Philosophy for Life

Helping Divorced Men Move On with Rachael Sloan

• Darron Brown • Season 3 • Episode 14

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Have you ever wondered about the emotional struggles and societal pressures men face during divorce? Join us for a riveting discussion with the insightful divorce coach for men, Rachel Sloan, as we delve into the complexities of male perspectives on divorce. Rachel's unique experience and compassionate approach to coaching help illuminate the often overlooked consequences men face in the aftermath of a divorce they didn't want.

In our conversation, we challenge traditional gender roles and explore the MGTOW movement, highlighting how men can find renewed identity amidst these life transitions. We also grapple with the nuances of power dynamics within marriage and the legal system, taking a critical look at how these elements shape men's experiences during divorce. Our exploration extends to the concerning issue of depression and suicide among divorced men, a significant conversation that underscores the necessity of emotional processing and mental health awareness.

The journey concludes with a focus on healing from emotional trauma, the advantages of single fatherhood, and the role of the nervous system in managing emotions. Rachel shares valuable insights on the power of male connection and community in the healing process. It's an enlightening discussion that will leave you with a new perspective on the challenges men face during divorce, the importance of reshaping societal expectations, and the potential for personal growth and healing. Let's dismantle stereotypes, empower healing, and foster a deeper understanding of men's experiences in divorce. Join us!

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Rachael Sloan:

You know, there's kind of a tragedy. I see a lot of men think that being the great husband and father is about being the provider and the protector and the rock, and so they do that and they really they commit to it and they double down them and things are hard. They're like, well, let's work more, let's make more money, let's create more stability, and a lot of times they don't realize that that's not for how close she is to leaving until she does, and so it's often after the point where she says I want a divorce that men go to pretty extraordinary length and at that point it usually doesn't work.

Darron Brown:

Hey, what's up guys? So I have a great guest with me today I'm speaking with Rachel Sloan. She is a divorce coach for men. Now, before we get into it, I want Rachel to just give a little bit about herself and you can get started.

Rachael Sloan:

Awesome, Darren. Thank you so much for having me on. I'm really excited to be here. So, yeah, I mean that's kind of the basics about me. I'm a divorce coach for men. I'm a master NLP practitioner and a certified life coach, and the main focus of my work is helping men move on from divorce. 70 to 80% of divorces, depending on what statistics you look at, are filed by women. Yes, A lot of men going through a divorce they didn't want, and the consequences can be pretty devastating honestly in life-threatening in some cases for them.

Darron Brown:

Why did you decide to work with men and not women?

Rachael Sloan:

Yeah, it kind of chose me, I think, because that's not how I started. I was working with women.

Darron Brown:

And.

Rachael Sloan:

I was honestly, I was kind of scared to work with men in the beginning. I was really, as a new coach, I was very intimidated because so much, especially with NLP so much of the coaching is about understanding how someone's brain is working and how they're structuring their experience of reality and I was like I don't know how men think, I don't know how men's brains work.

Rachael Sloan:

So I did a lot of coaching for women and all of the women's coaching women wanted to be empowered. It was all this empowerment movement and I started to realize that there's a whole culture around that that's pretty toxic because it empowers women by villainizing men.

Darron Brown:

Yeah.

Rachael Sloan:

And it was really hurting a lot of women Like I found a lot of the female clients I was working with were really resistant to coming out of a victim mindset and taking ownership of who they were and responsibility for how they felt and their happiness. But I also started to talk to some men and I had men reaching out at something and my marketing was speaking to them and they were so injured by that narrative, by that women's empowerment narrative, and I started seeing how I was really breaking them down, dcing in that villain mode, especially by somebody that they loved.

Darron Brown:

How do you get? Because there's, I mean, not only are women. You know they're feeling like victims in there, basically seeing men as the enemy. Right now, within on the YouTube space, there's a lot of men that telling men that they should not get married. You know that you can't trust women X, y and Z. My guess is that when a man goes to a divorce and they're heartbroken, it's easy for them to feel like the victim as well. So how do you get men to gather that victim mindset and to actually start healing?

Rachael Sloan:

You know it's interesting because it's totally the other side of the coin. Right, there's a whole red pill movement at McTowell and there's so much of that for men online too. I honestly I don't tend to work with men in that stage. I engage with them, sometimes a lot.

Rachael Sloan:

I get a lot of comments from guys that are in that place on my YouTube channel, but personally what I've come to see doing this work is that there's a period of time for a lot of men going through this where they need anger, and it's because one of the side effects of a divorce you didn't want tends to be depression, because you've lost both agency and the primary relationship in your life, and both of those things are pretty devastating on a nervous system level for any human being, and so I think that's why the suicide rates for divorced men are about nine times higher than they are for the average person, and so I used to kind of get upset about the McTowell red pill stuff until I realized what it was doing.

Rachael Sloan:

Getting angry at her and getting angry at women in general. I think that probably saves a lot of men's lives, because that anger is such an active, empowered place that it gets them out of depression. So I tend to get a lot of clients who have been part of that for a while and were in that really angry kind of victim place but it was actually empowering and then they reach a point where they realized that that's not sustainable for the long term, that they need something more.

Darron Brown:

Okay, I see. So basically that stage is kind of like it helps them heal, it gives them a sense of community, but eventually, as they get out of this anger stage, there's a next stage after that, that, basically the recovery stage. And the men that you work with, my guess, like, what category do they typically follow? They're not angry, they're not blaming women. Are they men who I'm guessing they're not men that cheated on their wives? I'm guessing Are these guys that just got left by their wife because of, like, just out of the blue, or was it a slow ending relationship? Like, what kind of men typically reach out to you?

