“Boys aren’t raised to be men, they are simply raised not to be girls.”

That sentence has been sitting with me because the more I think about it the more I realise that she’s identified something we’ve been doing for generations without ever really naming it.

I have a son and a daughter and I also have the discomfort of being able to look back at the boy I was and the man I became as a result of what I was taught growing up in the 1970s and 80s in northern England.

I was taught not to cry like a girl, don’t be such a girl, not to throw like a girl, just man up and grow a pair and there was nothing subtle about any of it. The message was explicit and absolute: whatever you do and under no circumstances must you ever become like a girl because becoming like a girl takes you further away from the man you’re supposed to grow up to and aspire to become.

Here’s what I know about that now: boys aren’t less emotional than girls. Boys learn very early that many of the emotions we experience aren’t acceptable to show. Sadness, fear, uncertainty, asking for help, vulnerability, insecurity, needing reassurance, handling rejection, feeling hurt or crying were all there, it was just that we learned they shouldn’t be.

When an adult tells a little boy that “boys don’t cry”, the crying doesn’t stop because the sadness hasn’t disappeared. When we tell him to “man up” because he’s frightened, the fear doesn’t disappear. He just learns not to show it and develops unhealthy coping methods that generally revolve around suppression.

When his first girlfriend rejects him and his mates tell him to get over it, the rejection still hurts. He’s still feeling every one of those completely natural emotions, only now he’s also learning that he shouldn’t be and that if he does, everyone will think there’s something wrong with him.

So he suppresses it, he bottles it, he pushes it down and makes sure nobody else can ever see it…and we call that strength. We call remarkably emotionless men strong, consistent, a safe pair of hands and leaders, all complimentary and all reinforcing the very behaviours that so often restrict emotional development.

We haven’t taught him how not to feel the emotion because that is impossible and the fact that he continues to feel it is all the evidence we should ever need that these emotions are completely natural.

What we’ve actually taught him is that he shouldn’t feel these emotions whilst doing nothing to teach him how to understand, experience and express them safely.

The emotions remain but now he believes he’s wrong for feeling them. He feels frightened but believes he shouldn’t be. He feels hurt but believes showing hurt makes him weak. He feels insecure but has been taught that a man should be confident. He feels rejected but has no idea what to do with the pain.

That isn’t teaching emotional regulation, it’s teaching emotional dysregulation and it’s being created right in front of us, so we should hardly be surprised when some of those boys grow into men who have absolutely no idea what to do with powerful emotions when they arrive.

I know this because I became one of those men. I could suppress or bottle any emotion instantly whilst appearing to remain calm and centred to anyone watching. I was completely incapable of identifying what was actually going on inside me at the time because I would never spend enough time in the uncomfortable emotion to do so.

I didn’t recognise myself as frightened, insecure, ashamed or vulnerable because those weren’t emotions I had learned how to understand, identify or own. Instead I would become angry, defensive, certain, frustrated or controlling. I could withdraw, project and become distant, could appear aloof and arrogant and at times like I didn’t care, even though none of those things would have been true at the time.

I needed to prove I was right and make whatever I was feeling somebody else’s fault. It took me years to understand what was actually sitting underneath those behaviours and by then the women I loved had experienced the consequences of me not knowing.

All of which brings me back to Jameela because something else I came across recently suddenly made what she was saying land considerably harder.

There’s a piece by the brilliant Harry Kloser-Pitcher, who goes by @shesnotcrazyseries on Instagram, that talks about what a woman’s body actually goes through during childbirth. The pain index that scientists created to measure the scale of pain different operations and injuries have, puts breaking 20 bones all at once at 43. At around 45, the human body is designed to lose consciousness to protect itself.

Childbirth comes in at 57. Her body should shut down yet it doesn’t. She stays conscious and she keeps pushing.

Then the baby comes and her hormones drop by 90% within 72 hours. That’s the biggest hormonal crash a human body survives. To put it in context, for a man to lose that much testosterone at our normal rate would take about 180 years. She experiences that in three days. Then she doesn’t sleep a full night for at least eight months. Eight months of no sleep, feeding the baby every two hours, day and night, from a body that’s torn and leaking and running on a fraction of its chemistry whilst also rebuilding her entire sense of who she is.

A woman will do this on average more than twice during her lifetime, which means she knows exactly what it involves and chooses to do the whole thing again, yet we call women ‘the weaker sex’ somehow.

That was when something else in what Jameela was saying started to land with me because women have lived under patriarchy for somewhere between six and ten thousand years and as she so eloquently puts it; “if they haven’t submitted by now they’re probably not going to”.

Women have been denied education, denied the vote, prevented from owning property, prevented from earning their own money, denied control over their own bodies, married off as children and silenced when they became inconvenient. Yet they kept pushing.

Jameela’s argument is that there is fear behind this suppression and I think she’s right, which rather begs the question that if women really are the ‘weaker sex’:

Why have men spent thousands of years putting so much effort into controlling them?

Why prevent somebody from being educated if you aren’t frightened of what she might do with that education? Why prevent her voting if her voice doesn’t matter? Why prevent her earning and controlling her own money if her independence isn’t threatening? Why silence older women with experience and influence if what they have to say has no power?

We don’t spend thousands of years suppressing something because we believe it is powerless. We suppress it because we fear what might happen if we don’t.

What I hadn’t connected until now is that these aren’t really two different ideas at all. “Women are the weaker sex” and “Don’t be such a girl” are two of the most common phrases I’ve heard throughout my life and indeed said for much of it. One tells us what women supposedly are and the other takes exactly that belief and teaches boys what men must never become.

The damage travels in both directions because girls grow up hearing that being female means being lesser whilst boys grow up hearing that anything associated with girls takes them further away from the man they’re expected to become.

We even managed to carry it into sex. For generations a girl’s virginity was something precious she protected and eventually gave to the right man while boys were encouraged to lose theirs and gained status amongst other boys by doing so. She gives her body and he gets kudos for doing so, she loses something and he gains something. Then we wonder where male sexual entitlement starts.

What I keep coming back to though, because this is where I start to see the real consequence of all of this, is what we teach girls about keeping themselves safe around boys and men. We teach them where to put their keys between their fingers, how to hold their drinks, where not to walk, how to get out of a grip, how to recognise controlling behaviour, how to say no safely, how to leave safely and what to do if a man attacks them and then we call all of that keeping girls safe.

Half a century later we’re still teaching another generation of girls how to protect themselves from or fight off men. Yet where is the equivalent urgency around teaching boys how to handle rejection, jealousy, anger, entitlement, insecurity and hearing no? Where are the conversations about consent, control, intimidation and what happens when their difficult feelings start becoming somebody else’s problem?

At what point do we decide that teaching girls increasingly sophisticated ways to protect themselves from male behaviour isn’t remotely enough? Fifty years after my generation of girls were taught how to protect themselves from boys, we’re teaching their daughters how to protect themselves from our sons.

Surely keeping girls safe has to include raising boys they don’t need protecting from in the first place?

We’ve spent generations doing something else that strikes me as particularly destructive. We’ve taught women how to manage male discomfort rather than teaching men how to actually recognise it, experience it, be safe in it and express it safely. Rejection, embarrassment, being wrong, hearing no, being challenged, feeling insecure or not getting what you want are not emergencies and none of them require a woman to make herself smaller, quieter or more accommodating so that we don’t have to feel them.

Learning to sit with uncomfortable feelings isn’t something women need to do for us. It’s part of becoming an emotionally grown man and there is an extraordinary irony in the fact that we’ve spent generations calling women the emotional sex whilst simultaneously expecting them to become experts at managing the emotions men were taught not to recognise in themselves.

I’ve watched this happen repeatedly. Highly capable, emotionally intelligent women who have become extraordinarily skilled at understanding, managing, soothing, explaining and adapting around male behaviour whilst slowly disappearing inside the process themselves. Women who can articulate every unhealthy dynamic in extraordinary detail and yet still feel emotionally responsible for fixing, carrying or redeeming the very men who are hurting or limiting them.

The tragedy is the number of women who have spent years directing those extraordinary gifts towards managing fragile and insecure men rather than themselves, their ideas, their ambitions and everything else they might have done with all that energy. Imagine what we might have gained if all of that intelligence, perception, awareness, brilliance and emotional capacity had been available to women themselves rather than so much of it being required simply to navigate the men around them.

Now, I’ve written before that I don’t believe we’re experiencing a gender war because women gaining freedom, independence and confidence and saying “I’m not accepting this anymore” is not an attack on men.

Losing the freedom to control somebody isn’t being done to. Being controlled is.

The same applies here because women gaining power and freedom doesn’t weaken men. Boys learning to understand and express their emotions doesn’t weaken masculinity. Men learning from qualities historically associated with women doesn’t make us less male and women don’t become more brilliant by demonstrating that they can do everything men can do.

I look at my son and daughter and I know we’ve been asking the wrong question. It isn’t which of them is stronger, it’s what becomes possible when neither of them needs the other to be smaller or weaker and when they both support, enable and celebrate the others’ success.

For generations we’ve behaved as though one of us needed to be less so the other could be more. It undoubtedly made life easier for generations of men but it was also an extraordinary waste of half the human race and it hasn’t exactly done wonders for the half supposedly benefiting from it either.

In many ways the Patriarchy has operated as though 1 + 0 = 1. Men were the whole and women were expected to become whatever was required around us; supportive enough, accommodating enough, quiet enough or small enough not to threaten the equation. We didn’t add what women brought to what men brought and ask what might become possible together, we simply made men the benchmark and then measured women by how successfully they could operate within a world largely designed around us.

Perhaps that’s the greatest waste of all because I equally don’t believe equality was ever supposed to mean turning 1 + 0 into 1 + 1 = 2 but then carrying on exactly as before. For me, the opportunity is what happens when two whole people, with different strengths, perspectives, experiences and ways of seeing the world, genuinely amplify what the other brings because then we can achieve 1 + 1 = 11, which always looks so much more impactful when written rather than spoken, it is the Art of the Possible!

