132: The 4 Male Archetypes That Guide Our Relationships | David Coates

There's a lot of internal division in the human mind. It's just like a family system with parts playing different roles and pulling on each other and creating alliances. The moment you try to regulate your nervous system outside of yourself by controlling the external world, woo, you are in for some stuff, right? There are nuances to the way that men who are struggling show up relationally. I would love to break down what you observed in terms of these archetypes. The four words I focused on are douchebag, pussy, ass, and dick. Let's own these. Let's face the worst in ourselves so we can become our best. I wonder, what does so-called healing look like? There's a lot of people selling really easy solutions to complex problems. That's not been my experience in 20 years. Hi, and welcome back to Reclamation Radio. I am Dr. Kelly Brogan, and today I sit down with psychotherapist David Coates, who is Internal Family Systems, a.k.a. Parts Work Trained. And we go into why parts work, why I'm obsessed with parts work, and his experience over the years of recognizing these discrete patterns in men and how they relate to the world. So he wrote a book called Be Less Dickish, and we're going to break down the four male archetypes, many of whom you are probably not only familiar with, but are also narratively blaming for many of your experiences of suffering and struggle in your life. And we're going to talk about how not to take the beat, how not to collude with these dynamics. And I hope that you enjoy this fun and enlivening conversation and come to appreciate the complexity underpinning even the asshole's behavior. Enjoy. Welcome, David, to the show. Kelly, glad to be here. So anybody who has heard me say pretty much anything for the past couple of years has heard me talk about my passion for parts work and for family constellation. And I see them as quite related. And when our mutual friend, Regina, introduced me to you, I was so, so, so thrilled to encounter somebody who was so on the page, so alive, so fascinating. I mean, there's like a million things we could talk about in this session together. And I want to start out with your expertise, though, which is Fart's work. That's the reason that she connected us, because I heard that she was working as she was doing my program. She was working with internal family systems. And I said, I got to know your guy. Give me your guy. And it's such a delight to connect to you. So I wanted to start there before we dive into the juicy material that we are navigating together today to just really, I guess I don't take the opportunity often to really foreground like what the hell is parts work? Why do you care about it so much? Like why do you love it? Why have you pursued expertise in it? And why do you bring it to your clients and your work? And maybe we can just sort of set the stage with that before we go into the many patterns that you have uncovered in your work. In this conversation, we'll be talking specifically about men and then we'll take it from there. So tell me a bit about parts work and for those who are like, what is it and why you're into it? The parts work that I do in particular is called internal family systems. And I found it about 12 or 13 years ago and I trained with the Institute there. And I not only work with clients with it, like it's the paradigm that I live my life through. and that's where I'm most passionate about it. To me, it's not heart's work just for healing, but it is great for that. It's great for trauma and it's great to understand our chaotic minds. It gives us a way to plug into ourselves that actually makes sense. Like most people have these minds that are kind of these polarities and they're at war with themselves. I want to go to the gym. I want to sleep in. I kind of want this. I kind of want, like there's a lot of internal division in the human mind and internal family systems comes in and says like, hey, your internal mind, It's just like a family system with parts playing different roles and pulling on each other and creating alliances. And so it allows you to actually pay attention to your mind. Like before we started, one part of me was frustrated about the Internet because I want this to go well. And so right away, I'm just like I'm with that part of me. I'm acknowledging its world and its experience. I get it. I'm right here with you. So I'm constantly engaging with the parts of me so they can actually get received and heard and cared for in the way that they need. And if they don't get that from me, they're just going to struggle amongst themselves. And the image I use is I think of like a fourth grade classroom and the teacher is not present. The kids are going crazy and they're throwing paper balls and they're getting in arguments and fights. But the moment a really present teacher comes into that room and is holding it fucking down, kids can feel it like we all can feel it when someone has that. And so the idea of IFS is we become that sense of presence that our parts connect with for soothing and grounding. It's an internal attachment model. So I love IFS because if you are triggered, you have a part that is triggered. That's what's happening. That's the information that the external world is giving you is you have a part that's triggered. And most people orient towards what they did or said that they shouldn't say, what's messed up about the world, like they go externally. But the moment you try to regulate your nervous system outside of yourself by controlling the external world, you are in for some suffering. You are in for it. Exactly. And it becomes this like holofractal mirror, right? Because the zero sum game that you're playing on the outside is also going on on the inside where there's one part that imagines it can, you know, take the wheel without acknowledging or validating any other parts. So there's this concept, maybe you can speak a bit about blending in parts work and how blending can drive suffering because of this zero-sum game consciousness, this victim consciousness. Yeah. Yeah. Most people will blend with a part and then believe that part's view of the world. So that person said that thing, they shouldn't have said that thing, that was messed up, and they are the part. So a lot of parts work and IFS work is unblending. That is a part of me that is mad or frustrated. And just even me saying that, I get a little distance from that part. That part's not running the show anymore. So a lot of what I do with clients help you unblend from the parts. And the more intense the parts, because the intense parts are always protecting more vulnerable parts. So intensity of your what we call protectors in IFS is perfectly correlated with the vulnerability of what usually is a young part that holds some trauma, holds a burden. We use triggered parts to appreciate them for how they're trying to create a sense of safety or understanding. There's no bad parts, which is one of the names of the IFS books that I love. And you appreciate that part for trying to help. Even the critic, you appreciate for like, yeah, tell me what you're hoping for by criticizing all the time. If you would just do the things I want you to fucking do, then everything would be great. Great. So even the critic, which most people hate their critic, is trying to help in its own way. So you see how these parts are trying to help. They'll relax a little bit and you can connect with the one that they've been protecting for a long time and do the deeper healing, which is what I love about this work. And that's why concepts even like self-sabotage fall