The Hidden Cause of Your Sh*tty Decisions and Lack of Confidence

Behind your bad decisions, behind your lack of confidence or lack of self-worth, there is a hidden driving force that so few people know and understand or even talk about. And that hidden driving force is confusion. And I'm gonna talk about today how confusion is one of the most damaging things for the development of your psyche, your personality, your sense of self, your relationships. And I'm going to lay out how this happens and what you can specifically do, the actions that you can take. Because if you are like I was not too long ago, not in the too distant past, you might feel like you're very confused, like you don't really know who you are at your core, or you don't really understand why you keep making the same decisions that you know aren't good for you, but you keep going back to them. So I'm Connor Beaton. This is the ManTalks show. We are going to dive in. I would love for you to hit the like button and subscribe. I hate asking, but, you know, it's just how the algorithm works these days. Kind of dogshit. Most of us know it. And unless you choose your content intentionally, you're going to get fed a whole bunch of content that's going to turn you into a little scroll zombie. So fight the scroll zombie. All right, let's dive in. Confusion. Confusion seems largely innocuous. It doesn't actually seem like it's that big of a deal, right? But if you're someone who's confused about who you are, what you want, where you want to go in life, we tend to kind of chalk this up to a normal human experience. Like, this is just a part of being a normal human being. You're meant to be confused about certain things. And so in many ways, it is a normal part of the human experience. But for many people, for many of you watching and listening to this, confusion will be one of the worst things that you could have experienced as a child that caused a disruption so deep that you likely haven't recovered from it. So imagine that you're a kid again. I'm gonna give you 3 different scenarios to kind of drive this point home. You are at home, you're just hanging out, you're reading, you're watching TV or playing video games, and suddenly, in the other room, yelling just erupts out of nowhere. Mom and Dad are going at it again. They're screaming at each other, they're yelling. You have no idea what they're arguing about, but for whatever reason, you hear your name tossed around. And this type of argument, sporadic conflict, appears out of nowhere on a semi-regular basis without warning, without explanation, and more importantly, without any type of repair or resolution. Now, the result internally inside of you as a kid is just confusion. And it's confusion about your place in the family, the family's stability, the stability of relationship, your parents' marriage, what possibly— what love means and what it means to be in conflict. So that's scenario number 1. Scenario number 2. Okay. Imagine that you come home from after school or from sports. And you walk in the door, you put your backpack down or your gear down or whatever, and you walk past the living room or in the living room, you see your dad sitting there, he's watching TV. You say, "Hey, Dad." Nothing. No reply. No acknowledgment of your existence. And so you try again. You do something else to try and get his attention. And he explodes. "What the hell is wrong with you? Stop interrupting me. Can't you see I'm watching something?" And the result again is obviously some fear and maybe some worry and some hurt, but also confusion. What the hell did I do? What could I have done to have caused that? I was just trying to connect with him. I was just saying hi. What's wrong with me that he doesn't want to connect? And slowly the confusion starts to turn into a big, broader question of, is something wrong with me? And as your brain searches the database of your experiences and your memories for an answer, it keeps coming up with nothing, just more question marks. Lastly, imagine that you live in a house where everything changes day to day. Maybe you guys moved around a lot, or you didn't just, you just really didn't know if mom and dad were gonna be up or down. They were gonna be happy or ballistic. They're gonna be connected and loving, or they were gonna be volatile and angry. Maybe you got punished and disciplined for things that didn't make sense, and you didn't understand why you were getting in trouble because the rules were just unclear. And so you have no real bearing on whether something that you said or would do was gonna get you praised or punished. And this confusion, this is confusion, and this confusion as a child, it can be paralyzing, it can be disorienting, But more importantly, it can deeply interrupt the development of your identity, your personality, and your sense of self growing up. But why is this, right? Why, why does this actually happen? Why is confusion so quietly devastating and such a devastating experience for the young psyche? Well, if you think about what's happening developmentally for a child, as you are growing, as you are moving through different experiences, most of them new, you're learning how to relate to different experiences. You're learning how to relate to life, to yourself, to family, to friends, to love, to sex, to rules, to authority, to discipline, and to the rules around you. And you're in something called a formation state. And this is where your brain and your nervous system and your identity, your personality, are coming into some semblance of coherence and alignment. So your sense of self, your sense of identity is trying to form, and that's basically going to be how you relate to yourself and your sense of self. And for the sake of this video, we'll just call it the identity, the personality. It needs a good mixture of ingredients