guys, because Owen, I think you’re my first guest who’s been back for a second visit on the show. So, I think that you are setting history today. Welcome, Owen, to the show.

You guys, oh, and you’re actually going to love Owen’s journey, his story and the wonderful, wonderful work that he does. So, I know all of you who are listening, men, this one’s for you. Women who have a man in your life that you actually care about. Keep listening, because this is going to help you too.

Owen started his transformative journey into emotional wellness all the way back you guys from in 1995. And he did that with his very first men’s group, which was an experience that would reshape the understanding of male emotional fluency. Yes, everybody, you heard me use the word male, emotions and fluency all in one set wall in one second.

One sentence. Gosh, Owen, I can’t speak today. Through decades of research, Owen has developed a groundbreaking methodology that leverages physiological responses to help men develop deeper relational skills. Owen, welcome to the show.

Owen: It’s an honor to be here, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Absolutely. So just give everybody a little bit of your background, your history. You have been leading men’s groups, helping men all the way since 1995.

Owen: Yeah, well, and I’m actually older than that even applies. I mean, I started in the late 70s. To make the story short, I just ended up in Boulder, Colorado. A roommate of mine had given up his law practice to learn to become a rolfer, which is a particular kind of body work. And he convinced me to give that a try. And it transformed my body, but more importantly, it transformed my emotions and how I was holding and dealing with stress, which sent me on now close to a 50-year journey of this somatic therapy approach to change.  And fortunately, I was in the right place at the right time.

So I’ve spent four years studying with all the founders. Back then, it was fringe therapy, the somatic psychotherapy and physical therapy. Moved down to Scottsdale or Phoenix, Arizona, developed an integrated medical clinic, worked with a lot of these aspects. But right before I left Phoenix in 95, I said, I needed a men’s group because I didn’t know how to connect. You know, I connected as well, maybe a little better than some guys, but I couldn’t connect with my partner.

I realized I was a consistent variable. I needed to change myself. I’d done a lot of other things that helped, but it hadn’t really changed my ability to relate in a more authentic or deeper way. So I thought, well, I’ll do a men’s group. Oh, I’m not going to do a men’s group. That’s stupid. That’s silly. That’s new agey. That’s, you know, men don’t do men’s groups. And I go, well, you know, maybe if I have so much resistance, I should do it. And so I did a little training, started my first group. It wasn’t all that good, but it was enough. It inspired me to do more groups around the country. And 20 years ago, I invited 11 guys and I said, yeah, I got a new model. See if you want to work with this model. They all said yes.

That group, the Sam Point men’s group at Sam Point, Idaho, it’s still going strong. We’ve had over 500 members in the group. We currently have over 60 members in like five groups. I’m in a group of expats, groups, the guys have moved away from the Sam Point. And that model that I evolved in 20 years of that group became the model for three businesses. The previous one was Everyman, that everything that I created ended up being what we did at Everyman. And then a year ago, I left Everyman and created MELD, which is this new company that Jennifer is helping me with.

Jennifer: Hmm. I love it. Gosh, so much great work. Talk to us a little bit about men and their emotions in general. I can tell you from a female perspective, some of what I have seen, and even having a son that I raised who’s now an adult, from what I see a lot of times, I think men’s emotions kind of get socialized out of them a little bit.

If you show emotion as a man, you’re weak, you’re inferior, you’ve got to be big and all the time. And I think that this really, really adversely affects men just in their lives, not just in their lives, but also in their career, in their business, in all aspects. So what do you see from your side or what have you seen because you’ve done so much of this work when it comes to just men and their emotions in general?

Owen: Yeah, I think in the bottom line or the through line for all that is we don’t know how to relate first to our own emotions, let alone to anyone else, because we really can’t connect much better to someone else when we can’t connect to ourselves. So, we haven’t learned how to, or wasn’t safe to connect to our own emotional experience. And I think there’s a few factors. I think stress and trauma, we’re all impacted by, but what you have referred to, Jennifer, I think is really big for us as guys is culture.

And it’s not a, what’s the word, a conspiracy, but I think over the few hundred years, particularly when men entered, we all entered into an industrial revolution and men left the home for work, women stepped up and raised us and the teachers were women. So what sort of happened by default is we’ve got, men have received a more feminine model of emotionality, which is not a bad model, but it’s not the best model for us because as boys, we didn’t have men around that were just being men in a real way. So over the years, we sort of lost that masculine model of connection. And what’s happened is that now society, and often that’s perpetuated by men. I remember as a boy telling guys, my peers, if they cried or weren’t being manly, I would tease them and they would tease me. So we get that at an early age and we learn that to be empathetic, to be emotional, to be human is a sign of weakness.

