447. Raising emotionally healthy boys: How to protect connection, vulnerability, and their authentic selves with Dr. Adam McCormick

Dr. Adam McCormick (00:00):

We do kind of socialize boys to disconnect from the things that we’ve feminized, like relationships, connection, intimacy. They need those just as much as anyone else. And what we’re seeing in the data is that so many boys at a younger and younger age are so much more disconnected than they ever were.

Dr. Sarah Bren (00:27):

As boys grow up, many can start receiving subtle and sometimes not so subtle messages about which parts of themselves are acceptable to show. And over time, the sensitive, tender, emotionally expressive child might actually learn that anger can feel safer than sadness or that shutting down or not needing anyone can feel safer than being vulnerable or asking for connection. Hi, I’m Dr. Sarah Bren, a clinical psychologist, mom of two, and the host of Securely Attached. Each week, I sit down with leading experts in psychology, neuroscience, medicine, and child development to translate complex research into practical grounded insights that help you parent with more clarity and confidence. Today, I’m joined by Dr. Adam McCormick. Adam is a professor of social work at St. Edwards University and his work focuses on boyhood, trauma, masculinity, foster care, and resilience. He’s the author of Healing the Helping Professionals Childhood Trauma Wounds: The Unfinished Business of Childhood, and is currently writing a book called The Cost of Boyhood: Trauma, Masculinity, and a Return to the Self.

(01:47):

In this conversation, Adam and I explore what can happen to boys’ emotional worlds as they grow up, and why behaviors that express anger or shutting down or pushing people away may tell us far less about what a boy is actually feeling than we realize. We talk about the role that shame can play underneath these behaviors and how even loving and really well-intentioned parents can very unknowingly respond differently to boys’ emotions than to girls’ emotions. And also why our instinct to fix a problem or talk a child out of a difficult feeling can sometimes get in the way of what they actually really need from us in that moment. Finally, we talk about something that I found especially powerful, which was the importance of delight, what it means for a child to experience someone who genuinely enjoys who they are, not because of how well they’re performing in school or in sports, but simply because they are them and why these seemingly small moments of our attention, play, curiosity and connection can have such a profound impact on a child’s developing sense of self.

(02:56):

So this really isn’t a conversation about letting harmful behavior slide, but really, we really want to understand that we can hold boys accountable while also really staying curious about what’s happening underneath their behavior. So we’re not only responding to what we could see from the outside, because boys don’t need us to teach them how to be sensitive and vulnerable and connected human beings. They are born with those capacities, but our job is really to help create the conditions that allow those parts of them to keep growing. So whether you are raising a very young boy, a teenager, or maybe you’re just thinking about the kind of man you hope your son might actually eventually become, this conversation I think offers a really important perspective on how we can help boys grow up without having to disconnect from themselves in order to belong.

(03:46):

Hello, Adam. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Dr. Adam McCormick (03:57):

Thank you so much, Sarah. I’m really excited to chat with you today.

Dr. Sarah Bren (04:01):

Me too. Before we dive into talking more about raising boys today, I really wanted just to kick off with maybe getting a chance to hear a little bit about you and your work and how you found yourself in this space of boyhood.

Dr. Adam McCormick (04:19):

Yeah, I think that’s an interesting question. I think for a long time, the way that I would have answered it is 25 years ago I became a social worker. I’ll kind of start there, but certainly my passion for the experiences of boys, especially some of the trauma and the stress experiences of boys certainly go back to the time that I was about two feet tall growing up with a father who was an alcoholic.

(04:45):

But professionally, 25 years ago, my wife and I, we were very young, moved in to be live-in house parents, foster parents for teenage boys in the Texas foster care system. And these were boys who had experienced some of the most horrific trauma imaginable in the form of abuse and neglect and family separation. And it was in those experiences that professionally I really developed a passion for better understanding and better responding to the needs of boys really throughout childhood and even into young adulthood. And so that’s kind of where the professional experiences that sparked this. But like I said, I realized in doing much of that work that I carried a lot of my own trauma and unfinished business from childhood into this work, which I talk about frequently. So yeah, that’s how I got into this.

Dr. Sarah Bren (05:46):

The unfinished business piece of bringing that work into our professional sphere.

Dr. Adam McCormick (05:54):

Yeah, absolutely. And when it comes to working with, and I’ve worked a lot with boys in multiple systems in schools and foster care and juvenile detention systems, but also with young men on the college campuses where I teach. And I find more and more that I’m resonating more on a personal level with what they have to say than even on a professional level in a lot of ways.

Dr. Sarah Bren (06:16):

Yeah. How so? What do they talk about?

Dr. Adam McCormick (06:20):

Yeah. And again, whether it’s boys that I’m working with out in the schools or in university settings or boys who’ve experienced just some of the most horrific trauma, for so many of them, it’s this disconnection from their self. For many boys, including myself as a boy, whether we realize it or not, we’re raised in environments where we’re taught or policed or shamed into rejecting anything in society that has been feminized in any sort of way, which unfortunately those things that have been feminized are oftentimes like emotional expression, a joy and passion. I think about this when I go read to my kids’ classes when they’re in kindergarten and stuff, they always like me to come read the stories. And the boys are just so excitable and they’re so joyful and their hands are raised and they’re talking over everyone and they’re proud of their artwork on the wall and, “Hey, look at this firetruck that I just colored.” They’re proud of it.

