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Prevent Porn Cravings & Relapse Through Emotional Awareness Techniques | Simple Methods to Slow the Mind & Connect with Others

Updated: May 14



Man meditating, calming his emotions, and stilling his mind to get rid of porn cravings

Many of us men struggle to express our emotions. It’s classic! What we may not know, though, is that unprocessed hard emotions can easily evolve into porn cravings and porn relapse. 


I know for me I used to have essentially three modes: Happy, angry, or shut down. I didn’t know how to express myself, and I didn’t understand what I was feeling or why I was feeling it. 


Anger and shame (the feeling of not being good enough) often drove my cravings for porn. And I hadn’t a clue this was happening!


This skill of noticing your emotions, processing through them, and being able to sit with them when they’re uncomfortable is crucial for recovery from porn addiction. This is because from a psychological perspective, hard emotions and insecurities (and I know that’s a swearword for a lot of us men) are at the root of our porn addiction. 


And we may not perceive that early on, but as we work through recovery, and especially when you get a few years under your belt, you start to become deeply aware of your emotions, your suffering, and your doubts, and that’s because the addiction no longer masks these things. 


These underlying difficult emotions are often some version of what I term in my porn recovery program “fundamental human insecurities”, which are fear, shame (I’m not good enough, or I’m too much) and the burden of feeling distrust for others or feeling distrusted by others. Many of us carry these things as habits from our childhood. 


In my program, I teach men specific methods to get deep into these emotions, reflect on them, and become experts at effectively working through them so that these fundamental human insecurities don’t evolve into cravings for porn. 


Today, I’m joined by Owen Marcus, an expert in somatic and emotional healing for men across the world. His company is called MELD. He is highly knowledgeable, with 30+ years of experience, and it was a real pleasure speaking with him. 



Breaking Free from Porn Cravings

Pornography addiction is one of the most isolating struggles a person can face. For many men, it feels like a secret battle with no clear way out.


But as we learn from this conversation between myself (Jake Kastleman) and Owen Marcus, there is hope, and the journey to healing begins with connection, courage, and practical tools. 


We dive deep into the insights shared in our discussion and explore actionable steps to improve physical and mental health, overcome porn addiction, and live a fulfilling life.


The First Step to Break Free

Owen Marcus emphasizes that pornography addiction isn’t just about habit; it’s often rooted in emotional disconnection. Men are conditioned to suppress their emotions, leading to unhealthy coping mechanisms. Understanding the "why" behind the addiction is a critical first step in breaking free of porn.


I highlight a vital point in the episode, which is that we need to bring awareness to the shame and fear we are carrying that is fueling the need to escape with porn. 


Shame keeps men trapped, while awareness opens the door to transformation. Recognizing that porn addiction is not a moral failing but a response to unmet emotional needs can help you reframe your journey.


Start with self-compassion. Accept that addiction is a signal, not an identity.


Risking Connection: The Power of Vulnerability in Healing

One of the most profound insights from Owen was the importance of "risking connection." Whether it’s connecting with yourself, a trusted mentor, your partner/spouse, or a group of peers, vulnerability is where healing begins.


Through MELD (Men’s Emotional Leadership Development), Owen’s organization, men are guided through emotional reconnection. As he puts it, “It’s messy and imperfect, but it’s the only way to truly transform.” This process is experiential—men not only learn the science but also apply it in real time.


Practical Tips to Risk Connection

  • Start journaling your feelings daily. Acknowledge what’s beneath the surface.

  • Seek out a safe space, such as a men’s group or trusted therapist, to share openly.

  • Accept that mistakes are part of growth; perfection isn’t the goal—authenticity is.


No More Porn: Building Emotional Resilience

One of MELD’s core offerings is their 10-week course, a proven program studied by researchers and published in an APA journal. 


This program is not about forcing change but facilitating organic growth through shared experiences. The course introduces somatic practices, teaching men to process emotions in healthy ways, making it easier to stop watching porn and build resilience.


Owen shares how laughter and enjoyment are elements of their approach. “We learn better when we’re having fun,” he says. Emotional healing doesn’t have to be grueling; it can be deeply fulfilling, and even enjoyable.


Emotional resilience isn’t built in isolation. Join a program or group that fosters connection and experiential learning.


How to Stop Porn Addiction: The Arc of Change

At MELD’s retreats, men follow what Owen calls the "arc of change," a 13-part framework for transformation. Each retreat is structured around small groups where participants take turns sharing, supporting, and learning.


The retreats are designed to be comfortable and engaging, with plenty of laughter and camaraderie. Participants often leave with lifelong friendships and a renewed sense of purpose. As Owen describes, even men who arrive skeptical often experience profound breakthroughs by the end.


Steps to Begin Your Own Arc of Change

  1. Commit to attending a retreat or program that resonates with you.

  2. Engage fully, even if it feels uncomfortable. Growth happens in the stretch.

  3. Stay consistent with the practices you’ve learned to reinforce new habits.


Overcoming Porn Addiction Through Professional Support

In addition to group work, MELD offers one-to-one coaching and small group coaching. These sessions are led by experienced professionals who guide men through intense, focused work.


“Transformation happens when you take action,” Owen shares. Coaching provides a tailored approach to breaking free of addictions or other challenges with overall well-being.


Stop Porn and Build a Life You Love

It takes courage to confront pornography addiction. Risking connection is an act of bravery, but it’s also the most rewarding step you’ll ever take.


As Owen put it, "It’s always messy. It’s never completely straightforward. But that’s where the beauty of transformation lies." 


Whether you start with journaling, attending a retreat, or seeking 1-on-1 coaching, know that you are not alone. The path to overcoming porn addiction is challenging, but it’s also possible—and deeply worth it.


Build the No More Porn Lifestyle







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Transcription of Episode 83: Prevent Porn Cravings & Relapse Through Emotional Awareness Techniques | Simple Methods to Slow the Mind & Connect with Others

Welcome to the podcast. It's fantastic to have you here. I've been inspired by what I found on your site and what I've been learning about what you do.


Thanks so much for being on the show, my friend. Thank you, Jake. It's an honor to be here.


Yeah. So tell everyone, even the word somatic, when I say somatic therapy, there's probably many people who don't know what that is. So explain a bit about what you do with MELD and how you help men, which is a very broad question, but.