Jennifer: Yeah, it’s so true. And it’s kind of sad, honestly, that you’re told these things. And then it seems to me that the only thing you can do is then repress those emotions. And there’s a myriad of things that happens from repressed emotions that affects us physically, spiritually, mentally, like all these different ways.

Owen: Yeah. And I think we all know this, but more and more the research is showing the affect and why this happens is that we have an emotional experience. You can say it’s an energy or whatever, and it needs to be experienced. And part of the experience is the releasing of the emotion. And so for men, we hold it and where we hold it is in our body, and particularly in that fascia, the connective tissue, but it impacts everything right down to the cells in the mitochondria.

And we get tenser and tenser. And then not only do we build, and I was a beautiful example of how tense you could get as a man, not only do we build that, but maybe more, we build a behavioral pattern that we keep perpetuating. It just snowballs. And then we teach this to our kids. And it’s all benign.

We don’t realize we do that. And then we get a lot of guys that come to us. And one of the reasons that they come to us is they say, I’m realizing that I’m doing what I did not want to do. I’m being my father to my kids, particularly to my son. And I know that I’ve got to change if I’m going to be a different kind of father, so they end up being a different kind of man.

Jennifer: Wow. So what would you say, Owen, in your experience, what’s the biggest lie that men have been told about their emotions?

Owen: That they shouldn’t have them, or to be vulnerable is weakness, to feel it and certainly show that weakness. And I know Rene Brown, we get all these special ops guys in our trainings, and they all say the same thing, that really being able to feel and express your emotions is an act of courage. But as a culture, we’re trained overtly and covertly to do that as a sign of weakness. So one of the things that we found years ago is you put a group of guys together, create some simple rules like confidentiality, and pretty quickly, these guys realize that if I’m one of the guys and I speak up first, and I say something that is vulnerable or would normally make me look unmanly, and rather than what would happen out there in the culture, what happens in our groups or trainings is I’m actually honored.

And it blows me away, and it starts to blow every other guy away, and then guys get a little competitive about, oh, I could be more vulnerable than you. Oh, I could be more vulnerable. And guys are crying because we start to share so many similar experiences. And once we can see them in others and feel them in ourselves and see that we flipped it where we’re not being shamed, but actually honored for the courage to feel and to express, we completely changed our operating system because that is our innate operating system. That system is still in us. It’s just been suppressed.

Jennifer: Yeah. Agree completely. And my husband has been to one of your retreats, and I’ll have to say he really respected that confidentiality because I was like, hey, how’d it go? What happened? He’s like, it went great. I can’t tell you what happened. I’m like, okay, great. But it was very, very transformative for him to be around other men. And I think the biggest thing was to be around other normal men.

My, my own husband has really suffered with feeling isolated, feeling alone, you know, wanting to hang out with other guys and, but not being able to find quote normal men in order to do that. And even in his search, he’s researched like different men’s groups and I was really shocked in helping him like try to find a men’s group in that some of the crazy stuff that’s going on in these men, men’s groups. And I’m just like, I don’t, my husband doesn’t want to like get naked and run around in the jungle. Like, he’s just like, that’s not him.

I’m like, I don’t blame you, honey. I wouldn’t want to do that either. Just crazy stuff that’s out there. So talk to me a little bit about that as well. Cause I know there’s going to be some men listening going, man, I I’m feeling that isolation. I’d like to be around more men, but I want to be around normal guys, like normal, regular guys. So talk to me a little bit about that and meld and how you guys are a little bit different.

Owen: Yeah. I’ve done a lot of things in my life, but I, you know, I don’t want to run around the wood naked with other guys. I’m not thinking that I have anything against guys, but we don’t need to do that. That’s not me. And it’s not the kind of guys I like to support or relate to. But the other part of that is you can have an experience when it’s extreme. And I’ve done some of those things, but it’s through deprivation and challenge. And that’s the normal, I hope not the normal scenario that guys have in their life.

So one of the reasons we get such powerful change and it’s easy and it’s actually a lot more fun than guys would think and sustainable is because we do it in a normal setting. Guys are just relating. And in this training, this prime training, what we do is over the years, I just noticed what happens when we change, you know, men, women, when there’s a certain arc of change and in an arc, there’s a general progression of what happens, certain steps.

