“Modern Mating Explained” is a special seminar series that explores the deeper psychological bases for mating in the modern world.

For over a decade, David Tian, Ph.D., has helped hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find happiness, success, and fulfillment in their social, professional, and love lives. His presentations – whether keynotes, seminars, or workshops – leave clients with insights into their behavior, psychology, and keys to their empowerment. His training methodologies are the result of over a decade of coaching and education of thousands of students around the world. Join him in this special seminar series as he explores deep questions of the psychological bases for mating in the modern world. Subscribe now.

Connect with David Tian here:

Website: https://www.davidtianphd.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/davidtianphd
DTPHD Podcast Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/dtphdpodcast/
Man Up Show Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/manupcommunity/
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAuraUniversity
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidtianphd/
Spreaker: https://www.spreaker.com/show/the-man-up-show-by-david-tian-ph-d
Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/davidtianphd/sets/the-man-up-show-by-david-tian-phd
Itunes: https://itunes.apple.com/ph/podcast/man-up-show-masculinity-for-intelligent-man-david-tian/id1356372719?mt=2
IheartRadio: https://www.iheart.com/podcast/53-the-man-up-show-by-28665066/
Anchor: https://anchor.fm/davidtian
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4t4b9XleG2nvycZDuXc8Mp?si=_XFnuVulQGu1shs4P_GOyw
Medium: https://medium.com/@davidtian
Twitter: https://twitter.com/davidtianphd
LinkedIn: https://sg.linkedin.com/in/davidtianphd

Narcissism & Codependency, The 3 Big Myths of Charisma Coaching

• David Tian Ph.D. debunks the three myths that guys who engage in pick-up end up swallowing.

• David Tian Ph.D. describes how a codependent becomes a narcissist.

• According to psychotherapist, Karen Horney, there are three general coping strategies for childhood trauma, Dr.Tian expounds on them.

• In this talk, David Tian Ph.D. discusses the vicious cycle fixers get into.

A couple of things I wanted to point out that I forgot to point out yesterday is that there are three very pernicious myths that guys who begin to engage in — who begin learning pick-up or down that road of learning game, in a way where they have to change part of who they are, their own identity to become the identity of a sexually-attractive man or something. So, like, real natural game or — and in fact, any kind of surface-level game as well where you’re learning lines, or routines, or stories, or things like that, DHVs, and all that stuff.

There are three myths that they end up swallowing. I don’t want to swallows these three myths. So, the first myth is — I’m just going to go over these three myths and then we’re going to roll into the narcissism. We’ll pick up where we left off. The first myth is the belief that they actually know what the problem is. And so, the myth is that the problem is obvious. They don’t know what to say, or they need more courage, or they need to dress better, or something like that. They think those are the problems. Here are some typical problems that aren’t really problems, they’re actually symptoms, but these symptoms are confused as problems.

So, I’ll give you some examples. Any difficulty attracting women. So, anything along the lines of, “I have difficulty attracting her.” This is not the problem. That’s the symptom of the problem. Difficulty getting physical with a woman. Difficulty asserting himself, whether with a woman, or with a man, or with a group. Constantly sabotaging or continually, frequently, sabotaging one’s relationships. That’s another problem. That’s another problem, symptom, that’s considered to be a problem. Social anxiety or awkwardness, it’s actually a symptom of a deeper problem.

Being uptight, or having weak frames, or not being adventurous, or being too risk-averse, these are all symptoms of a deeper problem. The problem with the pick-up approach or the learning game approach is that they address the symptoms, not the deeper problems. And the reason why that’s dangerous is because it’s a pure palliative but you think it’s a cure. Imagine you actually have a shotgun wound from being shot by a shotgun, and you think, “Oh, well, I’ll just cover it up.” Because you think that the problem is you have red stuff dripping out of your body and that’s embarrassing.

So, instead of actually getting the bullet out and healing, you just get some big-ass Band-Aids and you tape it all over yourself. And you think, “Oh, bleeding stopped. I’m great.” And you walk around continue on with life. And in the meantime, the whole thing’s rotting, and festering, and it actually spreads, the infection spreads the rest of your body and you lose your arm. And all of this is because you actually didn’t see that the symptom wasn’t the problem. The blood dripping wasn’t the problem. It was the wound.

What is the actual problem underlying all of these different symptoms? Difficulty attracting women, difficulty getting physical, difficulty asserting yourself, social anxiety, and so on. What is the actual problem? Well, there are more than one problem. I’ll give you some examples. Very commonly, it has to do with shame and unresolved trauma or unresolved perceived trauma. Also, the deeper problem is unmet needs, pursuit in unhealthy ways, in negative ways. There are also people following disempowering rules for their lives or believing in disempowering conditions to meet those needs, or they’re just white knights.

I’ve covered white knight syndrome and pleasers in other videos. Or they’re significance-driven achievers and that’s all tied back to having deep core insecurities. These are the underlying problems, but everyone learning game is really only attending to those symptoms. And they think that, “Well, if enough people like me, then I’ll be confident.” And then if they actually go through the process of externally getting that change coming out from the outside, coming from the outside, and they actually change who they are, and they get all these people liking them, they think they’re healed.

But this is just like — you have a wound and you get a big-ass Band-Aid big enough to cover all of the blood and you stop bleeding. All you’ve succeeded in doing is stop bleeding, but now it’s actually going to get worse because you haven’t treated the wound. Game trains you to be obsessed with symptoms and completely blind and ignorant of the problems. And then when somebody like me tells you what the problems are, you go, “Give me a break. I’m fine. I’m not that bad. I don’t have any childhood trauma. I have nice parents.” You have no clue, so I say this because I used to be like that.

I could’ve read these books and these resources and I could’ve met these people much earlier, but I, too, was willfully ignorant of the deeper psychology of it. I was just more on the social psych, the evolutionary psych. In other words, the Machiavellian manipulation psych. So, actually getting into — what do clinical psychologists actually do? And learning about myself that way, I finally understood the deeper problems. But of course, I had been ignoring the deeper problem for so long and just treating symptoms for so long that my fall became — what was much greater than yours generally will be, because I went much deeper down the rabbit hole.

So, that’s the first myth: thinking that the symptoms are problems. The second myth is thinking that even if you were to step back and say, “Okay, let’s do inner game instead.” And you think, “David’s an inner game guy.” Depending on how that term is meant, it may be true. But PUA inner game, or ‘game’ inner game is still fucked up. It’s still wrong. It’s still going to be dangerous because inner game is still filtered through external validation and outcome dependence. In other words, you know when your inner game is good when you get the reaction on the outside. So, you know the game is good when the girls like you now.

