From a young age, attractive women become masters at sniffing out neediness. Most men don’t discover this fact about life until they’ve sabotaged their dating lives and relationships.

But here’s the good news:

There’s a proven system for overcoming your neediness. It won’t happen overnight, but it will free you from the sadistic grip neediness has over you.

In this episode, you’ll discover the 7 steps to obliterate your neediness for good.

Listen now.

 Show highlights include:


  • How your fear about relationships dupes you into making relationship-ending mistakes (even if you don’t realize it) (2:40)
  • The counterintuitive reason becoming wealthy skyrockets your neediness (3:04)
  • Why women can see through your inauthentic attempts to get to know their personality like Swiss cheese (4:41)
  • The fundamental human needs that help you exterminate your neediness (9:03)
  • Why having an agenda of picking up women when you go out subconsciously repels them from you (13:27)
  • The 7 experiential steps to meet your own needs and obliterate your neediness (20:30)

   Does your neediness, fear, or insecurity sabotage your success with women? Do you feel you may be unlovable? For more than 15 years, I’ve helped thousands of people find confidence, fulfillment, and loving relationships. And I can help you, too. I’m therapist and life coach David Tian, Ph.D. I invite you to check out my free Masterclasses on dating and relationships at https://www.davidtianphd.com/masterclass/ now.

For more about David Tian, go here: https://www.davidtianphd.com/about/

    Get access to all my current and future online coaching courses by applying for the Platinum Partnership program today at:
https://www.davidtianphd.com/platinum

*****

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Note: Scroll Below for Transcription




Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in dating, relationships, success, and fulfillment, and explore the psychology of masculinity. Now here’s your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology podcast. I’m David Tian, your host. In this episode, we continue our sequence on neediness by getting into how to overcome your neediness, how men can overcome their neediness with women.

In the last episode, we took a little detour into the psychology of Thor: Love and Thunder, and in the two episodes before that, we were looking at neediness and how neediness is the one thing, the one factor, the one metric that you need to track and the only one that you need to track, if you’re looking to become more attractive to women, and more importantly, if you want to find lasting happiness, love and fulfillment in life. [00:56.8]

I say, “more importantly,” because it’s obviously more important, but most guys, instead of aiming for the thing that they’re hoping having more women be attracted to them will get them, which is self-esteem, a feeling of significance or worthiness, not just the sexual pleasure, because let’s be honest, if you are over 25, there are ways of getting sexual pleasure just on its own, no strings attached, without all the yuckiness or ickiness, or the attachments of feelings to a woman that you were really just going to for sexual gratification and for her physical attractiveness.

I don’t make this podcast or any of my courses just to help guys get free sex, so if you’re listening to this right now, you are probably hoping to get into a relationship or at least to find meaningful, emotional connections with women, and as a result, what you’re hoping to find or create as a result of that is a feeling or this emotion in you of connection, significance, worthiness, love, happiness, fulfillment, and joy. When it comes to your relationship with women or with a woman, add on top of that passion and pleasure, and adventure and romance, and sexual desire, too. [02:13.8]

All of that, pleasure on top of the happiness and fulfillment and joy, and connection and love, and for those guys who are insecure, of course, the guys who are needy, on top of that, certainty and security, the lack of which has caused the Red Pill movement or the move towards Red Pill, the fear that she’ll cheat on you or that she can’t be trusted. Hence, a big part of what these guys are also looking for and hoping for, but have given up on, is being able to feel that emotional satisfaction of certainty of security in a relationship. But they don’t have that and, instead, they have fear and insecurity, and as a result of acting on their fear, they end up making poor decisions and they guarantee they’re lasting unhappiness and a life lived with a background anxiety, always trying to out-achieve their nagging insecurities, that nagging anxiety that they’re not good enough just in who they are. [03:15.6]

In fact, if you’ve been following the episodes on neediness, you would know that they are the neediest. All of that is neediness. They’re unable to meet their own need for significance, for love, for connection, or being good enough to be loved just for who they are, not for what they can do or what they have done or what they do. As a result, they put up a persona that’s made up of these insecurities as a reaction to their insecurities that they’re not good enough, and so they overcompensate. [03:48.4]

I’m just as guilty of that. I’ve done many episodes and I’ve talked about my own life and my journey in a lot of videos, including the video that’s on the front page of my YouTube channel, that I went through that same process of overcompensating with achievement, or when it comes to being good with women, with being a player with a certain look, fitness, the six-pack, the outer symbols of status or wealth, and trying to bank on that to attract women.