It doesn’t have to be precise, but there’s a general arc. And so what I did was I extracted that out and I trained men to work with men using this arc. And we use that as sort of the teaching arc of this training. So we take a particular part of it. We talk a little bit about it. We demonstrate it. And most of the time it’s spent with three guys and they’re working on each other. One’s observing, one’s receiving, one’s working. And so you get to practice it and you get to experience it. And it’s amazingly transformational because you’re having the experience and you’re learning it, not because you’re sitting there and you’re listening to some dude talk about it, but you’re experiencing it. So you really learn it in your body. You sustain it and you’re having a lot of fun and quickly you realize, you know, just being real is really pretty natural. All I need is a safe place and a little guidance and it comes back to me.

Jennifer: Oh, I love that so much, right? That getting, almost getting us back to more of a natural state where we can just be real and be ourselves. What a concept.

Owen: What a concept. And, you know, women do it much better or more naturally than men do. But one of the things I noticed about men is we need to know what the rules and engagement are. That’s one reason we like sports. You know, okay, these are the rules. This is a play field. Everyone’s going to play on this field and with these rules. And then we’re into it. Women are a little different.

They can just sit down and have a conversation. We need the right space and the rules. But the other part of that is I find that men go really deep pretty quickly and they’re often blown away at how easy and fun it is. Because, you know, when we were younger, we had some deep connections. But what I hear for so many men is that as I’ve gotten older, I lost my real friends and we lost them because we can’t have real connections. We don’t have places that have real connections.

Jennifer: Yeah. I like what you said about, though, that you gave them a framework or you teach a framework. And then when they can follow that framework, it allows them to get into a place where now they can be vulnerable, express emotion and almost like get back to their natural state. But it’s like if you don’t have that framework, I think it can be, you know, really, really difficult. And so, like, you know, a lot of those traditional self-help, self-help. I cannot talk today.

Oh, and self-help, self-help. OK, methods, things like therapy and even coaching and mentoring and things like this. So many times these things will fall short for men. I know that even my own husband has been to multiple therapists of just, you know, trying to figure things out and he’ll just be like, man, it just wasn’t exactly what I needed. And so why do you think what’s your take on why some of those other methodologies, self-help things, like why do they fall short for men?

Owen: I think there’s a lot of reasons. I think one of them is they tend to be top down. So what that means for me is that, you know, we’re smart. We figure things out. But just because we figured it out doesn’t create the change. So it’s like, here’s the concept. It all makes sense. This is how you achieve this. You do boom, boom, boom, boom, sort of a linear process. And guys want to change and they certainly want successful relationships. And one thing about a man is we don’t enter into something unless we think we can win at it. And so guys want successful relationships. So they do a lot of that, like the more cognitive therapies or coaching or whatever, where it’s all sort of top down.

They understand it. It makes sense. Or they go, OK, it’s sort of making me wrong and this,  that, whatever. They give it a try, but it doesn’t work. And what I found is you don’t deny all that. You just go, OK, we’re going to work with your physiology. What that means is this is what happens under a stress response. You know, boom, boom, boom, boom. And one of the things is that you disassociate, you disconnect from your experience and from everyone else, and they feel it. So they feel threatened. So you don’t want to do that, right? Yeah, I don’t want to do that. So let us teach you how to connect to your emotions, but really by connecting to your body. Because I was one of these guys, if you said to me, you know, decades ago, what do you feel, Owen? I’d be looking for the closest door out of the room.

But what I found when, you know, I had my practice in my clinic was that I could have pretty much the same conversation with a man if I contextualized it around stress, which is valid because it starts as a stress response versus trying to have it as an emotional conversation. And particularly guys brag about how much stress they suffer, they endure. So we talk about it in terms of stress and the physiology. No one resists. They understand it. And then they go, oh, I can do that.

I can take a deep breath. I can feel my body and all the little things that we teach. And naturally, without us pushing them, they start to feel their emotions. And once they feel their emotions, they start to be able to communicate them in a more natural way. And when they communicate them that way, they start seeing positive effects. So their partner that’s just getting fed up with them starts to connect with them because they’re showing up. And a lot of women have told me that they’ll get their partners mad consciously or unconsciously just to feel them. And often, as you know, we do couples trainings and I’ll sit with these couples when they do their breakouts. And the guy’s really trying. And he’s using all the right words that he’s read about. And he was taught to use. But he’s using them in an intellectual way.

He’s not feeling them. And he’s sort of giving suggestions, trying to fix, maybe judging and analyzing all these things. But he’s not connecting to her. And so I’ll say, hey, Joe, I know you’re trying. And I know you see that you’re losing her. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Can I help you? Oh, yeah, please. OK. I’m going to channel what I think you feel in this other language, which is this masculine emotional language. Let’s see what happens. So I take a second. I feel it.

