Sexual Health: The Most Neglected Part of Holistic Wellness | Scott & Chris (We Got Balls Podcast) | Better Man Podcast Ep. 131

Dean Pohlman: Hey guys, it’s Dean. Welcome to the Batman podcast. Today’s episode is an interview episode with Scott and Chris from the We Got Balls podcast. This is a discussion around sexual health and sexual wellness specifically for men. I would say that this is a not safe for work episode, or if you have kids listening to the podcast with you, this is probably one that you might want to have a conversation with about later.

Dean Pohlman: But what I really do like about what they’re doing with their podcast is they are normalizing the discussion of sex instead of putting it away in a box and attaching shame to it. They are having conversations around sex so that it can be normalized, but also so that we can have better overall health. What I really got out of this episode is that our sexual health is not just an optional part of our overall health.

Dean Pohlman: It is an integral, essential part of our overall holistic wellness and that is what Scott and Chris are doing. They are starting to have these conversations so that we can be better well-rounded with our overall health and have the conversations that we need to have so that we can improve in this area of sexual wellness. So I hope you enjoyed this episode.

Dean Pohlman: It was really eye opening for me, and I’m looking forward, to what you get out of it. Hope inspires you to be a better man. What’s up guys at seen? Welcome back to the Better Man podcast. Today I have Scott and Chris here from We Got Balls and we’re going to talk about we got balls. What’s up guys.

Scott Cone: That’s our favorite topic actually.

Chris Inman: And you do too guys. You do too. You all got balls.

Dean Pohlman: So it’s it’s true. So yeah. So, I think a good starting point for this is, you know, I was telling you this before we started this, recording, but I don’t actually listen to podcast. I haven’t figured out how to work it into my life in a way that feels, you know, like a, like, just, the right use of my time.

Dean Pohlman: Just haven’t gotten into the habit. So I haven’t actually listened to the the We Got Balls podcast before. I think I’ve browsed through some of the episodes, but I’d love it if you could just tell me and and us. What is the mission of you got balls. What’s the what’s the idea behind it?

Scott Cone: Yeah. Chris, you want to tackle that first?

Chris Inman: Yeah, I’ll take that. So we started it as an experiment because Scott and I had done a training together about was it five years ago, I guess now. And we had, been working with a guy who wrote a book around. What turns you on sexually. And we were in the recovery space. And so we were working with guys and helping them tell their stories and get to the, the, the traumas that kind of bred their need to, to cope with, with sex in particular as a means of dealing with life.

Chris Inman: And so these guys lives had become unmanageable and, and so they were looking for help. And one of the clues to that was to give them a, a direction by understanding what turned them on, what did they type in the search bar on Google when they’re looking for porn? And so which.

Scott Cone: Is the question the most people, you know, if you’re in a men’s group, whether it’s a church group or recovery group or, you know, most groups that are in this space of recovery and addiction recovery, kind of the details of what arousal is us can be very vague. And so it’s it’s fairly shocking when, you know, guys start working with us and we’ll be like, well, what did you type into the search?

Scott Cone: What were the keywords that you were looking for? It’s not, you know, because we’re not aroused by everything. We’re not aroused generally. We’re, we’re we’re very specifically and very particularly like a particular type of person doing a particular kind of act in a particular setting. And so that was really vague to a lot of people, even, that were very seasoned in kind of 12 step recovery groups.

Scott Cone: And so this was kind of a radical idea of being curious about whom why do I look for that particular thing when I go searching for porn? And so that that was the context by which we started to launch the podcast.

Chris Inman: Yeah. And and then we found out that people really loved our content on, on penises for some reason. Okay. As a guy. So we start doing general masculinity stuff, you know, body shame, being naked with our guys, you know, what’s the benefit of that? All those issues which morphed into a little bit more of a broader what does it mean to be a man?

Chris Inman: What are some masculinity issues of our day? We recently did an episode on suicide. We’ve done things, you know, just really addressing the issues that guys, especially guys 35 plus are dealing with. And so that’s really kind of where we’re headed in the in the months and years to come is we want to be a platform. We call it a raw and real community for men.

Chris Inman: Or guys can just come share their stories. Here’s some, maybe some experts from time to time that have some great things to contribute and get their, questions discussed. We don’t really answer a lot of questions, but we discuss a lot of questions every Friday on on our, live episode that we have on the podcast. So we’re just trying to make it a safe space for guys to be guys and, and talk about things that maybe they haven’t ever talked about before.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, it’s such a, you know, I mentioned this or I tried to blurted out as you were talking, but it’s such a taboo topic and it’s such a, you know, it’s it’s. Yeah, it’s just such a taboo topic. It’s something that, I suspect that’s why it’s your guys have been the message has been popular thus far because like, oh, someone’s talking about this.

