Most Dating Problems Are Therapeutic Problems | (#085) The Masculine Psychology Podcast with David Tian

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, I’ll be explaining the biggest problem, the biggest impediment to accessing the naturally attractive parts of you.

A couple of episodes, I went into detail about how not only is your true self attractive, but that you also have parts of you that embody attractive traits such as adventurousness or risk-taking, or humor or just being funny, or being good at expressing yourself sexually and being comfortable and enjoying expressing sexual energy, being naturally good at being playful and fun, and bringing fun to other people, being spontaneous and uninhibited. [01:03.8]

Going even further, you might have parts, like I do, that can develop into sexually-attractive archetypes, like the rake or the charismatic or the charmer. I’m using these wonderfully-fleshed-out character types that were described in Robert Greene’s book, The Art of Seduction.

Accessing these parts of you, that is, already existing parts of you, that exist in you, accessing them is really important, because, otherwise, you’re going to force-fit a persona that doesn’t connect with or resonate with any pre-existing parts of you, in which case, it’ll be incredibly difficult, and the whole way through, it will never feel naturally. It will always feel fake.

Now, most guys listening to this who have trouble attracting women, they mistakenly think that their natural or true self is shy or socially awkward, or anxious or withdrawn, or something along those lines, and then any attempt to become more charismatic or confident or charming would, to them, feel false. [02:10.5]

That is a false belief that they’re harboring. They think that that’s their true self, but that is not their true self, and according to IFS therapy, which is the main type of therapy that I would recommend and is an evidence-based practice, and I’ve mentioned it in numerous episodes, so in IFS therapy, the true self is marked by, defined by, these eight qualities and they all start with C-words, making it easier to remember: compassion, creativity, courage, confidence, clarity, calm, curiosity, and connectedness.

The shy, socially-awkward, anxious part of them that they mistakenly think is their true self is not their true self. These are parts of them, parts of them that need help, that need the presence of their true self, that need to be seen and understood and appreciated so that they can relax enough to go through the processes, the therapeutic processes of unburdening, so that they can let go of their fears and anxieties in order to step into their healthier roles. [03:20.8]

That’s not all. What I’ve been saying in these past several episodes, especially the one two episodes back, is that in addition to these parts of you that are feeling vulnerable, and in pain or distress, and need help and unburdening, in addition to those, you also have parts that are naturally attractive, in addition, of course, to your true self that is already confident and courageous and creative, and has clarity and calm, and those are attractive traits.

But in addition to the true self, you also have parts of you that have other attractive traits such as being spontaneous or witty or funny, as I was pointing out, and you’ll only discover those when you go through the therapeutic process. [04:05.4]

The good news—all along the way, I’ve been sharing good news, but another piece of good news—is that once you’re able to access those parts of you that already have these naturally-attractive traits, you can actually further develop them so that they become even more witty or charming, or funny or adventurous, and definitely, and whatever strengths they already have in terms of sexual attractiveness, they, through more experience, can become better and can embody these traits more effectively with training and experience.

It’s so much easier when you’re able to access the parts of you that are already naturally talented in the emotional skills or the social skills that are required in dating and sexual attraction, and I believe that everyone has naturally-attractive traits, because many of the childlike traits of being spontaneous and playful, and adventurous and being present, and most importantly, being able to have fun. [05:07.1]

I believe all of us were born with these traits and we had these as children, but then the world got to us and we had to adapt how we naturally were in order to win or keep the approval of our caregivers or our peers. As we aged, we continued to do that adaptation more and more and more, and eventually, we ended up with just a small subset of our personalities that, now, as adults, dominate our lives, and we’ve forgotten these other parts of us and we have exiled many beautiful parts of us, and we’ve disowned the shadow parts of us that are comfortable and enjoy being sexy, and risk-taking and experiencing adventure.

As a result, we only have access consciously to a small portion of what we really are and we don’t get to experience our full potential or anywhere near it, until and unless you go through this therapeutic process, and this is why most dating problems or therapy problems or therapeutic problems. Most dating problems are therapeutic problems. [06:18.2]

Most people in the world don’t know this. I didn’t know this until my late-30s, which was almost a decade ago now, and I mistakenly believed as most men believe that, if they have dating problems, what they’re lacking is more knowledge, or on a more primitive level, they’re lacking good looks or money, or status or something along those lines. But when you’re smarter, you realize that there are ways of improving whatever your baseline is. You can raise it up.

