The Dark Psychology Behind Attraction Strategies (and Why They Always Backfire) | (#023) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Most people who struggle in dating don’t realize they’re living out unconscious patterns that keep them stuck in frustration, heartbreak and loneliness. What they often blame on bad luck or the state of modern dating is actually due to toxic patterns often running in the background, shaping their choices, who they’re attracted to, and the way they show up in relationships. If you don’t bring these patterns into awareness, they’ll keep running your life.

In this episode, we’re breaking down one of the most fascinating case studies in modern dating psychology, Erik von Markovik, who also goes by the online handle Mystery, and, specifically, as depicted in the New York Times bestselling book, The Game, by Neil Strauss. If you’ve read The Game, you already know his story, the highs of mastering attraction, the meteoric rise to PUA fame, and the complete mental and emotional collapse that followed repeatedly. [01:06.8]

But Mystery’s story isn’t just about seduction. It’s a psychological case study in Jungian Shadow projection, attachment wounds, internal fragmentation, grandiosity–shame cycles, and narcissistic defenses. Now, I want to emphasize I am not bashing Mystery here. He’s a real person. I don’t know him personally, though I do know several people who do. What I do know is his public persona, and that’s what we’re analyzing here, and it’s completely based on publicly available information, and especially, Neil Strauss’ book, The Game.

This episode isn’t just about Mystery, it’s about what happens to anyone who builds an identity around external validation, especially when it comes to dating. This mindset doesn’t just lead to burnout. It leads to deep emotional disconnection, compulsive self-destruction, and in extreme cases, total collapse. If you ignore what we cover here, you risk repeating the same cycle. [02:03.2]

Maybe you’re not dressing in feathered hats or teaching social dynamics on a global stage, but if you’re still measuring your worth based on external validation, on how women treat you, on your status, on your achievements or on proving something, then you’re walking the same path. Neil Strauss himself came to realize this years later, which he documents in his brutally honest book The Truth, and that book should have been called “The Consequences of the Game,” because that’s exactly what it exposes, and in this episode, we’re diving deeper into why.

Again, I don’t know Erik von Markovik personally, though I do know several people who do, and I do know Neil Strauss personally, but I won’t base this on any privileged information. This analysis isn’t based on any private conversations, but strictly on what’s publicly available, especially on what’s shared in Neil’s book, The Game.

I’m David Tian. For almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and happiness in their personal and professional lives. I’ve got five points here, and let’s start with the first and this is on the grandiosity–shame cycle. [03:04.8]

Mystery’s entire life as depicted in The Game is a textbook case of what the renowned psychotherapist Terry Real calls the grandiosity–shame cycle. This is the psychological loop where a man swings between feeling superior, larger than life, untouchable, dominant, and then feeling like absolute garbage, worthless, hopeless, completely defeated. Most men don’t even realize they’re stuck in this loop, but it controls them all the same.

I hasten to add that I, too, have experienced this grandiosity–shame cycle personally many times over the course of the several years of my journey in figuring out women and dating and relationships, and I covered this in the last episode, as well as in various other videos on my YouTube channel. But until I come out with my memoir, Mystery is an even better case study because of how detailed the depiction of him is in Neil Strauss’ book, and it’s easily available for you to consult. [04:04.0]

Mystery represents an excellent case study. One moment, he’s the center of attention, dazzling everyone with his magic tricks, his material, and his charm, dressed in ridiculous outfits that scream, “Look at me. I’m different. I’m special. I’m the man.” He’s the guy in the VIP section, teaching other men how to take control, how to manipulate, how to win at dating. His whole presence is built to command admiration. He even gives himself a name that implies that he’s unknowable, a puzzle, someone to be deciphered.

But that’s just the grandiose side of the cycle, and grandiosity is always covering something up, because the second Mystery’s world stops reinforcing his larger than life persona, when the approval and validation starts slipping, when he experiences rejection or failure, then he collapses into a suicidal state. [04:56.0]

The Game, the book, is filled with moments where his grandiosity crashes straight into toxic shame. One of the most dramatic moments happens in the latter half of the book, when Mystery is in L.A. running boot camps, and from the outside he looks like he has it all, especially in the eyes of the clients, but inside, he was actually spiraling.