Dean Pohlman: How? Like, you know, how interesting. How like, unless, I don’t know, it seems so taboo that it’s interesting and yeah, I guess what are also what are the things, some of the things that people come in and, and share or so some of the topics that you’ve discussed that are like common topics that a lot of guys have shame, embarrassment or just even have been there but haven’t brought to the front and like say, hey, I have these thoughts.

Scott Cone: Well, kind of what’s attested to if you look at the volume of, views on our videos, our most popular video right now is called Bro Baiting. It’s been viewed by over 70,000 men worldwide. Which for us is a big deal because we’re just, you know, we’re we’re little guys. We’re not man for yoga.

Scott Cone: So we’re, we’re happy with a thousand views on our videos. But this one really took off and it was really just kind of out of a discussion that we were noticing that a lot of guys in their growing up experience have these, well, first of all, it’s about this issue of sexual harm. So we make a distinction between sexual abuse and sexual harm, which I think is really helpful for men to think about.

Scott Cone: So worldwide, the statistics on sexual abuse are this about one in every three women will be sexually abused before their 18th birthday worldwide. Most, the figures for men are about 1 to 1 of every five men, so about 20%. But almost no expert believes that that’s the actual figure. And the reason why is because when men are sexually abused growing up, it’s almost always from another man.

Scott Cone: And that creates a lot of sexual confusion and a lot of shame. You know, if, if, if I’m, a nine year old boy and I go down to, my older friend’s, you know, house to kind of hang out with him, and, and he starts showing me porn and I get aroused. And then in the context of my arousal, he invites me to give him a blowjob or masturbate him.

Scott Cone: I’m typically going to view that as a consensual behavior. Right. But I’m not going to engage the dynamics that we’re in. The relationship is this guy use porn to arouse me first? He happens to be 15. He’s through puberty and he’s sexually mature, is as a boy, he’s he’s an adult male in his body. And I’m a nine year old.

Dean Pohlman:

Scott Cone: And and here I am in asking, being asked to connect with him in a really intimate and arousing way. And it brings a lot of confusion into my life because I’m not ready for sex at that particular age. And so that’s a very common scenario, whether it’s with a brother or an older cousin or an older neighbor.

Scott Cone: And a lot of guys have their first sexual experience in that context, and they swear that they’re going to take it to their grave. So most experts believe that the figure is the same for men as it is for women. And it may be a little higher because men never tell anybody that they’ve been sexually abused because of the shame around the fact that it’s arousal occurring in the context of a relationship with another dude.

Scott Cone: So that’s sexual abuse. When somebody exposes you to too much, too soon, that’s abusive, particularly if there’s a power dynamic there where they’re a little older or they’re more sexually sophisticated or they’re more experienced, and that’s going to do something to your nervous system, and it’s usually building on something that was already there in your nervous system that comes from your family of origin.

Scott Cone: So why is it that as a nine year old, I’m down in a 15 year old, house and playing with him, and nobody’s paying attention to that in my family? Why? Why do my parents care so little about where I’m at that they’re not actually investigating that, and they also don’t notice when I come home that day after performing oral sex on him.

Scott Cone: Maybe I’m a little downcast. Maybe I’m showing on my face some distress and nobody’s even engaging that. So that’s the category of sexual abuse. Not everybody has sexual abuse. A lot of men do, like we say, one out of every three worldwide. That’s a lot of men. But there’s this other category of sexual harm which is occurring in a family system, typically and primarily, where as I’m growing up, nobody is even talking to me about my penis or what an erection is or what masturbation is.

Scott Cone: And I’m just supposed to figure this out on myself and so there’s a lot of silence and a lack of education from the dad, in particular around my body and my development into a male body.

Chris Inman: And sometimes shaming and judgment around my body. So now I think sex itself is bad because nothing has been said except negative things.

Scott Cone: Yeah. So that’s the category of sexual harm. And I think we’re not really going out on a limb to say this. We all experienced sexual harm growing up. Every man does so nobody gets into adulthood without some sense of either their body being harmed. Like, these are typical scenarios, Dean is, you know, you played, college sports.

Scott Cone: I played high school sports. And there’s a lot of shaming that can go on in the locker room if you’re showering after the game, you know, hey, look at that guy. He’s got a really small dick, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, there’s all these micro moments that don’t seem like much when you, you know, just kind of look at them in isolation.

Scott Cone: But when you look at all the ways in which that has happened over the course of your development, it can be a big deal. And so sexual harm can fall in that category. And I was mocked for something of my body, you know, whether it’s my penis or whether I have too much body hair or a lack of body here, there’s all these stories that emerge from guys growing up years where they were made to feel really outside of belonging to the, the community of men.

Scott Cone: And then so everybody has sexual harm in their story in some way. And then a lot of men have sexual abuse. So this is where the foundation then from sexual struggles is an adult come because if you don’t engage that harm, what we call trauma, if you don’t engage that trauma, it’s going to start to resurface in your life.

