Episode 218 - Jay Scott

Jeffrey Besecker:

This is The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker. Conditionality. What happens when our sense of self-worth is tied to the silent hope that if we're good enough, the world will finally meet us halfway? On today's episode of The Lied Inside, we explore the subconscious and unconscious patterns fueling nice guy syndrome. From early attachment wounds to the covert social contracts that shape our relational behaviors, these primary and secondary patterns drive chronic people-pleasing, avoidance, and emotional dependency, distorting our identity concepts and social settings. Are these patterns truly nice, or are they self-sabotaging? Stay tuned as we unravel the forces behind conditional self-worth and the path to healthier, more adaptive social connection. When it comes to mobile service providers, many of the big-name networks leave a bad taste in your mouth, with their high-rate plans, extra fees, and hidden costs or expenses. Mint Mobile is a new flavor of mobile network service, sharing all the same reliable features of the big-name brands, yet at a fraction of the cost. I recently made the change to Mint Mobile, and I can't believe the monthly savings, allowing me to put more money in my pocket for all of the things which truly light me up inside. Making the switch to Mint Mobile is easy. Hosted on the T-Mobile 5G network, Mint gives you premium wireless service on the nation's largest 5G network with bulk savings on flexible plan options. Mint offers three, six, and 12-month plans, and the more months you buy, the more you save. Plus, you can keep your current number or change to a new one if you like, and all of your contacts, apps, and photos will seamlessly and effortlessly follow you to your new low-cost Mint provider. Did I mention the best part? You keep more money in your pocket, and with Mint's referral plan, you can rescue more friends from big wireless bills while earning up to $90 for each referral. Visit our affiliate link at www.thelightinside.site forward slash sponsors for additional mobile savings or activate your plan in minutes with the Mint mobile app.

Jeffrey Besecker:

Unpacking the complexities behind what we label nice guy syndrome, this episode dives into how maladaptive social attachment patterns and hyper-arousal responses shaped by over-acquiescence or chronic people-pleasing lead to avoidance and emotional dependency. So we're joined today by transformational coach Jay Scott. Jay, thanks for joining us today.

Jay Scott: Thank you, Jeff. It's great to be here and good to talk with you again.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes, in our pre-calls we talked about nice guy syndrome and how that leads to people pleasing. How nice guy syndrome is a group of categories of behaviors that we label. So if you could give us a little background on nice guy syndrome and how that typically plays out in our everyday behaviors.

Jay Scott: Yeah, and it probably helped, you know, by just the first question I invariably get from most people is what's wrong with being a nice guy, right? And when you think about being a good person, right, there's nothing wrong with being a good person. What defines a nice guy is a nice guy is an anxious, shame-driven person that has a deep belief that he's just not good enough as he is. And when you have that deep-seated belief that you're not good enough just as you are, it doesn't allow you to be yourself. So you're constantly putting on masks, trying to people-please, trying to be what you believe other people need you to be. And so you have a hard time setting boundaries, you have a hard time getting your needs met, you lose touch with your authenticity, it shows up in relationships, it just really guides everything you do in life. And at the core of all of this is every decision or almost every decision a nice guy makes is out of fear. And so how do we get people that have that deep-seated belief of I'm not good enough to get back into touch with who he is to realize that he's good enough just as he is?

Jeffrey Besecker: So to me, that speaks to that role of over-acquiescence or where we surrender agency, our ability to choose volition. We're basically self-sacrificing to others.

Jay Scott: Absolutely. Everything, you know, as you go through it is, I need this person to approve of me because I don't approve of myself. Our internal validation is at an all time low. So the only way we feel good. is when somebody else tells us that we're good. And so we're constantly seeking out ways to impress other people by, again, wearing those other masks that aren't truly ourselves, but we have a very innate ability to kind of read the emotions in the room. I'm sure we'll get through how that gets developed as we go into our discussion today, but we give up our own emotional state in order to satisfy the emotions of other people or the needs of other people.

Jeffrey Besecker: Many of our behaviors in relationships specifically are driven by patterns rooted in early attachment and subconscious childhood conditions. So early attachment experiences like inconsistent caregiving shape subconscious patterns of self-sacrifice and emotional suppression by instilling a survival mechanism rooted in that conditional approval, as you mentioned. How do these early attachment experiences such as inconsistent caregiving contribute to the development of the nice guy syndrome?

Jay Scott: Basically what the nice guy learns is that love and connection are conditional. If I am a good person, then I will be loved, right? And so as we go through this, what we develop is my needs aren't important, right? And so I just need to satisfy other people's needs so I can feel loved and I can feel connected to other people. And so what we learn from that is, as we go through, is just that we can't be ourselves. If we're ourselves, we're inherently bad, or our needs aren't important, or it's unsafe for me to have needs, because if I am my own person, if I'm an individual, then I don't receive love, I don't receive connection.

Jeffrey Besecker: Generational trauma comes into play a lot of times and manifests in relational dynamics and also through epigenetics, altered stress responses, and learned maladaptive behaviors like avoidance or people-pleasing. In what ways does generational trauma manifest in relational dynamics and how does it perpetuate maladaptive coping mechanisms like avoidance or people-pleasing?

Jay Scott: Yeah. And when I think of generational trauma, right, it's often passed down. It's unspoken rules or emotional patterns that we learn as we go through life. And so it's our example of how we need to survive. Very often I see this in the guys that I coach is if the dad puts the mother on a pedestal or if he's, you know, kind of a little bit more relying on her approval, right? So that's a learned behavior, but you'll also hear whatever you do, just don't upset your mother. And from there, you might get in trouble and it's like, it's okay, we don't need to tell your mom about this. So you learn these patterns of lying and hiding and covering up so that you don't upset the one that you love or the one that you're trying to get love back from very often. So it's a survival strategy and it's really to avoid the perceived threats of emotional instability or emotional unsafety.

Jeffrey Besecker: So looking at those roles of social imperatives or those unspoken expectations, we tend to have maladaptive conditioned beliefs. You know, we're conditioned with these beliefs that if X happens, then Y is the outcome. And that inherently limits our ability to focus on a broader perspective.

Jay Scott: Absolutely. And we internalize that as, you know, we've done something wrong if we're just being ourselves, right? We're all able to make mistakes, right? Love shouldn't be conditional. But because we've learned that from an early place, that's our paradigm that we then shape the world in. And if that isn't disruptive in an early stage, we go through life continuing that pattern even well into adulthood. Most of my clients come to me when they're roughly around 40 years old. So we've lived that way for 40 years. And then to get deep and to try to break some of those habits, you have to realize that we created those childhood paradigms really in a way to do two things. It's for our own protection and it's our own survival. So if you think about it, everything that we go through life, if you grow up in this way, is filtered through a lens of how am I going to survive or how am I going to stay protected through life? And it's a scary place to be in, which is why all of our decisions are based around fear.

Jeffrey Besecker: It's interesting to me to look at the role ego development plays at looking at an ego-dystonic perspective, which is that internalized, personalized perspective, and that ego-systonic perspective, where we're filtering through the external feedback, external experiences, and the perception of others. That balance, to me, has to be interplayed together in order to really, truly, fully adapt and evolve.

