Discover the depths of isolation's impact on young men as Vince, Gina, and Nicole offer insights into mentorship and healing paths.
Hosts: Vince, Gina, and Nicole
Topic: The pervasive issue of isolation among young men, its underlying causes, effective strategies for combating isolation, and the power of mentorship and community support.
Discussion Points:
Understanding Isolation:
The Roots of Isolation:
The Importance of Mentorship:
Real-Life Transformations:
Combatting Isolation:
A Call to Action:
Closing Remarks:
Contact Information:
Email: info@causewaycollaborative.com
Social Media:
End Note:
Causeway Conversations is dedicated to shining a light on the critical issues facing young men today, advocating for a collective effort to support, understand, and empower them toward a brighter future.
Speaker 1:
Welcome to Causeway Conversations where we help young men get their lives on the right track through mentorship, coaching, and therapy. If your son is stuck, you found the right support.
Speaker 2:
All right, welcome back to another Causeway Conversations.
Nicole:
That's right.
Speaker 2:
Today we're going to talk a little bit about isolation. When you were describing in the last episode some of the things that you went through, you mentioned isolation as one of the driving factors for part of why you were feeling so bad. So I'd really like to take this week's episode and just dive into why young men are feeling so isolated, what that leads to, and how we can fix it. Well, fix it, how we can help it. So what do you think, what are some of the leading factors driving isolation in young men?
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think this conversation started nationally around and in parallel to the rise of school shootings. And as the profile of school shooters became more frequently consistent over time, it was identified that these guys were highly isolated Caucasian males. And so for our purposes, that is our population, and I think the risks really began there, but we've seen them catapult into the national conversation as awareness of this has become more available. And so when you talk about isolation, there's I think a certain number of factors that drive it. One is a lack of social connectedness characteristic typically of a peer group, right? So you see guys who are floating on the margins of the social margins who don't have a tether to a sports team, to a club, to a group of people who get together on a regular basis, who frequently report having no friends or a lack of friendships or romantic relationships.
Speaker 2:
How is that happening over time? So young man goes to kindergarten, preschool and up throughout grade school, mom reports seeing him as always having a lot of friends, and now all of a sudden in the high school years, he's very isolated. So how does that degradation happen?
Speaker 1:
I think it happens like most other things slowly and consistently over time. I think when, as a young kid, again, child development is not my area of expertise, but I'll take a stab. So as a young kid, I think boys especially who engage in acting out behaviors, particularly those that are aggressive in nature, are pretty quickly ostracized from the social peer circle. If you think about your kid's friends, the kid's friend who was a friend at one time who he probably no longer has exposure to is typically the kid who acted out, who was pulled out of class, who maybe got handsy with kids, maybe who had some spectrum tendencies and didn't understand nuance or boundaries or appropriate communication.
So it begins as, in my opinion, acting out behavior and then leads to ingroup outgroup framing wherein a guy is relegated to the sidelines from a social perspective. And I think once that happens, it's really hard to bridge that and re-immerse oneself. Those guys grow up with limited social connection. I think as that social connection increases or increases in its rift between young man A and the rest of his prospective peers, you see that individual gravitate inward. And I think this is where we see things like tech reliance, video game addiction to offset some of that vacuum that's created by a lack of social connectedness.
Nicole:
When you're talking about you think the conversation really has had a spotlight on it because of those school shootings and things like that over the last decade or so. Is there anything else besides that? Because I know we're just talking about young men, but I also think it's men in general around loneliness and isolation. So are there other contributing factors besides that and the tech?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, there's a lot of content online about loneliness being the new epidemic. So this isn't an epidemic of gun violence. This isn't an epidemic of men who are failing. This is an epidemic of loneliness. And the catalyst for everything you see is actually disconnectedness, isolationism, men loneliness. To me, information and information dissemination, I think also leads to this because now you have groups of lonely individuals, groups of lonely men finding their way to one another vis-a-vis chats and forums and things of that nature. And that's how misinformation gets disseminated.
So these guys, these men who are struggling so mindedly to feel connected to anybody in whatever meaningful way can happen are often finding their way to one another, but only only as a means by which of promoting beliefs that I think are problematic. So you hear counterculture movements around violence, around aggression, around disempowering women as women have now gained footing and voice in terms of collective consciousness and how problematic American society is because women are viewed on equal footing or superior footing. Now these are margins of the margin conversations that represent a very, very small segment of the population, but I think it's representative of the broader issue, which is the desire to connect.
