There was a pull inside me that kept reaching for God long after I’d stopped believing there was a loving God to reach for. I left the church twenty-seven years ago, and I didn’t leave halfway, I left all the way, and I made my peace with being gone. But the pull never got the message. It stayed.

I felt it clearest on a bike. I was out on a stretch of Michigan singletrack one afternoon, the pines closed in tight and the trail down to one line, my legs burning and my head finally quiet, and out there where it was just my breathing and the tires in the dirt, something reached for me. It wasn’t in my legs and it wasn’t in my lungs, it was older than that, and it showed up the second I got quiet enough to feel it. For years I told myself it was just the ride.

Maybe you know the feeling. Maybe yours shows up on a drive with Spotify off, or in your kitchen at two in the morning when the house finally goes still, or in the flat quiet after a fight you didn’t win. You left the church, one way or another, and you figured the pull would leave with you. It didn’t.

That’s the whole reason I’m writing this. Not to talk you back through a door you already closed, but because that pull is real, and almost nobody is going to tell you what it is or what to do with it. So, I will.

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The Two Stories You Were Handed

When a man leaves the church, the world hands him one of two stories to explain himself with, and I’d bet you’ve been handed both.

The first story says you fell. You got lazy, or bitter, or busy, and the pull you feel is God tugging you back home, home being the building you walked out of. Stay gone long enough, the story warns, and one day you won’t find the road back at all. It’s a story built to scare a man back through a door he already decided to leave.

The second story says you woke up. You saw it for what it was, you outgrew it, and you’re free now, and that pull is nothing but old wiring, leftover religious habit, an ache that enough therapy and enough time will finally quiet down. Nothing’s really reaching for you, this story says, so let it go.

Here’s the trouble. You can’t take the first story, because the church you knew was wounding or hollow or both, and walking back in wouldn’t fix it, and you know that in your gut. But you can’t take the second one either, because the pull doesn’t act like nostalgia. Nostalgia looks back and aches for what’s gone. This looks straight at you, and it reaches, and being smart about it has never once made it stop.

So, you get stuck in the middle. You live in the gap between a door you won’t walk through and a feeling you can’t argue away, and some men camp in that gap for the rest of their lives, because nobody ever told them there’s a third way out.

There is. It just doesn’t have anybody handing it out.

The Third Path

You can leave the church and still walk toward God.

Read that slow, because it’s easy to hear it wrong. It doesn’t mean crawling back to the God you were handed as a kid. It doesn’t mean the building you left, or the next building that swears it’s different and isn’t. It doesn’t mean building your own little religion out of spare parts, a piece from here and a piece from there, and calling the pile a faith. It means walking, on purpose, toward the real thing, the thing that’s been leaning on you the whole time, the thing that never needed a building to be real.

I know that sounds thin written down. It is thin at first, for everybody, that’s just how it starts. But think about that trail in the fog. You don’t get the whole route up front, you get about ten feet of it, so you ride the ten feet and ten more show up, and you ride those and ten more show up, and it’s only later that you understand the road was there the whole time. It was never going to show itself to a man standing still, waiting for it to clear before he’d move.

What Walking Toward Actually Looks Like

Let me get to the point because a path this open can hang in the air for years if nobody tells you where your feet go. Here’s what walking toward God looks like on a plain Tuesday, and it’s a short list of ordinary things done with a little steadiness over a long enough stretch to matter.

Sit in silence

The pull can’t reach you through the noise, and most of us keep the noise cranked all day on purpose. A few minutes most days is enough to start. You won’t be good at it, and that’s fine, because being good at it was never the point. Showing up to it is.

Pay attention to your own life

Notice where you come alive and where you shut down, notice what the silence starts showing you once you quit burying it, notice what walks up to you when you finally hold still long enough to let it. The whole job is to keep looking at what’s there instead of looking away, and that’s harder than it sounds, and it’s most of the work.

Read what other men found on this road

Men have been walking this exact road for two thousand years, and a lot of them wrote down what they found, and none of it has to be Gospel to you to be worth something. The only trick is knowing where to start, so here’s four. Pick the one that meets you where you actually are.

• Thomas Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation. A monk who never stopped doubting, right to the end. Start here if you want somebody in the uncertainty with you instead of somebody trying to talk you out of it.

• Anne Lamott, Traveling Mercies. Faith for people who cuss, mess up, and can’t sit through a service. Start here if church left a bad taste in your mouth and you need to know you’re not alone.

• The Psalms. Just those, skip the rest of the Bible for now. Thousands of years of men yelling at God, grieving out loud, doubting in the open. Start here if you want proof the tradition always had room for your anger.

• Richard Rohr, Falling Upward. For men in the back half of life rebuilding a faith after the first one broke. Start here if you’re putting something back together and don’t want to put back what broke.

Go be the answer to somebody’s prayer

The pull gets clearer when you’re busy with something that has nothing to do with you. It’s a strange thing, but a lot of what you couldn’t figure out by thinking about it comes clear the minute you’re up to your elbows in somebody else’s trouble instead of your own.

Stay

This is the one that costs. With no church holding you in place, walking toward God means walking on the flat days too, the days you feel nothing, the days the whole thing seems pointless, and you’d rather be anywhere else. Men don’t quit this road in the storm, they quit in the dry stretch, in the long nothing where it looks like nothing’s coming and nothing ever will. The ones who keep walking anyway are the ones who find out the pull was real the whole time, that they didn’t make it up, that something had been walking out to meet them all along. That meeting is the point. That’s what the rest of it is for.

You Don’t Have to Walk It Alone

Here’s the thing nobody tells you on your way out the door. You don’t have to do this by yourself.

There’s a practice older than any denomination, older than the building you left, where one man walks the road beside another. He doesn’t drag you anywhere. He helps you see what you’re already half-seeing, he asks the questions you can’t quite ask yourself, and he won’t hand you answers, but he stays in the room while you find them. It has a name. It’s called spiritual direction.

It isn’t therapy, therapy is for healing what’s hurt and this is for noticing what’s there. It isn’t coaching, coaching drives at a goal. And it isn’t somebody teaching you religion, because there’s no doctrine to swallow and nobody marching you anywhere except into a more honest conversation with your own life and whatever’s been pulling on it.

And it doesn’t have to be one-on-one

This is the part I want you to hear, because it changes everything for a man who’d sooner do anything than sit across a table from a stranger and open his soul. It can happen in a group.

Group spiritual direction is a handful of men in a room with a trained director, taking turns putting their real lives on the table. One man says where he’s been feeling the pull lately, or where he’s lost it, and the rest don’t pounce and nobody preaches, they just listen and sit in the quiet a minute with what he said, and hand back what they heard. And here’s the part you won’t believe until you’ve sat in it, that with five or six men paying that kind of attention, you start seeing things in your own life you’d have walked past a thousand times alone.

It’s slow, quiet work. For a man who left the church because he was worn out from being talked at, it turns out to be a completely different thing to sit in a room with other men around something sacred. You’re not the audience anymore, you’re in it, and the pull you’ve been carrying alone gets clearer in the company of men carrying their own.

And if “direction” doesn’t hit, there’s another door

Some men hear spiritual direction and feel their shoulders go up. Direction sounds like somebody grabbing the wheel, and spiritual sounds like the exact thing they spent years getting free of, and that’s fair. So, here’s another door, right down the same hall. It’s called group spiritual coaching.

Coaching leans forward more than direction does. A direction group asks what you’re noticing. A coaching group asks that too and then asks what you want to do about it. Same circle of men, same honesty, but with a little more structure and some real accountability for the practices, the silence and the attention and the staying. Some men need to be walked gently toward seeing, some men need a push toward doing, and neither one is holier than the other. They’re two doors into the same room, and you take the one built for how you’re put together.

The men I sit with every week mostly left the church a long time ago, some of them ten years back and some of them last summer, and many don’t walk back in. But almost all of them want to walk toward something. What changed for them is simple, they finally got words for the something, and they finally have company for the road. That’s the work. That’s what I do.

One Last Thing

I ignored that pull for twenty-seven years. Twenty-seven years of feeling it on the trail and in the quiet and talking myself out of it every time, and it never once let go. That’s what I want you to hear. Not that I walked back through a church door a few months ago, which I did, on my own terms and nothing like the way I left. What matters is what those twenty-seven years proved. The pull was real the whole time, and I know it was real because I gave it every chance to quit and it never did.

And that doesn’t leave you owing anybody a return. Some men walk back toward a church eventually and some men never do, and I have no stake in which one you turn out to be. Walking back in was my road, it doesn’t have to be yours. The pull isn’t a summons to a building. It’s just real, and it’s just yours, and what you build toward it is between you and it.

