In this episode, we talk to Alex Holmes about identifying where your beliefs come from, which are really yours and having the conversation around masculinity.
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Alex Holmes is a London-based writer and existential mental health coach. In 2021, he won the Creative Impact Award for Best Mental Health Awareness, for his writing and conversations on mental health. He was also featured among Positive.News ‘20 Mental Health Leaders Supporting The Nation’s Wellbeing’, and won the Creative Impact Co Awards For Mental Health Awareness in 2021. His debut book Time To Talk: How Men Think About Love, Belonging, and Connection (Welbeck/Trigger). He writes weekly notes on his Heart-To-Heart Letters, exploring love, belonging and connection, He is also the founder and creator of the leading podcast Time To Talk with Alex Holmes, highly commended by British GQ as a top podcast for 2020 and 2021.
Social Handles:
instagram.com/byalexholmes
alexholmes.substack.com
alexholmes.co
Memorable Moments:
3:29 We are here on earth with our purpose and we are driven by our purpose and it's based on four tenants of responsibility, authenticity, consequences and freedom.
6:36 There's a whole phenomenon that happens inside us. When we go through particular things in life, we experience so much, and it does mess with the way that we think about the world and the way we see the world, especially when there's somebody who feels that they are absolutely powerless in a situation. That is one of the most crippling things.
6:54 I can attest to that personally and it's not until you find your personal power that you can then become different and make a step and change things that you want to change.
8:06 What does it mean for men to be men today? What kind of, what element of masculinity do we bring forward? And as you see it across the world and in the cultural zeitgeist of the West right now, we're having a huge resurgence of what masculinity does for the world, what it does for us. So I'm asking all these questions and I feel like I owe it to myself to ask these questions.
11:15 I had to write down all the things I believed about myself, that were inherently told to me, taught to me, expressed to me, whether that be directly or indirectly. And then how that has shown up in my life as an adult man. Right. And in doing all of that, I've really sat down and thought, “wow, all of these beliefs are not mine.” None of this is mine and I'm holding all of these things that so many people have put to me and said to me, and act it out towards me. So I had to go about trying to undo those beliefs.
12:47 I think that it's important to really think about those things. And that's where I would say to people, to really be able to look at really just kind of go and do, go and examine where these things come from and to spend time really having that honest conversation with yourself.
16:53 Like we are taught to mask a lot of stuff, to hide a lot of stuff, to keep things inside. A progressive stance, say a protest around, for men would probably, a progressive one, would look like men being able to really fight for paternal rights or to really fight for emotional intelligence among boys, or to really fight for…those are the things that would really center in around men's progress. But, the kind of established network and structures of patriarchy and you know, I hate using this term, but the toxic side of masculinity inhibits us from being able to fight for that. So we move all of that energy away from ourselves and put it into things that are external to us.
18:08 So, the question for me is, where and when will we be able to, as men, really want to stand up for our own fight and healing, as men, and be able to allow and create this progress to then move forward together with everybody? Because obviously we intersect, we're human beings. We're on this earth together.
20:31 We have to have those conversations about consent. We have to have those conversations about safety and safe spaces. We have to have those conversations about oppressive language. Things that men are not taught to be careful about.
21:52 We’ve had all these conversations but the real conversation that is upholding a lot of this and holding, trying to hold onto that oppressive night together, is masculinity and we're not having that conversation. And it's very difficult to some people, a lot of people don't want to have it.
23:22 What's important to me is that we have, we have these conversations, we continue to have these conversations. And it's not about this whole thing, where you go in with one set of ideas and you should, and you hold onto these ideas for the rest of your time and having conversations. I'm open to knowing more and changing my mind and knowing different, right? I'm open to all of those perspectives and all these different things. Not everybody's going to agree that everyone's going to have the same perspective and same view, but that's the joy of a school being able to learn together and move together.
23:57 my hope is that, and the one thing that matters most to me is that we get to a place where we can actually sit down and have a conversation that is progressive and can actually really push us, push us in a direction that is to change.