And I think in some ways the desire to find a perpetrator for their own pain makes it so that there's opportunity to scapegoat. And I think that's where you see aggressive speech, that's where you see aggressive action come to pass. The tieback to the school shooter would be the bullies who perpetrated against these guys over their arc of their development are the folks that are typically those who receive that retribution. I think within the collective consciousness of these small groups, there's got to be a finger to point. There's got to be a finger to point around why the world is the way it is, why conditions are so shitty.
I had a kid in my office, kid, he's 20 years old. And from a highly, highly prominent university, top 10, top 12 university. This was a kid who undiagnosed spectrum his whole life, had no idea. And went through life without that information, but moving through life nonetheless. And so could never connect with people, never had a friend his whole life and was always getting jammed up in terms of how to get next to somebody and why it wouldn't work. Always wanted a girlfriend, could never find one. Always tried to make inroads to connect with other people, wasn't successful.
And so fast forward to 20 years old on med leave now because he finally got a spectrum diagnosis, which is information that he believes that his parents have hidden from him literally his whole life, which they're going to wield against him in some way, shape or form. And so there's an understandable lack of trust for that young man around his world experience. And so whether it's his parents he's pointing the finger at for holding the information that they should have shared, the girls that didn't respond to his overtures or the guys that picked on him and treated him like shit his whole life. There's a lot of people that he could point his finger at as to why things are the way they are, and it makes it so that it's very, very hard for anybody to have an opportunity to connect with him and cut through that. So I, as his therapist, am now trying to cut through quite literally 20 years of misinformation, mistrust and distrust.
Nicole:
Wow. When I think about that example and then I think about isolation in young men, you're speaking to this lack of skill in developing relationships.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Uh-huh.
Nicole:
Right?
Speaker 1:
Uh-huh.
Nicole:
I have a couple thoughts on that as to part of what influences that is there's a lack of opportunity and/or desire to connect one-on-one in person with people because of the technology that you referenced before. I know I'm old, I'm not old, but...
Speaker 2:
No, you're not.
Nicole:
And social media wasn't a thing when we were younger. And so the way we learned to be in relationship with people was in relationship with actual humans and in person. And nowadays, I think with social media and with tech and things like that, I see there's a little bit of stuntedness in particularly some of the young men that come through our center in their ability to foster relationships. And then the question becomes what do we do about that?
Speaker 2:
So when you've talked about tech before, you've talked about missing developmental milestones and how that impacts the relationships. Can you talk to me about that too? Particularly romantic relationships and supporting?
Speaker 1:
I think rehearsal is an important component of this. There's so much skill rehearsal that occurs in ways we don't even see or acknowledge and is typical of these kinds of situations. So I flash back to 25 years ago like, gee, if I met you when I was 17 years old, that wouldn't work because the math wouldn't work. Let's say I met you when I was 21 and you were 17, and I would come to pick up you at your dad's house. I would drive over, I would drive over. First point of information. Our guys don't drive. Our guys don't want to drive. The overwhelming majority of guys who come to see me now are 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old, don't want a car, don't want a license. Feel that driving makes them too anxious and would be more than fine to have their mother drive them wherever they go for as long as they got to go there.
Speaker 2:
So they don't have a need for it though in their opinion?
Speaker 1:
But they don't want it. They don't want it. It's an inhibitor. It's another pain in the ass thing they have to go do that doesn't really add value to their life because they don't have a girlfriend they have to go pick up in their own car anyway. So who gives a shit if you're driving? Your mom might as well bring you where you got to go anyway. But I would drive over to your house and pick you up at your house, which would necessitate me coming in, knocking on the door, having a conversation with your father, introducing myself, chatting up with him for a few minutes, probably saying, what's up to your mom and your brother too. Spending 15, 20 minutes there and then getting in the car and taking you back. I pull up now 25 years later if I'm a 17-year-old, I text and you come out, I'm on my way. So we've diminished all those.
Speaker 2:
You should replace me in this story.
Nicole:
No, thank you. Get your ass to the door.
Speaker 2:
That's right.
Speaker 1:
I guess my point is, and it's just a silly stupid example.
Speaker 2:
No, it's a no one. It's a good one.
Speaker 1:
It evidences how many opportunities for skill rehearsal are cast by the wayside and how collectively, sociologically, we've just lowered the bar for young men. We've lowered the bar for young men to pass from one natural point of entry to the other in terms of how we get them to where they need to be particularly relationally.
Nicole:
Yeah. I would imagine too, just there's a lot of fear there. When I think about the technology piece and everything like that around comparison. There's just so much on social media these days around, you see on social media what people want you to see about them, it's the ideal and things like that. And so I would imagine as a young man, having all of those messages can also infiltrate their self-concept and it's like, well, I don't look like this so I'm not even going to try type of thing. Do you notice that a lot?
