How to ask for what you need

Welcome, I'm Connor Beaton and this is the mantalk show, Training for Men Answers for Women. Now, today's show, we are going to talk a little bit about what blocks a man from getting his needs met. Now there's a very, maybe some of you know of it, maybe some of you have heard of it, but there is something called a covert contract. And this is From no more Mr. Nice Guy. Dr. Robert Glover, incredible book, talks a lot about nice guy syndrome and how to break free from it. But I want to talk about COVID contracts because whether you are a recovering nice guy or you view yourself as a nice guy, or you don't at all, what I have noticed is that a lot of men will use covert contracts to try and get their needs met. Now a recent group that I was facilitating online, one of the guys said, why is that, like, why is it that so many of us resort to using covert contracts? The reality is that many young men are not taught to ask for what they want, contrary to popular belief. All right? A lot of young guys are not taught to ask for what they actually want. Desire are wanting within a relationship, are craving from a friendship or wanting from life or wanting from work. Many, many, many, many guys are taught that they are performance based objects. And what that means is that a lot of young boys get validation for their performance. So what they very quickly learn is I can take care of other people's needs, I can make mom or dad happy or whoever the caretakers are, so long as I am performing, so long as I am doing what they expect of me. So that might mean that I get really good grades academically and then I receive love. Maybe that means that I do really well in sports and then I get validation or like a little prize. And so for a lot of men, what they discover when they look back at their childhood is that love was often performance based. And this can be the same with women. So ladies like you, you're probably not exempt from this. But for a lot of guys, love was performance based. As a kid, when you performed properly, you got love, you got affection, you got attention. And what this does is it creates a part of the psyche, a part of the male mind that says, okay, in order to get my needs met, what I need to do is give my partner, give other people what they want, and hope that I'll get it back in return without having to say anything. Because as a kid, it was a very simple equation, right? It was like, do well in school, you do good in sports. And I got validation. And the More that I did that, the happier I felt because mom and dad were happy with me, my family was happy with me, et cetera. For a lot of guys, this starts to break down within relationships because it creates an immense amount of conflict and it doesn't allow for their partner to know what it is that they actually want. And for some guys, they actually aren't able to even voice what it is that they want and desire within the relationship because they haven't really given themselves permission to give voice to it and to think about it. So let's talk about COVID contracts. What they are, and now that you have a little bit of an idea of where they come from, again, performance based love and validation, let's talk a little bit about what they are. So this is an excerpt from Dr. Robert Glover's no More Mr. Nice Guy. He says using covert contracts prevents nice guys from getting their needs met. Prevents. Although for a lot of, a lot of nice guys, they think that it actually does work. All nice guys are faced with a dilemma. How can they keep the fact that they have needs hidden yet still create situations in which they have the hope of getting their needs met? Now, this is really important. Why would a man want to hide his needs for every different guy? It's going to be a different situation for some men. They're going to want to hide their needs because maybe they grew up in a home. And I've seen this countless times where they grew up in a home with a single mom. And that single mom had an immense amount of work to do to try and run the household and run the family because the father wasn't in the picture for whatever reason. And because of that, part of what a lot of mothers will do with a son is they will give him a lot of responsibility to be the man around the house, and then they'll give him love and affection in return. And so what a guy does at the end of that, through repeating that cycle over and over and over again as a child, is it trains him to be a good boy. It trains him to do exactly what a woman wants and what she is telling him to do. And his own voice, his own needs, desires, wants within the household becomes secondary. And so for a lot of men that have grown up in households where they only had the mom around, they didn't really have a father figure or the father figure was there, but wasn't really quite active. It's very common for them to have these covert contracts because they didn't learn necessarily how to make their needs known or Met. So that's just one example. There's many examples. That's just one. You don't have to fit into that category, Dr. Glover says. He goes on to say, in order to accomplish this seemingly impossible goal of getting their unspoken needs met, nice guys utilize covert contracts, these unconscious unspoken agreements, the primary way that nice guys interact with the world around them. Almost everything a nice guy does is in some way shape or form a manifestation of a covert contract. The COVID contract sounds simply like, I will do blank, fill in the blank for you so that you do this blank for me, and neither of us will acknowledge or be aware that this contract exists. And he goes on to say, this is the final little piece. As a result of the conditioning they have received from their family and society, nice guys believe if they are good, then they should be loved, get their needs met, and have a problem free life. In reality, the primary paradigm of the nice guy syndrome is nothing more than a giant covert contract with life. So I just want to emphasize one big thing. Problem free life. Okay? This is one of the cornerstones of why a lot of men use covert contracts. There are so many men, and look, I was one of them for years and years and years. I grew up in a household where I hated conflict. Hated it. And so when I got into relationships, I started using covert contracts because I wanted to avoid conflict. I wanted to avoid getting into arguments with my partner or creating a little bit of tension or, or creating that challenge when two of you disagree on something. I didn't want that to happen because in my upbringing, when challenge and conflict happened, it was usually not so safe. Right? It didn't feel good, it was sometimes violent or abusive, and it just wasn't pleasant. And so I avoided conflict almost altogether. And I had this idea in my head that I could create a problem free life, problem free relationship. And so many men that are out there in relationships are trying to create these problem free environments where no conflict happens, where his partner is never upset, where she's never pissed off at him, where she's never let down, and when she is, he is devastated