Scott Cone: And a lot of unproductive ways. And so that’s that’s really kind of where we originally started, but then evolving from there because so many guys are growing up without a sense of being initiated as a man by their dads being welcomed into kind of that community of masculinity. And when there isn’t a overt initiation kind of process in a culture, it defaults to sex.

Scott Cone: So I become a man when I have sex for the first time. And that’s a really low bar for masculinity, right? And then if that’s the bar that I learn is what makes me a man, I’m kind of bound to that view of myself, which creates these repetitive patterns of how I engage my sexuality to feel more like a man, how how I don’t really have an understanding of what masculinity is all about overall, other than just through that lens of sexuality.

Scott Cone: So that’s why we’re kind of expanding beyond just the sexual, abuse category. Sexual harm category overall, too. What does it mean to be a man, you know, in, this time in the United States in particular, where there seems to be so much confusion about gender and masculinity and, toxic masculinity is thrown around and I’m of the opinion that toxic masculinity is created by a culture that’s really hostile to masculinity in the workplace.

Scott Cone: And so that’s what we’re trying to engage with, guys, is where does this start in your life? What are your early memories of this? And being able to create a community where guys can tell their stories?

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, I think, I mean, there’s a lot that I can a lot of notes that I’ve been scribbling down, things that I can say back to that I think, I think the, the toxic masculinity term just has become a catch all term for masculine behavior that we don’t like. And it’s just and not even masculine behavior necessarily could just be like behavior from men that we don’t like.

Dean Pohlman: So, you know, I used to kind of just be on board with the toxic masculinity. And now people say that I’m like, well, what do you mean by that? Like, what do you do? What do you what are you referring to? Because as far as I can tell, it’s more of like this catch all term for I don’t like this behavior.

Dean Pohlman: So I’m going to call it toxic masculinity when, you know, it might not even be a masculine behavior. It could just be like, yeah, that dude’s being an asshole. But like, that’s not, you know.

Scott Cone: Tosca, toxic asshole.

Chris Inman: And this asshole ness has been around for a long time.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. And yeah, I think, you know, I was thinking about this today. Just in my own. In my own. You know, I have a I have a four and a half year old son, and, you know, I’ve also done some I’ve gone down the rabbit hole, with looking at, and I think some other, you know, some other short form content on, on YouTube where people trying to explain the evolution of masculinity.

Dean Pohlman: And one thing that I’ve came across is, kind of this idea that, you know, men are not boys are not around men as they grow up. Now, in our culture, that’s what they’re growing up with. Their moms. And so, you know, you have moms raising boys, telling them how to be men and, you know.

Chris Inman: And and even worse, their devices.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, they’re being mean.

Chris Inman: They’re being raised by the internet.

Dean Pohlman: Yes. Yeah. That’s what they’re their that’s what their exposure is now. And you know, you’re also talking about how, you know, you came home or in this situation the guy could come home from being sexually abused and he’s just like in a bad mood. But mom and dad don’t notice. Or they, you know, they’re distracted enough that they don’t have the conversation.

Dean Pohlman: Whereas, you know, if there were not TVs, if there were, if there was nothing to do other than maybe read a book or hang out with each other, you’d be like, hey, what’s up? What’s wrong with you right now? You seem down.

Scott Cone: Yes.

Dean Pohlman: So, yeah. So I guess for me, the one thing that came up that could be potentially, one thing that could be potentially useful in discussing right now is how can you tell if sexual abuse has occurred, in your past? How do you know if there’s something that needs to be dealt with that hasn’t been dealt with?

Scott Cone: Oh, that’s a great question. You know, we start with we actually start in the counterintuitive place. We don’t ask guys if they’ve been sexually abused because most guys will answer the question. No.

Chris Inman: Yeah, right.

Scott Cone: Because of this issue of arousal and most of it occurring in the context of some kind of contact or sexual involvement with another male, there’s going to be a lot of shame around that question. So the immediate answer will be no. And even if they feel like they’ve been sexually abused, they’ll say no. But most guys don’t even recognize what sexual abuse is.

Scott Cone: So but we don’t start there. Where we start is the family of origin. So it turns out that there’s always abuse before the abuse. And this may sound really rough for us to use the term abuse about how your mom and dad treated you. But think of trauma. The word trauma comes from a Greek word that simply means wound.

Scott Cone: And there are two ways primary ways that we get wounded growing up in our families. The first one is just out and out abuse. There’s physical abuse. There is emotional abuse. There can be sexual abuse from parents or sexualizing behavior. And,

Chris Inman: These days it’s actually more about neglect than it is about overt abuse. And neglect is the big harm that’s keeping guys numbed out and looking for love and any place they can find it.

Scott Cone: To your point, Dean, about 70% of boys are being raised in a household without a male presence, so it’s only moms. Well, what is that doing to the boys development. And so you have to look at the family system first, because if you go to the, the, the sexual harm or the sexual shame first, it’s just going to magnify the guy’s shame and he’s going to start shutting down emotionally.