That's a good question. Soma is a body, so somatic has to do with anything with a body. So somatic therapy can be body therapy or body work, or it could be somatic psychotherapy.


Both of those were things that I started getting into in the late 70s when I just happened to be in Boulder, Colorado, which was sort of the seed or the incubator for a lot of these therapies. And I had a good fortune of studying with the people that were developing these therapies. So over the years, I've done a lot in these realms.


I ended up having a integrated medical clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona for close to 20 years. Near the end of that, I started doing work with men's groups because I needed that kind of support or training myself to better connect with myself, and particularly from there with others, and most specifically with women or my partner. And then that was 30 years ago.


And then 20 years ago, after doing several groups in Arizona and Northern California, and then I was living in North Idaho, not too far from the Canadian border, I said, you know, this stuff is all right, but I've been trained in all this other stuff. I've been using it clinically, trained other people in it. Excuse me, I think that is a way to integrate this into a group and really men's work.


So I went into my straw bale house up in the woods of North Idaho and designed a new way to do groups, which ended up being a new way to do men's work, which is really a way where we connect to our bodies. Because like most men, if you ask me, at least in the beginning, what do you feel, Owen, in terms of what do you feel emotionally? I'd be looking for the closest door out of the room. Because I didn't know, I was ashamed to say, I didn't know how to say it, all those things.


I had no connection with my emotions. So I realized from my training, but working with thousands of people prior to looking at designing a group, that with men, if you get them connected to their bodies, if someone connects me to my somatic experience, what's happening with me physically, the emotional connection happens almost naturally, or you can ask a question in the emotional realm and it's easy for the guy to answer. So most guys can start to answer what happens to their bodies when they're having an emotional experience that they might know about.


So like we get a new guy in one of our groups and we do like a little check-in. Everyone sort of says where they're at and this guy says something and it's obvious to every guy in the group that he has no connection to his emotions. So a man might say, hey, Joe, what do you feel? And he says, I don't feel anything.


And then this fella might say to Joe, okay, fine. Can you just tell me what you feel in your hands? Because we know the guy speaking and his hands are clenched. And he says a few things about, you know, yeah, I feel a little tight in my hands.


And then we might ask him, okay, what do you feel in your shoulders? Because his shoulders might be up. And we ask him a few of these questions about what's he experiencing in the present moment about his body. And after a couple of minutes of that, either he just says, you know, I actually feel angry or we might go, okay, you know, as you feel your hands, what emotion do you feel? Oh, yeah, I feel angry.


And it's not like, I was one of them. So it's not like we intentionally avoid feeling or saying what we feel. We have been so trained for two basic reasons to not feel and communicate what we feel that we, you know, we don't know.


And so it's not an intentional hiding or denial. It's just all the stress and trauma we've had and then the enculturation of how we've been trained to be men that has taught us to not feel emotionally and not speak to what we feel. Yes, and I see that with a lot of people who come into my program and work with me.


I think it's incredibly common, especially for men that were not taught either, you know, I think there's a lot of ways it works, but essentially we're not taught how to communicate those emotions. We're not encouraged to communicate emotions. One of the biggest messages that we get in Western culture, I think is weakness is bad, so don't feel it.


And then I think coupled with that nowadays, even anger is evil too, right? At least in a lot of circles, it's don't feel anger, don't show anger, anger is bad. And so we're being taught sadness is bad, anger is bad, negative emotions are bad. I would even call them negative emotions, right? Which carries the connotation of they're bad emotions.


And so if I feel any of those things, a very natural kind of coping mechanism, I suppose is just, I've unconsciously learned, don't perceive it, don't look at it, don't think about it. And so I find that fascinating to kind of enter it through the body, as you're saying then for men to get in touch with what's going on in their body. And I was just thinking about, as you were describing that Owen, a while back, years ago, I remember I was really contemplating, just I was at this phase in my life where I was contemplating, what's kind of the next step for me? How do I become a better man, better husband, better father? And I remember this answer really clearly coming to me of you need to work through your anger.


And at the time, my reaction to that was like, what anger, what do you mean? What anger? I don't feel anger, never feel that. And I remember just, and so I'm a spiritual person and a person of a Christian faith. And so it was very, that's kind of the answer I felt I received from God was just, I was praying about that, how do I advance? And I remember just getting this over the coming weeks, just these insights that were coming to me of, oh my gosh, I thought I didn't feel anger.


I feel all the time. It's driving everything that I do. And it has been pretty much my whole life.


And that was such a wake up call to me because I experienced so many addiction cravings. And I think that anger alone is one of the things, and then you can dig underneath that to actually what's really driving the anger because that's ultimately not the core, it's still surface level symptom. But that was big, becoming mindful of that.


So talk, if you can talk more about why do you feel like we as men in Western society, and I know I already touched on this a bit, but in your experience with people and what you do, why are we, what is working against us in the way of communicating our emotions? Why are we taught not to express them? Or kind of what are some of these obstacles or barriers that you see for men in the work that you do? As I sort of alluded, one thing is that when we have trauma and what I call micro traumas or really stress events, we know about fight and flight. When we're in survival, we'll do one of the others. And more and more people, thanks to the work of some of my teachers, are realizing there's a third option, which is freeze.


And so when a mammal can't run or fight, and one of my examples is when I lived in Idaho, I lived in the forest and I had a meadow in front of me and there'd be all these deer out there almost daily. And if one of the local cougars came down and took down a deer and the cougar wasn't hungry and said, you know, I'll come back later to have my meal, the cougar leaves, the deer a few minutes later would jump up and you see videos of mammals doing this and tremble for a few minutes, literally shake off the trauma. Because in the freeze response, when a mammal can't run or fight, we default as a reptilian survival strategy of going into shock, pretending we're dead.


So outwardly, we look dead. Our breathing doesn't stop, it slows down. All this stuff betrays that we're dead, so maybe we can survive that way.


And if we're eating or injured or whatever, we're disassociated, we're disconnected, so we don't feel the pain. Great survival strategy. But in the natural world, if you survive, then the next thing to do is to come out of the shock and, you know, you see it with birds too.


They hit a window, they look dead, and then a few minutes later, they fly away. And so the natural thing to do is that you process or shake or tremble out what's been hidden below that affect of looking like you're dead. But you got to release it, your autonomic nervous system, your body needs to release it.


