Do you ever feel like you’re shutting everyone out? A fan who struggled with “Nice Guy Syndrome” wrote me about this problem. One reason why many people get stuck in shutting everyone out is that they try to take on other peoples’ problems too much and then get overwhelmed and wall off emotionally, so let’s explore that.
A viewer on our YouTube channel, Gaetan Osmond, asked me this a while back:
“I’m a huge fan. For years I’ve struggled with insecurities and with Nice Guy. I am a model and played Rugby on a national level. Unfortunately I’m still insecure and I’ve created a virtual wall that’s shutting everyone out. To even write this out, is a big deal your videos are the closest I’ve seen to fix this. What is the best course of action to fix this? You are helping so many with these videos.
First off, Gaetan came to the realization and acceptance that great looks doesn’t change anything.
I had one client who was incredibly good looking. He was 6’4, great jaw, perfect voice…and he couldn’t get a women to save his life before working with us. But I want to talk to you about the Nice Guy Syndrome and shutting people out.
The Nice Guy is born out of a sense of abandonment and perhaps inconsistent signals from your parents at a young age. I’m not going to dive into all the details in this post, but you need to read No More Mr. Nice Guy by Dr. Robert Glover.
In The Way of the Superior Man, author David Deida presents a powerful picture of the stages of masculinity, and what a man looks like when he’s not “too nice” to the point of being walked all over by people and shut down by women…but also isn’t an ass.
Deida calls it the Third Stage Man. In the nice guy you are climbing out of second stage masculinity, as Deida puts it. In the first stage, it’s the asshole/biker/macho “my way or the highway” vibe. The first stage man tries to control everything through force. That’s his power.
And in the second stage, you develop your abilities to feel and relate to emotions – yours and others’. This is your feminine side. That’s a good thing! Everybody has masculine and feminine in them, and you need to embrace both to be a well-rounded person.
What happens though, is men in their second stage are hypersensitive to emotions. Because this is a whole new world for men. We are going through an evolution.
The second stage is like the caterpillar turning into goo in the cocoon before it emerges as a butterfly- it’s a bit of a mess. It can be confusing and complicated for men going through it.
If you find yourself walling people off like Gaetan, it’s because you are feeling too much emotion – from inside you and from others – and you don’t know how to handle it. I want to invite you into this idea that you want to keep your sensitivity that’s developing, but also contrast it by bringing back your natural grounding and masculine energy.
A man in the first stage is good at walking into tension. Examples in our society are firemen, police officers, and pilots. Running into burning buildings, towards violence, and being responsible for the lives of hundreds of people going 500 mph 30,000 feet above the Earth.
The second stage is where you are dealing with more emotional tension – emotional expression and vulnerability. There’s still plenty of tension here, but it’s a different sort of tension than running into an active-shooter situation or trying to land a heavily damaged Boeing 747.
So in the second stage, now you have a guy who’s more in touch with his emotions, but he can’t ground and manage all the feelings inside him and coming at him from others. A women is going to poke and prod him and test him to see if he’ll show up as the masculine grounding force she wants, or if he’ll let her walk all over him, thus indicating that she can’t trust him to be the protective force (emotionally as much if not moreso than physically) she wants in relationships (or even just casual dating…she still wants to feel safe with you at multiple levels).
This is hard work for a guy who hasn’t developed much capacity to manage and ground emotion. It can be scary shit, really: Stepping right into the emotions, feeling the pain and nervousness. All of it, showing up in it, not shutting down, but handling it.
Now in the third stage, you bring back the masculine from the first stage. You can ground tense situations. You’re using it to ground emotions, sadness, hurt, joy, teasing, turn-on, flirtatious playing. The mistake men make in the second stage is that we lose our groundedness due to the emotions and become needy. It’s the energy of “I miss you! Please, please come back, we can work it out! I need you!”
When we hit that third stage, we start learning to reactivate that masculine part of ourselves. We’re not being needy, we’re stepping into it and handling it. This can change your whole life.
I remember 10 years ago I said to a woman, “I miss you.”
It was short relationship and we had broken up.
I went up to her and told her that I had to talk to her. She was running around trying to look busy and avoid me, but then I dropped into my emotions, got grounded, and calmly but firmly told her, “I want to tell you something. It’s important”. That’s when she turned and looked at me and said “what.”
She said it in a challenging way and I knew that was my moment to step into the tension of it.
I told her, “I miss you.”
“I’m moving away soon and may never see you again. I miss you and I want to work it out. If you don’t feel the same way that’s fine, but I want to say this before I leave: You’re beautiful.”
After I finished speaking, I sat there in the tension and didn’t move. I didn’t keep talking or spewing emotions. I waited.
After waiting to – consciously or subconsciously – see if I was going to break, she opened up.
We ended up talking for 45 minutes just sitting on the curb. It was amazing. That was my first experience with really stepping into and grounding emotional tension like that. I began to realize the power of it. You are built to do this as a man. It’s the next evolution of the masculine, but you have to learn to handle emotions.
Back to the nice guy for a moment. What the nice guy is doing is constantly trying to help everybody (often out of an unspoken expectation or hope for something in return-validation, friendship or relationship “points,” etc) and also be there for them emotionally all the time. But when he’s trying to help somebody, he’s in his head racing, thinking too hard to actually let anybody in emotionally. He’s not stopping to be present with himself.
Then he overloads and ends up hiding in his emotional cave and disconnecting from people, shutting them out like Gaetan talked about in his question. The disconnection happens as a reaction to taking on too much of other people’s problems and getting overwhelmed. It’s out of balance and you need to stop that dynamic. Read the books I’ve recommended and get in touch with where these patterns are arising in your own life.
You must learn to ground and be real. You need to let go of the part of yourself that wants to race in your head to avoid feeling real emotions, as well as the part of you that wants to run away from them completely. All of that needs to be grounded out.
One important thing is to practice saying “no” to people, setting the boundary and staying firm with them. :earn the experience of “no” while staying open to and connected with them. And then journal about it.
And practice some grounding exercises.
Questions? Tweet me @BrianFearless
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