Survival Mechanisms As a result of their childhood abandonment experiences and the inaccurate interpretation of these events, all Nice Guys developed survival mechanisms to help them do three very important things: 1) Try to cope with the pain and terror caused by their abandonment experiences. 2) Try to prevent these abandonment experiences from occurring again. 3) Try to hide their toxic shame from themselves and others. For Nice Guys, these survival mechanisms took the form of the