(07:23):

I couldn’t even tell it was a firetruck, but they don’t care. They’re proud of it. You see those same boys even just five or six years later, fifth, sixth grade, and it’s an entirely different dynamic for them. Not only the emotional expression, but just the joy, the excitement that they once had, they’ve kind of disconnected from, intimacy, relationships, compassion, expression, all of the things that any one of us need to be healthy and happy and whole. For many of the boys and the young men that I work with, they’ve been systematically, without realizing it, I think, taught to disconnect from those parts. And as they talk about that, I can certainly resonate with that a great deal as I too, as a boy, as somebody who was kind of, I would say the social worker of my family growing up with this really, really kind of hyper-masculine father as a timid and tender and sensitive kid. My father would have preferred that I be a serial killer than a timid, sensitive kid. I too disconnected from those parts and now in my forties trying to reconnect with them. And so I’ve developed a real strong passion for working with boys at a much younger age to try to help create some of the conditions and the experiences that they need where that disconnection doesn’t have to take place, but also what that work looks like to kind of reconnect with those parts.

Dr. Sarah Bren (08:49):

Yeah. I’m so curious, as a parent listening, especially if you’re a parent of a boy, there’s probably this question of like, okay, well, what are those things? How do I prevent that? What am I doing that I might not be aware of that could be stifling that or disconnecting them from that?

Dr. Adam McCormick (09:07):

Yeah. I think I always start just kind of emotionally, and I include myself in this category. I have a son who’s 18 years old now and for so long, and even still, I have a tendency to do this with him, when he has some of these bigger emotions or sometimes just any kind of emotional expression, I kind of catch myself wanting to help him to fix that, wanting to talk him out of some of those big emotions. Again, with the best of intentions, focusing on, “Hey, what can I say to him right now that’s really going to be helpful?” In reality, oftentimes what boys need from us more than anything else when they’re having some of these big emotions is just an adult, a parent, a coach, a teacher who can just stay with them through those big emotions, not try to talk them out of it, not try to work them through it as fast as they possibly can.

(10:05):

And what a lot of times we don’t realize when we’re working with boys or working with young men is perhaps sometimes because of our own upbringing or the ways that we’ve kind of been socialized around the emotional experiences of boys and young men is we too, without realizing it, might have a little bit of discomfort.This isn’t in our wheelhouse. I think about that I have four daughters and one son and I realized just a few years back that kind of how I related to them emotionally, even as a developmental trauma social worker was entirely different. With my daughters, I was much better equipped at kind of staying with them through these big emotions that they had with my son. I was wanting to talk him out of it or fix it for him as fast as I could. And so boys oftentimes don’t have those capacities or they don’t develop those capacities around emotional expression.

(11:04):

I think the other thing too is to kind of recognize, again, well-meaning without intention, the ways that we do kind of socialize boys to disconnect from the things that we’ve feminized, like relationships, connection, intimacy. They need those just as much as anyone else. And what we’re seeing in the data is that so many boys at a younger and younger age are so much more disconnected than they ever were before. And those connections are really, really healing. I was watching the Stranger Thing shows with my kids a couple months back and they were giving me a hard time because if you’re not familiar with the show, it takes place, the setting is the 1980s and it’s kind of this band of kids that are just running around town dealing with all sorts of wild stuff. And they were like, “Well, the 1980s, did you quite literally just travel around on your bikes with a band of your friends?”

(11:58):

And you kind of did. We had hardship and we had trauma and we had stress. I can remember many of my friends had fathers were alcoholics or there was a lot of heavy stuff going on at home, but kind of built into childhood was so much connection that helped to kind of regulate that stress, so much play that helped to regulate that stress. We see with teenage boys now, they’re getting less time playing outdoors than the average Texas state inmate is getting. So when they do encounter some stress or they do encounter some hardships, some adversity, and certainly some trauma, a lot of the things that have historically been built into childhood that would help them to regulate that stress, especially in the form of play and connection, well, we’ve kind of systematically taken a lot of that away from them in the experience.

Dr. Sarah Bren (12:50):

What’s causing that removal? I’m thinking of, well, lots of things. Obviously the higher demand on education and more homework, more time spent in the academic sort of seat, and then less time just even if you do have time to hang out, there’s nobody else out. And then over scheduling and sports and then video games and tech. So am I missing? What else is pulling kids away from this connection?

Dr. Adam McCormick (13:24):

No, it really is all of those things. In fact, this struck me pretty heavy. About a year ago, I drove through my old neighborhood where I grew up and I was showing my kids my old neighborhood and this is six o’clock in the afternoon on a weekday and nobody was outside and nobody was at the park. Nobody was out in the community. And so I think it’s tech, it’s social media. I think all of those things have really just taken away those experience for young people. So we’re seeing, depending on what study we look at, for every meaningful kind of, and I call this small tea therapy, these are just the little interactions that a child has on a regular basis with their teachers, with their friends, with a coach, with a mentor, a neighbor that a lot of parents don’t realize are far more relationally rewarding and healing and regulating than we could ever imagine.

(14:24):

I mean, think back to COVID just a couple years ago. We were all miserable. There was no amount of Amazon package deliveries or online yoga classes that could make up for what we lost. And of course it was even heavier for our kids. What we lost were those little interactions. I could remember getting emails from my students, “Adam, I would kill to be back in class right now. I would give anything to be back in class.” And these were oftentimes coming from students who never came to class, but that was kind of the point.