At one point, he’s in his hotel room crying uncontrollably for days, not eating, not showering, not moving. He’s in complete suicidal meltdown. And why? Because a woman he liked didn’t feel the same way about him and that’s actually all it took. A guy who had built his entire life around being a master of attraction, a seduction icon, had overinvested time and effort and emotions into a woman, and it was unrequited. It was not returned and he had very little ability to regulate his emotions when the illusion of his control was taken away, and that’s the grandiosity–shame toxic cycle in action. [06:00.5]

Mystery’s PUA identity was built on external validation. He needed women to respond to him in a certain way. He needed men to admire him. He needed to be the center of attention, the coolest guy in the room, or the most socially dominant, the one with all the answers, and as long as he could hold on to that, then he was fine. But when that bubble got burst, everything underneath came rushing to the surface.

And what was underneath? Shame, because deep down, Erik didn’t feel like he was enough, not without the techniques or not without the status, not without the performance. He never built his real self-worth. Instead, he built a persona and that persona required constant maintenance. Every interaction had to reinforce his sense of control, and it had to continue to do so or the whole facade collapsed. [06:53.5]

We see this again when he gets into a relationship with a woman named Katya, and this should have been a victory moment for him. He won over to him a stunning young woman, a model, a girl who validated everything he’d been working toward, but he actually wasn’t happy. He became obsessive, jealous and insecure. He couldn’t handle the uncertainty of real intimacy. He couldn’t stop himself from needing her approval repeatedly in order to feel okay and secure, so like many men stuck in the cycle, he sabotaged his own relationship.

The same skills that made him a seduction icon, the grandiosity, the obsession with control, with social dominance, were actually useless when it came to real, actual love. He had spent years mastering attraction, but he never learned how to be loved. He had never built the inner foundation to sustain a real, healthy relationship, not just one based on fleeting sexual attraction—and that’s the thing about grandiosity. From the outside, it looks like confidence, but on the inside, it’s actually the opposite. [08:02.4]

Real confidence comes from security, from being okay, whether someone else chooses you or not. Grandiosity, on the other hand, is fragile. Grandiosity requires constant validation, because without it, the whole thing falls apart. It’s all an illusion conjured by a magician. Mystery was brilliant in many ways. He was innovative, charismatic. He had a mind that could analyze social dynamics on an elite level, and is actually responsible for many groundbreaking concepts and techniques in, to geek out here, the PUA world. But he never escaped the grandiosity–shame cycle, at least as depicted in the book of The Game.

He never learned how to regulate his emotions well. He didn’t build a strong or solid core of self-worth, and that’s why no amount of tactics, strategies, methods, or seduction techniques could bring him lasting happiness, because at the end of the day, he wasn’t trying to connect with women. He was trying to outrun himself. [09:03.3]

That’s the first major piece of Mystery’s psychological puzzle, the grandiosity–shame cycle, the thing that made him feel invincible one moment and suicidal the next, the loop that many men, to some degree, get stuck in without even realizing it.

Okay, that’s the first of five points. Let’s go down to the second point. The second major point is that Erik was in a constant battle with his own Shadow and he seemed to have never noticed this. Jungian psychology tells us that the Shadow is everything that we repress, deny or refuse to acknowledge about ourselves. It’s the parts of us that hold our deepest insecurities and fears and desires, the stuff we don’t want to deal with consciously.

When a man doesn’t integrate his Shadow, when he refuses to face it head on, it ends up running his life in the shadows from the background in his unconscious. Erik didn’t integrate his Shadow. He was possessed by it. Rather than confronting his own feelings of inadequacy, rejection and unworthiness, he instead channeled them into a performance, an act designed to shield him from his real fears. He became a character, Mystery. [10:14.6]

The flamboyant outfits, the magic tricks, the elaborate social hierarchies, all the techniques, all of the complex methods and models, all of it was actually acting like a mask, carefully designed to make sure no one ever saw the real Erik, because if they did, he was afraid that they wouldn’t like what they saw because he doesn’t like what he sees, and this is classic Shadow avoidance. When a man refuses to face his own darkness, he either buries it or acts it out unconsciously. Erik did both.

When he was in control, when people admired him, when women responded the way he needed them to, he could keep the act going, but when he lost that control, his Shadow took over. He crumbled. He became consumed by doubt, rage, depression, despair. He had no inner stability, because his sense of self was completely dependent on external validation. [11:12.2]

We see this in the book, The Game, when he gets into a toxic downward spiral after his relationship with Katya starts falling apart. Rather than seeing her as a person with her own emotions and experiences, he turns her into the enemy. He projects his own Shadow onto her, his fears of abandonment, his deep-seated belief that he’s not good enough, and his terror that he’s unlovable. All of that gets projected and placed onto her. She’s not a woman with her own agency anymore to him. She’s an adversary, a threat. But this is actually a projection from parts that have this criticism of himself inside him, and instead of integrating his Shadow, he externalizes it through projection. Instead of looking inward, he lashes outward. [11:59.0]

His emotions become wildly unstable as a result. He swings between desperate, needy behavior, like blowing up her phone, obsessing over what she’s doing, and then going into extreme detachment, acting like she doesn’t matter to him at all, and this is classic Shadow possession. He’s no longer in control of himself. His repressed wounds are running the show, swinging between desperate, needy behavior and a dismissive detachment.

