The Primary Question
Digging into the most frequent question we ask ourselves
Hi there. I’m starting this newsletter about mens work. At its most structured, men’s work is men, sitting in a circle, telling the truth. Inevitably, it gets emotional. There’s a few hundred thousand men doing this kind of work across the US in various groups. I co-lead the Brooklyn chapter of one of them - All Kings - which focuses on supporting formerly incarcerated men.
I personally find this work the key to understanding what’s up with me and men more broadly, and I want to share that with you. Clearly, us men have some issues to work through. There’s a news article every week about increasing rates of suicide, unemployment, and school dropout for men. What goes less noted is the work being done in response - whether it’s men facing their demons in established men’s groups like All Kings or dudes online helping each other out on personal health, wealth, spiritual connection, our sense of “manhood” etc. There’s a lot of good stuff out there, and I want to use this space to highlight it - especially the identity and mental health related discussions.
I call the public push for men to better their emotional selves “the Men’s Work Agenda”. If you look for it, it’s everywhere. To take a few recent examples:
The first line from Kendrick Lamar’s recent single “Father Time” is a woman telling Kendrick “you really need some therapy”.
Daniel Craig’s James Bond is a man mired in anger, grief, and shame - a big departure from previous movies. As the movie’s producer put it, “Bond is evolving just as men are evolving.”
Charlemagne Tha God, host of one of the top hip hop morning shows in the US, talks about anxiety, depression, and the need to set boundaries just about every week on his show.
The movie Magic Mike II, which sells itself as a feel good movie about male strippers, is actually all about men’s group therapy. It’s two hours of dudes getting over their insecurities to support each other emotionally.
And yet for me, and maybe you, there’s still a gap. I don’t see many men publicly or privately saying “here’s what I’m working on emotionally.” Yes, there are plenty of dudes who do exactly that in therapy, but those are siloed 1:1 conversations. I believe that I and other men would benefit tremendously if that level of raw, direct conversation were more public. Men need their own language around emotional self-improvement and different norms for how we talk to one another about it. The way issues like processing trauma currently get talked about can sound “soft” or academic - and so those concepts are left alone. Language and norms around these emotional issues are exactly what these men’s groups provide, and so I want them shared. It’s middle aged, grown ass men - largely dudes in their 30s, 40s, and 50s - telling it like it is. They’re too old to beat around the bush. And young enough to prioritize changing how they show up to others. They’re there for themselves and so the pains and hopes that are communicated are honest and direct.
So the agenda for this newsletter is simple: to fill that gap, and reveal how men are helping men while we’re at it. Men’s work is sworn to confidentiality, so we’ll be going into my own work as a portal into what men, broadly, are up to.
If that isn’t your thing, thank you for lending me your email address many moons ago and smash that unsubscribe button. For everyone else, you’re in for a treat.
The Core Wound
I’d like to start with the jugular of pain. A few months into attending men’s group circles, one of the circle members apologized for bringing up the same issue with his dad for the 100th time. Another member told him not to stop apologizing, and that every man in the room has an issue that they come back to work on time and again. I immediately thought “well that sucks for everyone here.” While I knew I had some issues to work through, I thought a few men's group sessions would get more over them. But nope. Three years later, I’ve got the same core issues, albeit spoken with less wobbles in my throat.
Men’s work circles often call this a “core wound.” It’s that negative message I tell myself about myself and it never quite goes away. For most people, it’s a message that gets written in childhood. For me, this message was “you’re right and I’m wrong”. And no matter how much work I do to get over it, that message pops into my head when I want it least. And yea, my core wound message is a bit of a weird one for a young ambitious white dude like myself. I think a lot of core wounds, when spoken out loud, are not what I’d expect from the person.
Discovering a core wound is hard. If there’s one emotional reflex I’ve worked on my whole life, it’s the one labeled “I’m fine.” It took me watching a bunch of dudes describe their core wounds to realize that I had one too. And I realized it’s not always the result of the worst thing that’s ever happened to someone - I’ve seen someone’s core wound originate from a dad simply being aloof. Or it can be almost getting killed. Brains are different.
How to find your core wound, aka The Primary Question
I’ve seen a lot of different methods for finding a core wound. A therapist once asked me “why are you here?” as a way of teasing that out. Or I’ve been asked to close my eyes and visualize the first time I truly felt scared. Both worked, but one exercise in particular worked best for me, and it was called “The Primary Question.” The leader asked “What question do you ask yourself the most?” He then elaborated there were three characteristics of a solid Primary Question:
This question is an automatic, instinctual, perhaps subconscious one that I ask myself, in some form, every day.
If I don’t fulfill or answer the question, I believe irrational and dire consequences will happen.
I can tie the question to my childhood memories.
He gave me a few examples of other folks’ Primary Questions:
Do they like me?
How do I protect myself / my family?
How do I impress you?
How do I get to the “next level” of status?
Am I right?
I knew immediately what mine was: “How do I make you happy?”. If the person in front of me is stressed, sad, angry, shameful, etc - that question crowds out everything else. It can be a family member, a coworker, a girlfriend - the effect is the same. And making them happy felt like the reason I had internalized “you’re right and I’m wrong” as a message. Believing in someone else’s version of events is about the most rapid way to defuse tension that I know. The dire consequence I believe in if I don’t make the person in front me happy is that the situation will spiral out of control. And I can trace it back to trying to make my parents happy. Checklist complete.
