Julie Hilsen (00:06)
Hello dear friends and welcome to Life of Love where we gather each week to celebrate curiosity, to get to know ourselves and how we can show up in our life of love at this moment for our highest good. However it looks, it might be a struggle to find your highest good or it might be an easy day, but we’re holding space for all of it. And I’m just really excited to bring forth this message to you guys this week. But first of all, I’m gonna set our intentions so you know where we’re coming from.

And maybe you can set your intention for what you might want to know what your heart is looking for, what your higher self might be calling for. And so I invite you as long as you’re not driving, if you’re driving, just participate. But if you’re not driving, just close your eyes and feel your feet on the earth and your heart into your heart.

Dear God, God is creator. Thank you for bringing me to this moment. And I ask you to work through me and for me to bring forth a message for the highest good.

I invite my higher self and my soul to come forward with help with the Holy Spirit, help us reach the people who need to hear, the hearts that wish to soften and bring forth a message of love, clarity and intensity so that we can understand each other. And that’s our intention is to come forth and be present in ourselves, understand ourselves.

and understand that those we interact with. So our intention continues to be present in the highest form of our expression, however it looks, and honor our friends, our neighbors, and the struggles that they are going through. And I invite Gloria’s team, if they so wish, to collaborate with my team as we bring forth this message and hold space for

these important topics that might have gotten brushed over in our angst, we might have forgotten to look at and peek under the covers of other people’s struggles. So we’re having an open heart for an honest dialogue and something that no shame and all light and love. So I thank you, thank you, thank you. And so it is.

Gloria Vanderhorst (02:25)
Thank you. Lovely.

Julie Hilsen (02:26)
All right.

Thank you. Well, Gloria, thank you for being on Life of Love. I’m just so excited. Yeah, so Gloria is coming from just north of Washington, D.C. and she is.

Gloria Vanderhorst (02:32)
you

You’re welcome.

Julie Hilsen (02:41)
She’s an entrepreneur of thought where she was in a place of accidental exposure to the struggle that preschool boys were going through in her counseling. She has a background in psychology and counseling, and she was able to pick up on a society challenge and something that not a lot of people were willing to really look at.

She’s opening up eyes and she spent a whole career to raise awareness about struggles that boys and men go through and just illuminate how to be more present, how to heal and have compassion because there’s definite differences. And when those differences are honored, they can be celebrated versus hidden or ignored.

And it’s a beautiful thing when a man can be vulnerable and share and be in his strength and be supported. So I’m so excited, Gloria. Thank you for being here. It’s such an honor. ⁓

Gloria Vanderhorst (03:41)
You’re welcome. You’re

welcome. So I fell into understanding boys and men. didn’t go out after it. It came to me when I started my private practice. I had a friend who ran a preschool. And as you may realize, most preschools are run by women and they’re staffed by women. And so

When little boys are more energetic, more boisterous, they concern the female and she worries that maybe there’s something wrong with this little boy because he has so much energy that you just can’t get him to stay in the circle, right? Or put things down and transition to another activity. And so

I was referred a series of preschool boys and they educated me about what it means to be a boy in this society. And so one of the things that is a fact that has never really been disseminated across

The world is that boys are born with a wider range of emotional expression than girls are. Now that’s a very interesting fact, right? Boys are born with a wider range. You might ask yourself, well, what’s the point? Why, why that difference? But there is a difference. It’s a consistent difference.

Julie Hilsen (05:12)
Yes.

Gloria Vanderhorst (05:27)
And so boys go higher, they get more excited, more exuberant. They also go lower, they get sadder, more worried, more anxious, more depressed than girls do. And it’s a mind blower, isn’t it? I mean, what would be the function of that?

Julie Hilsen (05:41)
Gloria, you’re blowing, you’re,

Yes! And this is

why I’m exhausted sometimes around my husband because he’s just like, up and down, I’m just like, I just want to chill. And he’s like, when he’s sick, he’s super sick. And when I’m picking on my husband, but he knows. Yeah, it is a roller coaster. my gosh. And why?

