You’re Not Broken, Your Mind Just Learned the Wrong Lesson | (#031) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

Most people are walking around on autopilot. They’re not lazy. They’re not broken. They just don’t realize they’re still being run by scripts that they didn’t write, emotional patterns they picked up way before they ever had a choice. These patterns are sneaky. They don’t just show up labeled “childhood wounds” or “fear of abandonment.” They show up as the guy who chases success nonstop and still feels empty or the woman who dates emotionally-unavailable partners and swears it’s just bad luck, or the high-achiever who is always productive, always polished and quietly terrified of being found out as not enough. [00:54.5]

That’s what we’re diving into in this episode, the hidden patterns that block love, crush your confidence and make real fulfillment feel just out of reach, the ones that push people away even when you desperately want connection, the ones that keep you stuck in your head, disconnected from your body, second-guessing every move, even when you’re doing everything right.

Once you start to see these patterns for what they are, everything gets clearer. Relationships start to feel easier. Confidence stops being a performance and you start to move through the world with more calm, more freedom, more you. But if you never get to the root of it, if you keep throwing strategies and self-discipline at the problem, it doesn’t get better. It gets heavier. The relationships get more frustrating. The burnout lasts longer. The inner critic gets louder, and no matter how much you achieve that low-key sense of not being enough just keeps humming in the background. 

So, if you’ve ever wondered why success hasn’t brought you peace or why love hasn’t felt safe or why you keep getting in your own way, then this episode is going to explain a lot. [02:02.4]

I’m David Tian, and for almost the past two decades, I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives.

I’ve got three points that I want to take you through today and here’s the first—most of the pain you’re dealing with, whether it shows up in your dating life, your confidence, your career, or just that vague sense of never being quite enough, it’s not necessarily because you’re doing something wrong. It’s not necessarily because you don’t have the right strategy or that you haven’t worked hard enough.

It’s because you’re being run by an emotional script that you didn’t even know was playing, and I don’t mean some dramatic Hollywood trauma script. I mean the quiet, sneaky stuff, the kind of stuff that gets wired into your nervous system—like when you’re five years old and your dad ignores you for the hundredth time, or when your mom only praises you when you win something or bring home good grades, or when you learn that being too emotional made people uncomfortable, so you just stopped expressing anything at all. [03:03.1]

These scripts are not facts. They’re interpretations. They’re the meaning that you made out of what happened to you. As the renowned psychiatrist Gabor Maté puts it, trauma isn’t just what happened. It’s the meaning we made of it, the story we told ourselves to make sense of the pain, like, “I guess I’m not lovable unless I’m impressive” or “If I let people in, then they’ll hurt me,” or “Success is the only way I’ll be safe.”

Those meanings get locked in. It becomes a lens that you look through and then it becomes automatic. You forget they’re there or how they came to be, and years later, you’re out here trying to find love or trying to prove yourself, trying to finally feel like you’re enough, but you’re still playing by rules that you never agreed to in the first place. [03:55.6]

That’s what I mean by emotional scripts. They’re unconscious. They run the show from backstage. You think you’re making decisions from logic, from values, from some higher part of yourself. That’s what I mean by emotional scripts. They’re unconscious. They run the show from backstage. You think you’re making decisions from logic, from values, from some higher part of yourself, but under the surface, there’s this five-year-old version of you running the whole operation and he’s terrified of being abandoned or humiliated, or not chosen, or rejected, so he’s playing it safe.

He’s picking people who will recreate what’s familiar to him. He’s pushing people away before they get too close. He’s making sure you hustle hard enough that no one can ever say you’re not valuable. Yes, it’s not rational. It’s not even conscious, but it’s strong, because for a long time, that script helped you survive. It helped you navigate your childhood. Maybe it helped you get love or attention or approval from parents who were emotionally unavailable, or helped you feel like you had some control in a chaotic home, so you held on to it. You built your personality around it. [05:03.0]

But now that same script is the thing that’s keeping you stuck. It’s the reason you’re exhausted all the time. It’s the reason you keep choosing emotionally-unavailable partners, even though you say you want a real connection. It’s the reason you second-guess yourself even after a win, because no matter how much progress you make out there, in here, you’re still that kid trying to be enough.

