Mental Health

When I first read Dr. Julia DiGangi’s best-selling book, Energy Rising: The Neuroscience of Leading with Emotional Power, I knew it was a game changer for improving our love lives, our work lives, and the most important life we have—the inner life with our emotional selves. Dr. DiGangi is a neuropsychologist who completed her residency at a consortium of Harvard Medical School, Boston University, and the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

            I recently interviewed her and we explored her unique background and skillset, her family challenges, the surprising reason she got into the field, and how her work has impacted the world. I wrote an earlier article about her work, “The Neuroscience of Emotional Power,” and here we go deeper into the three critical “marriages” we all must address according to David Whyte, author of The Three Marriages: Reimagining Work, Self, and Relationship.

            “There is that first marriage, the one we usually mean, to another,” says Whyte, “that second marriage, which can so often seem like a burden to work or vocation and that third, and most likely hidden, marriage to a core conversation inside ourselves.” 

Understanding Emotional Power

            Humans are complicated and emotions can be confusing. But all of us want to know ourselves and feel good about the person we know. We call our species “Homo sapiens,” which means “the wise human.” We often think of being wise as being smart, able to think clearly and make wise decisions.

Humans, particularly those humans known as males, often put too much emphasis on our thinking abilities and not enough on our emotions. Dr. DiGangi defines emotional power simply as

“Your ability to stay strong in the midst of life’s inevitable challenges.”

Whether we want to be strong in the face of a challenging marriage or want to be able to stand strong when having to make a difficult business decision, we do best when we tap into our emotional power. We recognize the value of a passionate love life and a satisfying and successful career, but we also want to feel good with who we are inside our own bodies, minds, and souls. Yet, many of us fall short.

Emotional power is the foundation for achieving success in all areas of our lives.

“Your emotions are, in many ways, the final judge of your experiences.”

says Dr. DiGangi.

“Until you understand how to work more effectively with your emotions, it’s easy to expend tremendous energy yanking at ineffective levers of change.”

In our interview Dr. DiGangi introduces her findings on “neuroenergetic codes,” including the following:

How to Transform Your Emotional Pain into Emotional Power

            All of us try and avoid pain and seek pleasure. It’s the core of our evolutionary based survival mechanism. Yet, we want to do more than survive in life. We want to thrive. To do that we need to learn to overcome our brain’s automatic pain avoidance response and turn our emotional pain into emotional power.

Dr. DiGangi reminds us that our brains create a whole lot of sensations that are both painful and pleasurable, but they all reduce to two kinds of emotional energies. She calls them: Emotional Pain and Emotional Power.

Emotional Pain includes any type of negative sensations you feel. These can include things like anxiety, fear, worry, irritation, anger, shame, etc.

Emotional Power includes any type of positive sensations that makes you feel worthy. These include positive sensations we call confidence, strength, resilience, importance, etc.

            Here’s the basic fact of neurobiology: The most effective, scientifically supported forms of behavior change are based upon people transforming their relationship with the feelings they’ve been avoiding.

            “Over the years,”

says Dr. DiGangi,

“I’ve worked with many people who have experienced extreme trauma—everything from soldiers who experienced of trauma of war to survivors of rape and child sexual abuse. In all cases, the healing came from helping people regain the courage to move towards the feelings and experiences they have avoided all their lives.”

            She looks at some of the common ways we avoid pain in our love lives. Check the ones you recognize:

• Becoming attracted to people who are unavailable.
• Bailing out on a relationship that could be good and avoiding dealing with what is scaring you.
• Finding fault with little things a potential love interest does or doesn’t do which creates emotional distance.
• Trying to change the other persons behavior instead of dealing directly with your fears.
• Jumping into a new relationship and avoiding looking at what went wrong in the last one.
• Fill in your own example here____________________________________________.