I don’t want my daughter growing up believing she can be as good as a man. What an incredibly limiting ambition to give a woman.

I want her to discover everything she is capable of being, including qualities, strengths and ways of seeing and experiencing the world that generations of male dominated societies have undervalued precisely because they weren’t male.

Neither do I want my son growing up believing that becoming a man requires him to distance himself from anything associated with women. I don’t want him to believe that crying makes him weak, vulnerability makes him less masculine, asking for help means he’s failing, being frightened is shameful or being compared to a woman is an insult. I want him to become a secure man who can experience the full range of being human and still know absolutely that he is a man.

This is where I believe we’ve got this so badly wrong. We taught boys that women were weaker and then used women as the example of everything they must avoid becoming in order to grow into strong men. We taught boys to suppress the very emotions they needed to understand in order to become emotionally secure men and then taught girls how to recognise, manage and protect themselves from what some of those boys became.

Fifty years later we’re still doing it.

We’re still teaching girls how to protect their drinks rather than putting the same energy into teaching boys why consent matters. We’re still teaching girls how to leave safely rather than teaching boys that rejection isn’t humiliation. We’re still teaching women how to soften difficult conversations rather than teaching men how to hear uncomfortable truths and we’re still telling boys not to behave like girls whilst wondering why some of those boys eventually grow into men who experience women as something beneath them, something to control, something to compete with or something that threatens who they believe themselves to be.

I don’t want either of my children growing up inside that lie.

It’s time we stopped raising boys not to be girls and started raising them to become secure, emotionally intelligent men whilst allowing girls to become everything women were always capable of becoming.

Neither needs to lose for the other to win and neither needs to become smaller for the other to grow and so then…

1 + 1 = 11.

Ashley writes about the gender pain gap and her own experience of childbirth but what really stopped me was the history she gives of women having their pain, distress and experiences dismissed by the very people who were supposed to be helping them, invariably men in general and male doctors in particular.

Men who were and are physically incapable of experiencing what the woman in front of them was experiencing but nevertheless feeling perfectly qualified to decide whether she was experiencing it correctly, whether she was overreacting, whether she was irrational, too emotional or, of course, if she was being hysterical.

The word hysteria, I learned, comes from the Greek word hystera, meaning uterus. For centuries female hysteria was considered a legitimate medical diagnosis and this wasn’t some wonderfully ridiculous idea that disappeared with bloodletting and Victorian gentlemen wearing enormous moustaches. Hysteria remained in psychiatric diagnostic language up to 1980!

Women could be labelled hysterical for an extraordinary range of reasons and the successful outcome of treatment seemed remarkably consistent: the troublesome woman became less troublesome, quieter, more submissive, less emotional and less likely to complain.

Which left me thinking about a question that will probably sound outrageous to all women reading this.

Who gets to decide whether a woman’s experience is real?

The answer of course is her and because it’s real, she’s experiencing it. The considerably more uncomfortable question for me is why on earth, in 2026, am I still asking the question?

The answer of course is her and because it’s real, she’s experiencing it. The considerably more uncomfortable question for me is why on earth, in 2026, am I still asking the question?

When I stopped looking at this as some dreadful piece of history and started looking at myself, I recognised considerably more of it than I would have liked to. As I have written before, one of the reasons I am reading Bimbo is that Ashley’s experiences of men keep triggering memories of the boy and man I used to be and the man I am still working with and on.

I am looking at those memories now with what I understand today, partly because I think it might help women understand some of the behaviour they’ve experienced and also because I think men need other men to talk openly about how this stuff actually works inside us.

Looking back, when a female friend or partner told me she was unhappy about something I had done, I didn’t naturally become curious about what she was experiencing. Instead, I assessed whether her reaction was reasonable. Just sit with the arrogance of that for a moment. She was telling me what she was experiencing and I was deciding whether she was entitled to experience it or not and I thought nothing of that at the time.

I can also pretty much guarantee that if accepting her version of events meant facing something uncomfortable about myself, I could find a reason why her reaction wasn’t entirely reasonable.

As a man brought up in the Patriarchy, I was brought up with so many ways to dismiss an emotional woman or one confronting me with something uncomfortable. Surely she was overreacting, she was taking it too personally, she’d misunderstood what I meant, she was reading too much into it, she was being too sensitive, she was being overly emotional, she was hormonal or she was thinking too about it too much.

My particular favourite go to as a younger man was this: “That’s not what I said.” This was so effective and useful because now we’re no longer discussing the impact of what I did, we’re discussing whether she’s interpreted me correctly and I get to remain the reasonable one and she gets to start questioning her own experience. How extraordinarily convenient for me.

I never consciously thought; ‘I’m going to undermine this woman’s confidence in what she’s experiencing because that will protect my fragile male ego.’ Of course I didn’t, that would have been far too obvious.

Patriarchal conditioning is considerably cleverer than that. It doesn’t announce itself as: I’m going to oppress a woman now. It sounds much more reasonable and is far more likely to whisper: She’s overreacting, she’s taking this too personally, that’s not what I meant, why can’t she just let it go, I’ve already apologised, she’s getting emotional for no reason, nothing I say makes her happy or there’s nothing I can do.

One I now regard as an enormous red flag is:

“I’m not discussing this with you while you’re like this.”

I used versions of that too. I thought I was being calm and rational but what I was actually saying was that I would only listen to what she needed me to hear once she had removed enough of her emotion to make hearing it comfortable for me.

Yet what if her anger was partly there because she’d already tried telling me five times? Well, that would be even better because then the anger could become the problem rather than the thing she was angry about. I could dismiss the anger, criticise the way she was speaking to me or withdraw from the conversation and never have to get anywhere near the inconvenient truth underneath it.

The really interesting thing is that when we as men do this, it often doesn’t feel like dismissal to us, it feels like we’re being rational. That’s something I think men need to understand.

We’ve had centuries of teaching men that we’re the rational sex and women are the emotional one. That men think logically, women feel; men remain calm, women become hysterical. It’s nonsense, obviously but those ideas don’t disappear simply because we’ve stopped saying them quite so openly. They sit underneath things and I can see them underneath my behaviour as a younger man and still some of them today.

If a woman I loved became upset, I wanted to calm her down as I thought that was helping. Sometimes I undoubtedly did help and sometimes comforting somebody you love is exactly what they need in the moment.

However, looking back, I can also see something considerably less flattering going on, her no longer being upset made me feel better. If I could calm her, fix the problem, explain what I meant or persuade her that things weren’t quite as bad as she thought they were, then the uncomfortable emotion disappeared and crucially, I didn’t have to sit in it long enough to discover whether any of it belonged to me.

That’s not really so different from the ancient idea that successful treatment of a troublesome woman meant that she stopped being troublesome. Obviously the methods and consequences don’t remotely compare but the underlying instinct interests me enormously.

Why is our first response so often to ignore and stop the woman feeling what she’s feeling rather than understand why she’s feeling it?

This becomes particularly destructive in relationships because eventually something completely predictable happens, she either stops telling you or she leaves. Interestingly, the insecure man can actually experience the former as progress. There aren’t as many arguments anymore, she isn’t complaining as much, she seems to have finally let things go and the relationship feels easier. Brilliant. Except she hasn’t necessarily become happier, she’s just learned that there’s no point talking to you about it.

The man actually thinks that he has improved the relationship through his rational and logical behaviour and handling of the situation yet I can confirm with 100% accuracy that he hasn’t, he’s simply put another nail in its coffin.

What I have learned over the years is that as a man, all I’ve ever really wanted is to feel loved and wanted and I have been both of those things and I have had both of those things for much of my adult life with wonderful, amazing and deeply loving women. I have also sabotaged pretty much every single one of those relationships because whilst I was always on a journey to grow and develop, my own insecurities would never let me hear any feedback about my behaviour and its impact.

I desperately wanted the relationship to become deeper whilst repeatedly defending myself against the very conversations that would almost certainly have deepened it.

That’s the tragedy in this for men. The woman standing in front of you saying, “This is hurting me”, isn’t necessarily an attack on you. She is almost certainly giving you incredibly valuable information about how to remain close to her. She’s telling you what she needs, she’s telling you what is happening inside her, she’s telling you how your behaviour affects her and she’s telling you something about yourself that you may genuinely not be able to see.

She’s also probably telling you because she still loves you and desperately wants the relationship to work.

Yet we defend ourselves against it; we explain, correct, minimise, withdraw, tell her what we really meant, tell her why she’s misunderstood, tell her she’s making too much of it or tell her we’ll discuss it when she’s calmer. So she eventually just stops and/or she eventually leaves and the man has no idea why and there’s the tragedy because very probably, if not always, if only he’d been able to listen, she had given him everything he ever needed to know to grow that relationship in line with both of their desires.

So if you’re a man reading this, I think Ashley’s chapter leaves us with a couple of questions that have almost nothing to do with childbirth or medicine and everything to do with us.

1. How much of the ancient patriarchal belief that men are rational and women are emotional is still alive and well inside us?

2. When a woman tells us something is wrong, are we listening to understand what she is experiencing or listening for the evidence we need to explain why she’s wrong?

There is an enormous difference and I wish I’d understood it much earlier.

Being able to sit in front of somebody we love while she tells us something about ourselves that we really don’t want to hear isn’t weakness. We don’t become less of a man because we were wrong. We don’t become less worthy because something we did hurt somebody. We don’t become less lovable because there are still parts of us that need work and we don’t protect a relationship by protecting ourselves from everything our partner is desperately trying to tell us.

Quite the opposite in fact.

Very often our greatest opportunity to grow, to deepen and to become genuinely happy in ourselves and in our relationships comes in the form of the deeply wonderful and loving woman standing in front of us trying everything she can to tell us about it and to tell us what we need to do in order to deepen that relationship.

