When we make excuses we negate responsibility and therefore defuse our power. This is unattractive and makes us as men untrustworthy.

Recently having facilitated hundreds of men through deep transformational and explorative work I realized profoundly that our excuses are holding us back from intimacy and connection – to be seen and to witness.

No one resonates with a man who doesn’t take responsibility and ownership of his actions or his past. When we deny our role in any event, we disempower ourselves.

So many of us as men are so fearful to own our “mistakes”, the pain we’ve caused others, our shame, and even our dreams.

We are fearful because we carry deep embarrassment about who we are or who we have been. So many of us have grown up in abusive, absent, and/or repressive households. Not knowing how to emote, nor how to express have lost our sense of self and therefore have cultivated a gnawing frustration of life that is projected outwardly.

We have given our power away. Having controlling or even enmeshed parents, we have defused ourselves of our own responsibility, wanting others in some way to save us or take away our pain. And if not another then pornography, sex, drugs, excessive achievement, wealth, status, and any addiction that validate us and distract us from unaddressed pain.

We haven’t known how to help ourselves and as a result, we have either retreated from the world in compounded shame and meekness or lashed out in leaky aggression and blame with no connection to the actual healing that really needs to transpire.

We have to continue to come together as men and be witnessed by other men in all of our emotions and range of expression. The entire spectrum of who we must be felt by ourselves without shame. Truly… all of us must be welcomed…

What do you feel when someone close to you continues to make excuses for their actions and behaviors? 

One is glad to be of service.

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STEFANOS SIFANDOS

Relational Alchemist, Speaker & Author