Dreep

Dreep is an old Scottish word meaning “to lower oneself.” DREEP is an acronym I made up to help men rise to spiritual freeeeeeeeedom! And yes, Mel Gibson is an antisemite so I don’t rock with him, but Braveheart was a mega banger so I’m keeping the battle cry and leaving the dude.

Everyone fears what they can’t control. Of course we do. We humans evolved in harsh, kill-or-be-killed environments and, for the most part, we’re still operating on the same biological hardware as our prehistoric hominid ancestors.

Lately, I sense that most of the women in my life, especially the fancy white ones, think I’m “out of control.” Which I am—out of their control, which they had previously enjoyed over me until I finally wised up to what was what.

Historically, men controlled women with brute strength. That’s abuse, pure and simple, because a woman gettting beat up or otherwise worked by a man lacks choice in the matter.

So women developed a different strategy for controlling men—one that didn’t require physical force. They had to. Homo sapiens males are the most dangerous species to ever walk the earth. We maim and kill not just for survival but sometimes for sport. Even I still do that kind of stuff because while I’m middle-aged, I’m also a dirt-dawg meathead who sometimes feels the primal urge to tackle one of my boys or a friend who can handle it just because he’s standing there.

Faced with dealing with men even more knuckleheaded than me, women developed spiritual, emotional, and psychological means of keeping them in check. Their primary tool: putting us on the defensive.

And the more insecure a woman is, the more she’ll lean into that strategy—pointing out what her man did wrong, didn’t do right, or didn’t do at all. The twist is that half the time she doesn’t know what she wants or doesn’t even really care; she’s just building up enough righteous indignation to get properly worked up to hunt for something to pipe up on her dude about.

When this becomes habitual, it metastasizes into nagging.

Watch closely and you’ll see what I mean: women claim they want peace but they crave control. If they wanted peace, they’d meditate, journal, breathe, pray, or hold a crystal for five minutes instead of nagging.

They do it because it works—at least temporarily. It puts their man in check by making him question whether he’s meeting her standards.

But here’s the problem: if a man hears long enough that he’s falling short, he’ll start to believe it. Soon she’s left with a man whose self-esteem is running on fumes. Women try to balance the nagging with occasional praise, but the nagging always outweighs the bones they throw us, because the short-term payoff is too addictive. It’s spiritual crack for the mouthpiece. That’s why nagging should never start in the first place.

Even though I find this tactic cold and calculating, I don’t label women who do it “abusers.” Because women don’t “provoke” us—we men allow ourselves to be provoked. We walk right into it every time.

We Defend, Rationalize, Explain, Excuse, or Persuade.

We DREEP.

And fittingly, dreep is an old Scottish word meaning “to lower oneself.”

Defending ourselves drains our spiritual energy. Defensiveness ejects us from the present moment, makes us malfunction, and serves no useful purpose.

And women can sense it the moment it happens. Our voices get higher. Our posture softens. Our energy ungrounds. Even our donks shrinkle up a little. They’ve dragged us onto their home turf—the spiritual realm—where we are no match for their intuition, emotional footwork, or psychic jujitsu.

My personal Achilles heel is when my SO Jodi misquotes me. I believe I have an impeccable mouthpiece, so when she tells me I said something I would never say, it mega triggers me. She swears she’s not doing this intentionally, but after almost six years together, she knows on a soul level that misquoting me is the Bat-Signal to my defensiveness. Consciously or not, she deploys it, and I fall right into the trap. An hour later we’re arguing about what was or wasn’t said instead of the actual issue.

Rather than lowering myself by DREEPing, the way out is curiosity—not justification. When we give up the need to be right, we tap into an infinite well of loving energy.

So next time she misquotes me, instead of defending myself, I’ll let her finish and then calmly say, “I don’t view it that way.”

She probably won’t ask how I do view it, which signals she wasn’t actually curious in the content—instead, she was building righteous indignation to get the upper hand because she felt insecure.

When I’m really on my game, I can make a joke out of it. If I say her friend is looking healthy, for example, and she twists it into something prurient, instead of DREEPing, I might playfully lean in and say her friend looked so healthy I was thinking of asking her on a workout date.

But like every woman I’ve ever known, Jodi is sensitive, insecure, and exceptionally skilled at flipping the script. If I clapped back like that when she was on her moon, she’d likely act like I was serious and hit me with, “I can’t believe you’d say that!” And even though I’ve got jokes, I know it’s usually wiser to build her up rather than poke fun at her. She’s been through a lot and deserves gentleness.

While I find it incredibly frustrating when people try to control me, I get why they do it: Cuz they’re terrified we’ll notice they don’t know what they’re doing and making it up as they go. 

Lord knows I know—I do it too.

As my wise older cousin Sean told me one Monday when he was coaching me up on how to deal with the white women in my family cosigning on my babymama cutting me and my Black dad out of my daughter’s life:

“All I know is tomorrow’s Tuesday.”

Which is another way of saying:

We’re all making it up as we go.

No one’s really in control.

And the less we DREEP, the freer we become.