“4 Steps To Your Success With Women & Life” | (#003) 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.

Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast. I’m David Tian, your host, and I am pumped to get started in Episode 3.

Just in case you haven’t heard the first two episodes, quick recap: Episode 1, I went into the “just the tips” myth, and then, in Episode 2, we went into the myth of more information and how just getting dating tips is actually ineffective and, even worse, it could be really dangerous in the long run, and that what you should do instead is instead of giving into this myth that you think you just need more information, that instead what you need to address is, at the root of it, toxic shame, which is leading to the core insecurities, which manifest as neediness and anxiety and these inner critics and your mind, and the fear that you’re not enough, and that if you’re not enough, you won’t be loved. [01:10.8]

All of that is so important because most people have bought into the “just the tips” myth or the myth of more information, and they think that all they are missing to have a thriving dating life and relationship is just a few more tips. If you keep going down that road, it’s not only going to be ineffective, but it’s actually going to create layers of reliance on repressive strategies, because what you really want, what we all really want, is to be able to relax into a relationship of unconditional love, to not have that fear that we’re not enough and that, if we’re not enough, we won’t be loved, and have that fear triggered continually in our relationship when things get dicey that we don’t want to enter into dating relationships or intimate relationships out of insecurity or out of neediness, and having our needs met by things that are outside of our own control. That’s a horrible life to be in. [02:08.3]

Instead, what you want is to be able to wake up in a relationship of love, of unconditional love, and to be relaxed into that, not be acting and living out of fear, fear that you’re not enough or that you won’t be loved.

Those who are successful in dating and in relationships, successful in the long term, not just successful for one night or in a pickup or something like that, but successful in life, in their dating and relationships and in their personal lives, don’t just say and do different things. They actually think differently and, thus, they feel different and that’s what this entire podcast is really geared towards, understanding and exploring the psychology behind masculinity and success in life as a male.

Everything we’ve covered so far also applies to women, but it’s just part of my demographic that I’ve been focusing on. If you want to share this with a female friend or your sisters or something, please do so. [03:05.5]

This episode is going to be covering the question of what to do about it and, specifically, which steps in the therapeutic process are most relevant to success in dating and relationships. We’re going to get into the specifics now of how the therapeutic process actually works and I’ve got four points here, basically there are four steps that I’m going to be walking you through.

Okay, the first step is getting to know what is called your protective parts and, by the way, the terminology and the overall framework is taken from IFS therapy. It’s the most effective therapy style that I think is out there. I’ve had training in several therapy styles, the most prominent ones, the CBT, ACT, Schema, Gestalt, all the most common in most prominent therapy styles—and I can tell you, from my experience and my work, IFS therapy is the best go-to default therapy approach. It is deeper and more advanced, especially in learning it and getting the training and the experience than any of the other ones that I’ve encountered that are out there, especially any of the purely cognitive approaches to therapy like cognitive therapy. [04:17.2]

Just as a little bit more background on IFS therapy, I can share with you that it is entirely empirically verified. The IFS therapy is posted by NREPP, which is the National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices, which is maintained by the U.S. government SAMHSA, which stands for Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, which is what the most prominent insurance companies draw on to decide whether a treatment approach will be covered or is valid for coverage.

According to the listing for IFS therapy, IFS therapy has been subjected to independent rigorous scrutiny and the practices are deemed to show significant impact on individual outcomes related to mental health. In particular, studies indicate promising effects from IFS therapy on the mind, especially depression and anxiety, on the body and physical health conditions, and on the spirit in terms of personal resilience and self-concepts. [05:15.7]

At the time that the IFS therapy was listed, the only other type of psychotherapy listed in NREPP and maintained by SAMHSA was CBT, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, and CBT is sort of the most basic type of therapy that all therapists learn to start with because it’s the easiest to teach and requires the least amount of emotional maturity, but IFS therapy is deep, so I’m going to be drawing on the framework there. I’ve done a lot of content on IFS therapy. There’s plenty of content about IFS therapy on the internet.

If you want to go deeper, I highly recommend the introductory texts called Internal Family Systems Therapy. It’s in the second edition now, published by or authored by, or co-authored by, the founder of IFS therapy, Richard Schwartz, and the other co-author is Martha Sweezy. You can go, look that up on Google or Amazon and learn more. I’m going to be drawing on that framework. You don’t need to know any other details about IFS therapy to understand this episode, though. [06:12.3]

The first step is to get to know your protective parts. What does that mean? There are two major categories of protective parts, managers and firefighters. It’s kind of a kooky terminology, but I’ll explain it to you.