Jay Scott: It does. And you have to kind of start to test the waters a little bit, right? Because we're so based in fear and so based in trying to gain the approval of others, it becomes a very definite roadblock. You know, you want to do these things. You can feel yourself doing it as a way of protection. And very often, you know, as I start to work with people and we develop the tools, People often ask me, like, when does this end? When am I going to get better? And the reality is we've created this neural pathway in our brains that this is how things work, that unless you continually work on it and continually focus on it, your brain wants to go right back into that neural pathway. And so working through it over time, what you begin to learn is I can take risks. I can do things that are good for me. And even though it feels off at first, it feels a little bit selfish, it feels a little bit like I'm only worried about, you know, my own survival at that point in time versus trying to please somebody else, you start to build that other neural pathway. But in time, you know, you still start to slip back into those things, but they feel uncomfortable now or before they just feel normal. And so now once we start to work through those things, you can start to see, OK, I did this thing that was incredibly scary. My brain told me it was going to be a negative 10 experience. I did it. It was maybe a negative one or two. Right. So now I have this new belief or starting to build on this new belief. that things can get better and things can start to go in my favor in these worst case scenarios that I've been building in my life. Because a part of, you know, the nice guy is that we tend to isolate because, believe it or not, trying to seek the approval of others and giving up of our own needs is incredibly exhausting. So a lot of them come to me and they say, I'm just introverted. I don't like you know, to be around people, but it's because of that exponential energy loss that they feel when they enter into a room. Because if you think about how much your brain has to work to figure out, all right, I just met Jeff. What does Jeff need me to be? Can I meet what Jeff needs me to be before he finds out that I'm broken? And there's this constant struggle, this constant thing in your brain. Then if I win, Jeff, and I present myself to you and I say, all right, Jeff really likes me because I was somebody who Jeff needed me to be. We leave that room and we go, why wasn't I myself? Why couldn't I just tell him I didn't agree with this one concept or why couldn't I just do this? So we constantly then beat ourselves up and it's just an emotional roller coaster all the time. And so again, to go back to that protection or that survival technique, we just choose not to get involved the next time. And that leads us more into isolation. And the more in isolation that you are, the more you just have you and your brain to talk to. And when you talk to just you and your mind, your mind's whole job is to protect you. So it's going to routinely create these worst case scenarios as a way to say to you, but if this worst case scenario doesn't happen, then you can handle it. And so we just get bogged down in that chronic overthinking, which builds anxiety. which builds overthinking, which builds anxiety. It's like a spiral that goes down. It's just really hard to get out of that cycle if you're not guided in the right way to do that.

Jeffrey Besecker: So in that regard, what role do you think embodied processes like the autonomic ladder or neural imprinting might play where it's an unconscious embodied response rather than the mind acting on that? How does that tend to fuel and perpetuate those cycles of rumination?

Jay Scott: Yeah, when you get into your body, you know, and you start to feel the anxiety and you start to shut down, you start to do those things, it's really important to become aware or conscious if you want to talk about it that way, to where you understand that this is the body's natural response. Again, it's going back into a way to protect you, right? If you walk into, I don't know, a jungle or something and you can feel the presence of a tiger that's about to attack, that is your body warning you that something negative may happen. But we don't live in that world anymore, right? Most of the things, if not, you know, 99% of the things that we worry about never really come true. So to be able to take a step back from that, understand why your body is having that reaction to it. And then in my practice, I train guys to, you know, when you start to feel those things, get grounded, stand with both feet firmly planted on the ground a little bit wider than shoulder apart and start to breathe. Because when we get in that nervous anxiety feeling, our breath gets shallow, it's short. You know, we get hunched over, we start to become infinitely aware of all the things that are going to hurt us around us. So plant your feet, get solid, then start to get open and get curious. What's really happening? Is this real or is this my mind trying to protect me? And really start to kind of breathe into that. And then as your breath gets longer and deeper, you start to lose that anxiety feeling. You come back connected to your body. And it's an important part, you know, as you face any type of social situation or anything that makes you a bit uncomfortable to start then reconnecting in that way so that you slow down. Right. because anytime that you sense danger, our mind speeds up and it does it for a great purpose, right? If you're being chased by that tiger, I could find seven different exits in case some of those are blocked, right? So that's our mind's job of doing what it's supposed to do, but to become aware that that's probably not going to happen and then start to relax back into your body.

Jeffrey Besecker: What role do you feel developing a healthy acceptance of reframing of that fear has rather than trying to reject and avoid it? So often we try to reject fear or overcome fear or eliminate fear, yet there's a very real natural response in even fearing that we might have a bad interaction with somebody, that we might not engage and connect. To me, I feel there's a healthy framing of that rather than rejecting that fear. acknowledge and accepting that vulnerable.

Jay Scott: Yeah. And you know, where I'd like to take guys to is whatever happens, they'll handle it. Because right now they had the feeling of whatever happens, I can't handle it. This is going to be too painful. This is going to cause my demise. This is go on and on and on with that. But the reality is these are all things that sometimes are societal built in our head, right? If we go talk to or approach somebody at a bar and want to start a conversation, she's going to turn around and throw a drink or a boyfriend's going to come around the corner and you know, maybe punch me in the face, right? All of these things are irrational thoughts based on what you're truly doing is you're in that scenario, you're asking a question. And regardless of what happens, he or she may answer the question. And that's it. There's a part of it to where, you know, there are some really big perceived threats. You don't want to walk up to a guy from, let's say, the UFC and call him Nate's, right? Like, it's probably not the smartest thing to do, right? But if you're just going to put yourself in a situation to ask a question and get an answer, there's probably not going to be a lot of heavy outcome from that. So it's realizing what's real and what's, you know, again, your mind's making up as a way to just try to protect you.

Jeffrey Besecker: So in that regard, then, developing emotional maturity comes into play as we learn to interact more helpfully with each other.

Jay Scott: Absolutely. So it's those little baby steps to judge, you know, where you started out and maybe you don't go all the way in the first time, right? But you start to test the waters a little bit and realize nothing bad happens, right? It's those little baby steps. You know, it's eating the elephant one bite at a time. You don't want to you know, put yourself in there where you're like, well, I went from being a nice guy to a complete and total badass, and now I'm going to be able to say and do whatever I want. That acknowledgment of that black and white thinking of the all or nothing thinking can lead you to those negative outcomes, right? But if you build on them little by little, then you start to realize that your mind, again, was trying to protect you. And those things really aren't negative 10 experiences. There may be negative one or two, if negative at all.

Jeffrey Besecker: So looking back to that childhood development, we start to form a lot of those patterns through our attachment, as we mentioned. Going back to identifying emotions, you know, we learn a lot of conditioned or reinforced beliefs about what it means to experience emotion, what it means to be a man, you know, what it means to be present. All of these different theories learned in childhood. In that regard, we start to develop an overall language called an emotional annotation language. where we start to have that conditioned belief and then again apply it over and over to every circumstance. How does emotional annotation subconsciously trigger these emotional experiences and drive misinterpretations of relational conflicts? For instance, you know, the gentleman from the UFC, if we're walking up to him theoretically in a bar and threatening him in general, it doesn't necessarily equate to a healthy behavior. What role do those early experiences play in shaping that?