She goes on to describe common ways we avoid pain in our work lives. Check the ones you recognize:

• You are excited about starting a new project, but you’re afraid it might fail so you avoid doing it.
• You want to tell someone at work that they said something that hurt your feelings, but you’re embarrassed so you put off telling them.
• You’re having trouble with one of your employees who keeps making mistakes, but you’re afraid they might be hurt by your criticism so you avoid telling them.
• You feel you’ve taken on too much work, but you worry that saying “no” will make you look bad, so you reluctantly say “yes.”
• You want to advance and take on more responsibility, but you have a difficult time making decisions that might upset people you care about, so you hold back.
• Fill in your own example here____________________________________________.

She examines common ways we avoid pain in our inner work with ourselves. Check the ones you recognize:

Do you spend time…

• Being worried what other people think of you?
• Iirritated by what others are doing or saying?
• Scared you did something wrong?
• Anxious that you’ve upset others?
• Terrified that if you lived your life as you desire you’d be rejected?

When she talked about the ways we try and compensate and create stability, safety, security by getting caught in the “overs,” I felt some uncomfortable feelings of recognition. How about you? Do you…

—overthink looking for the perfect solution?

—overanalyze things trying to be sure you haven’t missed something important?

—overgive to make sure that people like you and they don’t disappoint anyone?

—overreact to keep people from taking advantage of you?

–overwork so no one can accuse you of not being on top of things?

–Fill in your own example here____________________________________________.

I added overdo. I often feel that everyone depends on me—my family (Carlin and I have six grown children, seventeen grandchildren, and two great grandchildren)—plus, I have clients, and work colleagues—I tell myself I’ve got to do more or the world is going to collapse and the people I care most about will die.

            I found a lot of what she said to be counter-intuitive, but right on the money, particularly when she said that one of our main problems in life is our attempts to avoid pain. Rather, than go with our desire to avoid pains, Dr. DiGangi recommends that we “Pick a more powerful pain.”

      Here’s an example from my own life. I played basketball in high school but have always been short and slightly built. I would get bounced around and dominated. I decided I couldn’t do anything about being taller, but I could get stronger. I started with leg presses. At first I could only do three sets of ten with 100 pounds. As I built up my leg muscles I could eventually do three sets of ten with 200 pounds. It was painful, but the benefits were worth it. I could stronger and more able to be successful engaging a sport that I loved.  

      When I could lift 200 pounds, it wasn’t that 100 pounds no longer existed. Each time I did a 200-pound lift, I first had to add four 25-pound plates to get to 100, before I could add four more to get to 200. Here’s how this analogy applies to emotional pain.

      Like many couples my wife and I divided up our duties. Although she worked outside the home, I was the primary “breadwinner” and she did most of the bill-paying, taxes, food preparation, and cleanup. In March she slipped and fell on a wet sidewalk. She suffered a broken hip, needed hip replacement surgery, and suffered a stroke.

Suddenly, I had to take over all the things she had been doing, in addition to taking care of her health needs when she came out of the hospital. I also had to continue carrying out my ongoing work responsibilities. At first I was overwhelmed, irritable, frustrated, resentful, and angry. I knew none of this was her fault and I desperately wanted to step up to my new duties, but I was afraid I would fail. At first I wanted to escape, to run away from the pain of increased caregiving. But as I stayed with it, I let go of my frustrations, resentments, and fears. I gradually gained confidence as I embraced the more powerful pain by confronting my fear of failure, the worry that I would screw things up or let my wife down or even make a mistake that would cause her health to worsen or even cause her to die.

I kept at it and over a period of eighteen months, I gradually took on more and more weight and gained increasing power as I felt more competent, confident, worthwhile, loved, and loving. Rather than running away from my initial pain, I picked a more power pain that I thought I couldn’t handle but surprised myself that I could become emotionally stronger.

As Dr. DiGangi says,

“When it comes to a tough circumstance in your life, you really have only two options: run from it or become more powerful in the face of it.”

Your nervous system packs 150 million years of evolutionary power. You are built to handle hard. Going after what you want in your life is powerful precisely because it is painful.”