in order to form a healthy, robust, resilient, and coherent sense of self. But there's one ingredient above all that the brain, that the nervous system, and that the identity need in order to form properly. And that ingredient is predictability. Your brain needs predictability. As boring as it sounds, predictability and stability are required to build a solid sense of self. Okay, so for a child's development, you need these sort of two driving forces in your life. You need high standards and high support. So you need parents, caregivers, etc., to really hold you to a good standard. I know you can do this. Here are the standards, uh, here are the expectations of you, and I'm going to support you in learning how you can do that, right? So if you have high support, and no standards, that is very confusing. If you have super high standards, right? And your dad or your mom expects you to achieve all A's and be first chair violinist and number one on the track team and the captain of the lacrosse team or whatever it is, but you're not getting any support in order to achieve those goals, that is unbelievably confusing. And so the confusion, what it does is it interrupts your ability to trust the standards, to trust the support, and it interrupts the predictability and the stability. Now, this doesn't mean that you have to live in a boring household where there's no risk-taking. It's quite the opposite, actually. It's that when you have predictability, your brain starts to recognize the patterns that it knows are going to lead to certain outcomes and results. Because the truth is that your brain is a pattern recognition machine. In fact, as you very likely have experienced in your life, your brain is so geared towards recognition that it chooses unwanted harmful patterns that it knows over the unfamiliar healthy patterns that you desire simply because it doesn't recognize those things. So for many of you, when you keep making these bad choices, when you keep going down these paths of relationships that you know aren't good for you, you eat junk food too late and you wake up too late and you hit snooze a dozen times and you don't go to the gym, you don't go to workout, and you keep choosing all of these patterns that are reinforcing something's wrong with me, a lot of the times, the driving force behind that is this deep sense of confusion. I don't actually know who I am, or the parts that I do know, I don't like, and the rest of me, I don't really know and understand. And so your brain is constantly seeking out confirmation of the patterns that it knows. And if you grew up in an environment where stability was absent, where predictability was absent, and what was in its place was chaos, was confusion, was unpredictability, where you didn't know what was going to happen, or you didn't know it was gonna get your needs met, you didn't know it was gonna get you safety, you didn't know it was gonna get you love, what ends up happening in the young psyche is that gets personalized. That gets personalized because for a young brain and for a young nervous system, it doesn't yet have the understanding that, hmm, maybe Dad's just being an asshole, or maybe Mom's having a really bad day, or maybe this is about them and it's their behavior and it's actually not me. The young brain and mind and nervous system can't figure that out. It doesn't have the awareness to do that. And so anything that happens with mom and dad and in the environment, anything that's confusing about the family system, about punishment, about discipline, about love, about affection, anything that's confusing gets personalized. And so you start to take on this deeply confusing question that says something along the lines of, what am I doing to cause this? How am I creating this chaotic environment? Because the little mind of a child is kind of omnipotent. They think that they're on, they're at the epicenter of everything that's happening around them. And so this confusion interrupts the sense of actually, this isn't me. This actually isn't my fault. I'm not causing I'm not causing these bad things to happen. I'm not causing the chaos to happen. I'm not causing the unpredictability and the instability and the fighting and the violence and the abuse. What happens to a small mind is that when those things happen and they are confusing, it tells the child, I must be doing something to cause this. All right, guys, really quick aside. First off, thank you so much for tuning in to the show and to the channel. If you are wanting to go deeper, if you're a man that's working on himself in some way, shape, or form, you're wanting to be more self-led, you want to trust yourself more, you want to have a deeper level of self-worth, or maybe you're looking to improve your relationship, then I encourage you to check out the Man Talks Alliance. You can go to mantalks.com/alliance. We have over 1,000 men in this incredible community from around the world, men who are just like you, working to better themselves, to be a better husband, a better father, a better leader in your own life. So check it out, mantalks.com/alliance. And so we need to start to break the pattern. And there's a few specific ways that you can go about this. I'm gonna give you some specific exercises that you can do. But the first thing that I want you to kind of take stock of is what was really confusing growing up? Like what just did not make sense? You know, maybe your parents went through a divorce and still to this day, it's like an anomaly about what happened. You know, it's in a black box somewhere and nobody talks about it. And you're just living completely in the dark about what happened. Maybe there's confusion about how to get love, how to get affection. And you can see that showing up in your adult relationships, because here's the thing I want you to know and recognize. The