Dr. Sarah Bren (14:53):

Because they weren’t there. It wasn’t because the academics remained, right? It was everything else that disappeared.

Dr. Adam McCormick (14:58):

It’s he connection. Those little interactions. Yeah. They’re so relationally… And we’ve had decades of research that effectively showed that the more relationally rich a child’s environment is, meaning the more those little connections, the happier, the healthier, the more mental health and all of that sort of stuff. And I think structurally, systematically, we’ve kind of eliminated that. I’ve told this story, it’s with my daughter, not necessarily with my son, but I think it still has some real meaning here. She’s a big Taylor Swift fan. She has a high school English teacher. She’s 15 years old, who’s also a big Taylor Swift fan. Well, here in the public schools in Texas, the kids are not allowed to have their cell phones at school. They got to check them in on a cabinet when they walk in the school. And so the teacher gets to her desk. She opens up her computer at eight o’clock in the morning and she gets this news alert that Taylor Swift is getting married or engaged or something.

(16:01):

She immediately thinks, so this is a Texas public school teacher. She’s got a classroom full of, who knows, 30, 40 kids, but she opens this alert up and she realizes, “Oh my gosh, Serena is not going to have this news until the end of the day. I can’t possibly allow that to happen.” So she quite literally tells her class, “I’ll be right back.” Runs across the school, pulls my daughter out of class, says, “This is an emergency.” I’m sure my daughter’s thinking, “What happened? Did something happen to my family? No, but this is much bigger. Taylor Swift is getting married.” And so she’s telling me about this on the ride home from school, and for her, it’s no big deal. In fact, this teacher, Ms. Rice, she does this sort of stuff with every kid every day. This is her thing. That’s just the kids love her.

(16:42):

But as a developmental social worker who studies the nervous system of kids, you realize, no, your nervous system has registered this in an entirely different way. Your nervous system, which is brilliant, and pays close attention to these sort of things, basically said this teacher who has hundreds of students who she cares about and loves, in this moment, I was the most important one. And not only was I was so important that she left her class and ran across the school to get me out of class to share in this moment with me. This is a really, really big deal. But it really kind of speaks to just that small tea that just how healing and how regulating and how important to kids these little relational moments are. It’s not, “Hey, tell me something big that’s going on in your life.” It’s, “Hey, did you watch that show last night?” That sort of stuff for boys, any kids, but what we’re seeing with boys is they’re less disconnected or they’re more disconnected than anyone else right now. They’re not getting those moments. They’re not getting those experiences.

Dr. Sarah Bren (17:43):

And what it makes me think of in the example you’ve just told of that story with your daughter, and I literally got goosebumps because it’s like to be thought of, to be held in the mind of another as a kid in that way, sure, we want our parents to hold us in their mind and that feels very good and very important. If you’re a parent listening, that’s probably one thing that you can really do meaningfully to show your kids, “I’m holding you in my mind,” and to make that transparent. But for somebody who’s not your parent to do it, “Wow, you must really matter.” It’s just a different level and it shows creating opportunities for kids to develop the depth of knowing another person in that way and being known by another person that way. Yeah, profound.

Dr. Adam McCormick (18:37):

It is. It is utterly profound. You mentioned goosebumps there. I had a moment where I got goosebumps a couple months back. I teach an intro class where a lot of the men’s basketball players at my university, they take this class and I have them write a lot about their attachments growing up and where they found worth and value. And this is something that’s really tough for these guys to write about. In fact, it’s not uncommon that I’ll send their paper back three or four times, say, “Hey guys, I need you to get more vulnerable here. You’re not there yet. I need you to work on this. This is really, really important.” And inevitably what happens is they’ll start to talk about our coach on campus, and he’s well known for just being this really sweet guy with his students. He just cares about them, but more than anything else, just delights in these kids, young adults, sorry.

(19:25):

Our team last year had just this historic year. We go to the national tournament, we win a game in the national tournament, which I think we’ve only done once or twice in our school’s history and we’re a hundred something years old. They’re doing a press conference after the game and coach is sitting by two or three of these guys, the seniors, and a reporter asks him, he says, “Coach, what are you most excited about right now?” And you would think he would say, “Hey, this is a historic win. We’re going to the sweet 16.” All of this sort of stuff, and without hesitation, he just says, just so raw and so organic, just knee jerk, just he says, “I am so excited. The only thing I’m excited about right now is,” and he points to the two seniors or the three seniors that are sitting right by him, “I just get 24 more hours with these guys.

(20:11):

I get to be their coach for 24 more hours.” And some of these guys have gotten professional contracts to be basketball players, and you just see these guys light up in their expression. He truly finds they have this sense of value, this sense of worth that has nothing to do with basketball or something else. As he said that, I though, “What if every boy just had that, just had one or two people outside of their parents who just delighted in them, that wanted nothing more than just,” Hey, I just want to hang out with you for one more day. “We’re not seeing that. And so there’s this big vacuum with this vacuum, even for younger boys, we’re seeing that void kind of filled in these really unhealthy ways.

