 What does what does a nice guy look like like the way the one that you write about in your book? Okay, and I'll talk about specifically nice guys, but also Say that a lot of things I talk about a lot of your women listeners will probably relate to as well Because there've been nice girls around forever. Okay, so it's the same It's the same problem for men and women at its at his base It is it then manifests often in a little bit different ways for men and women But the base core paradigm is a nice guy or a nice girl doesn't believe they're okay Just as they are and you know We mentioned Adam Lane Smith, and he did a really good job talking about how children internalize at a very young age Any negative painful experience as being caused about them all all children are very narcissistic They're the center of their world and so when something painful happens We believe I must have caused that which then turns into a grandiose belief system That has two sides to it. One is that I'm so bad I caused people to leave me hurt me cry be depressed drink yell scream whatever and If I am that powerful to cause that I also must be powerful enough to prevent that or fix it So there's these grandiose beliefs that there's something so bad with me that I caused people to leave me or hurt me and I must be powerful enough to prevent that from ever happening So so nice guys and nice girls Basically then grow up and by the way this belief system is recorded in a very deep emotional part of our brain It's recorded in our amygdala where our emotional operating system is so this isn't like words. We have it's not an intellect intellect Sexualization it's not even like visual memory It's just an emotional belief system down at our operating system that that then affects every other part of our brain And so we grow up to be children adolescents adults with a belief system if I can just be good enough and Become what I think other people want me to be then I'll be liked and loved and get my needs met And if I can hide anything about me that might get a negative response from other people then I'll never get abandoned So men and women both That they if they had these nice guys internalization or attachment issues as as Adam Smith called them They might manifest differently for a guy than they do for a woman But it the core belief system is the same is that there's something wrong with me. I'm not good enough That's typically called toxic shame. I have to become something different become what other people want me to be and hide Those whatever that bad thing about me that I think is and you for most nice guys What we tend to hide is our needs our wants and our sexuality So we keep that all under wraps so we don't get a negative reaction from anybody Okay, so would that kind of Would that kind of nice person arrive from a childhood that was like overly stressful Is that where it comes from or that does be a regular childhood and then like that anyway, you know the word stressful is probably a really good application because what happens and I write about this in my book is When I first started looking at nice guy syndrome, I was looking at me, right? So I thought I'm a nice guy How did I become a nice guy? Well, it's probably because I had this interaction with my foot this type of interaction with my father This kind of interaction with my mother I was brought up in a fundamental christian church that had a lot of you know hellfire and brimstone messages Just grew up in the 60s and 70s with angry feminism Every man's a rapist an erection to sign of aggression And so I all these got internalized into my emotional brain And I thought okay, maybe all other nice guys are just like me, but I quickly came to realize they weren't There's a lot of different factors and and the this you mentioned stress However, we might experience stress and a lot of this has to do with temperament because you can have two children Born into the same family with very different temperaments And they handle the stresses very differently and develop different survival and defense mechanisms So a lot for for what I found with nice guys and nice girls For many it partly is just do our net to our natural temperament I'm a fairly easygoing You know, don't rock the boat want to make everybody happy kind of guy. It's my basic temperament Yeah, okay. Yeah, so as part of who I am and then when you add those stresses as you speak of and and those stresses would be anything That's painful uncomfortable. You know, you you you went through a lot of painful things as a child I had surgery at five days old and I can just imagine emotionally what that felt like To have you know back then you know parents didn't come to the waiting room It wasn't nurturing and soft and you know, I probably would just Take it away from my parents put on a cold table put a mask over my face and wake up in pain And you know, how does the child at five days old internalize that information? It's not going to be done logically. It's done emotionally and so Whatever those stresses might be it might be, you know, our parents don't get along well It might be that You know that they repress their feelings. It might be that sexuality is repressed in the family It might be that mom and dad fight a lot. It might be our, you know Maybe our father was never there. It could be any number of things It could be that we were hungry and didn't get fed quickly or we you know, wet our diaper and didn't get changed quickly Those kinds of things are the stresses That a child internalizes I've got to find a way to not keep experiencing these these painful experiences And all children do this not just nice guys or nice girls All children develop defense survival mechanisms to try to do two things number one Cope with the uncomfortable feelings they're feeling in the moment So I sucked my thumb till I was in kindergarten. That was a coping mechanism Some children become needless and wantless some cry some fight some Some please some smile all the time. Um, that's how we try to manage the uncomfortable feelings The second thing that we try to do is try to prevent the things that cause these uncomfortable feelings from happening again in the future Now take all of that bundle of stuff that we just talked about Fast forward that into adolescence and adulthood. We all have that emotional operating system We formalized at a very immature Helpless dependent stage of life and we assume that's the way the world works and we go out into the world Operate functioning from that emotional operating system And even if for example, we can't find any big trauma in our life or our parents are still married and have a have a good marriage Anything uncomfortable or painful is stressful to a young dependent child