            I hope you found this article helpful. If you’d like to learn more about Dr. DiGangi’s work you can learn more here: https://drjuliadigangi.com/. If you’d like to learn more about her upcoming program, “The Age of Energy,” you can do so here: https://drjuliadigangi.com/the-age-of-energy/.

            I write weekly articles to share my own wisdom to improve your personal and relational skills and to share with you the wisdom of colleagues whose work is transforming our world. If you are not yet a subscriber, you can do so here: https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/

The post Dr. Julia DiGangi is Bringing Emotional Power to the World appeared first on MenAlive.

I was 25 years old on November 21, 1969 when I held my first-born son, Jemal, in my arms shortly after he was born and made a vow that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able to be for me and to do everything I could to create a world where men were fully healed and engaged with their families throughout their lives. When our daughter Angela was born on March 22, 1972, I first became interested in ways boys and girls, males and females, were similar and also different. I soon launched MenAlive.com as my window to the world to share my books, articles, and online programs.

            My wife, Carlin, and I now have six grown children, seventeen grandchildren, and three great grandchildren. We quietly celebrated my eighty-first birthday on December 21, 2024. My commitment to the wellbeing of future generations continues and my work with boys and men has expanded. In 2019 I invited a number of colleagues who I knew were doing great work helping improve the lives of boys and men to join me in what I called a Moonshot for Mankind and Humanity.

            We soon started an organization, MoonshotforMankind.org, and I wrote a new book (my seventeenth), Long Live Men! The Moonshot Mission to Heal Men, Close the Lifespan Gap, and Offer Hope to Humanity. In the final chapter of the book, “Join Our Moonshot Mission For Mankind and Humanity,” representatives of the founding organizations shared their reasons for joining. The founding organizations and current co-founding organizations are:

• Warrior Films. https://warriorfilms.org/
• Shana James Coaching. https://shanajamescoaching.com/
• ManTherapy. https://mantherapy.org/
• The Good Men Project. https://goodmenproject.com/
• The Mankind Project. https://mkpusa.org/
• MenAlive. https://menalive.com/
• MenLiving. https://menliving.org/
• Men and Boys Compassion Coalition. https://www.globalcompassioncoalition.org/topics/men-and-boys/mci-members/
• Diverting Hate. https://www.divertinghate.org/
• The Man Whisperer. https://www.themanwhisperer.co.uk/
• Wish For Wheels. https://www.wishforwheels.org/

As we begin 2025, it is clear to me that things are not going well in our world. Violence is on the rise, as is depression, addictive escapes, deaths of despair, and suicides. Our environmental life support system is on the brink of collapse. Yet warriors for the human spirit have always arisen at times of trouble when our families and communities are at risk. This is our time. Do you feel called to act?

I believe that males are both the “canaries in the coal mine” alerting us to the fact that we face a clear and present danger, as well as the hope for humanity. I am inviting a select group of men who are ready to join me on the hero’s journey of a lifetime—one where we heal ourselves as we commit to healing our families and communities.

            Hero’s journeys are never taken alone. They are too perilous, unpredictable, and likely to fail without a map, companions, and a guide.

            Your Map: I was blessed to join a men’s group that has been meeting regularly for 45 years. Over the years, we have developed a map that we’ve used to live fully, love deeply, and make a positive difference in the world. 

            Your Companions: A cohort of men who feel called at this time in their lives to join with other men to make this journey together.

            Your Guide: I have been a mentor to men, healer, and leader for more than fifty years. I am the author of 17 books on men’s mental, emotional, and relational health. I have earned a PhD in International Health and a master’s degree in social work and work with individuals and organizations throughout the U.S. and around the world.