I start speaking within almost 30 seconds. In most cases, a woman starts to cry because she’s known that he felt that, but she has not felt it. And his jaw drops. And he says, yeah, that’s what I feel. Yeah, that’s what I want to do. And I go, OK, I’m going to coach you on how to do this. And he starts doing that. So it’s not that these guys don’t feel it. They just have never been trained to have that language. In fact, they’ve been trained not to have that language.

Jennifer: Wowza. OK and so obviously, as I’m listening to you, Owen, I can see how important this would be for a man in his relationships, his personal, intimate relationships. But wouldn’t this also affect his ability to connect in the workplace, whether it be with his co-workers or for his employees as business owners? Wouldn’t it also affect his relationships professionally?

Owen: It certainly does. Because, yeah, most of my clients and many of the guys that come to our trainings come because they want to up-level their relationship. And a lot of our entrepreneurs or executives or whatever, so business is important for them. And they’ve usually mastered or have some level of mastery of the business. And I often say to them, look, I’m going to take some of the skills you have at your business and sort of convert them to be successful at home.

Yeah, OK, I can do that. And one of them is goal orientation. But you’re going to have to learn some other skills. And what inevitably happens, we’ll say in about three months, they’ve turned around the relationship. This struggling relationship starts to really connect and they’re having fun again and maybe falling back in love or whatever. It’s sort of like it was in the beginning. And she’s essentially saying, yeah, that’s the guy I first connected to. But because he has such intrinsic skills and they’re instinctual, they’re like buried in their genome, he just starts finding that without trying, they’re showing up at work.

Then he goes, Owen, can you help me to up-level even more at work? Now that I understand it and I’m doing it, I see how it’s going to improve my business. It’s going to lower my stress, everyone in my company’s stress. And, you know, we’re going to just be more efficient. The communication is going to be better. They’re going to feel more empowered on and on and on because they’re smart guys and they can see that, all right, I can translate or apply what I’m started to master at home and with my family to work because it’s all about not just communication, but about relationship.

Jennifer: Yeah. And when we look at our lives, I mean, it’s all relationship. I mean, professional, personal, it doesn’t really matter. And I think relationships so contribute to our overall quality of life. And if you can’t really get connected to yourself first and then successfully connect to others, it’s going to feel like a pretty lonely existence.

Owen: You nailed it. And, you know, the stats on loneliness in the culture, particularly for men, which sets up, you know, drug use, suicide, and, you know, surgeon generals, you know, put that big study out. So that’s one of the things that’s starting to bring this whole phenomenon of being a man and what men are suffering to a forefront because, yeah, we are living isolation. It only gets worse as men get older.

Jennifer: Yeah. Yeah. No question whatsoever. Okay. So I know you’ve got guys listening right now. What’s one thing, right, that they can do? What’s one takeaway that they could do right now to start moving from this place of feeling stuck and disconnected to feeling more connected, more thriving in work and at home?

Owen: I created this, what I call, the ROC formula, R-O-C. So it’s you slow down to relax, you open up to be vulnerable, and you reach out to connect. And the key is the slowing down. And you do that by slowing down your physiology. So you’re not trying to slow down your mind or, you know, your emotions. You just feel your body. So, the big takeaway is, you know, when you’re talking to your partner and it’s not going where you want it to go, slow down and feel what your body’s doing.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Owen: And, you know, maybe you take a slower breath or you relax your hands or your shoulders or whatever. But just the fact that you slow down, and this is what happens and the science supports this, is you go from being oriented out there like your partner, which you love, or in that moment, he or she is a threat to feeling your own experience. And what that does to you and consequently to that other person is you’re reoriented yourself.

So, when you feel your own experience, that means, oh, I must be safe because I can take all my focus that is out there as a threat response and bring them inside. And so that alone starts to downregulate you. And Stephen Porges, the guy that developed the polyvagal theory will tell you, we read each person’s nonverbals, the voice, the eyes, all these little muscles in the face. So he or she is going to see that suddenly you’re shifted.

Jennifer: Yeah.

Owen: And sometimes it’s that simple. That other person starts to relax. You pick that up unconsciously. And then that downward spiral starts to become an upward spiral connection. But it started because you were willing to feel, not even your emotions, just what was happening with your body.

Jennifer: Wow. I think that’s super powerful. Okay. So it was Brock. So R, wait, ROC?