Jay Scott: Yeah, this may be a great time to kind of give you an outline of, and I should have said this in the beginning, but I'm a recovering nice guy, right? This is how I got into the work. So I think now kind of giving you an idea of how I grew up might help frame this question. So, you know, I had both parents in my life and although I have an abandonment, which we'll get into in a minute, my dad was the kind of guy that had a sporadic temper. I like to frame it as you wake up and you have to kind of understand what kind of mood he's in before you can determine what kind of mood you can be in. Right. So I would wake up and I'd kind of listen to conversations between him and my mother about is he in a good mood today? Is he in a bad mood? And if he was in a bad mood, my role, which I thought was my role, was to go down and do what I call the clown dance. Right. Do everything I could to kind of get him back into a good mood. Do anything that I could to, you know, get him away from whatever anger he was displaying towards my mom, towards my brother, towards my sister. right, that kind of interfere there. And what I learned from that was it wasn't okay for me to be who I was. I had to give up my emotional state in order to get the emotional state smooth back into the room. Then you add the complexity of my relationship with my mom, who was my best friend until she had passed away. And, you know, she was a great person. She was My number one fan couldn't ask for a better mother. But because she wasn't getting her emotional needs met through my dad, as me being the youngest, and you know, the last one that she was going to have was to hook up an emotional host to me. And so she got a lot of her needs met that she was trying to get met through my dad, through me. Well, now I couldn't have needs again, because if I had needs, I couldn't be there to meet her needs. Now, neither one of my parents told, you know, to set out in the morning and said, I'm going to ruin Jay's ability to have needs, right? And coming to that conclusion as I've gone through my own process is very important in my healing. But that was my childhood paradigm of how I could fit into the world, is that I had to give up my own emotional needs in order to meet the needs of others. So therefore, whenever I went into any other relationship, business, career, friendships, it was always more important for me to be the guy who gives everything and hopes that I would get something back. And again, that's linked back to that I wasn't good enough just as I am. And so if I'm not giving to you, then you won't give to me. And that's one of the covert contracts that nice guys live with, which is if I meet your needs without you having to ask, then you will meet my needs without me having to ask. But the problem is if I pretend to not have needs or I pretend that my needs aren't important, it's like the other person in the relationship is throwing darts against a wall and the dartboard's in the other room, right? So I go through life and I feel unloved, I feel invisible, I don't feel like I fit into relationships, I don't feel like people love me because they're trying but they're not coming close to hitting that dartboard. And so once I've learned over time to start leading with my own needs, stop pretending that I didn't have needs but started to lead with my needs, started to hold boundaries in relationships, started to say no to things I wanted to say no to instead of just doing default yes to go along to get along, What I thought would push people away, lit up a path for them to love me. And now I felt love. I felt all of the things that I was looking for my entire life by just coming to grips with, it's okay for me to have needs. And not only is it okay for me to have needs, but it's my job to get my needs met.

Jeffrey Besecker: So in that regard, we start to avoid or we start to adapt and evolve into an avoidant defensive attachment style where we avoid confrontation, we avoid our own emotions, we naturally fall into defensive patterns where we're looking to put that guard up. Fear conditioning plays a large part in that, activating hypervigilance or constantly monitoring of our emotions. And we start to anticipate that anxiety by perpetuating those automatic responses. So in that regard, what role does fear conditioning play in triggering hypervigilance or emotional overactivity and that anticipatory anxiety in those close relationships?

Jay Scott: Fear prevents you from taking any kind of risk, any kind of putting yourself out there. The hypervigilance part is you always expect the boogeyman to be around the corner. That shows up in a lot of deprivation thinking where you see the world as enemies, right? And everybody's going to get your piece of the pie if you don't run out and get it first, right? For me, it showed up as I spent 20 years in a corporate career. You know, I would work harder than others. I would put more time in than others because But part of nice guy syndrome too is being a perfectionist, right? I have to be perfect. And if I'm not perfect, then you won't show me love, right? And so I would, you know, go out of my way, the hypervigilance part to make things as great as I could possibly make in my corporate career. You know, I, I'd give keynote speeches, I would give presentations, I would do all this. And I put so much time and energy in trying to make them perfect to avoid that pain, to avoid the fear. And then I get the constructive criticism at the end, which might be one little tiny piece of, you know, hey, you said this, I think what you really meant was this. And I just scrapped the whole thing. And I, you know, you screwed that up again, even though they gave me 99% praise, that one little piece that was off would destroy everything. And that's that hypervigilance setting in like, okay, if that one little thing wasn't good, then it was all bad. It kind of goes back to that all or nothing thinking as well. But you're in relationship, it shows up. If things are going good, I'm going to have to self-sabotage a little bit because I'm used to feeling bad. Feeling bad feels normal to me. I like to use an example of like a thermostat, right? Nice guy thermostat set at 72 and 72 is you kind of feel bad a lot of the times. relationship's going well, now we're up to 75. 75 feels a little bit uncomfortable. So now I have to self-sabotage a little bit to get it back to 72. And it happens the other way too, right? A lot of guys come to see me because their thermostat was at 72 and now it's at 58 because they went through a painful traumatic experience and they have to do something to get it back up to 72 and they become lost in that feeling because even though they want to get it back to 72, that hypervigilance keeps them away from doing the things that are going to get them back to that place.

Jeffrey Besecker: So that window of tolerance or that acceptable range of emotionality tends to be where we focus in and start blocking or repressing those emotions. How do we develop that window of tolerance where we're able to accept that uncomfortable emotion or that recalcitrant emotion when we're starting to feel a little uneasy about things?

Jay Scott: Yeah, you can get back into the body like we talked about earlier and start to do some of those body movements and, you know, getting in touch with your breathing, meditating, those kind of things help. But what really helps more than anything else, as we start to transition out of this, is to start releasing a lot of that shame that you feel. Start sharing that with people. When we talk about fear, one of the best things that you can do is to shine a light on it. And shining a light on it, for me, just means starting to share that with other people. We live in this, you know, kind of bubble to where we think we're the only people that feel this way. And so I can't share that with you because if I share it with you, well, now he's broken. You know, he's less than perfect. And if I'm less than perfect, I'll never experience love. So it keeps us trapped into that. But as I'm sure you've heard before, when you become vulnerable with safe and nonjudgmental people, either a men's group, a good guy friend or a good, you know, friend in general, a coach, anybody that you can share yourself with without the thought of they're going to judge me or stop loving me, then you can start to get involved with other people saying, you know what, I felt the exact same way. Now one of the biggest parts of my recovery when I finally found the book No More Mr. Nice Guy by Dr. Robert Glover, I'm sure I'll talk about him as we continue to go through, he's been a mentor for me, but one of the biggest shifts was I wasn't alone. And there's other people that feel this way. That gave me courage to start to talk about it. I joined a men's group and to have other people tell me how the world sees me, versus this vision I only get in the mirror that's often filtered by my life experiences, right? All the things that, you know, validated the things that I thought in my head, right? I wasn't good enough, so I failed at this one little thing. Well, that proves I wasn't good enough, so I'll never try that again, right? trying to put myself out there with different things. You just, you start to see it through this filter of, well, this is my past experiences. So this of course is going to be the way it's meant to be. So it's a self-fulfilling prophecy until you get the help from other people that can show you how other people see you. And it's hard to do that in a relationship, right? I've been married, I've been married for 25 years. My wife would give me compliments and I would say in my head, well, you have to say that you're my wife. I wouldn't believe anything she says. Because that was my paradigm of how I saw the world. My mom was my biggest fan, but she's my mom. She has to love me, right? So I could never take the things that people said that were kind to me in because my brain was always saying to myself, that can't be true. Look in the mirror. Is that what you see? Instead of seeing it. So when I started to release that shame through my men's group, through my coach and into doing all that stuff, I got to see what the world saw. And for people that weren't connected to me or weren't going to benefit from being nice to me. So I could trust that and that really helped kind of go through. The other part is, you know, when we go back a little bit to high vigilance is, you know, paying attention to what our fight-flight-freeze response is. And those to me are all ways to regulate our nervous system. Mine was to withdraw to flight. If I was in a situation that became uncomfortable, I just withdrew. But from that withdrawal, I didn't get to experience the depth of relationships. If yours is the fight, then you don't get to experience the depth of relationships because you push people away. And so learning that when you feel like you want to withdraw, being able, or fight, being able to stay in the tension, to ask a few more questions, that's that part of getting open and getting curious when you face those hypervigilant moments where you can stay into it. It's uncomfortable at first, it gets a little, you know, uh-oh, I'm normally used to running away right now, what do I do, what do I do? But in those moments where you find, because you stayed in the tension, that those reactions that you thought people were gonna have, they don't actually have. Now you can build on that and you can start to get a little bit deeper the next time and a little bit deeper the next time. In that experience, I started to disagree with people where before I was going along to get along guy, Hey, whatever you think, that's the exact same way I think. Cause if I say what you say, then you're going to like, and what ends up happening is we become what I like to call vanilla ice cream, right? We show up and we're vanilla ice cream. Now vanilla ice cream is great. It goes with pie, goes with cake, goes with birthday parties, whatever. But if you don't bring vanilla ice cream, nobody really cares. And so what I help guys do and I'm working with a client right now and we've worked through this example and I said, you know, what's your flavor of ice cream? And he said, mine is maple bourbon. Well, I like maple and I love bourbon. So I'm naturally going to like this guy, I think. Right. But you have to develop that courage of being disliked. Some people aren't going to like maple and they're not going to like bourbon. So they're not going to like you. But getting to that core of they may not like you having that courage to be disliked actually is a gift. You stop wasting your time trying to bend and shape shift and do all these things to get other people to like you just go, OK, No big deal. Not everybody's going to like me and that's OK. You know, I have blondish red hair and a gray beard. Some people may not like that. I can't change no matter what I do. So I tried. I've tried a lot of hair dye. It doesn't work. So I can't change that. And so that's OK. I just don't have to waste my time in trying to get them to like me, because the reality is they may never like me. And so why would I put all that time and energy? And by the way, if you don't like me, I'm continually putting myself in your shoes and trying to do that. What does that do? It reaffirms my own thoughts that I'm not good enough. And so getting able to be disliked and moving away from those people, but finding the people that, you know, if maple bourbon is their favorite ice cream and they get down to the little bit of a quarter gallon and they got to go buy two more because they can't live without, man, I'd much rather spend my time with those people because they can't live without me. So nice guys enter into the world, the vanilla ice cream, they go to parties, they go to, you know, social events. And then, you know, they may or may not get invited back. Right. But nobody really cares if vanilla is there or not. But when you're maple bourbon, the people that can't live without maple bourbon are going to want you at everything. And now it reaffirms this new association that you can have that I am lovable and people want me to be loved. And oh, by the way, I'm doing a lot less and getting a lot more because I'm not trying to be somebody who I'm not. I can actually settle into who I am. And regardless of what I do, these people still want me around. Now I'm starting to build that belief that I am good enough. And because it's getting reaffirmed time over time and I'm not doing anything, I'm not living in my head. I'm not wondering what they need. I'm not wondering how I can get out of this conversation if it gets too deep. I'm just being me and I can disagree with people.