Gloria Vanderhorst (05:53)
Mm-hmm. Right? Right.

Mm-hmm. Right.

And that’s

normal and natural for the male, right? And then just like you did, right? You’re responding to your husband, but the truth is mothers respond to their infant boys in exactly the same way. They have no intention to cut off these feeling states, but when a baby boy,

right, kind of gets more exuberant, louder, has more intense energy. Mother changes in some way, right, maybe it’s facial expression, maybe it’s body posture, but they do something that sends a message to the boy that mom’s not comfortable with that.

Julie Hilsen (06:45)
And they’re sensitive, so they… Yeah.

Yeah, and they

pick up on them, you’re the mom being uncomfortable because they’re already extra sensitive.

Gloria Vanderhorst (07:01)
Right.

Right. And that’s the goal of an infant, right? Infants come into the world emotionally brilliant. That’s their survival mechanism, right? That’s why you could take a very healthy, well-fed, well-clothed infant and put it on the steps of a church, all right? And it will start to cry.

Julie Hilsen (07:14)
Hmm.

Gloria Vanderhorst (07:27)
because it’s emotionally brilliant. That infant knows, I’ve just been left. All right, that infant reads the entire setting. I tell people, if you wanna know who to trust when you’re at a family reunion, pass a baby around the room, right? Because the baby will be comfortable and relaxed in somebody’s lap.

and then they get passed to somebody else and somebody else and the baby will start to fidget, right? And to somebody else the baby will start to cry. The baby is not hungry. The baby does not need a diaper change. The baby is telling you clearly this adult is not trustworthy. I am not safe in the lap of this adult. So

Julie Hilsen (08:01)
Yeah.

Gloria Vanderhorst (08:23)
reading emotion is the magical skill set of all infants because they need to be able to do that for survival. Right. And so a boy like a girl reads mom’s feedback and then modifies his behavior, his emotionality. So

Just in that normal natural exchange with mother who’s not comfortable with these higher ranges and lower ranges of feeling, the infant male narrows his expressiveness. And that’s powerful, right? We really need to be able to understand the impact of that for an infant.

It’s a mind blower.

Julie Hilsen (09:15)
There’s,

yeah. And so that’s across both genders. But then is there a demarcation where, well, maybe let’s explore how this bonding or this attachment is affected when they modify behavior based on the mom saying, this is not okay. You’re not gonna be part.

part of the clan, you’re not going to be part of the family if you’re showing these highs and lows. And how does that affect the preschooler and how they, or do they feel like, I’m at school, I can go explore these high and lows? Or what’s the behavior effect?

Gloria Vanderhorst (09:41)
Okay.

Yeah, I think it’s hard to completely eliminate, right, the highs and the lows. So as a boy, I’m still going to have access to some of that. And there are places where I’m going to go into those territories. But as a culture, right, we have the notion that boys should not be expressing

Julie Hilsen (09:59)
Mm-hmm.

Okay.

Gloria Vanderhorst (10:23)
kind of tender emotions. We want them to be strong. We want them to be brave. We want them to be courageous. We want them to explore and take risks. But, you know, we don’t want them to be tender or sad. I give this example numerous times, but on a playground at the mall, just observe families.

Right? And notice that if a girl comes off the playground and is crying or sad or needy in some way, she will get picked up and asked what happened. Then she can tell her story. A boy, same way, right? He’s hurt. He’s coming to mom or dad. He will get asked what happened.

If he gives a good enough response, he will get picked up and offered comfort. We treat our boys differently from the way that we treat our girls. We don’t do it intentionally. All right. It is just a natural part of the culture. We have this expectation that it’s all right for girls to express any feeling.

but it isn’t all right. We’re not comfortable when the boy is crying or fussy or anxious or worried, right? We want to scrub that out of their brains and we do, right? By the time they get into preschool, we’ve already taught them.