away. If there is a benign and benevolent even intention for each of these parts, then there isn't such a thing as fucking yourself over, right? There's just different strategies for protecting yourself. That's it. And then you can appreciate them. And even even a suicidal part is met with like, OK, curiosity, tell me about what you're hoping to do. Well, I want to stop the pain. Great. You want to stop the pain. Right. And then then then you can actually appreciate the part for its positive intention. Most people are very afraid of like a suicidal voice in their head. And we just meet it as like, yeah, you're trying to help out in a desperate situation. And what if there was a way we could help heal the deeper pain? Would you still want to commit suicide? No, of course not. So everything is held within this lens of everybody's trying to help in their own way. All these parts are trying to help. Even the darkest stuff isn't like pathology or a defense. It's just a part that took on a protective role. And it's doing best it can. How beautiful is that? What if we all walked around the world experiencing ourselves that way and other people that way? They're doing the best they can to try to keep themselves safe to take care of their vulnerability. Yeah, and accessing that radical curiosity. And I think back to when I was in practice and because I was specialized in helping women to come off of meds. So I think back to when I was in clinical practice and my specialty was in helping women to come off of medications and an experience of so-called suicidal ideation was, I mean, at any given time, it was probably 30% of my practice was verbalizing something to that extent. And when I look at the fact that I, you know, for a decade never had a negative outcome and never had anybody even go to the emergency room or anything along those lines, I can credit it to some containment that I was able to offer because I was simply curious. because I was able to hold my own freak out and to bring that energy of this is fundamentally not a problem. There's nothing to fix here. And I see that as being the energy of a great parts work therapist like yourself brings that embrace and approval, radical approval without the covert agenda to coerce any sort of outcome or any sort of prioritization even of one part over another. And it's kind of the only way, right, is to get all of these parts in the room, to give them all a seat at the table and to allow them to see each other, right? That's part of the goal is that they start to see that there are other parts with the same intention, but different means of achieving it. Yes. I love what you just said. Like there's no agenda. Like if we come even with a subtle agenda to change a part or bring in a different perspective, clients feel that and their parts push back. They want to be met with like, tell me what you're doing. I want to know you. And you can't fake it. You've got to be genuinely curious about parts of people and what role they're playing and then really appreciate and honor that, which is very easy to do because it's always something positive that they're trying to do, even if it's, you know, dressed up as something that's quite severe in traditional psychology. So that's what I love about it. It's so, so, so powerful. And you have brought parts work and internal family systems specifically to what I would describe as the deep end of the therapeutic pool with men that many would colloquially dismiss as narcissists, as men and their toxic masculine, as those who I am surprised even find themselves in a therapeutic setting at all. So it's like, how did they even end up in your room? Kind of a potentially even ambivalent patient about therapy itself. And you wrote a book about this. The book, is amazingly titled Be Less Dickish. I listened to it actually. And it is one of the most delightful books I have read. I cannot stop talking about it to all of my friends. And it's because everybody loves architects, right? It's like we love to feel like we can organize and sort these complex issues into meaningful categories. And what you have observed as a great therapist does is the patterns that underpin so much of the reprehensible, triggering, and in many ways, easy to pathologize behavior on the part of men. And I love this book because I'm really sick of the dehumanizing tropes around the narcissist, even though I am a passionate pattern recognizer, and I do see that there is, of course, a lot for us to learn from pattern recognition. There are nuances to the way that men who are struggling show up relationally, and you have really analyzed that in a way that not only helps us to sort of see what we're dealing with and recognize it, but also to have actual compassion, not hallmark level compassion, actual compassion for what might be possible if these men are in the right setting with the right kind of guidance and support to reconcile their parts and become self-aware and to develop choices where previously there weren't choices. I mean, in my psychiatric training, most of the, do you call them clients or patients? Clients? Okay. Most of the clients that you work with, we would have just put in the, you know, the personality disorder bin. Right. Access to, there they stay. Yeah. Exactly. And sort of left for, you know, left by the side of the road. And I also love about your parts work approach that, you know, as much as I'm curious about mother woundology and, you know, the way that emotional incest, for example, on the part of the mother sets men up for fears of being smothered for sort of like a big no to life. We don't really need to get into all that with parts work, right? We just need to go inside the present moment of what's actually happening in the human and turn the lights on. So I would love to kind of break down what you observed in terms of these archetypes and to talk a little bit about when it is that you started to recognize that there are different kinds of men showing up. They're all struggling and they're in fact triggering you. I mean, you were pretty disclosing about what they brought up in you, which of course is super relatable, and why you didn't say, you know, this guy's beyond, you know, beyond help, you know, seek another therapist, please, or this is not going to work out. And why instead you said, I'm going to, I'm going to study these men and I'm going to understand, you know, how to, how to kind of orient towards their habits of intimacy interfering behavior. So how did this, what's the genesis of this project, if you will? You know, people swear a lot in therapy. I think that they give, they have a lot of permission to be themselves. And so I would hear words a lot like, oh, guy's such an asshole. Or, you know, I heard these words a lot or, and like pussy, as much as that, I wish it wasn't the word. It is the word that shows up that men would use in my practice of like, oh, I didn't walk up to her. I'm such a, so I got, I've always been kind of interested in profanity because it's powerful. Like when someone would swear in my house growing up, it was like a big deal. So I've always been interested in profanity and I started getting groups of people together and I would say like, okay, when is a guy being an asshole? So there'd be 20, 20 of my people in my community. And we would talk about when is, when does a dick transfer into being an asshole? Right? Like, and so we would, and it was also really fun. We were laughing hysterically, finding these nuances of like, is ghosting like a dick move? Like what does the asshole do Why is that guy an asshole and not a dick This guy on television for example So I started doing