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Goodpain Episode No. 013: Thank you for Season 1 and Preview of Season 2
56 Plays1 month ago
Season 1 of Goodpain has wrapped and we thank everyone who came along with us. We are in production on Season 2 and introduce the topic in this episode.
Goodpain will return with Season 2 toward the end of October, early November in 2025. See you then!
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Transcript
Introduction to 'Good Pain' Podcast
00:00:01
Speaker
I'm Jeremy. And I'm Tyler. Welcome to Good Pain, where we talk about life's true intensities without pretending they're easy solve. What if the things we're told to fix, optimize, or get over are actually where the real wisdom lives?
00:00:14
Speaker
Each week we gather for the kind of honest conversations you desire to be a part of more often about the relentless demands, the unexpected grief, the quiet victories, and everything in between. Because maybe, just maybe, the answer isn't to eliminate the hard stuff, it's to find the good in it. Welcome to the conversation.
Reflections on Fall and New Beginnings
00:00:45
Speaker
It is officially fall here in the Rocky Mountains. This week we had our first temperature drop low and all felt the change and shift in the seasons officially from a summer that felt very different from others due to what has been happening in the world, as well as the fact that we launched Good Pain, a project, at least on the podcast side of things, that had been two years in the making.
Jeremy's Caregiving Journey and Transition
00:01:15
Speaker
And this episode is wrap up of that season. It was a long season. When we set out to discuss this topic, Jeremy and I had multiple sessions.
00:01:26
Speaker
We had an outline of how we were going to progress through it. And for me, by the end, it was an exhausting topic. It's one that we have lived for 15 years now, having just gotten to the point where we've entered into a new space where we are no longer simply Claire's parents as a minor.
00:01:47
Speaker
She turned 18 and we stepped into a new space of learning what it means to fulfill the roles from a legal perspective of what it means to be a guardian. That comes with its own new set of requirements.
00:02:00
Speaker
The last 15 years for me personally were spent consolidating learnings, feeling that sometimes I had things under control, that we had line of sight into what we were going to be doing in terms of what it meant to be caregivers, of what it meant to be a family, of what it meant for Tiffany and to be couples, professionally what that all meant.
00:02:22
Speaker
There was a whole lot wrapped up in that. And it took 15 years to get to a point where I was able to even look back and see how I carried that story of the last 15 years in a way that wasn't necessarily mine to carry any
Writing and Releasing Personal Stories
00:02:39
Speaker
longer. And so...
00:02:40
Speaker
The Irish wakeness of this exercise and the book and manuscript that I wrote at the beginning of 2025 was my memorial to letting go of this story and saying that it's served its purpose with me.
00:02:56
Speaker
It may have more to do with me in the future. It's not that I'm going to stop talking about it, but I don't need to protect it and I don't need to control it any longer. That it has more work to do and I don't need to make sure that it's doing the work I think it needs to do.
00:03:11
Speaker
And this series and the forthcoming book that eventually will get published and released, that really is me letting go of the story. It's still a part of me. It's still... and a part of our family's story, but it has other work to do that we don't need to monitor, that we don't need to be a part of. And there's a little bit of pouring one out for that story, no longer being just within the bounds of me and our family and letting it go on and do the work that it needs to.
Listener Feedback and Season Transition
00:03:39
Speaker
Sight unseen.
00:03:40
Speaker
You've come along for this story. Our listeners who have followed along with this, and we've been honored by the feedback that we've gotten of how it has given language to some people that have endured similar experiences for others that are in the midst of enduring acute trauma or just a disappointment, a disillusionment and disenfranchisement with the world around them.
00:04:03
Speaker
We thank you for coming along with that. And at the same time, as we close out the season, as the season of summer itself closes out, we move into fall, We want to give a preview to what we've been called to explore next.
Exploring Masculinity in Season Two
00:04:20
Speaker
We started production on season two about three weeks ago. The topic around season two is not the one we thought we were going to be doing. In fact, there were a number of topics we felt were going to step in front of what we are going to be discussing in season two.