Scott Cone: You’re not going to get him anywhere with that. So we have to set the context for how the abuse was able to occur in a family system where either a mom and dad are not paying attention to me, they’re very disengaged. They’re very involved in their church life or their business life or whatever, but they’re really not attending to my heart as a boy as I’m developing.

Scott Cone: That’s the bigger damage that that’s set in a family system. And then the other part of it is, you know, just out and out abuse one of the, and so that’s very difficult for a guy to actually recognize a name until we start asking him questions like, tell me about a time when you felt particularly seen by your mother or father, or you were struggling with a really intense emotion, like anger or fear or sadness, and you came home from school because you’d been bullied and know, you know, they noticed you or they didn’t notice you.

Scott Cone: Tell us a memory about that. And a lot of guys have a lot significant lack of memory of kind and present care by their parents. So really common theme for men in particular. And so we help guys understand in the context of my family, how did I learn to bond with other people? How did I learn to manage my emotions?

Scott Cone: You know, when I felt big feelings, what did my parents do to help soothe me or help pick me up and feel better about myself? And then how to how do those two things, my my ability to regulate my big emotions that don’t feel so good in my body and my ability to bond intimately with others? How does that affect my view of myself as a as a boy, as a man?

Scott Cone: And those three things are the definition of what trauma does to us, how it impacts our lives. And so we we help guys reverse engineer that by thinking about their stories that they remember. What was it like to be a boy in your home, in grade school, in middle school, in high school? What happened when you were bullied?

Scott Cone: What happened when you, had your first wet dream, you know, or you discovered masturbation? Like, tell us about those stories. When did you first get exposed to pornography? Another. This is another example of sexual harm. Most the average age for exposure to porn. Dean is eight years old. So in four more years, your son is going to be exposed to porn.

Scott Cone: Most likely. And it won’t be naked women. It will be orgies. So and it’s going to be Video. So what do you do when an eight year old is exposed to group sex video and he doesn’t even know what an erection is, or he doesn’t know what ejaculation is, there’s. So there’s this incredible need for dads to be involved in their son’s lives, kind of preempting that by being very engaged with their sons around their developing body, and about sexuality.

Scott Cone: From the time that you can start having a conversation with, oh, that’s your penis, buddy, and that’s a great part of your body. It feels really good when it gets hard and you touch it, doesn’t it? Yeah. Okay. So you start to normalize the conversation around your body and sexuality as he’s developing as a little guy. And it creates that avenue to have discussions about it as he’s facing these difficult things that he’s going to face.

Scott Cone: But most guys will not recognize that eight year old exposure to porn as abuse or sexual harm, because they’ll be aroused by it and they’ll feel alive by it, because we’re designed to be turned on by naked bodies.

Chris Inman: And and I think what we do, we got balls is and in the work that we do with our clients is we make it a normal conversation to talk about those difficult things. We talk about our own stories. We talk about our own traumas. We talk about our own journey. We talk about our own family, and we get it out there so that people can actually begin to have that conversation as a matter of course, in life, instead of it being something you just do in a therapist office, or just do it when you’re really in a very, very difficult dark spot.

Dean Pohlman: So I just I want to bring up one thing. My wife was actually I was my wife was scrolling through things last night and she said I think she, she was reading this a New York Times article, but it said, it wasn’t quite as, quite as significant as a statistic. You just said, Scott.

Dean Pohlman: But it was said that 1 in 10, boys would be exposed to porn by the age of nine, and I was like, 1 in 10. That’s not that much. Whatever. Like one intent is. But you’re saying most people will be exposed, most men will be exposed by the average age. Average age by eight. Interesting.

Scott Cone: Yeah. By the time you’re a teenager, you’re I think the most recent stats I saw were, 70% of teens have a nude photo of themselves or somebody else on their phone. And the majority of teen boys, about 90%, are using porn, at least on a weekly basis. So there’s a very fast on ramp into sexuality because of the ubiquitous availability of porn.

Scott Cone: Once they have a device, it could be, you know, you can get it on internet, you can have you can start to be, sexually groomed by an older man. If you have a Nintendo Switch, because there are chats in games and pedophiles go into those chats and they look for lonely little guys and girls to start conversations with, and they start to hook you in by the relational dynamics that are not being offered by your mom and dad.

Scott Cone: Think about how many latchkey kids there are. I come home from school, mom and dad are both working. I sit in front of the TV or now, more commonly, I go to my gaming devices and I game for four hours. That gaming process puts me into a dissociative state, where I’m just kind of focused in on the connection that I’m getting from all these random people that I’m doing.

Scott Cone: Multiplayer role play games with. And boom, a chat pops up that says, hey, I’m, you know, so-and-so, right? And we, we have guys that were groomed online by older men starting at 11 years old, just through chatting on game platforms. So parents are completely unprepared.