Let’s say that you are some objective measure of some kind, a four out of 10 on mating value, and if you apply yourself enough over time and get better at dating skills, social skills, emotional skills, you can raise that up to at least a seven out of 10, and the pickup artists are sort of like martial artists. [07:05.0]

The old martial artists myth is that you can take a skinny guy, or actually really muscular, but a very lean and relatively-small guy like Bruce Lee, and he can beat up Kareem Abdul-Jabbar 7’2” or whatever it was. Or in real life, you’ve got Royce Gracie in the early days of MMA at I think it was about 180 lbs., taking down and beating up much larger, stronger, muscular men—and this is actually a great topic for a completely different episode—but you’re not going to see that nowadays because the big heavyweights know how to grapple. But back then, they didn’t. They didn’t even know how to defend, so the martial artists had this huge, outsized advantage that would take him, let’s say, from a six to a 10, and that would allow him to overcome all of these natural advantages that the bigger, stronger fighter had. But now the playing field is a lot more level. [07:58.6]

The myth of the pickup artists are probably the part of the attraction of it, especially in the early days, in the early-2000s, was, similarly, like with martial arts that you could be naturally a four, but if you know that pickup arts, you can then out compete guys who are naturally better looking, richer, with more status, and you can beat them.

And this is true to a certain extent, right? If you take a guy who is ugly and poor, and have relatively low status, I don’t know, let’s just think hypothetically, and ugly, short, fat, let’s throw them all in there, janitor who drives a janitor’s van, but give him the social skills and the emotional skills of the most charming man on earth.

Then the metric here is—because in fighting, it’s like can you actually knock the guy out or choke him out or to have them tap—in the dating world and the pickup world it was how many and how consistently and how you got to measure the quality of your quarry, right, your target, and they used to do HB and give the girl a number, and so this was completely dehumanizing them. Of course, this was all coming out of a kind of toxic masculinity out of deep insecurity, right? [09:07.6]

But anyway, let’s just play along so I can go with this metaphor. You can get this fat, ugly, short janitor, who has, let’s say, genius-level social skills and emotional skills and seduction skills, and is amazing at flirting and banter, and making her laugh and putting all kinds of ideas in her mind that totally titillate and arouse her even before she’s aware of it and all this. Can he win over more women than a guy who has hardly any social skills but has the traditional things of good luck?

You imagine, just a good-looking, rich guy who comes from a good family. I know it depends on what country you are, how you measure social status. But take this rich, good-looking, high-status guy, but with zero game. He has no social skills. He’s horrible at emotional intelligence. Let’s say, he just blurts stuff out and tries to show off his wealth. He just throws his Lamborghini keys on the table and thinks that will win her over. [10:04.0]

Can the guy with the far superior social skills and emotional skills, and the seduction skills, out-seduce other guy with natural advantages? And how consistently can he do it? In fact, the answer, just like it is with martial arts, if you take a big, muscular, untrained guy, zero training, zero knowledge about martial arts, and you take a guy who has a lot of skills in the martial arts, but much smaller, several weight classes down– I guess, nowadays, you might think of Demetrious Johnson “Mighty Mouse”. I think he’s 5’3”, but arguably, the greatest if not one of the greatest mixed-martial arts, pound-for-pound mixed martial artists in history. At 5’3”, can he take down an untrained, 6-foot tall bouncer? If you know anything about martial arts, you should bet on Demetrious Johnson—and the same goes and I’ve seen this so many times in real life, the same goes for attracting women for short-term lays, short-term hookup, short-term sexual encounters, like one-night stands. [11:05.5]

I’m against spending a lot of time, investing a lot of effort into learning pickup techniques and tactics, and methods and strategies, and so on. Not because they don’t work, but because they very likely won’t work for you. For 95 percent of the guys listening to this who have experienced or currently experiencing trouble with dating and women, the chances of you being able to pull off these tactics and techniques the way they were meant to be or need to be is very low, because, otherwise, you would have done it already.