And so, it’s still the same, it’s just a different method of getting to the same result, the same — covering up the same symptoms. And this results in PUAs, and very professional PUAs who’ve been around for many years, having constant nervous breakdowns. Every year, every two years, the same guy will have a nervous breakdown and go drama. Because some girl that he actually cared about cheated on him, betrayed him, rejected him, or something along those lines, more drama.

And PUAs have a lot of drama in their lives, actually, and they’re constantly talking about how they’re fighting drama: drama this, drama that, drama this, or drama that. They’re not actually understanding why the drama is there. Here’s an example of a tactic, teaching, or lesson, that would fall out of believing this myth, believing that PUA inner game isn’t outcome dependent.

Here’s an example: If any time a PUA coach or game coach teaches you to be like some celebrity. In my day, it was like, “Act like George Clooney!” But nowadays, I hear things like, “Be like Donald Trump!” Like, Trump Game. I don’t know if you’ve guys seen that, Trump Game. Or it could be anything. It could be like Brad Pitt Game back in the days. The superficial way of doing that celebrities game is act like that celebrity: dress like him, have your hair like him, body language and tonality like him.

For instance, if you were to say, “You want to learn how to pass shit tests? Well, be like George Clooney. He just brushes them off.” And so, you get what you perceive to be a shit test and you do what you think George Clooney would do and you just brush it off. And you think, “Yes! I succeeded! That’s inner game.” But of course, that’s not, because all you’ve done is parrot the behavior.

But then the inner game guys say, “No. What you need to do is take on the beliefs that George Clooney has while he’s doing this.” Okay, well, in that case then how did they do this? Well, they just do affirmations over and over and over they say things like, “It’s always on. She wants me.” I’ve done this for many years so I know what that’s like. And then you try to replace your thoughts with the thoughts of this supposed mythical, idealistic celebrity figure. And he must think this way, so I’ll be like Trump, or I’ll be like Clooney, or I’ll be like Pitt, or whatever it is.

The problem with that is that you’ve totally missed the point. You’ve totally missed the point of you. They are actually going down the very dark rabbit hole of going from a co-dependent to becoming a narcissist, which are two sides of the same coin. They’re now actually taking on new thoughts because their current thoughts, well, those are not good enough. They’re shameful. Let’s not attend to those. Let’s not ask ourselves why we have those thoughts. Let’s just get rid of them and replace them with these celebrities’ thoughts. In other words, they shit on their current self to take on a new false self. And that new false self happens to be a celebrity that gets girls.

So, why do you take on that guy’s thoughts rather than somebody else’s thoughts? Well, because he has the results, and inner game is always going to still be filtered through outcome-dependent external validation frames. You’re picking this guy to replace your thoughts with his thoughts because he’s getting pussy. So, you’ve shit on your current self, and you’ve taken on a new false self, and you’ve already started down the path to becoming a co-dependent narcissist.

The third myth is that her response is mostly in your control. That’s not true, right? Obviously, but if you were to just look at that, you’d be like, “Yeah, okay. I get that.” But that’s not how they treat it. That’s now how game treats your responsibility in it. They make you write field reports, and lay reports, and they make you analyze your interaction. How did it go? What could you have improved?

And this is really attractive and makes a lot of sense to most guys, especially guys who would be attracted to game, because guys who would be attracted to game are, in some sense, usually co-dependent. And that co-dependent already has a natural urge to blame himself for failures in relationships. And what it does, is it takes the co-dependent’s natural urge to blame himself or failures and interactions in relationships and it masks it as a positive thing.

It’s a good thing you’re analyzing the shit out of a tiny conversation. It’s a good thing. It’s called field report analysis. And then it also brings out the co-dependent’s natural urge to persist, to stay at the thing that’s not working. It just believes that everything that goes wrong is my fault. Everything that goes wrong in this interaction is the man’s fault because it could’ve been prevented or corrected if you had the right tactic, or the right strategy, or the right method, or the right line, or whatever the fuck you’re asking for me as a pick-up artist boy.

You think, “If I just had that, if would go well.” That’s neurotic. That’s exactly what a co-dependent would think. That’s how a co-dependent already thinks. So, this is great. This is why it’s so easy for PUAs to prey on co-dependent males. That’s why most people who get into PUA and game started out as co-dependents, to fit in with their natural inclinations, the natural way they thought. And so, the truth obviously is the opposite. Her response is not mostly in your control, and you don’t want to attract every woman. You couldn’t even fuck them all, but what is that? That’s the co-dependent’s wet dream. “Finally, if I can fuck all the women, I’m enough! I’ll show them I am good enough now!”

Of course, he doesn’t think he is good enough until he can do that. This is the co-dependent’s trap. And here’s a good example, taking excerpts from The Game by Neil Strauss. We’re not going to analyze Neil Strauss, but we’ll look at how Neil Strauss analyzes Erik von Markovik, Mystery, in the book, The Game. And so, all I’m going to do is read it out and it’ll be quite obvious if you have theoretical background so far, right, on narcissism. So, I’ll read it.

He says, so I’m quoting it right from the book, “I don’t like it –” Okay, this is Mystery talking. “”I don’t like it when someone tells me what to do. My dad used to tell me what to do and I hate him.” And then Neil says, “Well, I’m not your dad.” And then Mystery says, “Thank god for that. He ruined my life and my mom’s life.” He pulled his hat up, tears lay over his eyes like contact lenses, unable to escape on their own. “I used to lie in bed at night thinking of ways to kill my dad. When I got really depressed, I’d imagine going to his bedroom with a shovel, smashing his head in and then killing myself.” He paused and wiped his eyes with the back of his gloved hand.””

“”When I think of my father, I think of violence,” he continued. “I remember seeing him punch people in the face when I was really young. When we had to kill our dog, he took a gun out and blew his head off right in front of me.” His father, he said, was an alcoholic German immigrant who verbally and physically abused him. His brother who was 14 years older than him was gay, and his mother blamed herself for smothering his brother with love to make up for her husband’s abuse. So, to compensate, she was emotionally distant from Mystery.”

“When he was a still virgin at age 21, he began to worry that maybe he was gay. So in a bout of depression, he began formulating what would become the Mystery method: dedicating his life to pursuing the love he never received from his parents.” Wow, Neil, that is really good. That is actually very astute. Of course, it’s always hard to analyze yourself. It’s so much easier to analyze others. It is easy, actually, in my opinion, to theorize. The hard part, in my opinion, is the emotional work, so I have a lot of respect for psychotherapists who do the vulnerability work.

I try to be as vulnerable as I can. I’m going to be more vulnerable on the recordings, but you know, I do what I can do. But anyways, it should be pretty obvious for you if you’ve been through any of my multi-week courses like Rock Solid Relationships, or even Invincible, which is like the beginning of understanding the psychology, but really just the beginning. Or Lifestyle Mastery, which is pretty deep. Why Mystery would’ve been so suicidally depressed because of girls and their rejection of him or the betrayal of him, perceived betrayal — because of his family background, his upbringing.

