The Hero Complex

While scrolling the internet, I came across something my friend Jimmy shared, and it struck me as a great writing prompt:

"Here I come to save the goddamned day."

That phrase explains why I became a psychotherapist. My journey from trying to fix myself naturally evolved into trying to save others. On one hand, I’m deeply motivated to help people. On the other hand, that same drive can unintentionally cause harm if not tempered with awareness.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with wanting to be of service to others. However, my efforts can backfire without a deeper understanding of my motivations and even create harm.

The notion that “if you can be helpful, you should be helpful” seems noble, but it’s not always that simple. The benefit quickly diminishes when I start doling advice like a Pez dispenser. Advice is often interpreted as criticism, and people rarely change when they feel criticized. Advice also implies the receiver lacks personal insight or experience with the problem. Yet, success is highly individual—there’s no universal recipe for solving the complex issues people face. Unlike baking a cake, where forgetting the egg might ruin the outcome, most problems are multifaceted. No single solution will fix them. Furthermore, advice often fails to account for the other person’s skill set, resources, or readiness to act.

In psychotherapy, countertransference—our thoughts and feelings about the client—adds another layer of complexity. Despite formal training, I still struggle with staying genuinely helpful without overstepping. It’s incredibly tempting when a client presents a problem in a way that seems to beg for a “fix.” With the best of intentions, I can still make things worse.

Here’s an example: When a client speaks, am I truly listening or just waiting for my turn to talk because I think I know the solution? Has my desire to solve their problem interfered with my ability to listen, validate, and offer empathy? That trilogy—listening, validation, and empathy—indeed facilitates change. Advice? Not so much. Am I secretly resenting the client for not following my advice? Am I dominating the session with my voice, inadvertently fostering their dependence on me and my “vast knowledge”? When clients share their distress, am I trying to cheer them up instead of sitting with their emotions? To the client, that might feel like I’m dismissing their experience.

There are countless ways to render therapy ineffective, and an unconscious hero complex is just one of them. While this post focuses on how that dynamic plays out in treatment, the same principles apply to relationships. Most of the time, my wife doesn’t want me to “fix” her problems. She wants me to listen, validate, and empathize.

While I may always carry some traces of a hero complex, awareness, and practice can help minimize its negative effects. Trying to save others is a profoundly human impulse, but it’s also a reminder that sometimes, the best way to help is simply to be present.

Exploring the Father-Son Relationship

A central issue some men face is a strained or poor relationship with their fathers. Our earliest relationships are the foundation for understanding ourselves, forming connections, and navigating the world. Questions like Who am I? What is a relationship? What can I expect from the world? Are first answered in childhood, often through our interactions with our parents. These early experiences shape how we relate to others as adults. Parental neglect, abuse, or even incompetence can leave lasting marks on how we approach relationships and life itself.

The intention here is not to blame fathers but to encourage personal accountability. Blaming others is easy; taking responsibility for where you are now as a man is much more complicated. If you’re reading this, it means you’ve survived your childhood—and that survival gives you the power to make changes. One step toward personal growth is to explore and reflect on your relationship with your father.

Revisiting the Father-Son Bond

As children, we may idealize our parents to feel safe, avoiding confrontation or protest to escape their anger or disapproval. But as adults, we have the opportunity—and perhaps the responsibility—to reassess these early relationships with a fresh perspective. Start by asking yourself some honest, reflective questions about your father:

• One of my earliest memories of my father is

• When I was a child, my father made me feel

• The way my father showed love when I was growing up was

• Something my father did that shaped who I am today is

• One thing I wish I understood better about my father is

• When I think about my father, I often feel

• A conversation with my father that stands out to me is

• One thing I want my father to do differently is

• I’ve learned to forgive my father for

• A way I can strengthen my relationship with my father is

• The Impact of Fatherly Relationships

You can learn much about a man by understanding his relationship with his father. Many men face sadness when reflecting on this bond, revealing emotions they rarely show. For instance, one man shared how his father’s absence during his childhood shaped him. He recounted how his stepbrother’s father would visit, sparking feelings of abandonment. “I would see him come to pick up my brother, and it made me long for my father. I would wonder, What did I do? Sometimes, he would take me along and even buy me things, but none of it erased my sense of being abandoned by my father.”

Such experiences can profoundly affect a man’s behavior and emotional well-being. Often, men are unaware that much of their present behavior is compensatory—anger masking more profound feelings of hurt, sadness, and even depression tied to their relationships with their fathers.

