I asked Dr. JJ Kelly to finish a sentence for the guys listening. The reason you are lonely as hell is blank.
She didn’t pause. “Because you have no emotional intelligence skills.”
I said, tell us more. And she did, for an hour, in the way only the Punk Rock Doc can. Her whole theory of the male loneliness epidemic, the one she laid out in a piece for Vice, is that it isn’t a mystery and it isn’t your fault, but it is on you to fix. Men were never taught the skills. So we sit in the loneliness, feel the shame of it, and hide the whole thing away where it can never get treated.
She’s been on the show before. She’s one of our favorites, and she is not gentle. Stay with it.
You can’t fix what you won’t look at
Here’s the trap JJ sees over and over. Loneliness gets filed next to weakness, so a man feels ashamed of it, and shame’s whole job is to make you hide. So the loneliness never even gets named, which means it never gets addressed. “You can’t problem solve something you won’t even look at,” she said.
The fix starts embarrassingly early in the process. Before you change anything, you name the thing. That’s the backbone of DBT and of mindfulness, validation first. You have to be okay with the emotion you’re in before you can do a single thing about it. And most men can’t, because we were handed exactly two approved settings, anger and fine, and told to run everything else through those.
There’s a sneaky wrinkle here that hit close to home. IQ does not translate to EQ. You can be the smartest guy in the building and know nothing about your own emotions, because you intellectualize them instead of actually feeling them. I did that for years. Read the books, could explain the concepts, could not for the life of me tell you what was happening in my own chest. This is the whole reason Will and I do what we do. The mask I wore wasn’t ignorance. It was a genius-level workaround for never having to feel anything.
Insight is not a skill
This is the line I’ve been chewing on since we hung up.
You can read every book on my shelf, listen to every podcast, quote every framework, and stay exactly as lonely as you started. Because insight is not a skill. Knowing is not doing. JJ’s program works, she says, because you actually do the reps, not because you accumulate more clever things to say at dinner.
She put a sharper point on it than I would have dared. “An apology without changed behavior is just manipulation.” And the C-suite guys who tell her, well, at least I know I do it? She’s merciless. Knowing it and doing it anyway is worse than not knowing, because now you can’t even claim ignorance. This is the exact gap Will and I named our course after, Awareness to Action. Awareness feels like progress. It even feels like humility. And it changes nothing until you take the next step and move.
She’s also strict about the raw material, and this one’s worth stealing. Most men name thoughts and call them feelings. “I feel like you’re attacking me” is not a feeling, it’s an accusation wearing a feeling’s coat. Neither is “betrayed,” which she corrected Will on the last time she was here. The actual feelings underneath are small and plain. Pissed. Scared. Sad. You have to get down to those before any of the skills work, and most of us never learned the vocabulary.
Find your own socks
Now the part that had everyone laughing and squirming, because it’s where all of this hits the kitchen floor.
JJ opened the whole episode with a message to men about emotional labor. “Pretend that you live alone and find your own fucking socks.” You have eyeballs. You can see the dishes in the sink and the kitchen that needs sweeping. Waiting to be asked is still the load, because now she has to keep the list in her head and manage you too. And then, she says, do not go to a shrink and complain your wife won’t sleep with you. Being a child is not sexy. Doing the dishes is. I’ve heard it put this way: the sexiest thing a woman can say is “I want you,” and the sexiest thing a man can say is “I got this.”
Under the socks is the bigger thing, conflict. She says most couples pick dishonest harmony over healthy conflict, and when someone tells her “we never fight,” she hears “somebody is stuffing a lot of anger.” There’s a way to fight fair, and there’s a way to apologize that isn’t garbage. “I’m sorry you feel that way” is not an apology, it’s an insult with a bow on it. A real one owns the impact, drops the “but,” and comes with changed behavior. I tell my kids all the time that you don’t have to be all the way wrong to say you’re sorry. JJ’s version for grown men is blunter. Eat your shit sandwich with dignity, then actually change.
And the thing she kept circling back to, the antidote to all of it, is courage. She’s got it on a sticker now. Courage rarely backfires. Do one thing that’s a little scary and a little honest every single day, and you build the muscle for the harder conversations, the ones that pull you out of the loneliness instead of deeper into it...
What to do about it
Name the actual feeling, not the thought about it. Next time you’re activated, catch yourself before you say “I feel like she’s attacking me.” That’s a thought. Drop under it to the real one, pissed, scared, sad, small and plain. You can’t regulate an emotion you won’t name. Reply and tell me the one you have the hardest time naming, I read every one.
Run the values gap on paper. Column 1, your top 5 values. Column 2, the behaviors you actually do that don’t match them. Column 3, what you’ll do instead. We built a whole module of Awareness to Action around exactly this. Start with our free Awareness Self-Assessment to see where your gap is widest: focusnowtraining.com/assessment-page. Paid subscribers, Resource 1 walks the full exercise.
Find your own socks this week. Pick one piece of the mental load you’ve been outsourcing and just own it, unasked. Then, if you’ve been coasting on it for years, go say the boss-move sentence: I see you’ve been carrying this, I’m sorry, I’m changing it. And follow through, because the apology without the change is the manipulation.
Do one courageous, honest thing a day. Small and a little scary. Say the true sentence at dinner. Make the ask. Tell a friend the real answer to “how are you.” Courage rarely backfires, and it compounds.
Reply with your top value and one behavior that betrays it. That’s the whole exercise in one line, and it’s the bravest thing you can do in an inbox. Tell me, honestly, and I’ll build a follow-up from what comes back.
This week on Men Talking Mindfulness
Dr. JJ Kelly is a clinical psychologist and the self-described Punk Rock Doc, who runs a practice called The Unorthodox, a punk alternative to therapy. She’s the author of the Holy Shit book series, she teaches emotional intelligence skills to everyone from C-suite executives to teenagers, and she just wrote a piece for Vice on why men are so damn lonely. She’s a returning favorite on the show, and this one is about you whether you want to admit it or not.
Watch on YouTube | Listen here
One more thing before the paywall
Awareness to Action has been open a couple of months now. Text A2A to 33777 or go to FocusNowTraining.com/A2A-course. The whole course is built to close the exact gap JJ hammered on, the one between knowing better and actually doing it, with a full module on values and the behaviors that betray them. On the fence? Reply with the word A2A and I’ll tell you straight whether it’s for you.
Until next time,
Jon Macaskill and Will Schneider
Focus Now Training and Men Talking Mindfulness
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