research that way about these words have power right And everybody knows these words right And the four words I focused on are douchebag, pussy, asshole, and dick. And it started out with eight and then it got moved down to four. And I kind of told their story from a place of their different parts and their wounding and how the behaviors serve them and then how they can heal. And it became evident that like, I have these strategies too. Like I have an asshole strategy of being shameless and selfish and edgy. Like that's how I define an asshole. He's shameless. He's not aware of the impact he has on other people around him. And he's selfish. He's only considering his own needs. And at the same time, there are a lot of men that need at times to be shameless and selfish just to do what they need to do for them and not consider how it affects other people. So a whole world kind of emerged as I did this project for like seven years around exploring these extreme male archetypes and claiming them instead of people saying he's an asshole, which is what we do with these words. We project it like, hey, let's look at these. Let's own these. Let's face the worst in ourselves so we can become our best. Yeah, you say that many times in the book that it's in me too, right? Like we all maybe even have these, and I love how you refer to it as strategies, because the baked in-ness of a persona often feels immutable. It feels like, well, this is just sort of, you know, how I am. And in my personal journey, I still have a lot of the same know-it-all tendencies, for example, as a strategy. They're still there. And the only real shift after, I don't know, 15 years of inner labor is that I have little moments between the experience of a trigger and my behavioral expression, let's say. So if we all have these strategies inside, what was your intention in terms of like even man-woman dynamics? Because most of your profiles, let's say, clients in the book are men who are in relationships with women, I think. And this is something that women are collectively struggling with. How do I characterize? How do I narrate? How do I make sure that my experience of suffering and struggle with a man is validated in an understandable way by others who didn't necessarily experience it firsthand? I mean, this is most of social media, at least in my feeds, is consumed by women who are in their victim, sourcing some sort of collective condemnation of men who play these parts. And I want to go through at least one characterization, one of these profiles, to sort of demonstrate the arc. But what you show is that with enough time, time, like on the order of months, let's say, with enough time, there can be a shift. And the women in these men's lives can feel and enjoy that shift. And yet, I certainly am a believer that it's no woman's role to send a man to therapy. So you're really putting it out there just for the collective to know, you know, that this is a strategy, it's a response, And it's not necessarily like the essence of this person, right? Yeah, that was a big goal of my book is I wanted partners of these men to recognize the behavior so they can stay in their own center. So all these guys in their extreme, they'll get triggered and they'll spin out to what I call the perimeter. They're not in their healthy center. They're on the perimeter. And they have all these ways of trying to seduce you to come out on the perimeter and meet them on their own terms. All right. So the dick will come out and he'll want you to convince you that, you know, you victimized him in some way. You did him wrong. You need to understand that. And if you meet him out there under those conditions, when he's in that triggered part, you'll never get anywhere. So what I want people to be able to do is recognize behavior that is extreme or that isn't healthy and to say, hold on, I'm going to stay here. I'm not going to meet you in your version of your world and your events like pussy I'm not going to come out there and take care of you dick I'm not going to come out there and cuddle you and take responsibility douchebag I'm not going to join you in your sort of illusory sort of shameless version of yourself I'm going to stay here with what I know this is my experience so to keep your sender in the face of all these forces coming from men is what I want the reader to be able to do recognize that behavior Don't get spun out with them on the perimeter of their extreme behavior. And instead, hold your ground. Yeah, which is where we really appreciate the struggle of the codependent, right? Because if you yourself are regulated, if you yourself have the capacity, I call it not taking the bait, right? To not take the bait, then you won't collude in your role because it takes two, right? It takes two in these roles. And while these big caricatures are the seeming pathological role, the identified patient, quote unquote. When you engage and as you say, you know, you meet them at the perimeter. You are also playing a mirror, right? Like a mirroring role. And that's what you're suggesting is here. Here's how to to rupture the covenant. Right. Like here's how to discontinue this cycle. You have a part. Yeah. So the codependent role, and I think we're all a little codependent to some extent, like it's really hard to not. But when you feel that part of you like, I think he's mad at me, for example, I need to go make sure he's not mad at me. Did I do something? You know, that's a part. And then that would be your responsibility. Hold on to recognize that part of you and help her realize that her sense of safety and connection starts with you. That's a lot about what IFS is, is teaching people to keep their attention on their own parts so that part can actually soothe. Whereas if you blend with that part, this part will convince you, I need to make sure that he's okay with me. So that's the only way we can feel okay is if I know he's okay with me. Hold on. Hold on. That's the old story. Can you feel me with you right now? You start working with that part. You don't get pulled out into his world. You don't dance that dance anymore, but it starts with you going inside and recognizing your parts that are triggered in any relationship dynamic and starting with them. Yeah, which is, you know, it's sovereignty in in these relational lifescapes. And I think part of what's so. And it's hard to do. Yes, it's the hardest. There's a lot of people selling really easy solutions to complex problems. And that's not been my experience in 20 years being a psychotherapist. psychotherapy. Yes. Couldn't agree more. One of the delightful aspects of this book is the feeling that it's almost like reality TV or something, the feeling that you're watching, right? You're flying the wall watching inside the cave of therapy and you get to understand what it is that these men are thinking and feeling because a lot of the codependent strategy is to project It's almost like astral project yourself onto the man who you have in many ways outsourced your power to and to try to mind read and try to figure out like why he's doing what he's doing and what is he thinking and what's his reason. And so it satisfies that to be exposed to what actually is the motivation, what actually is the alibi, what actually is the perspective and the narrative shared to the therapist. And also to to see that it's really it's like not your business in the end. Right. Like it's it's for him to unpack. That's it. It's for you not to get pulled into, but offer him a place to me that's more in the center. But that does like that. All these guys are in my therapy office over a matter of months. So you really do get to