It happens again when he has his infamous breakdown in L.A. after years of being the guy who had all the answers, the guy everyone looked up to. He suddenly couldn’t keep the act going anymore and he needed a suicide intervention. Mystery’s entire identity was built on the idea that he had unlocked the secrets of attraction, that he had hacked the system, that he had cracked the code. But deep down, he knew that it actually wasn’t true. [12:53.8]

There were attractive women he couldn’t control. There were attractive women who knew him well but rejected him. He might trick himself into thinking he’s always going four for four, but then reality hits, and when that facade comes crumbling down, his Shadow swallows him whole. He locks himself in his hotel room for days, doesn’t eat, doesn’t sleep, cries uncontrollably and falls into a black hole of despair, questioning everything, and that was when his real wounds came out.

He wasn’t just upset about a woman rejecting him. He was confronting a lifetime of feeling unworthy, a lifetime of feeling like he had to be someone else in order to be accepted, a lifetime of trying to outrun his own deep pain, and this is what happens when a man refuses to face his Shadow. He projects it out onto the world, onto women, onto dating, onto anything except himself, and when the weight of it all becomes too much, it crushes him. [13:49.6]

Until Erik integrates his Shadow, he’ll keep running this same loop—chasing performative success, losing control, crumbling under the pressure, and then spiraling into toxic shame—and he’ll keep looking for the next to big breakthrough, the next system, the next strategy that will finally fix him, but it won’t work, because the problem was never out there. It was always inside him.

Okay, that’s the second major point. Now let’s go to the third.

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Now, the third major point is that Erik struggles in dating and his approach to attraction weren’t random. They were an unconscious attempt to heal his deepest childhood wounds. The renowned psychotherapist Harville Hendrix has developed the Imago therapy model and this explains how we are drawn to romantic partners who reflect our earliest deepest wounds, our most formative wounds, the relationships we chase, the dynamics we obsess over, the heartbreaks that cut the deepest. They’re rarely about this other adult that we’re in a relationship with. They’re about something much older, much deeper, something we’ve been carrying since childhood. [15:51.5]

Mystery wasn’t just teaching seduction. He was repeating his trauma over and over. At his core, he wasn’t chasing women. He was actually chasing validation, and not just any validation. It was the kind that could fill the hole that had been there since childhood, the kind that he hoped could finally make him feel worthy.

From the book, The Game, we get glimpses into Erik’s past. His relationship with his mother was unstable and unpredictable. She was emotionally inconsistent, sometimes warm and loving, sometimes rejecting and distant, and that creates an attachment wound, because when a child doesn’t know what to expect from a parent, they learn to crave love, but never fully trust it. Then there’s his father, emotionally unavailable, often not there, detached, someone who didn’t provide the validation, attention or connection that a young boy needs in order to feel secure.

Put those two things together, a mother whose love was inconsistent and a father who was absent, and you get a man who spends his entire adult life trying to win affection and approval from others. This explains Mystery’s intense craving for validation, the elaborate outfits, the magic tricks, the need to be the most interesting person in the room, the obsession with making women feel attraction for him. [17:11.4]

None of that was about actual personal expression of creativity. It was about being seen, about earning attraction, attention, validation, significance, because if he could get enough of that attention, if he could impress enough attractive women and high-status men, if he could win attraction, sex and love often enough, maybe he’s hoping he’d finally feel like he really mattered.

But the tragedy of this cycle is that no amount of external validation can ever fix this internal wound. This is why he collapses into deep depressive episodes repeatedly whenever he feels unwanted, because rejection wasn’t just rejection for him. It was a return to his original wounds. It was his childhood playing out all over again. [18:02.1]

Look at some of these patterns. He obsessed over women who were unattainable and emotionally inconsistent, like his mother. He measured his self-worth entirely by how much women wanted him because, growing up, he never felt wanted. He couldn’t handle rejection, not just because of his ego, but because it activated that deep fear he had since childhood that he wasn’t enough, that he wasn’t worthy, that he was unlovable, that he would be abandoned by those he cared the most for.