Just in the free content alone that I put out in my masterclass, and my free masterclass you can opt in and you can get access to by just opting in to the quiz or through any of the major opt-in or main opt-in forms on my websites at DavidTianPhD.com. You can get access to this free masterclass. It’s got 13, I think we’ve added now 14, free masterclasses on dating, and several of them walk you through with videos and demonstrations, how to do the basic techniques. [12:08.8]

It’s sort of like if you had an instructional for BJJ, the basic techniques of guard and retaining guard, and you get your major submission moves, like your armbar, your triangle, your rear naked choke, your guillotine, your basic moves. And can you build a thriving dating life, where you have, if you want, a different woman every weekend, just by using the openers and the transitions, the screening and qualifying, and so forth, that I lay out in the free masterclasses, yes, absolutely.

Why is it that most guys can’t do it, though? It’s because they have therapeutic blockages. They have severe anxiety. They have self-doubt that while they’re saying these very simple words, I simplify it so much to the point where it’s just literally one sentence, and if you can say the one sentence really well like it’s natural and authentic, and you’re feeling the words—you have the right mental and emotional state and you’re just not just going through the motions of the words, but the right mental emotional state, which will come through in your body language, as well as your sub-communications and the tone of your voice, and most importantly, your eye contact—and you are hitting all of the major words, more or less, within the right parameters and so forth, you’ll be able to get the results. [13:22.0]

But my experience is, as a coach, that 90 to 95 percent of men who are currently struggling with their dating lives, they have too many therapeutic problems, issues, blockages, obstacles that are getting in their way so that they can’t feel natural while they’re doing it.

I literally have had countless hundreds of clients in person that I’ve seen who are trying, even in a classroom setting, like a seminar room, where it’s the code, totally just practice with another dude partner the line and it’s just one sentence of, I don’t know, seven words, and he flubs the words or he’s just super nervous, or his eye contact is really weird and he’s just so overwhelmed with his anxiety and nervousness, or they do it and it comes off really wooden and robotic. [14:11.2]

All of these symptoms, either coming from guys who have very high-performing, very intellectually-demanding jobs, doctors, lawyers, engineers, computer programmers at very high levels so I know it is not a general intelligence problem. They are able to memorize the words and say them back, for the most part. Some of them have such debilitating anxiety that they can’t even get the words out or they keep making the same mistakes on that fifth word or whatever, and these are really simple.

Really, this is far simpler than anything that you had to memorize if you were in a Canadian public-school system in the ninth grade where we had to memorize parts of Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, and kind of act them out in class—what to say and do, and how to have fun and be playful and spontaneous, and also then shifting into kind of charming, seductive tonality and so forth, the words are really simple, but the delivery is everything, and what gets in the way of the delivery are the therapeutic problems. [15:11.4]

Your self-doubt, your lack of confidence, your neediness, all of those times in your past when you got rejected, and now they’re coming up in your mind and you can’t get them out of your head, and all you’re doing is asking her, “Hey, do you have your phone with you?” Maybe the exercise that we’re doing in the seminar room is as simple as this. Say or ask, “Do you have your phone with you?” with a down tone. It’s just like a slight, little tweak that makes it a little bit better, maybe come off more confident. Don’t say, “Do you have your phone with you?” and do an up tone, but say, “Do you have your phone with you?” down tone.

And I’ve got these guys, some of them who are leaders in military units or leaders in big corporations, and when they’re put in front of the group or when they’re with us in a kind of simulation with one of our female assistants—this was back in the day, but I’ve worked with several hundred men in these situations—they will continue to use that up tone and they’d go, “Oh, damn, I messed up,” and then we’d do it again and again and again. [16:04.8]

These are therapeutic problems. It’s one thing to do it in a seminar room, in a controlled setting. It’s a completely different thing to be able to do it in the very fluid, dynamic, constantly-changing situation of real life, so 90 percent, maybe 95 percent of men who are currently struggling with women—that is, you have not access those naturally-attractive parts of you or not consistently accessed those parts of you that can be in flow in a dating context—for those men, they can’t do the dating tips that actually work, the dating techniques and tactics that actually work, because they can’t do the delivery right.