Rachael Sloan:

So I should caveat and say it doesn't mean they're not still angry at women, like the whole healing process it's just not linear. But they are guys who are starting to realize that they don't want to live with bitterness and resentment for their whole lives Doesn't mean they're past the anger. Like a lot of them, and I honestly I'm so honored that they work with me and they take the risk of trusting me because I'm a woman and a lot of them will admit to me like I don't want to offend you but honestly it's really hard for me to think well of women in general. So a lot of my clients are still angry. They're just seeing that if they stay angry forever, that's not the life that they want to live. So they're wanting to get past it and I guess, as far as like what kind of men, I get a pretty big range. A lot of my clients have been married a long time, some of them 20, 30, even 40 years.

Darron Brown:

Oh wow.

Rachael Sloan:

Yeah, it's interesting and so a lot of. There's a variety, but most of the time it's something that's been coming in some way for a long time, like the marriage hasn't been great, but they didn't think it was that bad. So it's both been a problem for a while. But it's also a shock because they really thought, yeah, things aren't great, but we've got time and there's room to make improvements. I don't tend to get so many like outright she cheated, I cheated. There was a big blow up.

Darron Brown:

Okay, why do you think people let the relationship just linger like that? Because I know people in my age group who have been in relationships for seven years and I'll speak to a friend of mine and she'll tell me well, you know, I knew the relationship was dead three years in, but I stayed into it. Like why do you think people? Why do you think when people? Why is it that when men see an issue within a relationship, they see it for one decade, two decades. They see that something's not right but they continue to stay in that relationship and just think that things will automatically get better?

Rachael Sloan:

Yeah, I think about this a lot. It's a great question. I think there's three or four different things that are happening. One is just on a physiology level the human brain doesn't like change, and so things that are new, the brain tends to look at them as interest or risky at the very least. And like I use this metaphor with my clients sometimes, like if I think of you know, like a prehistoric man, it was safer to stay in a damp, dark, cold cave. Then go out and, you know, hike 10 miles maybe to find an oasis, but I don't know what's between here and there, and maybe there's lions and maybe there's a storm, and like, at least in this shitty, crappy cave, that's not nice, I'm probably not gonna die.

Rachael Sloan:

So I think a lot of it is that kind of mental inertia that to do something new takes effort from us. It takes conscious effort. The brain doesn't like change, sees it as dangerous. I think that's part of it. I also think for men, at least in the men that I've worked with a lot of times they are trying to fix it and they think that they're fixing it and they really believe that it's their job to fix it and that they can fix it, and so they're doing the things that they think will make her happy, but they're just not the things she actually, or either not the things she wants to be happy, or it's just a case that he can't actually be the one that creates her happiness. So I think a lot of men think that they're. I just have to make X amount of money and the kids have to graduate and go to college and like then there'll be time for us and I just have to kind of keep going and keep providing and do enough. So I think that's part of it too.

Darron Brown:

What kind of things are they doing to save the relationship, cause they're thinking they're doing the right thing, and I'm guessing that paying the bills and being the breadwinner is part of that. But what things do men do to actually help save the relationship while they're in it, outside of paying bills?

Rachael Sloan:

You know, there's kind of a tragedy I see a lot, darren is that a lot of men think that being the great husband and father is about being the provider and the protector and the rock, and so they do that and they really they commit to it and they double down them and things are hard.

Rachael Sloan:

They're like, well, let's work more, let's make more money, let's create more stability, and a lot of times they don't realize that that's not. They don't realize how bad it is or how close she is to leaving until she does. And so it's often after the point where she says I want to divorce that men go to pretty extraordinary lengths to change other things. And that's when I see a lot of guys doing an immense amount of personal development work, doing a lot of work to understand and heal their childhood traumas and their attachment styles and like diving in and trying to understand the relationship dynamics more. But I say a tragedy because I usually don't, at least in the circle of men that I'm working with and tend to run into, I don't see that so much until she's already pretty checked out and at that point it usually doesn't work.

Darron Brown:

Yeah, I've heard that a lot of in many different books. I've heard that from a lot of coaches that women, when they leave, women have well, they're already lost interest in relationship. But by the time that they actually leave the relationship, they've been out of the relationship for years or longer. What are the most common reasons? Because you worked with both men and women. What are the most common reasons why women leave a marriage, especially one that long?

Rachael Sloan:

Gosh, do you want the reasons that they think they're leaving or the reasons they're really leaving?

Darron Brown:

I just want you to keep it real. You know, Let me, yeah, give me both, give me both.

Rachael Sloan:

Yeah, okay. So I mean this is definitely a generalization. There's a lot of individual differences, but a lot of women think they're leaving because he's not emotionally available or emotionally connected, because he doesn't listen to her, because he's too controlling, because she wants her independence, because he isn't making her happy, or another big one is just because he doesn't help she doesn't. She feels like all the pressures on her at the house are they kiss, although, interestingly, a lot of the guys that I work with find themselves in the position of not only being the breadwinners but also doing a lot of the childcare too.

Darron Brown:

So that's not necessarily always true.

Rachael Sloan:

So she thinks she's leaving because he's either not meeting her emotional needs or he's not making her happy. I think the reason that she's really leaving is because she has no idea what she needs to be happy and she doesn't know how to create happiness for herself. And I think that as a culture, as a society, we have this very beautiful Disneyland fantasy love story that says he's supposed to make you happy, and I think a lot of women believe that and internalize that, and then they leave and they're still not happy and they look for the next guy, and so I think a lot of women are stuck because they've never learned that their happiness has to come from the inside out.