Here’s the thing that most people never get told. You’re not broken. You’re not some anxious mess that needs to be fixed. You’re just running a program that made sense when you were small and powerless, and now it’s just outdated. That’s all—and here’s the good news: since you were the one who made up the meaning back then, even if you didn’t realize you were doing it, you can choose to make new meanings now. You can rewrite that story. [05:58.7]

You can interrupt the pattern, but only if you’re willing to slow down enough and bring those unconscious scripts into the light, because until you do, they’ll keep sabotaging you. They keep creating the same results, the same arguments, the same fears, the same letdowns, the same burnout, the same inner monologue that says, “What’s wrong with me?” or “Why can’t I just get this right?”

So, if any part of this is hitting close to home, I want you to hear this. You are not alone and you are not the problem. You’re just reenacting an emotional script that’s ready to be retired. You don’t have to keep performing for love. You don’t have to keep earning your worth. The next step is learning how to become aware of the script, not to fight it, not to bulldoze it with productivity hacks or dating tactics, or 10-step confidence plans, but to get curious, to trace the pattern back to where it started and to meet that part of you with compassion instead of shame. [07:08.2]

We’ll get into more of that in a minute, especially when we talk about the parts of you that are doing their best to protect you, even when it doesn’t look like it. But before we go there, just sit with this first insight for a moment. You’re living out beliefs that aren’t even yours, and once you start noticing them, you get your power back, not all at once, but enough to begin—and that’s where real transformation can start, not from trying harder, but from seeing deeper, clearer.

Okay, here’s the second point I want to walk you through and it builds right off the first. If you started to notice those unconscious emotional scripts, those beliefs and reactions that don’t really feel like you, you might have already stumbled into this next realization that there’s more than one voice inside your head—and, no, this doesn’t mean you’re crazy. It means you’re human. [08:04.2]

One part of you, let’s say, wants to be open and vulnerable, and find deep love, and another part flinches the second anyone gets too close. One part wants to rest or breathe and take a weekend off, while another part starts yelling that you’re lazy and worthless if you stop for even a second. This is what the Internal Family Systems model, or IFS therapy, for short, helps us make sense of all this. It’s a powerful framework and it has helped me a lot personally, probably more than anything else out there.

Here’s how it works. Inside all of us, there are different parts and those parts carry different burdens. They arose to deal with pain or fear, rejection, abandonment, and their job was to protect you, and for a while, they did a really good job at it. [08:56.0]

Let’s say, for example, when you were a kid, the people around you weren’t emotionally safe enough. Maybe they lashed out unpredictably or maybe they pulled away and withdrew unpredictably, so you learned fast that showing too much feeling was risky. So, that part of you said, “Okay, if I shut down emotionally, then I won’t get hurt. If I keep everything in, I’ll survive this.”

Then fast forward, 10, 20 years later, you’re in an adult relationship or trying to be and someone opens up to you or needs something from you, or sees you too deeply, and that protector part of you jumps in and says, “Shut it down. Deflect. Pull away. Say you’re too busy. Say you’re too tired. Say you’re just not feeling it,” and you don’t even know why you’re doing it, but that part of you does and his whole job is to keep you from feeling that same pain again. [09:50.7]

These protector parts of us show up in all kinds of ways. Some take the form of perfectionism, like if you’re flawless, no one can criticize you. Others show up as people-pleasing parts, like if everyone likes you, then no one will abandon you. Some parts go the route of avoidance, like if you never commit, then you’ll never get hurt. Other parts numb out completely, like scrolling or binging, or zoning out or overworking, just to avoid feeling anything that gets too deep.

None of these protective parts are the enemy. Okay, that’s maybe the most important thing to say in this episode. You don’t need to get rid of them. In fact, you can’t even get rid of them. You don’t need to silence them or dominate them, or fix them. That’s just actually more inner conflict, more self-rejection. Instead, what actually works is learning to listen to them, to turn to them and try to understand them and thank them for how hard they have worked, and then gently invite them to trust that they don’t have to run your life anymore—and this is where your True Self comes in. [11:00.8]

This is the IFS sense of the term “True Self,” capital T, capital S, “True Self,” and this is not the woo-woo concept of finding yourself. It’s referring to that calm, clear, compassionate center in you, in all of us, the core of you that can lead, that doesn’t have to react, doesn’t need to prove anything, doesn’t collapse or attack under pressure. That higher version of you already exists. It has just been buried under all of these protector parts or exiled parts that thought they had to take over.