Julie Hilsen (12:06)
you

Gloria Vanderhorst (12:14)
that that lower end of the emotional expression, being sad, being tender, being vulnerable is something we’re not comfortable with. And that’s a powerful impact on a human being. You’ve just taken me and told me there’s a range of experience that I have internally. And you’ve told me, don’t share it, don’t show it.

Julie Hilsen (12:25)
Mm-hmm.

Gloria Vanderhorst (12:42)
right? And then we marry these men and we wonder why can’t they be tender? Why can’t they be vulnerable? Right? Why can’t they cry at a sad movie? I cried a sad movie, right? What’s wrong that my date, my spouse doesn’t

Julie Hilsen (12:52)
Okay.

Gloria Vanderhorst (13:06)
cry at a sad movie or even at a funeral, right? They work really hard not to show those tender emotions. And it’s because we have trained them in very early childhood that somehow it’s not safe for them to go into that territory.

Julie Hilsen (13:30)
Wow. So I wanted to talk to you about transitions and how these submerged expressions can affect transitions. I don’t know what’s on the… My heart is maybe more talking about life transitions and relationships. if we’re…

Gloria Vanderhorst (13:40)
Thank you.

Julie Hilsen (13:50)
if society is saying, okay, it’s not okay to really express, how does that manifest in like say, know, empty nest or the kids? I know, I’ll just say from experience, my husband, it was harder on him when the kids started school. Like the first day of school, he didn’t cry, but I could feel that that affected him.

Gloria Vanderhorst (14:01)
⁓ yeah.

Mm-hmm.

you could sense it,

Julie Hilsen (14:16)
I was like, they’re gonna

Gloria Vanderhorst (14:16)
right.

Julie Hilsen (14:16)
be back, you You want them go to school, they gotta go learn. And he would be like, sitting in it more. And I’d be like, what? I mean, you leave them every day to go to work.

Gloria Vanderhorst (14:20)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Right. And

that’s normal, that’s natural, and that’s exactly where I was going to start, right? That the father quite often has much more of a struggle with transitions, going off to school, going off to college, getting married, right? These big transitions in life. Quite often, it’s the father.

Julie Hilsen (14:30)
Yeah.

Okay.

Gloria Vanderhorst (14:53)
who has a larger emotional reaction to them. And in part because he’s been restricted in expressing emotion along the way. And so there are all of these pieces of tenderness that have built up, all these pieces of connection that have built up.

right, and his heart is full of them, his brain is full of them, and then here goes the preschooler, right, off to school for the first day, and they just come flooding back. It’s emotional expression that they have housed, they’ve internalized, but didn’t express at the time in the way with the intensity.

that they were feeling it. And so at different markers in life, they’ll just come flooding out. There’s no way to hold it back, right? Graduation transitions are powerful too.

Julie Hilsen (15:54)
And yeah, and it’s that, ⁓ that’s over. Like

all the things I wanted to do with my up to three year old, I lost that. I can’t get it back. Time has passed and this next transition and you can’t get it back. So it’s a, I think it’s mourning like you said in the unexpressed and it’s just hanging out in their hearts. Excuse me.

Gloria Vanderhorst (16:02)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Right? Right?

But if you were to look

at your own experience with your children before they headed off to preschool, look at the years before that, you would find that you have expressed tons of emotional experiences, right? You’ve talked about emotion, you’ve felt emotion, you’ve expressed emotion, right? If they’ve been injured, maybe you’ve cried.

Julie Hilsen (16:20)
Mm-hmm.

Gloria Vanderhorst (16:41)
about that if they’ve been excited about something you’ve been joyous with them whereas dad has just kind of been hmmm.

Right? Just kind of this neutral tone and not the range of emotion that you’ve expressed, but naturally, right? He’s a human being. He’s feeling that range, but the culture says, all right, we don’t want you crying when your son gets up and walks for the first time. Mom can cry about that, but you can’t.