Darron Brown:

I think you kind of know the good point, because a lot of us I mean I came in we were all speaking to a doctor and he was telling me that a lot of people were basically at some point in our life, from childhood to adulthood. At some point in our life we kind of we start to change our standards to fit into whatever cultural standards we go into. We date the person that fits into this image. They have this job, they have this degree. You know, everything looks perfect on the inside but they're dead. I mean, everything is good on the outside, they're dead on the inside.

Darron Brown:

And women leaving, like you said, they're trying for what I'm hearing. When women leave, they're trying to actually find themselves Because they're out, they're away from people, they're in a relationship and they feel like they've kind of lost who they were over the years. And what's weird is that when a man well, when a person goes to a divorce in general, then it's kind of like you have to reinvent yourself Because you will rediscover who you are. Like how does that rediscovery phase look like for men once they realize that they're separated, their kids are out of the house, like how does that self-growth look like for them?

Rachael Sloan:

The beginning is usually pretty brutal, honestly, because it is so many of the men that I work with. Their whole identity is for years has been father, provider, husband, partner, and again I come back to the suicide rates. But it's such a major issue and I think it's so tied to that loss of identity Because a lot of men don't survive that reimagining and that's I think a lot of people understand or they underestimate the intensity of the pain that a man experiences when he goes through a divorce that he didn't choose. I've had so many men tell me who have literally fought in Iraq or Afghanistan and been through horrific events, tell me that the divorce was the hardest thing that's ever happened to them and working with them and talking to them, it is so intense and a lot of them don't make it through to that place where they renew themselves or find their identity again.

Rachael Sloan:

And honestly, that's why I don't have a problem anymore with the red pillar, the MGTOW movement, because I do think it helps them start to make that transition Because really maybe the word to use is codependency. I think that same love story teaches men to be codependent on the woman for their sense of who they are. And then you take that away and there's any foundation, there's nothing left, and so it's a really frightening time for a lot of guys. But what I see is that that journey has to start with emotional regulation and learning to sit in and experience and work with the things that they're feeling, and through that we can connect to that deeper sense of identity.

Darron Brown:

A lot of men of all ages, I would say, outside of probably like a preschool or grade school. Most men get their validation from a woman. So it makes sense that once you lose your woman you kind of don't feel invalidated, you feel like you're less of a man, you're weaker. Men even rate their cells based off of the beauty of the woman that they're with, because they're comparing themselves to people, other men and other people in general. They're basing their value off of a false cultural standard. And I feel like a lot of men, just like women. I feel like the traditional roles that society has given us. They have been not as valued as they were before. Do you? How do you feel like? How do you feel about gender roles? What traditional gender roles Like? What is your opinion on traditional gender roles? Do you feel like they're helpful today?

Rachael Sloan:

Gosh, that's an interesting question. If yes and no, I think there's wisdom to be found in them, because those traditional gender roles, even as a lot of people are breaking free from them, they really define a lot of our underlying beliefs and I think we see that, even as people are trying to challenge gender roles that they're like challenging, it's like you have to challenge it because it's true. So there's this assumption that that old gender role is this underlying story of what men and women are. So I think there's wisdom in it in terms of it can help us understand what a man or a woman has been conditioned to want or need from a partner. So the examples being a man raised with those traditional gender roles is going to need respect from his partner and to feel respected by her, and that's something that a lot of women don't do very well in their relationships. Or a woman raised with a traditional gender role is going to need to feel loved and supported or even protected by her partner.

Rachael Sloan:

It's my opinion that those things are not inherent in us, that a man can have a solid enough foundation in himself that he doesn't need that validation or respect from the outside, that a woman can have that internal sense of security and safety with herself, that she doesn't need that protection from a man. But I do think it can help us in understanding that most of us have been conditioned to think that we need those external things, that those might be weak places in our personal work or our self-development, and so we can support our partners if we know that we can say, ok. Well, because he's been a man raised in this society with these gender roles, respect is probably important to him, freedom is probably important to him, freedom of sexual expression is probably important to him. So as a partner, I can say OK, these might be sensitive places for him. Can I be supportive in these ways? But I think we can get ourselves into trouble when we're like well, men are this way and women are this way, and so we need things from each other.

Darron Brown:

How do you feel about marriage? Do you feel like marriage is a good thing? Do you feel like it's outdated, that we should get rid of it from society? Like, I mean, you're dealing with people who have gotten their heart broken all the time and I'm pretty sure you see a common reason behind all of that, but do you feel like marriage is something that people should really pursue in life?

Rachael Sloan:

So I'm going to give you a little my personal history with this question. Before I ever did this work, I had no intention of ever getting married. I thought it was really silly, like I didn't see the point. And I am married now and I've been with my husband now 12 and 1 1⁄2 years and our relationship was always really committed. From the start I knew we were going to be together, but we honestly only got married when we moved to Mexico and it made the immigration process easier for us.

Rachael Sloan:

But since getting married I'm surprised how much I like being married. There is something and maybe this is my cultural conditioning coming in, but there is something in that role of even introducing him as my husband or myself as his wife that there is a charge or a feeling behind it. So I like marriage more now after getting married than I would have said before. I didn't really respect it as an institution very much.

Rachael Sloan:

However, I think we have a lot of challenges to overcome as a society in terms of the legal side of marriage, because there's a lot of challenges I see men facing during divorce legally and there's a lot of biases in our legal system against men and if you talk to divorce lawyers like I've talked to a lot of them and they swear it's really 50-50 in most states. But I've worked with men in a lot of states in a lot of different countries and it is often a fight, especially around their children. So I can understand and a lot of men are like screw marriage, you should never get married. I can't say that I don't get it. There's especially with the political climate now and things like the Me Too movement. Women have a lot of power legally and marriage does make men vulnerable to that. So I wouldn't go as far as to recommend you not get married. But I do think as an institution it has that scenario that we really need to work on.