Dean Pohlman: Thanks. Yeah.

Scott Cone: Yeah, it is.

Dean Pohlman: I was thinking about, I was thinking about when the iPod came out, when video became available on the iPod. This was probably 2000, early 2000. Right. And I was like, oh, cool. You can have you can watch movies on your phone or movies on your iPod. Right. And then like a day later, I was like, oh, you can put porn on your iPod now.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah, now, now, you know, and go to where you can have it just in your which is, you know, of course, everyone has a phone now and yeah, I have been, I have not, I have not been a user of porn for a long time now. And that was that was before my, that was before I.

Dean Pohlman: What am I saying here? I’m saying I have not used porn on my phone. Which most people probably do now at this point. But anyways, yeah, the, the access to it as well, just thinking about how much access there is to it, but not just access to porn, but access to like someone who is able to inflict sexual harm on you.

Dean Pohlman: For if non porn platforms. Yeah.

Scott Cone: It’s it’s it’s scary. Kids are using Snapchat. Snapchat was developed to sext with people so yeah.

Chris Inman: 10s and it disappears. That’s the whole.

Scott Cone: Point. Instagram I’m like the avenues are endless and so you can’t you can’t protect your child from it. It will find them. What you can do is prepare your child for it. Yeah. So I mean, that’s the protection.

Dean Pohlman: I’m thinking of. Like the, this this reminds me of, like, the abstinence education versus, like, let’s have an open conversation about sex. Yeah. Like, you can’t just. You can’t just child your harm. You can just, like, shield your kids from sex.

Scott Cone: No. Well.

Chris Inman: And that’s why that’s that’s why we have to do it as adults. Because we have to get comfortable ourselves having these conversations. Right.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. You know I was thinking as you were as we’re talking about this, is there a are there countries or are there other cultures where sex is discussed is normalized for growing people, growing humans. And you know, where, where, where does that happen?

Chris Inman: Western Europe.

Dean Pohlman: Western Europe. Okay. I’m thinking France because okay. All right.

Chris Inman: Scandinavian countries, Germanic countries, France, probably not Italy so much because they’re more religious, Catholic. Yeah.

Scott Cone: Well, but at the same time too, like, Chris and I talk a lot about this idea of the middle path, like there’s two kind of standard roles that societies or cultures can take on the sexuality issue. One is we don’t talk about it or we the only way we talk about it is in terms of the pathology of sex.

Scott Cone: Like sex is bad until you get married and all these bad things can happen, so you need to avoid it. That’s typically the United States approach. The religious community in the United States takes that. Just stop it. Don’t do it. Try harder. Approach that doesn’t work.

Dean Pohlman: Chris, you’re a you’re a minister. Am I did I was was okay.

Chris Inman: No never. He never got really baptized into it and, escaped without being to being too traumatized. Yeah, that’s.

Scott Cone: The one one approaches a lot of rigidity and a lot of silence, which just reinforces shame around sexuality. The other approach is kind of the United States approach, or it falls under this banner of sex positivity. But in other words, anything you want to do goes sexually as long as you have consent. And our our position is, well, that’s a very low bar, you know, because you could have a child that was groomed into sexuality at a very young age, and he’s consenting to things that are really harming himself.

Scott Cone: But that consent is not really doing him much good. And so what we what we’re trying to promote is this middle path that both honors our sexuality as a, as a good and beautiful thing, but also provides some containment on it so that it can be used in a way that creates a lot of flourishing for us.

Scott Cone: So, you know, the hookup culture is kind of the the Western approach to this is just hookup with whoever you want, whenever you want. There are no rules around sexuality. And of course, if you try that for a couple of years, you’re going to find out that doesn’t lead to a lot of flourishing in your life. You might get some sexually transmitted diseases.

Scott Cone: You you can’t be sexual with other people without feeling somewhat bonded to people.

Dean Pohlman:

Scott Cone: Or you develop an inability to bond because of the way you’re having sex. And so that kind of free for all, aspect is not what we think leads to flourishing either. So it’s about, hey, what is the optimal? Because you’re into this, Dean. Like, how do I optimize my body for fitness? So. Well, I think what we’re talking about is how do you optimize your body, your mental states, your emotions, your relational connection for the optimal sexual experience for you as a man?

Scott Cone: And that’s what we would prefer to look at it. And so optimizing doesn’t mean quantity. It means quality of what sex is intended for.

Dean Pohlman: So I mean, I’m hearing you talk about this and, you know, I think what I’m struck by is I don’t think people will think of this as a it’s like, oh, yeah, it’d be kind of nice to have. But I don’t think people recognize this as like a component. What I’m hearing of what I’m hearing of sexual wellness is that is a it is a it is an integral part of holistic wellness.