have this voyeuristic perspective on as they unpack their trauma, as they hit rock bottom, like in the assholes case. Like what's really there? What gives rise to the behavior that drives you crazy about your man that gets revealed in this book? And the stand I take is you'll find some version of your guy in these four guys. So you'll recognize these patterns and it's not mysterious. It's not tragic. It's actually something that makes a lot of sense when you look at it through this lens. He's got a really intense protector part. The asshole learned to dominate. The douchebag learned to posture. The pussy learned to like be kind of harmless. You can see how those strategies would be useful in junior high school to avoid harm or to feel powerful. Right. These are all strategies that make sense. And once you can see what your partner's doing and what you're doing, wow, I'm doing something that just makes sense or it made sense at some point in the past, you can begin to unravel that strategy because you've probably outgrown it. That's true for all of us. You know, your know-it-all part, like you kind of cop to having a know-it-all part, like, hey, you're an MD, like you do know a lot, but you probably notice that when you're in that part, you're not feeling the quality of connection that you want, even though you might feel a quality of confidence. Yeah, absolutely. And it's coercive and requires the control of something outside of me. Right. So you're really willing to see that and know that. That's what you get. There's a coerciveness, but there's a power feeling I imagine you get from that. Yeah, absolutely. 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It's the only one available with published proof of its efficacy, as well as the path to truly embodying your femininity so that you can experience the specific pleasure of who you are, as well as access to the insider resources for living the relaxed woman lifestyle that I'm known for curating. It's a six-month tailored journey, all for less than $2,000, and it's designed to be the very last self-improvement program you ever invest in. Head over to kellybroganmd.com forward slash RWS. I'd love to go through these four. I also am kind of curious, what were the other four, if you remember? But I'd love to go through these four and just sort of give a couple of examples. you know it's obviously in in so much color and so much detail in the book but i i find it i find it fun you know to to to sort of start to paint the picture with a couple of examples and and maybe even a client trajectory sort of like how did it look when one presented in a seemingly impossible bind of like a shit show dumpster fire of his life and where did you get to, right? Like what are the goals that are realistic? So, okay. So the first one is the asshole. And it's pretty intuitive. Like you chose words that evoke something quite intuitive, but I still think it's worth nailing down exactly what the caricature of this archetype is meant to reference. So you alluded a little bit, but this is the man who. Think of the asshole as the guy, A classic asshole move is to just cut in a long line and just not give a shit. Most of us would be self-conscious when we're cutting in a line. And the asshole, he's shameless. He's not vulnerable to shame the way most of us are that keeps us in behaving ourselves socially. So he's shameless and he's selfish. I care about myself and I'm not impacted by my impact on other people. So he'll cut a line. Other people murmur. Other people even say anything. And he's kind of getting off on the impact he's having. So other people around him are feeling uncomfortable. People standing next to him are like, oh, God, this guy just cut. I can feel people behind me are pissed. And he's just kind of grinning at the chaos of it all. So that's kind of the classic asshole move. And in terms of like dating one, he just doesn't really register his impact on you. He's kind of oblivious in a way that gives him actually a lot of freedom. So in some ways, I talk about this in the book, people envy the asshole because most people are so self-conscious. They're not willing to kind of be big and go for what they want in their life because they're so afraid of. So a lot of the work I do with men is to help them learn to be more assertive, which is to help the expression that the asshole brings. Ultimately, it's like the gift is a lot of men. You know, we value that quality. Like Trump has a lot of that quality. He's shameless and wholly unaccountable. and he's having a big impact. I don't want to go down that rabbit hole, but yeah, that's your kind of classic asshole. And he's also really, really wounded. Like that's a really hard shell. So when someone with that quality comes in, it usually takes life cracking them open, like they're getting sued or they have to declare bankruptcy or they're losing their wife and their kids. It takes a lot to wake up a man in the extreme asshole archetype. And is there a sort of overlap, Venn diagram, between asshole and sociopath or antisocial, if you want to call it that? Or is that not even a relevant term? Like, can we just do away with that? Because we're really interested in these strategies and the foundational premise that they can evolve. Yeah. I mean, it's not having a conscious could be like a sociopath or psychopath would be considered shameless. But I wanted to get away from pathology when I was writing this book to just say, what are the behaviors? Yeah, I appreciate that so much. And he's selfish and he's aggressive. He does not consider other people. I love it. Actually, I don't, but I get it. There's power. There's an attraction to that kind of certainty. He knows exactly what he wants and it's nice to have an asshole on your team sometimes. There's a light side and a dark side to these strategies and probably a way to retain the farmer and transmute the latter. Yeah. You don't want to bring that home to your relationship, but sometimes at work, you need to be unapologetically selfish and shameless to succeed. So that's the asshole. That's Jonah in the book. Yes. Yes. And when you use the word selfish, because I've made an effort to rebrand that term a bit, I imagine you have to. You're talking a lot about sort of the objectification of others, right? The dehumanization of others and the focus on one's own needs. Right. Like making yourself the priority. That's how I define selfish myself and my co-author, Corey Kilpack, who wrote it with me. Yeah. Like, so we say, yeah, you're just prioritizing yourself and what you need and want. That's what it is to be selfish. So we want to reclaim it as well. Yeah. Right. Selfless as you're making someone else a priority. Right As a means of making yourself a priority It a means to it Right Right Right Okay so next is the pussy I forget if I asked you this I came across I think I literally saw this on social media or something Have you ever heard that maybe that term comes from the word pusillanimous? Do you know that word? It's like an old times word, and it means whatever, like weak, I suppose, or whatever. Anyways, it's a fascinating term because in a lot of my feminist moments, I took issue with using it as a derogatory term, etc. But regardless, and post my feminist moments now, it's an extremely powerful, evocative slur that men use. right and they use they use it to describe as you said like their own behavior and shortcomings and also other men but what you're what you're talking about um when a guy is in his pussy archetype is uh is in relation to his his professional life his personal life he expresses himself how i'm going to answer that in one second