Dr. Sarah Bren (21:02):

Yeah. Yeah. I want to follow that thread and I have to just go back a second because you were talking about delight and I can’t help but that is such an underrated quality in a relationship and it’s so predictive of attachment security actually. They’ve done a lot of research and the very original studies of attachment security that Mary Ainsworth was doing back in the 60s was what were the factors that predicted secure attachment? And one of the major predictors was a parent’s ability to delight in their child. And to be delighted in, it makes me think too of the difference between the kindergartners that you were talking about and the third graders you were talking about and the mutual… To be delighted in allows us to express delight in ourself and in what we’ve accomplished, the delight that kindergartner had in showing you the firetruck.

(22:04):

If there’s that serve and return of I delight in you, child, and then they experience that being delighted in and then they can give it back out into the world. And if that doesn’t continue, the other pressures that suppress all those raw, joyful, delightful expressions get… It’s the dialogue, it’s the back and forth that keep it going. I don’t know, that just feels really important that something as simple as delighting in a kid.

Dr. Adam McCormick (22:40):

Yeah. I love the attachment and there’s so much that that attachment work can teach us in terms of how we can better foster that in boys. I love the work of Gabor Mate, and he talks about the traumatic tension, and I see this so much in the boys and the young men that I work with. The tension is between the two most irreducible fundamental things that we need in childhood. The first, of course, is attachment, the most studied phenomenon in the history of child development, but I always say for really, really good reason because it’s really, really important. If I had a little guy who’s a year old and I sent him out on the wild on his own, he’s not going to last two seconds without me in his brilliant little nervous system, and let’s not be fooled, right? The nervous system of these boys are brilliant.

(23:27):

His little nervous system knows that better than anything else, that he needs me, and so he’s going to do everything that he has to do to stay close to me. As he gets a little bit older, you’re right. Attachment is not just simply about having somebody meet my needs or not even so much about just having somebody who’s always going to love me. Attachment becomes much more complex. It really becomes about belonging. You delight in my presence, your time, your attention, your attunement, your pride, your affirmation, and boys are going to do everything that they have to do to get that. Our greatest job as a parent, I always say this, our greatest job as a parent is to simply help his little nervous system know as early as possible and as often as necessary, “Hey, this thing that we got, my love, my time, my delight, my attention, my joy, you’re going to get it no matter what. There’s not a darn thing that you’ll ever have to do to get more of it, and more importantly, there’s nothing you could ever do to get less of it.

(24:22):

You’re going to get it, and you’re going to get it simply because you are you, not how you perform, not how successful you are at sports or school or anything like that. But then we have this other need, authenticity. If attachment is 1A, authenticity is one B, and attachment’s what keeps us alive. Authenticity is what allows us to fully feel alive in childhood. Every boy has this authentic self, my authentic emotions that you think about the boys I was telling you about that are so excitable. If I’m a timid or if I’m a sensitive kid, authentically, that’s just who you were made to be, your authentic needs, your personality, your expression, identity. All of these are just the you that you were made to be. And for so many boys, there’s a tension between those. If I’m vulnerable or if I’m scared or if I show any of these other emotions outside of maybe anger or humor, well, I’m not met, not only by my parents, but later on by my peers or my teachers or my coaches, I’m not met in the same way.

(25:21):

I don’t get the same delight. I don’t get the same acceptance. I don’t get the same affirmation. Sometimes I don’t get the same safety. Their nervous systems, again, are so brilliant, they realize, well, these authentic emotions, if I express a need and say, I need some help, I need some support, I need some comfort, I need some patience, I need whatever it might be, well, that threatens my attachment. Remember, attachment, his little nervous system knows I don’t survive without this thing.

Dr. Sarah Bren (25:52):

He’s always going to prioritize that.

Dr. Adam McCormick (25:57):

I’ll disconnect from those emotions. I’ll just not show that fear, that pain or that vulnerability or that excitement or that joy. I just won’t express those needs because they’re going to threaten my sense of belonging here, and I don’t survive without belonging. When we think about stress or trauma, really at the core is a disconnection from the self. They disconnect from those emotions, and it’s really, really hard for them to connect with them later on. And oftentimes with boys, what we have to do is create the conditions where they don’t have to disconnect from these parts of themselves in the first place.

(26:34):

You can have these emotions, you can be vulnerable, you can express a need, you can be joyful, you can be excitable, and you’re going to be met. I’m going to celebrate and invite you to be who you were made to be. In our society, we create all of these weird false equivalencies and we do all sorts of bizarre stuff around this, and these poor boys are just kind of lost in the midst of all of this, right? Yeah. Or we try to shame them out of it later on when they’re teenagers, and in 25 years of working with, especially survivors of trauma and kids who’ve dealt with the dynamics that I just talked about, I’ve yet to see child, boy, girl, male, female, who has been shamed out of a behavior that they were shamed into in the first place. That just doesn’t work.

Dr. Sarah Bren (27:23):

Yeah. Also, a lot of it’s unconscious initially, right? Oh yeah. This disconnect, first of all, this appraisal of, okay, if my attachment does not feel compatible with my authentic expression, I’m going to choose attachment over authenticity. That’s not a conscious process, certainly not, definitely not in young people, right? And so because it’s also not conscious, it makes it also very hard later for them to understand why it becomes this sort of dark room. The lights haven’t been turned on. They don’t know why it’s hard, which makes it confusing. And then even more shame gets compounded because they’re like, “Why am I feeling something weird here about this?” Because it’s not like they know they turn that light off.