Let me give you a quick client example to bring this home. One of my clients, let’s call him Jason, he was a hard-driving consultant in his 30s, Ivy League degree, high six-figure income, but completely miserable in his personal life. He kept ending up with women who either didn’t want him back or walked all over him, and every time something started to go well, he would ghost them. He’d just drop off the map, claim he was too busy with work. [12:03.6]

In our work together, in our sessions, we started exploring this behavior more deeply, and sure enough, a part of him came up that said, “If I let someone in, they’ll see that I’m not good enough and then they’ll leave, or worse, they’ll stay and then resent me,” and that part of him convinced Jason that he had to prove his worth at all times, at work, in dating, even in friendships. He could never relax, ever.

So, when I asked when he first felt this way, he told me about a time when he was 12 years old and coming home with a B on a math exam. His dad didn’t yell at him. He just gave him this look of disappointment and walked away in silence, and Jason said, “That was the moment he decided, I’m only lovable when I succeed,” and that belief became the core of a protector part of him. This protector part pushed him to overachieve, to impress, to always stay ahead. It sabotaged his relationships anytime he couldn’t control how the other person saw him. [13:10.4]

Once he got to know this part, really sat with it, felt his fear, thanked it for trying to protect him, then we started to see something truly shift. The panic in this part started to slow down. The need to prove started to quiet, and this deeper, calmer Self began to show up, the higher version of him that could sit with discomfort, that could actually enjoy connection as risky as it felt and that didn’t need to micromanage every interaction in order to feel safe.

This is what happens when you stop fighting your parts and start turning to them with understanding. Transformation doesn’t come from trying harder, necessarily. It comes from compassion, from leading your parts, from inner trust. [14:05.2]

Of course, this work takes time. You cannot rush it. In fact, if you rush it, it could get worse, so this is not some quick fix. But if you’ve been stuck in the same loops for years, trying harder, doing the same thing over and over but more of it, it’s not going to break the loops. Something deeper is necessary and this starts with understanding the parts of you that mess things up are also the parts that once kept you alive. [14:35.5]

Many high-achievers struggle when it comes to managing their emotions or navigating their relationships, and they hit a wall when it comes to emotional mastery. Maybe you’ve noticed that stress, frustration or anger is seeping into your personal or professional life, or you feel disconnected from those you care about.

That’s where David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program comes in. It’s based on peer-reviewed, evidence-backed therapeutic methods to help you find happiness, love and real fulfillment. Learn how to break free from the emotional roller-coaster and start thriving in every area of your life. You can find out more at DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery. That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

Now we move into the third point and this is one that a lot of people skip, which is why they end up stuck. When people feel anxious or unfulfilled or disconnected, especially in their relationships, they usually start looking for fixes, fast ones, hacks, tactics, quick dopamine stuff, like, “What text should I send? Just give it to me so I can copy and paste,” or “How do I get more dates?” or “How do I get motivated again?” [15:54.1]

They want a script or a simple strategy, or a step-by-step system, and when that doesn’t work, they try to go harder. They get into grind mode, more hustle, longer hours, less sleep, more reps at the gym, more money, more apps, more self-help content. Then when that still doesn’t work, they flip the switch the other way. They pull back and numb out and say things like, “I’m just focusing on myself right now,” and go monk mode while secretly hoping someone will finally love them without them having to try.

That back and forth that’s swinging from one end of the extreme to the other burns people out, because both sides miss the actual issue. There’s no awareness of what’s happening inside, no understanding of the emotional drivers that are really pulling the strings. The same old pattern just keeps running the show, even if you dress it up in nicer clothes or try to manifest your way out of it. [16:53.1]

The truth is, if you never slow down enough to notice the underlying patterns, then you’re just rearranging furniture in a house that’s on fire. You’re still reacting from the same wounds, the same beliefs, the same protective parts that are stuck with their burdens, and those reactions create the same outcomes over and over.