All right, you can go, bravo. But tears should not flow when in fact, that’s a joyous occasion and tears flow in joy as well as in sadness. So I don’t know the function of this. Right, right, right, because they have contained.

Julie Hilsen (17:21)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, we wonder why men have heart attacks, right?

Gloria Vanderhorst (17:47)
so much and we know that emotion doesn’t affect the body right if i’m going to contain feelings states my body is going to have a reaction to that maybe it’s ulcers maybe it’s heart trouble but my body is going to react to that containment

powerful.

Julie Hilsen (18:05)
Yeah, and

it is very powerful and it’s amazing. And I feel like we haven’t really tapped the power of the male emotion and honored it. And it’s sad because then I have friends who are just a step ahead of me where they’re not just empty nesters, but they’re like becoming grandparents. And yeah, and…

And I think it does get hard when, okay, all the attention is on the husband. And then all of a sudden there’s a grand kid or the kid comes back from school to like live and work. And all of a sudden this female attention is split up again. And there’s a lot of men who are like angry, like grumpy old men isn’t just a movie, like it’s a real thing. And when men feel bad, it’s like, it’s really visceral. it’s almost like they wanna…

Gloria Vanderhorst (18:32)
That’s so powerful.

Right. ⁓

Mm-hmm.

And that’s

Julie Hilsen (18:59)
like wallow in it a little bit more than we do. I don’t know how.

Gloria Vanderhorst (19:05)
Well,

I have empathy for the grumpy old men out there because if you think about it, right, I have to tell you this story. One little boy that I saw because his parents were divorced and he moved back and forth between houses and he was three, right? And his parents brought him in for therapy.

because he was a terror in each one of their houses. He was not comfortable in either place. And he transitioned one week with mom, one week with dad. And so after meeting with him for a few times, I asked him, you know, why do you get so mad moving back and forth? And he said, well,

I have these tears, right? And they don’t come out my eyes. They go down my throat and into my tummy and they turn into rocks in my tummy, right? And then they come out of my tummy and I just throw them all around the room. Well, if that isn’t the best description of what happens, right? When you…

Julie Hilsen (20:20)
Thanks

Gloria Vanderhorst (20:23)
confine a feeling of sadness and then it overwhelms you and you end up getting angry. So the grumpy old man, think about it, this is a person who has swallowed feelings, swallowed feelings, swallowed feelings because the culture says you’re not to show these soft feelings. Right? Don’t cry movies.

Don’t cry at your kid’s graduation. Don’t be tender with your children. They have swallowed this rule about how to be a male in this society. And so they have every right to be grumpy and to be irritated. But they need someone to really understand.

how important it is to release all of that tension, to kind of unlock those feelings and do what this little boy did, right? Which is, yeah, let’s get them out, right? Let’s express them, but not like rocks that you throw around the room, but in genuine understanding of I’m sad to leave mom and go to dad. I’m sad to leave dad.

Julie Hilsen (21:18)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yes

Gloria Vanderhorst (21:40)
and go to mom. I don’t like this

moving back and forth. And so I want to be able to express that sadness and to be understood. And we don’t let men express sadness to be understood.

Julie Hilsen (21:56)
And so I know from my experience, my experience, I realized that my husband was trying to channel his emotions through me because it’s okay for me to feel the emotions. It’s okay for me to be reactive and unpredictable, but he has to be this rock and he’s a,

Gloria Vanderhorst (22:06)
Hmm.

Right.

Okay.

Right.

Julie Hilsen (22:20)
Taurus is so grounded and that’s how he shows up in his son and how he…

Gloria Vanderhorst (22:21)
Impressible,

intentional.

Julie Hilsen (22:28)
Mm-hmm. And I’m

a water sign, so I flow and I, you know, that’s how I show up in the world. But actually, I want to be more like him. I, you know, there’s no accidents. we, this is, so I remember when I was just like, listen, I cannot own all your emotions. You’re going to have to, and it’s a very complex interaction between.