The only thing that occurs is that people only get to know your persona and are attracted to that, but your persona is not you. It’s just a part of you, and for most people, it’s not even a part of them. It’s just a front. It’s just a facade that they weakly put out there. Anyone who has been around the block and anyone who has lived through life who has wisdom, and for many attractive women, since they were young, they’ve seen through men, because since they grew boobs, men, maybe some creepy uncle, starting when she was 14, but definitely when she started to blossom as a woman, she has had to deal with the advances of men, the looks of men, the insincere, inauthentic, ungenuine attempts of men to be interested in her as a person and her personality. She has been forced to just survive and deal with this, to be able to see through all of that. [05:11.0]

If you are a good person inside, it might just be that the women think that your coping strategy of putting out this player persona is kind of cute and endearing in a way, because it shows that you’re insecure and you don’t even know that. I know that that was the case for me, for in many cases, they saw right through me and I thought they were reacting to my player persona and skills and all that. I’d find out only later that they saw right through all of that, but, luckily, they saw that I had a good heart and I was well-meaning, and it was a little endearing because of how I was overcompensating in this way because of my own insecurity.

For many men who put out that player persona, it turns out that if there’s a good woman who is actually into you, it’s very likely she’s into you despite that persona. Then, if there are women who are into you because of the persona, that’s even sadder. It’s much sadder, because they’re actually not into you for you, but for this front that you put up, because it’s all a facade and you could lose it all. [06:10.6]

When you lose it, maybe you get into an accident and now you’ve lost your six pack or you’ve lost your money, or whatever it is that the average dude thinks it’s just obviously why women would be with him. This is the average young guy, young twenties, thirties, forties, whatever, who thinks, of course, every guy gets a woman through that and that’s sad as fuck because that guy is already– He can’t even get it, but even if he were to get it being in a relationship with a woman, he’s already banking on her liking him just because he’s got money and can pay the bills, but that’s not loved right there. That’s like an unwritten contract. That’s like just a transaction, and if the bargain is good for her, economically speaking, she’d enter it.

That’s not love. That’s not real intimacy. She’s not really there for you, for you as a person. When the going gets hard, she’s bailing, and this is the reality of a lot of guys because they set it up that way. This is what they expect and that’s all that they ask for. [07:07.6]

But it doesn’t have to be that way, and if you’re a player putting out a persona, you can actually get real, and maybe you’ll find that the woman that has deigned to be with you who is a good woman, assuming she’s a good woman—I know a lot of guys who front with their player persona actually hate the women that they’re with or disrespect them or look down on them. But assuming that you’ve got a good woman who is in a relationship with you—and you drop the front, the persona, the façade, and get real, you’ll see that she also has a persona and has been putting that out out of her own insecurity, and maybe, finally, the two of you can get real and then something real can come out of that … or you’ll quickly discover that those women and your guy friends are not really your friends. They’re not really there for you as you, but for what you can get them or what you can do for them, what value you can bring them. They’re parasitic on your values. They’re sucking you for your value and it’s better to know that as soon as you can. [08:07.5]

Then when you don’t settle, when you stop settling for that and you get real, you’ll finally be able to make real connections with real people, men and women, in your life, and your life will take on a whole new level of experience and meaning.

This comes from focusing on the one thing, not on the results of back in the pickup days. It was like your close rates or something like that, like how many girls did you make out with, have sex with, get numbers from, whatever, the closing rates, but instead focusing on how well are you meeting your own emotional and psychological needs?