You left for a reason. You can walk toward something for a different reason. Both are true, at the same time, in the same man, and you don’t have to untangle the two before you take a step. You just take it.

If any of this landed, here’s three open doors. Walk through whichever one fits.

• The free e-book. If you’ve been wondering whether something’s been closer this whole time than you let yourself believe, I wrote a short, free e-book about exactly that, a quiet companion for anybody restless or unsure about what’s been reaching for them.

• Group spiritual direction. If you want company on the road and a place to notice out loud alongside other men, come see what the groups are about.

• Group spiritual coaching. If you’d rather have a little more structure and a push toward the practices, that door’s open too.

No pressure, no agenda. Just men being honest about what’s pulling on them, and what walking toward it might look like.

Next week: what spiritual direction actually is, and what it isn’t.

— Eric

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There’s a sound running underneath your life right now, and you stopped hearing it a long time ago. The podcast in your ear on the drive in. The TV you leave on in the empty room. The phone that’s face down and on silent and still pulling at you anyway, because you know there’s something on it you haven’t checked. You didn’t decide to fill every quiet minute, you just did, one input at a time, until the quiet was gone and you never noticed it leave.

So here’s a question, and I want you to actually answer it. When was the last time it was quiet? Not no-music quiet. Not radio-off quiet. Actually quiet, no input, nobody talking, no phone in reach, just you and the inside of your own head.

For most men, the honest answer is I can’t remember. And that’s not a small thing, that’s a man-sized problem nobody is treating, because nobody has a name for it yet.

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The Drug We Don’t Call a Drug

Writing this, I’m eleven years into my own recovery, and I’ve spent enough time around the anatomy of addiction to know its shape when I see it wearing a different coat. So let me say the thing plainly. Noise is the drug. Silence is the withdrawal.

Watch yourself the next time it gets quiet. The first three minutes feel uncomfortable. By ten minutes something in you is climbing the walls looking for the exit, and you reach for whatever’s closest. The phone, usually. Sometimes, for some, an actual drink. And here’s what matters, it isn’t the phone and it isn’t the drink, the object never matters. What matters is that you can’t sit alone in your own head without input, so you grab whatever’s nearest to make sure you don’t have to.

The Big Book has a phrase for what a substance offers a man. It says it offers ease and comfort. It takes the edge off whatever he doesn’t want to feel. Constant noise does the same job, it takes the edge off being alone with yourself, and it works the way every escape works. It works right up until it doesn’t, and then one day you look up and it’s cost you something you never agreed to pay.

And here’s the part that makes it harder to spot than a bottle or a pill. Nobody worries about you. Nobody pulls you aside and it’s because you have your earbuds in. A man can run from himself his whole life with a podcast and a podcast and another podcast, and the people around him will call him busy, or driven, or just a guy who likes to stay informed. The drug that nobody questions is the hardest one to put down, because the world keeps handing it back to you and telling you it’s good for you.

What You’re Actually Running From

Here’s what nobody tells you about silence. The reason it’s so hard at first isn’t that it’s boring. It’s that it’s loud.

Take the headphones off, leave the phone in the other room, and what shows up is everything you’ve been outrunning for as long as you’ve been running. The conversation you should have had eight months ago and keep not having. The sentence your father said to you when you were eleven, the one you’ve never repeated out loud but could quote word for word right now. The grief you keep postponing because there’s never a good time for it. None of it is new. It’s been sitting there the whole while, waiting for the noise to drop low enough that you’d finally have to look.

Silence is a room with no exits, and your whole life is in there with you. Of course you won’t sit in it. Of course you reach for the podcast. But the podcast is also the reason you never quite became the man you meant to be, because the work was waiting in the room you keep refusing to enter.

And the longer you’ve been running, the louder that room gets when you finally walk into it, which is exactly why most men turn around at the door. They mistake the volume for danger. But the volume isn’t danger, it’s just everything you postponed, all arriving at once because you finally stopped moving long enough for it to catch up. It feels like the silence is doing something to you. It isn’t. It’s just the first time in years that nothing is doing anything to you, and a man who has never felt that doesn’t know what to call it, so he calls it unbearable and reaches for his phone.

What Silence Actually Does

I’ve sat in enough silence with enough men to tell you what’s on the other side of the discomfort, so you know it’s coming, and you don’t quit at the worst possible moment.

The first few minutes are bad. I’m not going to soften that. Your mind throws everything it has at you trying to get you up and moving, and you have to let it. You just don’t get up.

The next ten minutes get quieter. The pile of things you were running from starts to sort itself out without you forcing it, and you stop making new noise and start seeing what was already there. Why you’ve been short with your wife all week. What you actually want to do about your job, underneath all the reasons you’ve told yourself you can’t. You weren’t avoiding those answers because they were hidden, you were avoiding them because you never gave the quiet long enough to hand them to you.

And somewhere around thirty minutes, if you make it that far, something else shows up in the room. Call it whatever you’re comfortable calling it. Quiet attention. Presence. Something larger than your own head holding the weight alongside you instead of leaving you to carry it alone. You can use the word God for that, or you don’t have to. But whatever it is, it’s the thing your nervous system has been begging for. It’s the thing no podcast ever delivered and the thing you’re exhausted from not having.

Where To Start

You’re not going to sit in thirty minutes of silence tomorrow, and I don’t want you to try, because you’ll fail and decide the whole thing isn’t for you. So, start small and pick one of these, and leave the other two for now.

Park the Car, Don’t Go In Yet

When you pull in from work, don’t go inside. Sit in the driveway for three minutes, phone face down in the cup holder, no music, no calling anybody back. Don’t try to think about anything. Just sit. The house is right there, you can go in whenever you want. But for three minutes, you don’t.

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On October 26, 2025, my daughter Ericka died.

I’m not going to walk you through the details of that day. They belong to me, to my wife, to my sister, and to the few friends who carried us through it — they’re ours to hold, and you don’t need them to sit with what I want to say.

What I’ll tell you is that the question I’ve been carrying since that day — the one that is beside me on the trail — is the same question every man I’ve ever sat with has asked, in his own version, on his own worst day.

Where was God?

I’ve spent years sitting with men in their hardest seasons — coaching and spiritually directing them through divorces and relapses and bankruptcies and the slow grief of a life that didn’t go the way they planned. I’ve heard this question more times than I can count, and I’ve always answered it carefully, gently, without rushing toward easy comforts.

Here’s the strange part: eight months in, I think I do know the answer. I even half-knew it on the day she died, though I couldn’t have said it out loud then. But before I can tell you where I’ve found God, I have to clear away where I haven’t — because the easy answers people reach for aren’t just hollow, they’re the very thing that keeps a grieving man from ever finding the real one.

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What I Won’t Say to a Grieving Man

Here’s what I won’t say.

• I won’t say God needed another angel, because he didn’t — whatever God is, that God didn’t need her more than we did.

• I won’t say everything happens for a reason, because not everything does; some things just happen, and the search for the reason is a kind of cruelty we inflict on each other when we don’t know what else to say.

• I won’t say time heals all wounds, because it doesn’t; time only changes the shape of the wound, and the wound itself is its own forever thing.

• I won’t say God won’t give you more than you can handle, because that isn’t true, it isn’t in the bible where people think it is, and I’ve watched too many men collapse under exactly that lie.

• I won’t say this was God’s will, because I don’t believe it was. God didn’t reach down and choose this, or need it, or write it into a plan I’m meant to understand someday. Whatever else I’ve come to believe, I won’t lay my daughter’s death at God’s feet.

• And I won’t say be strong for your family, because that’s the lie that turns a man’s grief into a clenched jaw and a short fuse, and it costs him the very people he’s trying to hold together.

Men and Grief: Why Anger Becomes the Only Emotion

I’ve learned something about men and grief in the years I’ve done this work, and I’ve relearned every bit of it from the inside these last eight months. We’re handed exactly one acceptable emotion. A man is allowed to be angry, because anger reads as strength and control and doing something — so when the grief comes, most of us route the whole flood through the only channel we’ve been given and call it rage. We snap at the people we love; we pick fights we don’t care about; we set our jaws and tell everyone we’re fine.

But anger is only one room in a very large house, and grief means walking through all of them. There’s the denial that keeps reaching for the phone to text someone who can’t answer. There’s the bargaining that replays the timeline looking for the exit you think you missed. There’s the depression that isn’t a disorder but a weight, the body’s honest response to a hole in the world. And there’s the thing people call acceptance, though I don’t love the word — it sounds like agreement, and I’ll never agree to this. What I’d call it’s closer to carrying: learning to walk again while holding what you can’t put down.