but i didn't want to use that word because i was afraid i was i was being a pussy about using afraid of the feminists Yeah, for sure. Good reason to be a part of them. Yeah, and I tried to use other words, but that is the word. That is the word that showed up. And we have to be honest about what that word is. And we're using it in a really deliberate way as a man that can be kind of effeminate and submissive and deferential. So this is the guy who in the partnership just always wants his partner to decide where we're going to dinner because he doesn't want to say anything that might have like he's always walking on eggshells. What do you think? I'll have what you're having. Yeah. He learned to stay safe by being really small or not existing or not bringing himself forward. So that's the kind of the childhood adaptation of the pussy. And it shows up. And a lot of women at first are like, oh, my God, this man's so considerate. He's so caring. He always asked me what I want to do. But at a certain point, they're like they want something to push up against. And that's where this archetype runs into trouble, because you want to be with a man that you can feel that has opinions and who exists fully. But this guy learned that's too threatening. It's too activating to his nervous system. So he is what we call selfless. His attention is on other people all the time. And he's very conscientious of what other people are thinking and feeling. So you can see he's not in himself. He's in other people. And he's conscientious about how they're doing. So his work is to learn to be more assertive and to find his center instead of just sort of crumbling as a way to not be attacked or not be judged. And so what does his life look like? As if I don't know, what does his life look like? You know, because in his relationship, he has a bitter, hardened, resentful partner who's nagging and micromanaging and disappointed all the time, right? So he's being henpecked in that way. And then professionally, what typically is going on for this guy? Yeah, like he ends up in a position where it's very predictable and reliable, the role he's supposed to play, low conflict, just don't rock the boat, like bureaucracy has a lot of roles for people like him. And he's not a bad guy. Like he is in it for the team. You know what I mean? Like he, there's a lot that he brings to the table that doesn't get appreciated, which the book goes into, like all these extreme parts have a gift. But like, yeah, he's showing up to work, doing jobs. Maybe not everyone wants to do like not complaining, just trying to be a good guy. But the problem is he's kind of empty inside. He's like kind of man defeated as he moves through the water. And you kind of see that man when he's walking by, like he can't really he's not really existing in himself. You can't really remember his face. He doesn't have like he's just not occupying space. He's just living, trying not to have anyone be upset with him. So there is a kind of a heavy energy, kind of a defeated energy with that guy. And he does try to drive his partner crazy. And it's not sexy, like it's not hot. So he's he's not he's not really getting his needs met, but he's too afraid to stand up, get his needs met because it might trigger his partner and then she'll go away. And that's his biggest fear. So he's kind of caught. in this pretty hellish realm because he's afraid. So he needs to do the deep healing work to help his little boy realize it's okay to be powerful now. You needed to do that in your childhood for some reason, but you don't need to do it now, which is what I hope a lot of clients do is come into being more assertive and realizing it's okay now. Your partner wants that. Yeah, and I'm just thinking about when we make contact in parts work with these exiles, as they're called, with these child parts. Again, part of what I love about this work is that I personally don't have a ton of recall or a huge bank of childhood memories to draw from. And so a lot of different kinds of trauma-based modalities were very stressful for me, actually, because I felt in a performative moment where I would have to come up with a memory and one wouldn't be available. And while often there is a prompt, right? Like for like, where do you, where do you see this part or how old is this part? What I have found is that there's, um, it's the same in family constellation. It's almost like the field for lack of a better word, like the energetic field of that container allows for these little insights. So, you know, these, little bits of intuition to come to the fore, and you're just literally reflecting what a part is holding. You're not digging through some sort of box of memories to come up with the thing that seems related to what you're feeling. There's something quite magical about it. And IFS, we call that capital S self, like right below the surface of all these parts and internal conflict is this field that self and it's the same self in me that's in you like there's a lot in all the great spiritual traditions that kind of shine a light on this and that's what our parts need to feel that there's actually this larger thing holding them it's so itself that does the healing which is what you're saying we just need to open it up so they can feel and be recognized and accepted and there's a healing process that starts to happen yeah and unlocking of so much vital force energy that is really drained through the process of compartmentalization. We have these wounded little parts, like the pussy has this little boy that might have been bullied or dominated by his father, not accepted and being a sensitive kid. He learns not to exist is the best way for me to be overwhelmed. So these protectors have all these strategies to keep attention away from him. And then he learns to care about other people, right? And so all that started when the little boy was overwhelmed. So in this work, we appreciate all the strategies and we eventually get to the little boy and we connect him with self. And ultimately, we get him out of the past where he's still caught, which is what trauma is. Trauma is disconnection, kind of a frozen moment in time in the past or time. So then we can bring them into the current moment. That's kind of the full cycle of the healing path in IFS. So you want to go on? All right. The douchebag. oh the douchebag he was the one when I was writing I spent a lot of time like this like oh he was the hardest one for me wow that's fascinating I could go into that but I mean the frat guy gets away with it because he's young like you know his identity rests in the fraternity that he goes to or the college that he goes to like he identifies as Sigma Alpha Epsilon or whatever or You know, so you can't really feel him. He's just identified as these external things. And he does so shamelessly. So like the asshole, he's shameless. He shamelessly promotes himself. So like the tech douche, like works for Apple and he loves Apple and he just, you know, I'm cool because of what I'm associated with. Right. So he's always trying to sell something. This is who I am. And I want to convince you that I'm this amazing guy and then I'll feel like this amazing guy. But when you're talking with a douchebag, you're kind of like, whoa, I can't really feel this guy. I'm getting a lot of like hype and enthusiasm, but I can't find him, which makes him kind of tragic and absurd because you can feel that he's working really hard to be something. And you just want to kind of shake him and say, just be yourself, like just be you. But he can't because his wounding was he needed to be something to be loved and seen and who he was. No