Speaker 1:
100%. Yeah. And it's very much an apex predator framework in a couple ways. 90% of the likes on Tinder go to 10% of the men who are enrolled in the use of the app.
Speaker 2:
That's crazy.
Speaker 1:
So 90% go to 10%, which means that the other 10% are disseminated against the bottom 90%, which the truth of the matter is if you're in the bottom 65%, you get no sniff ever, literally ever. And so how do you feel when you're swiping right and swiping right and swiping right a hundred times a day and you get zero hits? For how long are you going to be willfully engaging in that exchange? And so that's a [inaudible 00:12:41] comparison.
Speaker 2:
So are you finding that young men are just opting out because that's just too difficult?
Speaker 1:
Totally. Yes, totally.
Speaker 2:
Because the rejection.
Speaker 1:
I think it's the fear of rejection. I think it's the fear of rejection. Now, going sideways for a second, just the confusion around what it is to be a man and what a man even is. What the fuck is a man according to society's standards now? Is Jake Paul a man who beats the shit out of people, decided he was going to go train to do MMA and kick the shit out of somebody, became the heavyweight champion? Is that guy a man? Is the local pastor at your parish a man? The barber down the street a man? Is the guy who goes to Wall Street a man?
And all these mixed messages about what a man is or isn't and the things that are important and the things that we value. I think it's really hard for guys to unpack that and see themselves in it. They can't project forward and see themselves really in any of those different situations. And so it's hard for them to have role models, people that they aspire to want to model themselves after, which is why we get guys who want to be fucking professional YouTubers all day long and sit and play video games and do voiceovers of their own video game play as an actual job because that's what we believe our society aspires for in terms of aspirational goals for these kids.
Speaker 2:
But is it an actual job?
Speaker 1:
I don't think so based upon my definition. So I think my definition of a job is something that allows one to make a meaningful wage. There, you got your checkbox there, but contributes to the greater good of society in some fashion. I would be hard pressed to say that talking shit to another guy with a headset on while playing Madden contributes to the greater good of society in some fashion personally.
Speaker 2:
But isn't that a social interaction?
Speaker 1:
That's not the question that you asked. Is it a meaningful social interaction? Sure. Is it a job? I'm saying no, because also to me, a job requires a place to go and something meaningful and purposeful to do.
Speaker 2:
But also payment.
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah, sure. The point is that I think it's very hard for men and young men to understand what it is to be a man. I think there's a lot of different operational definitions for what a man is, depending upon your interest, depending upon what part of the country you live in, depending upon whether it's a red state or a blue state, depending upon who your parents are and what they do and what your father's done and if he's around or not. There's a million different data points that inform what it is to be a man.
Speaker 2:
That a young man can look to.
Speaker 1:
That a young man can draw from. But I think the challenge is they're very disparate. So a young man can be a guy who works on Wall Street, takes the train down to New York and gets up at 5:30 in the morning and provides for his family. That very same definition could be applied to blue collar farm worker who lives in Indiana and drives a tractor all day long and doesn't say shit about it.
Speaker 2:
Well, those things have to do with their job. What other factors do you think that young men are looking to? So mixed messaging around job or career, what else?
Speaker 1:
Wealth. And how wealth is tied to one sense of manhood, physical stature, and can you be a man if you are five nine and 110 pounds versus five nine and 200 pounds? So what does it mean to have a certain physical prowess that contributes to a definition of manhood, sexuality, certainly antiquated definitions of sexuality around promiscuity and how one's sexual conquests could influence their manliness or male prowess. And these are all data points that exist for guys to consume passively and actively. And then I think weave and synthesize together to this amalgamation of what a man is.
I think part of the reason why I got jammed up as a younger guy and even a 30-year-old guy, is this synthesis of all these competing data points. How can you be sensitive and still be a man? How can you be caring and still be a man? Don't you have to be tough to be a man? Don't you have to make a shit ton of money and skin it for your family to be a man? And these are all, in my opinion, passively transmitted over one's whole life in terms of how they view themselves and the context of the world around them.
Speaker 2:
You talked a little bit about sexuality and young men's isolation as it pertains to that. What have you seen in terms of the evolution of male sexuality just in the last 10 years of working with young men? Because I know we have some clients that struggle in those ways.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So I think you've seen romantic relationships among men, gay and straight take a backseat in terms of the priority and in terms of their hierarchy. Men are getting married later, they're getting involved in committed relationships later. They're experiencing sex with a partner later, they're having their first kiss later. All the developmental milestones are kicked way back for this new generation upcoming. A lot of it's COVID. Some of it's tech. some of it's some of what I'm talking about right now.