Another way to cash out neediness, borrowing from Mark Manson’s definition, is … how did he put it? Neediness is when you place a higher priority on what others think of you than on what you think of yourself. I think I have a simpler definition. Neediness is just the inability to meet your own needs consistently and frequently. [09:03.0]

There are needs that all human beings have universally and these needs include the need for security or certainty, the need for variety or uncertainty or unpredictability, the need for significance or worthiness, the need for connection, the need for love, unconditional love, the need for contribution to others and growth, and the need for autonomy and the need for limits, healthy limits, knowing where those limits are, and the need for play and spontaneity and adventure.

That last need is a good example of one that many men struggle to meet in themselves, and so they have this depressing, lonely, kind of pathetic life by their own estimation, and they’re just playing video games, kind of depressed in their own bedrooms, living with their mom, and living at home in their late-twenties or whatever, and they’re hoping that a woman will come and rescue them from their humdrum existence and give them purpose and meaning, and passion and pleasure, and that’s why they’re needy. [10:07.0]

If that’s you, if that describes you, that’s needy. That whole lifestyle is neediness and conditioning your neediness, and as a result, you are unattractive because, what we’ve established in terms of neediness and attraction, I devoted an entire episode as to why that’s the case and drawing from evolutionary psychology.

This is from Episode 54, the starting point being, borrowing again from Mark Manson because he puts it so well, your attractiveness as a man is inversely proportional to your neediness. The needier you are the less attractive you are and the less needy you are, the more attractive you are.

Then, in Episode 55, the next episode, I went into the pervasiveness of neediness. When you are needy, in other words, you’re not able to meet your own emotional needs in yourself consistently and frequently. When you are needy, it’s leaking through your sub communications, your facial expressions, your micro-expressions, your tone of voice, your body posture, your body language, the way you move and how you stand, and where your eyes are and your eye contact, in general, but also what you’re looking at. In social settings, it can manifest as this kind of fidgety way of being or this basic social awkwardness. [11:17.6]

Your neediness is evident, not just when you’re interacting directly with a woman over text or in conversation, or just in her proximity, but it’s always there, sort of pervasive. It’s just sort of infusing your very presence. You have this sort of vibe or air of neediness.

Have you ever been in a party or club where you’re standing alone and you’re feeling needy, you’re feeling socially awkward? You are feeling out of place and insecure, and you don’t know how to have fun in this environment and you are wondering why you even came, but you’re standing there and there’s somebody else who is also maybe off at the periphery of their group, so they’re not fully in the conversation. They’re sort of looking around and they look at you, and you can tell this person is looking for someone to talk to and they look at you and they just keep scanning. They just looked you over and like, Uh, no, and they keep moving. [12:09.8]

Have you ever had that, being looked over, glossed over for your neediness? What’s happening there is it’s two needy people looking, sort of scanning the room for somebody to latch onto, to meet their need to fit in and to have fun that they’re not able to meet on their own, except one person is a little less needy and that person is doing the rejecting, just through the eye contact of continuing to look around.

I’ve been on both sides of that equation in my socially-awkward phase that lasted for good three decades or so of my life, not in every case, but the ones where I walked in there and didn’t know anyone or didn’t know anyone and I was sort of waiting for the people that I did know and I felt obligated to be there. Maybe it was like a mixer for graduate students or professors or something like that. [13:00.0]

I’ve also been on the other end where I’m looking and I’m seeing somebody who is kind of needy, creepy, clearly wants to talk to me, but I don’t want to get stuck in a conversation that I can’t get out of, so I move on. But, of course, the very fact that I’m even scanning while I’m with people already is already indicative of a kind of inability to meet my own needs for fun or enjoyment.

If you’ve been following any of my dating skills courses like “Invincible”, you’d know that when you’re out in social settings, if one of the things that you’d like to do is to meet a woman, so you want to be sexually attractive, then there are only three things that should be dominant in your mind that should take up more than 90% of your thoughts and your mental processes, and that number one thing is to have fun.