Dean Pohlman: Yes. And that to neglect it like, yeah, you could neglect it and you could, you know, try to fill the gap with these other areas of your health. But it would be much more efficient to look at, you know, your sexual wellness. And I also like that you, you know, you pointed out these just asking yourself these basic questions that can lead like basically questions that can prompt self-reflection, that can lead to answers that can lead to discoveries about yourself.

Dean Pohlman: And I’m I’m a big fan of this. I’m a big fan of therapy. I talk about it all the time. But these are the kinds of questions that can lead to significant self, self-improvement, not self improvement in the sense of eating better or exercising, but helping you understand, understand yourself, understand your trauma, understand the protective or self-sabotaging behaviors that you’ve created for yourself in response to things that have happened to you that you have not resolved, and then being able to address them and move forward without that baggage.

Scott Cone: Yeah, absolutely. Exactly the methods that we’re using to approach this. So it goes back to where do we start? We invite guys to start with their story. What is the story of your relationship with your mother, your father, your body, your sexuality? Those questions lead them to these memories that that kind of crop up for me. Oh, what was my first experience with arousal?

Scott Cone: Why saw my dad’s Playboy stack down in the basement when I was five years old, and then a couple months later? And what does that do within me? Well, it teaches me that other people’s bodies are for our enjoyment, right? That I can just objectify another person and enjoy them. And that’s what men do. And then a couple months later, I’m down at my older friend’s house and he invites me into his sexual experience.

Scott Cone: And I already believe that, hey, my naked body, anybody else is naked body is up for fair games for enjoyment. So he’s inviting me to this. So sure, why not? I want him to be my friend. And then how does That impact.

Dean Pohlman: Development? To be my friend? That’s what I that’s what I go to. That’s what I think of. I think of like this desire to appease, to connect and that’s why. Okay. Well, I want you to be my friend. I want to be like, so I’ll do what you want me to do, even though I don’t, you know, even though if I had the choice, I don’t know if I would do this.

Scott Cone: Yes. Exactly. Right.

Chris Inman: So let me let me interject, because you mentioned that being raised in the church, I was raised by a by a pastor. So for me, sex was like a desert. There was nothing I heard nothing, I saw nothing, it was all bad all the time. So by proxy I was bad. So when I wanted to connect with somebody and started having these desires, sexual desires, there was really nothing I could do.

Chris Inman: I was stuck to just figure it out on my own. And so that’s where I had this kind of split personality. I had this, you know, as teenagers, do you have this moral good boy on one side and this sexual fiend on the other side, chasing down everything I could find to please my inner world. And so that’s how I come into adulthood.

Chris Inman: I think a lot of the guys we work with had this religious baggage, because they come up with a sexual story and a spiritual story, and they think they’re just enemies, but they’re really the two sides of the same coin, which is really ironic. You talk about wellness. This is all about wellness across the board.

Dean Pohlman:

Dean Pohlman: Awkward pause.

Scott Cone: So so we’re starting with the stories. When, when do you first remember experiencing sexual arousal. What’s the context of that. How was that engaged by your mother or your father. What are the other stories. When do you, remember feeling sexual shame? Where do you think there might be sexual harm in your story? But it’s not just about sexual.

Scott Cone: Then what’s your relationship? Describe your relationship with your mother. Describe your relationship with your father. Because it turns out all of this is speaking to the core issue, which is desire. What have you done with your desires and your disappointments? And what we were just talking about is so many of our stories are about belonging or not. Do I belong?

Scott Cone: And, helping guys kind of make sense out of their story as they’re engaging, you know? So you do a lot of this with the yoga, stuff, which is engaging your body, but engaging your emotions as a, as a process of engaging your body because emotions are felt in the body. So when I feel anger, what does that feel like when I feel shame?

Scott Cone: What does that feel like in my body? What impulse does that create in me? And typically we’re helping guys reconnect with their bodies and their emotions, because the way men have been socialized in this country is don’t feel your emotions. There’s very few emotions men are allowed to feel. You’re not allowed to feel anger because you might become violent and men cannot be violent.

Scott Cone: Right? You’re not allowed to feel, you can feel happy. But too much, but not too much. And you definitely can’t be tender.

Dean Pohlman: I feel like you’ve been there before. Yeah.

Scott Cone: You’re not allowed to be tender or compassion because that’s a pussy. And, you are allowed to feel shame, however.

Scott Cone: We want you to feel a lot of shame in the culture. But what we don’t want you to do is just be curious and kind to your emotions and engage those so that you can actually listen to your body, listen to your emotions, and and be invitational about what they might be asking you to do and in order to bring change about your life.

Scott Cone: So it starts with emotional regulation. It moves on to engaging our stories. And that process of engaging our stories then leads into a place where I reevaluate the identity that I’ve developed out of that. And do I want to continue with that kind of self-defeating, self-sabotaging way of living in the world? Or do I want to make some changes in that?

Scott Cone: And it turns out that I can’t live inconsistently with how I view myself. I have to change my identity if I really want to change my behavior. So we’re not nipping at symptoms like a lot of, there’s a lot of recovery stuff that focuses on the Symptomology just stop doing that. Try harder. Snap weekly band, avert your eyes.