That’s pretty bad. I mean, there was a movie — I mean, if this is true, right? There’s this movie, a spy movie. It’s set in a really great suit shop in Britain. Kingsman, thank you. So, the first Kingsman, they had to pass the test. To pass the test, they had to kill the dog, right? So, if you haven’t seen it, I’m not going to spoil it for you, but they’re supposed to kill the dog. And you think, “Woah, that’s horrible.” That happened to Mystery, apparently, according to Neil Strauss. If that’s not a traumatic thing for a child to see, I guess there are other worse things that could’ve happened, but that’s pretty bad.

And one thing that will happen is — what will happen with a co-dependent is that the co-dependent swings to narcissism and they swing back and forth. And when the narcissist can’t get enough narcissistic supply, he becomes a co-dependent again and they just swing back and forth like that. The dangerous thing is, you might be co-dependent now, but once you get — you could persist at that journey of learning game and go for hundreds of cold approaches and all of that, maybe a thousand. Back in my day, it was a thousand to even just get your yellow belt, to lose your white belt.

You go down that road and what’ll happen is you’ll end up just becoming a narcissistic, a compensatory narcissist. And now, we’re picking up the themes from last time. You know, continue there and finish off here and then we’ll take a break. So, where we ended there was the relationship between the co-dependent and the narcissist predator, or any kind of cluster B predator, or any woman who gives a shit a lot, really cares about getting the admiration, approval, and attention from others.

What’ll happen in the end, is that the predator will try to bleed the victim dry, the co-dependent victim, and the predator will keep the victim on standby as emergency supply for ego supply, for narcissistic supply. What that would look like in real life is that she’ll text him whenever she needs his attention. When he texts her, she’ll ignore it or take a long time to reply unless she’s in the mood. But then when she needs him, she texts him and demands him to be there. So, he’s the shoulder to cry on, or he’s there to make her feel better about herself.

There are so many white knights who will rush to do that. So, if you go to the Man Up group, it’s quite a common theme in the questions of the new guys in there that they’re stuck in this white knight sort of friend zone limbo, and they are basically co-dependents being bled dry by some woman who is taking advantage of him. What’ll eventually happen is the predator gets bored. She’ll either [INAUDIBLE 00:17:09] from that victim and then get bored with that individual and just basically drop him, at which time he would come to the Man Up group and ask his question, or maybe just before that.

Or the fixer victim finally has enough. He reaches rock-bottom and then becomes passive-aggressive, because that’s how co-dependents deal with issues. They won’t tell it to her face, they’ll just get really angry and want to get back at her somehow. So, either way, you can see how dysfunctional that would be. So, to solve this problem, to resolve the issue, you’ve got to understand how it began. What are the origins of this dynamic? The best thing to do is to understand the victim. That’s you, ostensibly, I’m talking to you. I doubt the predators will even listen to me. I have no interest in that, unless they’ve been broken down, like an alcoholic comes out of the bender. And for a little while, he’ll listen to reason. Right?

So, anyway, I’m talking to the victims. And there are many different terms that I’ve been using to denote the victims: these are white knight, fixer, caretakers, the rescuer, the hero complex guy, the nice guy, the co-dependent. These are all terms that are basically referring to the same sort of thing, a constellation of terms that are picking out different aspects of this type of character. The core issues that this person has that are preventing him from experiencing passion and fulfillment with a relationship is a neediness that comes from childhood, from infancy.

Neediness from infancy, feelings of inferiority stemming from being in a weak, helpless, dependent condition, or at least he perceives it to be a weak, helpless, dependent condition. So, I’ll explain this in a lot more detail as we go forward. And then there’s this transitional phase in childhood where he begins to have his first boundary violations, which is where he becomes responsible, he feels that he is responsible for his parent’s emotions. This starts the whole pattern where this is what he’s used to love feeling like. This is how love must be. And so, he needs love, because that’s an important feeling for everybody, every human being. In fact, that’s possibly what the thing that sustained us as a species.

He needs to go and feel it, but his way of playing it out is in this co-dependent relationship where his boundaries are violated constantly; where he’s made to feel dependent and responsible for their emotions. And there are three strategies for dealing with this boundary violation and any other traumas that occur. They can be various because it’s all about perception. What you would consider traumatic as a one-year old would be very different from what you consider traumatic as a 35-year old. But it’s subjective, so it doesn’t take very much to traumatize a one-year old. I did take that much for you. Of course, if you experience real trauma as a one-year old, it is very difficult to get you out of that as you become an adult.

So, the earlier the trauma occurs, the more difficult it will be to recover from it. I’m speaking from all of the research in PTSD, comparing that to dealing with trauma from sexual abuse as a child, that PTSD is actually a lot easier to therapize and treat than it is somebody who had sexual abuse as a child. The brain is that much more malleable when you were younger.

So, there are three general coping strategies. Karen Horney, a brilliant psychotherapist and brilliant theorist, I recommend all of her books to all of you. They’re relatively difficult to get through. When I first read them, I found them very difficult. She’s a direct student of Jung and part of that circle with Freud and so on, but she’s a later student. Anyway, she has a great formulation of thinking of the three strategies that we cope with as a child to trauma, and challenge, and adversity in this way. They are basically — it’s a nice rubric, which is to move towards, move against, or move away.

Moving towards is what the co-dependent did. He’s trying to get love by coming forward, and that’s the achiever or the pleaser. He emotionally and physically gives and self-sacrifices, hoping one day it will finally be his turn to receive, but he’s going to give and give and give because that please mom and dad and it worked in that moment. It worked in that time and he tried that again. And very likely, we tried all of those strategies and we eventually settled on one as our dominant strategy. That’s one, moving towards, which is sort of like a surrender. That person becomes a pleaser, or achiever, or something along those lines.

It could also be the joker, the joker kid who learns to adapt to bullying or whatever other perceived trauma by making light of it and entertaining, by entertaining. Another is move away, and that’s the flee or the flight reaction. This is where you have emotional and physical withdrawal. They become hermits. And then the other one — and probably if you’re having trouble with women, you didn’t choose this route, because if you did, there are a lot of neurotic women who would be very sexually attracted to you, and this is the fight reaction. This is the move against. You fight. You rebel. You give as little as possible while taking as much as possible. This is the strategy that was taken by cluster B disordered people, the fight.

So, there are these three different — broadly speaking, these three different coping strategies that have now set the pattern for the rest of your fucking life. Now that you understand this, the strategy that you settled on as your dominant strategy, your default strategy, can explain the difficulties that you have with women. Or the success — if you’re a bad boy rebel and got a criminal record — you probably wouldn’t be watching this if you did, this is like the Iceberg Slim route.

