# The Wounded Healer Podcast
## Series 2: On Becoming a Man, Smalley Style
## Episode 1 Full Package
# Episode Title
Passivity Will Kill You Slowly
# Episode Description
A few years ago, three teenagers in masks tried to grab me on a street in Lebanon. I put the big one down. When men interrogated me about why I was there, I told them the truth. When I walked into a Hezbollah camp by accident and had an AK-47 pointed at my head, I smiled and said hi.
A year before that, I could not even speak up in my own marriage.
This is the first episode of a new series called On Becoming a Man, Smalley Style. It is built from a letter I wrote to my son David after he completed Army boot camp. Not a "congrats on graduating" letter. A commissioning. A father telling his son what he believes it means to be a man. Not the cultural version. Not the church version. The Smalley version, built from ashes.
This episode is about the first principle: reject passivity. And I am going to be honest with you about how passivity almost killed me. Not quickly. Slowly. From the inside out. While I smiled on the outside.
If you are a man who knows something needs to change and you keep choosing silence instead, this one is for you. If you love a man like that, this one might help you understand why.
Text me at (303) 435-2630 or visit smalleyinstitute.com
# Full Episode Script
*Note to Michael: New series, new energy. Series 1 was sit down and understand. Series 2 is get up and go. The tone should feel like a campfire, not a classroom. You are talking to men. Be direct. Be funny. Do not coddle. These are guys who need someone to look them in the eye and tell them the truth with love and a little bit of edge.*
*Target length: 30 to 35 minutes.*
Welcome to Series 2 of The Wounded Healer Podcast. If you listened to Series 1, You're Not Crazy, You're Traumatized, first of all, thank you. That series was about understanding what happened to you. Why your nervous system does what it does. Why your body keeps score. Why insight alone cannot change you.
This series is different. This series is about what you do next.
Specifically, this series is about what it means to be a man. And if you are a woman listening, stay with me. You probably love a man who needs to hear this. Or you are raising one. Or you are trying to understand one. This is going to help.
I wrote a letter to my son David after he completed Army boot camp. It was not a congratulations letter. It was a commissioning. Seven principles of manhood that I believe with everything I have. Not because I read them in a book. Because I learned them the hard way. Through failure. Through addiction. Through a marriage that fell apart. Through a season of my life where I lost everything and had to figure out who I was when the performance stopped.
This series is that letter, one principle at a time. And we are starting with the one that nearly destroyed me.
A real man rejects passivity.
Now before you check out because you think this is going to be a lecture about manning up and taking charge and leading your household like some kind of benevolent dictator, hang on. That is not what I am talking about. That version of "reject passivity" has been weaponized by church culture for decades and it has done enormous damage.
I am talking about something much more specific. And much more dangerous.
Passivity is not laziness. Let me say that again because most people get this wrong. Passivity is not laziness. You can be the hardest working person in the room and still be profoundly passive.
Passivity is knowing what needs to be done and choosing not to do it because you are afraid of what might happen if you do.
It is silence when you should speak. Compliance when you should confront. It is letting someone else lead your life because leading it yourself feels too risky. It is swallowing your own voice, your own needs, your own convictions because the cost of expressing them feels higher than the cost of staying quiet.
I was the poster child for this. For most of my adult life.
Let me tell you what passivity looked like in my life so you can see if any of it feels familiar.
I stayed quiet when I should have spoken. In my marriage, in my ministry, in relationships where things were happening that I knew were wrong. I had opinions. I had convictions. I had a voice. I chose not to use it.
I performed peace when I should have made a stand. I told myself I was being patient. I told myself I was being Christlike. I told myself that keeping the peace was the loving thing to do. And you know what? Sometimes it is. But there is a massive difference between keeping the peace and keeping quiet because you are terrified of conflict. I was not being patient. I was being a coward. And I could not tell the difference because cowardice dressed up as patience looks really holy from the outside.
I let other people define the terms of my own life. What we did. Where we went. How we spent money. How we raised kids. How we ran the ministry. I had a PhD and thirty years of professional expertise and I routinely deferred to other people's judgment about my own life because having an opinion felt dangerous.
That is passivity. And it did not kill me quickly. It killed me slowly. From the inside out. Like a slow leak in a tire. You do not notice it until you are on the side of the road wondering what happened.
Here is the thing about passivity that nobody tells you. It feels virtuous. That is what makes it so insidious.
In the church especially, passivity gets rewarded. The quiet man. The easy-going guy. The husband who never makes waves. The leader who keeps everyone comfortable. We call him humble. We call him gentle. We call him a peacemaker.
Blessed are the peacemakers, right? Jesus said that.
But there is a difference between a peacemaker and a peacefaker. A peacemaker steps into conflict and works toward resolution. A peacefaker avoids conflict entirely and calls the absence of fighting "peace." Those are not the same thing. One requires courage. The other requires nothing but silence.
I was a peacefaker for decades. And I baptized it with scripture.
Joshua 1:9 says something that has haunted me since I actually read it with fresh eyes. "Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged, for the Lord your God will be with you wherever you go."
Did you catch that? God does not suggest courage. He commands it. He does not say "be courageous if you feel like it" or "be courageous when the conditions are right." He commands it the same way He commands anything else. Which means passivity is not just a personality trait. It is disobedience dressed up as temperament.
That wrecked me when I finally saw it. I had spent years thinking my passivity was a spiritual gift. It was not. It was fear. And fear is not a fruit of the Spirit last time I checked.