The problem is that we as humans in this developed society don't get to release the trauma. And so what we don't get to release becomes PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder. And so what happens is we continue with the disconnect and the disassociation, but underneath the disconnection of looking and believing and thinking and all that, that we're okay, our nervous system or our body's revved up.


And over time, it just gets more and more revved up, which we get into all the physiology and the consequences of that on a physical or medical level. But we also start to entrain our body, our nervous system, is that's our default. The under stress, we disassociate.


We do our version of a freeze. So when we start, when our stress, and it's usually more emotional, hits a certain threshold, which could be pretty low, boom, we, you know, this stuck survival strategy comes in and we disconnect. And it could be as simple as, you know, your wife says, hey, Jake, where were you? And for whatever reason, you freeze.


You're like, your executive function shuts down. And then it's like, you're disconnected. And what happens, because we work with couples, and my partner's a couple's therapist, and we do retreats, intensives, and all this for couples.


And so often, you know, we'll be sitting or I'll be sitting with a couple, like in the retreat, and going through these exercises, and the guy is disconnected. And he might, you know, he's talking in emotional words, but he's not feeling them. And so his wife picks it up, and he picks up that she's picking up that she's getting disconnected, she's getting angry.


So he picks it up non-verbally, so he gets more stressed, so he gets more disconnected, and that's a vicious cycle. So what I, you know, I work with in that situation, and really guys in general, is getting connected to what are you feeling in your body, which is safe. Because if you're feeling something in your body, it tells your body, oh, if I'm feeling my body, I must be safe.


And then eventually, or maybe it's pretty quickly, you can start to feel and express your emotions. So the guy starts to speak to his partner in an emotional way, where he's feeling it and speaking it at the same time, not speaking through his head, which is what most of us do, because that's what we're trained to do. So some of it's, you know, the affect of years of maybe severe trauma or a lot of stress.


And then it's what you were talking about, how in this culture, as boys and as men, we're taught not to feel and certainly not to express, and to be vulnerable is to be weak, and to be weak is to not being a man, to be a woman, to be all those things that we say. And then we start, you know, even as kids, enforcing that cultural perspective. So yeah, your friend falls down, he starts crying, you say, oh, you're being a wimp, don't cry.


And so we perpetuate that. And one of the great things when we work with guys is we deconstruct that whole model and we give guys an experience of the other model. And once you have it, as you were saying with your anger experience, you start to really realize how much we've suppressed and we start opening up the can of worms and start to let out the worms.


And what do you find, Owen, is so frequent with what men do feel under the surface once they do get in touch with their emotions and they start to see that, what are these feelings they come in touch with that are kind of driving a lot of the things happening in their lives? Like you said, I mean, it's the emotion that we're told is okay, and this is sort of limited to feel as men is anger. And even then it's limited, but certainly not the more vulnerable ones like fear and sadness, which as you also inferred, that's usually at the root of it, and maybe shame, the three vulnerable ones. And so it's easier to go to some version of anger and it's not a clean version, it's often a reactionary version.


It could be rage, it could be frustration, which is obviously a master at, which means I'm feeling angry, my body's getting tight, but I'm not expressing it. So I just hold onto it and I get tighter and tighter. And so one of the ways that we work, one of the beauties of what we do beyond the somatic perspective is a communal perspective of working with guys in groups, it could be an ongoing group, or it could be a training, a virtual or live training, where when we see other men having the same kind of struggle that we're having, and we don't think we're the only one, and the immediate interpretation is, we're not the only one screwed up.


And in those settings, we don't shame men for quote being weak, we actually honor them, because that's really what we wanna do. So there's a lot of stories of me leading a training of 60 guys, like in a big circle, and we do a check-in and every guy sort of says their name and maybe a little thing about themselves. And I set it up saying, look, we're changing the rules of engagement here.


It's not about how macho you can be, it's really how vulnerable you can be, because really that takes courage. The guy goes, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So after a few guys, one guy takes a deep breath and says something vulnerable that you normally wouldn't say.


And he's scared saying it, because normally, if he said this, he's gonna be shamed. He says it, and the opposite happens. Guys honor him, guys might be crying, they're going, me too.


And by the end of going around, guys just get more and more competitive. They go, well, if you could be that vulnerable, I could be more vulnerable. Which we like to be competitive.


And so we realized that in an emotionally safe environment, not only is it okay to feel and okay to be vulnerable, but it's actually more manly and more courageous to just start to connect to what you couldn't connect to and share that. Because not only are you releasing it for yourself, but you're also giving permission to other men to do it, you're modeling for them. And you realize anytime I share anything vulnerable, there's other men that can relate to it and they get something from that.


So this communal effect really is a powerful thing because I think ancestrally in our genome, we're used to being in tribes. We used to be going out and hunting parties and just being with our guys and having this time to really connect where in this culture, once we leave school or maybe the military, virtually every guy says, I don't have a place to really be authentic with other men. Yeah.


I love that. And one of the things that I was thinking about Owen is what for you personally got you into this work? Because you're doing this wonderful work with these men in communities and these groups and doing somatic work. I always find when there's that passion and you're helping people, there's a place where that started for you or what this work has done for you.


Well, this is true. I was like one of the tightest guys I've ever known. I might not seem that way, but- No, yeah.


After college, I was traveling, ended up in Boulder, as I mentioned, and ended up doing somatic work. It's one of the first things I did was I did a course of Rolfing. Rolfing is a kind of body therapy where you're releasing the chronic stress in the body as you realign the body to being better aligned with gravity.


It was developed by a woman named Dr. Rolf. She never wanted it named after her, but that's what stuck. And I was living in a group of guys in Boulder.


And one of them had given up his law practice in the late eight years, moved from Florida to come to Boulder to study because that's where the Rolf Institute was. And he argued his case enough every night after his course. And I said, all right, all right, Brett.


I'm gonna try it. If you just shut up, I'll try it. Okay.


And I tried it and that's all it took. So I went through 10 sessions once a week for 10 weeks. Yeah, I was really tight in the beginning, and I didn't feel anything or hurt.


And then as my body let go, it didn't. Nine months later, as my body integrated from the change, I was just short of an inch taller and just short of 20 pounds lighter. And I'm not a fat guy.