Erik wasn’t just a guy who struggled with dating. He was a wounded child still trying to earn the love that he’d never received, and the worst part was that even when he earned the validation, that never lasted, because it wasn’t the kind of love he actually needed. The validation wasn’t love. He just thought he could get the love through the validation, but that doesn’t work. [18:55.4]

That’s why his relationship with Katya became so toxic. At first, she gave him everything he thought he wanted. She validated his status, his attractiveness, his worth, but deep down, he still didn’t trust that he was lovable, just as he was, so he became obsessed with controlling her. He couldn’t just be in the relationship. He had to manage it, analyze it, game it. The same way he tried to control every social interaction, he tried to control her, because if he didn’t, then he might lose her, and if he lost her, he would be right back to where he started, and that’s exactly what happened and kept happening.

When she started pulling away, he’d panic. He’d become needy, desperate and overly emotional. He spiraled into breakdowns, anxiety and irrational behavior, because losing her wasn’t just losing a relationship. It was reliving his childhood wounds of unworthiness all over again, and that’s why he kept chasing the same types of women, because on a deeper unconscious level, he thought that if he could finally win this one, if you could finally make her stay, if he could finally get her to love him fully, then maybe finally the pain from his past would disappear. [20:08.1]

But love, real love, doesn’t work that way. You don’t heal childhood wounds by repeating them with new people and hoping for a different result. You can’t fix your self-worth by getting more people to approve of you, and you can’t escape your core insecurities by pretending they don’t exist and covering them up with status and strategies.

Erik didn’t know this, at least as depicted in the book The Game, so he kept repeating the same loop, winning, then crumbling, rising, then falling, desperate to finally feel like enough, but never actually doing the inner work to heal and get there. Until we face our deepest wounds, until we stop looking for external validation to fix what’s broken inside, we’ll just keep chasing the same deep pain over and over.

That’s the third point. Let’s move on to the fourth one now, which is that Erik wasn’t just playing a character. He had completely lost himself in it. Internal Family Systems therapy, IFS therapy, explains how people create different parts, protector parts to shield themselves from pain. [21:08.7]

When someone goes through emotional wounds, especially from childhood, they develop what we call “manager parts” to control situations, avoid risk and maintain a sense of stability, and when things fall apart, the firefighter parts come out. These are self-destructive parts that indulge in self-destructive behaviors that numb pain or create distractions. But underneath all of that buried and forgotten, are the exiled inner child parts, the parts of us that still carry the deepest wounds.

Mystery’s pick-up persona, the grandiose, larger-than-life figure draped in eyeliner and fuzzy hats, was a collection of manager parts. They were carefully designed to protect him from rejection and protect him from feeling worthless. His value system was built around social status, sexual conquest and social dominance over others. As long as he could prove himself superior in these ways, on these metrics, then he could avoid confronting how deeply unworthy he actually felt inside, and for a while and for most of the time, it worked. [22:11.8]

He surrounded himself with admirers, trained disciples and followers, and kept leveling up his social strategies. But manager parts can’t protect you forever, and when Erik faced failure or rejection, his firefighter parts took over, his emotional breakdowns, his disappearing acts, and his depressive episodes where he wouldn’t eat or leave his hotel room for days. These were all signs of a man desperately trying to escape himself.

Again, one of the most extreme examples happened when his relationship with Katya started falling apart and he spiraled into paranoia, insecurity, uncontrollable jealousy. The same man who had built an empire teaching others how to be alpha was now desperate for a woman’s approval, texting her obsessively, unable to focus on anything else. That wasn’t just a guy who was struggling with a breakup. That was his inner child parts screaming for help. [23:02.4]

IFS therapy tells us that when someone keeps their vulnerable Self buried for too long, it finds ways to break through, and when it does, it comes out as panic, self-sabotage or complete emotional collapse into suicide. Mystery didn’t have the tools to process those feelings, so instead, he kept doubling down on the performance route or strategy. He tried harder to regain control, which, in the context of a deteriorating relationship, actually is incredibly counterproductive.

He became more obsessive, more erratic, and the longer someone lives in their false personas, the further removed they become from actual connection, from self-acceptance, from happiness and fulfillment. No matter how much success Erik had on the outside, he was never actually free. [23:52.8]

Now let’s move to the fifth and final point, which is that Erik wasn’t just struggling with self-worth. He was operating with a set of narcissistic defenses that kept him trapped in a loop of grandiosity and collapse.

Now, again, let’s be clear, I am not saying that Mystery had full-blown narcissistic personality disorder. That is an actual clinical diagnosis. I don’t know him personally, but everything in this episode is based on how this character is depicted in The Game, the book, and Erik’s behavior lines up with a lot of the traits of narcissistic wounding, and in most cases, narcissistic defenses don’t come from a place of arrogance or entitlement. They actually come from deep, unresolved trauma.