Jeffrey Besecker: Doesn't that create a bit of a false dichotomy, though, where we avoid people that we might have a difference or conflict in beliefs with and only reinforce and surround ourselves with people that validate our core belief system or our established condition belief? You know, is there an element of repression there where we're avoiding the people that, you know, if we're going to frame it by ice cream preferences, we're going to avoid them because we don't agree with them?

Jay Scott: We don't want to avoid them. You don't want to hide who you are in order to gain their acceptance. Right. So what I've learned in my experiences, let's use the kind of disagreement that we're having in a conversation, right? Where before I would say to somebody, right, I go vanilla ice cream with them and I would say, You know what, that's a great point. I never thought about that, you know. Maybe you changed my way of thinking." To her, what I've learned to say is, you know what, I disagree with you, but let me tell you why. Now, I'm not avoiding that person. I'm getting deeper into the conversation. Now, he may think that whatever my opinion is, that's rubbish and he's going to go in his own direction. Then I have to be okay with losing that rather than trying to fight it back and then bend and shapeshift for who I want. So I might have led you a little bit astray there with my answer, but it isn't to avoid the people that don't like what you like. It's to figure out, you know, how can I maintain my own integrity, my own authentic being, regardless of if they like me or if they don't like me, if they want to be around me, if they don't want to be around me. I don't need to give up who I am in order to satisfy that as a person.

Jeffrey Besecker: might have a difference or conflict in beliefs with and only reinforce and surround ourselves with people that validate our core belief system or our established condition beliefs. Is there an element of repression there where we're avoiding the people that, you know, if we're going to frame it by ice cream preferences, we're going to avoid them because we don't agree with them.

Jay Scott: We don't want to avoid them. You don't want to hide who you are in order to gain their acceptance, right? So what I've learned in my experience is let's use the kind of disagreement that we're having in a conversation, right? Where before I would say to somebody, right, I'd go vanilla ice cream with them and I would say, you know what, that's a great point. I never thought about that. You know, maybe you changed my way of thinking. To her, what I've learned to say is, you know what, I disagree with you, but let me tell you why. Now I'm not avoiding that person. I'm getting deeper into the conversation. Now he may think that whatever my opinion is, that's absolute rubbish and he's going to go in his own direction. Then I have to be okay with losing that rather than trying to fight it back and then bend and shape ship for who I want. So I might have led you a little bit astray there with my answer, but it isn't to avoid the people that don't like what you like. It's to figure out, you know, how can I maintain my own integrity, my own authentic being, regardless of if they like me or if they don't like me, if they want to be around me, if they don't want to be around me. I don't need to give up who I am in order to satisfy that as a person.

Jeffrey Besecker: So there again, we're falling back into over-acquiescence or where we sacrifice those values and beliefs in order to just be accepted or feel we're validating rather than being vulnerable and open.

Jay Scott: Most of the time, the guys that I meet with, I don't want to put a percentage on it, but it's very high, is that we go into those situations just constantly giving up ourselves and hiding our vulnerability. And I'm 49 years old, so this for anybody younger than me may not get this. But if you remember, and Jeff, how old are you? Fifty four. 54. So you'll remember this. Remember those felt dart boards that we used to have, right? And that had a ping pong ball wrapped in Velcro, right? You threw that and the Velcro is what made it stick to the wall. Nice guys go into the world trying to be perfect. So we stripped off the Velcro and we're trying to be that perfectly spherical ping pong ball. and you throw it against the felt dartboard, well now it doesn't stick to anything. What the Velcro to me represents is our vulnerabilities, our insecurities, the things that we don't want to share with other people. And I'm sure you've heard the phrase, vulnerability is heroic. The more you share your vulnerability, the more you inspire others to be vulnerable with you. So instead of hiding that stuff, right, if we lead with it, when the ball's thrown, it leads with the Velcro. Very often what people find is when you say that you're scared of something, when you say you had this vulnerability and you lead with some of your imperfections, instead of pushing people away, they go, you know what, me too. And now they start to share with you. Nice guys spend most of their time, because of that perfectionist thing, playing in the shallow and wondering why they can't get deeper relationships. But you can't get deep with somebody when you're hiding everything, when you're covering up, which is a second covert contract that nice guys live by, which is if I do everything right, or at least hide everything I do wrong, then I'll have a smooth, problem-free life. All of the covert contracts that we'll talk about, and there's one more, but they're all giving to get something in return. And when you give, if I'm a nice person, right, then people will like and love me. That's the third one, right? When you give to get something back, it's only going to lead to resentment, frustration, and anger. Because throughout life, you're very rarely going to give and get something back in a reciprocal manner to where it's eye for eye. And if you feel that you've overgiven and somebody doesn't reciprocate that, then that's where that resentment, anger, frustration comes out. And then we start to act in passive aggressive ways. We throw tantrums, we get angry, we yell, we scream. We do all those things because there's that covert contract that's underlying underneath them.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, it speaks to the expectancy bias where we automatically start to assume the outcome of things. We automatically start to assume what somebody's emotion is going to be. We automatically start to project the behavior, for instance, back to the gentleman in the bar. We start to project our perception of fear about how this person is going to respond. So in that regard, approval motives or those covert contracts you spoke of, Co-relate to me. Approval motives just being that reasoning for how we expect things to return. Shape those relations by fostering excessive validation seeking and emotional parody, where we try to mirror and reflect the emotions or behaviors of another. So in that regard, how do approval motives influence behaviors like emotional parody and excessive validation seeking in relationships?