The practice map I will share with you was first described in my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home: Healing Men, Healing the Planet, which was published in 1994. In work leading up to the book, I drew upon ancient wisdom about the true nature of  warriorship. Tibetan Buddhist master Chögyam Trungpa tells us, “The world is in absolute turmoil. These teachings are founded on the premise that there is basic human wisdom that can help solve the world’s problems. This wisdom does not belong to any one culture or religion, nor does it come only from the West or the East. Rather, it is a tradition of human warriorship that has existed in many cultures at many times throughout history.” 

            Chögyam Trungpa goes on to say, Warriorship here does not refer to making war on others. Aggression is the source of our problems, not the solution. Here the word ‘warrior’ is taken from the Tibetan pawo, which literally means ‘one who is brave.’ Warriorship in this context is the tradition of human bravery, or the tradition of fearlessness. The key to warriorship and the first principle of the  vision is not being afraid of who you are.”

The Real Problem With Men

            Many believe that the problem with men is that we are inherently destructive or unsuited to be successful in a world where physical strength is no longer necessary and relationship skills that women often possess are not natural to men.         These are mostly media myths.

            The real problem with men is that we have become disconnected from nature and disconnected from ourselves. We don’t know who we are and are afraid to find out. We may put on a good front, but deep inside many of us feel lost and alone. We act like adults, but inside we feel like perpetual Peter Pans who never grew up. We hunger for women, but also resent them because we feel so dependent. We know we need to grow up but don’t know where to go for mentoring.

            If this resonates with you, know you are not alone.

A Cohort Guided by Dr. Jed Diamond is Forming Soon.

The World Needs You. Your Families Need You. You Need You!

If you are a man and this resonates with you, I would like to hear from you. If you are a woman who knows a man you feel would be interested, please pass this invitation on to them. Women have their own work to do in these times of transformation and change. But men and women are in this world together and we need to support each other.

            Among the many colleagues who reviewed my book, The Warrior’s Journey Home, was my Aikido instructor and mentor Dr. Richard Strozzi Heckler, author of many books including In Search of the Warrior Spirit: Teaching Awareness Disciplines to the Military. He says, “Jed Diamond draws a compelling thread between the loss of our warrior values, the desecration of the planet, and our pervasive addictions. He then outlines a set of clear and pragmatic practices that can return us to a deeper connection to ourselves and the natural world.”

Here’s what you can expect when you join:

            We will meet for a free 2-hour mini-intensive (Date to be determined). You will learn about the three archetypal wounds that men have experienced: Shame, Betrayal, and Abandonment and the warrior practices that heal them: Honor, Loyalty, and Commitment. You will also learn about the cultural editors that perpetuate our wounding and cause us to disconnect from ourselves and to continually look for love in all the wrong places.

For those who decide to continue together, we will open our hearts and minds to each other, learn that we all have something to teach others and we all have something to learn, and we can commit to supporting each other on our individual and shared warrior’s journey home. I am still developing the program, but it will likely include these elements:

• Each week you will receive one of my lessons articles: “Life Lessons of an 81-Year-Old Men’s Health Maverick,” which will have two lessons I’ve learned that you can reflect upon and apply in your own life.

• There will be a dedicated community space where you can share your experiences, ask questions, and get support and feedback from the community.

• Once a month we will meet together. There will be a short talk with wisdom you can use, followed by discussion, sharing, and suggested “warrior practices” you can engage.

• Twice a month you will receive a video program with me in dialogue with some of the world’s leading experts on Gender-Specific Healing and Men’s Health including the following:

Mo Gawdat, Former Chief Business Officer at Google X, bestselling author of

                           Solve For Happy.

Marianne J. Legato, M.D., Founder Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine,

                            author of Why Men Die First: How to Lengthen Your Lifespan        

David Katz, M.D., Founding Director of Yale University’s Prevention Research

                            Center and Senior Science Advisor to Blue Zones.

Riane Eisler, President and Founder of the Center for Partnership Systems, author

             of The Chalice & The Blade and Nurturing Our Humanity.

Richard V. Reeves, Founding President of the American Institute for Boys and Men,

                                                             author of Of Boys and Men.

