No More Mr. Nice Guy

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And everyone needs to learn how to recognize when they are in a bad relationship, with a partner they really should not be with. But that is still contingent on happenstance, which you can only improve by “getting out there” and interacting with a lot of people; that’s the only way to increase the probability of encountering someone right for you, and that you are right for, and who is also available.

Yes, those are useful; but it takes an impossible amount of work to gerrymander a brain through blind genetic selection to be a reliable truth-engine. But we still need “psychologists,” so we throw chump change at them that all they can do with is fund garbage low-powered, small-sample studies with disastrous failure rates and useless effect sizes.Some of Glover’s wild speculations declared as if facts suggest a sexist dark side even lurks behind his confidence; which in turn suggests maybe we shouldn’t even be reading his advice as charitably as I have been. And yes, Glover does a valuable job explaining the difference between genuine caring, and enacting “caring” behaviors for selfish reasons. Her book is extensively based on actual science, and provides science-based guidelines adaptable to pursuing and achieving any life goal, the pursuit of which will inevitably lead one out of any such conditions as “Nice Guy Syndrome,” should they really even exist. A man’s propensity to hide things about himself, for example, may have entirely different causes that don’t even connect to their childhood at all; broader issues of adult gender culture can be to blame, or even just universal human consequence-avoidance behavior.

Before we evaluate any purported “psychology of men,” I have to set the foundation of where I am with respect to even just psychology. Someone else who knew nothing of Glover’s book once wrote asking me my advice about much the same things that Glover wants to address. The only positive thing I can say about it is that what he draws up as bad mostly is indeed bad (no one should be ticking any of the boxes in his Nice Guy profile) and most of what he draws up as better is indeed better (with some misses and ambiguities I’ve already made note of). Glover never explains what the difference would be between a legitimate, healthy, productive, and appropriate parental chastisement, punishment, or criticism, and whatever he imagines is causing “toxic shame” and thus “Nice Guy Syndrome. As a result of their internalized toxic shame, each developed a life paradigm that involved seeking approval and hiding perceived laws.The charitably correct way to read what he means is more nuanced: that you should be respectfully open about what you need and want, and actually negotiate for it, with someone you are treating as your equal. e. not pretending to be that, but actually being that) is not likely to conflict substantially with what good people will respect and admire and like in you, and thus it may be the same thing as what “others want you to be. Because of their toxic shame, it is impossible for Nice Guys to grasp that people might like them and love them just for who they are. Written primarily from the prospective [sic] of alcoholic family systems, this early book on codependency applies to both men and women. Confidence and self-respect are attitudes towards oneself as a person, not incidental aesthetics of a body you were assigned by happenstance to wear.

Because it will lead to exactly the same problem he thought he was solving: someone following his advice will expect it to “work,” and it won’t. Affirmations are only effective when used along with other processes that help change the nice guy’s core beliefs. The essence of recovery from the Nice Guys Syndrome is the conscious decision to live one’s life just as one desires.In my experience, this is probably the most difficult concept for Nice Guys to understand and accept about themselves.

Hiding one's humanity and trying to project an image of perfection makes a person vague, slippery, lifeless, and uninteresting. Glover may have an advanced degree in family therapy, but he has no science backing anything he says, and cites none. The way Glover frames his project, is that “by giving these men the label Nice Guy, I’m not so much referring to their actual behavior, but to their core belief system about themselves and the world around them. The only fix really is to start changing the cultural mindset about this, so we will collectively see this as a national infrastructure problem and not just another thing we throw mere chump change at because we don’t take it seriously.But one of the many things psychology has gotten right is documenting the fact that the human brain is mostly garbage. Getting good sex is dependent on recovering Nice Guys bringing their shame and fear out of the closet and into the open where they can be looked at and released. science is that its results are less certain, and therefore more questionable—and are really, honestly, just the stop-gap we have to resort to while we wait for real science to weigh in. Likewise, to try too hard to “be nice” to a partner, without thinking to emotionally connect or communicate with them, need not have any such grand explanation in fossilized immaturity; it can simply be the behavior of an adult who was never taught anything about relationships and hasn’t figured this stuff out yet. He makes a bunch of assertions about child psychology—and despite there being a vast literature on that subject, he never links anything he is saying to any of it.