Jay Scott: I think it goes back to that love and connection need to be earned. I must do something in order to be loved, right? And we talked a little bit about a test.

Jeffrey Besecker: In regards on what they do have to be, you can't be disrespectful to somebody and fully expect to get that same respect back. In that regard, it is somewhat conditional. I'm going to throw that out there. It may be a little bit prickly for you, but in some regards it is conditional because if you're kind of being an asshole, it's hard to expect somebody to be nice back because you haven't really illustrated that behavior to them, haven't demonstrated that ability to emotionally regulate or be emotionally mature about it.

Jay Scott: And that's true, right? So there's, there's a gray area in between there. I know where he can be overly nice and try to get to get something back or you can be the complete asshole who doesn't strive for love at all. And you brought up attachments before, right? So most of the guys that I deal with are anxious attachment, right? They feel that love has to be earned and if they're not loved, then there must be something wrong with me. Avoidance is kind of the opposite of that is if I'm not loved then something must be wrong with them. And then secure is love can just exist. And so you don't have to necessarily bend or shape shift or do whatever in order to give that love back. And so it's not to say that you need to be an asshole or you need to be this covert guy. It's just to enter into the world saying love may exist here. How can I help it grow, right? Without overly giving up myself or having this covert contract that I have to give to you in order for you to give love back to me.

Jeffrey Besecker: So we often look at those implicit reinforcements, behaviors that we automatically engage in that avoid it defensive. Give us a little overview on the different type of attachment styles from your perspective and how those tend to play out in the nice guy syndrome or in people pleasing behaviors.

Jay Scott: Yeah, I think when you enter it into from an anxiety place, the anxious attachment, when you go in saying that I have to do these things in order to be loved, and if I'm not loved back, then there must be something wrong with me. And that creates this anxious thing. Now, as we talked about in the beginning, a nice guy is defined as an anxious, dream-tripping person, so that one fits quite a bit. My personal style is anxious avoidant. I'm anxious when I'm not getting love. When I get love, then I become avoidant, right? Yay for me. I wish it was more secure. And you can change those things as you become more comfortable with yourself. You can start to move towards a more secure attachment when you start to learn to accept yourself for as you are and start to lose that validation seeking that we do and become comfortable with, hey, whatever happens, I'll handle it. If we're in love, great. If we're not in love, I'm still going to be okay. That's where that secure attachment comes from. With avoidant attachment and thinking that if I give love and they don't love me back, then something must be wrong with them. There's still that thing there that it's almost like a placement of blame to where sometimes two people can have the best of intentions and it still just doesn't work out. It doesn't have to be one person's fault or the other person's fault. Does that answer your question?

Jeffrey Besecker: Yes. So looking at that role of labeling and identifying things, so often we personalize those situations where we start to automatically associate our self-perception through those filters. People pleasing being one, I'm an overachiever being another, I'm a nice guy, you have a nice guy syndrome. We start to form the perception that that's the totality of our identity and our persona. What role do you think that over-personalization plays in perpetuating some of that hyper-vigilance and some of that emotional responsiveness?

Jay Scott: I think it keeps us stuck, right? And I often use another example that I use emotions as a call to action. And this will kind of help frame this, right? So if you're lonely, the call to action there is just go to be around people. But very often what we do is we say, I'm lonely. And now you take the feeling of loneliness and it becomes your identity. And when it becomes your identity, it's incredibly hard to shake that off because everything that you do comes from the starting point of, I'm a lonely person. I feel defective. I don't feel the way other people feel. So now it becomes a roadblock for me to get what I want because I've taken on this emotion as my identity. The anxiety, another emotion, just means I made things much more important than what they were or what they should be. And so now I'm building this up. And again, nice guys are anxious. Because what we do is we make everything more important than what they're supposed to be. And there's fear based on all that. I can't do it because I'm too anxious about it. And we cut ourselves off before we even start to try, before we start to learn that maybe I'm anxious or maybe I'm excited. anxious and excited kind of had the same regulation in your nervous system. It heightened your awareness of the things around you. You get excited about doing things that often, you know, sits in the same way in your body that anxiety does. But because we're used to feeling anxiety, we've labeled it as I'm an anxious person. And again, once you take on that label, you've prevented yourself from taking the next step. So rather than wearing these things as a label, it's just a feeling. Right now I am feeling anxious. What may be causing my anxious feeling? Let me look at what's really going on here. What else could this mean? Is this really what's going on or is this my brain trying to protect me again? And so kind of going through those simple motions will give you the ability then to reframe it in a way that's manageable. And when it's manageable, then you can take the next step.

Jeffrey Besecker: To me, that summarizes the role of arousal misattribution, where we start to identify with these various sensations. Sometimes we mislabel that excitement for anxiety per se. For an example here, the response to that excitement, and we're focusing again on that anxious response because we're conditioned to believe, again, I'm an anxious person. We've over-personalized that as part of our identity, and we start to expect that conditioned response. We get a little excited about something. We get a little nervous about something. And we start to identify with that rather than sinking into our body and feeling that embodied response.

Jay Scott: We absolutely do. Yeah. And it does show up in the very same ways. But if you're conditioned to only feel anxiety versus excitement, you're always going to misattribute that towards anxiety. And so realizing kind of, you know, I have guys that I work with list out the series of emotions that they're feeling. and then work through each one to say, you know, what does that look like in your body? You know, how does that feel? And then you start to see those kind of things line up. But because they're they're telling you what it looks like in their body, then they can start to make those connections to say, yeah, this could be excitement. I was recently listening to a friend of mine who was on a different podcast, but he was talking about how speaking in front of people gives him the same feelings in their body as his first kiss. Right. One's exciting and one's nerve wracking. they show up in the exact same parallels as what you're going to do.

Jeffrey Besecker: So that's one instance where those dichotomies coexist. So often we get into that black and white thinking where it's either this or that. We have to be emotionally vulnerable first and foremost to accept that both can coexist. Seldomly are we one emotion or another emotion, even though one comes to the forefront. There's other operating in the background. There's other memories going on in the background that surface. There's that neural imprinting. So finding that balanced refrain is essential to me.

Jay Scott: It is. It's absolutely essential is to figure out which one is being called upon. And that way you can react accordingly. And sometimes you can be both, right? I can be excited and I can be anxious. I think back to that first kiss part, and I remember my first kiss, I was both anxious and excited. And fearful, right? What if she says no?

Jeffrey Besecker: So that speaks toward healthy rejection. Healthy rejection, to me, has to be a part of our emotional repertoire to develop emotional intelligence and add emotional maturity. We're not going to be accepted and validated by everybody, just like you mentioned with the earlier conversation about ice cream and finding those dynamics.

Jay Scott: Very often, again, most of the guys I work with have a very unhealthy fear of rejection. And what we work through is rejection itself doesn't hurt. And there's exercises that you can do that you and I can sit across from each other and no matter what you say, I'm going to say no to it. At the end of a couple of minutes, we'll both be laughing because it's that part of it saying no doesn't hurt. That's right. It's the story we build in our head of what the no means. And if you grow up with shame, the shame of you not being good enough. Yes. That creates a direct access line into your nervous system. So if I ask you for something, Jeff, and you tell me no, and I haven't lost or coped with that feeling of not feeling good enough. The only thing I hear is, see, you're not good enough. I told you you weren't good enough and I told you you weren't going to get what you wanted. And so it reaffirms that thought and that feeling. And so getting them to understand that rejection doesn't hurt. It's the story we build around what the rejection means that hurts and start to really tear that apart. We'll go back to the made up story about the guy in the bar and he's going to go talk to somebody that he's romantically interested in. And maybe he's with a group of friends, right? And he builds up the courage to go talk to her. And he goes and he talks to her and she turns him down. When he comes back, he goes, guy friends, how'd it go? Oh, she completely shot me down. Again, this is the hyperbole of what really happened. What happened? I asked the question, she answered it. Nothing more, nothing less, right? That's where you start to learn that the rejection isn't part of the problem. The problem is the story that we have with around what the rejection means. And so to work through some of those scenarios. And you may never get to a point, I'm not to that point, where rejection means nothing to me, right? It's still tied into my nervous system. I still don't like it. I don't think anybody likes it.