Then it gets even worse. On top of that, as I’ve been pointing out in the past several episodes, even if they do get it right, so that five to 10 percent of men who through dint of perseverance and maybe they’re just thinking about themselves in the world in a different way like I did—and I was happy and ready to jettison my old self and take on and completely redo my new self, thereby accessing through this kind of forced way, accessing my nascent rake and dormant charismatic, and just has the seeds of potential and has some talent to be a charmer and that sort of thing. [17:18.8]

Accessing them and then developing it through training and experience, and so forth, through persistence and perseverance, through countless rejections that you don’t even remember them. You stopped counting them because they’re just sort of like warmups for your workout, just get them out of the way, and they don’t even stick in your brain because then you only remember the good ones and those are the ones that you’re doing it for, those are the enjoyable ones.

Then you discover through experience, experiential knowledge, that it’s not the techniques that are difficult. It’s the accessing of these parts of you that is the key, because once you can access those parts of you, then it’s effortless because it’s natural. You have parts of you that are already naturally talented at these activities, these skills of flirting and banter, and humor and wittiness, but also maybe being seductive, holding eye contact, changing the dynamic of the interaction with the tone of your voice, your sub-communications, leading from one place to another and accessing those leadership parts of you. There’s different parts that are involved in real-life seduction and real-life dating experiences. [18:22.8]

But like I said, it gets worse, because if you’re not one of the five to 10 percent of those guys, it’ll get worse for you in this way that I’m about to tell you, and it’s also bad if you are successful and what you are looking for isn’t actually just lots of short-term one-night stands and hookups.

But, actually, what you really want is to be able to, when you reach your 40s, 50s, 60s, to be able to get into a successful long-term relationship built on love and unconditional love, and so forth. As I’ve been pointing out in the episodes leading up to this, you’re actually shooting yourself in the foot, because you’re optimizing your character, your personality, and your behavioral patterns, your thought patterns, your emotional patterns, for short-term hookups. [19:06.6]

No matter their physical strength, for many men, emotions are too much for them to handle. It’s why they can’t give women the deeper levels of emotional intimacy and connection that they crave. It’s why they fail to be the man that modern women desire most: a man with inner strength, a man who has mastered his emotions.

Find out how to master your emotions through David Tian’s “Emotional Mastery” program. The Emotional Mastery program is a step-by-step system that integrates the best of empirically-verified psychotherapy methods and reveals how to master your internal state and develop the inner strength that makes you naturally attractive, happy, and fulfilled.

Learn more about this transformational program by going to DavidTianPhD.com/EmotionalMastery.

That’s D-A-V-I-D-T-I-A-N-P-H-D [dot] com [slash] emotional mastery.

Not only are most dating problems therapeutic problems, but all relationship problems are therapeutic problems, and therapeutic problems cannot be solved with more intellectual knowledge. [20:18.1]

Hopefully, you’re following along. Let’s start from the beginning. It’s that accessing the naturally-attractive parts of you is the only way to become effortlessly attractive. Otherwise, if you’re not accessing the naturally-attractive parts of you—that is, accessing those parts of you that are already existing in you, and let’s include in that your true self, accessing the forces within you, aspects and parts and so on in you that are already naturally attractive—and instead of doing that, you’re forcing and putting on top of that, layering on top of what’s naturally there for you, layering onto it a false self, so that’s already a mistake. [20:53.7]

But then let’s say that you do force-fit it and, like me, maybe you have found some way to persist and persevere past your therapeutic blockages to delivering, implementing, applying the dating skills, techniques, tactics and methods that actually do work, and you’re able to then implement them and then in a sustainable way, which means that you would have had to either internalize them, in which case you have developed these parts of you that now are naturally this way so you don’t have to apply any more further effort. Because if you always had to apply a ton of effort, you’d just be exhausted and it’s not sustainable, right?