The managers are the parts of us, sort of like personas of us that deal with everyday life. You’ll have a manager part that deals with school or work and you’ll have a manager part that deals with socializing. For some of you, maybe your manager part isn’t very skilled at socializing, so you end up looking for information online, tips about how to be more social, and that’s okay. I mean, that’s fine. It’s just realize that that’s a part of you that’s trying to do that and maybe that part is not very skilled at the thing that it’s trying to do, but if you are skilled, you have manager parts of various skills. So, no matter whether you’re skilled or not, you have these managerial parts that are trying to manage your life, okay? They’re in charge of your everyday life functions. [07:08.5]

Then we have another category of protective parts. These are known as the firefighter parts, simply because they come up after the fire has come up and they’re sort of reactive. Managers are proactive. They try to stave off triggers and stave off vulnerability, fear, sadness, and all those more extreme emotions and behaviors. The firefighters come up as a response to being triggered.

You’ll notice firefighters who come on in a strong way if you experience extreme anxiety, the prospect of walking up to a woman and starting a conversation. If you get frozen there and fear, it could be a manager who doesn’t know what he’s doing, but it’s more likely that the prospect of doing this fear or scary thing has triggered a firefighter who is now sort of devolved into more basic coping mechanisms of fight, flight, or freeze. Okay, that’s another category of protective parts. [08:07.0]

You can just think of them more broadly as protective parts, because their job is to protect your more vulnerable, exiled, inner-child parts together. Their job is to make sure that you don’t go there, that you don’t go to those scary, sad, angry, those emotions that maybe that you find out comfortable or weak or something like that, but that are in you, but their job is to protect from that vulnerability, right, especially toxic shame, feeling the shame. You have these protective parts that run your everyday life that are proactive or reactive in the case of the firefighters who stave off the vulnerability.

The first step is meeting them, just discovering who they are, just noticing that they’re there, and then getting to know them, winning their trust, right? If you’re already in a therapeutic relationship with a therapist, the therapist, at the beginning of your treatment, so for the first several sessions, is going to be standing in, generally speaking. [09:04.3]

It really depends on you and where you’re at in your journey and your therapist’s style, but generally speaking, it will be the therapists standing in for your higher self and getting to know your protective parts and winning your trust, which basically means helping you to be more comfortable around the therapist, standing in as your higher self, and your higher self as you move on to Step 2.

Okay, Step 2 is uncovering and accessing your higher self. In IFS therapy, they use the term “true self.” I think the term “true self” is pretty loaded with lots of extra connotations, especially among millennials and Gen Zs, so I’m opting for this other term higher self. I think that’s more pure from an interpretive stance. Going with higher self, whenever I say higher self, I also mean what IFS therapy means by true self. [09:59.0]

The second step is uncovering and accessing your higher self because you don’t want to be dependent on your therapist. You want to eventually get to the point where your own higher self is able to meet the needs of your protective parts and help them to trust, and then relax back enough for you to move on to the third step.

But before we get into the third step, I want to come back to the second step, because this is super important. This is a crucial step. You can’t skip Step 2. Uncovering and accessing your higher self is really tricky for a lot of people, especially guys who are successful in life. I work with a lot of achievers, a lot of achiever types, especially pleaser achievers and they generally want to rush the process because they’re coming to therapy or the therapeutic process with a goal in mind—let’s just take as an example, the goal being, being more attractive to women, so part of the reason they’re in therapy or they pursue the therapeutic process is to get babes. That’s not going to be that plain, but get women, be more attractive to women. [11:04.2]

Part of it is because they are trying to meet their own needs for worthiness, but another part is they might be lonely and they want to find love and connection, and they also want to have that certainty, because in a dating and relationship situation, especially early on, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Does she like me? Is she going to reply? Is she going to say yes to my date requests? and all of this sort of thing, and so there’s all of that. They want to be able to get to the point where they can master that and that’s what’s driving them into therapy.

Then they think, “Okay, I want to hurry up and find these exiles and help these protective parts and so on.” They want to speed this process through and they think, Oh, I’ve got my true self. My true self once to get these parts to be fixed. Okay, that’s a surefire sign that that is not your true self, that, in fact, that’s a managerial part. That’s a manager part that’s trying to manage things and speed things along to make you more attractive, because if you’re not attractive, then you’ll be lonely, and then a big part of that is then you won’t be enough and you won’t be enough for love. Just being alone, in and of itself, doesn’t make you lonely. There’s something else. There’s some need for love and connection that’s not being met by you. [12:09.8]

I know for a lot of guys, it’s like, What? You can meet your own needs for love and connection? That’s so bizarre. I know and that’s why most people are messed up when it comes to relationships, but, yes, that’s exactly what you need to do. You need to be able to meet your own needs for love and connection and this is actually the long-term solution to neediness, not pretending like you’re not needy and doing alpha behaviors, like those tips content tries to get you to do, but, instead, being able to meet your own needs in yourself.