Dr. Adam McCormick (28:20):

Yeah. You don’t just consciously wake up one Saturday morning right before you watch your cartoon say, “I need to be a fighter or I need to be a hero.” I was telling that to my students yesterday. I was a family hero growing up. That’s kind of how I adapted to my father. I was his little mini social worker. I didn’t wake up one Saturday morning, look around and say, “Yeah, you know what this family needs? It needs a hero. Somebody go get my cape.” No, it’s subconscious. It’s knee jerk. Our nervous systems are autonomic. I want to recognize that if I’m working with boys at a younger age or if I’m trying to help a boy or a young man kind of try to reconnect, one of the best ways to do that is to just be open and honest about just how brilliant… I mean, a boy’s nervous system’s the most brilliant thing you’ll ever encounter.

(29:07):

I mean, any child’s. We always do, always do exactly what we need to do to attach and to belong and to survive and to endure whatever we’re enduring. So instead of focusing on what is wrong with this behavior and these boys right now and we’re going to suspend them and expel them and do all this sort of stuff, perhaps we take a step back and focus not so much on what is wrong with this behavior now, but what might have been right about it at some other point in time.

Dr. Sarah Bren (29:41):

I want to take a quick pause here because so much of what Adam and I are talking about comes back to looking beneath our child’s behavior and trying to understand what they may actually need from us in that moment. And that can be really hard to figure out on your own. Maybe your child is shutting down and you are struggling to help them to open Maybe you’re dealing with big emotions or challenging behavior, anxiety, power struggles, or changes in your family, or maybe you just keep finding yourself in the same difficult parenting moments and you’re just not sure how to respond differently. You don’t have to navigate these things alone. At my group practice, Upshur Bren Psychology Group, we offer virtual parent coaching designed to meet you wherever you are in your parenting journey. That might mean a one-time session to talk through a specific challenge and come away with a clearer plan.

(30:30):

It might mean a handful of sessions while you work through a particularly difficult phase, or it might mean ongoing support from someone who can get to know your family and help you navigate the challenges that come up along the way. Parent coaching means having someone in your corner who can help you understand what’s happening, think through your options, and feel more confident about what to do next.

(30:52):

If that kind of support would be helpful for your family, you can learn more and schedule a free 30-minute consult call at upshurbren.com. That’s U-P-S-H-U-R-B-R-E-N.com. Okay. Now let’s get back to my conversation with Adam.

(31:15):

Yes. That I think is really interesting because you were saying you can’t shame a child out of a behavior that they were shamed into doing, again, probably outside of their conscious awareness. And I think that’s the translation of that into practical life, right? If you have a kid who’s, let’s say, acting out in class or being aggressive at home, that using shame as a way to shift that behavior kind of ends up compounding the problem versus what you were saying, getting curious, seeing the behavior as an expression of something they’re trying to protect themselves from and getting into that space of like, well, what is the protection that this offers you? Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Dr. Adam McCormick (32:09):

Yeah, what’s the strategy there? And the shame becomes so, so important here. I always say if there is one thing that I wish that parents or educators, teachers, anybody who’s working with boys understood, it is the way that shame really is an emotion that oftentimes will be very powerful in their lives, but it’s also an emotion that they never have any language for. When I run my groups for boys, and especially I just did one a couple of weeks ago in a youth prison and I asked these guys, they’re 15, 16, they’re incarcerated at this point, “Tell me what you’re like emotionally.” Of course they say, “I’m angry and silly.” That’s the extent. There’s nothing else there. And I say, “Okay, you got some homework. This week when you talk to your grandma or your mom or your dad or whoever it is, ask them what you were like when you were two or three feet tall emotionally.” And they’ll come back and they’ll explain an entirely different kid. And so inevitably what comes up that the emotions that they’re experiencing now are oftentimes not initially anger or humor, it’s shame. And so many boys, they experience this emotion of shame and many of them for good reason.

(33:30):

Shame is what tells us to disconnect from that vulnerability or don’t express that excitement or don’t express that need or don’t play with that toy or don’t like that color. Shame is the emotion that says, no, no, no, don’t do that. If you do…

Dr. Sarah Bren (33:41):

Yeah. There’s going to be a big consequence. I might lose my social safety if I do this thing.

Dr. Adam McCormick (33:48):

Yeah, exactly. And then over time is that message starts, it’s not just, oh, this emotion’s not okay, this need is not okay. This expression is not okay, but there’s something inherently wrong with me because I still have that emotion. I still have that need. I still want to do that thing. There’s something inherently wrong with me. And that’s where the shame comes in. And I never work with a boy or a young man who has ever been taught in a meaningful way how to kind of process or tolerate shame. And I include my own son and I include my own self in this.

(34:28):

So I have this emotion of shame. Everything is filtered through this emotion of shame, but I have no capacity to tolerate it. I have no capacity to regulate it. So inevitably, what am I going to do? I’m either going to just shut down entirely because I’m so just overwhelmed with this emotion that I cannot handle or what we frequently see boys do, even at an early age is if I can’t regulate emotion because I don’t recognize it and I don’t have the capacities for it, I’m going to turn it outward onto other people. And we talk so much about men and young men who gaslight and do these what about isms and false equivalents and coercive control and all of that sort of stuff. What I’m really, really interested in is you don’t wake up doing that one morning, right?