So perhaps it’s time we stopped deciding whether she’s entitled to feel whatever it is that she’s feeling and started just listening because:

…the happiness so many of us as men say we want might actually be standing right in front of us, trying desperately to help us have it.

“Of course.”

I meant it too. I wanted a better relationship, better communication, less conflict, more closeness. I genuinely believed I was trying.

So why was I making it so difficult for the woman I loved to tell me the truth?

That question has stayed with me ever since I began trying to understand my own behaviour. Over the last two articles I’ve explored why so many women rehearse difficult conversations before they ever have them and why feedback can feel like criticism to the man hearing it. Both led me to the same place: it wasn’t the communication, it was identity.

I no longer believe my greatest obstacle was that I couldn’t listen. I believe it was that I couldn’t separate what I’d done from who I believed myself to be.

If my partner at the time told me I’d hurt her, I didn’t experience that as information, I experienced it as exposure. I didn’t hear, “Something happened between us that we need to understand,” I heard: “The man you believe yourself to be isn’t the man you really are.”

I don’t think I was aware that was happening at the time and had someone suggested it, I’d probably have disagreed. I would have said I was simply defending myself against something that wasn’t fair. Looking back, I can now safely say that I wasn’t, I was defending an identity that felt too fragile to survive honest feedback.

Looking back now, I can see something that never occurred to me then:

I thought becoming a better man meant proving I was already one.

So every difficult conversation became a test I couldn’t afford to fail. Every mistake had to be explained, every misunderstanding needed context, every uncomfortable truth had to be softened by all the things I’d done well. Not because I wanted to manipulate her but because I wanted to rescue the version of myself I was terrified of losing.

The tragedy is that whilst I was desperately trying to protect my identity, I was quietly destroying the relationship that identity depended upon.

It took me years to understand that and years to realise that I wasn’t being judged by my intentions. I was being experienced through my behaviour and those aren’t the same thing.

For years I measured myself by what I meant. My partner at the time and mother of my children lived with what I did. That sentence still stops me because I can no longer hide behind good intentions once I’ve understand that distinction. Intentions matter but they don’t erase impact.

Now that she’s my closest friend, she has been able to continue sharing with me the impact my previous behaviours had on her, so my learning and my ability to take more account for how I used to show up and, indeed, still show up on occasions, continues.

I’ve often wondered why some men seem able to hear difficult feedback without collapsing into defensiveness whilst others experience it as a personal attack. I don’t think the answer is that some men care more and nor do I think it’s that some men are simply kinder. I think secure men have learnt something insecure men haven’t.

They’ve learnt that acknowledging they’ve hurt someone doesn’t mean they are beyond love, beyond respect or beyond redemption. It simply means they’re human and that’s a very different foundation to build a life upon.

One of the biggest lies I ever believed was that good men don’t hurt people. The truth is that every human being hurts people. Parents hurt children, children hurt parents, partners hurt each other, friends hurt friends and leaders hurt colleagues. Not from cruelty and rarely with the intent to hurt but from simply being human. The measure of our character was never going to be whether we got through life without causing pain. It was always going to be what we did when somebody trusted us enough to tell us we’d caused it.

Looking back, I don’t think she needed me to be perfect. She needed me to be reachable and there’s a world of difference there.

Perfection might be impossible but reachability is a choice.

A reachable person doesn’t hear every difficult conversation as a courtroom. They don’t immediately begin building a defence or appoint themselves both witness and barrister before the other person has even finished speaking. They stay, they listen, they become curious and most importantly, they’re willing to allow someone else’s experience to change their understanding of who they are and what they’ve done. That’s not defensiveness, that’s the willingness to be altered by what you hear.

I wish I’d learnt that sooner, not because it would have made me feel like a better man but because it would have made life immeasurably easier for the woman sharing her life with me and thus myself too.

When I look back now, one of the things I feel saddest about isn’t the arguments we had but the emotional labour I never saw. The conversations rehearsed in the shower, the words rewritten in her head, the timing carefully chosen, the sentences softened, the criticism removed before it had even been spoken, the countless calculations she was making simply to maximise the chances that I would hear what she needed me to hear without disappearing behind my own insecurity or just no longer bothering to speak it at all because what was the point of expending that energy on someone who wasn’t capable of hearing?

I never appreciated that burden. Not once and that’s perhaps the hardest truth of all.

Whilst I believed I was carrying the weight of trying to be a good partner, she was carrying the weight of trying to make it possible for me to become one.

She was doing work that had never been hers to do.

Today, when women tell me they rehearse conversations before speaking to their partner, I don’t hear a communication problem, I hear a relationship that’s become organised around protecting one person’s identity instead of making space for both people’s experience. That’s not intimacy, it’s adaptation and adaptation has a habit of looking so normal that neither person notices it until one of them can no longer bear the weight of carrying it.

I no longer think the question is whether I’m a good man. It’s too blunt, too absolute and too easy to defend. The question I try to ask myself now is much simpler: When somebody tells me I’ve hurt them, do they leave the conversation feeling more understood than when they entered it or not?

If the answer is no, then it doesn’t really matter how good my intentions were because there’s still something for me to learn.

That’s what security really is. Not believing you’re a good man but becoming someone who no longer needs to protect that belief at the expense of the people they love.

The safest people aren’t the ones who never get it wrong, they’re the ones who make it safe for other people to tell them when they have.

So For Women:

Is he still the kind of man who needs you to tell him he’s good before he can hear that he’s caused you harm? If he is, why are you accepting that’s all you’re worth and that’s all you deserve?

So For Men:

Are you the kind of man who makes it safe for people to tell you when you’re not? Are you still the man who needs to be told you’re good before you can hear that you’ve caused harm? When somebody tells me you’ve hurt them, do they leave the conversation feeling more understood than when they entered it or not?

Reachability is a choice. Isn’t it time we made it?

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“Why does every conversation end up becoming about him?”

They don’t mean every conversation of course but they do usually mean the conversations that matter and that usually matter to them. The conversations where they’re trying to explain that something has hurt them, where they’re trying to be honest, where they’ve usually spent days rehearsing before they ever open their mouths.

Somehow, despite beginning with their experience, they often end with them comforting him, reassuring him, explaining that they didn’t mean it like that or abandoning the conversation altogether because it has become too exhausting to continue.

For a long time I thought I understood why that happened because I thought it was about some men simply couldn’t take criticism. I no longer think that’s quite right and in fact, I wonder if the word criticism is part of the problem altogether.

What if she isn’t criticising him at all? What if she’s simply describing her experience?

That feels like a very different conversation and yet somewhere between her speaking and him listening, those two things often become the same thing.

If my partner at the time told me I’d interrupted her, she wasn’t criticising my character, she was describing something I’d done. If she told me she didn’t feel heard, she wasn’t telling me I was incapable of listening, she was telling me what her experience had been. Looking back, those seem like remarkably ordinary conversations. At the time, they didn’t feel ordinary at all because I wasn’t hearing her experience, I was hearing my identity.

Without either of us understanding what was happening, a conversation about my behaviour quietly became a conversation about who I believed myself to be. That distinction has become one of the most important things I’ve ever learnt because behaviour can change whereas identity feels as though it has to be defended.

The problem is that nobody tells us that’s what’s happening. If you’d asked me then whether I was defending my identity, I’d have looked at you blankly. I’d have told you I was explaining myself, that she hadn’t understood what I’d meant, that there was more context. I’d have wanted you to know the things I’d done well and probably reminded you of all the times I’d tried my best and every one of those things would have felt completely reasonable to me.

That’s what makes insecurity so difficult to recognise because it doesn’t announce itself as such. It simply changes the meaning of what we’re hearing. “That hurt me” becomes “You’re a bad partner.” “I felt dismissed” becomes “You’re failing.” “I need something different from you” becomes “You’re not enough.”

The words haven’t changed but the meaning we’ve attached to them has…and we can change that.

Looking back now, I don’t think my partner at the time and I were having the same conversation at all. She was trying to help me understand what life felt like on the receiving end of my behaviour. I was desperately trying to convince both of us that I wasn’t the man I suddenly feared she thought I was. Those are completely different conversations, which also explains why they so rarely ended where either of us hoped they would.

The truth is I would twist her words. I would focus on the one tiny part of her conversation I felt confident enough to exploit at the expense of what she was really trying to tell me. Another argument in which I would deflect, project, defend, deny, blame and make her feel as though she’d done something wrong, that she’d misunderstood something I’d said or done, that somehow in spite of her intuition, intelligence, observational powers, everything that told her she was right that she was somehow wrong. I believe this is now called gaslighting and I had mastered the art without ever knowing the techniques or the term.

Looking back, I don’t think my biggest mistake was becoming defensive because that was simply the behaviour. The mistake happened much earlier than that, in the split second where I unconsciously decided that understanding her experience was somehow less important than protecting my own sense of myself.

I never made that decision consciously and if you’d asked me at the time what mattered most, I’d have said understanding her but our behaviour doesn’t always reveal our intentions. Sometimes it reveals our fears and that’s another uncomfortable truth I’ve had to make peace with.

For years I judged myself by what I intended whereas the mother of my children lived with the impact of what I actually did and those aren’t the same thing either.

To this day I don’t think I will ever fully appreciate the damage I caused over a 10-15 year period. Am I beyond that now? I’d love to say yes but the truth is no, I’m not. Am I able to hear so much more than I ever used to? Unquestionably but it still takes constant will power and I still don’t always get it right.

Perhaps that’s why feedback can feel so threatening, not because somebody is trying to diminish us but because we’re unconsciously measuring our worth against every piece of information we receive about ourselves. If my worth depends upon believing I’m a good partner, then every difficult conversation becomes a referendum on whether I deserve to keep believing it and that’s an impossible burden for another person to carry because they’re no longer allowed to simply describe their experience. They first have to protect my identity and in doing that, they have to soften what they’re really trying to say.

Once that happens, we’re right back where the last article ended:

She’s no longer simply trying to tell me the truth. She’s preparing me to survive hearing it.