The only things or the only aspects of you that can do that is your higher self. Other parts cannot meet the needs of other parts for good. I mean, it might be better than nothing, but we generally don’t want—it’s not a best practice—to have a protective part trying to find an exile and unburden it, okay, so generally we don’t want to skip Step 2 and go to Step 3. You want to stay on Step 2. [13:08.0]

How do we know you’re actually able, you’ve truly uncovered and accessed your higher self? How do we know? There’s a key question in IFS therapy, the IFS therapy, like structure and protocol, which is how do you feel toward this other part? What we first focus on is a part of you that is in some distress or needs some kind of help.

Let’s just take, as an example, in the dating context for dudes, this part of you that has a lot of neediness or anxiety around going up and talking to women, or maybe on a date, a lot of nervousness around the date or even asking her out on the date, maybe on the app, a dating app, and you’re messaging her about it or getting off the messaging and into a video call, whichever transitional phase. You feel that anxiety. We want to help that part, okay, so let’s say that that becomes your target part. [14:00.0]

Now you ask the question, How do I feel—how do you feel—toward that target part? If you feel anything other than acceptance or appreciation, then that is not yet your higher self that you are in. That’s another protective part. Notice that now you have a part that is maybe feeling a little judgmental towards the nervous, anxious, socially-awkward part, and wishes it wasn’t so socially awkward, then that’s another part of you.

That’s another managerial part and we can ask then to have that managerial part step aside or step back, so that now you can see both of those parts there, and then have that, the second part that you’ve just asked to step aside, if it could go to a place where it can just wait while you refocus on the target part. Then you just keep doing that until you truly and sincerely feel full acceptance of the target part. That is really tricky for a lot of achievers because part of the whole reason they’re in therapy or they pursue a therapeutic process is because they want to fix this part of themselves. That’s a key step. [15:13.7]

Full acceptance means this part does not need to change for you to be happy. This part doesn’t need to do anything. We’re just here to meet the needs of that part. That part it’s not here to meet your needs, right? You know that you’re in your higher self when you have full acceptance and sort of like … It’s easier to explain if you have a child, but you could think of it as like a younger brother or something. I’ll stay with the child is because it’s easier, if you have a child, and I know and actually I’m thinking that some achiever dads might really want to mold their kid or they won’t love them, which is really sad and that’s definitely a situation where you want to get therapy right away. [15:53.8]

You can imagine a father or mother who loves their child so much, they realize this child doesn’t need to be any different from how they are, but they would like the child to study more or to do well in life because they just want what’s best for the child. But even if the child fails at school or whatever it is, they’ll still love that child equally, and maybe the challenge is getting that across to the kid, right? But you can be in that state of full acceptance of your child, no matter what they do or what choices they make.

As I’m saying this, I know plenty of you have not had parents like this and it’s hard for you to imagine because you’re young and you’ve not even thought about having a child, so you can think about maybe a younger brother or maybe a best friend that, even if he just went off the rails, you would still love him and wish that, for his own sake, that he was different for his own sake, but that he doesn’t need to change for you to accept him.

Okay, so you get to that state of full acceptance. Then you move into even more appreciation, to appreciate. Let’s just move back to that example that we had of the protective part we were using, the part of you that maybe is socially awkward or nervous around women, to accept that that part is that way. [17:07.5]

What will help you to accept that part is when you’re in the higher self, you have clarity around why parts are the way they are, or you have the broader perspective and you have the kind of curiosity to find out more. Very commonly, you will find that socially-awkward or nervous parts are that way because when they were in your childhood, you experienced certain perceived traumas that caused them to be that way. Maybe it was bullying. Maybe it was bullying from classmates or from teachers, or from your own parents or from siblings, and it’s completely understandable.

In fact, they’re that way out of fear and you don’t need them to change because you can take over. Your higher self is, and this is the standard way of checking whether you’re in your higher self, you check whether you, the client, or you, the subject, are experiencing the eight Cs. [18:05.0]

This is like a kind of rubric that Dick Schwartz, Richard Schwartz came up with as a kind of shorthand for testing. We’re just remembering the qualities of the true self, the higher self, and those are, and I’m going to rattle them off, the eight Cs—compassion, courage, confidence, calm, curiosity, creativity, connectedness, and clarity.