by it. So one of the first things that we need to know about overcoming a covert contract style of communication, of getting our needs met, the, the very first thing is accepting that you are going to let your partner down. Accept it. Accept that sometimes you are going to screw up, you're going to forget shit, you're going to mess up, you're not going to say the right thing, you're not going to do the right thing, you're going to get too angry, whatever it is, but you're going to let your partner down. It's going to happen, I guarantee. It's one of the things that I can guarantee about relationships is that if you date someone long enough, you will eventually let them down. And, and you need to be okay with it. You need to come to terms with it. So that's number one. The second piece is that we need to be able to repair our relationship with directly asking for what we need. Now, for most men, there is a charge around asking for what they need because the reality is, is that the moment you go to ask for what you need, you are immediately vulnerable. You're vulnerable to embarrassment, you're vulnerable to rejection. You're vulnerable to that person disagreeing with you. I mean, you're vulnerable to so many different outcomes. But this is where, this is where Brene Brown's work is incredibly important. Because what she reminded people and what she reminded a lot of men that I know of is that you can't have courage without vulnerability and you can't have vulnerability without courage. So asking for what we need requires an immense amount of courage. If you are exploring with your partner sexually, you have a fantasy that you want to explore that takes an immense amount of courage to be able to say, this is what I want to explore tonight. This is what I want to explore in our next sexual encounter. This is the fantasy that I want to play with. Are you open to that? I mean, it takes an immense amount of vulnerability because you are at the whim of your partner saying no, or them being embarrassed or them not knowing what to think about it, or maybe they shame you, maybe, who knows, who knows what their response is going to be? But this is part of leaning into our healthy masculinity because if we can't embody this, part of being able to say, I know exactly what it is that I want to explore and I'm going to be courageous enough and vulnerable enough to ask for what it is that I want. We will never feel like we are leading ourselves. We will never feel like we are leading ourselves. And we will constantly be in the position of trying to convince other people to, to meet our needs without us having to be courageous and vulnerable enough to ask. And this is why so, so, so many men feel defeated in life because they aren't actually asking life, their partner, their family, their friends, their colleagues, their co workers, or themselves. They're not actually asking for what they really, really want and desire. And they are constantly in a space of trying to get their needs met without having to be brave enough and vulnerable enough to go out and ask. So.

Outside of these two parts, there's a third piece that I want you to know about. And third piece is we have to let go of caretaking a little bit. A lot of nice guys, a lot of men that use covert contracts will use and leverage caretaking as a means of trying to get their needs met. So what I mean by that is they'll go the extra mile around the home or with their, with, with their partner, the flowers and cards and notes and whatever else, and they'll do all of these things to try and caretake their partner's needs. And in the beginning, in the beginning of the relationship, it works really, really well. The partner's like, oh, this is amazing. He's just incredible. He's like the perfect guy, yada, yada, yada. And slowly over time, he will stop doing those things. He'll stop sort of overly caretaking for her. And, and because this, what will happen is the more he caretakes her over time, the more his resentment builds up because he's not asking for what he needs. And eventually it leads to endless amounts of clashing because he'll start to become resentful and passive aggressive and contemptuous and anxious, and all of these parts will start to come out. Maybe he'll start to stonewall and it'll start to come out because he's not actually asking for what he needs in the relationship. And, and he'll start projecting onto his partner, saying, this is your fault. You don't get it. You don't know what I need. You're not fulfilling me, you're not what I want, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And it comes back to him being able to ask. So we need to shift away from caretaking with expectations. It doesn't mean that you have to end caretaking. You can still support your partner, you can still go above and beyond, but you have to let go of the expectations that, that they're going to do something in return. And if you do want something in return for taking out the garbage or cooking dinner or rubbing her back or her neck, then you need to make that expectation clear because they might not agree to it, right? They might say no, in which case you get to decide whether or not you want to caretake and continue on that path or if you're going to let that go. The last piece that I'll say is you have to practice far f a r and all that means is that I'm going to look down. Is that because I need to read it here, I wrote it down. Is that you formulate, you ask and you receive. This is the process of healthy asking and healthy receiving and getting your needs met. You formulate exactly what it is that you are wanting or desiring or craving, and you ask for it and you create the space to receive. Now, there are parts within each. Each of those I understand. But practicing formulating asking and receiving is incredibly important. Formulating what it is that you want to experience, what you want to explore, what your needs are within communication, physical intimacy, sexual intimacy, emotional intimacy, all those different parts. Being able to ask for it courageously and bravely and then being able to receive it. Each of these parts, different guys are going to have different challenges with. For some men, just finding clarity on what it is they want to ask for is going to be the like, you know, like their life's work. You know, it's going to be like constantly having to formulate what it is that they want. For other guys, it's going to always be this anxiety or struggle to really be able to ask for what they need. And for other men, it's more about being able to receive because the receive is. Causes us to move into a more feminine space where we have to receive from our partner, share gratitude, share appreciation, and override the story that they're not willing to take care of us, that they're not willing to take care of our needs and our wants and our desires. So thank you so much for tuning in with me today about COVID contracts. If you have any comments or questions, pop them below. I would love to hear. If you're listening to this on the podcast, then head on over to Instagram and fire me off a message at man talks. And until next week, this is Connor Beaton signing off.