00:04:38
Speaker
I've hesitated to even name what it is that we're going to be discussing because the word itself is so loaded with academic intellectual conversation where public discourse is taking place right now.
00:04:55
Speaker
I'm going to attempt here to give a little bit more of a picture of what we're trying to accomplish within season two, we're going to get 50% of the way toward defining what it is that we're doing and describing the sandbox in which we're going to play as we discuss this topic.
00:05:16
Speaker
But I'm not convinced that we really know that the sandbox we're creating for this is going to hold in the way that we think it is. And part of that is because as we've gone through production, I've found that the ways we're guiding the conversations is enough to get us started and moving in the right direction, but it doesn't hold or define. If we were looking back at the end of those conversations, I would say, wow, all it did was provide a direction for us, but where we ended up, I could not have anticipated.
00:05:47
Speaker
The topic that we're going to be discussing is around masculinity and maleness.
Challenging Definitions of Masculinity
00:05:55
Speaker
and And that's about the most simple way that I can describe what it is we're going to be trying to do.
00:06:02
Speaker
My reticence to even name it comes from the fact that we don't want to have an academic conversation that tries to define or box in what masculinity is.
00:06:15
Speaker
The approach that we're taking is much more akin to an excavation, like an archaeological dig, where we know there's something here, there's there's something real here to be explored, but we don't need to define it in order to simply start digging and uncovering and seeing what comes forth and being surprised by what comes forth.
00:06:36
Speaker
I'll refer back to an interview I had this week with an individual where we set out to discuss what it was that makes it so difficult for men to deal with grief.
00:06:48
Speaker
And where we ended up was being somewhat surprised by other themes that I feel point a little bit more towards what it means to differentially find a mature version of what it means to be a boy or what it means to be a man, we're going to acknowledge the fact that there's a lot about what it means to be male, what it means to be female, what gender roles and gender assignments from a cultural construct perspective, how much of them are attributed to our inventions.
00:07:23
Speaker
Yeah, those things are real. But that also points the fact that not all of it is purely nurture, is purely environment. Part of my resistance to this topic itself is the polarized way that we take this, where we either go to one pole and we say, it's all a construct, it's all based on cultural norms, or we go all the way to the other side and say that boys will be boys.
00:07:52
Speaker
This is just the way they are. They're purely instinctual. What we're going to be working to do through this excavation, this archaeological dig that we're embarking on is to really uncover the lived experience, to make this feel alive without devolving into static definitions of this must equal this.
00:08:14
Speaker
And here's the diagnostic approach that we're going to take to defining what's wrong with the world because it has been throughout history dominated by men. We are going to acknowledge that these things are real. We can't ignore them.
00:08:29
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And we will bring them up appropriately, at least from our perspective. And that's where we get into the other struggle here.
Diverse Voices and Models in Conversation
00:08:37
Speaker
Jeremy and I are both white. We are both middle-aged white men in America at this point in time.
00:08:43
Speaker
That's insufficient to have a complete conversation. And so we are endeavoring to find other voices that we can bring into this conversation. And the structure that we believe we're going to be building for this is going to be a mix of two things. One is Jeremy and I are going to still continue to have our one-on-one conversations. We have about six of those conversations that we have outlined, that we know where we're going. And we're using the model of eldership. We're using the model of apprenticeship.
00:09:18
Speaker
Because if there's anything that we know is common across all races, all genders, when it comes to what it means to be a boy and what it means to be a man, we have an absence of modeled behavior.
00:09:35
Speaker
When we say this, We are really going to try to avoid using the very charged words of toxic masculinity because I don't believe that is a sufficient word to describe what's going on.
00:09:48
Speaker
I feel toxic masculinity is symptomatic. It is not pointing towards conversation between immature and mature masculinity. Even the division between mature men masculinity and mature boy masculinity and the immature versions of both of those as well.