Just two words, have fun, or however you want to cash that out, which could just be enjoy yourself, right? Just have fun, enjoy yourself, and you can’t do anything else until you’re doing that. Right off the bat, so many guys who are pickup artists, Red Pill guys, or whatever, they have an agenda when they show up, they’re already not having fun. [14:07.7]

Now, if you have fun and you have in the back of your mind this agenda of meeting new people or meeting new women, that’s great. I mean, you can move on to Step 2. Step 1 is to have fun. Step 2 is to make others have fun or help others have fun. Then Step 3 is make connections and see if people meet your standards.

They’re in that order, so if you’re not doing Step 1, have fun, you can’t go on to do a good job and have it come naturally and effortlessly and for it to be actually effective in meeting people, unless you’re having fun yourself, because what that does is it guarantees, at least, in that moment, that you’re able to meet your own need that everyone else in that party or in that social setting is trying to meet. They’re trying to meet their need for having fun as well. That’s the main reason they’re there, it’s a social setting. You’ve got to be able to meet that need in yourself and not require other people to meet that. [14:57.8]

But the needy guy is not only needy in that setting—of course, he is needy in that setting—but also globally in his life, as I was pointing out the sort of lifestyle of having a kind of crappy life and a lifestyle and waiting for a woman to fulfill you, to bring you that joy and adventure, just like the manic pixie dream girl, which is a trope in cinema studies and in movies, many movies like 500 Days of Summer or Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind to classic movies. Especially if you’ve just had a breakup, those are good ones to commiserate with.

But part of what’s happening there is the writers are writing women in a self-conscious way, so it seems self-aware, which is why those two movies are a little special in that sense. They’re self-aware that the female lead for much of the movie is seen from the man’s point of view, and that from the man’s point of view, she doesn’t really exist as a human being, but as a role, the role being the savior of his shitty life or his boring, crappy, depressing life, and she brings the color to his life, but he doesn’t really see here. [16:04.7]

I’ve done a whole other episode on this. It was one of the man-up episodes on the manic fairy dream girl. You can google it, David Tian, manic fairy dream girl. I’m sure you’ll find it. It’s a variation of the nice guy fixer who is trying to find, trying to fix a woman who has flaws, but the reason he latched onto her is because she brings the color.

She meets his needs that he’s not able to meet for himself of adventure and pleasure, and happiness and spontaneity, and happy-go-luckiness and easygoingness, and fun. He’s not able to do that himself for a variety of reasons from childhood, and as a result, he’s unconsciously looking for a woman to do that for him.

Unfortunately, that’s a huge turnoff for her eventually, or maybe right away for the more self-aware women, because he’s needy, and that, therefore, is a turnoff to her automatically, but it’s also that he’s parasitic on her and he’s not seeing her. He’s dehumanizing her. He’s not seeing her. I mean, this is a different kind of objectification using her as an object to meet his needs and not being with her as an end in itself, but as a means to meet his needs. [17:11.8] 

Now, as soon as I say that, if you’re using women as a means to meet your own need, you’re already objectifying them, and the self-aware women will be turned off by this, unless she is just as lost and needy as you are and you’re equally emotionally needy, so you latch onto each other and then you have a relationship.

This is how needy men get into relationships. They’re getting into relationships with needy women who are complementarity needy, but in different ways. It’s like the fixer nice guy achiever and the manic fairy dream girl. They’re sort of opposites on the outside, but on the inside, they’re both empty and trying to have their needs met from the other. As a result, this relationship is sabotaged right from the beginning, but they don’t notice it because now they’re in a relationship because they now have matching neuroses. They’re able to meet each other’s needs and have this false chemistry. [18:02.8]

A good example of these matching neuroses type of relationships that will fall apart in the end, maybe often in spectacularly fiery ways, is pretty much every relationship that any accomplished pickup artist has ever gotten into after learning pickup. It just blows up in a really dramatic way. That’s because they’re just using each other, and often unconsciously, to get their own needs met. That’s not a relationship of unconditional love.