unwanted, unhealthy, unhelpful patterns in your present are almost always a result of a pattern that happened in the past, the fears of the past, and specifically the confusion of the past. Things that don't make sense to a kid, and I want you to remember this part, things that don't make sense to a kid get internalized as something wrong with them. So anything that was confusing as a child, as terrible as it sounds, is just kind of the way it is. That child will have internalized as, I'm doing something about this, I'm contributing to this, this is my fault somehow. I don't know what's going on. And so, and I can't seem to stop it. I can't seem to make it stop. So it must mean that there's something wrong about me. So here's what we have to do. Step number 1, if you want to break the pattern, and move back to a place of coherence, of alignment, of congruency, of wholeness, there are a few things that you need to do. Step number 1 is name the confusion and not just the behavior. So many guys that I work with, they're fixated on the negative behavior, but they haven't named the confusion that they're actually dealing with. So most people try and fix the symptom, right? The snooze button, the bad relationship, the avoidance in the relationship, without tracing it back to its root. And research in something called narrative psychology by McAdams, and this is way back in 2001, shows that meaning-making, meaning-making is one of the most powerful tools for identity development. And when you look back at confusing moments, of your childhood and you name them, not blame them, right? Not to pass the blame or I hate mom for that, I hate dad, not to blame people, but to understand them, this will begin to create coherence in your brain. So write it down. What were the things that just genuinely did not make sense growing up? And what questions did you carry that were never answered? This is gonna create a kind of map for you to start to explore, okay? Number 2, create deliberate predictability in your daily life. One of the big challenges with men that were once boys and grew up in a confusing environment is that unpredictability, that instability carries forward. And usually the men that I've worked with that have had a lot of confusion and unpredictability in their childhood are very unstable as as adults. They don't have good predictable behaviors, choices, actions, routines, et cetera. So your nervous system is still looking and craving for that stability that it never had. And you can give it to that on purpose. You can give stability to your nervous system on purpose. And there's research to back this up, right? Research on self-regulation and routine consistently shows that structured daily habits reduce baseline anxiety and increase identity coherence over time. Okay, so this is insane. Self-regulation and routine consistently shows that structured daily habits— structured daily habits— so just doing something every single day reduce baseline anxiety and increase identity coherence. This is why when you look at the most successful people in the world, they're oftentimes not the smartest ones or they come from the richest family or whatever. They are the people that consistently had to do chores growing up, that had to contribute, that had a daily routine that helped them to regulate their baseline anxieties, that things weren't just wide open. But this doesn't mean that you have to adhere to a really staunch and rigid schedule. It simply means that you create anchors in your day. right? You have a consistent wake-up time or a wake-up window. So you're not like, I have to get up right at 6:00 AM. Maybe it's, I have to get up between 6:00 and 6:30. So it's not so broad. You have a morning practice, you have an evening wind-down, but you have these small repeated signals that tell your nervous system the environment is safe, the environment is knowable, and the environment is predictable. So choose a daily routine that feels good for you, something that you want to commit to. I have a 5-year-old son. He makes his bed every single morning. We have the same routine every single morning. We get out of bed, we make the bed, we brush the teeth, we change our pants. Right? There's like this, you know, we go downstairs, we eat some food. There's this very clear map for what's going to happen. And what's, what's wild is if— and I've tried this on purpose— if we deviate from that, I notice my son's behavior just go absolutely berserk. All right, so we are the same. Number 3, learn to tolerate the unfamiliar without fleeing from it. So learn to tolerate, learn to build tolerance for things that are unknown, that are unfamiliar without running from it, without avoiding it, because the healthy, peaceful, coherent life feels full. Foreign, right? Remember, you're used to confusion and chaos. You're used to big question marks, and the brain is going to somewhat generate discomfort when you start to move towards coherence, uh, answering some of those questions, having predictability. It's not a sign that something's wrong. This is where a lot of guys start to shift away, is that they start to build these routines, they start to get some predictability in their life and their brain goes, "Uh-oh, I don't really like this. This feels foreign. This is a new pattern that I'm not really familiar with." But that little bit of anxiety, that little bit of fear, that little bit of worry is a sign that you're on the edge of your old map. You're moving into new terrain and territory. And there's some good research on this, on something called distress tolerance. And the neuroplasticity of the brain can obviously build new patterns. We all know that. But only if you stay present long enough with the new experiences in order for them to be encoded. So we have to stick with the routines. We have to stick with