Moving Forward

Reflecting on your relationship with your father can be painful but also liberating. It allows you to recognize patterns, process unresolved feelings, and, if possible, build a stronger connection with your father. It will also help you become a better parent yourself. And even if reconciliation isn’t possible, this process can help you find healing and peace within yourself. Remember, understanding your past is a decisive step toward shaping a better future.

Understanding Reality Evasion: A Journey from Childhood to Adulthood

A reality evader defends against reality by avoiding, pretending, fantasizing, and lying in a childlike manner. This term captures the essence of their behavior in a non-judgmental, descriptive way. It highlights the defensive nature of their actions while acknowledging the underlying struggle to engage with reality directly.

To understand this behavior, let’s revisit its roots: childhood. Children who experience adverse childhood experiences often cope with vulnerability, dependence, and fear by employing mechanisms such as avoidance, pretending, fantasizing, and lying. These defenses help them navigate a reality they neither understand nor control. After all, what does a child know about the complexities of the world or how to process trauma? It’s safe to say that children have limited agency, skills, and information to deal with such situations.

Childhood determines the "rules" for how the world works. Experiences shape personality, and the skills used to survive adverse situations often become ingrained. Stress doesn’t simply come and go—it changes us. These changes are adaptive in a challenging environment, enabling survival. However, when the environment changes, those survival skills can become liabilities.

In adulthood, people often go to great lengths to avoid reality. This tendency can form the foundation of addictive behaviors or, as Dr. Philip J. Flores describes in his book Addiction as an Attachment Disorder, a “repair attempt that fails.”

The Need for a "Software Upgrade" in Adulthood

Welcome to adulthood—where childhood coping mechanisms often require a "software upgrade." It may be time to reevaluate your operating system if you navigate adult life and relationships using the same rules you learned as a child. While avoidance, pretending, fantasizing, and lying may have served a purpose, their effectiveness in adult relationships deserves scrutiny.

Avoidance and deception can sometimes be necessary, but their overuse can hinder personal growth and connection. Below are prompts to help you explore how childhood coping skills may influence adult interactions. These exercises encourage deeper self-awareness and emotional development.

Prompts for Self-Exploration

Exploring Avoidance

"When faced with something uncomfortable, I tend to avoid it by ________."

"The situations I most try to avoid are ________ because ________."

"A recent example of avoiding reality in my life was when ________."

Exploring Pretending

"Sometimes, I pretend everything is fine by ________."

"I feel the need to act like ________ when deep down, I know ________."

"Pretending helps me avoid feeling ________, but it also costs me ________."

Exploring Fantasizing

"When reality feels too hard to face, I escape into fantasies about ________."

"The ideal world I imagine looks like ________, and it helps me avoid ________."

"I use my imagination to create scenarios where ________, but in reality, ________."

Exploring Lying

"I find myself lying about ________ because I’m afraid of ________."

"The lies I tell myself are often about ________, which helps me ignore ________."

"Lying feels like a way to control ________, even though it ultimately makes me feel ________."

General Reflection

"The pattern I notice in how I evade reality is ________."

"I’ve learned to use these defenses because ________, but now they’re keeping me from ________."

"Facing reality feels hard because ________, but if I could, I believe I’d gain ________."

In Summary

Many behavioral challenges can be traced back to childhood experiences. Understanding and compassionately examining those early experiences can connect the dots between what happened then and now. This awareness can empower us to let go of outdated defenses and embrace a more grounded, authentic way of living.

What If It’s You?

Relationships are challenging for everyone. After the shine of a new relationship wears off, it’s very easy to feel discontent. When things go well, we take credit. When things go bad, we place blame. But what if it’s you? What if you are the reason your situation is miserable? What if you cannot recognize your role in the relationship you are co-creating with your partner?

The Pros of Asking, "What If It’s Me?"

1. Personal Growth and Awareness

Taking responsibility for your actions and attitudes fosters self-awareness and helps you identify areas for personal growth. This self-reflection can improve not only your relationship but also your overall well-being. Understanding your triggers, patterns, and emotional responses makes you better equipped to handle challenges constructively.

2. Empowerment to Change

Recognizing your role in relationship challenges gives you the power to make positive changes. Focusing on what “you” can control reduces feelings of helplessness. It’s liberating to realize that you can shift your behaviors or mindset to help repair or strengthen the bond with your partner.