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This podcast is hosted by Allison Walsh and Dr. Angela Phillips. It is produced by Allison Walsh, Ashley Tate, and Nicole LaNeve. For more information or if you’re interested in being a guest on this podcast, please visit https://arsnobu.page.link/arsevents.
Allison: Hello and welcome to the Dear Mind, You Matter Podcast. My name is Allison Walsh, I’m a long time mental health advocate and Vice President at Advanced Recovery Systems. On each episode I will be joined by my colleague and clinical expert, Dr. Angela Phillips. This show along with our mental health and wellness app Nobu, are just some of the ways we are working to provide you with some actionable tips and tools to take care of yourself each and every day.
So sit back, relax, and grab your favorite note taking device. It's time to fill your mind with things that matter.
Angela: Alex Holmes is an award-winning, London-based writer and existential mental health coach. In 2021, he won the Creative Impact Award for Best Mental Health Awareness for his writing and conversations on mental health. He has been featured as one of the top "20 Mental Health Leaders Supporting The Nation’s Wellbeing" and won the Creative Impact Co Awards For Mental Health Awareness in 2021. He is the author of Time To Talk: How Men Think About Love, Belonging, and Connection and delivers weekly notes on these topics through his Heart-To-Heart Letters. He is also the founder and creator of the leading podcast Time To Talk with Alex Holmes, recognized by British GQ as a top podcast for 2020 and 2021.
Allison: Well, Alex, thank you so much for coming on our show today. Would you mind introducing yourself to our audience?
Alex: It is an amazing pleasure. Thank you so much for inviting me to come on. My name is Alex Holmes. I am a writer. I'm a mental health educator. I'm a trainee psychotherapist and a podcast host.
That is where I am, in time. Right now.
Angela: Well, we are so excited to talk to you, Alex, and as a fellow mental health provider and just nerd, I love, I love that you really have a lot of this experience and specialty around existential mental health. And so I would love for you to just tell us a little bit more about, A) Just what this means. Right and then how this ties into really the importance and challenges we face when it comes to like, living authentically and how does this tie together?
And I'm sure there's so much in there, but it just get us started.
Alex: I get asked this question quite a bit, so I should be well versed to do it, but I'm always, I always struggle to find the entry point in and the only way that I can fully describe it is through a story.
But no, when I, when I was 18, 19, I studied French and Spanish at university and in the French and in the French side of the course a lot of philosophers came out of France, post war, well around wartime.
So just before occupation and then thereafter, there were lots of philosophers around such as Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Cummings wrote ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Falling’ he wrote a lot of these existential texts and they were known as the existentialists.
They made the philosophy a lot more popular, but the idea around existentialism is it's based on the premise that existence precedes essence. So we are here on earth with our purpose and we are driven by our purpose and it's based on four tenants of responsibility, authenticity, consequences and freedom.
Simone de Beauvoir then came in cause she was with Sartre. And she said that when it comes to those four tenants, it's important to note that power is a key part of our personal choices and our personal self actualization, because Sasha as very much in the privileged position of being a man, being whites, being heterosexual, being in that particular element and time in France. There was certain things that he could choose because his thing was that everybody is free. Everybody's born free. Everybody has this idea of what freedom means to them.
So Simone was like, no, like I'm a woman. So there is this level of oppression. And then I started reading into that a lot. And you know, when you're 18, 19, these things are heavy. Like, you know, like you get really dark. I already had this existential moment, everything was black and white for me.
It was just like, life has no purpose or meaning. It's just, you know but then as I, I finished that and I went through the process of studying journalism. I became a journalist for five years and then I became, then I left that and I started writing and wrote my book. And then I started training as a psychotherapist and one of the modules was about existential psychotherapy.
So I was like, wow, my degree is coming into use now because you know, there's this whole thing of when you finish university, you're like, oh, what am I going to use my degree for most people go and get postgraduate degree, and then they're not using their degree in the way they want it to. I stopped using my languages.