So, you have this core neediness, and this relates directly to the goals of our lives. How do we get love? Because it goes back to what I call the twin terrors. The biggest fears of all homo sapiens are two things. And in fact, they draw back to one, but the two big fears, what I call the twin terrors, are the fear that you’re not enough. The reason you’re afraid fundamentally that you’re not good enough, that you’re not worthy, that you’re not enough for that girl — which is what causes your approach anxiety, that you’re not good enough, which is why you have to take on Donald Trump’s thoughts instead of your own, and all of this deep insecurity that you’re not good enough. You’re afraid of that, and that’s why you stumble when you talk to women. You don’t think you’re good enough.

The reason you’re afraid of that fundamentally is because if you’re not good enough, you won’t get love. When our brains were being formed, if we didn’t get love, what would’ve happened? When you come out of the womb, can you hunt and gather for yourself? All the other animals in the animal kingdom, most of the ones, are able to start walking within the first day. They’re able to at least get some food or whatever, or they have a much better chance of surviving than a human baby.

The human baby is the most defenseless animal baby ever. In fact, it pops out prematurely because the fucking brain is too big and our brains didn’t evolve — our female bellies didn’t evolve big enough to keep carrying around these gigantic babies. But you know, it should’ve popped out when it was two years old, but for some reason, the brain evolved faster than the stomach, and boom, come out premature. You can barely see as a little baby. You can barely see a foot in front of you. It’s just all glossy and everything is just so cold versus the nice, warm womb.

Now, the liquid doesn’t come whenever you want it. It’s just not always there and it’s not warm and comforting. That’s why it’s so important to hold the baby, the infant, as soon as it’s born and start that skin-to-skin conductance and that touch. So, it starts when we were children. When we were children, we believed that if we don’t get love, then we will die, and it is a true belief. If some adult doesn’t love you enough to give you food and shelter, you’re dead. This fear is right in the core of our bodies, and this is the primordial fear, the fear of death. It all goes back to the fear of death.

And there’s an amazing book by Ernest Becker called The Denial of Death. I’d recommend it to everybody that is probably the best statement, explanation of this fear. It’s actually so grand that it’s even hard to summarize that book. We have these fundamental fears that are driving us. We believe that if we can finally be enough, that all of our worries will disappear. We believe if we achieve these narcissistic goals, for instance, that will get the attention, the approval that we want, that the girl will like us — finally, we can be ourselves. We can be proud of who we are and speak our minds and not be afraid, not have anxiety to meet somebody.

And your fundamental inferiority will finally disappear. There are three ways of looking at this that track the three childhood coping strategies. And they are: the fixer. The fixer is the one that moves towards. The fixer’s narcissistic goal is to find someone to please or to find someone to impress or to fix in the way he could never do for his parent figure, because you can’t really ever fix anyone but you want that love to be guaranteed. So, you take that responsibility on for yourself, and that’s how you know how love works, and then you go and try to get love in the same way from everyone else including the woman, because the woman is the only other primary source of love besides your parents in your life. The strongest, the most intense, right?

And then another strategy is the move against. That becomes the predator. If you stay with that, you’ll eventually end up being — like the more extreme rebels, if you just keep with it, you never really get socialized in society and all of this. You’re just like, fuck, you’re the man, the whole time, right? And very likely in relationships, you’ll end up being a predator. Now, you might not be cluster B predator. That’s like the big sharks, but generally speaking, you’ll be some sort of predator who will feel the need to appear perfect and you have this need to successfully demand others to fill your needs. In other words, you’ll be going around as the bully, the emotional bully.

Or like I said, if you’re a cluster B predator, you’re literally like a blood-sucking vampire. And then the third is the recluse, and sometimes I work with these people. The recluse is the guy who decided to move away from. That’s the hermit. The recluse, his narcissistic goal is to avoid all people so as to avoid feelings of worthlessness. What happens is some people start off as recluses, and then they want to learn how to pick up chicks. That is really an interesting transformation, because all of his life, he was all about avoiding people, so that he could avoid feeling worthless because they make him feel worthless.

But now, he’s missing love. He’s missing connection. He’s missing companionship, so he puts himself out there again and gets hurt over and over. What’ll happen as he gets hurt so many times, it is actually going to help him become more traumatized, and he can split off and dissociate from that self. He gets a new personality. This is in other words how multiple personality happens, but it’ll happen more cleanly with him because that triggers him so much worse. He’s been avoiding it for so long. The fixer, the predator, and the recluse.

Here’s some other examples of narcissistic goals that you might find among the different coping strategies that everybody has. They’re just straight up narcissistic goals, not confined to any one coping strategy. One is a high-status career or a high-status anything. People are focused on high-status and obsessed with being perceived as high-status, or attaining high status. People who think about status. Status versus actually creating something, like a thing that’s valuable.

This is like the kid who cares about the grade, not the stuff he learns in the course. That’s an annoying kid, by the way. I used to be that. That’s not a very good way of getting the grade either, by the way, but high status. Another is the woman who finds a sugar daddy to feed on. There are all these websites where you go on saying, “I’m a sugar daddy” or “I’m willing to be a sugar daddy.” And then there are women who are like, “I’m looking for a sugar daddy.” Anyway, there are a lot of sites like that, and you’ll find pretty disordered, dysfunctional people there.

So, finding a sugar daddy to feed on. Another is having a certain type of family. Especially in Asia, being very concerned to be seen as being a certain type of family. This is why there’s still that stupid stigma about admitting vulnerability, that you’re not perfect. Give me a break. We’re fucking looking at you. You’re not perfect. You’re fat, or you’re skinny, or you’re poor, you’re ugly. We already know that, so give it up. But they’re always so concerned that “Shhhh, we’re fine” having a certain type of family. Having a certain type of house in a certain type of neighborhood — giving a shit about that stuff, except for wives kind of shit.

Or being obsessed with having a lot of power. This is more obvious, right? People who really care about social and political power, these are narcissistic goals. Or really wanting to be a celebrity just for the celebrity hood, not so that you can use it as a platform for doing good or whatever. Very rarely — I’ve never met anybody who actually wants to be a celebrity so they could use the platform. They just want to be famous. That’s more obviously a narcissistic goal.

What’s the ideal? You reach this goal when you finally have the mythical false idealized self. And so, you have this superhero self that you want to become, and I’ve obviously been guilty of becoming that myself, like trying to become that. And if you can finally be it, then you will finally feel worthy and you will finally think destroy your fundamental core insecurity. And finally, you can rest. So, you see all the masculine narcissism coming together there.

However, this is a difficult road. And even if you do reach that momentarily, what will happen is, this thing that psychologists called narcissistic injury. Even if you think you’re at the height of your game, if there’s a little chink in the armor, or if there’s a little wavering in your subjective reality that could cause you to doubt whether you’re indeed your false, idealized self. Like, for instance, you’re a pick-up artist and you walk up to a new girl at the club, and she doesn’t laugh or isn’t into you at all. In fact, she rejects you or she ignores you and it’s very public.

