The Shadow You've Been Hiding From: Connor Beaton on Shame, Anger, and Men's Work | MTM AI Read Short

About this episode

Will Schneider interviews Connor Beaton about shadow work and its impact on men's mental health.

Text A2A to 33777 to stay in the know about our upcoming Awareness to Action Course! Carl Jung said that when a man deals with his own shadow, he does something real for the world. On this episode of Men Talking Mindfulness, host Will Schneider sits down with Connor Beaton, founder of Man Talks and author of Men's Work, to get into what shadow work actually looks like for men and why most of us have been trained since childhood to avoid it. Connor explains why men tend to carry a denser shadow than women. Masculine culture teaches strength through suppression. Stuff it down, hide the weakness, perform. The result is that the parts of yourself you've rejected... anger, vulnerability, self-compassion... don't go away. They go underground. And they start running the show from there. Connor walks Will through the mechanics of how anger gets repressed and creates the nice guy pattern, how shame gets used on boys to gain compliance and then keeps grown men living small, and what he calls shame-based motivation... using pain as fuel to achieve, which works until it doesn't. Connor shares his own story of bottoming out in his late twenties, living in the back of a Pontiac G5…

People in this episode

Host: Will Schneider

Guest: Connor Beaton

Topics covered

• shadow work
• men's mental health
• shame
• anger
• masculine culture
• self-compassion

Keywords

• shadow work
• men's work
• shame
• anger
• masculine culture
• self-compassion
• mental health

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Man Talks

Books & works: Men's Work

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