It was just very much just straight up writing. And so yeah, the next I'd say okay, so these are the existential approaches to psychotherapy and obviously psychotherapy is one of those disciplines where you have to, where it's working with a client or working with somebody who to get them from one place to go and really help them figure out what is happening with them so they can kind of move on to the next thing. And existential psychotherapy is just the approaches of existentialism. I applied to it the same way that you can have mind-body therapy, solution focused therapy you know, humanistic, all of these other kinds of things that you just put in front of therapy. And it's a, it's an approach where you look at the person's individual right to freedom and to choices and the responsibility and consequences.
So you'll be looking at things where people are thinking, should I have an affair? Should I like, am I being a good father? Am I a good father? Am I a good mother? Am I a good person? What is happening with this?
There's a whole phenomenon that happens inside us. When we go through particular things in life, we experience so much, and it does mess with the way that we think about the world and the way we see the world, especially when there's somebody who feels that they are absolutely powerless in a situation. That is one of the most crippling things.
And I can attest to that personally and it's not until you find your personal power that you can then become different and make a step and change things that you want to change.
So I started really delving into everything existential. I’m somebody, once I find something, I don't know, I'm a Raven claw. So I love that, Harry Potter reference there. I literally dive into everything. I find a focus in, on one thing and I'm just in it for like at least six months to a year. And I want to know everything about it and I think that we all had this level of existential angst whereby the biggest anxiety of a human of a person is the fact of inevitable death.
So that is one thing, if you know, I started applying that to the stoic philosophies and it was just really interesting where it all kind of came from. And yeah, that is me. So when I wrote my book, “How Men Think About Love, Belonging, and Connection”, the core question in there was, what does it mean to be a man today?
What does it mean for men to be men today? What kind of, what element of masculinity do we bring forward? And as you see it across the world and in the cultural zeitgeist of the West right now, we're having a huge resurgence of what masculinity does for the world, what it does for us. So I'm asking all these questions and I feel like I owe it to myself to ask these questions.
And then that's kind of where I apply existential psychotherapy. I hope that's the answer that you like.
Allison: Definitely. Well, and I think that, thank you for giving us the context too, and you know, I'm so glad you found something that you could just lean into and I totally relate with, like, when you find something and you're like, this is awesome.
I want to know everything. Right. So very cool that you found this and that you've been able to share so much of this with the world. I am really curious though and what your advice would be, because I think so often we get stuck in these myths, right? That we believe about ourselves and like, it's so hard to kind of get out of our own way of, of kind of what's going on internally with the narratives.
So what advice do you give to our listeners around how to really undo those myths that we believe about ourselves?
Alex: I always say to people especially when I work as a coach with people, I'm always questioning. Where do you believe that these myths have come from? We tend to think that these myths and beliefs are something that is just inherent, inherent to us.
So the only way I could really explain this is when I was in therapy myself and my therapist had already done extensive work with me because I was a very difficult client. I just did not trust for like two years either, but I was still there. I showed up every week. Well, I just did not trust. And we got to a point and we spoke about those one point we spoke about values.
All right. And then that was really important to kind of really sit down and address what meant a lot to me and you know, it was the core values of my book, which is love, belonging and connection. And then I was like, yeah, I've got my values. I've got everything. I'm like, I'm fine. This is what I know, my friends have to meet that, my family have to meet that, everybody new in my life has to meet that.
And then we sat down one session and she said, okay, let's talk about your core beliefs. And I said, I've spoken about my core beliefs. This is what we wrote. And she's like, there not your beliefs, they're your values, what are your beliefs? And I said, Hey, you're playing my games with me. I see. I see what you're doing here.
She said, no I’m not playing your games, I'm actually asking you what your beliefs are. She's like there's no psychobabble trick here. And I was like, okay. So I had to sit back and I said, I don't know what it is in the end. I had to concede to that. And then I went away and I started to research the difference between beliefs and values and really sat down and explored that.
I had to write down all the things I believed about myself, that were inherently told to me, taught to me, expressed to me whether that be directly or indirectly. And then how that has shown up in my life as an adult man. Right. And in doing all of that, I've really sat down and thought, wow, all of these beliefs are not mine.
