Masks, Shame, and Men

During the formative years of my life, I’ve worn a mask.

It wasn’t a costume I was wearing willfully or even aware of it.
But a version of myself shaped by circumstances and experiences that in most cases were outside my control.

Like many men, I thought being “good man” meant being agreeable.
I thought being strong meant staying silent. I thought being loved meant putting myself at the expense of others.
And all of it was a performance.

Dr. Robert Glover called this out in our conversation. This hidden identity crisis that so many men carry. He said most guys never saw real love between their parents. They never saw emotional truth or masculine presence. And so they learned to survive by pleasing, fixing, blending in and mimicking what they see from other men.

That hit hard—because in a way it was also part of my story.

I grew up around men who either disappeared, exploded, or demanded obedience.
And in that chaos, I shaped myself around what I thought a man should be.

Not based on strength, and good values, but on absence. Not on confronting life with truth, but on damage control.

But I’ve also been lucky.

Lucky enough to encounter strong, grounded masculine role models, men who didn’t posture, but also didn’t flinch.
Men who listened, who stood tall, who could say “no” with love and “yes” with responsibility.

Slowly, through them, and through the work, I began peeling the mask away or at least some of the masks I was wearing..
Not all at once.
But enough to start building a foundation that’s real.

2. Lessons Learned

There’s a line from No More Mr. Nice Guy that stopped me in my tracks:

“Nice Guys are often anything but nice.”

That’s the paradox.
Behind the helpfulness, the politeness, the easygoing nature, there’s often resentment. Exhaustion.
A quiet voice saying, “What about me?” but never out loud.

Glover calls this the covert contract:
“If I take care of everyone else, someone will finally take care of me.”

But no one ever signed that contract.
And that’s where the resentment begins.

He also talks about CRRs—Culturally Reflected Rules:
“Be nice. Be needed. Don’t be too much. Don’t need too much.”

And for a lot of us, those unspoken rules become a prison we don’t even notice.
Until the mask starts to crack.

One of the most radical things Glover said in our conversation was this:

“Nice Guys don’t know how to receive.”

And that’s real.

We deflect compliments. We turn down help. We hide our needs like they’re shameful.
But receiving doesn’t make you weak.
It makes you open—to love, to support, to truth.

3. Encouragement

If any part of this hits, I want to tell you something I wish someone told me sooner:

You don’t have to earn love by disappearing.
You don’t have to prove your worth by pleasing.
And you don’t have to keep wearing the mask.

You’re allowed to want.
You’re allowed to feel.
You’re allowed to lead—with strength and softness.

I don think this is about creating a new person that never existed, perhaps its just opening up the opportunity to finally allow yourself to be someone real.

The mask was never who you were.
It was who you thought you needed to be to survive.

But that’s not your job anymore.

Your job is to grow roots.
To choose truth.
And to build something stronger—starting with you.

The full conversation with Dr. Robert Glover is now live.
📩 Subscribe to Collective Project for more conversations that help us become who we were meant to be.

🗓 And next week, we shift gears. I’ll be sharing insights from my conversation with Dr. Leonor Carvalho, where we explore the quiet epidemic of burnout, the addiction to busyness, and how our bodies keep score when we don’t slow down.

You won’t want to miss that one.