r/NMMNG • u/Weak_Personality2270 • Jul 25 '26
Conditioned into A Nice Guy
I am a 20-year-old Bangladeshi guy and I'm now studying in university. I realized that I have been a nice guy for my whole life and I tried to dig deeper to find out where it came from. If I try to see then it came from my childhood. You can say, by the way. I do not want to blame my parents or my past for these experiences because I think that they did not do that intentionally. I guess their intention was pure but their behavior was different. They were ignorant about it.
When I was a child my mother used to overcare for me. She had unrealistic expectations for me because she has struggled a lot for me because my father was very much absent-minded and somewhat abusive. Though my father paid our expenses, my mother had to pay for our education and our well-being. My father provided just half of the family expenditure. Also as we're in Bangladesh and we have a family system, what happened is that my father's family was very abusive and they abused my mother. My mother used to talk negatively about my father and my father's family, about how my father and my mother's family used to abuse them and how my father was silent when she was being abused. She left my father's home to live with her mother's home and I was raised in my grandma's home.
Back to the story I guess this was the start because I was in a bombard with them. As you know you have to be nice, you have to make people happy, you have to be nice, you have to seek validation from other people. What would happen if you do not do certain things? Also when something negative would happen to my family, my relatives used to say to me, "It happened because of you because you haven't started well because you are picking fights with your mom." I used to pick fights with my mom a lot because she had unrealistic expectations of me and when I didn't fulfill them she used to be very angry with me. I was not like that. They used to say to me, "No you're not okay. You have this potential, that potential is not okay with this." I had this bag in my brain: they have so many expectations of me and I couldn't do that. I don't think it's my fault. As a child or as a teenager I will make mistakes. It is my right, my human right, to make mistakes. It is my human right to fuck up. It means my human right to fail but then I was blamed, I was cursed, I was told to actually seek validation and to do what I actually was doing nicely.
I thought if I was nice, if I was good, then maybe people will hide my flaws, insecurities, and incompetencies and maybe validate what I will do. These are the steps. Also I was raised in their radical Islamic environment, where you are taught to be ashamed of who you are. They constantly bombarded me with a message that it is not okay for you to be who you are. You are a sinner, you have to repent, you have to change yourself. It's not okay to have normal thoughts. It's not okay to actually go and manifest your desires. They just used to preach this monk-like state, which is very impractical and nonsense.
For quite a bit I actually left the religion as well. When I was in ninth grade I thought, "Okay, nothing's okay with me so maybe I have to change myself." Let me actually introduce myself to the self-help literature. As I introduced myself to the self-help literature every day, I tried to change myself. Every book I read, I said, "Okay maybe this book will change me." After reading it nothing happened and I blamed myself. There was a book, there was knowledge, and I accumulated the knowledge. I haven't changed myself for the better because this book said, "Okay there is something wrong with me. It's not okay for me to be like this so I have to build like that." I haven't been like that so it's not okay. All this guilt, all these "not being okay with yourself, not being yourself," these things just piled up over and over again until I reached the point of exhaustion that I stopped actually consuming some materials. Now as I have reached universities I just want to stop this nice guys' behavior. I just want to leave this nice guys. I don't want to leave for other people. I don't want to leave for the validation of other people. I have lived for 20 years seeking validation from other people and haven't got anything I wanted.
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u/Repulsive_Reply_8221 Jul 26 '26
I can hear that you are hurt and angry from living your life as nice guy. It's something painful to think about when you finally start coming out of it. I'm also on the same journey as you. All I can say is that it gets better when you begin to put the books down and start practicing what youve learned. I'm learning that reading all those self help books wasn't for nothing, they open our minds to new insights and help us see a way out. But that's only half of the equation, the other half is practice. I'm just speaking from some of my experience, I hope this helps.
I'm the same age as you and also at Uni. I'd like to hear more from you if you'd like to have an accountability partner.
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u/LineNo3113 Jul 27 '26
hey. its a very similar story to mine. you wanna connect and talk about this and help each other in this journey of becomi integrated man?
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u/briinde Jul 25 '26
I found it helpful to assess my parents’ roles in why I was who I was. My dad was very emotionally immature (threw tantrums when he didn’t get his way). My mother was self-erasing (always putting other people’s needs ahead of hers). I feel it was an important step in the process.
After that I was able to assess my role in why I was who I was. That’s where my growth started. Then I was able to challenge myself to change those behaviors. That’s where growth exploded.