Which leaves me with a question. Not for women this time. For men.

Why can hearing “You hurt me” feel more threatening than knowing you did?

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Before they ever say a word to their partner, they’ve spent hours, days and sometimes weeks working out how to say something to them. Not because they don’t know what they think or can’t find the words because they know exactly what they want to say. They also know it matters and they know he needs to hear it.

I’ve heard them say things like “I’ve been thinking about how to tell him for ages”, “I know what I want to say, I just don’t know how to say it without upsetting him”, “I’ve rehearsed this conversation in my head a thousand times” or “I’ve changed the words over and over because I don’t want him to think I’m attacking him.” The list goes on.

What always stands out to me when I hear these comments spoken, isn’t how difficult the conversation itself sounds, it’s usually very straightforward and even simple, it’s how much time, effort and work has already gone into it before it’s even begun.

By the time she walks into the room, she hasn’t simply thought about what she wants to say, she’s anticipated his reaction, prepared for his defensiveness, softened her language, removed anything that might sound critical, added reassurance, chosen the right moment, considered his mood, thought about how to make him feel safe and has a well thought out list of mitigations in case it all goes horribly wrong.

She’s carried the entire emotional weight of the conversation before she’s even started.

Looking back at my own life, I now understand why that happens because I was him, I was exactly the kind of man that made a woman feel like she had to do that, and I never knew. I never knew because I was far too insecure to be remotely able to hear ay feedback that might have made me confront the fact that I wasn’t the great partner and man I projected to the world.

I never thought I was difficult to talk to. In fact if you’d asked me twenty years ago whether I welcomed honest conversations and feedback, I would have said yes and I would have meant it because I genuinely believed I did. I believed I wanted openness, for us to be able to talk about anything and I genuinely I thought I was someone who could take feedback.

Looking back, I know that what I believed to be true about me, what was actually true about me and what my partner experienced as true about me were not remotely the same thing.

I was perfectly happy to hear things that fitted with the picture I already had of myself.

What I was simply not capable of hearing about myself were things that challenged that carefully curated image of myself. From my perspective, I wasn’t defending myself at all, rather I was explaining myself, I was adding context and I was making sure she understood what I really meant because surely she had to be wrong about me if she thought bad things.

That’s what my insecure ego told myself even though the truth was something completely different.

If my partner tried to tell me that something I’d done had hurt her, I wouldn’t hear her experience because I couldn’t. Somehow between her speaking and me listening, her “That hurt me” became “You’re a bad partner” which then became “You’re a bad person”. Her “I felt dismissed” became “You’re failing” which became “You’re a bad person”.

A conversation about something I’d done, quietly became a conversation about who I was, even though that wasn’t the conversation she was trying to have at all.

I’ve found myself wondering how often that happens, how often one person is talking about behaviour while the other is hearing something about their identity because they’re not the same thing at all. In fact they’re two completely different conversations.

If somebody tells me I’ve interrupted them three times today, they’re talking about my behaviour but if I hear “You’re selfish” or “You’re not the man you think you are,” then we’ve left the conversation she was trying to have about her experience and entered one that exists almost entirely inside my own head about me.

Once that shift happens, curiosity isn’t possible because if I believe my identity is under threat, understanding her experience becomes secondary to protecting my identify and image. The conversation stops being about what happened and what I can do about it to becoming one about proving that I’m not the person I suddenly fear she thinks I am.

That’s one of the cruellest tricks insecurity plays.

It quietly convinces us that feedback is actually an accusation and a personal attack, that a disagreement is actually personal rejection, that handing him accountability for his own actions and behaviour is a way to humiliate him and that somebody else’s experience of us somehow diminishes our own worth. When that happens, curiosity and willingness to reflect and change disappears and defensiveness takes its place.

Looking back, I now know that my partner at the time didn’t want a partner who never got anything wrong but rather a partner who could hear that he’d got something wrong without needing her to spend half her life carefully packaging the message in a way that protected my sense of myself before she was finally allowed to talk about her own experience.

Just writing this makes me feel ashamed that I put someone else, never mind the woman I loved, through such an unnecessary and tortuous time and that’s before I even acknowledge the amount of shared joy and happiness I never allowed to happen because of that.

No one should have to become a diplomat simply to tell the person they love how they feel.

Which brings me to a question that I’ve been sitting with ever since I thought about writing this article. It’s not the questions we usually ask such as why women don’t speak up sooner, why they keep things bottled up or why they struggle to speak honestly in their relationships, even though they might appear understandable questions to ask.

The question I have been sitting with is this:

Why do so many women feel responsible for preparing a man to hear the truth before they feel safe enough to tell it?

She’s not rehearsing the conversation; she’s rehearsing his ability to receive it. She’s not preparing her words; she’s preparing him. Somehow, somewhere along the way, we’ve accepted that as normal, which means that somewhere along the way we’ve also accepted that the burden of successful communication rests entirely on her shoulders while his only responsibility is to show up and, if she’s really, really lucky, to listen.

Except he’s unlikely to do that either.

He’s defending, he’s deflecting, he’s explaining why she’s clearly misunderstood him, he’s adding context she never asked for to redirect the conversation, he’s proving he’s not the person he thinks she thinks he is and he’s protecting his identity whilst she’s managing his reaction.

Then we call that a communication problem on her side.

Perhaps we’ve spent years helping women become better communicators when what we really need to do is to help more men to become able and willing to hear the truth without experiencing it as a threat to who they believe they are.

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It started as an attempt to understand insecure men and why so many of us struggle with equality, particularly in our relationships with women. Over time it became an exploration of the patriarchy and the hidden beliefs it teaches boys from a very young age. More recently though, it has become something much more personal because the more I’ve tried to understand insecure men, the more I’ve found myself having to understand the man I used to be and, perhaps more uncomfortably, the parts of him I can still occasionally recognise today.

If you had asked me for most of my life whether I was an insecure man, I would have said “No” because it simply wouldn’t have crossed my mind that it might have been true.

I was comfortable standing in front of hundreds of people, I could walk into a boardroom full of strangers and lead a conversation without thinking twice about it and I could talk with utter confidence about subjects I had absolutely no right to.

People trusted me, sought my advice and paid me to help them solve their problems. I don’t think anybody who knew me professionally or personally would have ever described me as lacking confidence or being insecure and neither would I because I had learned to perform confidence superbly. It had become my survival and coping strategies from early boyhood as protection from a highly abusive alcoholic father.

Looking back now, I think there were two reasons for that.

The first was that I’d completely misunderstood what insecurity was.

To me, insecure people were the quiet ones. Surely they were the people who lacked confidence, the ones who held themselves back, doubted themselves and looked like the were worrying what other people thought. They certainly weren’t the people standing at the front of a room speaking to hundreds of people or walking into a boardroom full of strangers without the slightest hesitation or holding centre stage and being the life and soul of the party.

I’d created a picture in my head of what insecurity looked like and I simply didn’t recognise myself in it because I’d crafted a persona specifically not to.

The second reason is one I’ve only really begun to understand recently and that is that I never allowed myself to ask the question until only very recently.

As I’m writing this, I don’t remember ever wondering whether I was insecure because, from early boyhood, I’d already learned that insecurity and vulnerability were dangerous for me, that they weren’t things men admitted to and they certainly weren’t things men ever showed in public.

Somewhere along the line whilst growing up I’d become convinced that if you looked uncertain, frightened or vulnerable you risked being judged, ridiculed, excluded or harmed. Whether that would actually have happened is almost beside the point because, by then, I’d already learned that it would, it had become a conviction.

The more I think about that, the more I wonder whether that’s one of the patriarchy’s cleverest tricks. Not simply teaching boys to hide their vulnerability from other people but teaching us to hide it from ourselves, which leads to one of the core wounds boys learn very quicky:

If we show emotional vulnerability or uncertainty then we will not be accepted so we will not be loved. From there is a very short step to:

I am not lovable.

And there it is, the core wound that sits at the heart of almost every man raised in the patriarchy because it is the core wound that was learned in boyhood.

It also explains something else I’ve discovered through my work. So many women find themselves unable to reason with the adult man standing in front of them because, in that moment, his boyhood wound has been triggered. It may be a 35, 45 or 55 year old man standing there but it is often a 7, 11 or 14 year old boy reacting to the situation he’s experiencing.

This insecurity, which I learned as a boy and then as a teen and young man learned to compensate for, and when I say compensate for I mean bury and hide, arrested my emotional development in that specific experience, which is why when the adult man was triggered, it was my 7, 11 or 14 year old that reacts.

The reason I think this matters, isn’t because it’s my story. It’s because I’ve seen the same pattern repeated hundreds of times through my work. A woman speaks to the adult man standing in front of her. She uses logic, reason and explanation because she’s talking to an adult.

The problem is that if his boyhood wound has been opened up, that’s not who she’s talking to anymore. Without either of them understanding what’s happening, she unintentionally pushes further into the wound, which triggers him and so he reacts from the emotional age it happened at rather than the adult he now is and so they both walk away feeling frustrated, angry or resentful.

When I started writing this article I thought it was about insecure men and equality. Then I thought it was about the patriarchy. Now, I keep coming back to a different question altogether.

What would I do if nobody needed me?

That’s not a question I’ve ever consciously asked myself before. In fact, I’ve just written it and found myself staring at it for a couple of minutes because it feels as though it’s come from somewhere much older than this article.

When I look back over my life, I can see that so much of my identity was wrapped up in being useful and thus, in my frightened and insecure mind, needed. I wanted to be a good partner, a good father, a good leader and a good friend, somebody people could rely upon and, more importantly, someone people wanted.

None of those things per se are unhealthy, I still aim to be those things today. The difference is that back then, they weren’t simply things I wanted to become, they were the way I measured my worth and value. I had to be doing things to be valuable or worthy of affection.

I had to be generous and give everything I had in order to be liked and wanted. I had to be funny and entertaining in order for people to want to be around me and to include me.