So, to get good enough, you have to reach the level of unconscious competence, and that would have meant that either you have created a part of you that is good at this or, more likely, you have accessed parts of you that are naturally inclined to or talented towards—or, as I would put it, nascent, like they’re still kind of in the birthing process and you’ve accessed that potential in you—and you have leaned into it and given that experience and training, and so forth, and now it’s come out into its fullness and now it’s relatively easy for you. [22:00.5]

But let me remind everyone that that’s a very small percentage of guys who currently have trouble with women, like five to 10 percent at most of guys who currently struggle with women. I keep saying “currently struggle with” because you might actually be naturally attractive in the sense of at 10 to, whatever, 16 years old, you had whatever set of experiences in your life or you might have been genetically predisposed to being attractive or spontaneous, or present in the moment and self-confident and self-assured, and so forth, and that’s a minority of men.

But I’m thinking that my son will end up that way, because he’s going to be pretty damn confident, I think, and relatively lacking in sexual shame, but we shall see as he grows up what happens. But I can imagine, and I’ve met guys who are teenagers who are seducing women, very desirable, high-status women in their mid-20s and so on being chased by very rich guys, and these 17-year-old boys, really, but they act like men, are seducing them. I’ve seen that happen, too, because these guys, just when it comes to short-term seduction anyway, already have these mindsets internalized from their childhood. [23:06.1]

That’s a very small minority of men and this is what the pickup artists used to call, or I guess they would still call them, naturals. Assuming you’re not already a natural, in which case, you would have to go through a process to access, either go through a process to access the naturally-attractive parts of you, which is what I’m proposing by using the therapeutic method to do that, or you can do it by dint of persistence and perseverance and just blowing past rejections, and so forth, and getting good at it, like I did.

I would say, five to 10 percent of men who go through that route are actually able to do that, or the vast majority of you listening, you very likely won’t be able to do that, because without going through the therapeutic process, you have therapeutic blockages and they are not being addressed by the processes that you were using.

That’s why these dating tips and advice and all that won’t work for the vast majority of men, because they’re actually addressing the wrong problems. This is a category error, where you’re trying to use intellectual knowledge or analysis to address an emotional problem, an unconscious-issues problem, what I would call therapeutic problems. [24:16.6]

You have to use the therapeutic processes to address the therapeutic problems. Tony Robbins put it well, he said, “If you stay in your head, you’re dead,” and he says this over and over in his Date with Destiny, which I highly recommend. Tony Robbins is coaching this, too. It was the first life-coaching training I ever did.

While I’m giving props, I also want to give props to Mark Manson for being the first person to point out to me, almost a decade ago, actually, that most dating problems are therapeutic problems and got me turned on to taking seriously psychotherapy and clinical psychology, which led me into the field that I’m in now.

Because most dating problems are therapeutic problems, as I’ve explained, and all relationship problems are therapeutic problems, you either can or can’t benefit from good dating advice, and most guys, 90 percent of guys, can’t actually implement, apply or do the delivery right on the dating skills that actually work. [25:12.5]

Then the guys who can pull them off, those sets of men actually then suffer from a further problem, which is, if what you’re after is a successful, loving relationship that lasts, actually, if you optimize, if you put lots of time and effort into developing those personality traits that enable you to pull off the dating skills that you weren’t able to do before, but now you’re able to after lots and lots of training, for you to have gone through that process—that is, you’re optimizing for the metric of increasing the number of lays that you could get. You’re optimizing for quantity and the greatest quantity of, I assume, the highest quality that you can get—you’re actually optimizing for the wrong metric when it comes to a relationship. Then when you get into a relationship, you will have to undo a lot of the patterns that helped you get lots of short-term hookups. [26:08.0]

What would actually be most effective for most guys and what would be most effective for everyone who wants to succeed in a long-term relationship is actually addressing the underlying therapeutic problems, and that requires going through the therapeutic processes.

The point I want to make here is that the therapeutic processes aren’t just reading a bunch of books. It’s not about getting more head knowledge, more intellectual analysis or more cognitive understanding. In fact, you don’t actually even need to have the cognitive understanding to go through the therapeutic process successfully—and this is why in so many of my courses, like Invincible, which is actually a dating-skills course, but half of it, more than half, is therapeutic, of course. [26:50.5]

In Invincible, Lifestyle Mastery, Rock Solid Relationships, and Freedom U, I’ve incorporated, and many other courses, by the way, I’ve incorporated meditative exercises that are 10 to 45 minutes in duration that incorporate music and visual imagery, imagery rescripting, and so forth, to help you access, at the emotional level and the unconscious level, those blockages and undo those and unburden those—because these emotional issues require emotional solutions, emotional intelligence and emotional growth, emotional maturity, emotional processes, at the level of the unconscious, not just reading books and intellectualizing. That’s not actually going to solve it. That’s not the therapeutic process. Just reading more books isn’t the therapeutic process.