But bottom line, when guys, I'll go back 25 years ago, every guy I ever hung out with romantic relationships and sex was in the absolute forefront of every guy I knew my whole life. Fast-forward now 25 years later, we see mostly guys who are asexual at this point. Who do not have a committed romantic relationship, who are not actively seeking one, who are instead occupying themselves in a variety of ways, but with a physical companion in a monogamous relationship or even in a polygamous relationship where you're going out and hooking up with girls in variety of ways. We see a lot of guys who are opting out of that frame. And I think it goes back to the bottom 65% piece. If you only get rejected and you don't have any success, and/or you've been so awkward your whole life that you don't know how to initiate and have never had any skills in doing so, be it in a friendship capacity or a relational capacity, you're going to be deterred from wanting to continue to participate in that paradigm.
Speaker 2:
So what are young men doing to get their physical needs met?
Speaker 1:
Oh, porn. Porn, yeah. They're almost exclusively relying on porn.
Speaker 2:
And how does that impact their ability to function in physical relationships?
Speaker 1:
I read a stat 12 years ago, which said that 68% of incoming college freshmen men were addicted to pornography before they got to college. Addicted. And this is 10 plus years ago. So I have to imagine the problem has been getting significantly worse over time progressively.
Speaker 2:
I'm going to Google that while we're here to see what it is.
Speaker 1:
It impacts sexual performance, it impacts functioning, but mostly it impacts the relational frame. It's predicated on the male experience of sex as opposed to the female experience of sex or an equitable sharing experience of sex. And so when you only see things through the male lens, it's highly askew. Highly, highly askew. And also we know from research and so on, that porn is a fact assimilated narrative anyway. It doesn't accurately represent what the real world is or what sex looks like in life in general. And so not only is it the foundational piece of what guys rely upon to meet their needs in maladaptive ways, but it does so in an artificial frame, which makes it difficult if not impossible for guys to relate when they are given the opportunity to be with a physical companion.
Nicole:
Lots of obstacles.
Speaker 2:
Lots, all the obstacles.
Nicole:
And so take any one of those things. Take any one of those things and it's a client of yours, how are you helping him?
Speaker 1:
I think I would start... It's a lot. It's a ton to sift through.
Nicole:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
I think starting with mining out what's important to that individual to help find his voice as a man. So taking inventory from a values-based perspective of what's important to him. What has he received? How does he see the world around him? What does he want to do with his life? Who does he keep the company of? What kinds of things can he imagine as possibilities for his future? So start to get next to him in a way where you're gathering information about who he's been, who he wants to become, and what are the barriers to that, just to know him.
And then I think from there you can begin to first funnel him in the direction of stuff that can make him feel connected, right? Because what you're trying to do is get him connected to a group of like-minded people, at least to start wherein he could practice relationships. So if he's a kid who plays video games, well let's get him connected to people who play video games. If he's a kid who likes to skateboard, let's figure out a way to get him skateboarding. If there's a guy who likes to do MMA, let's get him around other people, but let's leverage those often technologically based relationships and see if we can get him person to person so that we can begin to cultivate a network of people that he can have in his life.
And I think from there, we don't want to force the issue with respect to relationships because it promotes pressure and it feels false. If a guy isn't ready, a guy isn't ready. But what we can do is that we can increase his desirability. Because you're not a very desirable mate when you are 26 years old, don't shower, don't brush your teeth, have no money, haven't had a job in four years and live in your fucking parents' basement. So we can promote his desirability from within to then increase the likelihood he could meet somebody if that's a goal of his going forward.
Speaker 2:
And what if it's not a goal? What do you do?
Speaker 1:
I think that's okay. I think that's totally fine, but we have to acknowledge what's happening too though.
Speaker 2:
Which is?
Speaker 1:
We went from a generation of guys who wanted to chase tail and get laid to a generation of no one who wants to meet a physical companion ever. And it can't be that much of a pendulum swing over 10 years. And now I'm being a little hyperbolic and tongue in cheek, but I think it's real because there's been a massive shift and the data bears it out that guys are not investing themselves in looking for relationships anymore, and they're relegating themselves to the sidelines instead. So what's going on that's making that happen? That's really the question. If somebody wants to be single, great. There's a lot of great men both in history and who I know personally who are single guys who are quite happy, but their lives have purpose and they're connected to people and they have relationships and they have friends, and they would probably self-describe as happy. Our guys don't always fit that bill. So I think if he's single, great, God speed, sounds phenomenal. If he's single and miserable, well we got our work cut out for us.
Speaker 2:
Sure. What role, Nicole, do you think that the family system plays in a young man opting of those types of meaningful relationships?
Nicole:
How does it play into the isolationism and things like that?