Chris Inman: We believe the symptoms are just the root of the greater problem.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. For sure. You know.

Chris Inman: Those those those behaviors are symptomatic.

Dean Pohlman: Like instead of you could use ibuprofen or you could, you know, you could work on your hip flexibility. Exactly.

Scott Cone: Yes, yes, yes.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. So like I feel like we’ve opened up a lot of a lot of things here. And, you know, these, these new episodes I’m doing, we’re not doing like the hour and a half long episodes anymore just because I know you guys don’t have time for that. But I want to kind of close the loop here and talk about how can we start to, you know, talk to a little bit about it, like asking yourself these basic questions, but what are some ways that people can start to explore this area of sexual wellness in a way that, yeah, in a way that you are trying to promote?

Scott Cone: Yeah, I would say, probably the best guide that’s available to do. This is Jay. Our friend Jay Stringer is a therapist, based in New York City. And he he’s the guy we trained with. He wrote a book called unwanted How Our Sexual, brokenness points the path to healing. And basically, we operate on the same principles that in our sexual story.

Scott Cone: Now, the things that are causing us problems in our sexuality, in our relationships now, there’s always two storylines at work there. There’s what’s going on now, but it’s how what goes on now points back to my past and is inviting me to be curious about my developmental story, what is happening in the past that ends up showing up in my present.

Scott Cone: And so his book is a great, kind of introductory guide to that. He did a lot of research with about 3400 people that do struggle with sexual brokenness in some degree in their lives. And he kind of explains the format, you know, kind of the the steps that you can use to engaging your sexual story and being more curious about it.

Scott Cone: So I highly recommend, Jay Stringer’s book, unwanted. He’s got a new book coming out in the fall that’s purely on desire that, we’re both really looking forward to. Yeah. And then the other book I would recommend is, this one by Adam Young that just came out. Adam is a friend of ours. He’s going to be our podcast in a couple weeks, but making sense of your story is a great guide for just engaging your story.

Scott Cone: Overall. It’s an easy read. It’s a very, very well, sequentially, kind of systematically laid out all the areas of your story that you might want to be curious about. He’s got lots of questions in there, and there’s exercises in there. So those are two kind of mainstream resources available. From a, you know, informational standpoint. But, you know, we think probably one of the most effective things is kind of like you’re doing with man flow with us.

Scott Cone: We actually have groups that guys can participate in where they can tell their stories, where they can engage other men’s stories, and they can begin to form a masculine tribe around engaging not just my sexual brokenness, but my my identity as a man. And what does it mean to be a man in today’s world? And how do I form a tribe of other guys around me?

Scott Cone: Because our core operating principle is we’re not intended to do this alone, as men were intended to have brothers and guys that can see things in our stories that we can’t see, and they can invite us into a place of a greater degree of kindness towards ourselves. So, you know, joining a group that’s based on kind of engaging your story and your trauma and, and, working on, a holistic way of finding a place of flourishing and life in your life and relationships because.

Chris Inman: As you mentioned earlier, the that that the thing that we really need is a community of men to rediscover what it means to be a man.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. If we don’t have.

Chris Inman: That circle of brotherhood, how do I know what it means to be a man? How do I find who I am, what my purpose is in this life? So we got to have that environment in order to develop and grow back into the men we are supposed to be.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. I mean, you’re talking to the guy who created podcast to just specifically talk about this too. So exactly. Yeah, it’s it’s a it’s a difficult it’s a difficult question because it’s, you know, it just in today’s climate, if you say men are this way and women are this way, then you’re like, you know, you’re met with instant, instant rebuttal.

Dean Pohlman: And so but how do you yeah, how do you differentiate or like, is there, you know, is it even does it even make sense to, to differentiate or what’s the benefit of, of doing this. But you know, I mean, I guess I can speak to my own personal experience, but I have found a ton of power in interacting with just men and kind of, working through my own discomfort, my own baggage around, like, being and men only, communities.

Scott Cone: There’s a tremendous longing for that. That’s why our podcast has attracted such a following. And, you know, guys are, you know, we do weekend retreats. We do. We’re going on a Colorado, hiking adventure this summer, going up a, 14,000ft hike on one of the 14 or 15 years out there. Fourteeners, 14.

Chris Inman: There are no 15 year.

Scott Cone: Yeah. Fourteeners.

Dean Pohlman:

Scott Cone: What we’re creating, we’re creating not only online, but, real world experiences where men can kind of bond around their stories and engaging their stories and have experiences with their body in a context with other men, where we’re doing stuff and we’re actually going on adventures and we’re engaging our stories and we’re forming community all at the same time, which I think is really critical because men are so men are very isolated and very lonely now.