The more you embody those traits or feeling those when you ask the question of yourself, “How do I feel toward this part of me, this target part? Do I feel any of these eight Cs, compassion, confidence, calm, curiosity, connectedness towards this part?”

I like to focus on acceptance if it’s an achiever that I’m working with, so that’s also a really important step, just stopping to check whether you’re fully accepting of this part. We’re helping this part because it doesn’t like being this way. It’s not that we need it to change for our own agenda. The higher self will come to other parts without an agenda. It’s just to help them if they want to be helped. [19:08.0]

Now, if you don’t feel confident, right, so that’s part of the thing, you might want this socially-awkward part to change because you, this managerial part that’s inhabiting you that has identified with you that has blended with you and it has kind of taken over your consciousness, needs this other part to be good with women. Then you know for sure that you’re not in your higher self. Your higher self doesn’t need the parts to do anything. Now your higher self can bring full confidence and courage and calm to any of these social situations.

When you’re in your higher self in Step 2 and you’ve uncovered and begun to access more of the energy of your higher self, you will notice that you don’t need that target part to be any particular way, but if it’s in distress and it wants to help, then you can, with full confidence, go and help that part. You can begin with some curiosity. [20:00.8]

So, after you’ve reached a state of acceptance and appreciation for its doing its job, like this part is trying its best, and that appreciation that it has got a positive intention and it’s trying its best, then you can send appreciation toward that part that has been working so hard and then lean into that curiosity as to find out more. Am I right about what I suspect is the reason for this? And let’s find out. That curiosity coming from your higher self is then allowing you to proceed to the next step.

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.

That step of befriending your protective parts never ends. You’re going to continually learn more about the protective part and build a relationship between your true self and the protective part, right? That continues forever for the rest of your life and it’s a beautiful thing. Okay, that’s part of the beauty of living.

As you get to know this protective part, it trusts you more and more, trusts your higher self more and more, and at some point you can then ask the protective part, Is there a more vulnerable part you’re protecting? Sometimes the protective part, even without prompting, will just send, tell you, Hey, there’s this other more vulnerable part. You need to go and help it. Okay, whichever it is, you make it to Step 3, which is to discover the exiled, vulnerable inner-child parts and help unburden them and heal them. [22:00.5]

Okay, so that’s Step 3, to discover the parts of you that are actually holding on to the concentrated version of, the concentrated form of the toxic shame, the fear, the sadness, the anger, all of those more extreme emotions being held in their most concentrated form by the exiled parts. How all of this happened is there was some perceived trauma that you perceived, some trauma you perceived, and there was a splitting off to protect that exiled you, to protect that hurt you. There was a splitting between that exiled version.

The inner child that was holding that fear gets exiled by a protective part of you that showed up to stop that pain from being felt, and so then the exiled part of you now is holding onto that pain, but it’s locked in the basement of your consciousness and shoved further and further down. Then what’s standing guard over the door of that basement is your protective part or parts that are trying to stop the consciousness from getting in, or another way of putting it is to stop that exiled inner child from bursting out and breaking out of the basement into the light of day into your consciousness. So, you’re feeling it, right? That’s what they’re trying to protect. [23:15.7]

Now when you get to Step 3, discovering, unburdening and healing the inner child, exiled inner child, the vulnerable parts of you that are holding the concentrated form of all of those extreme emotions of sadness, of anger, of hurt, now we proceed very carefully and I’m not going to go into detail on Step 3, because I don’t want you to try to unburden your exiles alone. This is a delicate procedure that, if you do it wrong, can actually re-traumatize them, so I’m just going to mention this step and then you know what it’s supposed to do, but it’s best if you seek out a good therapist to lead you through this step. [23:58.8]

I have guided meditations that help you to do more manageable versions of Step 3, kind of warm ups into Step 3, that will give you a safe version of Step 3. Okay, so those are in my courses, Rock Solid Relationships, Lifestyle Mastery, Freedom U. There’s even an embedded version of that inside Invincible, a couple of the odd modules, meditative exercises there. It’s sprinkled throughout those exercises in the Invincible and goes deep into them in the other three courses, Rock Solid Relationships, Freedom U, and Lifestyle Mastery. They’re all accessible through Platinum Partnership as well because Platinum Partnership gives you all access to all of the online courses.