00:10:07
Speaker
That is where we believe we can be calling towards something that is a deep inborn drive, a yearning, which is to reach for maturity.
Maturity vs. Immaturity Discussion
00:10:17
Speaker
And part of what we talk about when we say maturity is reaching for something that makes us smaller in our own personal narrative, but somehow bigger because we're attached to something greater than ourselves. Right?
00:10:31
Speaker
And that maturity calls toward that, and immaturity pushes us further and further into this narcissistic, egocentric view of our own story and a scarce mindset that makes us scrap and fight, inflict violence and invade, all on the basis of what my own individual experience is, and that is immaturity.
00:10:57
Speaker
We've forgotten how to call towards maturity. We believe by being louder, by being more oppositional, that we somehow can make ourselves right and that right equals maturity.
00:11:11
Speaker
We're going to reject that. And then we're going to move into the sharing of stories, the sharing of personal experiences, and what that means across lots of different points of view, across lots of different histories.
00:11:25
Speaker
what that means for how we don't let those histories, don't let those point of views hijack who we are and how we decide to be in the world. We don't allow the pain and trauma that we have experienced to be the license to transmit it onto others, that we instead allow the histories, we allow the traumas, we allow the struggles, we allow the intensity of what each of us have experienced to transform us so that we can bring that forward in into a possibility that is much bigger than who we are.
00:12:00
Speaker
A lot of these things are going to apply not only to men and not only to boys. This topic is much more not about what it means biologically, philosophically, to be man.
00:12:16
Speaker
It's much more about what it means to be in relationship to male energy.
Understanding Male and Female Energies
00:12:22
Speaker
Male and female energies and the differences between the two of those is a framework that helps us understand different ways of being in the world.
00:12:31
Speaker
And we may say that biologically, a significant portion of the population may have more of a predilection towards some of these energies than others, but we also know that biology alone does not define that, even within a biologically defined male.
00:12:49
Speaker
We know there are different flavors of what it means to be male, but we've been hijacked into believing that there is a narrowness to that that is the only thing that defines what it means to be male.
00:13:01
Speaker
We are going to get down to the work of picking sites in which we are going to dig, and then we are going to respectfully start to brush things away and uncover what are the themes that emerge.
00:13:14
Speaker
What are the things that we know? what are the things we believe we know? What are the things that have diluted us through the lens of our experience? I have no idea where it's going to take us.
00:13:25
Speaker
We hope that it is something the audience finds voice in, but we're not doing this for the audience.
Season Two Launch Plans
00:13:33
Speaker
We're doing it for ourselves because something happened within the last four weeks that increasingly said this is where we're supposed to dig.
00:13:40
Speaker
We don't necessarily know why. We just know we're supposed to. And so we will get down to the business of tilling the soil, of creating the conditions for whatever is going to come forth on this topic.
00:13:53
Speaker
And we hope that you will join us in season two, which we plan on launching towards the end of October, early November. Once we've gotten a handful of these episodes under wraps, it will take us into the new year and wherever it needs to go.
00:14:11
Speaker
Thank you again for listening and joining with us on season one. We're looking forward to extending that conversation to a new area that will still have very similar themes because that's what all of this is.
00:14:26
Speaker
And we're excited to keep exploring this time from a different perspective.
00:14:32
Speaker
Thank you for sitting with us in this conversation, for bringing your own story, your own questions, and your own hard-won wisdom to what we're building together.
Subscription and Engagement Encouragement
00:14:42
Speaker
If you want to keep this going, subscribe to GoodPain on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, where you can also leave us a review that helps others find their way to these conversations.
00:14:51
Speaker
And for weekly doses of conversations that go beyond quick fixes or surface level advice, subscribe to our Kindling newsletter at goodpainco.com. Good Pain is recorded in Colorado on Arapaho, Ute, and Cheyenne ancestral lands.
00:15:07
Speaker
And let's remember, we are not alone in this. Our struggle is not our shame. Whatever we are carrying today, we don't have to carry it alone. We will see you next time.