And then you go into another one and she ignores you again. And you go to 10 girls in a row, all hot models, and all the guys in their group want, and they all ignore you. They all reject you and you go, “Fuck, my night sucks. I hate this night.” And you know, no matter how good of a pick-up artist this guy is, he’s still a narcissist and he’s still dealing with his core insecurities. If a girl can reject you and you feel bad as a result of that rejection, if you perceive rejection — then I’m talking about you, and I’ve been talking about you since the beginning.

So what’s happens is called narcissistic injury, and that’s a little chink in the armor. Oh, maybe you’re not perfect. Maybe you’re not that guy you hoped you were. This has the potential now to expose our narcissistic ideal as simply a myth and not our reality. And then we feel pain. Psychologists call this peripheral narcissistic pain. They have a term for everything, you know. This is the pain you feel as a result of narcissistic injury.

Peripheral narcissistic pain can trigger the anchors associated with that core neediness. That’s why you see these pick-up artist guys swing back and forth from on top of the world to down the depths of hell. All it takes is that narcissistic pain as a result of the injury to send them right back to ground zero. In fact, it’ll feel even worse because of the difference between where he was in the plateau falling all the way back down to the ground. Most of them don’t see any of this, though, they just think, “Ah! Life sucks!”

And so, I read you that quote earlier, how Mystery reacted to that. That core neediness popped out again, the core insecurity that came from his childhood. But what did he do? He didn’t go seek a therapist and actually work with him. That would be somebody who doesn’t have cluster B disorder. What instead he did is he repeated it. He just got back on the wagon, and after the effect wore off, got back on and went back out there, put on his uniform, dusted himself off, and went back out into the field like a soldier. They actually use metaphors like that. This is what psychologists call repetition compulsion. You will see this a lot in trauma therapy and addiction therapy.

The idea here is — there’s a really great phrase. What you don’t complete, you will repeat. In other words, the core issues that you don’t resolve, you’ll stay stuck in that, all your life, in fact. Repetition compulsion. These are situations and dynamics from our childhood which we feel as our comfort zone even when they are actually objectively very painful. We seek them out and we repeat them. This is how you can understand why — you see this a lot in the Man Up group — guys ask, “Why did this girl that I love keep going back to her abusive ex?” I just made a Man Up episode on that a couple weeks ago. Over and over and fucking over.

It’s the same reason why you keep going out in the club and trying to pick up chicks. You’re the same thing. You’re going back to your abusive ex. It’s the same fucking thing. She knows that that’s her comfort zone, because of whatever issues in her childhood. She’s taken that route of moving towards and anchoring the feeling of connection or love to that abuse. And so, when she’s in her right mind, her prefrontal cortex is working, she’ll go out and seek a guy that she think will treat her well. She will never be attracted to him, though. No chemistry is there.

It’s like when you guys, when you started out, nice guys, looking for the hot girl, could’ve met a nice girl that’s like you, like your sister, you know, and then you would not have been attracted to her? We’re talking about that in the break, right? The twin version of you, but she’s female. You weren’t sexually attracted to her. You would’ve been good friends with her like your sister but you don’t want to fuck your sister, I hope. It’s the same sort of thing.

Incest is actually different, but same sort of thing. It would feel like fucking your sister because she’s so like you. So, that’s no good because you don’t like you. You like the opposite of you. When you’re the mild-mannered Clark Kent, you want the wild crazy hot sexy one. Well, that’s when you’re in your emotions. When you’re in your head, you’ll be like, “Yeah, I need to find an intelligent, educated, responsible girl.” Yeah, whatever.

That’s what they all say on the surveys when they write it to me, and then we go out to the club and like, “Here’s a really nice girl. She’s just sitting by herself like all demure and shit.” And they’re like, “Uh, yeah.” And then looking on the stage, the girl dancing in her bikini, like, okay, I get it. I get it. Alright. Let’s just — what we don’t complete, we will end up repeating. If you don’t resolve the early issues from your childhood, you will simply repeat them, that pattern, over and over until you die like a drug addict. You seek it out and repeat it. Even when you know it’s bad for you, you know, all the girls who keep dating bad boys who abuse them, they will all say he was awful.

They’ll even go and look for a victim, because the victim becomes the predator, because co-dependency and narcissism is two sides of the same coin. That’s why a lot of you guys who haven’t owned up to your nice guy-ness, I cannot trust you as a man, as a human being, because you’re a narcissist. If I were to give you my superpowers of pick up shit, you’d turn into a nasty guy. I’ve seen it, so I’ve learned my lesson. It’s better to keep you in a weaker position so that you’ll finally go see a therapist, right? Otherwise, we’ll just prolong this whole thing and we’ll have to wait three years after you’ve fucked your way through the clubs and you finally realize — some of them never actually realize it. They just keep being very empty.

Anyway, so when you don’t complete, you will repeat like the girl who keeps going back to the abusive ex, and she says, “I know he’s abusive” and then she goes and finds some guy who will listen to her and give her his shoulder to cry on and so forth. And then she keeps repeating the cycle, because as soon as she gets the narcissistic supply from that guy, it’s sort of like a video game. Now, she’s all energied up. She got her health packs from him, you know, sucked him, stole his health packs, and she goes off and goes back to the abusive ex or finds another bad boy ex who will beat her.

And then he comes in the Man Up group like, “I’m so confused. I was a good guy.” And you find out that actually he was also a narcissist, he just sucked at it. You could tell a narcissist because he didn’t actually give that love and support from his heart. He gave it from his dick. He gave it in order to get. He’s just as bad as all of them, he just had a bad strategy. The guy at the top who is abusing, he’s actually the one who wins the Machiavellian game. That’s why if you trust somebody, if there’s somebody who starts coming at you — and there’s a lot of this happening in the manosphere, like men’s world stuff, and they say, “Well, they look at the reality of evolution and they embrace it” with no goodness. There’s no goodness. There’s no moral good and evil.

They will only be nice to you as long as they can use you. Once you throw out morality, I will crush you or I will stay away from you because what is this? This is survival, right? So, look out. But if you want love, you will never find love that way because love requires vulnerability. What happens when you’re a child is, you get all of this hurt, you find a coping strategy, you stay with that. The coping strategy protects you at the moment when you’re a child, and then you grow up with the same fucking coping strategy because no one told you all these different options. No one gave you therapy. I think that’s the way forward, by the way, child therapy, but whatever.

So then, you become an adult, and adults build defensive mechanisms that prevent them from facing their core issues. One defensive mechanism is — and it’s happening in your unconscious mind, by the way. So, you’re building all of this in your unconscious mind that will be more obvious when we get to the part about the parts, the internal parts. But you have this defensive mechanism that will prevent you from actually facing the core issues. One will be that repetition compulsion, you just keep repeating it because that’s not just your comfort zone but that’s the only thing you really know.