3. Healthier Communication

You may approach conflicts with more empathy and understanding by reflecting on your behavior. This reflection can lead to healthier, more productive conversations. Acknowledging your role often encourages your partner to do the same, creating a foundation for mutual respect and collaboration.

The Cons of Ignoring Personal Growth, Empowerment, and Healthy Communication

1. Stagnation in Relationships

Without personal growth, individuals may become stuck in repeating negative patterns, leading to frustration and dissatisfaction in their intimate relationships. This stagnation can create a sense of being “stuck” without resolution, making connecting and thriving as a couple harder.

2. Loss of Agency

Ignoring the possibility of personal empowerment can make you feel like a passive victim of circumstances. This lack of control may foster resentment or a sense of helplessness, further eroding the relationship. Over time, this dynamic can lead to emotional disengagement.

3. Escalation of Conflict

Avoiding healthier communication means unresolved issues may fester, leading to miscommunication, frequent arguments, or emotional disconnection. This avoidance often deepens relational rifts, making it harder to rebuild trust or intimacy.

The Challenges of Self-Reflection

While asking, “What if it’s me?” is a powerful tool for growth, it also comes with potential pitfalls.

Potential for Overthinking: Self-reflection, when taken to the extreme, can lead to excessive rumination or self-blame. This may harm your confidence and emotional well-being, leaving you feeling inadequate or overly responsible for relational issues.

Neglecting Mutual Responsibility: Focusing too much on your actions may overshadow relationships as a two-way dynamic. Your partner’s behavior and choices also play a role, and neglecting this reality can lead to an imbalance in the relationship.

Risk of Emotional Burnout: Constantly questioning yourself without balancing self-compassion can lead to emotional fatigue, making it harder to engage meaningfully in the relationship. Reflection should be balanced with self-kindness and boundaries.

Final Thoughts

When you ask, “What if it’s me?” you open the door to greater self-awareness, empowerment, and healthier communication. However, it’s equally important to approach this reflection with balance. Relationships thrive on mutual responsibility, so while owning your part is essential, don’t lose sight of the shared dynamic between you and your partner. Personal growth is a journey, and recognizing your role in your relationship can be one of the most rewarding steps you take—not only for your relationship but for yourself.

Intimacy and the Power of Conflict

When we talk about intimacy, we often frame it in romantic terms, focusing on closeness with a partner. But this perspective overlooks one of the most intriguing aspects of relationships: conflict. Intimacy isn’t limited to romantic moments; it also reveals itself during disagreements.

You can learn more about how someone truly feels about you in a heated argument than you might over months or years of quiet togetherness. Conflict can uncover hidden truths—beliefs, feelings, and perceptions that might never surface except in heightened emotions.

Conflict as a Window Into Values

We see conflict everywhere—at home, school, workplace, and relationships. It is an integral part of the human condition.

Conflict lays bare values, needs, and perspectives like nothing else. Consider this: when your heart beats calmly at 60 beats per minute, you are one version of yourself. But when it accelerates to 100 beats per minute during conflict, you become someone entirely different. Granted, about 80% of what we say under stress may be exaggerated or unfiltered, but the other 20% often cuts straight to the truth.

The challenge is that as conflict escalates, both people can get pushed beyond their emotional limits, becoming too defensive to hear or process what the other is honestly saying. This communication breakdown often leads to misunderstanding and missed opportunities for connection.

Conflict as a Tool for Closeness

Conflict, when approached with intention, can deepen intimacy. Instead of avoiding arguments, use them to understand your partner better. The next time you disagree, take a few deep breaths and reflect on what your partner is saying. Shift your mindset from defensiveness to curiosity.

Listening shows that you see and hear them and take their concerns seriously. This validation can help your partner calm down, creating space for meaningful connection. Like finding money on the ground, their expressed needs are a gift—you no longer have to guess what they want, allowing you to meet those needs more effectively.

Embracing Conflict

Here’s the truth: avoiding conflict kills relationships. Disagreements are not inherently violent or destructive; they are growth opportunities. When you approach conflict with curiosity and openness, it becomes a powerful tool for building closeness and understanding.

• Don’t fear conflict—embrace it. Use it to deepen your connection and strengthen your relationship.

• Main Takeaways:

• Conflict is a natural and essential part of all relationships.

