How to Change Everything
How to Change Everything
Shifting our thoughts from pathology to wholeness.
A number of months back I matched with someone on a dating app. On the surface, things looked good. There was the obvious attraction that we all seek, but more importantly, her profile had a nice blend of playfulness and spiritual woo that for me is essential.
In Denver, where almost every profile includes a blend of which ski pass you buy, golf pictures, and a comment about working hard so you can travel and drink wine, something existential or metaphysical always grabs my attention. You could say it’s a hint that this person might also be seeking eco-centrism over ego-centrism.
As the conversation started, she asked about my breathwork and coaching business (which at the time was just coaching) and my target audience. When I said men, she took off on a rant about all the things that are wrong with men.
The crazy thing is, while at some level I agreed with much of what she had to say, the way she approached it, put me completely on edge, and while I tried to offer some thoughtful pushback, it took everything I had to not just unmatch and walk away.
We never did meet because the woman I’m still seeing made everyone else comparatively uninteresting, but I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about my internal response over the past few months.
What was it that triggered me?
I think it all comes down to pathology vs. wholeness.
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Pathology
Perhaps the easiest way to explain the difference between pathology and wholeness is to look at the difference between Eastern and Western medicine.
In the West, we’re pathology-based so we start with the question, “What’s wrong?” Then we identify the specific part of the body that has an issue and aim to fix that, often with an end goal of making ourselves more comfortable.
So if there’s a headache, we numb the pain.
If we have a fever, we take something to bring our temperature down.
For heartburn we slam some antacids.
For cancer, we historically try and either cut it out or blast it with radiation.
What we often fail to ask is why we have a headache, what is behind the fever or the heartburn, or why our body is allowing cancerous cells to grow.
This is not to say the Western approach is always bad. After all, when I blew out my ACL, I was thankful to have orthopedists who could, as non-invasively as possible, get in there and use a cadaver tendon to replace the ligament I’d ruptured.
There are also moments in the West where we do seek alternative solutions, like the immunotherapy my dad is receiving for his cancer treatment, which is specifically designed to take the breaks off his immune system so it can fight the cancer.
But more often than not, partially because our Western mindset calls us to look at individual pieces rather than the whole puzzle, something Dr. Gabor Mate explores in The Myth of Normal (affiliate), and partially because (at least in America) our medical system is about the far more profitable sickness management than actual health care, our approach to medicine starts with the pathology approach of attacking what’s wrong.
We often do the same thing when we talk about men’s work.
So instead of asking why a guy is angry, we tell him to stop being pissed off.
When he asserts himself, instead of asking what’s behind that, we just assume he’s being a power hungry asshole.
If he seems broken, we scoff at how someone with so much social privilege could dare complain about anything.
All this results in the mass pop-diagnosis of men as a massive cohort of self-indulgent patriarchal narcissists, a social cancer that needs radiation.
Wholeness
In the East, there is a greater interest in wholeness, so the leading question is more, “What’s missing?”
Could that headache be cause by dehydration?
Fevers are an attempt by our body to kill off some kind of pathogen in our body, so why are we shutting down our natural immune response?
Did that heartburn start because we eat crap?
What is going on in the body/psyche that is allowing cancer to thrive?
The idea is that when we bring what’s missing back to the equation, suddenly the things that are “wrong” naturally resolve themselves.
My Move To Wholeness
I started my healing and wholeness journey thirteen years ago, although, it wasn’t until the last five years that the idea of wholeness took center stage.
For the first eight years I embraced a pathological approach where I ebbed and flowed between determination to fix whatever I deemed wrong with me and feeling absolutely defeated because, as far as I could tell, I was irreparably broken.
Nowhere was this more true than a longstanding battle with compulsive sexual behavior. I tried sheer will to resist my body’s impulses, aimed to boost my faith in hopes that I could resist sinful temptations, attended 12-step groups and other communities centered on sexual sobriety, put accountability software on my computer, and started running long distance again, all in hopes of “fixing” me.
I’m not sure why, but sometime in late 2018 I decided I was going to stop trying to fix myself. Instead, I decided it was time to learn to love myself … especially the parts of me I’d previously deemed unlovable.
With this move, instead of judging my impulses and hating myself for having them, I began asking myself what was going on behind the scenes. This is when I finally began to really unpack some epically fucked childhood experiences and do the work that was necessary to heal my psyche.
While the change wasn’t immediate, over time, the compulsivity faded and, when something did stir, simply asking myself what was behind it gave me the opportunity to honor the wounded parts of me, especially those that desperately sought acceptance from women.
How About You?
Men, what would it look like for you to shift your approach to self from pathology to wholeness? Would it mean that you would stop living under Saturn’s shadow? Or maybe it means stepping beyond a life of conformity. Perhaps you are like me where pathology drives compulsive behavior and this is your chance to be free.
Women, what would it look like for you to see yourself and the men in your life through a lens of wholeness rather than pathology?
I’d love to know what you think.