Darron Brown:

Did you get married in Mexico or did you get married in the States?

Rachael Sloan:

I got married in the States.

Darron Brown:

OK, all right, because I was wondering if marriage in Mexico is different, legal. No legal-wise OK.

Rachael Sloan:

At the time my husband was making a lot more money than I was and we were trying to get residency in Mexico, and so to do it, I didn't qualify at the time and he did, and so we went and got our temporary residency. And it's been funny because we actually moved back to the States for about six years and a lot of things changed in his business and in mine, and so now we're back applying for residency again, and this time I'm the one who qualifies. So it's still serving us to be married here.

Darron Brown:

But OK, so ideally, we know that traditional gender roles are outdated and I think we both understand why they're outdated. Basically, women can be just as aggressive. Women are leaders Just as much as men are leaders. I mean, I can see that and, um, what I'm wondering is that, within our marital system, like what do you feel like needs to be added or changed within the when it comes to, like that paradigm, that belief system around marriage, what needs to change within relationships?

Rachael Sloan:

So you know, for me this is kind of the deeper mission, I think, darren, of what needs to change in our cultural story, and it's within marriage as an institution. But I think what happens within marriage, especially legally and during divorce, is just a small part of what's broken in our justice system, because we live in a society that really wants to classify people as good or evil and we judge people as bad all of the time and we punish them for their badness and we're very quick to write somebody off as a bad person or deserving of all kinds of horrible things. And the reality that I've learned through doing this work with men and women is that we're just human and that it's hard to be human and it's complicated to be human. It's even harder to be a human being in a relationship with another human being and that every action we take whether it's in a relationship where we yell at our spouse or we withdraw and don't talk, or we withhold sex or whatever we do to our partner, or it's something worse like a crime, you know, even murder I think by every action we take there's a positive intention and the root all of our behavior at least that I've explored with my clients seems to be rooted in wanting to be safe or free or feel loved, and I think that we live in a culture and a society that doesn't do a very good job of helping us feel that way, especially as children.

Rachael Sloan:

So we grow up looking for those things and unable to meet those needs throughout our lives, and they cause us to mess up our relationships and get into legal trouble and cause all kinds of recall kinds of havoc in our lives. And so I think the shift we need to make is to really see each other, all of us, as human, dealing with these same root desires that we wanna have agency in our lives, we wanna have that's the freedom piece we wanna feel loved and we wanna have security. And I think if we could look at people through that lens men and women and even people in the criminal justice system that we would have to start to create a very different system around how we handle things like marriage or divorce or custody, or jail time or capital punishment or those things. So for me it's a question of how do we humanize our narratives of across the board.

Darron Brown:

It's hard to be human when you live in a society that does not allow you to be human. You know, from what I can see is that just through my observation, I feel like, cause there's a lot of guys on the internet talking about, like women, this and dating and guys and shit and all this opinion. But from what I can see is that both men and women have a high level of anxiety when it comes to dealing with the opposite sex or just going for your goals or doing anything in life. There's a high level of anxiety which affects multiple areas of the life. You know it can transition into fear or depression or anything.

Darron Brown:

But I think that, just like you were saying, we live in a society that's kind of pushing fear on us and we're always getting these constant images about you know negativity over you can't trust these people or you know this group's doing this. Our political parties can't even talk anymore, you know. So I think a lot of it is all is all of it is kind of connected. I'm wondering you said that you worked with men that were that go through depression to the point where they're thinking of committing suicide. Can you talk to me about how it is working with somebody that's in that mental state.

Rachael Sloan:

It's hard. I've so. In the last year I've had two clients who have killed themselves. One was a brand new client who I didn't know very well I'd only talked to him once but the other was a guy I'd worked with for quite a while and I knew him very well.

Rachael Sloan:

So it's, it is. It's emotionally hard, but it's. It gives me a lot of hope too, because it's amazing to see how resilient the human brain is and how resilient people are. Because you said it's well, we live in a we're humans in a world that doesn't let us be human, and I think the reason so many men are pushed to that point by divorce is because they've been taught since they were little kids that their emotions aren't valid and just like.

Rachael Sloan:

Think about what we do to kids all the time. If they get angry, we put them in timeout and what is the message that the child gets? Well, I feel angry. That came up in me and you told me it's not appropriate and I can't be part of your society again until I can control this anger. So it's natural to me and it is right. Anger happens when we feel threatened and we need to fight back. So anger is a natural response in me. But you've just told me that it's not acceptable and it can't exist here. So the message that child learns is that I'm not acceptable, I'm not okay the way I am. I have to be different, to be here, to be part of our society.

Rachael Sloan:

And I think men especially learn that, because men's anger tends to scare us, and so we reject it. But their anger is a manifestation of their fear. They wouldn't be angry if they didn't feel threatened in some way. And when we reject the anger, we're not just rejecting the feeling, we're rejecting the person. And so I think a lot of men learn to stay in control and suppress a lot of what they feel.

Rachael Sloan:

Then they go through this divorce, and maybe it's been 10 years or 20 or 30 years with this person, and their whole identity and their life and their future was wrapped up in it. And so all of a sudden they're having such intense emotion that they can't suppress it. There's nowhere to shove it down too. But they have no tools for dealing with it, because every time they got upset or hurt or we do it to men with sadness too you cry well, don't be a girl, don't be a sissy. So they don't have any tools for dealing with emotions, and now they're so intense, there's no stuffing them down, and so I think the depression and the suicidal thoughts are actually their brain's way of trying to protect them, because they don't have a better way to deal with the emotional pain. So the brain's like, okay, well, let's just numb everything and that's depression. Let's just not feel anything.