I had big, thick, hard, tight legs. I didn't walk, I waddled. I mean, my friends in high school used to tease me in a fun way, because they could spot me blocks away by my walk because I didn't walk, I waddled because I was so tight.


That tension just left my body, but that tension was really emotional tension, stress that I stored in my body because of what happened or didn't happen in my childhood. And then, yeah, and then I got into these more psychotherapy or somatic psychotherapy approaches, and then did other things. And in the course of many years, I continued to change.


And then I realized that I had dyslexia as a kid. That was why I struggled in school. And then I realized I had Asperger's syndrome, which is why I struggled, say, socially and in other ways.


And I healed a lot of that. Not all of it, but a lot of it. But I still was not having successful relationships with, in this case, with my partner at the time.


And I mentioned this in a TEDx talk I did many years ago. We're sitting on a couch and she's saying, Owen, I don't feel you. And I would say something.


I wasn't arguing. I would say something and she'd say, Owen, I just don't feel you. And she said this several times.


And then it finally hit me. As I sort of mentioned earlier with other guys, I realized that I was using all these emotional words and I was sort of arguing, not in an angry way, but like debating or trying to convince her I was being emotional. It was all mental.


It was all logical. It was like I was having this debate with her. She was really patient and empathetic and compassionate, but I was disconnected.


Now, I realized that, but I didn't know how to do it in the moment. And that was the impetus for me to start my first group out of my clinic. And then I led into more groups and just being with men in this way taught me a lot, gave me an opportunity to be vulnerable, to practice these skills because one of the other things that I see with men is that we can start to realize, as I did, what we don't know and what we need to learn, but we don't have a safe place to practice it.


So practice it at work where you're gonna perform is not necessarily the safest place to at least start off and practice it at home. We feel like we gotta perform and it doesn't seem logical, but yeah, even in their romantic relationships, there's a certain sense of performance and we are hardwired to perform as guys and that's how we get our rewards. But in a setting of just being with men being real, that just dissolves away.


And you get to feel, you get to share, you get to practice this. And then because that's really our default, pretty quickly for a lot of guys, it starts to become their default. It starts to become something they do naturally.


And then they just start doing it naturally at home or at work where they're interacting in a more authentic, maybe vulnerable, but more real way, not just a mental way, but a way that reflects what they're feeling in the moment, which innately has people wanna connect with them. And they feel the other person feels safer. They trust this person more and they start to, as Stephen Porteous, the guy that developed a lot of the science behind this would say, they start to co-regulate.


And so if I'm that guy and I'm doing this, I'm connecting to you, Jake, my non-verbals, how my voice sounds, all this is telling you that, well, I'm connected to my emotions, I'm safe, I'm not a threat. So you down-regulate, I read that from you, I down-regulate and we start to co-regulate and we develop a relationship, which is for a lot of guys a unique experience. Yeah, yes.


And so what would you say is, are there ways for us to simply tap into getting out of that purely mental space and into our emotions? I'm sure there's probably a lot of answers and practices to that, but is there a simple way for us to do that? Yeah, I think there's, yes, there's a lot of ways. One of the things I came up with several years ago, and this is really more observing what was happening and just saying I came up with it, was what I call the ROC formula, R-O-C. And this is a real simple logarithm or formula.


So we slow down to relax and most of us have been told, relax. Well, they never told us how to relax and then we go, oh, I gotta perform, I gotta relax, which just adds more stress. So it backfires.


Yeah, I'll be the best at relaxing right now. I'm gonna really try here. But the key to relaxing is slowing down.


Slowing down could be your breath, your autonomic nervous system, particularly the sympathetic part, which is a fight or flight, the survival part, slowing all that down. And so we work on that. So when you can slow that down, you drop down into your body.


And as I said earlier, you do that and you just start to feel safer, which has you want to or be able to or innately just slow down. And as you slow all your physiology down, you start to relax. And the classic way is the breath.


And then the beauty with the breath, it's something that is part of the autonomic nervous system, the automatic nervous system, the stress nervous system. And it's something that we can control. So when we can slow our breath down, and as you were talking about earlier, the Wim Hof breathing and all these different breathing approaches, when we can slow down our breath and connect to our breath and maybe our body and just get into a slower rhythm, that physiology starts to generalize throughout our whole body.


So slow down to relax. Next one, the O is to open up to vulnerability. And first is to open up to your own vulnerability, which almost happens naturally as you slow down.


Because as I slow down and I get out of the threat response and the performance thing, and I start to slow down, I just innately start to feel my body. I go, oh, maybe my jaw's tight. Oh, my shoulders are up.


Oh, I can drop my shoulders. Oh, I'm holding my breath more. And I thought, oh, I can let go of that.


So you start to connect to your body. And with that, you might go, oh, yeah, I'm feeling a little anxious or fear or really a little anger here. And you're like, okay, great.


You don't have to change it, just feeling it. It's just like feeling your body slows you down, feeling your emotions slows you down. It just opens you up.


And as you do that, other people at least unconsciously pick that up. And then the C is I reach out or risk connection. So being slowed down, being vulnerable and connected to my own experience, I reach out from that place, not from my head, but from that place and interact with you in a way that feels connected.


So again, you feel me in a more substantial way, not just in an intellectual way. I'm not the threat and you wanna connect with me. And then when you start to connect with me, we start to co-regulate.


So I relax even more and it becomes a positive cycle. But in this scenario, it starts with you slowing down your physiology. That's great.


I like that. It's a very practical way of approaching it. So you mentioned earlier, Owen, and I'm a little bit familiar with this.


I've read a bit on it, but definitely not as much as you. Emotions stored in the body. Can you talk about how that works? Because there's gonna be a lot of people that are actually completely unfamiliar with that.


How does that work? What does that mean? Maybe why do our bodies do that? Or just kind of some concepts of what that means. I could go on for a few hours about it. So I'll try to be simple.


Sure. We've been trained to think, and I emphasize that word, everything's in our mind, and in our mind is our brain. And so we've been trained, science, medicine, a lot of psychologists train us in that.


Yeah, there's some truth to it, but it's not all of it. And like the nervous system is a digital system, quick on off and impulse. And we think, again, that everything is through the nervous system, but we have other systems, or we have the digestive system and all that.