That meant buying people gifts that I’d inevitably over explain because I wanted them to understand the thought that had gone into them. It meant writing ridiculous poems and sliding them under friends’ doors at university so they’d come back, laugh and, hopefully, feel good about themselves. It meant always being available when somebody needed to talk because, somewhere along the way, I’d discovered I was actually really good at listening.

Looking back now, I can see what was happening. Those things got me invited into people’s lives but, more often than not, only when they were struggling. I’d become the person people turned to when they were unhappy, confused or in difficulty. Then, when life picked up again and they naturally gravitated back towards the people they laughed with, celebrated with and simply enjoyed being around, I’d quietly find myself left behind.

I never understood it at the time. I just remember thinking, “What have I done wrong?” or projecting my insecurity onto them thinking thoughts like they were ungrateful. I couldn’t see that I’d taught people what my role in their lives was. I’d become valuable because I carried things for them and took them off them, who needed to do these things because that’s when I was needed and wanted. I hadn’t realised that I’d never really shown them the person underneath who simply wanted to be alongside them when life was good as well.

I thought that perhaps I was trying to become a man nobody would ever leave and I think that’s true, I just don’t think it’s the whole truth.

The deeper truth is that:

I didn’t know who I was without those roles because I didn’t believe I had a worth or value unless I was doing something to deserve it or prove I was worthy of it.

If I wasn’t being useful to somebody, solving somebody’s problem or carrying something for somebody else, who exactly was I and why would they want me around? Strip away the role of partner, father, friend, supporter, listener or leader and the person people turned to and I didn’t have had the faintest idea about what or who was left.

That’s why being needed became so important because being needed was simply the closest I ever got to believing I might have been lovable.

All of which has finally made me realise that for the majority of my life I have been searching for and trying to become lovable, able to be loved and worthy of love.

Now, if you ask many boys, teens and men of a manosphere persuasion if they want to be loved, you get many different answers but they all pertain to being needed in some way, be that in a financially, physically or psychologically controlling way.

To me, having sat with this ever since my partner at the time uttered those pivotal words to me that got me to finally confront the man I actually was, rather than believing myself to be, when she turned to me one day and quietly said: “I hope our daughter never meets a man like you and I hope our son never grows up to become one” this points immediately to a man carrying this core wound.

To the men reading this or witnessing it in another man, this is a moment to call them on it and to support them see it and move through it with your support and help.

To the women reading or witnessing it in their partner or potential partner, it is a huge red flag that this is a man with a serious core wound and one that is unlikely to be able to offer you anything remotely resembling an equal or stable partnership at this time (see my earlier article https://jamesdakin.substack.com/p/when-did-being-in-a-relationship)

All of which leads me to conclude that we must reach out to boys and teens to support them learn and understand that who they are is every bit as valuable as what they do and that without it, what they do will always be more about performing and proving than about being.

Until they learn that, women will never experience their greatest gifts and they will never experience true freedom and happiness.

I’ve watched it happen in boardrooms, leadership teams, workshops and conferences for years and, if I’m honest, I never even questioned it at first because it simply struck me as normal and I was learning that this was just something women did or at least that was the assumption I was making without really thinking about it.

It wasn’t only women who would do this (men sometimes did it too), but it was women who did it significantly more than men did in my experience and it wasn’t until I started paying closer attention that I realised how strange it actually is.

Here is somebody with years of experience, somebody invariably whose opinion was respected, somebody who has probably forgotten more about the subject than most people in the room will ever know, and yet before offering a thought that could change, add to or improve the direction of the conversation taking place, she feels the need to begin with an apology.

“Sorry to ask but...”, “Sorry to interrupt the flow but can I just ask...”, “Sorry, this might be a stupid question but...” or “I could be completely wrong here but...”

The more I think about it, the less I believe this has anything to do with confidence because confidence has become the answer we seem to reach for whenever we don’t understand why somebody is behaving the way they are.

The narrative has become that if a woman doesn’t put herself forward, she’s lacking confidence; if she doesn’t ask for the promotion, she needs to develop more confidence; if she apologises before speaking, she needs to become more confident.

It is such a convenient explanation because it places the problem entirely inside and onto the individual and relieves everybody else of any responsibility to ask what might have created that behaviour in the first place or what is continuing to embed it.

I have now reached the conclusion that whilst confidence can certainly play a part in this discussion, what we are invariably dealing with is a cultural, environmental and leadership issue, and one that affects everybody involved.

After spending more than thirty years watching people in organisations and in public, I don’t think I’m looking at a confidence problem at all; I think I’m watching safety related adaptation and there is a world of difference between the two.

Nobody is born believing they should apologise for taking up space in a conversation, and little girls don’t naturally arrive at school thinking they should soften their opinions before expressing them; they learn, they watch, they notice and they adapt.

Sometimes they adapt because something highly impactful has happened that has taught them it is very unsafe to do that because it leaves them being humiliated, ridiculed or verbally attacked (which still happens in meetings today) but more often than not this doesn’t happen because of one defining moment.

Rather, it happens over time, after they have been interrupted regularly enough that they begin to anticipate the interruption before it arrives. It happens after they have had their competence questioned often enough in front of people in the meeting that they begin answering the criticism before anybody has actually criticised them. It happens after they have watched a man react badly to being challenged and quietly conclude that perhaps it is easier and safer for them to protect his ego than continue paying the emotional price of risking bruising it.

Most of the time though, I don’t think the lessons are nearly that dramatic and I think the real education happens through thousands of interactions so small that nobody remembers them individually and the vast majority of the room don’t even see them at all.

It’s the raised eyebrow when she speaks up, the joke that everybody laughs at apart from her, the loud sigh when she challenges an assumption or the man who repeats her point five minutes later and somehow becomes the person who came up with it.

I see it in the meeting where certainty is admired in one person and criticised as arrogance in another and none of these moments are particularly significant on their own, yet added together as an accumulation they quietly teach her how much of herself it is safe to bring into the room and how much isn’t.

That is why I keep coming back to adaptation because adaptation not only makes perfect sense, it is a highly intelligent strategy for survival. Human beings adapt to environments all the time; we become louder in noisy rooms, quieter around volatile people, more careful where there is risk and more guarded where there is judgement.

We eventually don’t even realise we are doing it because after a while adaptation stops feeling like adaptation and starts feeling like normal and like it’s just the sensible thing to do until we can’t distinguish it anymore from our personality.

I suspect this is why so many women tell me they don’t feel confident, when what I actually see standing in front of me is somebody who has become extraordinarily skilled at reading other people’s insecurities before deciding how much of herself she is allowed to reveal. Confidence and willingness are very different things yet inextricably linked.

It also explains why I find myself becoming increasingly uncomfortable every time I hear somebody say we need to teach women to be more confident because I don’t think we do. I think we need to start educating and teaching leaders and those around her to create safer environments, which will involve holding others in the room to account for their behaviour.

There are brilliant leaders around us, both men and women, who do this superbly and everyone, including their company or organisations, benefits but they are still very much in the minority in my experience. Having men call out men for the standards of behaviour that are and are not acceptable must increase, that’s awareness, that’s game changing and that’s leadership.

If an intelligent woman feels the need to apologise before contributing one of the most valuable ideas in the room, the question is not why she lacks confidence but rather what has she had to experience or is currently experiencing for her to feel that it is safer for her to apologise first.

As leaders, I think that is a far more interesting question because it shifts our attention away from fixing women (which they simply do not need and is utterly arrogant, untrue and patronising) and towards examining the environments we have created and continue to maintain.

It asks whether people genuinely feel psychologically safe enough to contribute without first making themselves smaller; it asks whether authority only feels acceptable when it comes wrapped in certainty, volume and confidence that looks suspiciously masculine; and it asks:

Whether we have confused the absence of challenge with the presence of inclusion.

The irony, of course, is that the women I hear apologising before they speak are very often the people saying the thing everybody else needed to hear. They’re asking the question few others have considered, they’re spotting the flaw everybody else has potentially missed or they’re introducing the perspective that could change the discussion completely.

Which leaves me concluding that the apology is rarely about confidence at all and that it was simply the final act of adaptation in order to risk allowing their contribution into the room, and if that is true, what might the invisible cost to the organisation or team have been?

How many ideas, questions and observations might have been lost that could have developed, improved or benefitted the organisation? If that is true, perhaps the real loss isn’t borne by the woman apologising at all; perhaps it is borne by every organisation, every team and every relationship that never quite benefits from everything she was about to say because she had first learnt that taking up space carried a cost.

The apology wasn’t the problem at all; it was simply the point at which years of adapting to the culture that has been allowed to continue finally announced themselves.

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There are now thousands of videos, podcasts and books explaining the warning signs. We talk about red flags, coercive control, gaslighting, love bombing, emotional abuse and manipulation. Every one of those conversations matters because every woman deserves to recognise unhealthy behaviour as early as possible, sadly, for their safety. I have a fifteen year old daughter and I want her to understand every one of those things before she ever needs them.

A few days ago I was reading an article by the trail blazer Liz Plank in which she wrote that the question isn’t whether patriarchy shaped us but whether we’re willing to keep asking how it still does. That sentence stayed with me because, as a man, I don’t think there is a finish line to that work. Every truth I’ve uncovered over the years has simply revealed another truth waiting underneath it and every belief I’ve challenged has uncovered another one I hadn’t even realised I was carrying.

That triggered another thought.

In much the same way that when we buy a new red car of a particular make we suddenly start seeing them everywhere, I found myself wondering:

…if there is a risk that if all we’re teaching women to do is to recognise danger, then danger is naturally what they’ll become exceptionally good at recognising.

We absolutely have to have those conversations and we absolutely must teach our daughters about coercion, manipulation, control and abuse because a lifetime of not recognising those things can fundamentally change the course of a woman’s life. My wondering though is whether, unintentionally, we’ve only been having half the conversation because a lifetime of learning how to survive insecure men doesn’t automatically teach a woman how to recognise a secure one.