I know for most guys, it boggles their mind that they don’t even know that that is possible to have a relationship that you go to not to get your needs met, but because you have all of your own needs and you’re able to meet all of your own needs. As a result, you’re able to see clearly, and because you’re able to meet your own needs, you’re not going to her with your umbilical cord out, so to speak, and asking her to meet your needs, to give you those emotional nutrients. But, instead, you have an abundance of love and connection in your life, and significance, and you freely give it to her and she freely adds to your already abundant store of emotional needs. [19:07.2]

Now you’re able to be secondary providers of these emotional needs for the other, but you’re not the primary provider, because the primary provider is you yourself for your own needs. That is the basis, it’s the requirement, for a successful long-term intimate relationship of passion and love.

Do you struggle in your interactions with women or in your intimate relationship? Are fear, shame, or neediness sabotaging your relationships or attractiveness? In my Platinum Partnership Program, you’ll discover how to transform your psychological issues, improve your success with women, and uncover your true self.

Get access to all my current and future online courses by applying for the Platinum Partnership today at DavidTianPHD.com\\Platinum.

Now that was the first set of bullet points I had for this episode, and the main point of this episode was to give you the seven steps to meet your own needs, the seven steps of the therapeutic process, the core seven steps. But I guess, I don’t know if I’ll keep all that that I just covered in there. I think I probably will. Let me know if you like that or if you thought that was too long of an intro, but let me give you the seven steps.

The seven steps are experiential. That is it’s not enough to just know them intellectually; you actually have to experience them. That’s the case for almost everything important in life. You have to do it yourself. You’ll have to apply it, follow through, implement it, in order to see the results, and someone else can’t do it for you. It’s sort of like working out. No one can work out for you. I suppose, I’m still waiting for this to become a reality, if you could just lie there and someone works you out and you get all the muscles and everything. Theoretically, this should be possible, but I haven’t seen this in reality. [21:05.8]

Then, that person will have to, whatever the system is, the computer or whatever will have to keep doing that for the rest of your life, and that’s quite onerous—or you can learn how to enjoy the process and then the process itself will be the enjoyment. Then you don’t need to worry about just doing it for the result, and that’s, ideally, how you approach the therapeutic process as well.

Okay, so here are the seven steps. The first step is to discover your protective parts. Discover your protective parts. Hopefully, you have some basis or background in IFS, Internal Family Systems therapy, that uses parts language. I’ve devoted so many episodes to IFS therapy, the parts, the true self and all that, so, hopefully, I can bank on that and not have to review a half hour or more of the basic model. This will, hopefully, be understandable to you. 

The first step is to discover your various protector or protective parts. [22:00.0]

The second step is to access enough self-energy. That’s the term from IFS therapy, self-energy. It’s the state of your higher self and it’s on a continuum. It’s not like you’re all in self or not in self at all. It’s more of a continuum, so it’s really about accessing enough of it to be able to feel towards these, any part that you’re focusing on. You feel one or more of the eight Cs qualities.

Again, this is for the geeks out there. This is not a comprehensive list. It’s not only these aids and it’s just an easy way to remember these different qualities. It’s just a heuristic. Okay, so calmness. Curiosity; curiosity is often the first one to come online when you’re accessing self-energy and you’re focusing on a protective part. Do you notice curiosity without an agenda or are you frustrated, ignored, angry at it, or ashamed of it or want it to go away or want to fix it? Those are all signs that you are identified with or blended with another protective part. [23:02.4]

But you’ll know when you’re accessing self-energy, when you feel this curiosity toward it, or calmness or clarity, or compassion or creativity, or connectedness, and especially when you feel confident and you feel courageous.