one was really curious about that. so that's the douchebag poor guy and why do you think he was the most difficult for you to be in the room with I think he's like like he's kind of he would be a shadow for me like I have a hard I'm kind of a truth guy I'm more of a dick which is why the book is called Be Less Dickish but there's something about that kind of personality that is so removed from himself and trying to sell himself that's just like ugh and I also I grew up in the deep south like Southern Louisiana. I think there was a lot of that identification. There was a lot of that quality of people. I couldn't really feel them. They were just like, they just go team. So there was something missing, I think, of desire for genuine connection. And the douchebag, there's no real genuine connection. You just get the character he's trying to sell you the whole time. So he's very frustrating. There's no real connection happening. It strikes me almost as the shadow of a kind of tribalism too, right? Because you're identifying with this externalized metric of status. And there's obviously that's natural in organized human society. And when you take it down to the personal level, in lieu of any authentic dimensions of yourself, it feels disorienting. Yeah, but it's fun. It's like, I love going to LSU football games when I'm back in Baton Rouge where I grew up and like being a part of a crowd, cheering for a team. Like it's amazing being a part of something. That's a human evolutionary need to be part of the tribe. You get cast out of the tribe, you're going to get killed. But if you lose yourself in that, that's extreme expression is the douchebag. And so you, this is so funny because I can't really imagine this strategy being employed by you, but you say that you're most identified with the dick. So what does that mean? Yeah, be less dickish. That's all I'm trying to do, Kelly. it's a noble effort yeah like the dick is kind of the contrarian like he um oh man i just i also i'm thinking about the character in the book like but the dick always feels like things aren't going the way he wants them to go like he's he's selfish like the asshole he's very aware of what he wants and needs and he's very conscientious about the ways that like the world or other people aren't meeting his expectations or being authentic, authentic enough. So he, he kind of champions himself as like the truth teller in a world that doesn't want truth. So he plays out that in a big way and kind of a, kind of a bit of the victim. Like, don't you see how, what, how you're acting me? So he's very aware of other people, but only insofar as how they're impacting him. Right. So there's a lot of blaming, right? Blaming finger pointing. Yeah, it's not my fault on that. So he doesn't really know how to be in a relationship in his extreme because he only just sees you as someone that's impacting me. So this is how you're impacting me, Kelly, and this is what you need to see. Like, so you exist insofar as you impact me. And then it's about that. so he's a little more nuanced to play out so he's very conscientious of other people but he's very selfishly oriented so he's the guy that's always feeling screwed victimized and then justified in his kind of bad behavior you did this to me so of course I didn't show up for our date because you said that thing earlier so it's always your fault see the asshole you don't even exist that's the big difference right your experience the dick you exist as someone that has fucked me over in some way. And I'm going to tell you about it. Yes, absolutely. The douchebag, I want to sell you on who I am. And then you'll think I'm amazing and I'll feel amazing. The pussy, I want you to kind of take care of me and be in control. So I'll feel safe. So all, you know, these get projected upon their partners, the role that you're cast in and you can't get cast in the role. If you fall into the role, you're fucked. You're just going to play out the same, the same thing, which a lot of women will recognize that, God, I've played out the same thing again and again. So I'm saying, see these patterns playing out. See how you're getting enrolled in their narrative based on their archetype. Don't do it. Yeah, when I was reading about the Dick caricature, I really recognized, I mean, so many, and I'm sure I have embodied this, so many of my activist colleagues, there's a lot in the true saying realm that invokes this. And it's the classical the classical victim triangle dilemma, right, where you experience yourself as the poor me, no fair. I hate this victim. You're pointing a finger at the villain. You're recruiting often, you know, people onto your team who are saviors or rescuers. But then you almost always just cycle right through to that villainy and you end up perpetrating from your victimhood, which is relative to the asshole who just owns his villainy. It's almost more insidious. It is actually more insidious because like the douchebag and the asshole, there's an unattunement, a lack of attunement to whomever it is that becomes the object. But it's really in this covert sort of mix of, you know, I'm innocent. And somehow you're experiencing this person as like quite a perpetrator. perpetrator dark it's a dark angle of the triangle for very astute yeah that's that's the dick to the t and nobody wants to be around righteous energy like it's hard to receive someone who's like you did a thing to me i'm justified in being a fucking dick to you because of what you did to me or in activism look what's happening so i get to act like this because you guys are super fucked up like you can't no one gets received in their kind of righteous part And again, there's the work again. Oh, that's the righteous part. It's protecting a more vulnerable part. Let me go to the vulnerable part. Then I can actually connect with my partner. Yeah. I mean, ask me how I know, right? I mean, in my years of activism, it took me so, so, so long and a good amount of a humbling amount of humility to get to the fear that was underneath and specifically fear of men and sort of the bad daddy, you know, projection, the negative animus. It took me a long time to see that that was beneath, you know, my righteousness, my insistence that, you know, the perpetrators pay and my entitlement to protect those anonymous victims out there who are vulnerable and helpless and dependent somehow on my information. it's uh this particular archetype i think really is uh pretty ubiquitous these days and certainly not you know relegated just to the man pile of human beings you were so articulate the way you said that like you were playing it out you were feeling the power of that like you you just played off this cycle but then it doesn't actually ever get anywhere like that's the painful part like no one can really receive you even if you even if you have science on your side if you come from that energy, no one's going to be able to receive you. And that's what we play out. And I've had a lot of activists in my practice, and that's the work we do. What's that part afraid will happen if it doesn't go out there and try to shift this in the world? And invariably, there'll be some part that will feel like they be alone forever or they be in pain forever When we try to externalize the deep inner healing it just doesn work I have so much compassion for that Yeah. It took me a long time to get there. I couldn't agree more. I couldn't agree more. And I imagine you got a lot more effective once you did the inner healing, like in changing the ways that you wanted to change. That's what I find is people are finally much more effective and received because they're not