Nice Guy Syndrome for what it truly is…

Second wave feminism arose during the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s during the baby boom in a great vacuum of male weakness. It was a time of turmoil where many ideals were being challenged.

One of the results was a striking increase of women attending post-secondary education. Male dominated departments were suddenly overwhelmed with new perspectives on science. That continues today.

One of the brilliant researchers to come out of that educational era is Shelley Taylor. Taylor realized most all the work on fear to date had been done with male subjects.

She began with rodents in her lab and saw that when under threat, the females tended to affiliate with each other. Some of the males did so too but it was primarily a female response to stress.

I first came upon her work on what she called “tend and befriend” for females under threat about ten years ago while researching my first book, Drinkers Riddle.

In fact, in chapter one of Sipping Fear Pissing Confidence (Crux Bamboozle) I posit this typically feminine response to fear is also at the crux of a woman’s alcohol intoxication.

On occasion, I might mention this to the men I work with, i.e. that if he’s buying her drinks and thinks she’s sweet on him, it may not be him, but the booze.

Upon hearing my explanation, one man I worked with said, “You just ruined my life.”

We had a good laugh about that.

Let the truth set you free, I say.

Others since have described Taylor’s “tend and befriend” as “fawn,” which fits nicely with fight, flight, fawn, freeze.

What’s this got to do with men? Plenty.

You see, parents install abandonment fear in a child to leverage survival. They are perfectly imperfect in the way they do this.

Their approach can range from teaching you how to look both ways before stepping on a road (so you don’t get run over), or to hold mom’s hand in a mall parking lot for the same reasons.

I am sure you’ll agree those are fairly innocent, necessary, and unavoidable interventions.

But it can also mean threatening to send a child away to Boys Reformatory at age six because your two big brothers and their boisterous play inside the house were driving her nuts (as in my case).

There are a multitude of circumstances where a child might acquire the idea that mom (or dad) will leave them behind. We are sensitive to these things from the start.

Often, I relate how the baby arrives at birth and the greatest sales job on the planet occurs when the newborn convinces mom to take it under her care. Crying, clutching, and smell are some of the ways a baby sells her on NOT abandoning her or him… to the elements and the animals.

It’s primal stuff, for sure. Furthermore, in the beginning the child has no idea of the separation between them and mom, something it only realizes in the months ahead. That egocentricity remains in the human animal in diminishing degrees for life. We have self-interested brains.

You have a brain for executive function, as well as a spinal column with peripheral nerves for fight or flight. Internally, the vagus nerve connects all your internal organs, your skin, even your balls, and is wired into two places in the brain stem to keep the brain apprised of your body state.

The lowest order nervous system uses the dorsal vagus (digestion, sex, freeze) for immobilization and is the most ancient at around 500 million years old.

Fight and flight occur instantaneously through activations from the spinal column to musculature and is said to have developed some 400 million years ago.

Both of these nervous system functions are in place in the first trimester of gestation.

The upper ventral vagus controlling heart, lungs, throat, voice and facial muscles came with the advent of mammals some 200 million years ago.

It is used to convey feelings and to discern other’s emotional states using facial expressions and voice. It also regulates our internal homeostasis (emotional balance).

This part of your nervous system only comes online in the third trimester of pregnancy, presumably when the baby begins to hear its mother’s voice outside the womb.

At birth, mom’s use of “motherese” talk (ex. “Oh, my little man, are you hungry?” said in a sing song voice) continues the nervous system training.

It’s from these humble beginnings over the first fourteen years of life that the child more or less forges an emotional template for connection.

So two things: protection mode is primarily lower order dorsal and peripheral nervous system activation while connection mode uses ventral nervous system activation for reassurance and to restore emotional balance. Secondly, we are herd animals.

So why is “fawn” relevant to the average nice guy? For several reasons.

Nowadays, we tend to be over-mothered and under-fathered, and children experience families physically.

This means that little boys will see their nervous system attune to their mother’s nervous system for survival reasons. All mammals do this to some degree in the wild.

It’s why I can spot deer through my monocular lens in the bush while hiding behind a tree and see her ears scanning the area like radars looking for me though I remain hidden.

Beside her, a fawn remains immobilized. It knows something is up with mom so doesn’t dare move.

Women generally carry more negative emotion, which having read me before you realize is an evolutionary adaptation she uses for survival.

If a child’s main exposure in the family is mom, and there are little or no countering male influences of note, expect that child to grow up with a sensitivity, if not a propensity, for anxiety and depression, more often than not.

That’s how it works.

Shelley Taylor’s research showed that males tended towards fight or flight, while females more easily resorted to tend and befriend.

Oxytocin, critical in caregiving, is thought to play a role in this need to connect to others by way of the opioid system which regulates reward and pain related behaviours by acting to mitigate fight or flight. Under threat, women tend to good will, or at least hope for it.

A psychcentral.com article mentions these ways fawning shows up:
– stifling your own needs
– finding authentic self-expression challenging
– flying under the radar
– having trouble saying “no”
– over-apologizing
– holding back opinions or preferences that might seem controversial
– experiencing chronic pain or illness
– having depression,
– trouble with personal boundaries
– assuming responsibility for the emotional reactions and responses of others
– fixing or rescuing people from their problems
– attempting to control other’s choices to maintain a sense of emotional safety
– denying your own discomfort, complaints, pain, needs, and wants
– changing your preferences to align with others.

Sound familiar? Don’t get too hung over trauma as it’s tossed around all over the internet. Instead…

Notice how these are part and parcel Nice Guy traits.

It’s why I tell anxious men they have their mother’s nervous system.

So, what do? This nervous system template was the best mom (and possibly dad) could do under the circumstances.

I often tell men that if your parent’s kept you alive until age twenty and you can say please and thank you, as far as nature’s concerned, they have done their job.

What’s important is to realize they were a stepping stone along your journey, and as an adult, you retain the right and obligation to update your operating system to meet the demands of life around you.

Remember that Nice Guys have a shame- and anxiety-based syndrome sourced in abandonment fear.

So, the idea is to take the Taming Shame course and learn how to integrate the Younger Self.

One way to do that is to confront each of the behaviours on this list at a minimum and instead of “falling into fawn, freeze or fight or flight,” meet them proactively and assertively head-on.

You do that by pushing through your resistance and enacting a different response using thought, feeling and behaviour.

That’s all you own in life brother, what you think, how you feel, and what actions you take.

In my experience, once you do the above and forge new ways of doing things in a circumstance a handful to times, you have handed your nervous system a fresh concept it can use as a template to use again and again in the future.

At that point, you have upgraded your nervous system and it’s much less likely to regress to the old ways of doing things. In effect, you have updated your O/S.

But keep in mind, some of these new ways will transpose themselves onto other similar contexts, but it’s unlikely to happen completely. Old ways are on autopilot to save the brain energy.

It is more likely that you will need to recognize when you are in protection mode versus connection mode and realize an opportunity to upgrade.

The Taming Shame course teaches all that.

In this way, you update your model of the world and make one more step forward in the face of fear.

Do it for you, for the people around you, for the culture at large. It is men who balance out the two genders, masculine and feminine.

She is the burdened female creator of life.
He is the expendable male powerful defender of life.
Together, with some overlap, they are Team Human.