Rachael Sloan:

It's part of a freeze state, right Like comes after we go through fight or fight. If we can't fight back and we can't get away, we shut down. And I think that's where the impression is and the suicidal thoughts are just this is too much, it's too painful. Maybe this is a way for it to finally stop. So I understand it and I understand why they're there, and what gives me a lot of hope is that understanding in that way gives us possibilities, because it's not a I don't say it's a mental illness or even a problem.

Rachael Sloan:

Suicide's a solution to a problem. The problem's the emotional pain, and so to help people that are in that state, that need to just give them better tools for handling the pain and making the pain go away, and if we can do that, then the depression and the suicidal thoughts tend to resolve themselves. So it's hard, but it's. I have a lot of hope with it. It's a very. For me it's also a very personal issue. I haven't dealt with depression or suicidal thoughts, but a lot of the men in my life have, and seeing them struggle and not knowing how to help has always been really hard for me, so it's still hard to do it with my clients, but at least I have the ability to help now and that's that's really empowering and I do really enjoy that aspect of it.

Darron Brown:

What are the conversations like when you speak to a person who committed suicide? What are the conversations like before they actually do it?

Rachael Sloan:

My sample size is very small, but I am part of a clinicians support group for clinicians who've lost clients and I've talked to a lot of people I don't think I can get. I could tell you a little bit about my experiences, darren, but it varies so much. I've really been educating myself about suicide because I think there's a lot. Well, there's a ton I didn't know and it's so complicated. Some people will be talking about it and getting help and seeking support and you'll think they're okay and then they die. Other people won't say a word, you won't even know they were suicidal and they die.

Rachael Sloan:

One of the support groups that I'm a part of, they've really been on a campaign to change the narrative around suicide, to just say that suicide is complicated, because it is. It's a very complicated and very different person to person. One of the men that I was working with I probably will never know what happened, but he was working with me. He was seeing a psychiatrist, he was starting new therapy, he was reading, he had told his family what was going on with his brain and he was getting help from a lot of different places. I think one thing that does happen and I don't know if this is what happened for him. It might have been, it might not have been, but it's something I learned afterwards and I wish I had known before is that a lot of men going through this will go into anti-anxiety medications To help them sleep, and there's a certain class and I can't remember which ones they are right now but there's a certain class of anti-anxiety medications that reacts very strongly with alcohol and if you drink while you're on that medication, it really releases all your inhibitions pretty powerfully. And what the research on suicide and with people that have survived suicide attempts shows is that if you have the urge not just the thought but the desire to do it now, if you survive the first five minutes something like 80 or 90% of people live Because it is this you're in a moment of acute pain and it's like I have to end it, it has to stop, and it comes up as a sudden intensity but it passes.

Rachael Sloan:

But if you have access to a gun and if you're a man because men are more likely to kill themselves with firearms than women are and guns are more likely to work the first time than overdosing or other ways of killing yourself so if you have that moment of that sudden urge and you've been mixing an anti-anxiety medication with alcohol. So your inhibitions, your ability to block that urge, is reduced and you have the lethal means right there. There are a lot of men who are actively getting help, working to get better, getting the sport and tools, and they die because in that moment there was that combination of drugs and alcohol and they had access to a firearm. And so, learning that one of the things that I'm starting to incorporate into my practice is education and planning.

Rachael Sloan:

I'm trying to talk more about suicide and let people know that because, who knows, maybe that's not what happened with this client. It might have been. If it was, and he had known that, he could have taken measures like okay, well, these thoughts are active, I'm on this medication, I'm going to lock my gun up, so it takes me at least five minutes to get to it or give it to a friend, or just little things that make a huge difference, because the studies suggest that most people who died by suicide didn't really want to die. They were just in a moment of overwhelming pain and in that moment they decided to try to do something about it. So, yeah, we could talk about suicide a lot. It's complicated and it's hard, but we're learning a lot about it and I think we have a lot of tools to help people who are feeling that way that we maybe didn't have 10 or 20 years ago.

Darron Brown:

I'm not sure if you can answer this, but I'm curious. The man that you work with like, what is their relationship like with their father?

Rachael Sloan:

I'm trying to think if I've seen a pattern that stands out, I wouldn't say that that's a strong pattern that I see as a specific kind of relationship with fathers.

Rachael Sloan:

I do see a fair amount of various levels of childhood trauma on both sides with my clients in themselves and or in their ex-wives. A lot of times, like, honestly, when you ask that question, the examples that come to mind are more maternal trauma as opposed to. There's a few examples that I'm thinking of where it was really the relationship with the father that comes up when we go into childhood stuff, but a lot of times it's the relationship with mom or with both parents.

Darron Brown:

There's a book called Iron John, and this is the reason I asked you this question, because in the book it mentions that young men, when we went from an agricultural society to an industrial society, they took fathers out of the household. Traditionally young men, they grew up around their fathers, their grandfathers, their uncles. They had a community, so there was always a community of maleness, a community where they got an idea to see a variety of different shades of masculinity. But once the men were taken from the household into the work field, boys were with their mothers most of the time and then when they went to school, their teachers were most or predominantly female. And especially in today's day and age, where we have a lot of images about like women are the future a lot of young men. They used to get their validation from other men in their family.