coming, they're not righteousness. Exactly. And it's the same. I even think about my mothering, you know, when you can offer a regulated or at least a relatively regulated system to those around you, to the world, honestly, to your kids, to your partner. There is nothing for you to get anyone to see. Right. It's like that whole experience of coercion and strategy and manipulation falls away again, because as you've said, this is where I want to move to. it's become an inner job, right? So when I recognize that my greatest gift to humanity would be to just sort out my own relationships and to focus on my own upset and to learn how to be with it with curiosity, yeah, I shifted. I matured probably to a great extent and my entire professional life shifted and started all of my relationships. So when you talk about this being an inner focus, an inner job. I wonder if you can depict for us maybe one example of the arc, because that was the most beautiful part of these clinical stories, these clients that you shared. And most of them obviously are an amalgamation of many clients who you were exposed to. And you did that so artfully because they feel so real and so vivified. It was very sweet and tender and inspiring to bear witness to the moments of shift, like what they actually look like when one of these archetypes has a breakthrough, sees, wow, I can still be me. I can still be alive and safe in the world and not do this same thing, which is the only thing I know how to do. So that sort of pixelation into the nihilistic realm of like, who the hell am I then? You really depict well. So I wonder, yeah, what does so-called healing look like? I love that you just brought in the identity piece. A lot of people don't know who they are. They're not playing out these patterns, which keeps people in the patterns because at least it's something known. So that's something we could talk about as well, spin off on that. But I talk about myself in my experience as the dick. And what I know about me is I was always kind of discontent like as a kid I was and when I was discontent like my mom kind of wanted to know how she could help when I was doing well I was just kind of on my own and so there was something that I learned about like attention like the discontent got attention like I was kind of more of a brooding type that was interesting to some types of women that you know they wanted to crack the code. And, but I felt somehow like I, you know, something wasn't right. Something was always off. And so I got the benefits of that. Like people were interested in me because they wanted to kind of understand me. And my healing has been like getting to exist without that. Like in this interview, for example, like that's not the guy that I'm with now is a very different way to face the world. Then I'm going to pull back and have my own little psychotherapy practice where I, you know, it's my world. I'm going to not engage in the outer world because it feels a little bit overwhelming to me. Like I talked to you about this, like ambivalence about having more of a public persona. And so for me, letting go of that, that kind of like, I don't like this, I don't like that, was really vulnerable to say, hey, I really like internal family systems parts work. I really think it can change the world. And to be a little douchey about it, feels ego dystonic. I think everyone should perceive reality through the lens of this model. And it's amazing. It's something I never would have said before. I would much more comfortable saying, this is what I don't like about the way things are. So I'm not going to play anymore. As opposed to me saying, hey, I'm ready to play. I think I have a better way and I'm going to tell you about it. So that's an example of integrating a different way of facing the world that's been my process this last decade. Yeah. So it's almost recruiting the gifts of these other archetypes. Yeah. And learning to be more shameless, like the asshole and like this thing that I think really matters. For example, I think this is something everyone should explore is this IFS model. I think it's brilliant. And to give you kind of a different answer, like for the example, you know, for the douchebag is his whole persona falls apart. People don't want to be friends with him anymore, except people who want to use him and take advantage of him. and he has to face the emptiness inside. He has to face the time where he decided, wow, I became a great tennis player or a great student because that's what made my parents happy or that's what I felt like I had to do. But really when I did that, I abandoned some core experience of myself as like an artist or like a free loving, like happy, you know, some other version got left behind. So the douchebag has to go back and reclaim that from the past. the part of him that got exiled out so he could be the thing society or his parents wanted him to be. He has to find himself. He has to heal that. And I imagine, like any hero's journey, you hold these clients through the dark night of the soul, right? Where there is, and you depict that in these stories, where there is that seemingly intolerable collapse, right? and then shortly thereafter it's okay it's somehow okay in a new vista yeah without the old strategy without the let's say the douchebag in his story he feels the dark night of the soul the emptiness the nothingness and the terror of that and yeah i'm gonna be right there with him in that fear and that's a beautiful part of the therapeutic relationship is i'm holding that hey i know that you're something more and it's almost here. And I'm going to be right here with you as you're continuing to shed the old that no longer serves because something's coming and it's going to be great. And I love playing that role. I can sense what it is that wants to come through this human that's been waiting as these other strategies have been dominant. And it's beautiful. It's inspiring. I love hearing you articulate that because I've often reflected and shared that the role that I played in clinical practice with women was, and it was never intentional. It was never even conscious. It was only in retrospect that I was able to appreciate like, what the hell was I actually doing there? You know, to support these outcomes that in other conditions might have been more difficult to achieve. And that is exactly what I came upon. It's like, I could see the woman in her grandeur in that moment, you know, which came into me on five meds, you know, just out of State Hospital or whatever, I could see her in her grandeur and almost like insist on it, right? Like insist that this is real. And I love that you're sharing that because you can feel that even in your persistence with these clients that so many would say, fuck this, you know, like this is just not, it's not a fit, you know, it's not for me. I have a sense of like, hey, we're going to do this. It's going to be really hard and scary at times, but it's going to be really fucking interesting and fun and alive. That's how I hold the therapeutic and coaching process. Get on this ride. It's a good ride. I love that. And this is such a great counterpoint. I mean, we're not explicitly talking about diagnostic labels or narcissistic personality disorder, but I have had Sam Vaknin on the show in the past speaking about the subject. And he feels pretty strongly from what he verbalized that they cannot change, you know, that these men cannot change. And obviously that's not a world I want to live in. And I do appreciate, you know, his personal and professional experience, of course, but I would prefer to enjoy the arc, you know, the hero's journey and to