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Nicole:
I think they play a lot of different factors. I think first of all, what I am looking at with the families where the young man seems to be isolating in his room, not socializing and things like that, I want to understand what is the family dynamic that's happening that creates an environment where the kid feels better in his room. And again, it's just an assessment. So it doesn't mean anybody's doing anything wrong, but is there something going on in that family system that makes him not want to come out of his room? Whether that's conflict among the family members, conflict between the parents, conflict with siblings, what is the dynamic that actually is playing into that isolationism? That's the first thing that I would want to know. And many different dynamics can play into that.
And then what's really important to me is how is the family handling it? How are the parents handling that young man becoming more and more isolated? Are they going into his room, sitting on the bed and just being with their son and saying, "Hey, what's going on? And I'm going to sit here for a while and you don't have to say a word to me." Or are they going in and say, "Get your fucking ass out of that bed. I'm ripping the TV out of the wall." How are they actually handling it? Because if their attempts aren't working, we have to do something.
Speaker 2:
We have to do something else.
Nicole:
We have to do something else. And so all of those two things in particular are important to understand so then we can help them to adjust. And truly, we may try things and it doesn't work, but it's information for us. We need that information to be able to then say, oh, wow. So dad, you're the one who goes in when Johnny doesn't come out of his room for eight hours. Are there ever times when mom does? What happens when that happens? Who has more influence and why? So those are the types of things that I would be looking for in an instant that you're talking about.
Speaker 1:
How does a parent know which pitch to throw? So how do you know as a parent, and how would you as a family expert coach a parent around sitting on the bed, giving the kid room, just being a quiet presence, waiting for the kid to share versus fuck you, smash the TV, rip the video games out.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Baseball bat.
Speaker 1:
Like baseball bat. How do we know what pitch to throw?
Nicole:
Well, I'm going to suggest you don't throw the last pitch ever. I'm going to say-
Speaker 1:
Damn it, that's my favorite pitch.
Nicole:
That's not the pitch we're ever going to throw.
Speaker 1:
Ever?
Nicole:
Ever. Ever. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
For the record, it's baseball bat to the TV or the gaming console. Not to a human. Let's just go on the record with that.
Speaker 1:
No, I'm not trying to hit people with baseball bats.
Speaker 2:
Get canceled before we even launch.
Speaker 1:
Smash the video games, that's what I mean.
Nicole:
No, I got you. So that's not what we're going to do. I think it really has to start with curiosity. The more curious you can get about your son, even when you feel so tapped out and so tired, because it's been a struggle for so long to really just to enter any conversation from a place of curiosity. So going into a room and just being curious around what keeps you in here? And a lot of times you're going to get the leave me the fuck alone, stuff like that. But it can't be a one and done. So the first thing I think is curiosity and it's warmth. I think if you start with that, that's where you have to start. Does it mean that you don't have expectations and things like that? Absolutely not. But you have to start with warmth and curiosity if you're going to make any inroads.
A lot of times what I've noticed with a lot of the parents who come through is that they've been working so hard with their young man for so many years with a lot of different challenges, and they're tired. And I've tried every fucking thing. And so they're at their wits end. And so what happens is their approach with their son becomes a bit reactive because they're so frustrated that they don't know what else to do. And it's anxiety provoking for parents, and it's frustrating. And so their delivery often is one that doesn't influence their kid.
And so for me, that's where it has to start, is that we have to reframe how they approach their son, get information from that. How does he respond to that over time? And then how can we tweak that going forward? And then we also have to truly, that's when we bring the young men into a family therapy session because we have to see it in real time. When we ask parents to do things, that's great, they can go home and do it. And a lot of times that happens and they come back and they're like, well, that didn't work. Okay, so how did he respond? And it's like, okay, it's time to have Johnny come in too, because we need to actually see this family dynamic because we may be missing something that when dad goes in and sits on the bed and is curious, the other parent comes in and then takes the baseball bat and they undermine each other. But to distill down your question is really starting with warmth and curiosity.
Speaker 2:
Well, give me an example please of when parents have undermined each other and completely the fucked process up completely.
Nicole:
I can give you one.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, go ahead. Go ahead. Because I think we do it. So I laugh as I ask it, cringing, hoping that I haven't done this exact same thing. So go ahead.
Speaker 1:
Is this like a from this week?
Nicole:
This is from the past several months.
Speaker 2:
All right, go, get it.
Speaker 1:
It felt fresh. That's what it felt. I got it. I got one. I got one.