Harville Hendrix & Helen LaKelly Hunt, Relationship experts, authors of Getting

                               The Love You Want and How to Talk with Anyone About Anything.

Dr. Jill Bolte-Taylor, Harvard-trained neuroscientist, author of My Stroke of Insight

                           and Whole Brain Living.                  

Dr. Warren Farrell, Author of The BoyCrisis and Role Mate to Soul Mate. 

Dr. Julia DiGangi, Neuropsychologist and author Energy Rising: The Neuroscience

                       of Leading with Emotional Power.

Shana James, Marriage and family therapist, author of Honest Sex who is rumored

                                to be “A blend of The Dalai Lama and Dr. Ruth.”  

Dr. Gary Barker, International voice for healthy manhood, gender equality and

violence prevention. CEO of Equimundo.  

Chip Conley, Co-founder and CEO of the Modern Elder Academy and author of

                       Learning to Love Midlife.                                

Dr. Margaret J. Wheatley, Author of Who Do We Choose to Be? Facing Reality,

                       Claiming Leadership, Restoring Sanity.

Ruth Whippman, Journalist, documentarian, and author of BoyMom: Reimagining

                       Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity                       

Michael Gurian, Journalist and bestselling author of 32 books including The

                                 Wonder of Boys and Boys: A Rescue Plan.

Kelly Wendorf, Author of Flying Lead Change: 56 Million Years of Wisdom for

                                  Leading and Living.                   

There are four pillars that support this healing journey: 

• Becoming your authentic self and being the best you that you can be.
• Learning to love yourself, your family, and your community, deeply and well.
• Embracing your calling and bringing your unique work to the world.
• Being a source of clarity and strength at this challenging time in human history.

If you would like to learn more, please drop me a note to Jed@MenAlive.com and put “MenAliveNow” in the subject line. I will send more information as soon as it is available. I also invite you to subscribe to my free weekly newsletter, if you haven’t already, to hear about my latest articles, announcements, and classes. https://menalive.com/email-newsletter/.

The post MenAlive Now: Taking Action in Support of Our Children appeared first on MenAlive.

Part 5: Our Home Attracted Death Like a Magnet

Our home attracted death like a magnet. In 1949, the same year my father was committed to Camarillo State Hospital, Holly, a close friend of the family, shot himself. I remember going to the service, confused and afraid, but no one talked about why he died. Yet, everyone knew it was suicide. Years later I was looking through our attic and found nine of my father’s journals written between 1946 and 1949. They were a goldmine for me, giving me insight and understanding about my father’s inner world, his hopes, dreams, and the demons of doubt he wrestled with all his life.

 There were numerous entries about his friend Holly, a fellow writer, written three years before the death. He described the pressures Holly was facing in the years leading to his suicide.

“When a theme possesses you the way Holly’s theme possessed him, good writing must result. You begin to see and understand what a herculean job novel writing is, how much guts, stamina, endless sweat and stick-to-itiveness you need.”

My father also felt the same force driving Holly to despair.

“How alike Holly and I are in our basic situation in life. We both struggle trying to make a living, feeling a furious hate inside, the hot breath of necessity blaring down our necks, the constant finger about to stick itself in our noses and telling us ‘times up. It’s too late.’ Now you’ll have to make it by working at what you loathe. The hands of the clock point to twelve.”

The same year that Holly died, my closest friend, Woody, drowned in the river near our house. He was my best friend and his sudden death left me feeling sad and lonely. I tried talking to my mother about my feelings, but she was caught up in her own fears. “Oh my God, I’m so glad you didn’t go with him to the river,” my mother said as she hugged me tight. “That could have been you.” I put my own feelings aside and tried to assure her that I was O.K. and wouldn’t go near the river.

My mother was preoccupied with her own death. From the time I was born, when she was thirty-five, I knew my mother was about to die. She talked about it all the time. “I just hope I’m around to see you off to high school,” she would tell me. Her voice was always light and breezy, but it chilled me to the bone. When she was still around when I went to high school, she wasn’t reassured, she just moved her imminent death a little farther down the line. “I just want to see you go to college before I die,” she would tell me.