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:15):

No.

Dr. Adam McCormick (35:16):

It starts…

Dr. Sarah Bren (35:17):

No, they start with the kid with the fire truck who’s joy and love.

Dr. Adam McCormick (35:21):

Exactly. Yeah. And it is. And we can always trace that back too. And just like any adaptation, the more we rely upon it, the better we get at it, the more that it grows and then it can become something really, really harmful in the context of a relationship. And so we got to teach boys how to tolerate the shame. We have to give them the language for the shame. We need to recognize in the moment. I mean, this has definitely been the most helpful thing when I’m trying to help my son is to recognize, hey, right now he is flooded with shame. He maybe didn’t score what he had hoped to score on an exam or he didn’t perform the way that he’d hoped to play in a basketball game or something like that. He is overwhelmed with shame. And the first thing that I have to help him to do is to process and regulate and to be present with this shame and then we can do the other stuff.

(36:12):

But oftentimes we skip about three or four levels and we think we’re talking to them up here on this level and they’re still flooded with the shame down here. And so that can make them feel really unseen, unheard, misunderstood.

Dr. Sarah Bren (36:27):

Yes. And without shaming them, because I can imagine, because the shame, yes, obviously there’s going to be experiences where a kid is actively shamed for crying or losing it where a peer might make fun of them or a parent or an adult might make them explicitly feel shame. But I imagine more often than that, it’s an internal experience of, again, either conscious or unconscious internalized narratives of, oh man, this is not going to work. This feeling that is about to come out of me, I fear that it will be met poorly. And that shame, or I don’t see anyone else doing this right now.

(37:22):

We all humans are able to elicit our own sense of shame even without other people shaming us. Obviously we don’t want to shame our kids. And we could talk a little bit about how that sometimes becomes a really effective parenting strategy, not in a abusive way, but it’s effective. So we rely on it sometimes. It’s going to be happening so we can be mindful of that. But our kids do it all by themselves. And then it’s like in that example you were saying where the adults talking to the kid about, oh, you were talking to your son, you’re having this feeling or you just expressed this emotion. They’re not expressing the shame. They’re just expressing the secondary emotion. And I want to go and help you problem solve it. That’s the jumping to the two steps later. And it’s such a knee jerk, helpful, intending to be helpful approach of a parent like, “Oh man, you are upset or I can see you’re really overwhelmed by this loss of the game or the bad grade or the breakup or whatever.

(38:36):

And I want to go to how do we solve this problem?” But because we’re not inquiring about the internal experience of shame, we’re never giving them the language for it. We’re never directing the attention inward. We’re directing it still outward to the outcome.

Dr. Adam McCormick (38:56):

Absolutely.

Dr. Sarah Bren (38:56):

Relief from the problem.

Dr. Adam McCormick (38:58):

Yeah. And then we focus almost entirely and exclusively on the behavior. And then this is perpetuated in schools and everywhere else. We are so focused on the behaviors of boys, which is understandable, but we’re not nearly as curious about the inner worlds and the inner experiences of boys. And we can walk and chew gum at the same time because we definitely have to hold folks accountable for their behavior. We can do that, but also remain interested and curious and compassionate about their inner worlds. Because in reality, what kid really is going to come to their parents and say, “Mom, dad, I’m so sorry. I’m just flooded with shame right now.” No, that’s our job to recognize that as the adults or that’s my teacher’s job. I mean, even the most emotionally immature kids probably not going to have the capacity to recognize that, but we can recognize, oh, they’re not so much angry right now. They’re just flooded with shame. They’re disconnected right now or they’re shut off right now. There’s probably shame that’s playing a part here. A boy’s behavior to me is always the least interesting thing. The behavior to me is always just a signal. It’s a message.

(40:11):

There’s a story, there’s a narrative. I mean, that’s the other thing about in childhood is we’re narrative in nature. We create stories to understand and boys do this when they’re small kids. We create a story based on what we see in our environments, what we see in the media, where there are those moments where maybe our emotions aren’t met by our family or our parents in the way that we would hope that they would be. And then we construct a story. And once a boy has constructed that story, what he does next I think is far more important because what he does is he rolls up his sleeves and he gets to work to corroborate or confirm that story. So if the story is that my emotions just don’t matter or these emotions are okay and these aren’t, well, then he gets to work, to creating the conditions where that story is corroborated and it becomes true because you’re wired for control in childhood.

(41:05):

And if you’re not getting it in healthy doses, in healthy ways, every kid is going to do everything that they have to do. We prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty. And so I get control. And the more that this story is as harmful as it might be, as unfair as it might be, I get control from it. I get identity from it. I protect my belonging from it. I was talking to a group of kids in foster care a couple months back and a boy told me he had been in 26 different foster homes. And before we had this session, he said, “I felt like there was something inherently wrong with me because I would do this thing where I would, anytime there was somebody who expressed an interest or invested time or love with me, I would just push them away or I would sabotage that relationship.” And he said, “I didn’t realize until right now that this was a strategy and a very brilliant strategy, but I was confirming a narrative that I’m unlovable and that if you push people hard enough, they’ll prove that you’re unlovable.” Because every time he did that, it corroborated that story.