Awareness is where things really start to change, not some perfect, enlightened state of awareness. I’m referring to the quiet, uncomfortable moments when you catch yourself mid-pattern, when you feel that tightening in your chest before you ghost someone, and when you hear that voice in your head telling you not to speak up because you’ll sound stupid, or when you notice the part of you reaching for validation instead of authentic connection—and that moment of awareness, that can be the turning point, not because everything suddenly feels better, but because now you’re aware of it. You’re watching it. You’re observing it. You’re not just swept up in it, blended with it, or overwhelmed by it. Here, in that moment of awareness, you have a choice, and once you have a choice, you’re no longer a slave to your patterns. [18:08.4]

Let me give you a quick example. A client of mine, let’s call her Rachel. She came to me after yet another dating situation blew up in her face. Smart, ambitious, very competent in a very challenging field, she was hyper-logical, and she kept ending up in situationships with men who didn’t want commitment and then she spiraled when they inevitably pulled away. In her mind, the solution was to be more detached, more strategic. She’d actually written down a list of rules that she was going to follow to make herself seem more mysterious and high-value. It was exhausting and she was exhausted. [18:48.5]

So, we first slowed down. We traced the spiral and what came up was this part of her that had decided very early in life that being too much, too emotional, too demanding, too expressive would drive people away. That part of her had kept her polished, high-functioning and always just a little guarded, at least. It helped her succeed in a male-dominated industry, but it was also the part that panicked anytime someone got too close, because closeness felt too dangerous.

Once she was aware of this, then she was able to get control over it. Not instantly, not dramatically, but gradually, she stopped blaming the men. She stopped blaming herself. She started noticing the pattern as it kicked in, how she’d go cold when she felt vulnerable, how she’d pretended not to care when she actually did.

Instead of shaming herself for it, she got curious. She started writing down the trigger points. She started journaling conversations with the parts of her that were terrified of rejection. She started letting herself actually feel emotions instead of performing a version of herself she thought other people wanted. [20:10.4]

Over time, that awareness gave her a kind of calm that she had never had before. She didn’t have to fake confidence anymore. She didn’t have to run mind games to keep someone interested, and yes, she started attracting different kinds of men, too, ones who actually wanted genuine connection. But more importantly, she stopped abandoning herself in the process—and that’s what self-awareness can really do. It doesn’t give you a magic pill, but it gives you your agency back. It gives you your power back, and once you have that, the whole way you relate to life starts to shift dramatically.

This is the kind of deep emotional work that doesn’t show up on Instagram reels or dating app profiles. It’s not sexy. It’s not optimized. It’s not viral, but it’s real, and it’s what I guide people through inside my Platinum Partnership, 21 and counting full courses designed to help you uncover these patterns, reconnect with your core and lead your life from a grounded, integrated Higher Self. [21:14.0]

All right, let’s bring this all together. We’ve covered three big points today.

First, most of what’s holding you back in love, confidence and fulfillment isn’t some flaw or a missing skill per se. It’s an emotional script that you didn’t even know was running. These are beliefs and meanings that you picked up before you could even spell belief or interpretation, stuff like, “I need to earn love” or “If I’m vulnerable, then I will get hurt.” Unless you become aware of those scripts, they’ll keep running your life from the shadows of your unconscious.

Second, those inner patterns are driven by protector parts of you that are trying to protect you. They’re not the enemy. They’re not mistakes. They’re scared little parts that think that they’re keeping you safe, and the more you fight them, the more stuck you stay. But when you turn toward those parts with compassion and appreciation, when you start leading from your calm, connected self, then everything starts to open up for you. [22:14.5]

Third, the work doesn’t begin with tactics or strategies or hacks. It begins with awareness. Without it, you’re just spinning your wheels. You’ll keep chasing more, more success, more approval, more distractions, while that same ache deep down keeps whispering, “Still not enough.”

Ignore what I’ve covered here, and the consequences don’t just stay the same. They compound. You build a life on top of a foundation that doesn’t hold. You end up in relationships that look good on paper maybe but feel hollow, or you’ll climb the ladder only to realize it was leaning against the wrong wall, and then it’s not just burnout, it’s despair, quiet, creeping despair, the kind that makes you wonder if maybe happiness just isn’t in the cards for you. [23:00.6]

But if you apply what we covered today, if you start becoming aware of your emotional scripts, start getting curious about your protector parts, and start leading your life from the ground itself, then you won’t need to perform for love anymore. You won’t need to grind for self-worth. You’ll feel confident because you’re connected. You’ll feel calm because you’re no longer at war with yourself, and that’s when you feel real freedom.

In the next episode, I’ll walk you through the three levels of personal growth and why most people get stuck at Level 2, thinking they’re making progress, when they’re actually just reinforcing the same old patterns. It’s one of the most important concepts I will ever teach and it’ll help you see where you’re at on the path and what’s really next for you.

Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone else you think could benefit from it. If you liked this, hit a like or give it a good rating on whatever platform you’re listening to this on.Again, I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [24:01.8]