The men who do the worst are the ones who try to skip the house entirely and live in the one room marked anger. I’ve lived it and watched it for years. The anger feels like motion, like strength, but it’s a man standing still and calling it running, and it hardens into something that outlasts the grief and poisons everything it touches — the marriage, the kids, the work, the faith. Grief doesn’t get smaller when you refuse to feel it; it just goes underground and comes back wearing a different face.

So, here’s what I actually offer the men who sit across from me now, and it isn’t advice and it isn’t a five-step plan. I offer them permission — permission to feel the thing all the way down, to weep in front of another man without apologizing, to be sad and frightened and lost instead of only angry, to admit that the faith they were once sure of has gone quiet. I offer them a room where they don’t have to be strong, because the performance of strength is the very thing that’s been killing them. And then I stay. I don’t fix it, because it can’t be fixed, and the men who tried to sell them a fix are part of why they’re so alone. I just sit with them and tell them the truth: that this won’t be over soon, that there’s no shortcut through the house, and that feeling it fully isn’t weakness but the bravest thing a man can do. That was the work before October 26, and it’s the work now — except now I’m a man who needs it as badly as any of them.

My sister knows this house better than anyone should have to; she has buried three of her own children. When she came to sit with me, she didn’t bring a single easy comfort, because she’s been to the bottom of every one of them and found it empty. She didn’t tell me it would be okay. She just sat in the wreckage with me, because she’s lived there, and there is a particular mercy in being held by someone who isn’t flinching — someone who already knows the worst and stayed alive anyway. My wife held me the other way, the daily way, the one that keeps a man fed and breathing when he’s forgotten how to do either. Between the two of them I finally had to test something I’d been telling other men for years: that grief isn’t a problem to be solved but a weight to be shared, and that we were never meant to carry it alone.

Finding God in the Ordinary

So where was God on October 26?

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Step Three is shorter than Step Two and twice as misunderstood.

Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

I read that step the first time and thought: I don’t know what God’s will is. I don’t even trust God. So, I won’t turn anything over. I’ll come back when I’ve figure it out.

Well… I came back two years later and read it again and thought: Okay. I’ll try turning it over. I felt better for about forty-seven point two hours.

Then I picked back up the thing I had supposedly turned over, and I held it tighter than ever, and I called myself a fraud for not being able to “let go.” I did this for years., because nobody had told me what Step Three actually asks.

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What I thought it asked

I thought Step Three was a one-time event.

Like getting baptized. Like signing a contract. You make the decision once, decisively, and you mean it, and now you’ve turned everything over to God, and any time you find yourself white knuckling something, that’s evidence that you weren’t sincere enough the first time.

That’s not what Step Three asks. That’s a recipe for shame. I also thought Step Three required certainty about what God’s will is for me.

If I was going to turn my will over to God’s will, I needed to know what God’s will was, right? Otherwise, how would I know I was turning anything over? What if I was just doing what I wanted to do and calling it God’s will? What if God’s will was different from what I was already doing or wanted to do? Was I missing it, or did I really want to do it?

So, I would be in my head, trying to figure out why I would turn it over to a God that I didn’t trust and was angry at me because I did something wrong. Would I really turn it over to that?

It was an absurd loop. And it was exhausting and that’s also not what Step Three asks.

What it actually asks

Here is what took me a long time to understand. Step Three isn’t asking you to have it figured out.

Step Three is asking you to stop trying to run the show. It’s not a one-time decision. It’s a daily, sometimes hourly, practice of opening your hands. It’s not certainty about God’s will. It’s honesty about your own.

The honesty goes like this: I don’t know how this is going to turn out. I can’t control how this is going to turn out. I’ve spent enormous energy trying to control how this is going to turn out, and that energy hasn’t produced the outcome I wanted, and it’s cost me peace. So, I am going to stop and do the next right thing in front of me, and I’m going to leave the rest in hands larger than mine.

That’s Step Three.

It doesn’t require you to know who those hands belong to. It doesn’t require you to know what those hands want. And it only requires you to take your own hands off the wheel for a moment, and trust that the universe won’t immediately drive you off a cliff because you did.

That trust is small at first, but you have to keep practicing it.

*A quick side note, because some of you have asked. If you’re in recovery and wondering how spiritual direction is different from working with a sponsor, or whether you even need both, I created a series with a short white paper that walks through it directly. It’s free here. Both relationships are sacred. They serve different purposes.

What it actually looks like in a day

Here’s what surrender looks like for a man living his life after making the decision to turn it over.

You wake up in a panic about something at work. You spin in your bed for forty-five minutes running scenarios, or… you can take three deep breaths and say, out loud or in your head: I don’t control how this turns out. I’m going to do the next right thing. The rest isn’t mine to carry today. And then you get up.

That’s Step Three.

Or maybe your kid is in trouble, and you can’t fix it and the helplessness is eating you alive. You can either make it your obsession for the next six weeks, or you can do the things that is actually yours to do — show up, be present, listen, love and let go of the things that aren’t yours to do, like controlling the outcome.

That’s Step Three.

Someone you love is making a decision you think is a huge mistake. You can spend the next month trying to manipulate them into the choice you want, or you can speak honestly, and then take your hands off, and let them run their own life trusting in something greater taking care of them.

That’s Step Three.

There’s no ceremony. No moment where the heavens open. Just a man, daily, taking his hands off the things that were never his to control in the first place.

Why this changes everything

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It was sometime in October. I couldn’t tell you exactly. The days had been running together for a while by then, the way they will after the thing that breaks you finally breaks you, and I was sitting on the edge of the bed with the light getting long in the window. I had spent most of the day doing what I had been doing for days, which was mostly nothing. I had tried to pray a few hours earlier — the words had stopped meaning anything and they weren’t going to mean anything today either, but I was at the point in the day where you try anyway, the way you try the light switch in a room you know has no power. Just in case.

I had spent many years practicing the kind of thing I was suddenly unable to do, and that didn’t help me. If anything, it made it worse. I had a whole vocabulary for what was happening, and the vocabulary was useless.

What I did next is what I want to tell you about. It got me off autopilot at the moment I most needed it, and it wasn’t what I would have predicted.

I sat there a while longer, and then I did something so small it almost embarrassed me. I asked myself two questions. Where had I felt most alive today. Where had I felt least. That was it. That was all I could manage, and I’m not even sure I planned to ask them — they just came out, the way old things will when everything new has stopped working.

And the small thing turned out to be enough. It got me through that night, and the next one, and the thirty after that, and I’m here writing to you because of it.

So, this is for the part of your life you’ve been meaning to pay attention to and never quite got around to. It comes from someone who lost almost every practice he had and was given back the one that mattered most. You can actually do it tonight.

It’s called the Examen.

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What It Actually Is

The Examen is a five-hundred-year-old contemplative practice that comes out of the Christian tradition, though the roots run a good deal further back than that. A man named Ignatius of Loyola gave it the name in the 1500s. He wasn’t really inventing anything, because the thing underneath the name — a daily, honest look back over your own life, turns up in nearly every wisdom tradition we know of, going back about as far as we can see.

Strip off the religious history and what’s left is fairly simple. It’s a way of paying attention to your own day before the next one shows up.

Most of us don’t. We get up, we work, we eat, we scroll, we sleep, and we rinse and repeat, and the days quietly stack up unexamined. By the time something inside us finally begins to make noise, it has usually been trying to get our attention for years.

The Examen is how you stop. It doesn’t require you to believe in God, and it doesn’t require you to believe in anything at all. It asks one thing of you, which is that you’re willing to sit with yourself honestly for ten minutes.

That sounds like the easy part, and it isn’t. That difficulty is more or less the entire practice.

How To Do It

Find somewhere that no one will need anything from you for ten minutes. The end of the day works best for most people. Your bed is fine. The couch is fine. Even the bathroom is fine, and depending on the people you live with, it might be ideal.

Put your phone face down, or better yet leave it in another room. Close your eyes if you want, or don’t. Then move through these five steps slowly.

Step One — Stop

Take three slow deep breaths. Don’t try to clear your mind, because that’s a fight you’ll lose, and don’t try to manufacture a feeling of peace. Just notice that the day is ending. That’s all this step is. You made it to the end of one more, and for a moment you can simply let it be.

Step Two — Look Back Over The Day

Walk through your day in your mind, from the moment you woke up to where you are now. Not as a to-do list. More in the way you’d watch a film of your day. The morning, the commute, the conversations, the meal, the slow hour in the afternoon, the evening. Where you were, who you were with, what happened. Don’t go overboard. Just let the day roll by.