We know that, but we also have an emotional system in our body. And the guy that wrote the book on stress, Hans Selye, he's a physician, it was probably 50 years ago, maybe more now, cause I've been doing this for 50 years. The book was the stress of life.


And he said that fascia is the organ of stress. And a fascia is what they're all for works with. And fascia is the connective tissue that holds everything together.


So you pull the skin of a chicken, that white sheet is fascia, the gristle in a state is fascia, a tight knot in your shoulders is fascia. The hardness in your body is the fascia. And so physically, emotionally, when your body has a stress that it can't deal with in the moment, it just stores it as stored up tension in the body.


And for most of the clients I've seen, and thousands of them, most of our attention at the end of the day was more stress or emotional than physical. Yes, I've had people that had no stress at all, major injuries in elite athletes, in Olympic and professional athletes, where they had physical tension. It's a different quality.


It lets go easier. It's a lot less associated with pain. But most of our tension or physical tension is the emotion that we couldn't feel, experience and release in that moment. Just as I said earlier, like with the deer, we couldn't go through that natural cycle. So what does not get to cycle through and gets to reset or release, in some way we store in our body.


And that's like an analog system, it's not digital, it works in a different way. And so, for example, I mean, when I was rolfing people, I'd rolf these people, and they would have spontaneous releases sometimes on my table. And one of the classics was that this is many decades ago.


So I was rolfing an officer that was an officer in the Army Special Forces. And he was behind enemy lines and behind either Cambodia or Laos, or wherever. And they were going to ambush a village.


And they got ambushed. So he had to do some things to save his platoon. And he did it, and the mission was successful, no one was killed.


While I was working on his leg, he started having this spontaneous like shaking and crying and sobbing for at least 20 minutes. And I just sat there with him. And you know, we didn't really talk about it.


I just let him have the physical experience. He came back next week, and he told me the whole situation. And what it was, was that he they were getting ambushed.


And he had to break a neck of a 12 year old boy to save the platoon. Yeah. And he couldn't deal with it in the moment.


Yeah, obviously. So it went into his body. And it went into his leg.


And he came to me because he had this chronic hip problem that no one could figure out and certainly fix. He came back next week, his leg and his hip was perfect. Never had the problem again.


Wow. It's incredible. I it's such a it's such a different way of thinking about emotions and psychology and connecting the mind to the body.


I think that as you were saying, we've been traditionally trained in modern psychology to disconnect mind from body. They're two separate things. They're not intertwined.


For for one, I teach a lot of people how important nutrition is just that alone, where we're disconnecting mind from body and that what I eat impacts how I feel impacts my emotions. Now we're talking about as well. It's it goes so much deeper than I think so many of us understand where your emotions are throughout your body.


Like this is all interconnected. It's not detached. Yeah.


And we've been trained academically and experientially that it is attached. And that is the core of this connection. And a little sidebar, it's easy to control people when they're disconnected.


And but when you're connected in this somatic way, which means emotionally. And I remember one of my first teachers, Ron Kurtz, he developed a Komi method, which was a method based on really mindfulness. And it was very it is a very powerful somatic psychotherapy.


One of the first. And I remember him saying that I was in his first professional training. He said, the problem is we get disconnected.


We get disconnected from our body. We get disconnected from our emotion. We get disconnected from people.


We get disconnected from nature. We get disconnected from our creator. We get disconnected across the board.


And often what I found myself and others is when you start getting reconnected to your somatic experience, your body, what's happening in the moment, this is we do a lot of somatic mindfulness training. When we get connected to what's happening with our body, it just starts to connect to all these other disconnections that we've had. And for some guys, they have a big spiritual experience.


Some other guys have a very big emotional experience and go home and they finally connect with their partner. But it starts when we can connect with ourselves. It's like it's all intertwined.


You can unlock one. I'm not sure what the analogy would be, one door, then all these other ones can begin to creak open, I suppose. And it's a generalization, but I find that the easiest, the quickest, and maybe the biggest lever is getting connected to our bodies.


And that's something that guys can actually do. In part, because we tend to be physical, maybe not in this way, but we are physical. You don't even need to have played sports.


And when we are emotional, we're usually more physical with our emotions. Women can sit down and just cry. Not that we can't, guys do.


I have, but often getting physical becomes another catalyst for us to feel and release. So the physical conduit for us is probably more powerful than it might be for the average woman. Well, there's a book, The Wonder of Boys.


My wife was reading. She was telling me that one of the ways that boys connect and form attachments so much is through physical activity with others and actually getting physically engaged. So, yeah, I love that.


I wondered if you could give people insights, because I think, I know that there are people listening right now who struggle with an addiction or porn addiction specifically. And I know when I was in the thick of that, I didn't attach all these other root causes of the addiction. It was like, okay, I have sexual urges that are out of control and that's my problem.


It's like somehow I just can't get this satisfied and I have a chemical addiction. And you kind of laugh, which is, yeah, because there's 95% underneath that of all these other things. And then the 5% is like the sexual arousal.


And the chemical addiction part, I should say, is very challenging, but there's all these other factors. So talk about how this disconnection fuels addiction, kind of how this correlates and why getting that connection can free people. Well, I think basically what happens is that we have this connection, we have trauma, stress, or whatever.


So we develop survival strategies or coping mechanisms. And when I tell people, men and women, when they work with me is, look, you have an addiction, you have this, you have that was how you learned to survive. Great.


You survived. Congratulations. You didn't do anything wrong.


You did, given all the variables you had available, you chose the best one. Now the problem is it's that coping mechanism has run out of its usefulness. Now it's a limitation with yourself and often with relationships or whatever.


And so, yeah, you're trying to change it and you're trying to understand it, which is good. And often you're trying to change it by forcing it. And often that is sort of like, well, my arm wants to do this, so I'm going to grab it and I'm going to pull it back.


And it's like this sort of isometric struggle that you're doing internally rather than what you were saying, Jake, let's deal with that drive to do this. So you're not doing this. And the drive that set up the coping mechanism in one way is the drive for connection again.


You're probably familiar with Johan Harari's book, Lost Connections. I'm not. I should be.


He's an English dude that wrote this book. He's a journalist, brilliant guy, very articulate. I don't know, the book came out probably in the last 10 years and brilliantly written.