I was seven when the “Forester man” came for a visit. He sold life insurance, but his story made it seem that he was here to offer protection and support. Though we had little money for essentials, my mother bought the whole package. My mother signed up for insurance on herself, so I’d be taken care of when she died. She also bought an insurance policy on me because “it’s never too early to think about your wife and kids.” As a dutiful son, I felt proud to own an insurance policy to take care of my family when I died…while I was still in the first grade.

I began to see death as a companion, a deadly twin that shadowed my dreams. I slept alone and had developed a ritual to enable me to go to sleep. I had to arrange the sheets and blankets in such a way that I created a safe cocoon and when it was just right I could fall asleep. But every night I would have the same dream:

I awaken and get out of bed. I walk from my bedroom into the dining room and from there into the kitchen and the living room. Somewhere along the way a dark figure jumps out carrying a long knife. I immediately begin to run away. I know if I can get back to my bed, I’ll be safe. But I never make it. I’m stabbed and wake up screaming.

My mother never seemed to hear the screams and I didn’t want to worry her. When I finally told her the dream she offered no clue of the cause, nor did she seem concerned. The dreams continued, but I never discussed them with her or anyone. Yet, my own preoccupation with death took hold in my subconscious, only to surface many years later in college. I took my girlfriend to see the play “A Long Day’s Journey Into Night,” Eugene O’Neill’s autobiographical masterpiece about growing up in a crazy, dysfunctional family. My girlfriend hated it. I felt I had found a kindred spirit who was telling my story. One small section spoke deeply about my own life to that point.

In the play, as his family unravels around him, the younger son, Edmund, tries to make sense of his place in the family drama. He says:

“It was a great mistake, my being born a man, I would have been much more successful as a sea gull or a fish. As it is, I will always be a stranger who never feels at home, who does not really want and is not really wanted, who can never belong, and who must always be a little in love with death!”

After I stopped visiting my father in Camarillo, my mother and I never talked about him. It was as though he was dead or had never existed. We became a family of two. My mother never mentioned him and I told kids in school that “my father died,” which got me a little sympathy that I never got when I said he had a “nervous breakdown and was in a mental hospital.”

Life Lesson: When adults deny the reality of depression and suicide children are left to grapple with their confused feelings alone.

When my mid-life father took an overdose of sleeping pills and was committed to the state mental hospital the adults in my life couldn’t deal with the reality of his feelings of despair. My mother was consumed by her own terrors and denial and chose not to visit him in the hospital. She tasked my uncle and me to make the weekly visits to see my father. Family and friends didn’t talk openly about the death by suicide of my father’s close friend, Holly, another struggling creative artist.

Men die by suicide at rates four times higher than the rates for females and is even higher as men get older. When we deny our early wounding, it often turns into depression, which can lead to suicide.

Life Lesson: Although depression and despair that can lead to suicide can impact everyone, it is more prevalent among sensitive, creative, men and women.

Kay Redfield Jamison is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. She is the co-author of the standard medical text on bipolar disorder and the author of national best sellers An Unquiet Mind: Memoir of Moods and Madness, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament, Night Falls Fast: Understanding Suicide, and other books.

In Touched with Fire, she begins by quoting poet Lord Byron as he talks about himself and other creative types.

“We of the craft are all crazy,”

said Byron about  himself and other creatives.

“Some are affected by gaiety, others by melancholy, but all are more or less touched.”

Where has depression shown up in your life or in the lives of people you love? Do you consider yourself a creative person?  Do you see a connection between your creativity and times you felt down or depressed?

I look forward to hearing from you. New training opportunities coming in 2025. Drop me a note to Jed@MenAlive.com if interested.

If you appreciate these articles, please share them. They are my labor of love. If you are not already a subscriber, feel free to do so here.

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