And like most Primary Questions, asking this question was a form of self-protection. Until it wasn’t. And now it’s getting in the way of me becoming the person I want to be. These days, “How do I make you happy” is a solid instinct for shooting the breeze with someone, but it gets in the way of having deep conversations. If someone is pissed off at me, my instinct is to say whatever I need to say to get them to “calm down” - I’ll apologize or take on the burden of fixing the issue immediately, even if it causes my own resentment to come out sideways later on.
So I have to reframe this question into a more useful one - the type of question that, whenever the old Primary Question comes up, I say instead so I can better act how I want to. I was given two tips on how to reframe it:
A lot of Primary Questions are exclusively about other people, whom I don’t control (e.g. “how do I get them to like me?”). I should make the Primary Question either exclusively about myself (e.g. “how can I appreciate myself”) or about myself in addition to other people.
A lot of Primary Questions require a lot of work to be fulfilled. For example, “how can I get rich” can be a lifetime of work, if it’s fulfilled at all. Use words that don’t require doing much such as “enjoy” or “appreciate” - e.g. “how can I appreciate what I have”. The point of the Primary Question is to put me in a better frame of mind so that I can show up in life as a more positive person, as opposed to making me feel guilty for not doing something.
My reframed question is “How can I appreciate my power to heal myself and others?” Instead of trying to make folks “happy” - or whatever I thought “happy” meant - I seek healing. By “healing” I just mean understanding what’s causing the issue. If someone is pissed off at me now, the impulse shifts from immediately resolving the tension to asking questions around what’s driving the tension. I want to understand the emotional buildup. I want to understand the role I did and didn’t play in it. It’s helped me stand my ground a bit more while also getting closer to the person in front of me.
And the point of reframing the Primary Question is just to take a harmful instinct and make it less harmful. It is to turn the core wound into a core gift. A common refrain in men’s circles is that our greatest wound is the source of our greatest gift. It sounds cheesy as hell to say out loud, but it’s been useful for me in choosing my focus in life. For me, my wound of “how do I make you happy” is the source of my gift of healing myself and others. So that’s what I’m working on these days - healing myself and others. It’s trying to turn that instinct of making others happy into listening to others, being sensitive to how others are doing, and being a source of understanding.
So what’s your Primary Question? If you have a partner, what’s theirs? Or your parents and siblings’? I did this exercise with my siblings and parents once, and I highly recommend it. It was probably the most insightful question I’ve ever asked them.
Hot take
Thinking on all this recently has gotten me into hot take territory. What does this Primary Question look like at a national level? What question does the archetypal American man ask most? I’m thinking folks like the Marlboro Man, the folk legend John Henry, or Bruce Willis in Die Hard. What’s their Primary Question? “How can I be free?” feels like a tried and true answer, and we can tie it back to slavery and England taxing and murdering us, so that feels about right to me. But what does freedom mean? Perhaps a lot of things, although my hot take is that it usually means one thing. By now I’ve spent enough time in circles of dudes talking about freedom to comfortably translate “I want freedom” to “I want my balls back.” At least most of the time. The dude who wants his freedom back after starting a family. The dude who wants freedom after feeling stuck in a job. The dude who wants his freedom after spending time in jail. Not always, but most of the time, the dude wants his proverbial balls back. I think “How do I get my balls back?” is male America’s Primary Question.
One more thing
Men’s group exercises like the Primary Question are generally traded word of mouth. They are repackaged and refined over generations. It’s rare to be able to say Exercise X comes from Person Y. The Primary Question is different. I got it from Tony Robbins.
This is the same Tony Robbins that sold people dreams of life transformation via self-help tapes and infomercials. The same Tony Robbins who got Me Too’d. My passing opinion of Tony Robbins over the years had ranged from “lame” to “this guy sucks.” Nevertheless, I found myself in a work-related 6-day Tony Robbins seminar at a conference center in West Palm Beach, Florida. His name and face were plastered everywhere. I was resolved to hate it. And I did, for about 48 hours. But then his schtick totally worked on me. By Day 3, I had never felt more amped in my life. Describing how I got to that place is a whole yarn unto itself, but needless to say I came home ready to karate chop the hell out of some life goals.
And somewhere in all that karate chopping, I realized Tony Robbins is to mental health coaching what Arnold Schwarzenneger is to bodybuilding. He mastered facilitation work and popularized “life coaching”. He sold 50 million self help audio programs. In a world that is hungry for mental resilience and “the work”, Tony Robbins has been America’s doctor for 40 years. For all the struggling Gen Zers and millennials out there, he should be, culturally, a big deal.
But he’s not, and for good reason. He’s too busy. Tony Robbins pivoted from mass marketing infomercials to doing extremely high end executive coaching ($1 million per client per year) and multi-day in-person seminars that are $1,000 - $5,000 a ticket. The audience tends towards middle-aged small business owners and sales managers. It’s a great way to make money with an audience that takes his advice extremely seriously. The folks around me at the Florida convention center attributed a big part of their success to Tony’s advice. But his audience is more focused on sales goals than TikTok memes. As a result, a whole army of guys who are way worse at selling the “help” part of “self-help” have gained traction.
I predict that Tony Robbins will be reincarnated. Demand is too high for him not to be. Tony Robbins 2.0 will be all over TikTok and Youtube hawking how to get past depression and anxiety. It will be seen as revolutionary, because for Gen Z it will be. But it’s the same schtick that worked for regional sales managers in West Palm Beach. The same schtick that got sold in an infomercial and delivered via audio cassette tape in 1985. The prescription for getting past your shame and self doubt is timeless. It just needs to be tailored for our ADD brains. And be less expensive than a car.