Owen: ROC. Yeah. You’re slowing down to relax. You open up to be vulnerable to your body, to your emotions. And with that, with your vulnerability, this is the key. You reach out and connect. So you’re not reaching out with your head.  You’re taking a risk and the other part of that is if you take that risk, at some level, your partner is going to know that you’re taking a risk, which means that you’ve gone from a threat for her or him to someone that’s being vulnerable and not a threat.

Jennifer: Yeah. It’s so true. You really do read people. When my husband comes into my office, he hasn’t said a word yet, but I already know. It’s like, oh, this is going to be fun or this isn’t going to be fun, just based on the look on his face, the body language, all of that and I know all of you guys out there with partners can absolutely relate, but it’s no difference for at work either.

Like, you know, your employees come marching into your office and it’s like, oh boy. So that’s even a good thing. I mean, for all of us, I would think, regardless, man, woman, it doesn’t really matter to just slow down and relax, set your intention to open and set your intention to connect. And I think that’s beautiful. Like everybody can do that before you have any interaction with another human being.

Owen: Yeah. I mean, one of the ways that we do that in our groups is we just do a round of a guy just checks in and says what he feels. And many years ago, we had Esther Perel, which is this big therapist at one of our trainings. And she was so impressed with the simplicity of that, she started doing that in our sessions. Because what we found in our groups, a guy just spends 30 seconds saying what he feels in his body and what he feels emotionally shifts him. And then you imagine what happens in a group of just say maybe 10 guys, every guy does that and it’s a different kind of group.

Jennifer: Yeah, I agree so much. This is one of the things that I do in our groups is when you have a group of people together, the first thing we do is we literally take 60 seconds and we all just calm down and relax. And when we set our intention to relax, like all the stress, to stay open, to be vulnerable, it just really sets a tone for the whole rest of the meeting to go. So I love that so, so much. Owen, I know a lot of people right here, women are going like, oh, I need to get my guy connected with him. And there’s guys listening that are just like, man, who is this Owen Marcus guy? I got to find out more about him. So tell everybody, tell us about your books. Tell us where they can go and find you online so that they can connect to you.

Owen: So the book is Grow Up, which I wrote years ago. It’s still relevant, guys still read it, they actually find me. It’s my works evolved over the years and now they can find me at mel.community. It’s M-E-L-D dot community and it’s spelled out. Anyone, man or a woman, they’re welcome to give us a call and we’ll talk to them about what’s happening and what we can do to help them. And we have one-to-one coaching, we have group coaching, we have this amazing 10-week introductory course that we do and most of it’s experiential. It’s something I first developed 10 years ago and it’s completely been revamped a few times.

They did a several-year study that ended up being published in the premier American Psychological Association Journal six months ago. It’s like a 13-page study on what happens in this course and how it transforms men in a lot of the ways what you’re talking about. And now we also have our prime retreat, which is a four-day retreat down in Joshua Tree, which we’ve been doing. I did my first one almost eight years ago. And it’s really, you know, taking these things that we talked about, these skills and teaching them in a way that you don’t have to remember them, your body remembers them.

Jennifer: So powerful. All right, you guys, so we are going to put all of Owen’s information into the show notes. It’s mel.community if you want to check it out. Owen, thank you so much for being here with me today. And as I always share with everybody, you know, it’s fun to sit back and listen, whether you’re driving, you’re exercising, or you’re just sitting, that’s all fine too.

But, like, take something from today’s episode and put it into action. That’s how you’re going to absolutely get the result. And there’s no way that there wasn’t at least one good aha in everything that we spoke about today. So I really want to encourage you to just take an action from today’s show. Owen, thank you again for being here with me.

Owen: It’s an honor. And yeah, thank you, your audience for listening.

Jennifer: Absolutely. All right, guys, we’ll put all of Owen’s information in the show notes, mel.community, go check him out. Owen, thank you. And that’s it for today’s show. Everybody get out there and have a happy, productive day, y’all. Bye.

I really hope you found today’s episode of the Happy Productive Podcast inspiring. Every successful business is formed by sets of small, consistent, and attainable steps. If you want to learn more, come visit us at jenniferdawncoaching.com to take your next step and learn how to meet your business goals and really to knock them out of the park.

On the website, you’re going to find free resources along with links to all of our life-changing coaching programs that have transformed the lives of so many of our clients, including the Coaching Academy and our Unbreakable Retreats. Many of them started their journey by listening to this podcast.

Thank you so much for listening today and stay tuned for our next episode.

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