• Avoidance doesn’t prevent problems; it creates distance.

• Conflict is a form of intimacy.

• Disagreements can build closeness when approached mindfully.

• Destroying conflict destroys the relationship.

• Conflict does not equal violence.

• Choose curiosity over defensiveness for healthier outcomes.

Fight Better

I recently read an article entitled, “How to Save a Relationship that’s Struggling (and When it’s Best to Let it Go)” by Jessica Estrada. Estrada offered numerous suggestions. The one I want to focus on here is fight better. Because in my clinical experience, working with couples interested in improving or saving their relationships, I stress learning to fight better.

Relationships can be challenging—even good ones. The emotional turmoil evoked by a failing relationship can make it difficult to determine if it can be saved or not. You may not have a very good understanding of how your behavior changes during a conflict or how you contribute to the conflict escalating. When things go well we take credit. When things go bad we place blame. You can't improve or save a relationship without improving your self-awareness. It's essential. Anything else is like trying to bake a cake without cracking an egg.

Even if you successfully avoid conflict, it can be the death knell for the relationship as resentments accumulate creating frustration, and distance between you and your partner. As you tiptoe around your partner in a vain attempt to protect them from your thoughts and feelings, self-betrayal rationalized as keeping the peace, more accurately amounts to holding your breath. Sooner or later, you have to breathe. Avoidance is useful sometimes, but rarely useful all of the time.

Emotional intimacy occurs under two conditions in a relationship. When you feel romantically bound to your partner and when you are in conflict with them. During romance, you whisper sweet nothings and express your deepest loving feelings to them. During conflict, on the other hand, you express other important thoughts and feelings about your partner and the relationship—things you might never say otherwise. In both instances, you communicate important information about how you view the relationship.

Learning to fight better actually means learning to communicate and control your own behavior better. Both of which are skills you can practice and improve. The trick to fighting better is to express yourself in a way that does not blame, hurt, or antagonize your partner. You want to help them hear and understand you rather than cower and withdraw from your wrath. If you find yourself fighting constantly over the same thing it might be because your conflicts are destructive rather than constructive. The object is to unlearn how to win—in the sense of using destructive power and tactics over them. Learning is winning. Solving problems and maintaining the connection is winning. Engaging in constructive conflict is the key.

Investing time to learn about your own conflict style and how conflicts work could help you acquire the skills necessary to fight better. Improving your tactics could increase intimacy, learning, and security between you and your partner. With those strengths, you could be well on your way to revitalizing the relationship.

There’s a way to improve your skill set. Me and my colleague, psychologist Dr. Lorie Hill have designed a digital course entitled Constructive Conflict to help you learn how to fight better. You can improve. Hit the link above and take a look at what we have created for you.

A New Way to Live

How do you want to live your life? If you want to make any changes you’ll need to wrestle with that question. Often we get so caught up pursuing the "American Dream," and following the dictates of others, that we fail to ask ourselves what we want. It’s as though pursuing the dream lulls us to sleep.

Too much automatic pilot mode can make you feel dissatisfied. Failure to identify and meet your own needs, clips your wings. Assisting others and following through on commitments can be accomplished without losing yourself in the process. The toll of ignoring your needs is too great. I’m not promoting selfishness nor encouraging you to ignore others. My suggestion would be to keep your needs in focus. To borrow an adage from personal finance, “pay yourself first.” My intuition suggests that if you had more resources, time, money, acceptance, gratitude, or creativity, you would have more to give to those you care about.

Lack of self-awareness may be preventing you from reducing stress and increasing personal satisfaction. If you are working yourself so strenuously that you’re over-extended emotionally, financially, and physically, you can’t be happy.

We all need time to reflect. It’s OK to interrupt what you’re doing to give yourself what you need. Repressing your feelings and desires can make you disappear from your own life. It never works to show up in everyone else's life but your own. Breaking out of that habit requires pressing the reset button and reorganizing your priorities in a more sustainable way.

What would your life be like if you had more disposable time? I don’t imagine you would fritter it away. I believe you would read a book, start a creative project, go to the gym, organize your stuff. These kinds of pursuits would rejuvenate you, increase your confidence and overall competencies, enabling you to meet your other priorities more creatively.

What do you think would happen if you took the time to reflect on your thoughts, feelings, and priorities? You’ll have to decide if you want to stage the experiment and find out. It’s worth a try. You’re worth a try. Your family is worth a try.