Step Three — Ask Where You Were Most Alive

Where did you feel most alive today?

This isn’t a question about the most pleasant moment, or the one you enjoyed the most. It’s asking where you were most present — being where you were standing. It might have been a hard moment rather than a happy one, or a very small one: a laugh with a friend, a moment of clarity at work, a sentence you read that struck something in you, a walk where you looked up and saw the sky. Notice it and resist the urge to analyze it. Just sit with it for a minute.

Step Four — Ask Where You Were Least Alive

Where did you feel least alive today?

Here you’re looking for the place where you checked out. Maybe you were defensive. Maybe numb, or hiding from something, or performing and not being yourself. Maybe lying to yourself, or to someone else. It could have been a moment that should have been alive and somehow wasn’t.

Try not to turn this into a courtroom. The point isn’t to locate a failure and sentence yourself for it. The point is only to notice. Most of us couldn’t honestly say where we checked out today, because we have never paused long enough to look.

Now is the time to change that.

Step Five — End With A Single Sentence

Thank-you for —

Thank you for the sunny day.

It can be a request. Help me come back tomorrow more present than I was today. Or a question you don’t expect to answer right away.

If you don’t believe there’s anyone on the other end of that sentence, then say it to whatever a higher power is to you, or to the universe.

Who you’re addressing matters less than saying it out loud.

Why It Works

Most of us carry our entire lives around without stopping to look at them, and that, more than anything else, is the problem the Examen is built to address.

It’s only two questions because it’s simplistic yet powerful.

If you do this for thirty days, something begins to shift, and I say that without exaggeration. The men I’ve walked with who have stayed with it for a month describe patterns they had been blind to for years.

Where they come alive, and where they shut down.

Who fills them up and who slowly drains them.

What they’ve been refusing to let themselves feel.

You begin to notice things about your own life that you had simply been too busy to see, and noticing is where everything else begins.

What It Gave Me

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I left the church of my childhood tradition many years ago.

The leaving wasn’t dramatic. There was no blow-up, no scandal, no Sunday I walked out and slammed the door behind me. It happened slowly. I started missing weeks, then months, and eventually I noticed I was relieved every Sunday morning that I didn’t have to go. One day I admitted to myself I wasn’t going back.

Over the years that followed, I drifted in and out of other denominations. I’d visit one for a season, find pieces of it that fed me and pieces that didn’t, and move on. I wasn’t shopping so much as searching and trying to figure out what was mine and what had only ever been borrowed.

That long stretch of wandering wasn’t the end of my spiritual life. It was the beginning of it. And eventually, after all that wandering, I came back to the tradition I grew up in. But I came back as a different man, carrying a different bag. Some of what I’d been given as a boy I had thrown out along the way. Some of it I had kept and held onto more tightly than ever. And some of it I’d picked up from other rooms entirely and brought back with me.

This is a short field guide for what I threw out and what I kept. Yours will look different from mine. But you might recognize some of it.

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What I threw out

The certainty

I threw out the version of faith that required me to be sure and perfect. The one that treated doubt like a moral failing and handed me a set of answers with the instruction to defend them.

I’m not sure of much, and I’m sure of less every year. I’ve come to believe that isn’t a problem.

The men I sit with who are actually growing spiritually aren’t the ones with the most certainty. They’re the ones who’ve made peace with not knowing and have learned to keep walking anyway. Certainty is a posture you take toward an idea; faith is a posture you take toward a life. They aren’t the same thing, and I had them confused for a long time.

The performance

I threw out the part of church life where you had to seem like you were doing well even when you weren’t — where struggle could only be confessed in carefully managed forms, never the real thing, and never the thing that would actually disqualify you from community.

The men I sit with now don’t perform. They show up to a meeting afraid and uncertain about how they will build a new life. These men are courageous and tell the truth. They show up to my zoom room shaking and tell the truth. They don’t have to dress it up first, and that’s more spiritually serious than anything I ever experienced inside a sanctuary.

The God who needed me to be afraid of him

I threw out the God who was watching to catch me — the one who kept score, the one whose love came with an asterisk.

I no longer need me to be terrified of the divine in order to get my attention. If your image of God has to scare you to function, that isn’t God. That’s leverage somebody used on you a long time ago, and nobody ever helped you put it down.

You can put it down now.

What I kept

Silence

I kept silence — the kind that happens when you sit by yourself, early, before anybody needs anything from you. The kind that doesn’t ask you to perform or believe or decide, but simply lets you be there long enough to hear what’s actually going on inside you.

The church I grew up in didn’t teach me silence in this way. I had to find it later, in other rooms. But I’ve come to think it’s the most ancient practice the human spirit has, and the one a man recovering from too much religion needs most.

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You’re doing fine.

That’s what you tell people, and it’s mostly what you tell yourself when the question even makes it that far.

You’ve got classes or a job, a place to live, and a group chat that’s mostly active. There are a few people you’d reach out to if something went wrong, or at least you’d think about it. There’s a gym you go to most weeks, a feed full of stuff you’ve watched, and a life that, on paper, is working just fine.

And yet.

There’s an 11 p.m. version of you that the rest of the world never meets—the one with a show on in the background he’s not actually watching, the one who scrolls until his thumb gets sore and couldn’t tell you a single thing he saw, the one who lies in bed at 1 a.m. not depressed exactly, not anxious exactly, just empty.

A friend asks how you’re doing, and you say you’ve been a little burned out, a little tired, and that maybe you should see somebody.

Maybe you should.

But before you do, I want to offer you another possibility.

What you’re feeling might not be depression at all, it might be your soul telling you something.

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The thing nobody is naming

A Gallup poll last year found that one in four American men under thirty-five said they felt lonely “a lot of the previous day,” which is higher than every other demographic in the country. It’s higher than women your age, higher than older men, and higher than at any point in the data going back decades.

You aren’t making it up, you aren’t soft, and you aren’t broken in some way other men aren’t. There’s something happening to men your age that nobody is naming clearly.

The mental health field is naming part of it, calling it depression, anxiety, or burnout. For a lot of men those names are accurate, the treatment is real, the medication helps, and you shouldn’t stop taking what’s working for you.

But there’s a part of what you’re feeling that those names don’t quite reach, because here’s what you’ve already noticed. The relationship didn’t fix it, the gym didn’t fix it, the trip didn’t fix it, getting out of your hometown didn’t fix it, and having more money than you used to didn’t fix it either. Therapy helped, and it really did help, but it didn’t reach the bottom of the thing.

There’s something underneath the burnout that has its own weight, and that something is what I want to talk to you about.

What disconnection actually feels like

There’s a long tradition older than psychiatry, psychology, and older than the United States—of naming the condition you’re describing.

The desert monks called it acedia—a kind of spiritual flatness, a listlessness, a loss of taste for the things that should taste like something. Later mystics like St. John of the Cross described a different but related experience, the dark night of the soul, where the old sources of meaning go silent not because something is wrong, but because something deeper is being asked of you. They aren’t the same thing, but they share a family resemblance, and other traditions had their own names for the territory. Some just called it being lost.

What every tradition agreed on is this: when a man feels what you’re feeling, he isn’t malfunctioning, he’s signaling.

Something in him knows that the life he’s living isn’t the life that would feed him, and something in him is asking, not in words, but in this exact heaviness, “what am I actually for?” Something in him is reaching for a connection he can’t name and hasn’t yet found.

You can call that something the soul, or the deeper self, or whatever the Holy means to you when you’re being honest. The name doesn’t matter as much as this: it’s asking for your attention, and the modern world has trained you, every single day, to give your attention to anything else.

The wrong fixes

This is where most men make the mistake, we try to fix the feeling without ever asking what it’s pointing at.

So, we work harder, work out harder at the gym, optimize, build the morning routine, track the macros, and download the meditation app for a 14-day streak before quitting. We say yes to more things, then no to more things, then we try the new workout split, the supplements, the porn, the weed, the drinking, the situationship, the gym-as-identity, the side hustle, the new app, and the next thing on the feed someone said would fix it.

And the heaviness comes back, because the heaviness isn’t the problem—it’s the messenger.

If you want a structured way to actually look at where your life is out of alignment—to see, in writing, which zones are pulling at you most—I built a free 8-zone assessment for exactly this. It takes about fifteen minutes, with no upsells. It’s here.

What if it’s information

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You sit in the meeting.

The chairperson reads Step Two: Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

Around the room, heads nod. A few guys mumble it along with him. You stare at the floor.

