Making a decision is hard enough. Having the wrench of guilt thrown into your machinery while you’re making a decision is even worse. Many times, were not even aware of the guilt that we carry, and it operates beneath our consciousness and controls our thoughts, feelings and decision-making skills. When we indulge in our guilt, we are generally not making the right decisions for us, or what’s in our best interest as individuals.

When we try to adhere to other people’s desires of us, whether it’s family, friends, or our significant other, we sometimes get lost in trying to both please them and ourselves. The friction that’s created is where guilt lies. Guilt is more about “should” or “have to,” rather than “wanting to.”

Guilt is corrosive. When we let it fester, it eats us up inside. It stops our better judgment of how best to live our own lives. I think guilt is more related to people pleasing, and when we: the people pleasing, we lose our own voice.

What we call ‘guilt’ is usually representative of a blade within us, between pleasing some outside person or entity and ourselves. The more we can learn to tune into what we really want, the more will find happiness, contentment and confidence. We’re certainly not going to find those things if we endlessly tried to attend to or appease others, or try to do their agenda. Ultimately, will fail, and fall victim to addictive people pleasing.

Ask yourself: “what is it that I really want, if I can cut away trying to always please others?”. if you didn’t have to deal with guilt, what would your certain outcome or decision actually be? Would it looked different than how you’re used to doing it? Are you prepared for that outcome?

If we actually take the risk of listening to ourselves and what we truly want, and not others, what are the risks? usually, there is fear or panic about letting others down, or doing the opposite of what others want from us. When we grow up, we often develop guilt from interacting with our parents. They usually have a certain agenda for us, and we usually just learned to absorb it. As kids, we never really considered doing things our own way, or if we did, it was usually in a defiant or flippant way.

I think the first way to successfully deal with guilt is to start to recognize what it is that you actually want. What would your relationship look like if you really wanted it to be free of guilt? Would your friendships change? would you end up dropping friends who you didn’t feel guilty around?

On the other end, sometimes guilt is flared up by others manipulative tendencies. Manipulation and guilt are bedfellows. Where there is manipulation, there’s often guilt. if you’re feeling manipulated by someone close, it’s important to start to understand that dynamic in your relationship, and start to address it head-on. If you allow yourself to be manipulated, the end product will probably be guilt. And guilt is extremely corrosive to the soul.

Anger and nice guys don’t mix very well. Because nice guys are known to stuff their emotions, and anger is an emotion, the cycle of avoidance never gets broken. Nice guys get angry because their needs aren’t being met, and most times, nice guys don’t even know what they need. They’re swimming in the dark, yet live in a world that they need to interact with. Because life is a series of interactions and interplay between needs and need gratification, lack of awareness about what those needs are leads to a lack of gratifying them.

So what do I mean by “needs”? I think we can all agree on the general definition of what needs are, because we have many different layers of them. We have a need to eat, to sleep, to excrete, and to have sex. Higher order needs are also needs, and include needs for love, validation, understanding, compassion, and avoidance of pain. As people, we also have a need for pleasure. The list can be quite infinite, and will vary drastically between different people.

Whereas I have a need to be validated for my efforts as a relationship partner or as a business owner, the next guy may have very different needs. He may need power, and may seek that out through a variety of different channels. The basic motivation to get those needs met will be so different for each person, so it’s really hard to set one standard of needs for everyone. This is where it gets tough, because many mail clients that I work with who don’t know how to recognize their own needs, end up comparing and contrasting themselves and their needs to their friends, family, and culture in general. Although our culture and society has some generally universal needs, they vary by degrees.

How does anger factor into all of this, you ask? I think that when men’s needs to go unmet and unattended to, they do not goaway. Instead, they lie dormant and mutate into other types of feelings. Anger is a byproduct of not getting those needs met. Although there are other emotions underlying anger — like sadness, emptiness, helplessness or loss of control — those are emotions that are even more obscured with most men today.

