The Masculine Wilderness Podcast · Epik Project

The Way Back to Yourself: Emotional Mastery, Masculinity & the Rise of Men’s Work with Andrew Carruthers

·49 min·3 clips

Andrew defines shame as “I am something bad,” and says that belief can drive people toward “bad things” to get needs met.

Tom Perez brings the show back after a short hiatus. He welcomes Andrew Carruthers as a friend and as someone whose work has crossed paths with Epic Project. The setup is simple and personal: two men talking about where they are in life and work. Andrew introduces himself and starts to sketch the kind of conversations he has with the men he serves. Tom quickly turns the focus toward the people who come to Andrew for help. Andrew says he mainly works with men, often in their mid-30s and early to mid-career. He describes a familiar pattern of lower capacity to stay present with emotions. Tom recognizes that pattern right away and says he would have been that man a few years earlier. He names anger as the feeling he knew best. Tom also brings up Atlas of the Heart as a book that helped him see how many emotions there are. That leads them into the odd reality that some people have never really learned the vocabulary for what they feel. Tom asks which emotions are hardest for the men Andrew works with. Andrew points first to grief and the feelings around it. Sadness, he says, is one of the biggest ones men resist. He adds that joy can be hard too, especially the lighter or goofy kind. The conversation keeps coming back to the gap between what men are carrying and what they can name. Tom and Andrew stay patient with that gap instead of trying to rush through it. Late in the episode, the talk widens to enoughness, shame, and the constant pressure of being told you are not enough. Tom closes by linking that pressure to the 600,000 people he says we lose every year, and he frames self-acceptance as something men should offer themselves and each other. They end with gratitude and a quiet sense that repair begins with honesty.

As heard by us

A grounded conversation about masculinity, grief, and the language of feeling.

Tom Perez and Andrew Carruthers spend the conversation circling a plain but hard subject: men learning to say what they feel. Anger comes up first, as it often does, but the talk keeps opening into sadness, grief, and even joy.

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Why you'd press play

A conversation about men learning to name what they feel.

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