Gloria Vanderhorst (22:51)
Mm-hmm.

Julie Hilsen (22:52)
a couple, a relationship. This could be a best friend. This could be a father, daughter, mother, son. But bringing it back on him saying, need to own this and I love you and I’m going to be here for you, but you feel it. Don’t project it onto me.

Gloria Vanderhorst (22:54)
It is.

Well, you’re an emotionally mature woman because many women ask for that very thing, but then they are not able to be responsive. Right. So the guy comes home from work. He’s obviously agitated. Something has happened at work that’s creating a problem. And so you ask, right, what’s going on?

Julie Hilsen (23:26)
Mm-hmm.

Gloria Vanderhorst (23:39)
And he tells the story in probably two sentences, right? ⁓

Julie Hilsen (23:45)
Yeah, yeah,

no detail. No, yeah.

Gloria Vanderhorst (23:48)
Right, no details. He tells his story in two sentences and the woman invariably will go, I think it’ll be all right. Right, I’m sure that will work out. Right, not curious, not seeking more, not saying that sounds really important to you. All right, let’s put dinner on hold.

All right, I’ll shut the stove off. Let’s go sit, have a cup of coffee. I want to hear more about this. Right? Because you have to invite more in order to create safety for disclosure. Right? You want your husband to go deeper, but he’s not going to go there on his own. All right? The only way he’s going to get deeper on his own is to get angry.

right, is to come back a half an hour later and say something nasty because you didn’t listen to him a half an hour ago. So women need also to be able to modify their expectation and take more of a risk in really wanting to go deeper and to understand.

Julie Hilsen (24:43)
you

Gloria Vanderhorst (25:08)
What are the feeling states that my husband has just walked in the door with? And quite often, we’re reluctant to do that.

Julie Hilsen (25:18)
Mm-hmm, right, because a lot of times when women have a problem, want to talk, they just, you know, say, you know, they just talk about it. Yeah.

Gloria Vanderhorst (25:26)
They will just do it spontaneously. They’ll just do it spontaneously.

And if you’re used to that, it doesn’t work with a male. He’s not going to just do it spontaneously. You have to invite it. You have to set the stage of safety for it. It really has to be safe for a male to go deeper.

Julie Hilsen (25:45)
So creating that space is really important. And I think that’s why sex gets so convoluted with that dynamic because there’s, you know, in the bedroom, it’s safe to be vulnerable. You want to be open. And then people say, well, you know, I don’t feel connected even though we just had sex. I don’t think we made love because there’s, you know, there’s men are still holding on to when you ignored when they were upset, but they’re not going to tell you.

Gloria Vanderhorst (25:48)
It’s very important.

Mm-mm. Mm-mm.

Julie Hilsen (26:13)
that they’re upset, but they want sex because they want to go back to the womb. They want to be seen and held.

Gloria Vanderhorst (26:14)
That’s right.

Mm-hmm. Right. Yeah, they want to

be accepted. They want to be connected, right? And that is a powerful way of feeling a sense of connection with your spouse. And many times, I think that ends up being the primary way of feeling connected to your spouse. So as women, we do need

Julie Hilsen (26:24)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm?

Mm-hmm.

Gloria Vanderhorst (26:45)
to learn to give the male much more safety to be expressive emotionally as well as physically.

Julie Hilsen (26:56)
Right, because then if sex is the main way you’re connecting and then the woman is like, well, it feels empty to me because women know intuitively when there’s something else going on. And whether it’s they’re emotionally expressing to somebody else who’s better at talking to them, whatever it is, women know when there’s something missing. And…

Gloria Vanderhorst (27:07)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Julie Hilsen (27:19)
and that unfulfilled feeling after sex that we really didn’t just connect, we just did the deed. And so then they’re like, I don’t want to have sex with him anymore because it’s not doing anything for me. It’s not great for me. And so then that goes away because a woman loses interest. She’s not getting her emotional charge from it. And I think that has a lot to do with the grumpy old men because I feel like they’re not

Gloria Vanderhorst (27:25)
physical.