And the other thing, there’s a part of you in your unconscious that prevents you from hearing or understanding the words I’m saying if in fact you are still stuck in narcissism and aren’t ready yet to be vulnerable, and move forward, and grow. Another is you might have to pee. I’m making these fucking videos long for a reason. None of this dumbing down for YouTube bullshit. If you can’t fucking listen to me for seven minutes, I don’t want you to listen to me. It’s too late. I can’t help you. If you’re just coming in for quick dips, go somewhere else on the internet. The internet is full of that shit.

But if you’re serious about learning about yourself, and women, and all of that, then listen up because that’s a defensive mechanism: to suddenly lose concentration. When you can stay concentrated for three fucking hours if it’s a good movie, concentration is not the issue. And maybe you can stay concentrated on a math test, math exam, for three hours. You’ve done it. You know, the more obvious one is when you actually read the book, your eyes go over the words, and then two hours later you do not remember any of the things you read.

You actually made it through the book, right? You don’t remember anything. That’s a defensive mechanism: cognitive blindness. Another is your body just starts to — you get a headache, maybe, or you get some pains in your stomach. You got to, you know, that’s a great excuse to exit, and your body is giving you messages to do that. And maybe you fall asleep. That’s also a very common one. Obviously, there are real physical reasons for this, but you should start seeing this if it’s a pattern. A lot of headaches are psychosomatic. Put it out there, defensive mechanisms.

So, quickly now, we’re going to understand the fixer, and the white knight, and then I really want to move on. We’re going to spend some more time understanding you. And I’m not saying that you’re all white knights. I think people have shame around that ‘white knight’ label. In fact, I’ve encountered this, that guys would willingly say, “I used to be a white knight”, because that’s like a badge of honor as it should be. But then they say, “But I am no longer!” And then they post a question and it’s a white knight question. And then I’m like, “Okay.”

And even at the suggestion that they could be repeating this pattern, they bridle at that. I don’t want to trigger you yet so I might be talking about you. I actually have no idea if I’m talking about you watching this, but I think most of you in this room, I know you; this is applying to you. Because it’s sort of like if you’re once an alcoholic, you never want to think of yourself as ever free of that trap. You always want to be weary of it.

So because of repetition compulsion, the fixer, we, let’s say we, we’re drawn to people who are unable to meet our emotional needs, because this is just like the parental figure. In our childhood, the parental figure that we are unable to meet their original emotional needs, and they’re unable to therefore meet our original emotional needs. And then we, the fixers, link loving relationships to these feelings, the feelings of, for example, trying to please someone who is hard to please. What’s that sound like? Oh, every guy who is learning game, right? You’re talking to this girl. She doesn’t want to hear the shit that you want to talk — that’s going through your head, no.

What do I need to talk to her about? Fuck, what does that mean? That means she’s hard to please, and you’re used to that, so you’re like, “Yeah, alright, game on. Let’s take some notes and memorize some stuff because this is how I expect it to go.” Another is the fixer links loving relationships to the feelings of being emotionally nurturing to someone who doesn’t reciprocate at the same level. That’s how the relationships usually end up, okay? So, the mom, the parental figure didn’t reciprocate at the same level to give you some examples.

Maybe I’ll just start bringing up examples now but I have a whole section on the inner child that I was going to give more examples of. So, I’ll give you an example. I’m thinking about the example now. A little boy is playing hide and seek — and that’s what I witnessed in person. And he’s playing hide and seek with other people and it’s going really well. Like, he’s really good at hiding. And they play maybe two or three times, and then they stop. And then later that night, the dad comes along and the dad is sick. He’s not in the best of moods but he tries to play with his boy, so they play one game and the boy hides.

And the dad cannot find the boy. He’s, like, looking everywhere. Now, he’s really tired and it’s late for him. He’s just sort of like, “Okay, it’s time to go to bed.” So, he’s looking for the boy. And then eventually the boy comes out and he’s like very proud of the fact that he hid so well, because after all, that’s the point of hide and seek, isn’t it? And the dad says, “Alright, alright. Yeah, okay. We got to go to sleep now. Let’s go.” And so, the boy just got — it’s like kicking a puppy in the face. He’s like a three-year-old boy. This is an example of trying to please someone who is hard to please, as the little boy perceives it as hard to please. The little boy also is being emotionally nurturing, or trying his best, to someone who doesn’t reciprocate at the same level.

So, the father is like, “Okay, okay. Let’s get to bed.” You see how hard it is to parent? You see how easy it is to slip up? And so many times, the feedback from dumb people, ignorant people is, “David, isn’t this just growing up?” And I said, “Oh, you have kids, don’t you?” Oh, fuck. How much trauma have they already gone through? Because you’re like, “Hey, fuck up, kiddo. This is life. Man Up!” in the wrong way. Right? “Hey, kid. Beat up. Man up. Let’s just go to sleep.”

So what happens? The kid starts acting out. He goes running into the next room, just screaming about, whatever, like a terrible two tantrum and rolls around the ground. He’s like, “I don’t want to go to bed! I don’t want to go to bed! I don’t want to go to bed!” And all the women are like, “Woah, what happened here?” And he got to swoop in and deal with his emotions. They didn’t have the context, I saw it, but — So I came in and told them, so that helps. He wasn’t in the state to be coached, unfortunately, but you would want to explain that to him afterwards. But you don’t ever want to play good cop bad cop with the dad being the bad cop either.

It’s a tough situation to be in, to parent somebody else’s kid, but it’s so easy to slip up. He was tired. It was totally understandable. It’s not like I’m saying your parents are malicious and we’re beating everybody. You could’ve had very well-intentioned, very well-meaning parents, very likely they had you much younger than you’re going to have kids, right? How old were they when they popped you out? You know? If you think about my parent’s grandparents, or even my old professors, the ones who were 60, they had kids when they were 25.

They were always like — because all the grad students are all asking the older professors, like, “How do you juggle kids with school?” Now, looking back, I think it’s funny because grad students and professors have the most flexible schedules, but you know, they’re always worried, “How do I juggle the kids with all this stuff?” And professors share their stories, but they’re always like, “You wimps.” You know. We had three kids while we were undergrads. Something like that.

It’s hard. Who do I know who has avoided being traumatized as a child? Zero people. That’s all of you then, and me, of course. So, they’re thinking, “Oh, this is just growing up.” Yeah, it’s growing up in a really shitty way that has caused you to suck with women, or to be a criminal, or to be a loser, like a reject, a recluse, someone who is a hermit. Or it could cause you to just be a well-adjusted looking, from the outside he’s fine. Everyone thinks they’re okay on the outside. It’s really easy to seem okay.