(42:07):

It confirmed that narrative and he got a little bit of control, but it also protected his sense of belonging, preferring the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty. I can handle pushing you away because I can control

Dr. Sarah Bren (42:16):

That. Right. Because then the rejection I feel or the abandonment I feel that I anticipated is predictable. Yeah. And I can handle that. I don’t know when it will come. It’s like I’d much rather create the abandonment so it’s predictable and in my control than not know if it’s coming or not.

Dr. Adam McCormick (42:36):

You bet. I can’t handle that.

Dr. Sarah Bren (42:37):

Heartbreaking, but so makes sense.

Dr. Adam McCormick (42:40):

Yeah. I mean, I can remember being a small kid and kind of setting off my father knowing that he was going to get irate, but I could handle that. I could control that. What I couldn’t handle was sitting around and wondering, is tonight going to be one of those nights where…

Dr. Sarah Bren (42:56):

Right. The anticipatory anxiety is unbearable.

Dr. Adam McCormick (42:59):

The kid’s nervous system can’t handle that.

Dr. Sarah Bren (43:02):

No. So okay, you’re a parent, you have a younger kid. You want to inoculate them a little bit to this idea that shame… We want to give them language for it. We want to help them have just as many words to describe that as I’m mad, I don’t like this, give that back. It’s my turn. How do we start? And then I’m curious about how you do it with older kids.

Dr. Adam McCormick (43:33):

Yeah. Yeah. But definitely much easier on the front end here. And sometimes it’s just being very, very intentional about keeping a close eye on and making sure that the boys in our lives are, that they’re not being kind of socialized into or expected or forced into disconnecting from those things that we’ve kind of feminized because these are the things you have to be happy and healthy. Connections in relationships, intimacy, you don’t have a healthy development without those things. Emotional, to be able to experience the full range of emotions, fear, pain, shame, vulnerability, excitement, tenderness, all of that sort of stuff. Are we creating an environment where our boys can really safely express those sort of things? And I’m going to be very, very mindful when they do that and really reinforce and affirm when they do and recognize sometimes the vulnerability and the risk that comes with those sorts of things. But also in terms of their play, their toys, their interests and that sort of stuff.

(44:36):

I’m going to be really, really mindful. I was at our community swimming pool a couple years back and a boy was swimming with his big brothers and his big brothers were just giving him the hardest time and his dad’s across the pool, doesn’t want to have anything to do with any of this. And you could just see the little boy, he’s probably eigt or nine years old. He’s increasingly getting more kind of worked up and sad and angry and he just starts crying. And once he starts crying, dad screams from across the pool, “Quit crying like a little girl here.” While that might be a pretty common interaction or experience for this kid is so devastating on his little nervous system and on his sense of self. And it’s basically saying, “When I express or show any of these more human parts of myself, I’m met with shame.

(45:27):

I’m met with disappointment here.” So we want to make sure that we’re not doing that sort of stuff. I think on a strategy level, there are some little tweaks and some little things that can be really, really effective in our work with boys. Focus a lot more on our capacity to stay with them than what we say to them. How we create the conditions for some of these conversations and some of these things is a huge deal with boys.

(45:51):

I always talk about going shoulder to shoulder. I’ll give you an example. I wanted to have a big talk with my son about some big healthy relationship talk with him as he was becoming a teenager. So I sit down with him in the living room table and I kind of said, “Hey, I want to have a talk with you and let’s have this conversation tomorrow night.” And he’s just not having it. He’s kind of shutting down. I mean, how over… And then I realized in the moment – I don’t want to do that. What in the manual of boyhood would have prepared this kid for that conversation? You know better than that. A couple weeks later, we’re riding in the car shoulder to shoulder and he’s just asking questions and he’s opening up and we have this really deep heart to heart, meaningful, heavy conversation. And then I though, you think about almost every big moment that we’ve had like this, and we both like playing video games together, it’s been shoulder to shoulder with one another.

(46:44):

One of the coaches that I work with, he calls it the hot seat when his guys, and these are grown men, right? When they sit in the shotgun seat on the bus, on the van, he knows that this is my opportunity. We’re talking about family, we’re talking about relationships, we’re talking about future. We’re going to do this shoulder to shoulder. It’s not so overwhelming for them. So there’s a lot of that little stuff that we can really do to kind of create the conditions to have some of these bigger conversations that are really effective with boys.

Dr. Sarah Bren (47:14):

Yeah. It makes me think too of the critical importance of presence as parents because we were talking about all the things that can disconnect kids these days and a lot of it has to do with their world, but the other thing is the intersection of their world and our world. So if we’re super busy and over scheduled and on our phones and we don’t have as much time to just notice them and take those moments to be shoulder to shoulder and that also our absence can be just as much of a player in their disconnect as their lack of being in the mix.

Dr. Adam McCormick (48:02):

Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And I think the unfortunate reality too is that now there is in that absence or in that void, there’s a lot of really, really harmful stuff in our society that are just there to kind of exploit the shame and the loneliness of boys and young men that as parents can be really, really scary. But all the more important for us to have these conversations and to make sure that we’re creating these moments and that we’re showing a lot of curiosity around their inner worlds and inner experiences and delighting in their presence and making sure that they’re playing and connecting and doing all of these things with the recognition that there’s a whole group of grifters out there that are ready to exploit that shame and pain and disconnection. And sometimes even that aggrieved sense of entitlement, “Hey, relationships have changed. Expectations of boys and men have changed in a very healthy way.” As somebody who teaches primarily female students who are social workers, and we talk about families and we talk about relationships, I oftentimes think like we did something the other day in class where I said, “Tell me what you’re looking for in a romantic partner.” So these are seniors in college, many of them females looking for male relationships.