But that’s Step 3, discovering and healing your exiled, vulnerable parts that are holding the concentrated forms of these emotions that are, if you trace, if you allow them, trace them far up enough, they’re manifesting at that more superficial surface level of those symptoms that we started with Episode 1, where you’re coming off nervous or needy, or you freeze when you’re looking at an attractive woman and all of that. Those are the surface-level symptoms. [25:14.3]

The deeper cause of those are the feelings and the beliefs and emotions that are held by the patterns or cycles of thought that are held by these exiled, vulnerable parts of you, so we’ve got to go and discover them, heal and unburden them. That’s Step 3.

Then, Step 4. Getting up to Step 3 might take some guys a year of weekly therapy. You can speed that up in a major way by going through my online courses, and the more of that you do, the more accelerated your growth and progress will be, but generally speaking, you could do it. I mean, it might take a whole year to get through Step 3. It might take two, three or four years. It might take a decade, theoretically. It depends on your particular situation and your background and all of that. [26:00.5]

But there is a Step 4 and I’m putting this out there, even though this isn’t well-known even by IFS therapists, because often therapists themselves have clients who come to them in distress with severe personality disorders or something along those lines and severe trauma, so they’re just happy to not be lost and out of control and their emotions, but there’s actually a Step 4, which is a kind of empowerment, so it’s even beyond just healing. Now we’re into growth because we notice that as you unburden the exile parts of you, you can also unburden the protective parts.

That will happen much faster because the whole reason the managers and firefighter parts of you are that way is to protect the exile. Now that the exile’s unburdened, it doesn’t need protecting anymore. The protective part doesn’t need to do its neurotic action or coping strategy anymore, so now it’s automatically unburdened, but you can help it with a further unburdening. The unburdened parts of you, as you get through the later stages of the therapeutic process, are incredibly powerful, and some of them and I suspect that almost all of us have parts that are naturally sexually attractive and naturally seductive. [27:08.6]

These parts now, not operating under their burdens anymore more, are naturally playful and spontaneous, so many of our inner child exiled parts, when you unburden them, they suddenly now give you access to, very naturally to playfulness, spontaneity, kind of sensitivity and warmth that maybe wasn’t there before or wasn’t easily accessible.

The managerial or the protective parts, the firefighters, when you’ve unburdened them, suddenly, you have access to passion and sensuality and the kind of happy-go-lucky laidback fun or a sense of adventurousness or being cool with risk-taking, being comfortable with uncertainty and accessing this confidence as well that many managerial parts have and that kind of creativity as well. This is all in addition to the qualities that you would have access to as your higher self. [28:01.1]

So, all of this good stuff, all of these positive qualities, all of these very empowering aspects of you are now online and accessible and active for you, so that in the realm of dating and relationships, you have this kind of freedom and liberation to be able to access all of these positive traits.

If you’ve read the book by Robert Greene called The Art of Seduction, at the beginning of that book, there are these characters sketches, and he’s drawing on thousands of years of literature there or over a thousand years of literature from world literature, including from ancient Japan, as well as European literature and Chinese literature. It’s great.

Unfortunately, Robert Greene writes in a particularly … What’s the word? He takes an angle that’s sort of sensationalized to sort of get attention and get the clicks and all of that, to get your attention basically and to suck you in, so there’s an approach to it that’s sort of Machiavellian. It might leave you feeling yucky. That’s unfortunate because his excerpts from literature are wonderful. [29:01.6]

Of course, if you keep in mind that these parts can be burdened and yet still be seductive—that’s very obvious. A Marilyn Monroe figure is obviously burdened and yet incredibly seductive. Rock stars are obviously burdened. Not all of them, but the quintessential rock stars are burdened, but seductive. You can have seductive burdened parts—but you can also have unburdened parts that are also seductive and love to operate in the world and interact with other people obviously.

Taking me as an example, I had a part that I developed that was burdened, but still very effective called the rake, and I had another part called the charismatic and I had other parts that were involved with attraction, maybe some childlike part and so on. As my internal system became unburdened, these parts also became unburdened and now come into the fullness of their roles, but they don’t lose their attractive qualities. They don’t lose their way of being that they really enjoy. [30:01.3]

You can have a part that’s really cheeky and flirtatious, and fun and adventurous, and laid back and cool, and so on, and you might have multiple parts like this. They can now come into your life and be more active in your life, and help you when you interact with other people, with women, for instance, and do it from a place that’s not burdened. That’s later in the therapeutic process you can get access to. You’ll have access to all of these positive qualities from these unburdened parts, some of which might be sexually attractive or seductive.