Right.

Julie Hilsen (27:47)
They’re not getting fulfilled in either way because the bucket’s completely empty. Because that core need hasn’t been met and it’s been tried, it’s supplemented with a pacifier of sex. But then once that’s gone, it’s like, what are we doing? How do we connect?

Gloria Vanderhorst (27:51)
That’s right. It is totally.

Thank you.

Mm-hmm,

mm-hmm. I think you’re right on target, right? And that’s why it is so important for women to recognize how to create safety for emotional disclosure, all right? The male.

Julie Hilsen (28:18)
and realize that as a woman

you’ve been entitled to it.

Gloria Vanderhorst (28:22)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. And so you’re comfortable, but in interacting with other women, it’s very easy to be vulnerable. But you have to learn to create safety for your spouse so that your spouse can also be vulnerable. And you know, sometimes it is, right? Shutting the dinner down in order to sit and have opportunity to talk.

Julie Hilsen (28:24)
Mm-hmm.

Gloria Vanderhorst (28:49)
Another place that is much easier for men to share is actually in the car. Because when you’re in the car, you’re not facing each other. So it’s not as risky to tell your stories in the car. All right. So sometimes I encourage couples to get in the habit of going out for a drive. All right.

Julie Hilsen (28:58)
Okay.

Mm-hmm.

Gloria Vanderhorst (29:18)
because that can be an ideal time to encourage your husband to share stories, share the situation, share the feeling, experiences. And as the wife, you have to be willing and cognizant of how hard it is for your husband to go into that territory. So you have to be prepared with some prompts.

right with some questions with some guesses about you know that might have felt fill in the blank all right that might have felt demoralizing that might have felt scary that might have felt demeaning to just fill in the blank

Julie Hilsen (30:01)
Yeah, like I wouldn’t blame you for being

frustrated about that. Like anybody would feel frustrated or, you know, I would be angry too or yeah, just validate. I love that. That’s beautiful. And it’s, it’s just your opinion. So they can say, well, you know, it’s more like this, but you’ve actually, you’ve gotten them to share, which is.

Gloria Vanderhorst (30:17)
Right.

Right. And another thing that I do for couples is that I have a list of feelings. It’s three pages. Each page has three columns of feelings on it. So there are tons of feeling words out there. And I send that to couples and I say, make a copy for the kitchen table, make a copy for the family room, make a copy for the bedroom so that when you’re in a discussion and

Julie Hilsen (30:20)
and you’re connected.

Gloria Vanderhorst (30:47)
your husband is struggling to find the feeling state, trust the brain. Your brain has access to all of these feelings. And if you read through the list of feelings, it will just pop out. It will just automatically, you know, I’m feeling that, I’m feeling that. Your brain knows it’s still brilliantly.

processing feeling states and can identify them easily and then you have labels for your feelings that you can hold on to the next time. Right now you’ll recognize that feeling. I was feeling insulted. Right when my partner did this in the office the other day or I was feeling demoralized. Right words that are not

normally a part of your vocabulary will become a part of your vocabulary and they will. They’ll just jump off the page and give you then the opportunity to elaborate on the experience. So a list of feelings or a feeling chart with words is really powerful and important.

Julie Hilsen (31:59)
I love that. It seems so simple but very powerful. It’s free, like feeling chart.

Gloria Vanderhorst (32:05)
Right. It’s easy, but very complicated.

Julie Hilsen (32:08)
Yeah, well, it’s messy. It’s messy to be like completely honest with yourself and then and say it out loud and you

know, we’ve it’s been It’s been weeded out of our culture ⁓ I have one more thing I want to talk about and then we’re getting close to our time but in in that Mary Ellen Flora book I was telling you about the male and female energies something I’m reading it for the second time because

Gloria Vanderhorst (32:19)
It has.