It's a thesis on addictions and really it all, and he argues way better than I can, on all the science and his own experience and talking to all the experts, where it all sort of distills down to, we lost our connection. And he tried everything and it only got worse. The drugs, all the normal treatments, you got worse and worse and worse.


And then you get off the drugs, and then he started dealing with the causal things and then he healed it. And then he started saying, well, see if that's true for other people. So when we can get reconnected to what we got disconnected from, the drive goes away.


Simple concept, not always easy to do. And you often need facilitation or a catalyst. So we see more and more people, particularly men doing plant medicine journeys for trauma and for addiction, because when done well, what a plant medicine journey can do is it can, yeah, release some of the trauma, but more like take you back to the origin when you checked out because you had to.


And you never checked in, but that plant medicine journey takes you back and it can be pretty intense. And you start to feel and in the journey experience some of the things that you couldn't experience the cycle through that. I'm simplifying it, but essentially that's what can happen for guys.


And then a key part is integration. Now we do not do plant medicine journeys, but we work with guys after the fact, and sometimes before the fact for the integration, because the integration is key because it can open you up and get the release. But you need an environment to sort of work with this new state of awareness, this new state of connection that it's safe where other guys that maybe they didn't have plant medicine journeys, but they're doing the same thing.


So it's like you need this incubator to sort of grow some of these skills or connections that you couldn't because you were disassociated all those years until that moment. So it's really about finding or going into the place that you had to leave because it was too intense. So one of my little ways to frame trauma or even a stress event is that say a normal range of tolerance or ability to experience present might be say this, which is say, six inches between my hands.


And then you have something that is more intense, which could be two feet. And so all that stuff that can't fit in those six inches, we disassociate. But when we can expand our tolerance and we can incorporate the full experience, we don't disassociate.


And so what we're trying to do is slowly expand our window of tolerance that we can experience or stay present or stay embodied or stay mindful for that whole experience. And when we do that, we don't need our coping mechanisms. And so our coping mechanisms sort of exist in the places that we can't experience.


Yeah. And I think one of the things that you said at the beginning there, Owen, that is something that I really try to emphasize with those who struggle with addiction is you stated how this is a coping mechanism and it's something that you went to because you didn't have other options. For me, I'm very passionate about IFS.


I don't know if you're familiar with Parts Work and IFS, that there's a part of your psyche that chose this often in childhood, right? Or chose whatever form of addiction it might be. And then you evolved to other ones later on, but that chose it because of things that were going on internally and externally. It was the best thing that you had, as you said.


I love that. It's so important and so key that people understand that. Because I think that a lot of, which this is very natural, so many men feel, I went to this because obviously I'm morally deficient or I'm a bad person or I'm just really twisted inside.


I'm all screwed up. I'm just deeply flawed. That's why I'm doing this.


Anything that you would tell those men going through that? Yeah, you're not flawed. There's nothing wrong with you. You're not bad.


You're not broken. You just have a cochlear mechanism that's seen its usefulness. We've had Dick Schwartz, the guy that started IFS or Internal Family Systems Theory on one of our programs a few years ago.


I love the guy. I really appreciate that he stuck with it because at first he was another one of the people I knew that got shunned because it was weird. Did he get shunned because IFS was weird? Yeah, because it was like, oh, that can't work.


That's not true. That's strange. He just stuck with it.


Now, it's a hot therapy too. Same with another champion that she recently died was Sue Johnson that developed emotional focus therapy. She was a huge supporter of what we do and she said that if you guys were doing therapy, it would be emotional focus therapy, which is true.


Anyway, to answer your question, I think to build on your IFS model of the parts, what Dick says is that you have these parts that disassociate and they're floating around. As you can accept them and bring them back in, in my world, they go from a coping mechanism or a bad voice or shaming voice, whatever it might be, to an ally, to a resource. What I found is that one of my things I teach men when they work with men is take the man deeper into his experience.


If I'm working on you and I can facilitate you going deeper into your experience, and so you naturally expand your window of tolerance, what happens magically or naturally is these parts start to drop down. What will happen is this part that left, we'll just say because you're being shamed by your older brother because you cried when you fell on your knee, maybe you don't remember the incident, but you just start to relax, you start to feel something around that, and that part just drops back down. And when you say drops back down, to explain what you mean by that? Yeah, and so like I said earlier, the core of freezing is we disassociate.


And so to disassociate is to disconnect. And parts of us just left, the part or parts that we couldn't experience, we couldn't accept, we couldn't release, we couldn't cycle through physically or emotionally, they check out because it's like, there's no room for me, I'm leaving. Right, yeah, they become an exile, right? Exactly, exactly.


But they're not like in another universe, they're just sort of in another part of us. And then they're like whispering at us or poking us or doing their tape, which might be a negative tape, often is. And then, you know, when we relax, it's like, oh, you got enough space for me to come back.


Oh, you can accept this part. Oh, I'm okay, this part saying, oh, I'm okay. Hell yeah, I'll come back.


And inevitably, particularly if it's a big part or a constellation of parts, that is a big thing. Inevitably, there's a positive asset or quality to that disassociated part. And so here's a simple one.


I work with a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of their coping mechanisms just have been like workaholics, you know, that was their addiction. And so it's easy to see there's an upside to that. And myself and, you know, the thousands of people over the years, I've never seen anyone lose the upside of their coping mechanism.


Granted, some coping mechanisms have more or more positive upsides than another one, but I would imagine almost any coping mechanism has some upsides. You don't lose that. When you reintegrate that part, you lose the downside, you know, the negative voices, the saboteur, whatever it might be, you start to lose it.


And you start to really sort of have more compassion for that part in you and for that part in anyone else. Because as you know, and this is a core thing of psychology and everyone teaches this, is we project. Jung was the first to say this, you know, the parts that we don't own, we project onto others.


When we start owning them, we change our relationships with other people because we're changing our relationship with ourselves. Yes. Well, and when you were talking about that, Owen, I was immediately brought to just my own personal experience with one of the addictive parts of me, which I would term, the label I would give it is the escapist, right? But through healing, and still a bunch of which I have to do, but I've made some, you know, progress, it is an adventuring part of myself.