Jeffrey Besecker: balance there just like everything else. We can't go through life just discounting everything in that regard. We do have to find that mode of agreeableness and that is one of the big five-factor personalities of just being able to find that equilibrium of agreement, that acceptable range of tolerance more than anything, especially emotionally.

Jay Scott: And another thing that keeps, you know, the guys that I work with stuck as well is they only face rejection every so often. And so I see the person at the bar that I want to go talk to, and in my mind, she's the 10th. But I've never talked to anybody else. And now I've made this person in my mind, the one who's going to fix me also, right? If I just have her, then all of my guy friends are going to think that I'm the greatest person that's ever in the world. So now as I'm walking over there, I'm thinking of all the things that I've attached to this outcome of me asking her out. And then if she says no, all of those things go away. And so now that rejection meant so much more to me. Because I just did it this one time and now I vowed never to do it again because this is so incredibly painful But you have that attachment to outcome that she's gonna be somebody who by the way You've never talked to that she's gonna solve all these worldly problems for you where if you go out every day and talk to people Right. Whether you're interested in them or not interested in them, but start to just feel people out, start to talk to them, start to get used to it. Right. When I grew up in Ohio and I moved to California, California has a lot of great hiking. And I remember going out hiking and now I'm Midwest at the core. So as I'm walking and people are walking towards me, hi, how you doing? Morning. Yeah. In California, people don't talk to people very often, right? So I would lock eyes with somebody and go, hello, and they just put their head down and walk away. Over time, what I found myself doing was this didn't feel good anymore. So now I have people walking towards me and they may say hello, and I just put my head down because I started to develop that fear of rejection. Like, man, this doesn't feel good. And then as I went through my recovery, it's just like, hey, this is me. I talk to people. So I just say, how you doing? They don't talk to me. I don't take it personal. And there's a great quote from Eckhart Tolle that I love. It was in The Power of Now, and I won't get the phrasing quite right, but it basically says, people don't do things to hurt you. They do things for themselves. As I'm walking past somebody and I say hello and they don't say hello to me, They don't know who I am, right? They don't know my story. They don't know anything about me. I do, so I naturally correlate it back into my stuff, right? But what I started to interpret was getting that quote kind of stuck in my head to lead in the forefront. If they don't say anything to me, it has nothing to do with me. She's not saying hi because it's got something to do with her. Guy cuts you off in traffic, right? What do we do? We get pissed off, we yell, we scream. And how could you do that to me? He doesn't know you exist. He had to get in that other lane for whatever reason it was. He had to get there. He did that for himself. He didn't do it to hurt you. If you're in a relationship and the person you're in a relationship with has an affair, cheats on you, it's painful. You get hurt in the process. But I don't think they did that to hurt you. I think they did that for themselves. And when you start to develop that underlining feeling that, you know what? I'm the center of my own world, but I'm not the center of everybody else's world. Sometimes people make decisions based on what's right for them, not to hurt. Even though I got hurt in the process, I don't have to take that on as though I did something wrong or that I'm a bad person.

Jeffrey Besecker: So in that regard, I'm going to bring this back in a little bit, that idea of ego development through the filtered lens of unitive ego development. It's those processes that inform our psyche. I'm going to kind of simplify that today. They help create what we form as our value system, what we create as our constructed sense of self. So ego dystonic being the one where we tend to be more internally focused would come into play here. You know, we're filtering that through all of our self-validation. We're filtering it through those conditioned beliefs about our experience. experiences, our identity, the past, even unconsciously bringing online that neural imprinting where we're just acting out of that habitual pattern of belief a lot of times.

Jay Scott: Yeah, and you know, you start to see patterns, right? In our own lives, we're kind of almost geared now to see the patterns and things that help us advance further. But when you start to notice the patterns of how you interpret these things that happen to you, it's important that you build in pattern interrupts, right? Guess as a way to dispel it. You know, so as you go through, you just have to break the pattern. I'll think, I'll give you an example. In my own marriage, my wife, wonderful person, but sometimes she speaks before she thinks, right? And when she does that, sometimes it hurts. And I would use my natural routine going back to, you know, the fight, flight, or freezes, I would disappear. I'd go away. I'd pile. And all of that I realized later was an effort to get her to follow behind me and prove that she loved me again, because in that moment I didn't feel loved. which is kind of silly on my part, but rather than disappearing, again, staying in that tension of it, I've learned to just go, ouch, that didn't feel good. So it's a pattern interrupt. And then when I do that, what I found was she would go, oh, I didn't mean to say that at all. What I meant was, right. But prior to that, my pattern was that I believe that I was, you know, bad and now she saw it. So this is why she's treating me this way. Not that she didn't think the answer through before she said it or she's in a hurry and she says something wrong. that I took offense to. So just being able to take that moment and go, yeah, that didn't feel good. Or another one that I learned was, you know, I don't think that landed on me, right? Can you explain that? But just to take the moment, right, to take a step back, see what it really means, not go through our normal routines, our normal patterns, a familiar neural link that doesn't get us what we want, but to take a step back and say, what else could this really mean?

Jeffrey Besecker: Let's look at identifying with the silliness of that quote-unquote sulking behavior. You know, when we look back at your history, it's completely rational to understand why you had that kind of demoralized programming. You know, when you're constantly being monitored for your behaviors, when you're constantly walking on eggshells or pins and needles because you're avoiding triggering somebody's emotional anger, their emotional reactivity, you know, all of these recalcitrant emotions, there's a very logical framing of that.

Jay Scott: There is. And my framing for it was to stay safe. Yes. I wanted to not be hurt. And, you know, as we talked about my story growing up and about how I gave up my needs for other people, you know, as children, we're very egocentric. If our needs weren't met, we adopt that as we did something wrong. because we rely on other people to meet our needs at that age. And so that was my paradigm. And I went through life with that. And now when she was upset, I routinely went right back into that, what I call the clown dance before was, well, she's upset. It's my job to fix it, right? I'm quote unquote, you know, masculine in the relationship. If she's hurt, my job is to put a Band-Aid on it or to fix it. And through time, what I realized was I was making all of her problems about me. So every once in a while, she would say, why are you making this about you? And I'm in my mind going, how am I making this about you? You're in a bad mood. I'm trying to get you in a better mood. Now you think I'm making it about me. That doesn't make any sense. But she was right. I was trying to soothe my own anxiety about her being upset. my emotional wound from childhood was abandonment. And if she left, that was close to death for me. And so I was trying to soothe my own anxiety about her leaving by giving up my own emotional state in order to satisfy her and get her into a better mood. Now, as a side project from that, what ends up happening when you do that is I do the clown dance and the clown dance isn't working, right? I'm, I'm cajoling, I'm teasing, I'm being light, I'm trying to be funny. All the while, my energy is just draining to a point where at some point you have nothing left to give. And the minute I started to shut down, she would snap out of it. And I was like, what's wrong? Everything okay? What in my mind I'm going, what? I just sat three hours trying to get you out of a better, you know, into a better mood. And now that I have nothing left and I'm drained, now all of a sudden you're okay. Right. So then I, you know, your mind builds up these scenarios as to why that is what's going on. Not very often, you know, I support in a way to just say, seems like you're going through something I'm here for you if you need to talk about it, but maybe, you know, you just need time to handle it. And now she goes away and she comes back and goes, thanks for giving me the time or, you know, thanks for giving me the space to handle that. I kind of look around and go, I didn't do anything. You know, but suddenly I'm the hero of that story and I don't know how that happens. But, you know, it's not trying to problem solve. It's not taking it on. It's not me making it about me, which I had to learn why I was making it about me. But I truly was making it about me, trying to soothe my own anxiety for leaving.