Scott Cone: And, and there is, you know, there’s we try to ground everything we do in neuroscience and the latest findings of neuroscience. And there’s among neuroscientists, there’s there’s no dispute that males are different from females like you, those that that dispute is occurring in the social sciences or the soft sciences. It’s not occurring in the hard sciences. Everybody knows men operate differently in their brains, in their bodies than females do in the in the hard science categories.

Scott Cone: And so we’re trying to ground what we do in that because we think it’s very empirically valid. And it speaks to so many, you know, so many of the cultural issues. Instead of getting into the politics of it, we’re actually looking at how is our design as a man work? How does my mind, how do my emotions work?

Scott Cone: How’s my nervous system work? How’s my endocrine system? How does all of this work together? And how can I optimize this to be the best version of myself? And that’s that’s our goal ultimately. And that’s why we like working with you. And, other guys, that we’ve had on the podcast, just everybody that’s kind of in the space of, I guess you could call it the new manosphere.

Scott Cone: It’s not to be an asshole like Andrew Tate, you know? Like. Right. It’s not about having a lot of bravado and begging a lot of women and, you know, driving a Ferrari. It’s about thinking about what is the best version of me and how do I get pointed in that direction and stay consistently moving in that direction. And our contention is you can’t do that without the help of other men.

Scott Cone: Right? So that’s what we’re inviting guys to.

Dean Pohlman: I love that, I love that and I love the I love that you also brought in, this concept of what is the story? What is your story around yourself? That’s a question that I didn’t initially understand. And and now I’ve got a friend who I talk with, and he’s like, well, what’s your story around that?

Dean Pohlman: You tell yourself whenever I explain the situation, he’s like, well, what’s your story around that? And now I understand, like, oh, you know, like, what is the sense that I’m making of this rather than, like, here is the facts. This is what the reality is. But then you create a story on top of that to create meaning to it.

Dean Pohlman: And so that’s right. You look at that and recognize that, oh, I can retell this story or I can tell myself a different story then, that’s that there’s, there’s some magic that happens there.

Scott Cone: Yeah. That’s transformative.

Dean Pohlman: That in.

Scott Cone: Yeah. And that’s exactly what we’re doing. So that’s awesome dude.

Chris Inman: And it’s very human too. I think we, we missed that part that that’s we’ve used stories throughout our history to make meaning and sense of things.

Dean Pohlman: Yeah. Well I want to I want to stop here just because time wise. But also, I want to have you guys back. I’d love to hear kind of your personal stories with what got you into this work. You know, a theme that we’ve explored here a lot on the Better Man podcast is significant times of trauma or significant, you know, harmful experience as.

Dean Pohlman: But also, how did people somehow come out of those for the better? How do they grow from them? And that’s where I’m that’s where, you know, in my in in my own life. And also like looking at other people who have had these significant, you know, these significant breakthroughs or the significant self-growth, it’s occurred as a result of these traumatic experiences.

Dean Pohlman: So that’s where I’d love to take this the next time.

Scott Cone: Yeah, we’d love to do that too. Thank you.

Chris Inman: Great. Thanks for having.

Dean Pohlman: Us. All right, guys, thanks for listening in. I hope you enjoyed this episode. Scott and Chris of the We Got Balls podcast. I’m assuming all the all the podcast platforms. Where else can guys find you?

Chris Inman: YouTube is the best place to find us and we got Balls podcast.

Dean Pohlman: Awesome. All right guys, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it inspires you to be a better man. Scott and Chris are going to come back holding on to it and we’ll see you guys on the next one.

Scott Cone: Thanks, Dean.

Chris Inman: See you.

Dean Pohlman: Thank you guys. All right guys, I hope you enjoyed that interview with Scott and Chris from We Got Balls. They are doing their own podcast. Very successful. The best platform I think is on YouTube. They actually do these podcast live, which is pretty cool. So you can join them on, I think Wednesdays and Fridays as of now, at 12 p.m., possibly 12 p.m..

Dean Pohlman: Not sure the time zone. You might have to check that out. Links are in the show notes here. I also listed links for the book that we discussed in the show notes, and I encourage you to check them out. They’re doing really good work. I learned a lot, and, it’s gotten me really intrigued. If you are enjoying the betterment podcast, I encourage you do to leave a review.

Dean Pohlman: You can do that on the Apple Podcast platform on, Spotify. You can also listen to a video version of the podcast on the Betterment Podcast YouTube channel. So check that out. You can also watch it in the man for yoga app and members area. So thanks for being here. I hope you’re enjoying this. If you haven’t already gotten started with the For yoga, I encourage you to try out a free seven day challenge.

Dean Pohlman: We actually have a sexual wellness challenge that if you’re listening to this podcast, you might enjoy, it’s mandala yoga.com/swc. So sexual wellness challenge SWC to sign up for that. And, totally free. No credit card required. All right, guys, I hope you’re enjoying this. I hope this inspires you to be a better man. I’ll see you on the next episode.

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