Let me tell you about Lebanon.
In 2023, I went to Lebanon on a trip that I can only describe as one of the most insane and transformative experiences of my life. I am not going to give you every detail here because that story deserves its own time. But I need to give you enough so you understand what changed.
I was on a street when three teenagers in masks tried to grab me. Now, a year before that moment, I would have frozen. I would have gone passive. I would have let it happen and processed it later in therapy.
But something had shifted. Something had been shifting for months. The healing work I had been doing, the somatic work, the recovery, the deep honesty with God, all of it had been rewiring my nervous system. Not just my thoughts. My responses.
When those kids came at me, I did not freeze. I put the big one down. Not because I am tough. I am a middle-aged psychologist from Texas. But because passivity was no longer my default setting. My body had learned a new response.
Later that trip, men interrogated me about why I was there. I did not hide. I told them the truth. When I accidentally walked into a Hezbollah camp and had an AK-47 pointed at my head, I smiled and said hi. Not because I have a death wish. Because in that moment, the man I used to be, the passive, silent, people-pleasing version of me, was gone. And in his place was someone who had decided that honesty was more important than safety.
I am not telling you that to sound tough. If you met me you would know I am not tough. I am telling you because the man who did those things in Lebanon was not the same man who spent twenty-eight years swallowing his own voice in a marriage. Something had changed. Passivity had been replaced with presence. Silence had been replaced with truth. Compliance had been replaced with courage.
And it did not happen because I read a book about being brave. It happened because I did the healing work that made courage possible.
I want to talk about my son David for a minute. Because he is part of why this series exists.
David joined the Army. He went through boot camp. And the letters he wrote me during that experience showed me a young man becoming exactly the kind of man I wish I had been at his age.
David rejects passivity. He signed up for something hard on purpose. He got up at four in the morning when his body screamed to quit and he got up anyway. Every single day. Not because it was easy. Because he decided that the man he wanted to become lived on the other side of the hard thing.
There was a moment during boot camp, he told me about it in a letter, where he was on fire guard and something happened. He reacted physically, smacked another soldier's arm. He felt terrible about it immediately. Apologized immediately. And committed to never letting it happen again.
Now most people would hear that and think, okay, he messed up. But that is not what I heard. What I heard was a man taking responsibility in real time. He did not pretend it did not happen. He did not justify it. He did not go passive and stuff it down and let it eat at him for years. He owned it, addressed it, and corrected it. In the moment. At twenty-four years old.
That is what rejecting passivity looks like in the real world. It is not always dramatic. It is not always Lebanon. Sometimes it is just the willingness to admit you were wrong before the sun goes down.
So let me bring this home. Because I am not just talking to men who are passive in their marriages, although I am definitely talking to you. I am talking to every man who has been swallowing something he knows he needs to say.
Maybe it is a conversation with your wife that you have been avoiding for months. Maybe years. You know the one. The thing that sits between you at dinner like an uninvited guest. The issue you both pretend is not there because addressing it feels scarier than living with it.
Maybe it is a boundary you need to set with someone who has been taking advantage of your niceness. You keep telling yourself you are being gracious. You are not being gracious. You are being passive. And it is costing you.
Maybe it is a career decision, a health decision, a financial conversation, a friendship that needs to end or change. Something that requires you to open your mouth and say what is true even though it might cost you something.
Here is what I want you to hear. The cost of speaking is real. I will not pretend it is not. You might lose a relationship. You might create conflict. You might disappoint someone. Those costs are real and they matter.
But the cost of staying silent is also real. And it compounds. Every day you choose passivity, the leak gets a little bigger. The tire gets a little flatter. Your soul gets a little smaller. And one day you wake up in a rental car in Colorado Springs wondering how a psychologist with thirty years of experience ended up unable to see his own life clearly.
That was the cost of my passivity. Do not wait as long as I did to pay yours.
Think about one area of your life right now where you know you are being passive. Just one. You already know what it is. You knew before I asked.
I am not asking you to blow up your life this week. I am asking you to name it. Say it out loud, even if it is just to yourself in the car right now. Name the thing you have been avoiding. The conversation you have been dodging. The truth you have been swallowing.
Name it. That is step one. Because you cannot reject passivity in the abstract. You can only reject it in the specific. In the actual conversation. The actual decision. The actual moment where silence feels safer than truth.
A real man steps into the hard thing. Not because he is not afraid. Because he refuses to let fear make his decisions.
Next week, we are going to talk about the thing that makes rejecting passivity possible. Because you can step into the hard thing, but if you step into it with another lie on your lips, you have not actually done anything courageous. You have just performed courage. And performing courage is just another form of passivity wearing a louder costume.
Next week is about honesty. Brutal, ugly, costly honesty. The kind that breaks things open so they can actually heal. Episode 2: "Stop Lying to Everyone, Including Yourself."
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.
Text me at 303-435-2630. Email me at [email protected]. I respond. That is not a tagline. It is just who I am.
If you want to learn more about what we do at the Smalley Institute, marriage intensives, individual coaching, trauma coaching, or a community called Sojourners for people doing this work together, visit smalleyinstitute.com.
See you next week.
*End of Episode 1.*
*Show Notes:*
*Text Michael: (303) 435-2630*
*Email: [email protected]*
*Website: smalleyinstitute.com*
*Next episode: "Stop Lying to Everyone, Including Yourself" dropping next week*
*Subscribe and follow wherever you get your podcasts.*