Darron Brown:

Historically and what we see. You know this book mentions around men in the world. You know even ones that are like in the jungle or you know things like that. They used to get their validation from the men within the tribe, but now men are getting their validation from women and one of the things that it mentions in that book is that as a man, he gets older and he's living by, he's basically being this character that society has designed him to be. At some point in his life he starts to get that urge, that feeling, to explore his masculinity or to figure out who he really is. And it's said that the key is taking the golden ball from your mother, basically separating yourself from your mother, not allowing your mother to have so much control over your identity or your masculinity, because not only do men try to get approval from women, their wife, they try to make their mothers proud, you know. So we try to do that by being the opposite of whatever their father were or the image of who, you know, their mother thinks a good man is.

Darron Brown:

So that's really why I was asking that question.

Rachael Sloan:

That's fascinating. I'm going to have to read that book, taryn. Yeah, you know, I think the lack of male connection, male community and just space for men to be men in our society is probably a huge piece of it. And it's interesting because, yeah, I said well, I see more maternal trauma and maybe that's because that was the relationship that they were seeking the validation in. So, yeah, I mean, I would agree with you completely and I'll be curious to learn more about about that idea, but I do think that's a huge change. I mean, I think back to, yeah, like a hunter gatherer tribe, you're hunting, you're in a group of men, a community of men. There's a lot of strong male role models and our society right now you're punished a lot for being a man in a lot of different ways.

Darron Brown:

Yeah, it's just go ahead.

Rachael Sloan:

I do know. A lot of the men I work with feel isolated and that connecting I have a community and connecting with other men in that community. I used to just do one on one coaching with this. Since I started doing groups in this community, the results have skyrocketed. Like it. Working with me one on one is not what what these men need. They need to be in a community of men who are going through it and learning to get through it together, and I can give them the tools that they didn't learn. You know about how to deal with emotions and how to understand and unpack some of these belief systems, but it's the connection with other men and going through it together that I've seen make the biggest difference.

Darron Brown:

I think it's really important Me. I grew up in a pretty hard environment where people were always, you know, acting tough or you know they feel like they had to be tough. But I hear that same like message being shared to young men on on YouTube like you have to be strong, you have to be rich, you know that's what being a man is all about.

Darron Brown:

Exactly that's what women want. That's, that's all it. That's that's all. The value that a man brings to the table is his body and his wallet, but I do know for a fact that there's more to being a man than physical power. You know, we have emotional needs, psychological needs. We're all living life and going through the same things, and I think that there needs to be more, there needs to be a more well rounded communication when it comes to masculinity and maleness, because even to be, even being a man part of being a man is also accepting your feminine aspects of yourself. You know, both men and women have feminine and masculine aspects of yourself, and I feel like a lot of men are afraid of the feminine aspects and I'm not saying the feminine aspects that society gives men today wear makeup, wear a dress, do all that type of things. I mean like really communicating with men and putting their their their emotions and feelings out there and learning how to deal with them. I think that a really it's a good start to to healing and figuring out who you are.

Darron Brown:

So I'm curious that this might go through divorce. You know you always hear these types of stories like the best way to get over a relationship is to get into another relationship. From your experience of working with these men, I'm curious like what? What helps them get over the relationship the fastest? I'm guessing it's not sex. So what is it?

Rachael Sloan:

It's funny I've had men who's therapists have given them that advice like go out really.

Rachael Sloan:

It's like so deeply ingrained in our narrative that like that's what men need to feel better. Yeah, it's amazing, some of the things that people share with me, that they're I'm always like, really, did you hear that right? Okay, so what actually helps? There are two things that I see is really foundational. One is to learn to regulate their nervous system. So they need to get tools to be able to physically manage and there's an important distinction here it's not managing the emotions, it's managing the nervous system reaction to the emotion.

Rachael Sloan:

So you're going to go through this divorce, you're going to feel sad, you're going to feel angry, you're going to feel shame, you're going to feel guilt, you're going to feel resentment. There's going to be all kinds of emotions anxiety, fear about the future, loneliness so many feelings are going to come up. The emotional regulation work that we do is not about stopping those feelings, but what happens for most people, not just men, is that when we feel a really strong emotion, we panic. We're like, oh shit, this is too much, I don't like this, I got to get away from it and we have this anxiety response to what we're feeling and so we start to go into a fight or flight state in the nervous system that makes whatever we're feeling the grief or the anger so much more unmanageable. And so the first thing I see men really needing to do and I think this is true for women too to move on is to learn the skills to regulate the nervous system so that you can feel everything you're feeling without your body freaking out, without your blood pressure going through the roof, without the anxiety coming up, without feeling overwhelmed by it. So it's increasing the capacity for emotion, and maybe the simplest way to explain what that really means is it means working with emotions as physical sensations.

Rachael Sloan:

And this is actually really cool for men, because most men, I know, are pretty good about dealing with physical pain. You can hit yourself with a hammer or even break a bone right, have some physical injury and it hurts, and you might swear and be upset and unhappy about it, but you don't go into a fight or flight response because it's just pain and you know you're not gonna die and you know it's gonna heal and pass and you know there's nothing you can do about it right now. The leg is broken, it's gonna hurt and then it's gonna itch and it's gonna be, but you're gonna heal and so you don't panic, and so that's the first thing that I try to teach them. How I work with to do is to deal with their emotions in the same way.