It's an adventure, it's bold, it's courageous, it's risk-taking. You know, it wants to experience things and, you know, put itself out there and do things that are big. And that's an amazing part of me that essentially I had stuffed away a lot of the time, not expressing it, and then it would just pop out in really destructive, crazy ways where it's like, what just took over me for the last two hours? What has just happened? It's like, well, there's this, for one part, there's this aspect of me that I'm just not honoring.


I'm just not living or doing the things in my life that I really, really want to do. I think a lot of healing took place through starting to adventure, take risks, put myself out there, be vulnerable, as you said, right? That's needed. It's needed.


Well, I think you just, you hit on a point that a lot of people don't realize, which is a critical point, because it's not just everything I was saying, or, you know, bringing the parts in and all that, but a key part is going out in the world. And there's a healing that happens with that. And it's risky to take your connection, what's important to you, and be vulnerable with that out in the world, because you might get shot at or, you know, not literally, but, you know, emotionally or shamed or whatever.


And it's, we all have a creative part that needs to be expressed. And that's scary. So I work with a lot of guys.


And so often they come in because they have an issue or maybe the relationship or whatever, they get on the other side of it. And then it's like, what's next? And this is one of the limitations of a lot of men's work. It's like, there's no what's next.


I said, I would say, the what's next is really what it's about. So you're on the other side of your dysfunctional parts, or however you want to frame it, taking you out, you're always going to be there, whatever, but you know, you're not living your life at the effect of those parts. And so it's like, okay, what do I do now? I mean, my question is not to fix myself to heal myself.


I'm on the other side of that. Well, the next journey, which is like the journey you're talking about is taking yourself and putting yourself out in the world, which reinforces any of the healing you get. It's your contribution to the planet and your own unique way, your unique gifts.


And guys get further healing and doing that. And for a lot of guys, in some direct or indirect way, part of that is serving other men. Maybe it's just showing up in the weekly group years after they needed to, but because they continue to get something, but they continue to give some and, and we need that.


And we don't talk about that. And for a lot of guys, you know, I work with their creative side and I've done programs around for groups around, how do you focus on, you know, taking or finding and taking that thing you found and putting it out in the world and using each other as a support mechanism? Yes. Well, I know for me, doing the work that I do with people one-on-one and then the podcast and all this, I will say often to, you know, friends or family or, or even on the podcast that this helps me just as much as it helps other people.


It really is true. And I, you know, I go to a 12-step group, like you were saying, that it gives me an opportunity to help other people. But that at the exact same time, it's like, I, I need that.


You know, I've been sober almost 10 years, still need it. And that doesn't, doesn't go away. I think no matter how many years you've been.


Well, I'm going to, I'm going to push back on that. Sure. I think it can go away.


I've had a lot of people I've worked with that, and Jason Portnoy, who I mentioned earlier, that wrote the book, Silicon Valley Foreign Star, which is, yeah, he was one of the founders of PayPal and other tech companies. And, and then as he says, he had everything he wanted and he'd buy a red Ferrari, you know, he went, I want a red Ferrari. By the end of the day, he'd have a red Ferrari.


Oh my goodness. Yeah. It's sort of like the constant like story of success.


But that was a setup for him to get into porn and other things. And he'd get in and out and in and out. And then he just literally had to lock himself in an apartment for a month to let everything he was running from to catch up to him, to get connected to what he was running away from.


And then he got into the side of it and he says, and I believe him that he's on the other side of it. So we've worked with guys that, you know, that, and we're going, you know, we were asked to create a program for a big hospital healthcare network here in the state of California. We're just not ready to do that yet.


Working with guys who are in recovery that, that, that want to go to the cause so that, so they're not in normal recovery any longer. They're actually on the other side of it. So that, you know, I've had people that, that were able to address the real driver of it where, you know, I'm not an addict anymore.


Yes, that might be a weak link. And yes, maybe I got to be a little concerned, but if I continue to stay present and deal with my stuff in the moment, me going to my addiction, it's not ever going to happen. Yeah.


Yes, exactly. And I, I describe that as the recovery mindset and lifestyle. If I keep living by that each day, which is, I think to me in a lot of ways, it's ultimately just how healthy people live.


You know, it's like, this is what you need to do to feel like a healthy, happy individual. I just talk about how, you know, the podcast itself is called no more desire, right? So we can lose our desire for our addiction. And that, so I think I should, you know, kind of add that, that I think that within the addict, the addict community, the addiction community, we can often label ourselves as you're saying, or it's hi, I'm Jake and I'm an addict.


And I make the conscious decision not to do that because it's like, I, you know, I'm Jake and I'm a human being. Right. Yeah.


Yeah. You were an addict, but you know, yeah, you're more than your past behaviors. Yeah.


Yeah. And, and so it's, I think there can be power in, as you were saying, just remembering this is something that I can be vulnerable to. And so I need to continue to make choices in my life that support my wellbeing and connection with others, connection with God, et cetera.


I need to continue doing that. You really can. Yeah.


As you're saying, get on the other side and feel free and be like, this is not something I'm facing cravings with every day or anything like that. And that's very freeing. Yeah.


Because I think when we can't get the real connection, we see these pseudo connections. And for a lot of people, Nicole, the addicts, it's their addiction. But when we get the real connection, it's like literally, like you're saying with nutrition, when we get the real nutrition, we're fed because most of us are eating junk food.


Not literally, not only literally, but junk food connection, social media is not connection. You know, we do a lot of virtual stuff, but I mean, it's, you know, what real connection is. When we get real connection, we're not hungry anymore.


We're not starving. We're not, we're not malnourished. Yes.


And there, yeah, there's a lot of us now that are starving for connection. And I think I see that changing. I think I see more people, like there's more pain in the world than there has been a lot of ways.


But I think that there's more people understanding, Oh, wow, this is not good. What we've kind of done to ourselves in a lot of ways over the last 30 years, since the internet came around, I need to connect, I need to get out, you know, outside, I need to do think move, I need to, you know, do these things that human beings should do to feel human. So that's, that's good.


Yeah. And one of those things is, and we've lost this is agreeing with certainly all the physical is, is the connection. And part of that is we don't have venues to do it.


I mean, in most situations, the churches are going away. I talked to these guys who are like in England and Australia, and you know, where they have pubs and they're going away. So these guys don't have places that connect.


