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**Cory Allen** (0:00)
My father was kind of like a Texas Tony Soprano vibe character. Yeah, I mean, the time that I spent with him was, it was all about being tough and aggressive and taking people down. From that early stage, it made me realize that the messaging around masculinity that I was not even being taught, but just that were available for me to observe, weren't necessarily accurate. I just wanted to do the opposite of it.

**Sreela Roy-Greene** (0:57)
Don't cry. Man up. Don't be so sensitive. These are messages that many men absorb from an early age. On today's show, we're joined by two guests who reflect on the impact of being taught to suppress their emotions.
Plus, how they each eventually learn to become, as one of them puts, full spectrum humans.
First, there's Cory Allen, an author, musician, and podcast host whose work explores mindfulness, self-awareness, and human connection. We're also joined by James McCrae, a writer and poet whose work blends philosophy, humor, and emotional honesty in really relatable ways. Later in our episode, BetterHelp therapist David Yadush joins me to unpack why so many men are taught to disconnect from vulnerability, and how we can create safer spaces for emotional openness. Let's get talking. Well, thank you again for being here today. And I'm going to jump right into it today and get into our topic, which is around really the importance of being vulnerable and talking about our feelings and all of that stuff. You know, I think early life experiences shape all of us. It's inevitable, you know, when it comes down to it, you know, for you, Cory, you know, when you were growing up, what were some of the like ways that, you know, you experienced emotional expression in your household?

**Cory Allen** (2:13)
Well, it wasn't really a safe environment for me. I discovered very early to express emotions. I think there was an expectation to always uphold the status quo to create this feeling of everything being okay.
And that one of my earliest memories is the first time as a child, whenever I did feel something was wrong and I tried to share an emotion, I was attacked for doing that. And it made it to where very early on, my earliest emotional awareness was rooted in fear and in withdrawing. And it made me, it created the pattern and some of the wiring for me to feel like that emotion should be compartmentalized, they should be hidden.

**Sreela Roy-Greene** (3:10)
You were never given permission to be vulnerable.

**Cory Allen** (3:13)
Exactly.

**Sreela Roy-Greene** (3:14)
And it was like a punishment if you were, if you expressed any sort of humanity, any sort of realness around like what made you you, that was like, no, we're not supposed to do that.

**Cory Allen** (3:26)
Yeah, totally. And to this day, I still am aware of a bit of identity management. You know, where I'm aware of how people are perceiving me and if there's any type of identity misrepresentation, it still bothers me, you know, but fortunately, I've worked on it a lot of the years to where now I know when it's happening and I can work with it and put those walls down and reopen, but it is a deep fundamental imprintation that I had.

**Sreela Roy-Greene** (3:57)
Yeah. Yeah, it's really hard to undo those old habits, you know, because that's what you go to becomes your knee jerk reaction.
So that makes a lot of sense. James, curious to hear about your perspective and the same question, you know, what were your early experiences and how they shaped you and how you emotionally express yourself?

**James McCrae** (4:15)
Sure. Well, when I think about emotionally expressing myself, both now and when I was young, so much of that has been through my writing. You know, I'm a poet and I've really been a poet my whole life. You know, I started writing poetry consistently when I was like 13 years old. So, it's fair to say I've always been sort of a sensitive person.
And I feel like poetry gave me an outlet to pour that into in a way that I didn't have in real life. And I sort of had this dichotomy of persona because people didn't know that I was writing poetry.
Right? Like, I feel like I would have been made fun of, like especially at school. It wasn't normal for maybe a boy in small town Minnesota at that time to be a poet. So, I almost felt embarrassed. I felt like it would have been a social liability to go around sharing my poetry with friends even. Even my good friends didn't know that I was doing this because I felt guarded from it.