That triggered yet another thought.

If insecure men rarely know they’re insecure, why are we spending so much more time teaching women how to recognise insecurity than we are teaching boys how not to become it?

I am not for one moment suggesting that we stop teaching women about the clear and present dangers they face but I am saying we should be stepping up our training of boys, teens and indeed adult men to recognise insecurity and the associated insecure behaviours so that they too can become far more discerning when it comes to listening to and being influenced by unhealthy influencers and influences.

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons so many of us men don’t actually know what emotional security looks like ourselves. I certainly didn’t.

For years I genuinely believed I was a good partner. I loved deeply, worked hard, wanted the best for my family and believed I was doing exactly what a good man was supposed to do. I actually thought I was a wonderful partner!

Looking back now, I can see that I spent a lifetime confusing insecurity and need with love. I wasn’t trying to overtly control anybody and I certainly wasn’t setting out to make anybody’s life smaller. I simply couldn’t see that my need to feel needed, my defensiveness, my certainty and my belief that I knew what was best for the people I loved weren’t signs of strength at all.

They were the behaviours of a frightened man desperately trying not to feel frightened.

In an earlier essay I wrote that insecurity rarely introduces itself as insecurity because that’s one of the most important realisations I’ve made over the years. It disguises itself as certainty, leadership, protection or simply believing you’re right. The reason that matters so much is because if you genuinely believe those behaviours are signs of being a good man, why would you ever question them? The answer is that you probably wouldn’t.

What I’ve found myself exploring and discovering ever since then is something else entirely:

What does emotional security actually look like and would I, or anyone else for that matter raised in a patriarchal world, recognise it if it suddenly showed up?

I can say with utter certainly that it doesn’t look like anything like I was taught as a boy, as a teen or as a young man.

What I have learned since, and continue to learn, is that a secure man doesn’t react out of fear when the woman in front of him challenges him, whether she does so through emotion, logic, facts or simply by saying, “That hurt me” or “I’m angry”.

He knows that somewhere inside him there will still be old wounds and old stories that can be triggered but he also knows that those wounds belong to him. He doesn’t make them her responsibility.

An insecure man very often does the opposite.

His previous wounds get triggered and suddenly the conversation isn’t really about the woman standing in front of him at all. It’s about the little boy who learnt somewhere along the way that emotions weren’t safe, that boys don’t cry, that becoming emotional is what girls do and that a stiff upper lip somehow made you a stronger man.

He doesn’t realise he’s reacting to yesterday’s wounds whilst believing he’s responding appropriately to today.

A secure man can hold space whilst a woman works through what she’s feeling. He can listen to her and hear her, these are two very different things, because he isn’t simply waiting for his turn to speak or to shut her down. As a result, a secure man is able to be genuinely curious and will seek to understand what he did or didn’t do and, more importantly, what s of that on the woman was.

He wants to understand before he wants to be understood because understanding her matters more than protecting his own image.

An insecure man explains things away, justifies, deflects, projects and denies, not because he’s a bad man but because somewhere inside him he desperately needs the conversation to stop before he discovers something about himself that he doesn’t want to be true.

A secure man knows how to say, “I’m sorry.” Not because he’s weak or because he’s trying to keep the peace but because he understands that he will always miss things, misunderstand things and get things wrong. He doesn’t experience that as humiliation but rather as another opportunity to become a better man.

A secure man will disagree with a woman and he’ll hold his boundaries when he needs to because emotional security isn’t about becoming passive or endlessly accommodating. He won’t belittle her though and nor will he demean her or make her feel foolish for seeing the world differently and he won’t apologise simply because he wants the noise to stop. He’ll stay in the conversation because the relationship matters more than winning. This applies to professional and personal relationships.

A secure man includes the woman in front of him. He treats her as his equal, shares the emotional load, the mental load and the physical load as he doesn’t assume that she’ll notice what needs doing before he does or that she’ll simply pick up the slack because she’s the woman.

As I write those words I can remember myself in having been every single example of insecure behaviour I’ve just described and, if I’m honest, that’s difficult to admit publicly. I have done every one of those things, some of them repeatedly and a few of them I still catch myself doing today.

The difference now is that I’m looking, asking and listening much more than I have ever done before.

When I receive difficult feedback these days, I’m getting significantly better at leaning towards it instead of away from it because I know that somewhere inside it is another opportunity to understand myself better, understand the woman in front of me better and become a healthier man, partner and father than I was yesterday.

I’m under no illusion that I’ll be a work in progress for the rest of my days! Growing up in 1970s Northern England with an abusive father in the heart of a patriarchal culture shaped me in countless ways that I’m still uncovering today. I suspect I will be uncovering them for the rest of my life.

Oddly, I find that reassuring as it means I’m still looking.

As a father, I find myself thinking about this more and more. We should absolutely be teaching our daughters what insecurity looks like because every woman deserves to recognise the danger signs.

At the same time, I believe that we should be spending just as much time teaching our sons how insecurity drives them to behave and the impact those behaviours actually have on others before it ever becomes somebody else’s problem.

Unless we help them understand what fear, shame and inadequacy look like before they’ve learned to disguise themselves as certainty, control and the need to be right, we simply leave the next generation of women to deal with exactly the same patterns the last generation has been trying to escape.

We are increasingly becoming much better at teaching women how to survive insecure men.

Maybe it’s finally time we taught our sons how not to become them.

At what point did we start teaching women that having someone was automatically better than having themselves?

Years ago, perhaps that made sense. Women often needed a husband to survive financially, buy a house or even open a bank account. Today millions don’t and that changes everything because the moment a woman no longer needs a man, every relationship becomes a choice that she gets to make.

That’s the bit many men are struggling with, not because women hate men but because they finally have a choice.

Reading BIMBO brought that into sharp focus for me. Ashley describes being told there are plenty more fish in the sea before replying, “I can tell you for sure that the sea has been chronically overfished, polluted and was full of commitment-phobes.” It made me laugh because, although it’s funny, it also contains an uncomfortable truth.

The more I thought about it, the more I realised I don’t actually think this is a conversation about dating. I think it’s a conversation about one of the biggest cultural shifts any of us will ever live through. Women becoming financially independent isn’t just an economic shift, it’s a cultural earthquake because for the first time in modern history millions of women can ask a question their grandmothers often couldn’t.

Does this relationship actually improve my life?

Once that question can genuinely be asked, everything changes.

After more than thirty years coaching men and women around the world, I reached an uncomfortable conclusion: most men believe they make a woman’s life better, yet very few actually do and even fewer are willing to ask the woman whether they have.

That isn’t because most men are bad men. It’s because most of us were never taught to ask the question because the patriarchy raised us to believe that we were the answer. This belief sits at the heart of everything we must work towards to undo as it is one of the cornerstones of the patriarchy.

I know that now because I was one of them.

I loved my partner, I worked hard and I genuinely believed I was making her life easier. Looking back, I was making it smaller and I had absolutely no idea I was doing it. The reason I couldn’t see it was because of my insecurity.

The difficulty with insecurity and the behaviours it drives is that insecure behaviour almost never introduces itself as insecurity.

It introduces itself as love, protection, leadership, caring and wanting the best for someone. It certainly did in my case.

That is one of the cruellest things about insecurity. It doesn’t just fool the people around you, it fools you too.

Meanwhile, the woman quietly adapts.

Not because she lacks confidence but because adaptation is often the easiest route through another difficult conversation.

She starts choosing her words more carefully, she decides some things simply aren’t worth raising and she explains herself a little more than she used to. She apologises for things she didn’t need to apologise for and she begins managing someone else’s emotional world without even noticing she’s doing it.

None of these decisions feel significant on their own but over months and years they quietly accumulate until one day she finds herself living a life that has been edited around somebody else’s insecurity rather than built around her own values, personality and choices.

Then people tell her she has a confidence problem.

Rarely, in my experience, is confidence the real issue. More often than not it’s adaptation. She’s spent so long becoming who she needed to become in order to keep the relationship working that she’s begun to believe that’s simply who she is.

If your partner makes your life heavier instead of lighter, what exactly are they bringing?

I appreciate that’s an uncomfortable question but I think it’s one we should all be asking, regardless of gender. A relationship should bring more laughter, more peace, more support, more friendship and more possibility into your life.

A relationship should leave you feeling more yourself, not less. If it doesn’t, why are you in it?

For centuries many women didn’t really have the luxury of asking that question because leaving often came at an enormous financial or social cost, if they could leave at all that is. Millions of women around the world still don’t have that freedom today and we shouldn’t forget that. Increasingly though, many do.

That’s why I think women becoming financially independent is one of the most significant cultural shifts of our lifetime.

It isn’t simply changing who pays the mortgage, it’s changing the entire basis upon which relationships are built because:

…women becoming financially independent is forcing men to compete on the quality of their character instead of the necessity of their existence.

Personally, I think that’s one of the healthiest shifts we’ve ever seen.

It isn’t asking men to become perfect, it isn’t asking women to hate men and it isn’t an attack on masculinity. It’s simply removing the historical advantage that meant many women needed a relationship whether it enriched their life or not.

Now they can choose.

That’s where much of the anger we see today from men really comes from. Not all of it, of course, but enough of it to be worth paying attention to.

As a man, if your sense of worth depends upon someone needing you, what happens when they don’t? If your value has quietly become wrapped up in being indispensable rather than being enjoyable to build a life with, independence can feel like rejection rather than liberation.

I understand that because I had to confront exactly that in myself.

The question many of us men need to ask ourselves isn’t whether women have changed. They have.

The better question is whether we as men have changed enough to deserve a place in the lives they’re now free to build.

If a woman no longer needs us, what do we actually believe we’re bringing into her life?

That’s not a question to answer defensively. It’s a question to sit with because somewhere in our answer will probably be the work we’re here to do.

To the women reading this, I’d offer a different question.