Julie Hilsen (32:35)
It’s just full of stuff. But one thing I want to talk to you about was she explores the difference between male social structure and female. And ⁓ I want to bounce this off of you. Her observation is that men, maybe it goes back to hunting clans and part of our epigenetics, but that men need to have social groups where they feel like they can collaborate and tribe up.

Gloria Vanderhorst (32:45)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Julie Hilsen (33:03)
⁓

And, but then women, you we don’t, as you know, and these are broad categories. I’m not putting everyone in a box, but there’s continuums on both sides, but all in all, women tend to be more, they wanna be like in the space, feel safe. You know, it’s more about safety and comfort, predictability. And so, well, men, wanna go out with like,

Gloria Vanderhorst (33:11)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

That’s right.

Julie Hilsen (33:29)
eight of their friends and it’s exhausting to us. But have you noticed?

Gloria Vanderhorst (33:31)
Mm-hmm.

That’s right. and you,

you put, put it in the right place, right? Because you said it’s like caveman, right? So think about it, right? The caveman needed to go out, right? Take his spear. He couldn’t be soft, tender, afraid, anxious. He has to take his spear, join other men with their spears, right?

Julie Hilsen (34:00)
You

Gloria Vanderhorst (34:00)
Track

down animals, be courageous, be brave, kill that animal and bring it back to what’s the woman doing? The woman is safely in the cave playing with the children, Tending the fire, waiting to cook the food. I mean, it is classic.

Julie Hilsen (34:15)
Tending the fire, making bread.

Gloria Vanderhorst (34:24)
Right? It is classic. Yes, men want to gather with their buddies and go out as a group. All right? They need, however, a focus. They’re not going to share deep emotional experiences with each other. They don’t take that risk. Women, when they come together in a group, will take that risk.

easily, smoothly, right? Sometimes anxiously, sometimes comfortably, but you will never get a group of women together without discovering that somebody goes deeper into an emotional experience. But not with guys, right? Guys are bumping each other and teasing each other.

and complaining about their work experiences, but not going any deeper than that. They stay on the surface, right? They stay on the top of the water and women like to dive deeper. We’re different.

Julie Hilsen (35:29)
And so I think that’s why it’s beautiful

how it’s a balancing act. We need this flow and this balance of each other. And there’s no mistake. So I love how you’re illuminate how we can balance better. How can we support each other? We’ve gotten so much attention with us exploring our more masculine tendencies to go out and…

Gloria Vanderhorst (35:37)
Thank

Right.

Julie Hilsen (35:56)
and produce and to create in the world. And now I think it’s men’s turn to understand or to be honored for their other side of their psyche, know, white male privilege or whatever. It’s like, okay, there’s more than that.

Gloria Vanderhorst (36:07)
right for that, they have a natural

access, they have a natural access to feeling states on the negative end of the continuum. And it’s safe to go there, right? It makes you real. And I have said many times, it’s gonna be much more important in the future that we help men to go there, because there will be

more free time with artificial intelligence. You I talked earlier about, you know, maybe the woman needs to stop making dinner in order to go sit down and pay attention to this story. But what if the robot is doing dinner, right? Then what’s going to happen, right? There’s going to be more opportunity for free time and free interaction. So we do need.

to be able to understand each other and give each other permission to access the full range of emotions or there will be more domestic conflict. It just can’t be avoided.

Julie Hilsen (37:16)
Hmm.

Right, and I love that you said that because we need a substitute for TV. Like if you have dinner, do the dishes, know, sit down and watch TV. You can only do that for like 45 minutes to an hour. I’m sorry. Like you’re not gonna watch a whole movie. You know what mean? And if you have this free time, you didn’t spend that much time making dinner.

Gloria Vanderhorst (37:36)
Mm-mm.