the deliberate daily actions in order for them to start to really build those new neural pathways. And this is, this is kind of like when calm feels uncomfortable, don't run from it. You know, all the guys are like, oh, I don't know how to be alone with my thoughts. Well, that's usually because it's chaotic inside of you. There's a lot of confusion inside of you. And that's the sign that you need to sit in it. You need to breathe in it. You need to allow your brain to collect new data that says, I can I can build tolerance. I can be in this state and still be okay. Number 4, stop trying to think your way to clarity. Stop trying to think your way to clarity. Get into your body, right? Confusion is a cognitive experience, okay? I'm gonna say it again. Confusion is a cognitive experience, but it started somatically. It started in your body. When you were a kid, that confusion wasn't so much like, why are mom and dad having this conversation? It was more physical in your body of, am I okay? Am I safe? And, you know, if you grew up in a chaotic environment, your nervous system was bracing, your nervous system was afraid, your nervous system was in fight, flight, or freeze, even when there was nothing to brace for. It was just the confusion of what's happening in my environment. I don't know why dad's yelling at me. I don't know why mom's shut down. I don't know why they're arguing. So practices like breathwork, cold exposure, movement, somatic therapy, all of these things are going to help to discharge some of that stored and pent-up tension, energy, and emotion, and allow the body to complete some of the stress cycles that were never really finished in childhood. Because here's the thing that I want you to know and understand about what it was like growing up in that confused state. Okay. If you resonate with everything that we've talked about so far, what happened in that state in those moments is that your body, your nervous system went into a stressed state. And usually for young boys that grew up in very confusing homes and there was very chaotic behaviors, those cycles never really got repaired. And so they stayed in a stressed state. And they stayed in a stress state, and then that sort of became their way of existing in the world, constantly and chronically in this stressed-out state. I can't calm down, I can't rest, I can't exhale. And so clarity often doesn't come from thinking harder, which is what many guys, almost every single dude I've ever worked with that grew up in a hyper-confusing environment, he's trying to think his way out of how he's feeling. He's trying to think his way out of the anxiousness or the tension or the chaos that's happening inside of him. And that is not going to work. So you need practices that are going to help to discharge the stored tension, the stored energy, the stored emotion from those incomplete stress cycles. And when I say stress cycles, I mean walking in through the door, saying hi to Dad and having him like lose his shit on you. And you're like, what the hell just happened? I'm so confused. I was saying hi. Hi. Okay, so that's number 4. Number 5, last one, is rewrite the story deliberately. The identity conclusions you made as a confused kid, again, were personalized, right? Something's wrong with me. I can never get this right. What am I doing to cause this? I don't know who I am. I don't know why I can't get my needs met. Those things weren't truth. They were your best attempt to make sense of the nonsensical, right? They were your best attempt to make sense of an environment that was chaotic, not because you were doing anything. So there's something called cognitive restructuring, and in cognitive restructuring research, and more recently in IFS, which many people are familiar with, Internal Family Systems, it shows that conclusions can be revisited, they can be updated, they can be replaced. So this conclusion of something must be wrong with me that, you know, mom and dad are fighting or I can't get my needs met, that can get updated, that can get revised. Instead of what did I do that caused this, we can shift to I'm actually okay, or I'm a good kid, or I was a good kid, My environment was chaotic. Nothing's wrong with me. My parents had a really unhealthy marriage. And so we start to separate our sense of self from the environment that we were in. So ask yourself, what did I decide or what did I learn about who I was inside that confusion? What did I learn? What did I take on about who I was? Because the challenge that so many guys experience is they're still living that same old script, that same old story. Something's wrong with me. I must be causing this dysfunction. So you have to consciously rewrite the script, and then you can ask yourself, what's actually true today? If I wasn't at cause for all of that chaos, What's true about me? And you can start to rewrite the story. So the bottom line is this, you are not your confusion and you are not the conclusions of a child that was created in chaos, okay? You did generally the best that you could. It's like that scene in Good Will Hunting where Robin Williams is like, it's not your fault, it's not your fault, it's not your fault. You took it on as your fault as a boy. What can I do about this? How do I change this? How am I causing this? What did I do to deserve this? All of that started to get personalized inside of you as a child, and that was deeply confusing. But there's nothing wrong with you. You weren't at fault for the environment you were in. You were a good kid, who was growing up in a chaotic environment. So if this resonates, comment below what stood out to you about this episode. What are you gonna implement from this episode? Please hold yourself accountable in the comments below. And as always, man it forward to somebody that you know needs to hear it and will enjoy it.