If your life feels lighter, calmer and more like yourself when you’re single than when you’re in a relationship, why would you believe being in a relationship is the prize?

Perhaps the prize was never finding someone else first. Perhaps it was finding yourself. The version of you who no longer mistakes sacrifice for love or adaptation for kindness and who realises that the right relationship doesn’t require you to become less of yourself in order to keep it.

The right person should help you to become you more yourself than you were before they arrived.

If they can’t do that, leave that seat empty until someone can.

In the meantime, build a life that delights you.

In the Q&A that followed, a retired female Naval Officer asked him about his views on the sexism and demeaning attitudes and behaviours towards women that still prevail within the Armed Forces.

He told the audience that these appalled him, as they should, but when she pushed and asked him what he was going to actually do about it, his answer demonstrated the problem that sits at the heart of so many of these conversations and leadership roles.

He said that where possible women should “simply ignore these behaviours because we should not give these men oxygen” and “to push back where they could.”

Halfway through his answer I remember thinking to myself; “Oh sh*t...no! You can’t say that as the leader of the armed forces.”

His answer surprised me because it demonstrated just how easy it is for even the most respected leaders to unintentionally reinforce the very culture they’re trying to change.

Initially, that sentence appears to be very sensible advice, do not provide the sexist, misogynistic and abusive men any airtime. I understand this sentiment.

However, when you look at the first part of the sentence though, the part about just ignoring the problem where possible; the problems become significant and very apparent.

Only somebody who has never been on the receiving end of hourly, daily, weekly, monthly and annually sexist views and abuse would ever suggest that ignoring it was the way forward.

Ask women what ignoring these beliefs and behaviours ultimately lead to and they will say rape and murder.

Now, whether every individual act ends in rape or murder isn’t the point here. The point is that women have watched enough of these behaviours go unchallenged, escalate and ultimately become violent that they no longer see them as isolated incidents. They see them as part of the same culture.

As white middle aged men, we have never been exposed to or been on the receiving end of this and so for us, ignoring the problem makes sense because we don’t fully understand it as to do so would mean that we’d have to deal with it and that might become deeply uncomfortable for us for so many reasons.

Yet in a military context, we would never hear a commander, on being told that the enemy was advancing up the left flank, advancing up the right flank and encircling us, utter the command to ignore them and only push back on the battalion they could see directly in front of them.

Yet this is exactly what women are being told, all…the…time.

For women throughout our Armed Forces it is very clearly still in front of them, still all around them and still behind them.

Military leaders spend their entire careers trying to understand the battlefield they can’t yet see. They actively search for threats, weaknesses, blind spots and vulnerabilities because failing to see them costs lives. That’s what good military leadership looks like, which is why I found it so surprising to hear women effectively being told to ignore a very real and present threat they are living with every single day.

The remarkable woman who asked the question spoke openly about being sexually assaulted, sexually abused and verbally abused during her career in the Royal Navy. She also openly said that life for women today in the Armed Forces is significantly better than it was. That said, the bar was clearly so low when she joined the service some 30+ years ago that the only way was up and that also doesn’t necessarily make today’s bar remotely acceptable.

Leadership isn’t demonstrated by recognising unacceptable behaviour.

Leadership is demonstrated by creating an environment where unacceptable behaviour becomes unacceptable to everyone serving under their leadership.

The responsibility of leadership is not simply to react to what it already knows. It is to become aware of what it doesn’t yet know and then lead the organisation somewhere better. Leadership sets the standard. Leadership decides what will and won’t be tolerated. Leadership creates the culture that everybody else either lives up to or learns to live with.

That means saying clearly, “This stops now.” It means backing those words with action and it means consequences for those who do not abide by the new standards of behaviour to create the desired culture.

It means promoting people who live those standards and removing those who choose not to. Anything less simply tells everybody watching that the behaviour is still acceptable.

This level of change can only be led.

It can only be led by the person ultimately responsible for the culture of the organisation. If we are unable to get it right at the top then we can never expect it to change at the roots of the organisation and if, at the roots of the organisation, sexist thinking, sexist attitudes and sexist behaviours are not picked up on and stamped down on with significant consequences, there will always be the risk of sexual, verbal and physical abuse to women.

Personally, I’d go further.

I think this also demonstrates why we need more women leading our biggest institutions, not because women are necessarily any better leaders than men but because leadership teams made up of people with different lived experiences are much less likely to miss what is hiding in plain sight.

I left the House of Lords with even more respect for Sir Richard Knighton than when I arrived because I have no doubt whatsoever that he wants the very best for the men and women under his command and for the country he serves.

What stayed with me though was the reminder that good people, even exceptional leaders, can still have blind spots.

The responsibility of leadership is to find them before anybody else pays the price for them.

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One woman describes a partner who becomes defensive whenever she raises an issue whilst another talks about a boss who is perfectly pleasant until she challenges one of his ideas. Someone else talks about a colleague who constantly interrupts her, dismisses her ideas or talks over her despite appearing charming and reasonable to everybody else.

The details vary enormously but the resulting impact and feelings are remarkably consistent.

She invariably ends up asking some variation of “Is it me?” or “Did I say/do something wrong?”

What many women clearly describe is a sense that something changes the moment they stop accommodating, start succeeding, challenge an idea, offer a different perspective or simply take up a little more space. In other words, the moment they stop playing smaller than they know themselves to be.

Growing up, I used to think these men were confident. Looking back, I can completely understand why because they certainly looked confident to me, they sounded confident to me and, if I’m being honest, I spent years trying to look and sound exactly the same.

For much of my life I thought confidence meant certainty. I thought it meant having the answers, being right, appearing strong and never allowing anybody to see doubt, uncertainty or especially, vulnerability. That was my training as a boy and as a teenager. That was the Patriarchy at play. Emotions were for girls and boys didn’t behave like girls otherwise they risked being ostracised.

Most people assume these men are confident because that is precisely what they want you to believe.

I know because I spent decades trying to convince people of it myself. Not because I was confident. I clearly wasn’t. I was frightened.

The irony is that many of the men women experience as controlling, dismissive, defensive, passive aggressive or threatened are often trying to do exactly the same thing and they’re doing it through fear because they are afraid.

My greatest fear was that if people looked too closely they would discover what I secretly believed about myself, namely that I wasn’t good enough, wasn’t worthy enough, I was a fraud for even trying and that I simply wasn’t enough, full stop.

The strange thing about insecurity is that it rarely introduces itself as insecurity.

It arrives dressed as certainty, authority, superiority or the need to be right. It arrives in whatever form is required to stop people getting close enough to see the thing we are trying hardest to hide which is invariably our true selves because we have been taught that our true selves aren’t good enough.

The more I’ve thought about this over the years, the more I’ve come to realise that many of the behaviours women describe are not really responses to them at all. They are responses to something happening inside the man and, more often than not, something he is rarely aware of himself. Thus these behaviours are actually projections and defensiveness.

In my upcoming book, How to Stop Taking Sh*t from Insecure Men, I describe this as an insecure man’s early warning defence system because that’s exactly how it behaves. The moment something threatens how he sees himself, his competence, his status, his idea, his integrity as he sees it or his place in the world, the alarms go off and the missiles launch automatically.

The trigger point for his early warning defence system to launch is invariably any time the insecure man feels remotely threatened that people will view him less than he wishes the world to see him or experience him. In businesses, this tends to get more pronounced with seniority as the spotlight adds pressure externally and then internally.

How women often describe what they are subjected to in the work place is often those very same automatic defence systems in action and showing up as dismissiveness, defensiveness, control, ridicule, undermining, withdrawal, shouting, sulking, passive aggression or an inability to celebrate somebody else’s success.

The behaviour varies but the purpose rarely does: protect the insecurity and at all costs, avoid facing or feeling the discomfort.

It’s primary objective is to stop anybody getting close enough to see what is underneath or to stop them from ever looking less than they want to or need to be seen as.

None of this excuses the behaviour for one second.

Our upbringing can explain how we arrived at our destination as young adults but staying there is not excusable, it’s our adult choice and our responsibility whether we stay there or not.

It is explainable but it is not excusable. What it does do is explain something many women have spent years trying to make sense of.

The more I’ve learned about insecure male behaviour, my own being the foundation of this journey, the more I’ve concluded that women are not imagining what they are experiencing. They’re not overreacting, they’re not being too sensitive and nor are they reading too much into something that was just ‘banter’. More often than not they’re noticing something very real, they simply haven’t been given a framework for understanding or naming it.

Perhaps that’s why so many women describe the same feeling whilst struggling to find the same words. They know something is happening; they’ve often known it for years but they just haven’t always known what to call it.

Or perhaps they have.

Perhaps they simply needed somebody to confirm for them that it wasn’t them.

It’s not a question I hear discussed very often and yet it sits underneath so many of the conversations I find myself having, particularly as it happens, with women.

One of the phrases I hear most often is some version of “I’m just conflict avoidant” and “I’m just not a confident person”.

Now, they may be right of course and they may very well be describing how they experience showing up today. What interests me more though, is whether how they are showing up today is really who they are or how they have learned to be?

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Having coached people from most backgrounds for over 30 years, and having been my own work in progress for much of that time as well, what I have come to the conclusion about it if we have spent a lifetime managing other people’s reactions by modifying our own, then after a while we risk believing that our learned behaviours, our often limiting beliefs about ourselves and how we experience ourselves is who we are and how we’ve always been.

My own experience tells me that this is very rarely, if ever, the case.

When I explore this with people, and especially women, most of them tell me they’re just being sensible, they’re keeping the peace, being realistic, picking their battles, managing a difficult relationship, avoiding unnecessary conflict, being professional, being safe, being kind, being understanding, being patient or being the bigger person. All of which are perfectly reasonable explanations when you examine them one at a time.

The challenge however is that when you place enough of them together and repeat them often enough and over a long enough period of time, something else starts to happen. We slowly begin to adapt ourselves around the people and the systems we is navigating, usually so gradually that we don’t notice it ourselves.