Jeffrey Besecker: To me, again, that speaks to that healthy window of tolerance and being able to create that healthy psychological distance from the circumstances. You know, rather than running from them, it's all right sometimes to step back and take that breath, regulate and find the mature coping, adapting skill rather than that immature defensive mechanism.

Jay Scott: Yeah, we talked about staying in the tension, right? And when your natural response is to go fix it, and now you're not going to do anything, the amount of tension you feel with not doing anything, which you would think, well, I'm not doing anything. There shouldn't be any tension there. But there is a ton of tension there because your natural instinct is to run and help. And now I'm not doing that. And so you got to realize, and again, this goes back to some of the body work and things that we talked about before, as she would walk away to kind of get herself, you know, back into a good space, which I couldn't help with most of the time anyway. But as she goes to do that, in my mind, I'm thinking, did I do the right thing? Is she going to be even more upset now? You know, all these things, but it's staying in the tension, but also providing, you know, some framework around it of saying, I'm here for you if you need me to help with something, right? to not turn your back on her. My wife also has some abandonment stuff in her past as well. And so even through like our own arguments as we get into things, we need to take a break from it. One of the coping mechanisms that we learned to kind of soothe that part of it is to say, I need to leave the argument. I'm not leaving you. And that helps both of us. Or, you know, if she comes in and she's upset with something at work, right, my natural response, the one that I've learned, the neuropath says, this is about you. You've done something wrong. Even though she's complaining about work and she's, you know, her anger may be at a level seven or eight. What she began to notice in me was as she came in hot like that, I would start to shrink down because again, my childhood mind is going back to my dad and his explosive anger, right? Now she'll come in and she sees me shrink a little bit. She'll just go, this has nothing to do with you. And that lets me off the hook. And now I can be present. But we had to work through that. We've had to have conversations, stay in the tension of the conversations to say, when you come in like that, I get scared. My wife weighs 140 pounds. She's 5 foot 7. I'm 6 foot tall. I weigh 250 pounds. She walks heavy. And when she walks up the stairs and I hear those heavy feet, man, I'm right back to my childhood thinking, here it comes. I'm going to get something, right? Again, you have to train your mind to say, she really can't hurt me. You know, she can hurt me, but chances are she's not going to. And she's not even mad at me. I just hear heavy steps and it triggers, you know, some of my old thought patterns. And I have to just regulate myself, take a breath and go, you didn't do anything wrong.

Jeffrey Besecker: So to kind of sum things up today, Jay, you know, we talked about the importance of staying in that tension and developing that window of psychological and emotional tolerance where we can sit with those uncomfortable emotions. So as we look at those to kind of wrap up today, what are three tips or three practices we can engage to first acknowledge and accept hyperactivity and then adapt and expand that window of tolerance?

Jay Scott: I think, you know, if you're listening to this and you identify with some of the things I talked about with the shame of not feeling good enough and, you know, going through life, giving up of your needs in order to satisfy other people, the best thing you can do is start to reveal yourself to safe, nonjudgmental people. to release that shame. We talked about it with fear, shine a light on it. It's the same thing with the shame. So find, you know, a men's group to go to if you're a guy. And by the way, I should have said this in the beginning, No More Mr. Nice Guy was a book written by Dr. Glover. Nice guy can be a nice girl, nice woman, however you want to do it. these behaviors in the beginning. So my practice focuses solely on men, but it happens on both sides, right? And so find a woman's group, find a man's group, find a coach, find a mentor, somebody that's safe, nonjudgmental, that you can start to reveal yourself to. And once you start to open up and to shine a light on it, that shame gets almost instantly released. You know, if you think about a conversation that you're going to have and you're concerned about the direction it's going to go, if you bring that anxious energy into the conversation, it's going to have an effect on how the conversation goes. But if you come into it and say, I have something that I'm concerned about saying, you know, let it out of the bag in the beginning. All that dissipates and you get your emotional, your nervous system back into order because you're not hiding it. The minute you hide it, you wrap everything in shame and then it becomes exponentially bigger than what it was in the beginning. So if we can just find safe places to let that go. It's also, I believe in the phrase for my practice, a man can't lead where he hasn't been. So to get people that have been down that path before you that have some experience in being where you are, but also being where you want to be so that they can guide you down a path and show you the potential pitfalls. You know, but also completely understand the way your brain is interpreting the things that you're going through. Staying in the tension is just giving yourself the ability, the freedom to say, I'm going to stick this out. Part of you believing that you're good enough comes from an internal validation so that you don't seek external validation anymore. And internal validation comes from doing the hard stuff. Staying in the tension is hard stuff, right? Going to the gym a few days a week initially is very hard. Then you get used to it and it becomes easier. Taking on tasks, you know, whatever the task may be, where you go into it not knowing the answer, not knowing how you're going to get through it, but sticking with it until you get the thing done, even if it's imperfect. builds up that internal validation. The more your internal validation is built, the less reliant you are on somebody else telling you that you're good, right? And so starting to do those hard things, starting to do the things that you don't believe that you can do, share those experiences with people, celebrate the small wins, all of those things, stay in the tension like we talked about, all of those things will start to redefine how you see yourself. Very often when I work with guys, you know, I ask them, part of my practice is to fill out a brag book. Because remember, when we grow up this way, we always yield towards protection and survival. And when I ask them to tell me about some of the good things they've done in their life, they can think of a few, not a lot. And they're mostly monumental things, right? And then if I say, tell me about the bad things that you've done or things that you're not so proud of, they'll fill up a notebook full of it. And that's really just our brain trying to remind us that these things weren't healthy, they weren't good for us, they made us feel bad. So let's not do those again, right? So what I help guys with is get from the untrained mind, which is the protection and survival, more into a trained mind, which is how do we use those things to serve us here? But really pay attention in that brag book part of it to go through and list down all the things that we've done that we're proud of, that other people didn't do. And they don't have to be climb Mount Kilimanjaro. They can be, I told three people the truth this week. Instead of lying, covering, hiding it up, I told three people the truth. Then when you get in those moments, as we all do, no matter how refined you are, they'll get in those moments where we don't feel great. And now if you can open up that brag book and see 50, you know, 100 things that you've done that you're proud of, all of a sudden you go, you know what, this guy's kind of a badass. I don't need to feel the way I used to feel. And that builds up that internal validation and makes you start to believe in yourself that you are good enough. So it's really a healthy place to kind of do that. And the reality is Jeff, all of those things are already there. We just don't pay any attention to them. It's kind of like a junk drawer, right? You have some pretty good things in that junk drawer. Company's coming over, take your arm, you swoop everything in there. Now, every time you open it up, it's just the junk on top.