None of this is mine and I'm holding all of these things that so many people have put to me and said to me, and act it out towards me. So I had to go about trying to undo those beliefs. So I say all that to say, when we are looking at our beliefs and we're doing belief work. Really sit down and think about all the things that we believe about ourselves.
Things that we believe about the world, things that we believe about others and trying to really, really think hard about where they came from, which one of those came from your dad when he was angry with his experience, which part of this came from your mom when she was frustrated about something or when, when she was trying to console you.
You felt comforted by something that you carried to the next place? What kind of, what happened along the way from your siblings or your cousins or school friends or teachers, where did all these beliefs come from?And I think that it's important to really think about those things. And that's where I would say to people to really be able to look at really just kind of go and do, go and examine where these things come from and to spend time really having that honest conversation with yourself.
Angela: I'm so glad you brought that up because that's one of the things I first really realized. I think when I started practicing with people after doing a lot of my own work, but still being in the thick of it. So being in therapy, doing the hard work and then starting to work with others, is you really realize how, how hard it is to move forward when you don't have access to that lone sort of self realization, but then you don't have the tools to kind of get there. Right.
So what I've noticed when I work with other people too, that are really stuck as it's sort of like. They've never considered that. Right. They don't, they don't really sit back and think about, well, what are my values?
And then how does that sort of blend into my belief system? Where did this come from? Because no one's actually ever, you know, we don't sit down with ourselves and give ourselves the space to do that. And so one of the great things about therapy is, you know, somebody's telling you that this is something you need to do.
Right. And actually take that time for yourself. Which as you said and I agree is, is just so important. And you've brought up a couple of really great examples of when I think, and particularly you know, certainly at different points in time for all of us. But you mentioned when this really hit home for you, but I think for listeners and people who've really gone through a lot in the past couple of years for a lot of different reasons right.
But more specifically with a lot of these issues, you're bringing up around you know, men and masculinity. Of course we have a lot of other, sort of the societal issues, cultural issues that have come up. Obviously the pandemic. So for a lot of these reasons, how have you seen this sort of shift in impact of sort of realization of some of these new things coming up for people.
And what has that been like as you've really been a leader in this space to kind of say, Hey, you know, we're experiencing something new. This can actually help guide you toward figuring out how to focus on a life of purpose and belonging. Although right now you're, you may be feeling really confused, lost, what have you.
What's that been like?
Alex: It's been very difficult and it's been difficult because, when a large amount of my work is directed at men but it's also directed at people who love men. So it's whoever comes, but I'm just directed at men. And when it's directed there I find that men are the hardest people to change, or to want to change because progress.
If we look at the way progress has happened across time and across the world throughout history, whether that be the fight for women's rights and vote, the fight for civil rights, the environment, the racial rights, queer rights, all of these different things where oppressed minorities have to fight for something men in itself, like as in masculinity, in itself and men in themselves there fight is so in trouble and internal to so many different things.
Like we are taught to mask a lot of stuff to hide a lot of stuff, to keep things inside, a progressive stance, say a protest around for men would probably, a progressive one, would look like, oh, men being able to really fight for paternal rights or to really fight for emotional and intelligence among boys, or to really fight for those are the things that would really center in around a men's progress, but the kind of established and established network and structures of patriarchy.
And you know, I hate using this term, but the toxic side of masculinity inhibits us from being able to fight for that. So we move all of that energy away from ourselves and put it into things that are external to us. So we, so there will be some men that then fight for the environment and that's all they're fighting for.
And there will be some men who fight for queer rights cause that's what they fighting for or be allies to that and the same with racial justice and gender justice, but all the other fights are integral to somebody's identity and to somebody's personhood. So, the question for me is where, and when will we be able to, as men really big to stand up for our own fight as in healing, as men, and able to allow and create this progress to then move forward together with everybody.
Because obviously, we intersect, we're human beings. We're on this earth together. We intersect in all of these societies in all of these communities, but as men, we're so disconnected from one another and then, and then other people, other genders and whatnot. We've stolen a lot of this progress and we'll kind of hoard things that just don't want to change.