With the women I have been privileged to work with over the years it can start with becoming a little less direct, a little less visible, a little less likely to challenge something she knows isn’t right, a little more likely to explain herself when no explanation was ever required and thus a little more likely to smile and say “Yes” when what she really wants to do is to shout and say “No”.

“Over time, what began as adaptation starts to feel normal and in many cases it starts to feel like personality”.

I know something about this because I spent much of my life believing things about myself that I now know simply weren’t true and indeed were never true but that doesn’t necessarily make them easy to undo, at least quickly.

Growing up in the north of England in the 1970s with a highly abusive father, one of the many lessons I learned was not to bother trying to become successful because sooner or later I would fail or that I would be found out to be a fraud, that was my father’s teaching to me. That was his own deep insecurity and self-loathing speaking of course although I couldn’t have known that at the time. If I stood out, I would be found out. If I put my head above the parapet, people would eventually realise I wasn’t intelligent enough, clever enough, talented enough or worthy enough to be there in the first place.

My foundational belief was that I wasn’t good enough.

The interesting thing is that I never experienced any of this as conditioning. I experienced it as truth and thus it gradually became my reality.

That, I think, is one of the reasons I find this question so interesting.

When we talk about limiting beliefs, conditioning or learned behaviour, we often do so with the benefit of hindsight. We can look back and see the pattern; we can identify where it came from and we can then begin to understand how it was formed. At the time however, none of that is visible and so it simply feels true.

The woman who hesitates before speaking in a meeting doesn’t usually think to herself, “Ah, there goes my conditioning again.” She usually describes to me that she feels a tension or constriction in her body first which leads to a hesitation and then an uncertainty that makes her think that she should probably be better off not risking a potential confrontation or being seen to be difficult because she is not the sort of person who likes conflict.

The man who believes he isn’t capable of becoming a leader doesn’t think, “I am experiencing a limiting belief.” He simply experiences the belief as reality and behaves accordingly.

That is what makes learned behaviour so powerful. We stop seeing it as learned and we start seeing it as who we are.

In all my experience as a coach and an observer of human behaviour around the world, especially through the lens of leadership, I have come to the conclusion that women are fundamentally the most natural leaders. I am not saying men are not, I am simply saying that to me women are.

Women make life and death decisions as part of their life; men generally only do this in the role they have taken. Women are naturally more disposed to be inclusive in their thinking; men tend to be more solution focused.

Over the years, thousands of women have sat opposite me and described some version of the same experience to me. They wanted to say something and didn’t. They wanted to challenge something and didn’t. They wanted to ask a question, raise a concern, offer an alternative perspective or simply disagree with what was being said and yet somehow found themselves remaining silent.

What I find fascinating is that when I ask them what happened, very few begin with their thoughts. They begin with their body and what they felt. They describe a tightening in their stomach, a tension in their chest, a sudden feeling that perhaps now isn’t the moment, a shallowing of their breath…perhaps they should wait, perhaps somebody else will say it, perhaps it isn’t worth the hassle.

The feeling arrives first; the explanation arrives afterwards.

What if that matters?

What if what many women are describing as conflict avoidance is not actually conflict avoidance at all but a learned response to environments where speaking up has historically carried a cost?

I have never met a woman who hasn’t experienced being ignored, dismissed, talked over or had her idea credited to somebody else at some point in her career, even and often in the same meeting but I have met plenty who have spoken up brilliantly when they felt safe enough to do so.

The same woman who describes herself as conflict avoidant in one environment can often be articulate, challenging, courageous and deeply influential in another.

Which rather begs the question: If you can do it there, why not here? The answer, I suspect, lies less in personality and more in safety.

Children become extraordinarily skilled observers when they have to. They learn to read mood, tone, energy, atmosphere, the sound of a door closing, the way somebody walks into a room, the difference between a healthy silence and a dangerous silence. Many women become experts at exactly the same thing, not because they are weak or overly emotional or lacking either ability or confidence but because adapting to insecure male behaviour is often the safest thing available to them at the time.

As I’ve written before…the trouble is that adaptations which help us survive one environment often follow us into environments where we no longer need them.

So now we are dealing with habit and the good news about habits is that given the right environment, support and encouragement and determination, we can unlearn and change them.

One of the most useful things we can do is start looking for evidence.

Fear loves absolutes like nobody listens to me, everyone will think I’m difficult, people like me never do that or women who speak up always get punished.

The problem with these statements is not that they are entirely false, as enough women will have experienced every one of them sadly. The problem is that they are almost never true all of the time. Look for the supporting evidence.

Where have you spoken up and been heard? Where have you challenged something and been respected for doing so? Where have your ideas been welcomed, acted upon and encouraged? Where have you felt able to be more of yourself rather than less?

You see, once you have reminded yourself that those places, people and experiences exist, then perhaps the story isn’t quite as fixed as it first appears.

Men have a very real responsibility here too because in the majority of cases it is men who have created the majority of these environments and cultures. We need more men willing to challenge interruptions, recognise contributions, create psychologically safe environments and become aware of behaviours that many women have spent a lifetime navigating.

This is one of the reasons I became so interested in understanding insecure male behaviour. Not because I believe men are the enemy, as I’ve written before, I don’t but because I spent much of my own life being one of those men. Insecure, defensive, needing approval more than truth, confusing control with care and confusing being needed with being loved.

Looking back now, I can see that many of the behaviours I now help women navigate were behaviours I once displayed myself, albeit in ways that seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time.

“That is the thing about insecurity; the person carrying it rarely experiences it as insecurity. They experience it as logic, common sense, leadership, protection, love, standards or expectations”.

Only later do they begin to see what everyone else was experiencing all along. The question that keeps returning to me therefore is not whether women are conflict avoidant. It’s whether some of the things we believe most strongly about ourselves are actually true because if a behaviour was learned, it can be unlearned and if a habit was acquired, it can be changed.

So, if what you’ve been calling your personality is actually an adaptation that helped you survive a particular environment, perhaps the most important thing isn’t learning how to become somebody else.

Perhaps it’s learning how to become who you’ve always been once again so you can bring your greatest gifts to the party.

With love,

James

The interesting thing for me is that very few of them actually describe it that way. Most tell me they’re just being sensible, keeping the peace, being realistic, picking their battles, managing a difficult relationship, avoiding unnecessary conflict, being professional, being kind, being understanding, being patient, being the bigger person. All of which are perfectly reasonable explanations when you examine them one at a time.

The challenge however is that when you place enough of them together and repeat them often enough and over a long enough period of time, something else starts to happen. A woman slowly begins to adapt herself around the people and systems she is navigating, usually so gradually that she doesn’t notice it herself. A little less direct, a little less visible, a little less likely to challenge something she knows isn’t right, a little more likely to explain herself when no explanation was ever required and thus a little more likely to smile and say “Yes” when she wants to shout and say “No”.

My father was a highly abusive alcoholic. The lifelong damage he caused my mother and sister shaped my life in ways I am still understanding today. What I didn’t understand then was that one of the things I was watching was how women learn to adapt who they are and how they behave around men like this and how, as a result, they become smaller than they know themselves to be in order to survive.

Children become extraordinarily skilled observers when they have to. They learn to read mood, tone, energy, atmosphere, the sound of a door closing, the way somebody walks into a room, the difference between a healthy silence and a dangerous silence. Many women become experts at exactly the same thing, not because they are weak or overly emotional or lacking either ability or confidence but because adapting to insecure male behaviour is often the safest thing available to them at the time.

So now we are dealing with habit…and the good news about habits are that given the right environment, encouragement and determination, we can unlearn and change them.

This is one of the reasons I became so interested in understanding insecure male behaviour. Not because I believe men are the enemy (I don’t) but because I spent much of my own life being one of those men. Insecure, defensive, needing approval more than truth far more than I realised, confusing control with care and confusing being needed with being loved. Looking back now, I can see that many of the behaviours I now help women navigate were behaviours I once displayed myself, albeit in ways that seemed perfectly reasonable to me at the time.

Only later do they begin to see what everyone else was experiencing all along.

Over the years, thousands of women have sat opposite me and described some version of the same experience. They know something feels off, they know they are carrying too much, they know they are adapting, they know they are editing themselves and yet they keep going. What continually strikes me is not that women do this but how normal it has become for them to do this.

The real cost is not simply the promotion that wasn’t pursued, the opportunity missed or the relationship that lasted longer than it should have. The real cost is much more personal than that. It is the gradual abandonment of Self, the habit of overriding what you already know, the slow erosion of self-trust, the distance that forms between who you are and who you have learned to be.

That is the conversation I want to explore here, not because women need fixing (they absolutely do not) and not because men need blaming (they don’t) but because once you can see a pattern clearly, you no longer have to keep living inside it.

Much of what I write will be about this cultural, societal dynamic because women are so often the ones paying the highest price for these dynamics and we share a collective responsibility to heal and close this divide. Much of what I write about will be about men because unless we understand what creates insecure male behaviour, we will keep mistaking it for something else.

What interests me is freedom, for women from the patterns that cause them to abandon themselves and for men from the patterns that cause them to abandon themselves too.

Neither was born to live this way.

I suspect we’ll talk about power, self-trust, leadership, relationships, confidence, patriarchy, insecure male behaviour and the subtle ways both women and men learn to abandon themselves.

This is the conversation I hope to continue exploring here.

Not simply insecure male behaviour but the wider patterns that cause women and men alike to abandon their true selves, how those patterns and resulting habits shape our lives and relationships and what it might look like to move beyond them.

I don’t claim to have all the answers. Much of what I write will be me sharing what I’ve learned, what I’m still learning and the questions I find myself increasingly curious about as I get older.

If any of that interests you, I’d love for you to join me.

With love,

James

P.S. If you’d like to explore more of my work, including my upcoming book How To Stop Taking Sh*t From Insecure Men*, my coaching programmes and free resources, you’ll find everything at www.jamesdakin.co.uk.

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