Jeffrey Besecker: I love that. That's one of my favorite analyses right there. So often we're rooting around in that junk drawer and fishing around for that story that reinforces one pattern or the other. Reframing brings that back into context. Healthy depersonalization, where we remove that I am an anxious person and reframe it simply as I am a person who experiences anxiety sometimes. I am a person who sometimes has this reaction to this certain situation, the certain pattern, you know, and how do we reframe and change that? This simply becomes acknowledging that we're vulnerable, we're open. We have those things that happen. We have those emotions that come up like fear or shame when it's a secondary emotion and we keep pushing it down. You know, I know that was a big one for me. I went through an age regression hypnotherapy to help mange anger. couldn't figure the last piece of why, you know, I knew all the things that led up and triggered that anger, but I couldn't figure out what the underlying piece was. I gotta take a big breath because that was such a relief for me that every time I go back into that, I can feel that start to come up. I can feel that neural imprinting start to reactivate, even though it's been years since I've worked through that pattern, but realizing that that shame of feeling any emotion, whether it was fear, whether it was anger, whether it was anxiety, triggered that shame in me. I had to start monitoring and paying attention to, again, trying to manage those emotions. You know, these emotions are acceptable, these are not. Those subconscious patterns of belief of what I was telling myself was allowed and what wasn't allowed. The more I shoved down all of those other emotions or the more I had to monitor my emotions, the angrier I got because that shame would subconsciously coop up. I was feeling judged. I was feeling criticized. So then it was kind of a feedback cycle. The more that crept up, the more I didn't acknowledge that shame or that ability to just be open and vulnerable more than anything. the angrier I got. I couldn't figure out that piece until I could figure out that it was that shame coming in as a secondary emotion that was unconscious, and it was a body response of that feeling of insecurity, that feeling of it's not safe to have all of your emotions, even anger, when it's expressed healthfully, whenever that adaptive pattern comes in.

Jay Scott: Yeah, and you know, to kind of identify with you in that story, anger used to be a big part for me too. And when we talked about using your emotions as calls to action, what I've deciphered in my life, and it sounds like yours is maybe somewhat similar, anger for me came from three things. I was hiding my needs and therefore my needs were being met. I was saying yes to things I didn't want to say yes to and I didn't set a boundary and a boundary was crossed and I didn't set it because I thought it was common sense. Now, the third one is kind of a double-edged sword because I was mad at myself for not setting the boundary, but I was also mad at the other person for not understanding that would be a natural boundary to have. But what I found was, in saying yes to things I didn't want to say yes to, as soon as I corrected that one, a lot of my anger went away. And I'm sure anybody listening has had this experience where, you know, maybe your wife wants to go to a party or somebody you're with and you don't want to go. But for compromise, we'll call it, you end up going, but you don't share that you didn't want to go. So you go to the event and you're miserable. And your wife's asking you the whole time, you know, why are you upset? What's wrong? What happened? What's going on? And you just want to be left alone, but you're mad at yourself because you didn't tell them what you wanted to do. But you're also mad because, why the hell am I here? I didn't want to be here. But again, we hide it. And so we wrap in shame and it makes it bigger than what it is. Now, if the situations come up and it happens a lot, my wife will say, let's go do this. And I go, it's not something I want to do. If it's important to you, then we can talk about it. But it's not really how I want to spend my day. Now, if I end up going, she knows, and I don't have to carry around all this BS about me being, you know, the victim in the thing. And why did I say yes to this? And why didn't I do that? You know, so my anger dissipates. I find that when I go to those things now, I have a lot more fun than I used to because I'm not in my head about all the things we just talked about. But for me, And so as, you know, the people listening and watching today, you go through it, just really get in touch with what those emotions are telling you to do. You know, what am I angry about and what is it telling me to do? You know, what's that call to action? And once you figure that out, you can manage those things so much easier as they come up because you'll know how to head them off. Now, it doesn't mean that I'm perfect in those things. There's still times that I, for whatever reason, don't lead with a need, but now it feels bad when I don't do it, where before it felt natural. Now, I'm like, I didn't say that. And very often, Jeff, and a way to counteract that is I'll go back and say, you know, I said yes to this. I really wanted to say no to it. And what that does is it implants something into your mind. Number one, that when I go back and I tell my truth, the other person, the reaction that I get is, why didn't you just tell me? Yeah, but it wasn't this huge fight. It wasn't, you know, this thing that I made it into be, but when it becomes uncomfortable like that, you realize it. So when we talked before, like when does nice guy syndrome, man, what I always tell guys is they never end. The storms never stop. They just don't last very long because you get the tools to handle it. So these things, these situations, as they come across this, now we go, okay, I handled it this way. Didn't feel good. I'm going to go back and correct it. Or I have this bookmark for why this made me feel bad and I'm not going to do it again. And so you just develop tools to handle those situations.

Jeffrey Besecker: So to wrap things up finally today, we look at how that people-pleasing guides a lot of that nice guy syndrome where we struggle to form healthy boundaries that don't necessarily push people out or create an artificial resistance, but open us to meet our needs. How can we look at that role of creating healthy boundaries? And what are three tips or practices we can use to sum things up today that allow us to develop more adaptive, fluid, emotionally regulated boundaries?

Jay Scott: I think the first part is to realize that the way that we see the world we're developing childhood, our paradigms from that, and that worked then and they're not working now. Right. And so to just kind of come into that understanding of, I no longer need this in order to survive or be protective, but I can, I'm in charge of that now. And then with boundaries, as that goes, just start to do small little things, build boundaries, you know, around things that are important to you. And a boundary is not, you know, how we see other people interact with the world, right? A boundary is just something for us. By the way, I started my recovery at 40. I didn't know what a boundary was until I was 40. And I don't think I could have defined it until I was 42. It just wasn't something that was ever talked about or considered in my life up until that point. But the best way I've heard a phrase is a boundary is simply what you are willing or not willing to put up with said in a kind, calm, but assertive manner. You know, you don't have to say, this is bullshit and I'm never putting up with this again. A boundary for me in my relationship that I say, you know, from time to time is this isn't good for us. And I don't want to be in a situation where this takes place. Right. My wife and I, a long time ago, would yell at each other a lot and it would cause a lot of damage. Right. So I would just simply say, I don't know if being in a relationship where we react to each other like this is going to be sustainable for the long term. I'm not saying I'm leaving it or I'm not saying she's bad for yelling or for me for yelling. I just say, you know, I don't think this works for us anymore.

Jeffrey Besecker: Just acknowledging the pattern and where that pattern is not serving either of you.

Jay Scott: Yeah. And hold it. You know, the hardest part about setting a boundary is all, you know, people will generally, you know, brush sand over your line in the sand. So you got to just remind them. But again, kind, calm, but assertive. This isn't good for me.

Jeffrey Besecker: Thank you for that valuable input today. I feel like that really sums up things in our conversation. I want to thank you for having such a deep and insightful approach to this.

Jay Scott: Thank you, Jeff. It was a pleasure to be here. I appreciate your openness to having me on and get a little deep in these conversations and still a lot more to go. So we should do this again at some point.

Jeffrey Besecker: Yeah, so I'm glad to have you back and look a little deeper at some of these patterns. Thank you for bringing this to light for us. I know this is a new area where I'm really digging into the patterns that's driving the nice guy syndrome. It's one that's been kind of off on my radar to really look at and dig in and kind of pick apart. So thank you for bringing that to light for us.

Jay Scott: Yeah, thank you. Appreciate it.

Jeffrey Besecker: Namaste, the light meet. Knowledge is the light. You have a terrific day.

Jay Scott: Thank you Jeff, namaste.

Jeffrey Besecker: By recognizing the subconscious and unconscious patterns that drive people-pleasing, avoidance, and emotional dependency, we can begin to shift toward healthier, more reciprocal connections. True confidence isn't just about being nice. It's about embracing self-awareness, setting boundaries, and cultivating relationships built on mutual respect rather than silent transactions. If you found value and meaning in today's show, please share it with a friend or loved one. And as always, we're grateful for you, our valued community of change leaders and therapeutic professionals. This has been The Light Inside. I'm Jeffrey Besecker.