Nicole:
It is. Yeah. Yeah. It is. It is fresh. Where we come up with some type of set of rules and expectation, let's say around curfew. The parents agree on the curfew, the timing, who's going to be responsible for what. The kid is aware of it because he's in the room too, is a little frustrated because it's 11:30 rather than one in the morning. And so he's uncomfortable and he's pushing back, but the parents say, "No. Okay, 11:30 it is." Okay, so if for some reason that is broken, what going to result? How would you like to talk to, I keep using Johnny, I don't know why. How do you want to talk to Johnny about what will happen if he doesn't meet the curfew? Calmly, non reactively, and they go on their merry way. I'm like, great. That was a great session. Everybody's clear clarity, whatever.
They come back and this time it's just the parents. And Johnny wasn't home by 11:30, didn't call, didn't text, and mom and dad, the mom wanted said, "No, it's fine. He'll come home at some point." Dad said, "No, we had-"
Speaker 2:
We had an agreement.
Nicole:
"This was the agreement." And so the dad moves through on the agreement and the mom, when they finally got the kid home around 12:30 or one said that she didn't agree with the dad doing that approach-
Speaker 2:
In front of the kid.
Nicole:
In front of the kid.
Speaker 2:
Oh no!
Nicole:
And so it all went to shit. So that's undermining.
Speaker 1:
No, thank you.
Speaker 2:
How do you respond as a therapist in that?
Nicole:
Yeah, so I have to check myself obviously.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I imagine.
Nicole:
But what I do is I mirror what I would want and I get curious what happened? Tell me what happened in the moment where... So when we left here, I had a sense we were all on the same page. How did it fall apart? Tell me what happened. So that's how I approach it because if I go in with guns a blazing and be like, okay, that is not what we fucking agreed to, it's like the baseball bat against the television. And so I want to know really where did it break down? Why did that happen? Because that also shows me a little bit about the dynamic between the couple and the parents. So that's where I would start.
And then just getting more and more clear around if this happens again, how are we going to handle it differently in the best interest of your son? Because that situation is confusing to your son.
Speaker 1:
No doubt.
Nicole:
It's very, very confusing. And it actually puts a burden on your son to figure out how to manage a system. That's not his responsibility.
Speaker 1:
It's not his job.
Nicole:
No, not his job. You got one?
Speaker 2:
Give me another one of parents undermining each other even on a small thing.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Well, I mean this is like parents undermining us maybe. Could we roll with that? Because it's just top of mind or?
Speaker 2:
Sure. No, well, undermining the therapeutic process is good. But-
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Nicole:
Because mine was a both and. They undermine each other and the therapeutic process.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. And you. Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. So one that's coming to mind, and I think there's examples of this. So we had a kid a couple years ago who was drinking and driving and got into a really bad car accident, hit a lady, really fucked up, brutally bad. Everybody was okay, thank God. And so this kid came in the center and I fucking laid into him. This was the verbal equivalent of smash the video game console as fucking justifiably so. And so we had agreed collectively, the parents, the kid, us, all hands that he was going to forego going to school that coming fall, stay home, do the community college route, get a job, humble pie, pay back his dad for the car and bootstrap his way back. That's a fucking appropriate consequence for the reckless behavior that the kid engaged in.
And then I think social comparison crept in, mom and dad hearing about where the other friends are going to school, that they're going to do this and that and the third and whatever. Kid's getting all bent out of shape about it. Finally, meeting called by the parents, or at least the mother and her new husband to say that there's no possible way we can't send this kid to school. He's going to get depressed if he stays home and we have to send him to college.
Now, the father was irate.
Speaker 2:
I bet.
Speaker 1:
I fucking irate. It was his 7 Series Beamer got smashed. So of course he was irate. But basically the mom undercut the dad and gave the kid permission to go to college and the father ended up siding alongside the mother because he didn't want to lose the relationship with the kid and be the odd man out. So she sent him a banana and put him in a catch 22. And he didn't really have a choice but to go against his own better judgment and advice. So everybody undercut everybody. And we were basically very firm with the family and we said, "Listen, we came to consensus, we established the framework, we agreed that you were not going to send this kid to school, and so you send him, it's going to be without us." And so they went and the kid went to college absent our support, and obviously I wish him the best, but the parents' lack of alignment led to a very poor decision being made.
Speaker 2:
As I'm thinking about isolation and a young man's stuckness, we've talked about just how instant gratification has dramatically shifted the way a young man is getting through the world and as it pertains to tech. So can you talk to me about that a bit and how you're seeing that impact a young man's growth trajectory?