believe that there are shifts and your depictions of these, these characters really inspires that. I think it gives anyone reading the opportunity to feel like, yes, we all can become, you know, we all can become. And you just got to want to. I don't know. What do you think the ingredient is? Be willing to? No, no. I mean, I think part of it is just grace that some people get curious and they move towards kind of an awakening path, like getting curious about their parts. And then through that, they get curious about this larger field. I don't know why some men do and some don't. Like karma is a pretty good explanation. Like my co-author, who I just love, he insisted, and this was a point of a contention for us, that, hey, there's some guy that never changes and he's the piece of shit. And he does get a couple of chapters in the book. And I was so uncomfortable with this idea that some men were unredeemable. And I still think I am uncomfortable with that section. And he said, listen, and he grew up in a much more kind of rough environment than I did in a lot of ways. He's like, these men exist and they need to be named. So I think that's and I think that's probably true, like extreme pathology. And I think there's even some sort of neural stuff that happens around psychopaths where there's no empathy. What what is change possible if there's no awareness of a compassionate ability to be with our own experience and other people's experience? I don't fuck. I don't know, Kelly. Maybe it's just that it feels important maybe even to soften the attachment that maybe folks like you and I might even have to that redemption moment to say, yeah, and some people choose not to. And that's totally fucking okay. Some people are watching a different movie. And I'm not trying to change. I used to want to change everybody. But like, yeah, everyone gets to have their own ride. And you mentioned the word redemption. That's a big theme in IFS as well. is so many people's parts are playing out. I'm going to redeem some painful experience when I was a kid where I got bullied by being really strong and successful. I'm going to redeem something by proving something when I get older. So a lot of the work we do with parts that are seeking redemption, which is very interesting. The theme of redemption runs through Christianity and we're born in sin. There's so much in the psychology of these parts that come online as we grow. and the imitation is, hey, get curious about those parts. They're all trying to help you in some way. It's better than any reality TV show you'll ever watch because it's your experience. It's your life, moment to moment being experienced. Like what's cooler than that? So I'm always amazed that people aren't paying attention because we're fascinating in the way that we bumble through being a human and that other people do too. And I want us to just be collectively, kind of like you are, you're able to name like, oh yeah, I played out the dick thing as an activist. And I was like, oh, I played it out this way. And like, this is these are the conversations that to me are really rich because they're real. Like, hey, this is this is what is happening over here. What's happening over there? What was threatening maybe gets rebranded as interesting, you know, and fun even. Yeah. Like when I feel like a guy with really intense energy, like, yeah, he's really holding down that kind of like power dominant thing. I'm going to steer clear of it most likely because I don't want to engage in that energy. But like, oh, yeah, I see what he's holding down. I see what he's doing. Yeah, that's his that's that's how he's dancing. So I want to close out with this question because you you touch on it towards the end of the book. And I thought it was so beautiful and really anchors a lot of what we've come to in this conversation around the existential depth of what we're dealing with here. And you talk about the difference between surrender and submission and specifically the role of surrender as a comportment maybe towards reality for these men. And I'd love to just close on that because I think it's quite important. Yeah, I've thought about that a lot. You know, surrender is to what is. Byron Katie frames it. You mentioned earlier is like when you argue with reality, you lose only 100 percent of the time is kind of a famous quote from her. And I see surrender that way. Like what's actually happening in the moment, like before you go into dick mode or pussy strategies or asshole dominance or douchebag showmanship? What is actually happening? And if you can surrender to that moment, okay, I'm getting like, my chest is getting a little tight. I'm getting a little contraction. My breath is getting shallow. Like, okay, I'm telling myself a story that like, I need to be different than I am right now. Like, I just want people to surrender to the thing that's just actually happening because that's the thing that's always happening. So surrender is just like surrender to reality as it is, not the layers that you put on top of it to create the dramas that lead to these extreme archetypes. but just to what is and be curious about what is not what we wish was or what we think they're doing or what should be just what is in this moment what's happening in this nervous system what are the different parts in my mind that are telling stories right now and to come into relationship to that that's all it is bring your curiosity here as opposed to out there you don't need to play out these strategies to get by in the world anymore get curious get curious about other people. That's what I want. Then magic happens. Connection happens. Then you just get to be you and I get to be me. And then we get to come together and see what happens. And that's just my favorite thing. That's what I want for people. Yeah. And I imagine that many would hear the word surrender, let alone submission, in the context of men and how they relate to the world and see it as like a confusing juxtaposition of, you know, hierarchical ideas. And, you know, what I hear you saying is that it simply means you have a yes, right? You approve of what actually is. You're coming to it without a fight. And perhaps you're understanding that you're not necessarily the one who's directing the entire show for everybody at this moment. Right. Yeah. We don't have nearly the control we think or we wish we had. At the end of the journey, there's an ecstasy, which I imagine you experienced it, where you're like, wow, this whole Kelly story that I've been playing out, this whole David story, there's nothing solid about it. It's just been this dance and there's something larger. So there's a beautiful dimension to that as well. And submissiveness, like that is kind of the pussy strategy. But that's, yeah, that's very different than surrender. Surrender is amazing. Surrender to what's happening. Well, thank you, David. This is so fun. And it's so, so colors a very like desiccated and drab field of discussion when it comes to what men are up to in the world. And I so appreciate knowing that you're out there doing this very sacred work and that you can also laugh about it and render, you know, what it is that you're appreciating and learning for others. It's really, really beautiful. Thank you. Yeah. My last shout out would be that like, hey, it's really rich. Like get curious and it's a really rich journey. Like most people think like I'm fine the way that I am. Like just open to see what you find when you get curious about your internal world and your different parts. And see where it takes you. Why not? Amazing. Thank you. Kelly, thank you so much. You were amazing. Bye-bye.