They're not in the military, no longer a college or whatever it might be. So we don't have those venues. So that's one thing.


And are you familiar with Richard Reeves and his book, Boys and Men? I've heard of that book. Yeah. So he's an English dude that wrote this book over a year ago.


We had him on our program. Great guy. He was, he still sort of is a Brookings fellow.


So, you know, he's a sort of scientific wonk, as you would say, he studies all the research around really connections and stuff. And so he wrote this whole book about boys and men. Yeah.


Agree with everything he said, certainly way more intelligent than I am, but he distills it down to the one way saying the liberals and the conservatives have it wrong because the way that they want to deal with boys and men are sort of, as you imagined, diametrically opposed. And the conservatives want to take guys back to the fifties or culture back to the fifties, where, you know, we know what that is, where the woman doesn't have any voice and the guys are, you know, doing what they're doing. And the liberals have traditionally gotten to a point where anything you do for a boy or a man or boys and men, it takes away from women, you know, that sort of hyper-wokeness.


And I think I really see that changing because I see more and more women going, you know, my husband, my brother, my father, my friend, you know, they're men and they're suffering and I care about them. They need help. And so Reeves and other guys are in a good way, really looking at it from a top down approach.


And my approach, as I was saying to him, and he agreed, is a bottom-up approach, more scalable, getting guys one-to-one or one-to-groups connected because we need connection. And so you're right, we need to go out and do these things. But when you think about where can guys get authentic connection in this society, there aren't many places.


And so my scalable model is we create these peer-to-peer men's groups. We do a little training and, you know, there's no real leader. Every guy sort of leads the group and it's not sitting around B.S.-ing or talking about sports or politics.


You're actually getting real, like I was saying earlier, and you're supporting each other just by being real in those places because that nourishes the emotional soul. Yeah, yes. Well, talk about some of that, Owen, just as far as what you guys offer with MELD.


I know there's a few different things through treats and coaching, etc. So, talk about those different approaches and what you guys generally do with them. Yeah, so we, yeah, I do, I still do one-to-one coaching and I have professional trainees who are trained men in that work.


But right now, primarily at MELD we have three things. We have what we call a core course, which is a 10-week introduction to a lot of somatic stuff. And it's not, it's little of us teaching some of the science, how to apply to science, but most of it as with anything that we do is experiential.


And you get to experience it with other guys. And it's a course that I first developed 10 years ago, and it's evolved and refined and grown over the 10 years. I don't teach it.


The guy that leads that teaching is better at it than I would be. He's been doing it for several years. And this course was studied over a couple of years by the scientists, researchers.


And that study in the last year was published in the premier APA journal, American Psychological Association journal, about this course and the power of it and how men need what this course develops in a man and why it works. So this is easy, fun. And, you know, most guys think emotions and all.


How's that fun? No, really, it's fun, of course. So that's a great introduction. I do a 12-week in-depth small group coaching, which is not the normal peer-to-peer group.


It's me leading these groups and coaching, you know, guys and four to six guys, small groups, intense, but hugely powerful. And it's a model that I've refined over the years. And then we have our live retreats, which it's a retreat that I developed eight years ago because guys would see me work in these other retreats.


And I go, they go, how the hell did you do that? I want to learn that. So, all right, I got to teach it. So I created this retreat that's evolved over the years.


And now it comes with a 100-page manual that we don't cover everything in the manual, but it's like a resource book. And we teach essentially the arc of change. So over the years of working with all these people and myself, there's a general arc of change when people transform.


And so I somewhat arbitrarily divided it up into 13 parts. And we just teach one part, then the next part. So we do a little teaching, a little demo.


And most of the time is you working with two other guys. So you work on the guy, he works on you, and then the other one observes. And we just rotate around.


So you literally just build on these skills as you go through the long weekend. And we've had guys completely off the street, no training. They didn't know anything about us.


They didn't even know it was a men's retreat. They just showed up because their wife said it to them. And by the end, they had it.


They were doing it. They got it. In part, because this is the organic way of change.


And it's fun. It's deep. Guys often develop lifelong friendships with men because it is so authentic.


And we're doing one in Joshua Tree at the end of February. Love to have you come. It's a beautiful venue.


We get out in the park. And it's a relatively small training, comfortable place, great food. I'm not into trainings that are confrontational or deprivational.


It's about, let's make it the most comfortable, enjoyable training. We laugh a lot if we can, because we learn better when we're having fun. And we integrate better what we learn when we're having fun.


And so those are the things that we offer. And I always say to guys, look, you're welcome to schedule a free call with one of us. And we'll talk with you about what works best for you.


And then we have a free membership for men. And we're on all social media platforms. And yeah, we work with all these thought leaders and corporations.


We were doing trainings for Google X. And Google X is Google's R&D department for all these scientists. Because they realized that, essentially, they needed to get these scientists connected so they would perform better and have less stress. Wow.


That's fantastic. Very, very cool. OK, well, great.


And tell people where they can find all this. Yeah, so it's MELD.community. So it's M-E-L-D, which actually stands for Men's Emotional Leadership Development. But it's MELD.community spelled out.


And you'll be there. And that's the website and the blog. And we're about ready to start our podcast, where it's going to be a different kind of podcast.


Where we're interviewing men that either, and we'd love to have you as a guest, men that, through our program or any other program, gone through their transformation. And just tell the story. Because I know when I started out, and I hear this from other guys, we don't have a model of what it's like to change as a man.


Yeah. And so I said, look, let's just get guys on. We got a fella doing one of my programs.


He's an English dude that's a music producer. And he's going to interview you and just ask you questions about where you were. And how did you get to where you're at now? So these guys have like, oh yeah, if Jake could do it, hell yeah, I could do it.


Yeah, that's awesome. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much, Owen.


Appreciate your time and some really, really valuable information. Is there anything else that you want to tell people about or bring up that we haven't covered? No, I appreciate being with you, Jake. And I would just end with risk connection.


Risk connection with yourself and with others. And as you were saying, try it. And you're going to screw up.


Bucky Fuller used to say, if you're not making mistakes, you're not learning. But it's an act of courage to risk for connection. I love that.


It's always messy. It's never a completely straightforward process. No, that's not it.


Yeah, thank you so much, Owen. Appreciate you coming on, my friend.


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