So, to properly address therapeutic issues and problems, you’ll need to go through the therapeutic process, which operates at the level of the unconscious and that the level of emotions, not just the intellectual, mere intellectual analysis, and it requires experiential knowledge, if you want to use the word “knowledge”, experiential knowledge, not just intellectual knowledge. [28:00.4]

If you’ve gotten this far, I want to invite you to something. It’s something I’ve been considering for a while now and I’d like to put this out there. If any of you want to work with me one-on-one on any of the issues I’ve been covering in the podcast, let me know at support@AuraTransformation.org. I know that’s a mouthful. You can also find the contact forms on any of my websites, DavidTianPhD.com, for example, and go to the upper home menu and look for the “Contact Us”. You can fill out the form there and will get sent to “support@”, and we will follow up with you to arrange a time where we can do a video call.

We will only record the audio of us working together and, hopefully, I can get to some of the therapeutic process during these coaching calls and put up some of the audio for the podcast, because I’d like to give people a better idea of what the therapeutic process looks like here inside the podcast, so we’re not just stuck in explaining intellectually and getting stuck at the cognitive. I want to get into the emotional and the experiential. [29:08.1]

So, I invite anyone who would like to work with me and is good with us using that audio for the podcast, and of course, if there’s anything that you brought up during the session that you wouldn’t want others to hear, you can let us know and we’ll take that out. I definitely want to make sure that you are comfortable in sharing and opening up, and so on.

I was thinking of putting this announcement at the beginning, but I really want to reserve it for true fans or those who are committed to this podcast. So, if you’d like to work with me one-on-one and have the audio available for this podcast, let us know on the contact form on our website at DavidTianPhD.com, or you can email us directly at support@AuraTransformation.org, and I look forward to hearing from you. We will reply and follow up with a short survey so I can get the basic information of your background, and so on. [30:01.7]

Also, tell us what your main issue is or main question is, and give as much background as you can so that we can decide at what point you should go in the podcast and so that I’m prepared for when we meet to make the most of that time that we have together.

I also just want to recap here that in order to access the naturally attractive parts of you, for almost everyone who is not a natural with women already, you would have to go through a therapeutic process, because most dating problems are therapeutic problems. What you don’t need is simply more intellectual knowledge.

What you actually do need is the therapeutic process, which is at the category of or the level of emotions and the unconscious. So, most men are committing a category error of trying to address problems that are emotional, unconscious ones, but trying to do it at the level of the intellect and conscious cognition. [30:55.2]

I know how bad this mistake is because I made it. I have a lot of very dominant intellectual parts in me that are beautiful and wonderful, but are not very good or not suited, well-suited to this emotional or experiential process of the therapeutic process.

With the help of my therapist, my method acting coach, and other sort of mentors and peers who helped me along the path, I was, over the period of about two years or so, able to go from leading with my head to being able to stay with the vulnerable emotions that I was feeling in my heart, so to speak, these are all metaphors, and going from head to heart and staying with the heart and then leading with my heart more and more.

The more quickly and efficiently spotting when I’d slip into the intellectual mode as a kind of protective mechanism from going to those vulnerable emotions that are being felt by and held by most acutely, most intensely, those exiled parts of me that need that unburdening and the connection of my true self, and which is a central and required part of the therapeutic process. [32:03.3]

Thank you so much for listening. If this helped you in any way, hit a like on whatever platform you’re listening to this to. Share it with anyone that you think could benefit from it and let me know what you think, leave a comment. 

And if you are interested in working with me one-on-one and making that audio of our session available for the podcast, let us know at support@AuraTransformation.org, or you can go to the contact form on our website at DavidTianPhD.com and let us know. I look forward to hearing from you. Until then David Tian, signing out.

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