(49:14):

And I want a best friend, I want a soulmate, I want somebody who’s emotionally regulated, but I also want them to be a provider and a protector. And I’m thinking, that is wonderful. Never change that. At the same time, I’m thinking of the boys that I work with and the young men that I work with and I’m thinking there’s not a lot in the manual that would prepare these guys for that. And so the expectations of relationships have changed. I think in a good way, especially as somebody who has four daughters, I think in a very healthy and a very good way, but then they maybe don’t have the capacities for this in a world where previously you were kind of entitled to certain status or jobs and what makes a boy or a young man think that they’re entitled to a relationship or somebody’s emotional time or attention or wellbeing or truth or reality or any of that sort of stuff.

(50:05):

There is that sense of entitlement that is still kind of fostered in our society in many ways, but expectations have changed in relationships. And so it just creates this big void or this big vacuum and it can get really, really messy.

Dr. Sarah Bren (50:24):

It’s so easy for that toxic stuff to just seep right into that vacuum. But it’s interesting when you’re describing the question you’re asking these female social work students, okay, what do you want in a partner? And one, their capacity to just name all these really relationally healthy qualities.

Dr. Adam McCormick (50:43):

Yeah, exactly.

Dr. Sarah Bren (50:44):

But also that’s the question they’re being asked, right? Are we asking boys, college men, what’s the qualities you want in a partner? And if they’re even being asked that question, are their answers at that point in their life, 18, 19, 20 years old, that rich in language to describe intimacy, mutuality, delight, respect, healthy interdependence, sharing their inner world. That’s probably, one, they’re not being asked that question and two, they couldn’t answer that if they like… But if you asked a seven year old boy, what does it mean to be a good friend and what do you look for in a good friend? They would be able to describe without a hesitation, rich, detailed world. And it was interesting because I had… I don’t know if you’re familiar with the research of Naobi Wei, Dr. Naobi Wei, but she was on the podcast recently and we had this really interesting conversation and she’s done all this.

(51:50):

I’ll link that episode in the show notes because it’s really very connected to what we’re talking about. But she talks about how there’s this crisis in male experience of childhood, but it’s not because they’re not born with the equipment to have and desire deep connection. And it’s eroded over time, not because of them, but because of what we aren’t asking them and what we aren’t teaching them to maintain. It’s like use it or lose it, right? They’re not invited to use it. We don’t have to teach them as though they don’t have it. We just have to keep it alive because they’re born with it.

Dr. Adam McCormick (52:36):

Oh, I couldn’t agree more, right? And we have to remember, and it’s tough for narcissism. We say boys will be boys and that sort of stuff. These boys are born with every one of these capacities, but we have to recognize that they are capacities that for these capacities to grow, you have to have the air and the water and the oxygen and the environmental experiences and the relational experiences for them to grow and to develop. And so if we don’t show that same curiosity about their inner worlds, if we don’t create the conditions for them to express emotions and engage those emotions in healthy ways, then you’re right. They’re going to disconnect from those things. It is a use it or lose it function. And then later on, when they do want to be in a healthy relationship with somebody, well, in order to kind of understand your inner world and be responsive to your inner world, I would have had to develop the capacity to understand my inner world because you’re 100% right when I ask that question all the time, what is it that you’re really wanting to share and love and relationships with?

(53:39):

I mean, the answers are pretty superficial and not because the expectations or the desires are any different, it’s the capacities to answer that question that would require a lot of internal work. They didn’t develop. We know that. I mean, these things develop in the context of our environment.

Dr. Sarah Bren (54:02):

Yep. Adam, thank you so much for coming on this and having this conversation. I feel like anyone listening today is going to be walking away with a lot to digest and it can be heartbreaking to hear some of this stuff, but I do think it’s really hopeful because one thing I’m taking away from this conversation is it isn’t… Earlier is better and it’s also not… There’s no expiration date on recouping it.

Dr. Adam McCormick (54:31):

Absolutely. Absolutely. We disconnect from the self brilliantly, strategically. It doesn’t disconnect from us. We can always, at any point, we can make that reconnection. And I see it with young men all the time. Yeah.

Dr. Sarah Bren (54:43):

Yeah. If people are interested in connecting with you, reading your books, you have a new book coming out, The Cost of Boyhood.

Dr. Adam McCormick (54:52):

Yeah, hopefully it should be out in the next year or so.

Dr. Sarah Bren (54:55):

Congratulations. That’s awesome. How can people connect with you?

Dr. Adam McCormick (54:59):

Yeah, so I’m on LinkedIn. Of course, as a developmental social worker, I don’t do too much on the social media, but I’m on LinkedIn. I have an author newsletter that you can click on from there where I write some trauma related topic, child trauma related topic every single week, or try to every single week. And you can kind of follow some of my work there. I have a couple books that I’ve written that you can easily find on Amazon.

Dr. Sarah Bren (55:27):

Well, great. We’ll link those in the show notes too so people can find them and thank you so much.

Dr. Adam McCormick (55:32):

Thanks so much for having me, Sarah. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Dr. Sarah Bren (55:41):

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