Speaker 1:
Yeah, I got a couple. So a more recent example, first of all, when I was senior in college, I didn't have a laptop. And so well, I used to abuse Adderall and stay up all night and write my papers in the computer lab, but I would go to the computer lab and write my paper for 20 hours straight and then hand it in the next morning. If you're a college student now and you're a causeway guy, you put into ChatGPT what you're writing a paper on, you frame the parameters and the terms and conditions and it spits you out a five page paper in 14 seconds and you just pump it in. You just hand it in. You change a few words, you make it so that it's not ChatGPT produced and you send it on your merry way.
So talk about instant gratification. Long and gone are the days where a guy has take 25 hours to write a five page paper. You can literally go put it in ChatGPT, and it'll just fucking produce you your term paper right there.
Speaker 2:
Come on.
Speaker 1:
So that's a pretty good way I think that instant gratification has changed things for us. Didn't anticipate that would be a thing, but I would say it comes up in a million different ways. I think the pornography is a huge piece.
Speaker 2:
Sure.
Speaker 1:
What's the incentive for a guy to go out and initiate relationships with a prospective romantic companion where he can go home and take care of business and find literally any type of pornography on his cell phone-
Speaker 2:
That he would ever want.
Speaker 1:
With a microsecond. Within a microsecond.
Speaker 2:
And not have to deal with the rejection and not have to deal with anything that would make him feel uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:
And that's such a huge piece, and I'm glad you voiced that over. It's like the opposite of what we know from exposure work. So when you're anxious about something, we know that exposing yourself to it in small degrees of inoculation and scaling that up over time will build your ability to be less anxious to the exposure, whatever it is. Instead, if you just opt out at any small sign of discomfort, you're never going to develop the skills necessary to progress in that way. And so that's a nice real clean example of how instant gratification can not only give you another avenue to get your needs met, but deter you from trying to get better in a meaningful way.
Speaker 2:
Which then we're finding young men just opting out because of the fear of failure.
Speaker 1:
Completely.
Nicole:
Wow. I think it can be extrapolated beyond young men too, just around the discomfort piece. I think it is one of the most challenging things for humans to experience is pain and discomfort. And we will avoid it at all costs because we like our comfort zone. Right?
Speaker 1:
Sorry to interject. Is there a place and a way that that comes up for you personally? Is there a common ground for you in that framework?
Nicole:
I think absolutely. I am trying to think of when I hit... Well, yeah, my comfort zone is, I was just talking to Heather about it this morning, is flying under the radar. I was a point guard. Point guards don't get all the attention, they just do the hard work and they get the assist, but the people get all the attention are the ones who are under the basket and score the most points. Being front and center is so outside of my comfort zone. Even being here doing this podcast, when we first started talking about it, I was totally stoked about it. And there's the part of me that's like, wow, outside of my comfort zone, but I also know that I'm not going to grow if I don't meet my comfort. Yeah. Go beyond that.
Speaker 1:
Push it. Yeah. That's cool.
Nicole:
Who would've known?
Speaker 2:
Who would've known?
Speaker 1:
I even think that the instant gratification piece is in silly stupid ways.
Speaker 2:
Like what?
Speaker 1:
Fiscally. So people are shitty with money now. Very shitty with money now. And I think part of it is the access that we have through our phones to fucking anything we want at any given moment.
Speaker 2:
Absolutely. Is this an intervention?
Speaker 1:
I was going to say-
Speaker 2:
You've brought me here today-
Speaker 1:
With all love, with all love, care and respect, we get about fucking 30 Amazon boxes a day. It could be literally anything, and some of that stuff is essential for the house and some of that's-
Speaker 2:
Yeah, but do you always have the shit you're looking for?
Speaker 1:
I do. I do.
Speaker 2:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Like napkins or razors.
Nicole:
Coffee.
Speaker 2:
Coffee.
Speaker 1:
I wasn't going there.
Speaker 2:
Paper towels.
Speaker 1:
Abort, abort, abort. Back up, back up. Abort, abort, abort. No, but in all seriousness-
Speaker 2:
This shit just shows up. [inaudible 00:40:00].
Speaker 1:
So imagine... And I obviously wasn't profiling my wife's spending habits because they're very, very sound.
Speaker 2:
I know.
Speaker 1:
I was just saying that because we have access to anything literally at any time, people just get whatever the fuck they want without thinking about it. And so at 5:30, Uber's going to put an alert on my phone to order dinner at 5:35 and a few times out of the week when I probably should cook my own food instead, we're going to order some shit on Uber and it's going to be 50 bucks, but it's really going to be a hundred bucks because of all the fees and the tip and so on and so forth. And that's just a silly example of how reckless we have the opportunity to be with our finances because of the volume of inputs at our disposal at any given time.
Nicole:
It just makes me think of the old stories of when I was a kid and I walked to school backwards with [inaudible 00:40:47].