Everybody thought I was okay. On the outside, it’s easy to seem okay. That’s the most — actually, that, on the outside, that’s the most pernicious because then you think you’re okay and you won’t seek therapy. So, unlike health, where it’s more obvious when you’ve not been treating yourself well. Mental, we’d have to open your brain up to see it. But if you know what to look for, you can spot it. You can spot the tightness and the tension around the face, the body, you can spot through the language the person uses, beliefs that they espouse, and all kinds of other things, but you have to know what to look for.

On the outside, you can have a great job, a perfectly fine looking family. You know, you could dress normally. You could have a normal income. You could be making whatever the normal income here is wherever you’re at. I think in the US, the average income is like 40,000 or less. You could just be average and no one would ever think you need any help. Everybody needs help. The only people who don’t need help are the ones who’ve had a lot of help already. So, there you go, just putting that out there. Hopefully, we can make a little clip; tell Jon make a little clip, going to put that on Instagram or something.

Alright, look, because of repetition compulsion, we’re drawn to people who are unable to meet our emotional needs, just like our parents, and then we look for these relationships where we get used to being self-sacrificing. That’s what defines the fixer, the white knight.

Here are some other symptoms of the guy who is a co-dependent but who is actually a co-dependent narcissist: pursuing and remaining in relationships with partners who are emotionally erratic and need your help, or your advice, or emotional support, yet fail to reciprocate appropriately. Pursuing and remaining in relationships with partners who are emotional depriving or covertly abusive or controlling, and not allowing this behavior but are even — not only allowing this behavior, but are even forgiving of it; and giving a lot to others while not asking others to meet your needs, yet somehow hoping they’ll eventually decide on their own to meet your needs out of appreciation for seeing how much you’ve done for them.

That’s the cry of the guy who got cheated on, right? “I did so much for her and yet…” Or the nice guy who the girl goes back to the abusive ex. “I did so much for her! I gave her everything!” That phrase we hear, “I gave her everything.” That’s a red flag. Or when a woman says, “I gave him everything!” Another red flag. Well, why are you so angry about it? You’re clearly just giving it because you’re hoping that they’ll see how much you’ve given and finally reciprocate. So, you weren’t really giving from your heart, right? It wasn’t sincere.

Now, some of you might have taken the rebel route. Some of you might have taken the recluse route, so I’m happy to answer questions on that. But by and large, the majority is taking the moving towards route. Another consequence of the moving towards is that you end up living through and for your romantic partners. This is guys, a common symptom is once they get into a relationship, they just disappear from their friends and all that. They just become a couple, that’s their entire life, living through.

And then it would be even worse if he ended up getting his pride from her accomplishments, too. That would be another version of that. But living through and for your romantic partners. Another is to do whatever you could to avoid emotional and physical abandonment and rejection, even if this sometimes leads to clinging, smothering, and jealous behavior, which would obviously produce the opposite effect and drive the person away.

Also, the way you treat life: overachieving and seeking perfection through roles, careers, partners, that you think will please and impress other people. So, if I get that hot girl, then my life is complete. I can finally rest. I don’t need to go out and do this thing anymore. I got the hot girl, then all the guys will look up to me and I’ll be able to show her off and I’ve finally arrived. This is proof that I’ve made it, that I’m enough now. Alright, so — Well, I think you know, if you just examine yourself, that’s often what you’re looking for.

So, this is a vicious cycle. The fixer needs to find and win over partners who are emotionally unavailable and are conditional with their approval or feels like a hollow victory for them. Because the core neediness remains. In other words, if she likes him, he doesn’t respect it. This is why you get these guys who start learning pick-up, and then they get stringed along a bunch of HB5’s and 6’s that they close in using, like, the typical — they’re not saying, “Hey, I’m in an open relationship” before they have sex. It’s just like what the pick-up artists call tacit approval. If she asks, then you can say you’re seeing other girls. But if she doesn’t ask, then don’t tell. Don’t ask, don’t tell.

And so, he just starts grueling over all of these girls that he finds less attractive and then, just like a sports fisherman, just throws them back in the water because they feel like hollow victories. They’re not the 10, because only the 10 would show that he has arrived and he is worthy. They’re actually narcissists and they’re very dangerous people. If you’ve seen the movie — who has seen Talented Mr. Ripley? Oh, wow, quite a lot of you, okay. Well, they’re like Mr. Ripley.

And if you’re Jude Law, was a pretty narcissistic guy himself, and who would naturally attract another narcissist predator, it was predator after predator, and he lost. Jude Law was the more obvious, simple-minded predator. He was just more obvious. A spoiled little kid, well he wasn’t that little. Spoiled kid. And then he got taken down by a shark, like literally taken down. Brutal. That movie was just like shocking. But anyway, that’s the type of person you’re dealing with, who is the nice Matt Damon — you know, you think he’s the Princeton grad, he’s all a nice boy, sort of naive, innocent, harmless, but you give him some skills and fucking look out because he will stab you in the back.

That’s what happens when you give some of these guys skills, because they’re doing this for narcissism, not for sex; not for pleasure or gratification. Well, it is ego gratification. And they’re also looking for women who don’t actually like them. So, if the six is in love with him, he will stay there out of guilt, but he’s not into it. He’s waiting for the 10. How does he know she’s a 10? When she’s emotionally unavailable to him. You see this at the end of the game, right? Neil Strauss, Lisa Leveridge, didn’t respond to all of his tricks the way the other girls did, and that triggered him to pursue because that means it’s love. Because that’s what he’s used to.

The women who are conditional with their approval, which means, obviously, the whole thing is doomed to fail. These adult failures then, in gender, narcissistic injury, which trigger his core issues, leading to crashing down and feeling as hurt and wounded as a child, as a wounded child. And I’ll get into why there’s — I wanted to talk about the chemistry between a fixer and predator.

The reason why they have chemistry is because their neurosis match. Hopefully, you can start seeing that, right? And I think I’ll reserve this for another section. Just quickly, I’ll finish this off and then we’ll take a break. So, the fixer on the surface could actually be extremely accomplished and successful, because this coping strategy is to achieve. So on the outside, you’d think he just got everything going for him. He doesn’t even have to be a nerd or a geek. He could be totally put together and very successful in the worldly sense: lots of money, and all the other stuff that other people crave. He could even have a great body and lots of money, what else does he need? Right? Like, when girls go after him.

But the predator will methodically learn the underlying insecurities and self-doubts and use them against him. In fact, the more on the outside he seems successful, the bigger the prey, so then the bigger the predator will come. It’s pretty easy when you’re a predator or you’ve been around the scene to be able to spot people’s insecurities and self-doubts. It’s pretty easy to trigger these and see them come out and then see their vulnerabilities and then use them.