At his peak, Mystery displayed classic grandiosity, like he needed to be seen as a genius, a master of seduction, a guru who had unlocked the secrets of attraction. Everything about his public persona was designed to elicit admiration, the wild outfits, the theatrical social presence, the way he structured his boot camps. All of it was meant to reinforce an image of himself as someone highly significant, someone who had transcended the struggles of average men. [25:05.2]

But real confidence doesn’t need validation. Grandiosity does. Whenever Erik lost control of the narrative, whenever a woman didn’t respond the way he wanted, whenever someone challenged his status, he ended up collapsing. His emotional instability wasn’t just a sign of heartbreak; it was an implosion of identity. A truly confident person can handle rejection, but Mystery couldn’t, because rejection meant that, to him, he was nothing, and that’s the biggest tell of fragile self-esteem, when you need the world to constantly reflect back to you that you’re valuable, you never actually believe it yourself.

He also exhibited a level of emotional exploitation, not necessarily in a malicious way, but in a way that reinforced his need for significance. He didn’t build relationships based on mutual connection. He built them based on how they made him feel about himself. The women he pursued, the men he mentored, they were actually all means to an end. They validated his self-worth. [26:11.3]

Yet, at the core of it all, he was deeply unstable. He could be on top of the world one day, then completely broken the next. His depressive breakdowns weren’t just moments of sadness. There were full-body collapses into hopelessness, the kind that happened when a man has no internal foundation to hold him up. Mystery, Erik was not a monster. He was a deeply wounded man who never learned how to heal, and in the end, that’s what made his rise and fall so tragic.

Okay, let’s sum up this episode. Erik’s story isn’t just about a man who mastered seduction. It’s about a man who spent his life trying to outrun himself and lost. He wasn’t born the larger-than-life figure from The Game. He was a highly sensitive, deeply insecure man who never learned how to deal with his emotions in a constructive way. So, he did what a lot of men do. He looked for a system, a way to control the chaos inside him. [27:05.5]

He wanted a formula, a set of rules, something predictable, and the pick-up artistry that he created and founded and pioneered gave him exactly that, and at first it worked for him. The techniques, the status, the validation, it all gave him a temporary escape from his core insecurities and wounds. He could reinvent himself, become someone bigger, bolder, untouchable, and for a while, that was enough. His grandiosity kept the pain at bay.

But there’s a cost to running from yourself. No matter how much success he had, the emptiness never left, because the problem was never that he wasn’t good enough at the game. The problem was that he had abandoned his True Self. He could manipulate attraction, but he couldn’t handle emotional intimacy. He could control a social interaction, but he couldn’t control the feeling of being not enough, and the more he avoided his real wounds, the more his Shadow took over, and that’s why he collapses so hard, the breakdowns, the depression and the desperation. [28:06.1]

His inner child parts were screaming to be heard, but instead of facing them, he kept doubling down on the performance, and eventually, he lost himself in it. If Erik had ever truly healed, it wouldn’t have come from another seduction technique or method, or a new high-status persona. It would come from real psychological inner work.

He needed to stop repeating his childhood wounds and start forming real secure attachments. He needed to stop swinging between grandiosity and shame, and start finding self-worth that wasn’t dependent on external validation. He needed to stop bearing his vulnerable parts behind performance and start integrating them into a real, whole, authentic identity.

Mystery, as depicted in the book The Game, is a tragic figure, not because he failed, but because he succeeded in all the wrong ways. His brilliance, his creativity, his intelligence, it all went toward reinforcing a false Self instead of healing the authentic, true one, and that’s what makes this story of his a warning, not a victory. [29:09.5]

True fulfillment doesn’t come from more status, more tactics or more control. It comes from healing self-acceptance and integration, and that’s what I’ll get into in the next episode.

Erik, if you’re listening, I hope you were able to listen to this with an open mind. Everything I charted in this episode, I, too, have experienced in my own way, so I am by no means standing on some soapbox looking down on you. We should all thank you for allowing Neil to tell your story in the book The Game so that we could learn from it, as I’ve just devoted an entire episode to this as a case study. Thank you for that, and I sincerely hope that you’re in a better place now.

If you or anyone has benefited from this episode, please share it with anyone else you think could benefit from it. Hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you listen to this on, and let me know what you think. Leave a comment or send me a message. I’d love to get your feedback, and I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. David Tian, signing out. [30:05.7]