Dismantling the Mens Work Industry Episode 4 — Robert Glover: The Architecture of the Rebuilt Performance - What No More Mr Nice Guy Actually Builds

The man that's the subject of this particular episode arrives confused. Now I want to distinguish him from the ones we've already spoken about. This is not the Tomasi man's certainty or the Bligh man's eloquent grief. This is confused, genuinely confused in a way that was different from what he had presented when he first walked through the door months or years earlier.

When he first arrived, the presenting problem was legible. He was the nice guy. He knew it. He read a book, recognised himself on every page and arrived in the room with the particular relief of a man who has finally been accurately described.

The covert contract the suppressed needs, the approval seeking that it organised his entire relational life. He did the work and applied the prescription and stopped seeking approval. He then stated his needs directly. He ended the covert contracts.

He stopped being the nice guy. And then he arrived confused. Because something had gone wrong that the book had not prepared him for. He'd stopped trying to please others, but he'd also stopped pleasing himself.

Some of these men developed narcissistic tendencies, not the clinical narcissism in every case, but the functional presentation of a man so organised around not accommodating others that he'd lost the capacity to genuinely consider them. The pendulum had swung so completely from self-arrager to self-centredness that there was no middle ground left. Others lost touch with what it meant to be a decent man while trying not to be a nice one, as though somehow they figured out that niceness and decency were the same thing. As though the antidote to a performance of goodness was the abandonment of goodness itself.

The nice guy had been replaced by a man whose entire architecture was still organised around the nice guy just facing the opposite. Robert Glover holds a PhD in psychology. He was a licensed marriage and family therapist. He sat with real patients in real clinical settings for years before he wrote No More Mr Nice Guy.

He's the only author in this series besides more with genuine clinical credentials in the relevant domain. This matters quite deeply, but it matters for a very specific direction I'm going in here. Bly stopped short of the surgical work because he was a poet. He had no clinical training.

To mass he stopped short because he was a graphic designer building a framework from his own unexamined wound with no clinical training at all. Glover had the training. He had the tools and he prescribed a behavioural change and called it integration. Now this is not the failure of a man with no tools.

This is the failure of a man who had the tools and chose to use them on the symptom rather than the root. A clinician who stops at the presenting pattern is making a choice. That choice has a name in clinical practice. It's called treating the surface.

Now the covert contract is real. It's one of the most precise and clinically accurate observations in all of the man's work, literature. A man who was learned from childhood from a wound so early it predates language that his needs are not safe to express directly. He's constructed an elaborate architecture of niceness, of accommodation, of self-suppression and who expects beneath all of it that the accommodation will eventually be reciprocated.

The contract is covert because he never stated it. He suppressed the asking and performed the giving and waited for the reciprocation that would confirm that the performance had been sufficient. But the reciprocation doesn't arrive because no one agreed to the contract because the contract was never stated. The diagnosis is the second most accurate in this series, which is precisely why the prescription that follows it is so consequential when it falls short.

You see, glauver's prescription is behaviorally coherent. Stop seeking approval. State your needs directly. End the covert contracts.

Reclaim your masculinity. Build a tribe of men. Prioritize your own needs without apology. On the surface, this looks like integration.

The man who is suppressing his needs now expresses them. The behavior has changed, but the man has not because the prescription never asks the question that a clinician with glauver's training should have asked first. Why? Not why does the nice guy seek approval at the surface level, the deeper why.

The why that hopefully answers the question, what happened to this specific man at what specific moment in his early life that made the direct expression of need feel so dangerous that an elaborate performance of niceness was preferable to it. The wound underneath the pattern was never examined. Only the behavior it produced was addressed. The wound continues to run the production.

The costume has changed. The fragment directing the performance has not. The opposite of a wound is still organized around the wound. A man whose entire relational architecture was built around seeking approval and suppressing needs does not become integrated by learning to withhold approval and assert needs.

He becomes the opposite version of the same man. Both versions are defined by their relationship to the wound. There's a distinction that no more Mr. Nice Guy never makes and that its absence costs every man who follows the prescription faithfully.

The distinction between niceness and goodness. Niceness is a performance. It's the suppression of authentic response in favor of whatever the social environment appears to require. Whereas goodness is a character trait.

It's the genuine regard for other people that doesn't require their approval to sustain itself. It's the capacity to be honest rather than nice, which is often harder and less comfortable than niceness but ultimately more genuinely caring. Glover correctly identified that niceness was a problem. He did not adequately protect goodness in the prescription that followed.

And the man who followed his prescription most faithfully are the ones who arrived in the room having shed both. Now I want to speak to two men at once. First is the man who recognized himself in the Nice Guy portrait. He's been performing niceness for so long that he's lost contact with what he actually wants.

To that man, Glover saw you accurately. The covert contract is real and it's costing you something real that needs to change. But the change is not in the behavior. The change is in what is underneath the behavior.

In the wound that formed that belief, in the child who learned to accommodate rather than ask and the adult who's still running that child strategy in a world that doesn't require it anymore. The second man is the one who read Glover, applied the prescription, stopped being the Nice Guy and arrived somewhere very confusing, who's direct now and self-possessed and still has the undercurrent. To that man, you did exactly what the book asked. The book was not wrong about the presenting problem, but it was insufficient about the root of it.

The target was always underneath the niceness, not what the niceness was doing, what the niceness was covering. That is still there. If something in this episode landed for you and you'd like to explore what that might be, I wrote a book called Before Approaching the Threshold. It's free and Link is in the show notes to access it.

Welcome to the Architect Speaks.