Because the word in that sentence, the one nobody says out loud, but everybody hears is God.

And every time you hear God, something in you tightens.

Maybe it’s the church you grew up in. Maybe it’s the pastor who knew what was happening in your house and did nothing. Maybe it’s the youth group that loved you only as long as you were performing. Maybe it’s the funeral where the priest said the wrong thing about the wrong person.

Maybe you don’t even remember why. You just know that when somebody says God, your shoulders pull in a half inch.

I want to tell you something nobody told me for a long time.

That flinch is not a problem.

That flinch is information.

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The wrong question

Most men I sit with assume Step 2 is asking them to believe in God.

It isn’t.

Read it again. Slower this time.

Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity.

There’s no name in that sentence. No theology. No church. No book. The Step doesn’t tell you who this Power is. It doesn’t tell you what this Power wants. It doesn’t even tell you that this Power is personal.

It tells you one thing, and one thing only: something other than you has the capacity to do for your life what you cannot do for yourself.

That’s a much smaller claim than “you must believe in God.”

And it’s a much harder one to argue with.

Because you already know it’s true.

If you could have fixed yourself, you would have. You tried. For years. With everything you had. You read the books, you made the rules, you white-knuckled it through the nights, you swore to yourself it would be different this time. And you ended up back in the same place every time.

Whatever runs your life when you’re running it alone — that’s the thing the Step is asking you to step away from.

It’s not asking you to find God.

It’s asking you to admit that you aren’t God.

There’s a real difference between those two things.

What a workable Higher Power can actually look like

Here is what I tell men when they get stuck here.

Your Higher Power doesn’t have to be the God you were taught.

Your Higher Power doesn’t have to have a name. It doesn’t have to have a face. It doesn’t have to live in a book or a building. It doesn’t have to want anything from you. It doesn’t even have to like you.

What it has to do is one thing: be larger than your own will.

For some men, that’s the group. The room of strangers who somehow stay sober when you cannot. The collective wisdom of people who have walked the road longer. There is something in a healthy meeting that is bigger than any single person in it. That is a Power greater than yourself. You can use it.

For some men, it’s the natural world. The mountain that doesn’t move when you yell at it. The river that keeps flowing whether you believe in it or not. The simple, indifferent fact that the universe was here before you and will be here after. That is a Power greater than yourself. You can use it.

For some men, it’s the part of themselves that knows. The voice that, on your worst nights, still whispers this is not who you are. Not your willpower. Not your ego. Something quieter and older than those. You can call it conscience. You can call it the soul. You can call it the deeper self. It is a Power greater than the version of you that picks up. You can use it.

For some men; eventually, sometimes after years, it becomes something more personal. Something they end up, almost reluctantly, calling God. Not the God they were handed. A different one. One they had to find for themselves.

That last one isn’t required. It may come. It may not. The Step doesn’t care.

The Step only cares that you find something to lean on that’s not you.

What to try this week

If you’re stuck on Step 2, try this.

Stop trying to figure out who or what your Higher Power is.

Start paying attention to what has already been carrying you.

Make a list. Be honest. What’s kept you alive when you should have been dead? What has pulled you out of nights you don’t talk about? Who’s shown up? What rooms have you walked into broken and walked out of a little less broken? What moments have you had, even one where something happened that was bigger than you, and you knew it?

That’s your starting point.

You don’t have to name it. You don’t have to define it. You don’t have to defend it to anybody.

You just have to admit, quietly, to yourself: something other than my own will has been at work in my life. I’m willing to stop fighting it.

That’s Step 2.

The rest will come.

A last thing

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Six months ago, I wrote a piece called The Ache That Won’t Let Go.

It was about grief.

I published it on October 25, 2025.

The next day, my daughter Ericka died.

I haven’t been able to write much since.

Some days the words came, and I thought I could keep going. The next day, the fog rolled back in. Thick. Disorienting. Every sentence felt like lifting something heavier than I had strength for.

There was a Saturday morning, weeks in, on a mountain bike ride. I thought I was fine. Then a time flashed in my mind when Ericka and I had a good laugh on a hike on one of my favorite trails in Tucson, and I lost twenty minutes I can’t account for. That’s how grief works when you stop fighting it. It doesn’t announce itself. It just walks next to you and waits until you notice it’s there.

So, I stopped writing. I sat with my own people. I sat with my own grief. I let the work go quiet because the work I teach others to do; slowing down, listening beneath the noise, refusing to outrun what hurts, was the important work I needed to do for myself.

You can’t direct other people through what you’re unwilling to walk through.

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Here is what I didn’t expect

I’ve spent years sitting with men in recovery. Men who lost marriages, careers, custody, years they can’t get back. Men who walked away from churches that lied to them. Men who carry grief their fathers never taught them how to carry.

And what I notice, six months in, is that the men I sit with may not have gone through the exact things I’ve gone through, but they’ve also suffered in their own way.

We’re all standing in the same country now, just at different points on the road.

The sabbatical wasn’t only grief. It was also work

I’ve been finishing up my journey in spiritual formation — the slow, contemplative work of learning how to notice God in the ordinary, – establishing new prayer rhythms and rules of life. Some of it has been study. Much of it has been silence. All of it has been transformational.

There’s something strange about training in spiritual formation while you’re being formed by the best days and worst loss of your life. The grief has been part of the formation. The formation has been part of carrying the grief.

I don’t know fully what to do with that. I only know it’s true.

I’m telling you this because I’m coming back. Not all at once. Not with a tidy lesson learned. Just back.

And the men I want to write for and I do mean men specifically, men in recovery, men who don’t have a church and aren’t sure they want one, men who carry questions they’ve never been able to say out loud deserve to know who’s writing.

A man who knows.

Not in theory.

If you’ve followed this work before, you know it’s been about spirituality and the manosphere. Writings about how to have healthy masculinity and how to be a leader guided by spiritual principles.

That hasn’t changed.

What’s changed is what I carry now.

I used to write toward the questions in The Ache That Won’t Let Go. I’m writing from inside them now.

Where was God when the bottom fell out?

If grief won’t heal on schedule, what is it trying to teach?

What do you do when the prayers you used to pray no longer fit your mouth?

I don’t have neat answers. I have something more useful. I have the willingness to stay in the questions long enough that they begin to change shape.

Who this is for

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Early this fall, before the season shifted in ways I could never have imagined, I began writing a short eBook about something I was hearing over and over again:
“I want to feel close to God, but I don’t know how anymore.”

I didn’t know then how much those words would eventually land in my own life.

After my daughter Ericka passed away, returning to the project became a quiet place for me to sit with my questions, my ache, and my hope. I didn’t write the eBook about grief—but grief deepened the way I understand God’s presence in the hidden corners of our days.

That eBook is now finished, and it’s free for anyone who needs a gentle reminder that the spiritual journey doesn’t always require certainty. Sometimes it simply asks us to notice what’s already stirring within us.

What If God Is Closer Than You Think? is an invitation to pay attention to the subtle, often surprising ways God can meet us—in longing, in restlessness, in silence, in small joys, and in the spaces we rarely name as spiritual at all.

If you’ve been feeling spiritually disconnected or quietly searching for something deeper, I hope this eBook offers you a moment of grounding and maybe even a renewed sense of connection.

👉 Download your free copy of What If God Is Closer Than You Think?
May it meet you right where you are.

https://www.newmindsetpathways.com/what-if-god-ebook

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There are seasons in life when everything you’ve built—your routines, your commitments, your sense of purpose suddenly comes to a full stop. Not because you planned it. Not because you lost interest. But because life broke your rhythm in a way you never saw coming.

That’s what happened to me on October 26, 2025.

My daughter, Ericka, died at 34 years old after nearly a decade of battling multiple sclerosis. She suffered deeply for years, more than most people knew, and the only comfort I can hold onto is that she isn’t suffering anymore.

And in the weeks since, I’ve had to face something I never imagined: the silence that follows the world ending but only for you.

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The World Keeps Moving, Even When You Can’t

If you’ve followed my work, my weekly podcast, my leadership writing, my reflections on spirituality, culture, and the world we’re trying to navigate together you’ve probably noticed the quiet. My absence. The skipped episodes. The unfinished drafts. The blank days.

I wish I could tell you the silence was intentional or strategic and that I stepped back for clarity or perspective. But the truth is simpler and far more human:

Some days, I just can’t do it.

Grief doesn’t ask for permission to show up. It doesn’t knock. It doesn’t schedule itself between meetings or line up neatly with your content calendar. It interrupts everything your thoughts, energy, memory, focus, sleep, the motivation to care about anything at all.