Rachael Sloan:

Emotions are just physical sensations in the body, and when you can start to show your brain that it comes out of fight or flight and it's like, oh yeah, okay, anxiety is just tightness in my chest or an unsettled feeling in my stomach, anger is heat in my face and pressure in my head, and then we can start to feel the emotion but still function and choose how to respond, just like if I had a broken leg, I could still choose how to go through my day and think clearly. So that's the first one, and it's because if you go into fight or flight, you lose access to a lot of your executive processing skills, like the part of your brain that makes good decisions and has a rounded memory of the past and really can see the bigger picture and think clearly. It just starts to go offline when you go into fight or flight and you're just in survival. So if you're reacting to your emotions, like most people do, you lose the ability to think as logically as you would.

Darron Brown:

How does that look like, though? Learning skills to handle your emotions? The reason I asked that I've been doing like mental work for the last decade. You know, and it's definitely I definitely have gotten better. But to even start doing that work, you have to be really introspective, you have to be really like, mindful, you have to have a good sense of yourself, you know. So how do you, how does somebody, how do you get somebody to really take on that level of self-awareness?

Rachael Sloan:

Yeah. So I appeal with men. I appeal to their logical brain, because most of my clients are very logical men. I tend to attract engineers and doctors and people who are like very problem solving, systematic, smart guys. So I explained to them look, if your nervous system is activated you can't think clearly. Here's all the research. You can look at it Brain doesn't work properly when you're activated and you have to make legal decisions and you have to make career. You have to do a lot of.

Rachael Sloan:

It's a horrible thing about divorce you throw somebody into the situation where their nervous system is just activated through the roof and then you make them make, like critical life altering decisions all day. So I, to get them interested in doing the work, I appeal to logic. But then what I explained to them is the logical part of our brain is primarily the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the emotions originate in the limbic system, which is much deeper in the brain, and there's not any physical neural connections between that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the limbic system. So, trying to think your way through and this is what most men do they try to solve the problem of the divorce. They try to answer why did she do this?

Rachael Sloan:

What did I do wrong, what happened, and they try to think it through and get this like, put all the pieces of the puzzle together and they think if they can understand it well enough, they'll feel better. But they can understand it all day and it doesn't change the emotion because those two parts of the brain aren't talking. So it's actually really simple to work with the nervous system you have to activate the medial prefrontal cortex, because that part of the brain has neural connections to the limbic system, and so that's the awareness part of the brain. And the example I like to give is just like if I told you right now to you know, notice your right knee, what does your right knee feel like? And maybe you like can't describe it, but you can feel it right, yeah, I can feel it. And then, like, feel your left knee and notice what feels the same, what feels different.

Darron Brown:

It tingles at a different angle. There you go.

Rachael Sloan:

You just activated the medial prefrontal cortex and that is all you have to do to work with your emotions physically. And so that's what I teach men to do is to notice okay, you're anxious. How are you anxious? Where do you feel it in your body? Okay, it's in your chest. How big is it? Find the edges, notice where it stops and where it starts. Is it more intense in one part or the other? It's just a practice of becoming more anxious, of becoming aware of what is the physical experience of the emotion, and it's not magic, it doesn't just sometimes it kind of is Like sometimes it does just decrease the intensity, but usually it takes some practice. You have to notice it throughout the day.

Rachael Sloan:

But there's a really interesting researcher over at Harvard, dr Jill Bolt Taylor, and she studies the human brain and she did a study on emotions, trying to figure out how long an emotion stays in the body, and what she found is that after that first flush of emotion, if you don't feed it with your thoughts or reject it and try to get rid of it, if you just let it be, it only lasts for about 90 seconds. So, whatever happens, we get triggered and we react. We have this flood of neurotransmitters and peptides and hormones in the body, and most of the time we feel that in the brain it's like oh no, what happened? And we try to look for the story behind the emotion. Why am I anxious, why am I afraid, why am I angry? And so then we start thinking about the things that upset us and now we're triggering the brain to release more and more of those chemicals.

Rachael Sloan:

But if we don't do that, if we feel that flood of emotion and we stop and we just say how do I feel it? What does that feel like in my stomach? What does that feel like in my head? How big is it, what shape is it? And we do that for 90 seconds, we give it time to subside and then we can stop and say, okay, is there really something here that needs my attention? Is there a reason to be anxious? Is there something I do need to fight back against? And we can make a choice, but we've allowed that initial emotion to subside.

Darron Brown:

What is this called? Because I've read things like this and I kind of practice it on my own time. But from the books that I've read, the way that I understand it is that I try to prevent myself from diving deep into like when I have like a negative thought. I try to prevent myself from really like going deep into that thought. I try to change my thoughts because your thinking affects the way that your body feels. That's the way that I understand it, but there's a science on this as well.

Rachael Sloan:

Yeah, so I call it limbic awareness what I do with my clients. But if you Google that you're not gonna find much about it except my courses.

Darron Brown:

Okay.

Rachael Sloan:

So there is a science behind it. Bessel van der Kolk, who is a psychiatrist who spent his whole life treating PTSD patients and it's kind of the father of the whole idea that trauma gets stored in the body, he wrote a lot about and he's the one where I first found the studies about the different parts of the brain. And when I read that there's no connections it was in his book the Body Keeps the Score that he writes there's no connections between the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the limbic system I was like, oh my God, that's why. Because clients are always telling me, well, I understand this, but I feel this. I know I need to let go and move on, but I just can't and I'm so connected to her that disconnect or I know I'm a good person, but I just feel so ashamed and guilty At the disconnect I was like, oh, that's why there's no communication. And then there's a lot of other research around it Dr Peter Levine has done. He spent like 30 years studying how wild animals release trauma and why they don't seem to get PTSD even though, like a gazelle gets hunted by a lion, and so there's a lot of pieces out there.