One of the biggest signs that you are still blended to some degree with a protective part is when you feel the same fear as the part that’s your target part. It’s the part you’re focused on. A hallmark of the higher self is confidence and courage, so if you can access those, as many of those qualities as you can, the more of them that you can access and the more intensely you can access those qualities while being with a protective part, the more that you have fulfilled Step 2, which is to access enough self-energy. But even if you just access curiosity and you feel curious without an agenda toward this part, you just want to learn more about it, not to fix it, but just to get to know it better, then you can proceed to Step 3. [23:59.7]

Step 1, discover your protective parts. Step 2 is to access enough self-energy that you can be with the protector parts without an agenda, and then Step 3 is to befriend and understand your protective parts one by one, focusing on them one at a time.

Then these three steps, discover, actually the first two steps, discover and access, depending on where you’re starting out on this journey, could take months. For some people, it could take years before you are safely able to move on to Step 3, because that second step of accessing enough self-energy, if you’re unable to access enough self-energy, your therapist can stand in for your higher self for that session or in the short term and get to know your protective parts and then get that trust of your protective parts, enough trust that they can step back to allow you to access enough of your own self-energy. [24:55.2]

But the first two steps are the crucial ones for most people when they start with the therapeutic process. Their tendency or temptation is just to rush through it and think you’re further along, and then go to the unburdening steps before you’ve accessed enough self-energy, and that’s often from a protective part or a manager part that wants to be fixed so that you can go pick up chicks.

Just to reiterate, this therapeutic process is not a way to pick up chicks. If it wasn’t clear enough in the early part of this episode, if somehow you found me because you wanted to pick up more chicks and that’s your main thing and you think that’s my main thing, too, it’s best if you don’t get frustrated by following my material for now and go and learn how to go pick up chicks somewhere else and then blow up your life, as it necessarily will if you follow that, and then come back to this and what I’m sharing here will make a lot more sense.

I’m trying to help men become more attractive. That doesn’t mean picking up chicks through cold approaches and stuff like that, but being naturally attractive, attractive enough that you can relatively effortlessly meet a great match for you, the right woman for you. [26:01.6]

Okay, the first step is to discover your protective parts. The second step is to access enough self-energy to proceed without an agenda. The third step is to befriend and understand your protective parts, including their fears, how they got to be that way, what their coping strategies are, how they see their own roles in your life or in your system, how they see their job, what they’re trying to do for you, what their positive and what their intention is. You’ll know that you understand them when you can see the positive intention, and that’s Step 3, befriend and understand your protective parts.

Step 4 is trust, to build a trusting relationship with your protector part. This is super important and another one that guys generally just skip over, and these are all necessary steps, necessary. This fourth step of building trust, this takes time. In between sessions, many people just do weekly sessions with a therapist. Some even do every other week. I recommend that you only do every other week once you have done 10 weekly, 20 weekly sessions, so that you have already learned how to build this consistency, because that’s what trust is. Right? [27:10.6]

A part of you has not met your higher self or doesn’t trust your higher self enough to relax back and step back. What you need to do there is, the first time this part meets your higher self, it’s the first time they’re meeting and they need a relationship in order for that trust to happen. Trust is built over time. In between sessions, you’re supposed to do check-ins.

You check in with this part, and throughout the day, if the part needs to get your attention and you ignore it, then you’re actually building an untrusting relationship. You’re doing the opposite of building a trusting relationship. You’re establishing a relationship where the part can’t trust you, so you’re going to have to make up for that. Plus, you’re going to have to make up for 30 years or whatever of the lack of a relationship between your higher part and the self in this part, which is why the part is stuck in this and feels like it can’t let go of this job, because it doesn’t trust you. That is your higher self. [28:02.2]

That fourth step, super, super important. You cannot rush this. It takes time and consistency, and maybe it takes apologies as well. The part is angry that you weren’t there when the bad shit went down and that you’re only showing up now, and so there’s that apology. Plus, any apologies that would ensue if you screwed up your commitment to checking in or to monitoring or paying attention, or noticing or being aware of this part, throughout your week or day. That fourth step, building a trusting relationship with your various protective parts that you become aware of, super important. You cannot rush those first four steps: discover, access, befriend, and trust.