There have been days I sat down to write or record and stared at the screen, unable to put a sentence together. Days when even small tasks felt like heavy lifting. Days when I wondered if I’d ever return to what I love doing.

Some days I’m okay. Some days I’m absolutely not.

And if I’m honest, grief has a way of making you feel like you’re failing the world simply because you can’t perform for it.

The Pressure to “Be Back” Before You’re Ready

I’m wired, like many of you, to push through pain. To keep showing up. To “be strong.” Years of leadership roles, military training, spiritual work, and real-world responsibilities teach you how to carry heavy things. But burying grief isn’t strength it’s a slow erosion.

And yet, when you’re a creator, a leader, a guide, or someone people look to for meaning, there’s a quiet pressure beneath the surface:

People are waiting.
You should be better by now.
You used to be so consistent.
They subscribed to hear from you don’t disappoint them.

That pressure doesn’t come from subscribers. It comes from within. It comes from being someone who believes in showing up, in delivering, in serving.

But life doesn’t care about your internal standards. Loss doesn’t negotiate with your sense of responsibility.

There’s a strange dissonance that occurs after losing a child: the outside world keeps spinning while your inner world still feels like it’s smoldering. People talk about weekend plans. Emails keep coming in. Deadlines still exist. But your heart is stuck on a moment that refuses to move with time.

Grief Rearranges Everything You Thought You Knew

I’ve lived through addiction, recovery, military service, leadership challenges, spiritual deconstruction and reconstruction. But nothing recalibrates your entire being like losing a child.

It’s not just sadness. It’s disorientation.

You try to work, but your brain slips sideways.
You try to rest, but your mind replays every memory.
You try to pray, but the words feel hollow.
You try to function, but everything feels heavy.

And underneath all of it lives the unspoken, unavoidable question:

How do you keep doing the work you’re called to do when your heart feels like it’s been split open?

I’ve wrestled with that every day since October 26.

Some mornings I wake up ready to return to the microphone, ready to write the next article. Other mornings I feel like I’m walking through fog thick enough to touch.

And that’s why you haven’t heard from me.

I’m Not Quitting but I’m Not Fully Back, Either

I want to be clear about something:
I am returning.

I plan to restart my weekly podcast next week and step back into writing. I want to get back into the rhythm of providing thoughtful content that challenges, equips, and strengthens people in a polarized world. That hasn’t changed.

But I also need you to know this:

It may not happen every week.
Some episodes may be delayed.
Some posts may take longer.
Some days I may simply not have it in me.

I’m doing everything I can to move forward, but I’m doing it with a heart that’s still learning how to beat in a world without my daughter in it.

If you’ve ever grieved deeply, you know that healing is not linear. It’s not predictable. And it certainly doesn’t care about your publishing schedule.

What I Can Promise You

Even in the heaviness, something inside me hasn’t gone out. Purpose is still alive. Calling still matters. The work I do still feels worth doing. If anything, it feels even more urgent and not because of the loss, but because suffering sharpens the truth:

Life is fragile.
People matter.
We don’t get unlimited time to say what needs saying.

So, here’s what you can expect from me moving forward:

1. Honesty

I will not pretend to be okay when I’m not.
I won’t fake the energy or pretend grief is clean.
I’ll show up human because anything else would be dishonest.

2. Presence

When I record or write, it will be from a place of depth, not obligation.
If I’m here, I’m here. Fully.

3. Purpose-Driven Work

My content may feel more grounded, more raw, more direct. Grief strips away anything that isn’t real. You’ll feel that shift in the work.

4. Imperfect Consistency

I’m committed to continuing but not at the cost of collapsing.
Some weeks will flow. Some may be quiet.
You’ll hear from me, but the cadence will reflect the season I’m navigating.

To Everyone Who Subscribed—Thank You

I cannot express how grateful I am for your patience, your presence, and you’re understanding. You could choose to read or listen to anyone. You chose to show up here, in this space, with me and that means more than you know.

Thank you for giving me the grace to grieve.
Thank you for not expecting perfection.
Thank you for trusting that I’ll return when I can.

This isn’t a goodbye. It’s simply a recognition that I’m rebuilding. And like anything built with intention and honesty, it takes the time it takes.

Grief Doesn’t End the Work—It Changes the Voice

I don’t believe we “move on” from loss. We move forward with it. We learn to live differently. We learn to breathe again. And eventually, we learn to speak from a deeper place.

That’s where I’m headed slowly, unevenly, imperfectly.

But I’m heading there.

And if you continue walking with me, I promise the work ahead will be real, grounded, and infused with the hard-won wisdom that only sorrow can carve into the soul.

I’ll see you next week and hopefully with a new episode, maybe with a new article, always with a sincere heart.

—Eric

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Grief doesn’t follow the rules. It doesn’t care about calendars, timelines, or what other people think you should be feeling by now. It comes in waves—unexpected, uninvited, and often when you thought you were finally okay.

Whether it’s the death of someone you loved, the end of a relationship, or the quiet collapse of a dream, loss shakes your foundations. It makes you question what’s real, who you are, and where God went when everything fell apart.

People will tell you time heals all wounds. They mean well. But time doesn’t heal what we refuse to face. Some pain needs to be acknowledged, not managed. Some grief needs to be felt all the way through, not wrapped in platitudes.

When the World Moves on, and You Can’t

There’s a moment after loss when the world seems to hit “play” again. People go back to their routines, talk about weather and weekend plans, and expect you to do the same. But your insides don’t match the outside world. The rhythm is off.

You catch yourself scrolling through old photos or replaying conversations, trying to find where it all went wrong. Faith, once a source of comfort, now feels hollow. The songs, the prayers, the scriptures, everything that once anchored you now feels distant or even false.

You whisper questions you never thought you’d ask:
If God is good, why this? Why now?
Where was God when the bottom fell out?

Those questions can make you feel guilty, even rebellious. But they’re not signs of weak faith. They’re signs of a heart refusing to settle for easy answers. They’re the beginning of an honest search for meaning and one that runs deeper than the pain itself.

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The Silent Weight of Unfinished Grief

Grief isn’t just about what you lost. It’s about what the loss exposed—the illusions, the dependencies, the ways you tried to control outcomes or avoid vulnerability.

When you push pain away, it doesn’t disappear. It seeps into other areas: exhaustion, short tempers, anxiety that doesn’t make sense. You might throw yourself into work, relationships, or distractions just to keep from feeling. But no matter how fast you run, grief has a way of finding you.

Because underneath the loss is something larger than sorrow. It’s a longing for meaning, for connection, for assurance that life still has purpose. That ache is sacred, not your enemy; it’s an invitation.

The Invitation Hidden in the Pain

When everything you relied on breaks, you’re left standing in the ruins, holding questions that don’t have quick answers. That’s where healing begins, not in fixing, but in allowing.

Allowing yourself to grieve is an act of courage. It’s choosing to sit with what hurts instead of pretending it doesn’t. It’s opening the door to the parts of yourself you’ve kept hidden because they’re too raw, too uncertain, too human.

Real healing doesn’t mean forgetting or “moving on.” It means letting grief become a teacher. It means discovering that what was taken from you doesn’t define you, but how you respond to it does.

Listening for What’s Beneath the Noise

If you slow down long enough, you may begin to sense that the grief itself is speaking. Not in words, but in the deep language of the soul.

• It says: Pay attention to what still matters.

• It whispers: Let go of what no longer fits.

• It invites: Come back to what is real.

Spiritual direction can become a sacred container for this kind of listening. It’s not about someone giving you answers. It’s about being witnessed as you bring your unfiltered self into the presence of God, or whatever name you use for the Holy.

There, you begin to notice that the Divine didn’t leave when everything fell apart. The voice of Love was simply waiting in the quiet, beneath the noise of your attempts to stay strong.

When Healing Looks Nothing Like You Expected

Healing doesn’t always look like joy returning on cue.

Sometimes it looks like breathing again after weeks of holding it in. It looks like small acts of kindness toward yourself while resting when you’d rather be distracted, crying when you thought you were done.

Over time, a subtle shift begins. You stop asking “Why did this happen?” and start asking “What is this trying to teach me?” The grief that once consumed you becomes a thread that weaves wisdom into your soul.

You start to realize that the wound itself became the doorway to something sacred. Compassion grows where certainty once lived. Humility replaces pride. Presence replaces performance.

And slowly without even noticing when it started you begin to heal.