Speaker 1:
Yeah.
Nicole:
It's just times they are a change in.
Speaker 1:
They are. They are.
Speaker 2:
They are. Yeah. I mean, he said computer lab, and I was like-
Nicole:
You're like, what is that?
Speaker 1:
I actually went to the computer lab.
Speaker 2:
So our son, Vince, and we're going to talk about this at some point, desperately wants a cell phone and it's just not time. And we know him and we know his brain and no is the answer right now. How old were you when you got a cell phone?
Speaker 1:
21.
Speaker 2:
21.
Speaker 1:
21 years old. Flip phone by the way. Flip phone.
Speaker 2:
Can you tell our friends about when you went to go meet a buddy for, was it in New Orleans or where were you going?
Speaker 1:
Oh yeah.
Speaker 2:
With no way to get in touch. So the resourcefulness that you had to have 20 something years ago versus now, so.
Speaker 1:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. First of all, now I can't get anywhere. I don't know how to get anywhere. I just plug it in the ways and go. I'm not even paying attention. And I don't think that that's unique to me. I think that's the plight of human civilization. Again, lack of skill rehearsal by the way. I used to read a map to figure out where I had to go, again, 5 million years ago, whatever. But the point is, so I remember going on spring break my freshman year and we were going to visit some friends down in Tulane and get fucked up for a week basically. We were flying on different flights. So all three of my buddies, me and my two other buddies were all flying on different flights. So the plan was, let's meet at Tulane. That was the plan. We didn't know where my friend lived. We didn't know how to get there. We didn't know the address, we didn't know shit. And it was like ready, set, break, let's go meet at Tulane. And we fucking made it. All three of us. And we got there at the same spot.
Speaker 2:
So what'd you do? You get to the airport.
Speaker 1:
Get to the airport, take a cab, asked the cab, how do you get to Tulane? The cab took me to campus, and I think I said at the time, where's the bar on campus? Because I remember there was one or two bars. So where's the main bar on campus?
Speaker 2:
So you just go there and find everybody?
Speaker 1:
I went to the main bar and I found my buddies.
Speaker 2:
With no communication.
Speaker 1:
Zero. I didn't have a cell phone, I didn't have a map, I didn't have anything. I had my ticket and that was it. But I think those are the kinds of things that we had to do to get around, right?
Speaker 2:
Did you have to do it that way? No. That's just the way you did it.
Speaker 1:
Well, those are the kinds of things that shithead guys like me did to get around.
Nicole:
That is so great.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Yeah. But you did it and you were resourceful.
Nicole:
Yeah.
Speaker 1:
I was definitely resourceful. Safe, probably not. Smart, definitely not. But resourceful, sure. Yeah.
Nicole:
I remember when I was five years old, my family and I were in Disney World in Florida, and I got lost.
Speaker 1:
Lost.
Nicole:
Lost.
Speaker 1:
Like properly lost?
Nicole:
No parents in sight. Totally got lost because I let go of my mom saying... I don't know what happened. All I know is that I was lost and no cell phones then and we're in Disney World.
Speaker 1:
No. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
Yeah. Yeah.
Nicole:
And so I remember what both of my parents had said at the time and said, if for some reason in the crowd we get lost, stay exactly where you are. And I was like, so okay, I'm going to stay exactly. So I stood exactly where I was, people going around me and about a half hour later-
Speaker 2:
They came back.
Nicole:
My mom and dad roll back up and they found me. But nowadays, first, we'd have the cell phones, we'd have... But we didn't have that then. And I was found.
Speaker 2:
You were found.
Speaker 1:
You were found.
Speaker 2:
We made it.
Speaker 1:
And there you go.
Nicole:
Yeah, look at them.
Speaker 2:
Look at that. Parents were resourceful. We were so resourceful.
Nicole:
Right? Yeah.
Speaker 2:
That's it.
Speaker 1:
And that's a wrap for today's episode of Causeway Conversations. We hope you found our discussion on these important challenges, insightful and valuable.
Nicole:
And if you're looking for more guidance, support and inspiration, be sure to follow Causeway Collaborative on social media. We're on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter where we share resources, success stories and updates. And if you want to reach us directly, email us at info@causewaycollaborative.com.
Speaker 1:
And don't forget to hit follow or subscribe on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode of Causeway Conversations. You can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, and more
Nicole:
For those who prefer a visual experience, our podcast episodes are also available on YouTube. Just search for Causeway Collaborative and hit the subscribe button.
Speaker 1:
Thank you all for joining us on this journey of growth and discovery. Remember, we're here to support you and your son every step of the way.
Nicole:
And until next time, take care of yourselves and each other.