If you can picture the cross-section of an Everlasting Gobstopper, you’ll see that it would be comprised of layer upon layer of coatings. Imagine emotions are like a Gobstopper: they are many in number and layer similarly. At the core, we have emotions that consists of sadness, emptiness, pain, loss of control, and other very basic emotions. Go out one more layer and we find the more “empowering” emotions, like anger. Anger empowers us to act, and yet is an outer layer that obscures the more basic emotions. For many guys — especially nice guys — continue to go out to one more layer and you’ll find a layer of fear.

Fear of anger is a whole different matter. Many guys are just simply too afraid of their own anger or rage, so they end up stuffing it and coating it with a layer of fear. The fear layer then translates into behaviors that communicate that fear when there are situations or people that trigger the anger. Instead of getting angry, a lot of guys are so disconnected from their own anger and go to the fear place immediately. They shut their whole emotional system down, and continue to compress their emotions and avoid them. This is a disastrous cycle, because these men are muzzling themselves every time they are provoked. I’m not suggesting that they fly into a fit of rage and put her fist through the wall. What I am suggesting is that getting in touch with that basic experience of anger is an important first step to recognizing that it even exists.

The whole thing for nice guys: they’re not going to express their anger because it will lead to devastating to actually express the anger to the recipient. Instead, nice guys will swallow their anger, where it ends up mutating into much worse problems for the host nice guy.

So what happens to the anger when a nice guy stuffs it? A lot of things. Because the anger is not being communicated directly to the people that need here at, it ferments within a nice guy. But anger needs to come out in some way, and it often comes out through the forms of sarcasm, criticism, self-criticism, superiority, judgmentality, and on the other end of spectrum, rage and acting out physically.

A lot of nice guys are also smart guys. Smart guys being who they are often reside in their heads most of the time. The very skills and abilities that smart guys have used to create success in their lives, such as in their professional lives, are the worst skills to deal with anger. Smart guys also have the unique ability to intellectualize their anger, and this is another form of fermenting that anger loves. When I talk to guys who come in because they can’t deal with their anger, we always end up talking about how they try to “think their way out of their anger”, but it never works. I was asked them “so how is it worked for you up until this point?” These guys usually say, “well, not to good. on here and counseling now aren’t I?”

This tendency to intellectualize our anger is a real problem. We become hamsters in our own mental wheels, spinning ourselves into a mental oblivion. We also try to apply those same election will skills to solving our marriage and relationship problems, and those skills and tools are about not very successful to fixing those problems.

When nice guys get mad after having said “yes”, they tend to stuff that voice within them that really doesn’t want to say “yes”. By not saying ‘no’, these guys swallow what they really want because they’re too afraid that and they’ll be rejected by saying ‘no’. And this phenomenon plays out in all sorts of areas of the guy’s life: work, friendships, intimate relationships, within family relationships and on and on.

Stuffing anger is a real problem, because anger slowly builds up over time when it gets stuffed. Each incident of stuffing one’s anger and not saying no creates a compounding effect, where people to comes more difficult to say no and anger festers even more. Others may even notice that we where anger on our faces or in our behavior, and not know why. We may not even know why we’re angry, and not connect the dots to know that by not saying no to others when we don’t mean it, creates this cause-and-effect relationship.

For a lot of men who can’t say no, they have to release their anger in some way. This often comes out in a variety of ways, that we’ll identify here:

• drinking alcohol to cover up anger
• acting more feeling superior to others
• being overly critical or judgmental of others, or oneself
• feeling stressed all the time, and not knowing why
• feeling stressed all the time, and knowing why, but not doing anything about it
• feeling like the “weight of the world” is on them
• feeling like they’re working too hard
• concerned that others don’t appreciate what they’re doing
• working too hard in general
• feeling constantly angry, or even rageful
• getting physically angry, and doing things like putting your fist through the doors or walls
• not taking care of themselves, or not knowing how to

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