The Sacred Work of Becoming Whole

You can’t rush this work. You can’t intellectualize it. You can’t talk yourself out of it. Healing happens in the surrender and the letting go of how it “should” be and learning to meet life as it is.

Loss may have rewritten your story, but it hasn’t ended it. What feels like destruction is often the beginning of reconstruction. Something new is forming, even if you can’t see it yet.

The invitation is simple but hard: stay open.

• Stay open to the ache that reminds you you’re alive.

• Stay open to the silence that might just be holy.

• Stay open to the possibility that your heart, though broken, is still capable of love.

Because in that openness, the Divine meets you—not as a distant rescuer, but as the quiet presence that never left.

If you’re grieving and you don’t know how to “get over it,” maybe that’s not the goal. Maybe the goal is to be transformed by it and to let it shape you into someone more tender, more awake, more real.

Healing isn’t about erasing the story. It’s about integrating it into the mystery and peace in the process.

Grief doesn’t end when the tears stop. It ends when the pain finds purpose.

And when it does, what once felt like an ending becomes something else entirely, the beginning of becoming whole again.

Finding Support on the Journey

You don’t have to navigate this alone. If you’re seeking space to process grief or rediscover connection with the Divine, consider exploring spiritual direction. At NewMindsetPathways.com, you’ll find a supportive environment where healing and self-discovery happen one honest conversation at a time.

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The endless stream of “alpha” advice telling men to take control, stay dominant, and never show weakness. It promises power, success, and love.

But look closer.

If control is the answer, why do so many men feel disconnected, anxious, and alone?

Something isn’t adding up. The more we grip, the less we seem to have. Relationships that start out passionate turn tense. Teams that once thrived under our leadership start walking on eggshells.

What began as confidence quietly morphs into control and suddenly, the very people we care about pull away.

It’s not because we’re broken. It’s because we were taught the wrong definition of strength. The kind that mistakes dominance for respect, silence for peace, and fear for loyalty. It’s a lesson that runs deep in dating, in work, even in politics. But it’s a story we can rewrite.

What if real strength isn’t about control at all?

What if the men who build the strongest bonds are the ones who lead differently without intimidation, without fear, and without needing to win every time?

That’s the conversation behind my latest article, When Being “Alpha” Backfires ¬– How Dominance Destroys Connection at Home, at Work, and Beyond.

The real power move isn’t holding on tighter; it’s learning how to let go in the right way.

Allied We Can

When Being “Alpha” Backfires

Love shouldn’t be a contest of power. Yet somewhere along the way, control became confused with strength. Many men were taught that to lead, you must dominate and being in charge means keeping others beneath you. It’s a belief deeply rooted in modern masculinity culture and amplified by the online “manosphere,” where dominance is marketed as confidence and manipulation is dressed up as strategy…

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9 months ago · Eric Miller

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There are seasons when life rearranges itself without asking for permission. A job you counted on disappears, a relationship dissolves, or a dream that once defined you suddenly loses its pull. Other times, you choose the change—a move, a career shift, a conscious ending and still find yourself unsettled. The familiar patterns fade, but the new ones haven’t taken shape. You stand between what was and what will be, unsure of who you are in the space between.

This threshold is what some call liminal space. It’s not comfortable. It rarely feels sacred at first. Yet these in-between places are where the deepest work of the soul takes place. They expose what you relied on for security, what you believed about control, and what you trusted to define your worth. When those outer structures crumble, you meet yourself again and sometimes for the first time in years.

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The Disorientation Beneath the Surface

Change has a way of revealing how much of our identity has been built on doing. When the routines, titles, and roles disappear, the silence that follows can feel unbearable. You start to ask questions that don’t have quick answers: Who am I now? What matters most? Where is God in all of this?

These aren’t intellectual questions, they’re existential ones. They surface in the stillness, in the ache of uncertainty, in the long pauses between what you know and what you can’t yet name. Many people mistake this ache for failure, but it’s actually an invitation. Life is asking you to slow down, to stop performing long enough to listen.

That listening, however, is difficult to do alone. The mind wants to fix; the ego wants to rebuild; the heart wants to cling to what’s familiar. Without guidance, it’s easy to loop endlessly between resistance and regret.

Our Culture’s Myth of Quick Reinvention

Everywhere you turn, someone is offering a blueprint for instant transformation. Five steps to pivot your career, ten ways to reinvent yourself after loss. We love the promise of progress. But real transformation is rarely efficient. It’s less like building a new house and more like living through a remodel while still inside. Walls come down. Dust rises. You can’t see the finished form until the work is almost done.

When we rush to escape discomfort, we trade depth for distraction. We may find another job, another partner, another plan, but if we haven’t tended to what’s shifting within us, the same patterns will quietly follow…

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When Belief Becomes a Battlefield

You never thought faith would feel like this. You’re walking through a house you once loved that’s now in ruins. The walls that once held your certainty now echo with questions: How did it come to this? Where is God in all this mess?

For many, “church hurt” isn’t a phrase. It’s a wound.

Maybe you were told you could “belong” but never lead because of who you love. Maybe your marriage ended, and suddenly you were no longer fit to serve. Maybe you sat in a pew and listened as the pulpit defended hate, nationalism, or bigotry in the name of Jesus. Or maybe you trusted a pastor with your soul, only to realize they were never trained or emotionally equipped to hold it safely.

If that’s you, you’re not crazy. And you’re not alone.

Faith deconstruction isn’t rebellion. It’s often what happens when your soul refuses to make peace with spiritual abuse. When your conscience finally says, Enough.

But once the unraveling begins, where do you go from here?

The Agony of Questioning Everything

There’s a peculiar loneliness that comes with deconstruction.
The Sunday rhythms that once grounded you now ache like phantom limbs. The verses you once clung to feel hollow. The people you prayed with might now see you as “backsliding” or “fallen away.”

It’s disorienting, like losing both your map and your compass.

Everywhere you turn, someone has an opinion about what you should believe. Some say, “Just leave it all behind.” Others insist, “You just need more faith.” Neither helps. Both erase the complexity of your experience, the betrayal, the grief, the hunger for something real.

For LGBTQ+ Christians, the pain cuts even deeper. Imagine being told your existence is an abomination while hearing “God loves you” in the same breath. The cruel irony of being welcomed into worship but banned from leadership. The promise of “conversion therapy” that ends in trauma, shame, and years of untangling.

For Black and Brown believers, it’s watching the rise of white Christian nationalism twist the cross into a flagpole and seeing faith weaponized to preserve power rather than embody love.

And for those who’ve been divorced, you may have discovered that your church preaches grace but practices punishment. That the same community you once led turned away when your marriage ended, as if heartbreak disqualified you from holiness.

These aren’t isolated experiences, they’re part of a pattern.
When the Church fails to embody Christ’s love, people are left carrying the debris.

And in that wilderness, you start to wonder: Is there anything left worth keeping?

Why Deconstruction Isn’t Destruction

Here’s the thing: questioning your faith doesn’t mean you’ve lost it. It means your faith has grown too big for its container.

Many people mistake deconstruction for demolition, as if the goal is to tear everything down and walk away. But real deconstruction is an act of courage. It’s refusing to live in denial. It’s daring to take apart what was built on fear, control, or exclusion so that something truer can emerge.

But that process can’t be rushed or done alone.
Because when your spiritual foundation is cracking, what you need isn’t more noise, it’s companionship.

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Enter the Spiritual Director

This is where a spiritual director can become a lifeline.

Unlike a pastor, therapist, or life coach, a spiritual director isn’t there to fix you, preach at you, or hand you answers. Their role is to listen with you, hold sacred space while you listen for the voice of God underneath the rubble.

They’re trained to notice what’s stirring beneath your words—the grief, anger, awe, and longing that make up your spiritual DNA. They help you slow down enough to discern: What’s dying here? What’s being born?

In spiritual direction, you don’t need polished prayers or perfect theology. You just need honesty.
It’s a place where your questions are safe, your pain is witnessed, and your faith, whatever shape it’s in, is enough.

The Healing Power of Being Seen

One of the most damaging effects of spiritual trauma is isolation.
You start to believe that your questions make you the problem, that your doubts mean you’ve failed God. But when you sit with someone who doesn’t flinch at your uncertainty, something begins to shift.

You realize your doubt isn’t dangerous, it’s holy. It’s the space where authentic faith begins to breathe again.

A good spiritual director doesn’t try to rebuild your belief system overnight. Instead, they help you notice where grace is already present, even in the wreckage.
Sometimes that looks like silence. Sometimes tears. Sometimes laughter at the absurdity of it all.

It’s not about returning to the old version of faith. It’s about rediscovering the God who never left, even when the church did.