Julie Hilsen (37:42)
need an activity, you need something in common to build that bond to explore these things, like you said, in a safe way, whether it’s a physical activity or sitting around a campfire talking or, you know, you can’t, you can’t rely on the TV programming to be your connection. And that’s a, I think that’s a really easy thing to slip into with how many different channels we have and so much is on demand. And you think you’re in control, but are, do you want to spend

Gloria Vanderhorst (37:52)
Mm-hmm.

Right.

Mm-hmm.

Julie Hilsen (38:11)
your free time staring at a screen when you’re on the computer most of the day anyway, or, you know, like, so I love that you illuminated that, that I, I appreciate that insight.

Gloria Vanderhorst (38:16)
with it.

Yeah, the television means the two of you are in parallel. You’re not interacting with each other. Maybe you make the comment or two as a show goes on or as a game goes on, but you’re not really interacting and connecting with each other on any level that goes beyond the surface. And we all need connection. We’re born connected to another human being and we seek

connection with others for the rest of our lives and we want a deeper connection with others. And it takes awareness to get there. We have to be aware of the need in order to satisfy it.

Julie Hilsen (39:01)
Thank

Well said. Okay, so last question and I’m let you go. So if you were to think of activity, like are there certain games you like to bring, you know, that kind of interaction, whether it’s a young family or even older people? Like we love playing poker. When my boys come home from school, we’ll play poker and that sort of, but I miss my grandparents used to play cards all the time. They play canasta and I’ll be like,

Gloria Vanderhorst (39:27)
Right?

Julie Hilsen (39:36)
to my friends, let’s play games. Nobody wants to play cards. I don’t know. do you, do you have a favorite game or anything?

Gloria Vanderhorst (39:43)
No,

think you’re right on target, right? Getting the family around a table to play a game. And there are hundreds of very interesting board games out there, right? We’ve lost track of the fact that there are board games out there, right? As a kid, maybe you played Monopoly or Parcheesi.

Julie Hilsen (40:05)
Hmm.

Gloria Vanderhorst (40:10)
But there are troops and ladders, there are hundreds of games out there, board games, there are card games out there, getting people around a table to do an activity, right? And maybe that activity is decorating something, right? Making gingerbread houses, but being in proximity.

Julie Hilsen (40:11)
Yeah, shoots and ladders. So fun.

Gloria Vanderhorst (40:36)
to each other where there really is opportunity to be able to talk, to be able to laugh, to be able to appreciate each other and challenge each other. Those are healthy experiences. So, you know, shut the television off, put the phones away, sit around the table and figure out what to do.

Julie Hilsen (41:00)
Yeah,

I love that. Well, thank you for your wisdom and insight. This has just been such a delight. And I’ll put a link to your website in the show notes. But if you want to call that out or anything you have coming up.

Gloria Vanderhorst (41:10)
Thank you.

Yes, the website is www.drvanderhorst.com. So it’s www.drvanderhorst.com. You will find all of my essays and blogs there. You’ll find resources for therapy and descriptions of different effective types of therapy.

You’ll find my recent book, which is Read, Reflect, Respond, The Three R’s of Growth and Change. And I got feedback yesterday from a woman who said this was the best growth experience that she has ever had. And so that was just heartwarming for me. And it’s a very different kind of blog essay.

Julie Hilsen (42:05)
you

Gloria Vanderhorst (42:08)
book because there’s an essay on one page, the facing page is blank, which gives you access not only to words, but we store things in terms of actions. So you can draw, you can scribble, you could tear the page if you want, you’ll run the essay on the other side and have to tape it back in order to read it. But it is a book.

for people who want to explore themselves and want to grow socially and emotionally. And you can find it on Amazon or walk into any bookstore and they will order it for you any place in the world.

Julie Hilsen (42:52)
Well, thank you. Congratulations on that. It’s a legacy offering, really is.

Gloria Vanderhorst (42:54)
Thank you.

It is. is. I’ve enjoyed talking with you. Thank you, Julie, very much.

Julie Hilsen (43:01)
Thank you, I appreciate it, can’t wait to share this.