But then if they’re good to show off to other people — One of the reasons why a guy predator having a hot girl co-dependent victim would be great, because now, not only do you get the ego supply from her, but you get an ego supply from all of the people who look up to her. You’re up on the feeding chain, the supply chain, the prey pyramid, whatever they call that — food chain, thank you. And same the other way around, right? So, if you’re a really cool guy that lots of guys respect and all that, pick-up artists, the better you are seen, the more narcissistic ego stroking she can get out of being with you, the bigger you are as prey for her. And so, this would normally attract the big predators.

And fixers are perfect for this because they’re addicted to helping others. So, even though they’ve put up a front, they’re actually, really, on the inside, wounded children who are repeating the pattern of achieving and pleasing to get love. Earlier, I talked in other courses about one up, one down dynamics, like a see-saw dynamic in a relationship. That see-saw dynamic is there when there’s a fixer and a narcissist. I learned later on, I put that into Rock Solid Relationships, that it doesn’t have to be one up, one down. It doesn’t have to be a zero-sum game.

But when you’re a fixer, or a predator, or you’re a narcissist and co-dependent, it is a zero-sum game. And fixers hate being in the one up position. Unconsciously, they hate it. They don’t know how to handle it, so they keep putting themselves in the one down and then they hate being in the one down. They just generally have a horrible life. Also, the predators won’t let them stay in the one up. Because when the predator seduces with her virgility, she will share tales about former boyfriends or lovers who assaulted her.

This is a normal trait. This is a normal strategy. You can appeal to the white knight and the boy by putting yourself as the victim, like that abusive ex-boyfriend. You tell the story. As soon as she tells the story about the abusive ex-boyfriend, that guy is hooked. Now, he sees himself as the defender. He is the knight who will arrive to her defense, and these guys become outraged at this, “How could he do that to you? I’ll rescue you.” And now she’s like, yup, got him. Basically, these fixers anxiously attach themselves to females that they date. I mean this in the technical sense of anxious attachment style.

They continually choose partners they think will never leave them, and they hold on. “Please don’t ever leave me.” This opens up a whole other can of worms of attachment styles and understanding anxious attachment, avoidant attachment, anxious avoidant attachment. It all comes together. And the predator fits this profile, obviously, that he’s looking for until she dumps him for another victim or for another source of ego supply. That is when his fragile ego takes a nosedive and his original core neediness is triggered again.

He may even know he doesn’t really want her. And this is when you get quite advanced, because generally speaking, if you’re a weak victim, you won’t have met a great predator yet. Generally, they’ll just think, “Oh, I got stuck in the friend zone” or “Oh, I got rejected again.” But when you’ve been in a long time and you deal with a major predator, you know that this is bad for you. In the forums with other pick-up coaches back in the day when that sort of thing was happening, when we still had forums, right? Remember those old forums? What are those called, like BB forums or something? It’s like an actual forum, right? I haven’t seen those in a long time.

They’re sort of like early Reddit, you know what they look like? Anyway, so you have these forums, and these pick-up coaches would be talking about how we keep choosing the bad girl. Like, there’s one guy who even said, “I had this choice. I was at this beach rave, and there was this good girl. I was hitting on these two girls. They were friends. And this one girl, she was so good. She was like an MBA. She’s really responsible and we got along really well.” And then there’s this bad girl who is already hyped on E, and she’s going crazy. She’s like flashing her tits and now he’s just like — it was like the black and white, like the blue pill / red pill. “I could’ve chosen the good one but then I ended up taking the bad one back and look what happened!”

“Why do I do this to myself!” And then we’re all like, “Oh man, I totally know what you mean.” We didn’t understand the underlying psychology of it. We just thought, “Oh, we’re stupid. Don’t do that again.” But of course, we keep getting in these patterns. And maybe you’re good or you exercise discipline, but then you go with that girl and you’re not turned on that much. It’s not passionate because the underlying issues weren’t dealt with, because we desperately needed to be wanted to ease the painful shame that you feel from your rejection.

So, he knows he doesn’t really want her, doesn’t really want her. It’s not good for him. For some reason, he gets pulled in there, and the reason he keeps getting pulled in there is because of his shame issues. Alright, so I’m going to skip the stages. Fixing the fixer, okay, right. I’m going to pause there. We’ll take a short break. Yeah, if you have questions?

AUDIENCE: Are you saying there are certain actions you can take and certain ways you can do, that you actually change to whom you’re attracted to, as in sexually, and what turns you on?

David Tian: Oh, yes. I’ll go into a lot more detail on this tomorrow, but yeah. Who you’re sexually attracted to, like the personality you’re sexually attracted to. And maybe even the body type, but you know, definitely the personality, is largely determined by your own neurosis, by your disowned parts. It’s crazy. None of it is bad, though. It’s not like you should be now shamed about that. It is what it is. You can tell a lot about a guy by what type of girl he goes for.

Okay, cool.

AUDIENCE: When you say somebody — [INAUDIBLE] and then they start to get really [INAUDIBLE], are you saying when that happens, that person refuses to acknowledge his disassociated self?

David Tian: What he’s doing is the tension is there to hold down a part of him that is being triggered by some trauma, or shame — is being triggered and trying to hold it. It’s called repression, or actually, what that is is suppression if it’s your conscious. You’re trying to constantly suppress it from coming out. Sure. I’ll give you an easy example that every guy can relate to.

When you’re talking to a girl and you’re trying not to seem nervous, but you’re actually super nervous. You’re trying to hold it down. The result is, you’re going to have hyperactivity or hypertension. You’re really tense or you’re just going to be letting out that energy in nervous movements. I see pick-up artists on a video back in the day that look like they’re doing this when they’re talking to girls. They’re just releasing the tension that way.

But basically, what’s happening is they’re splitting off at that moment to present a part that is not actually in control. That part is not fully-embodied yet. And so, that other part of them that’s more used to being is threatening to come out, the part that’s like, “I’m not worthy. You’re way hotter than any girl I’ve ever talked to. Oh my god.” That part, and doesn’t want that part to come out, and embarrass him, and shame him, and possibly get him rejected. So, he holds it down.

I can trigger parts like this often in Singapore by simply being more authoritative in my voice and questioning the person. It’s sort of like an interrogation. And pretty soon, he’s going to start stiffening it up again because I remind him, I triggered something from his childhood where there was some male authority figure who talked to him like that, and he felt shamed. And very likely, that male authority figure said something like, “You’re so stupid. How can you not know this?” And that sort of thing. I know teachers here say that sort of thing, and then you see he’s trying to hold it down, hold it back. He’s either going to cry or fly into a rage. Either way, it’s cool, but he doesn’t think it’s cool so he’s just trying to, “I’m fine. No. I don’t feel anything.” Yeah, well, that’s because you’re not vulnerable.

Cool, alright. Let’s take a break. See you in the next video.