Christian Howes

You don't really understand.

Well, post-traumatic stress disorder, basically the way it was explained to me, it's like, I asked my therapist, it was like, is it, do I have PTSD?

And he was like, well, wait, so you spent four years in prison?

He was like, well, yeah, that would be a good reason to have it.

And, but he broke it down to me.

He said, PTSD is stress.

Something if you've found yourself in a lot of uncertainty and a lot of fear and a lot of anxiety.

But what I'm saying is that I don't think I'd given myself permission to acknowledge that I had been afraid.

I think it's like taboo to say I feel fear.

Again, this is part of what I admire about you, I think, is like you're a very strong man.

Yeah.

who also names all these different emotions complex emotions and provide a model for how and you too yeah you know what i mean and this is like your book the mask of masculinity i think deals with a lot of these things so i try to be constantly surrounding myself with education and inspiration you know stories and uh and of course i keep trying to be engaged in all the other

work of being present in my body, present in my emotions, meditation, all these things.

But I think it starts with naming these things and making it less taboo to be able to talk about, as men, all these different feelings that we have.

First of all, if we say, I feel grief, that's the starting point.

To say, I feel fear, I feel shame, I feel guilt, it has to start there.

Um,

I think I agree that I do a lot of work in schools.

I've visited nearly a thousand orchestra classrooms in the United States in the last 30 years, you know, and that's a big part of what I do is going and working with kids, middle school and high school.

And a lot of the teachers that have hired me over the years, they know my backstory and they even think like, well, this is a good thing.