You have leaders in power who don't want to shift, set in ideals and identities. You've got and then not fit that structures like that structures between those down to institutions. As you know, it goes from schools to health care all the way down to the home. Like literally, and it's just really kind of is so interwoven in so many parts of our society that if men were to actually grab that opportunity to charge fully and then progress forward.
A lot of, lot of men's mental health issues would diminish in so many ways. And I wouldn't say diminished as in like, the puff is just gone, but I mean, the process of. The process of deconstructing and delineating all of those, those ties, that pressure, the shame, the deep shame, the real kind of things that hold that, that keep men disconnected in a way from 70 different things would change.
And I think that that's where is, I find that it's very difficult to kind of really tap into that part. So I work with young men who are around 16, or 17, a lot of the time as well. And it, and it's really interesting to see where their perspectives of manners have come from. What it means, what they can change, the things that they don't agree with, but they uphold, anyway sort of thing.
It's just one of those conversations that we need to continue to have. We have to have those conversations about consent. We have to have those conversations about safety and safe spaces. We have to have those conversations about oppressive language things that men are not taught to be careful about.
And if they are told to change those things, it's this whole, oh, I can’t say anything now, is this, you're just like, what do you mean? You can't say anything now, life progresses and why are you holding onto something that is oppressing another person? And it's just one of those things. And you see all areas of oppressed and oppressive and, you know and dominant culture sides and all these different things.
So, yeah, it's difficult. It's challenging. I'm optimistic but so it was, I'll keep pushing you on with the work. But yeah, when it comes to mental health and the way that we end up seeing the world and seeing others, that is a key part. I think that's the last, that's the missing puzzle, you know, after all this time, we've had conversations about race.
We've had conversations about sexuality and gender loving, and we've had conversations about ability, the conversations about women and gender rights. We've had conversations about the family, we’ve had all these conversations but the real conversation is upholding a lot of this and holding, trying to hold into that oppressive night together about masculinity and we're not having that conversation.
And it's very difficult for some people, a lot of people don't want to have it.
Allison: I'm so glad that you're having it. And I mean, you've definitely been using your voice. You've got a podcast, you've written a book you're constantly connecting with your community, which is so important.
And just continuing to have those really important conversations and thank you for all of the work that you're doing and we're coming up close on time here, but we love to ask every guest that comes on our show at this point in your life, what matters most to you right now?
Alex: At this point in life, what matters most to me right now, in the very immediate and just my own personal situation.
I really just want to make sure that I'm doing the best possible work I can. So I'm giving myself a lot of space to finish my studies, to write well, to be able to create and craft actual shows that people want to listen to and actually want to take away as some, a level of learning and understanding and care.
And do my book proud, you know, I want to be able to I've written it, but I want to be able to uphold what, what is, what is his values. But also on a more on a wider level, it’s important, what's important to me is that we have, we have these conversations, we continue to have these conversations.
And it's not about this whole thing, where you go in with one set of ideas and you should, and you hold onto these ideas for the rest of your time and having conversations. I'm open to knowing more and changing my mind and knowing different, right. I'm open to all of those perspectives and all these different things. Not everybody's going to agree that everyone's going to have the same perspective and same view, but that's the joy of a school being able to learn together and move together.
So, my hope is that, and the one thing that matters most to me is that we get to a place where we can actually sit down and have a conversation that is progressive and can actually really push us, push us in a direction that is to change.
Angela: I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that, Alex. And I know we're really looking forward to seeing what you're going to do next and how you're going to continue to support, you know, yourself and the community, and just love the conversations that you're continuing to have.
So thank you so much again, and thank you for joining us. Can you just share with our listeners how we can follow you either on social media or otherwise?
Alex: The best place to go is my website, which is Alex Holmes, A L E X H O L M E S . C O. not.com, dot C O and everything's there. It has my publication on sub stat, which is called liminality, and that's an essay every other week.
With a writer about their mental health. Then the podcast is on their time to talk and The Valets Holmes is my book, time to talk and then my Instagram links are there too, and all the other places you can contact me. So that's all there. So just go.
Angela: Amazing. So everyone check it out and thank you again to Alex for being our amazing guests today.
Alex: Thank you!