Then the fifth step is the one that a lot of guys rush to because there’s a lot written about this step and this is the most delicate step. Step 5 is to unburden. This is where you unburden any vulnerable exile parts. First of all, you’ll meet the vulnerable exile parts only when the protector parts that guard them that are protecting them allow you to do so. [29:02.0]

If you somehow do an N-run around the protector parts, as some novice therapists might facilitate, hopefully, by accident, you get backlash and that makes things even worse. Richard Schwartz has written a lot about this in his books. This is part of what he discovered and this is why it was so important to break it down into these necessary steps, so don’t rush into Step 5, but Step 5 is also a necessary step in the therapeutic process.

When you build enough trust with your protector parts, they will allow you to and sometimes take you to the vulnerable exile parts they’ve been protecting who are holding these burdens of thoughts or beliefs that they took on from the past that are causing them to still be in pain.

When you then build relationships with the exile parts, which is much faster generally than building relationships with the protectors, there’s a process by which you can help them let go of those burdens. Often when the vulnerable exile parts let go of their burdens, the protectors that were protecting them naturally also relax and release their burdens. But sometimes they don’t. Sometimes the protective parts have their own burdens, so then you can help them go through this process of unburdening for them as well. That’s step five, the unburdening. [30:12.6]

Then, Step 6, super important. Even some therapists skip this. The first few months of my therapy life, I kind of rushed this one as well. Luckily, many years ago, I learned not to and that is Step 6, which is to integrate. This is where you integrate any newly unburdened parts into the new roles in your system.

Every time a part gets unburdened, there’s going to be a big shift, and especially depending on how big the burden was, there’s going to be a shift in your internal system. That might mean sleepless nights for a little while. That might mean more crying. This is beautiful. This is a beautiful thing when you can be there for the parts that are sad and you can feel that with them, not in a kind of hopeless or despairing way because you don’t understand or can’t make sense of the thing that’s so sad, but sadness can now become a really beautiful feeling and a very pleasurable one, and I know for many guys, they can’t even imagine that. Here in step six, you’re integrating the newly unburdened parts into your system in their new roles, in healthier roles that they enjoy. That’s to integrate and that’s step six. [31:13.8]

Step 7 is to train. I use that word instead of “do it again” or “practice”. “Train” is a good word because it implies that, every time you do it, you get better at it, but also that you’re supposed to keep coming back to it. Step 7 is to train and what you’re training is consistent access to more of your higher self.

Each time you go through this, the first six steps of the process, really, even just the first two steps, you should be able to access more and more self-energy over time so that you can access more of those eight Cs qualities over time. Over the years that you do this, the months and years that you do this, the process should be easier and quicker. Often, you’ll discover more challenging burdens that arise or more challenging parts that are stuck in their ways and in their pain, so the challenge will arise with your own maturity, but you will have a greater facility with it as part of the training of it. [32:08.0]

Then Step 8. Two bonus steps, Step 8 is to repeat Steps 1 to 7, and then there’s actually a bonus Step 9 which I hope to cover in another episode. But the therapeutic process is those seven steps and, again, just to recap, Step 1, discover. I’ll give you just the first word so it’s easier to remember, and then you can go over this episode again to recap. The first, I’ll just do the first word, the first step is to discover. The second step is access. Third step is befriend. Fourth step is trust. Fifth step is unburden. Sixth step is integrate and the seventh step is to train.

Okay, those are the seven steps to go out to get to them, but, hopefully, you can see the bigger picture of how the therapeutic process works. Remember, this is an experiential process, so just knowing the steps intellectually obviously won’t do it, but it’s important to give you the roadmap so you know what’s coming up and what to expect so that you can buy into it yourself and experience it yourself. [33:03.5]

This brings us to the conclusion of our brief mini-series on neediness. Thanks so much for listening. If you have any feedback whatsoever, I’d love to hear from you that you can comment wherever you’re seeing this. Also, please share this with anyone that you think would benefit from it. Thank you so much.

I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. I’ll see you then. David Tian, signing out.

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