By focusing on the relationship instead of their partner, recovery Nice Guys are able to use their partner to get in touch with their childhood experiences of abandonment, neglect, abuse, and smothering. And this bizarre, indeed disastrous failure permeates the entirety of psychology as a science: every study that claims to have proven “something” about human nature always has outliers (usually quite-a-disturbing-lot of them), and almost no effort is made to find out why. So all he does here is justify any man assuming any criticism whatever from his parents thus “caused” their every false belief or toxic behavioral pattern. In my experience, this is probably the most difficult concept for Nice Guys to understand and accept about themselves.

As they reclaim personal power, recovering Nice Guys can experience the world in all of its serendipitous beauty.

A man’s propensity to hide things about himself, for example, may have entirely different causes that don’t even connect to their childhood at all; broader issues of adult gender culture can be to blame, or even just universal human consequence-avoidance behavior.

That in mind, if you think you need help with this, the books I’d recommend actually start with Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. They conclude that there must be something wrong with them, which causes the important people in their lives to abandon them. I both critique and rely on it a lot in my philosophy; I use it throughout Sense and Goodness without God. There is, I am certain, a lot of real science backing the general advice: stop pretending to be someone you are not; fix what is genuinely wrong with you (and stop caring about what you merely have been led to believe is wrong with you); work to become the sort of person you like and admire and want to be around; be honest in your relationships; and don’t treat relationships like a vending machine (“do x, and get y.But seriously, if what you mean is, do I recommend anyone ever read this book, my answer plainly is no.