Why You Can’t “Think” Your Way Out of Church Hurt

Most people try to heal spiritual wounds the way they were taught to handle everything else, through more study, more logic, more control.
But deconstruction isn’t a theology problem…

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There’s nothing inherently wrong with ambition. The drive to create, to provide, to build something meaningful and it’s written into the human spirit. Work, in its purest form, is participation in creation itself. But somewhere along the way, what was meant to be expression became obsession. What began as purpose turned into performance.

In today’s culture, the pursuit of success is not merely encouraged; it’s sanctified. Busyness is baptized as virtue. Accomplishment is confused with character. The more one achieves, the more one is told they matter. And yet, beneath all the recognition, there’s often an unspoken ache, a quiet exhaustion that no promotion or number in the bank can quiet.

This is the spiritual cost of chasing the False Self, the version of identity built on image, status, and approval. It looks impressive, but it’s fragile. It requires constant maintenance. It thrives on doing but fears stillness because silence threatens to expose its emptiness. The soul begins to forget that worth was never meant to be earned, it is inherited.

The False Promise of Achievement

The pursuit of success becomes dangerous when it stops being about contribution and becomes about validation. The deeper need isn’t for achievement itself but for belonging. For love. For assurance that one’s existence matters.

But instead of finding that security through connection, grace, or inner peace, many seek it through accumulation, more titles, influence, and affirmation. It’s the illusion that if the outer life glitters brightly enough, the inner life will finally feel whole.

That illusion is powerful. It drives people to exhaustion and calls it excellence. It teaches that rest is weakness, that slowing down is laziness, that stillness is for those who’ve already made it. But the more one chases it, the further away peace seems to move.

Richard Rohr describes this as the tyranny of the False Self and the mask that forms when people confuse their roles with their essence. It’s not that the False Self is evil; it’s just incomplete. It’s the part of us trying to survive, to prove, to be seen. The tragedy is that many never meet their True Self because they never stop performing long enough to listen for it.

There is a kind of spiritual loneliness that grows from living too long in the False Self. It’s not the loneliness of being alone; it’s the loneliness of being unseen and even by oneself.

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The Agitation of Overachievement

When identity depends on success, every setback becomes a crisis. A missed goal, a stalled project, even a season of rest can trigger shame. Because the unspoken belief beneath the drive is simple and cruel: I am only as valuable as what I produce.

That belief breeds anxiety. It corrodes joy. And it fractures the inner life into extremes, either overconfidence when things go well or despair when they don’t. There’s no balance, no centered ground.

Many high performers live in this quiet pendulum swing between pride and panic. They look composed but are constantly calculating, fearing that a single failure might expose them as unworthy. Their relationships begin to mirror their performance mindset, transactional, rushed, and outcome-driven. Even spiritual life becomes another arena for achievement: more discipline, more study, more striving to “get it right.”

This is how the soul burns out. It’s not simply from overwork; it’s from disconnection. The False Self can achieve endlessly but never rest, because it knows its value only through comparison and control.

And so, even the moments meant to bring joy, whether it be a promotion, an award, a milestone—become fleeting highs. The satisfaction fades quickly because the False Self can’t hold peace for long. Peace belongs to the True Self, the part of us that doesn’t need to prove anything to deserve love.

Accentuate the True Self

Healing begins when one grows tired enough to stop performing for approval …

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I remember the early days of sobriety like a blur of white-knuckled mornings. I was doing everything the recovery books said to do. Meetings, steps, phone calls, prayer. Outwardly, it looked like progress. Inwardly, it felt like free-falling into a void.

For the first three years, I tried to “do spirituality” the same way I’d done everything else, alone. It was how I survived my addiction: trust no one, depend on no one, figure it out by myself. That mindset might have kept me alive, but it was killing my soul.

I’d sit in silence, desperate to hear something, anything from God. I’d read spiritual books until the words blurred together. I’d pray like my life depended on it. And still, it felt like shouting into a canyon, my words bouncing off the walls and echoing back empty.

No one tells you how terrifying spiritual growth can be when you’re walking through it alone. It’s not the absence of belief that’s scary, it’s the absence of companionship in the questions. And the questions kept piling up.

Where is God in all of this? Why does faith feel more confusing now than before? Am I doing this wrong?

I told myself this was how the spiritual life was supposed to feel lonely, uncertain, mysterious. But deep down, I knew something was missing.

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The Weight of Trying to “Get It Right”

In those early years, I measured my progress by effort. If I prayed more, read more, served more, maybe then I’d feel what everyone else talked about. The problem was, the harder I tried, the emptier it felt.

I remember a bike ride about two and a half years into sobriety. I was peddling hard out of frustration because of the lack of clarity about what God wanted from me. I felt the silence from the Divine and it wasn’t the peaceful kind, either. It was the hollow; unsettling kind that made me wonder if anyone, even God was listening.

I started questioning everything I’d been taught. Was God real? Was this “relationship” just something people made up to feel better? I didn’t dare say it out loud. In recovery circles, doubt was often treated like failure. But inside, it was eating me alive.

The irony was, I was doing more spiritual work than I ever had and feeling less connected than ever before. And that’s when I realized something crucial: I wasn’t failing at spirituality. I was trying to walk a relational journey like it was a solo project.

The Turning Point: Letting Someone In

It wasn’t a dramatic conversion moment or a blinding light on the road. It started with a conversation. One that was hesitant and uncomfortable. But “on my own” was no longer working. I was exhausted. Frustrated. And honestly, scared that I’d stay stuck in this spiritual fog forever. So…

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He left before you could remember his voice, or maybe he stayed but never really showed up.

Either way, the absence carved something deep inside.

It might show up as the need to prove yourself over and over again.

It might be that wall you build in relationships, the one that keeps people close but never too close.

Or maybe it’s that constant low-level anger you can’t explain, the kind that simmers beneath the surface and explodes when you feel small or unseen.

And here’s the truth: these patterns don’t just disappear with age, success, or grit. They follow you into adulthood, shaping how you love, how you lead, and even who you trust. They convince you that strength means control and that vulnerability is something to fear. They whisper that if you just hustle harder, you’ll finally feel whole.

But what if there’s another way?

What if the very wound that once defined you could become the starting point for something stronger, steadier, and more grounded than you ever imagined?

I’ve written something deeply personal about that journey, and how men like us can finally break free from what’s been holding us back.

👉 Read the full article now and begin that work for yourself.

Allied We Can

Daddy Void

I’ve spent many years wrestling with a question that showed up when I was three years old: Why did my dad leave? When he walked out, a part of my sense of safety, identity, and worth went with him. For years I believed that damage was permanent and at best all I could do was to cope. I don’t believe that anymore. The…

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10 months ago · Eric Miller

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It’s the emotion that gets rewarded, the one that feels “safe” to show. Everything else …

fear,

sadness,

shame—gets buried.

But here’s the catch: living that way doesn’t make you stronger. It makes you smaller.

Think about it. If anger is the only role you’re allowed to play, then anyone who knows the script can control you. They can press your buttons, light the fuse, and watch the same explosion every time.

That’s not strength—it’s a trap.

And maybe you’ve already felt it.

The isolation.

The exhaustion of holding up a tough façade.

The emptiness that follows when the rage fades but nothing really changes.

I’ve been there. I know what it’s like to confuse a mask for manhood. But I also know there’s more. Real strength doesn’t come from living in that cage, it comes from breaking out of it.

If this speaks to you, I wrote about my own journey and what I discovered outside the walls of anger. It’s for men who are tired of being used, tired of being predictable, and ready to step into something stronger.

Read it here: https://www.alliedwecan.org/blog/prison-living-in

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Maybe you know that script. You grind harder, turn up the volume, try to outmuscle doubt. Then a real test hits, at work, in a relationship, in your own head, and the whole act starts wobbling.

That performance tax is brutal. It drains energy, thins out friendships, and warps how we lead. Everywhere I look, the costume keeps getting sold, the online “alpha” routine, the chest-thumping politics, the promise that force equals certainty. But watch long enough and you’ll see it: the gloss gives way, the edges fray, and the noise can’t hide the cracks.

Here’s what changed my direction: realizing the image I was defending wasn’t worth the defense. There’s another lane and one that doesn’t require pretending, doesn’t spike your pulse every time life leans on you, and doesn’t turn you into a stranger to yourself.

I put what I learned into a new piece. No lectures, just the path I wish someone handed me sooner. If the mask feels heavy, this points to a lighter way to carry strength. https://www.alliedwecan.org/blog/strongest-men-arent-who-you-think

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