Rachael Sloan:

Talking about processing emotions in the body. Dr Candice Pert is another one. She's the woman who discovered the opiate receptor in the brain. She was the first one to actually identify and bind something to the opiate receptor and prove that it existed back in like the 70s. And she's written a couple of books about the biochemistry of emotions, how emotions are just peptides in the body and that a lot of what we feel when we feel an emotion is actually when that peptide binds to the surface of the cell. So there's a lot of these pieces of information out there. There's Tara Branch is like a mindfulness coach. She puts together an exercise called the RAIN technique and some of what I do is similar to that. It's recognizing and allowing the sensations, kind of like you're recognizing your thoughts. This is recognizing the feeling. So what I'm talking about this like 90 second process is kind of what I've pulled together from all of these different sources and also from NLP, which is where my training is, and that really teaches you to watch your internal experience. What are you seeing and hearing and feeling on the inside? And then a lot of it has just been noticing what happens, because what's really cool?

Rachael Sloan:

You had asked me a little while ago, darren, what helps men move on. What I find is that if you can get a man's nervous system to be calm, that and then usually we have to do some self-esteem work after that, because the process of divorce can be pretty brutal on your self-image and a lot of men have a negative self-image to start with because they've been told their whole lives that they shouldn't be the way they are and what they feel isn't right and that men are bad. Right, there's a lot of narrative that men are carrying. But once your nervous system is balanced and you've been able to get to know yourself beyond that story you've heard about what a man is your whole life I find that men know how to move on. They're incredibly resourceful, they're incredibly wise, they have lifetimes of experience.

Rachael Sloan:

You know some of my clients are in their 60s. They were married for 40 years. Who am I to tell you how to move on? But I don't have to do that for them. What I have to do is help them get their nervous system balanced, because when that happens, you regain access to your full executive functioning parts of your brain. Right, when you're in fight or flight, everything narrows. You can't see anything bigger, but when you're back in a balanced state, it all opens up and you have access to all of the resources you've accumulated your whole lifetime. And what I've found is that when people really feel safe and their nervous system feels safe and they can feel that and sustain it even when strong emotions come up, they're really wise and they make amazing decisions and strong choices. And so I find that men really naturally start to find ways to accept, to move on, to forgive and to move forward with their lives once we deal with the emotional nervous system piece.

Darron Brown:

I was talking. I have a videographer I do street interviews, right and he's younger, he's probably he's about 22. And he was telling me about how he found out that there's a married family member because he's in the LDS church. He says married family member that has these like these sex parties and whatnot, and he was giving this opinion on it and it was super negative.

Darron Brown:

But one thing that I told him I was like hey, man, you know the one thing that I've realized and dating, having relationships, getting my heart broke it's just realizing that nobody controls you and you don't control anybody else. And if you can honestly love somebody and not try to like control the outcome or try to tell them what to do, then you can actually have a more peaceful I wanna say more peaceful, free type of relationship, because you kind of it's like a level of acceptance, you can kind of be free, you're not so anxious in trying to get a specific outcome when it comes to relationships. We're close to the end of this. I wanna make sure I ask you this question. I ask everybody well, this is a new question. I'm asking everybody like, what is their philosophy for life? So yeah, rachel, what is your philosophy for life?

Rachael Sloan:

Oh, that's a great question. You know what I mean. I think my philosophy for life is just that we're all human and we all deserve grace and patience and respect. And maybe the last piece is that that also has to come from within first. We tend to look for it outside of ourselves.

Rachael Sloan:

I had a client the other day. I asked him. He was really struggling with how he talked to himself and how he dealt with himself in his own mind, and he said you know, if I treated my children the way I treat myself, I'd be in jail. And I think that's so true for most of us. These things we're looking for out in the world, we need to give them to ourselves first. We need to give ourselves respect and grace and the benefit of the doubt and we need to allow the possibility that maybe we've been doing the best we can with what we have and what we know all along. And honestly, maybe at the root of it.

Rachael Sloan:

Jared, I think my philosophy is that people are good. We just have a lot of bad strategies and there's strategies that we learn to survive because, like you said so, while we're living in a world that doesn't really let us be human, and so we have to find ways to live through that. And then I think we look back on the things that we did to get by and we judge ourselves for them and we think that we're bad and there's something wrong with us. My philosophy is that we're just people and we're good and we want the same things and we need to start to give ourselves some little grace and respect around that. That was beautiful.

Darron Brown:

Oh, sorry about that, Rachel.

Rachael Sloan:

I know what to do, but yeah, but then maybe we can pass it on to others after we give it to ourselves.

Darron Brown:

Lovely Rachel. I forgot you mentioned kids and I forgot to ask you about that. Do you have anything on your channel regarding divorce with kids, people who are married with children?

Rachael Sloan:

Yeah, I do. I've got a few videos about that. A lot of my clients have kids and I am actually a child of divorce myself. My parents got divorced when I was six, so there are quite a few videos there about navigating it with kids and to sum it up in like one sentence most people are really scared about the consequences because the statistics are bad, but the research shows that if children have one emotionally engaged and emotionally responsive adult in their lives, that's enough for them to have healthy relationships, secure attachment, success in their careers and educations.

Darron Brown:

I needed to hear that I have a daughter as well and I'm not with the mother, so I'm glad you said that.

Rachael Sloan:

Well, one more thought for you, because one of my friends is always telling me this Research also shows that children raised by a single father tend to do better than children raised by a single mom.

Darron Brown:

Lovely. You hear that fellas Shut that down, rachel. This is a great show. Thank you for being on and I'll catch you next time. Any last words?

Rachael Sloan:

No, Darren, thank you so much. It's really been wonderful speaking with you. Thank you for having me.

Darron Brown:

Thanks for being here. Thank you.

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