Okay, just to recap, the four steps that I’ve covered here—the first step being meeting and befriending your protective parts, the second step being uncovering and accessing your higher self, the third step being discovering and healing your exiled parts, and the fourth step is now having access to the positive qualities of your unburdened parts, some of which will be sexually attractive and seductive. [31:00.0]

Okay, I just wanted to wrap that up with a quick story of a client named Howard, and Howard, when he first came to us, was so socially awkward that we, I and my assistants, didn’t try to do much more than an image makeover, just like change his clothes. I think even then we were sort of … because what he really needed was the therapeutic process.

We normally would give a kind of survival level of tips to just get him going, so that we could get him having a social life, and along the way, we also do the therapeutic process. For this case with Howard, it would have been such a hard road to even get the basic socializing going. We went straight full on into the therapeutic process.

Howard was an incredibly socially-awkward person. Even with his friends, it was very hard for him to make eye contact. Just having a normal conversation, there was a lot of stuttering and stopping and self-doubts, and he couldn’t make eye contact. His physical appearance, he was already short and fat, but, in addition, he just had no fashion sense at all. It was a tougher case and he was a virgin, of course, as many of our tougher cases tend to be. [32:09.5]

What we did was we threw him into the therapeutic process. In the first couple of months, he was just exploring his inner child parts and, eventually, because he went all in on it, lots of credit to Howard and just persisting—we all believed in him. We just knew that this was going to be he was going to make or break it. It was like he had to do this therapeutic process because nothing else was going to work for getting his dating life and social life up and going—and it was amazing. Within a span of a couple months and by the third month, he was coming out to the bars and to the parties, and I was seeing a video of him and happened to also be there in person a couple of times where he was just the life of the party.

He just changed because he was able to, he unburdened his inner-child exiled parts, and these inner-child parts were coming out in these really fun-loving, attractive ways, where he just didn’t give a damn about what anyone else thought and, as a priority, he was going to treat these inner-child parts that he has discovered as the top priority. [33:13.8]

So, if they want to have fun, they want to dance with abandon, that’s what they’re going to do. If they want to laugh at ridiculous things, if he wants to spout ridiculous jokes that no one got at first, he was going to do that. Because he was just so in his own element and he was so full of confidence, but also of love for himself, that he was able to access this playfulness and the spontaneity and this adventurousness that it became infectious. I was shocked at the rate, the speed at which that happened for him and, soon enough, he was dating models and women that other men were fighting over and it was quite astounding.

That’s the story of how this could work for you. If you throw yourself into and fully commit to the therapeutic process, starting with that first step of meeting and befriending, and building that relationship with your protective parts, and eventually getting to later in that process … [34:07.7]

I’ve got to put it as a disclaimer, Howard’s rate of progress was really surprising and is atypical. The typical rate would be a year or two of immersing yourself in the therapeutic process, discovering your dozen or two dozen protective parts and their attendant, their match, the exiled parts that they’re protecting, and helping them to heal and so forth and to find liberation in that, and then down the road, a year or two down the road, being able to access those unburdened parts of you that naturally come out and then are with you for life.

If you fall into that trap of “just the tips” myth or the myth of quick fix, then this is not for you. My online courses can speed up this whole process for you, but if you’re the type of person that doesn’t have the patience to invest in yourself for something that will make a huge difference in your life …

I mean, we’re talking about your life. Eventually these are the skills and mindsets and so forth, behavior patterns that you will need to succeed in your relationship that will make the biggest difference in your personal life, and if you’re not ready to invest in yourself for the long-term, I am not for you and my courses are definitely not for you, okay? [35:15.8]

But if you are ready to invest in yourself in a deeper way, if you are ready to explore the roots of your hurt, your pain, your insecurities, your neediness, your anxiety, then these online courses that I’ve been making over the past several years are exactly what you should be doing. You can pair that with one-on-one therapy, but having these online courses, the guided meditations, really accelerates all of that growth and healing. Okay, so I can’t recommend it enough. Obviously, I’m biased. I developed them, but I’m such a champion of what I’ve seen, the results of these processes, that it would be irresponsible of me not to mention that here again. [36:00.5]

Okay, so what you want is to be able to be free of the fear, to have full confidence and courage, to be free of the fear that you’re not enough, that you won’t be loved, so that you can be fully relaxed into unconditional love. What that means is you love her without conditions. That is, you’re not afraid that she won’t return it or that she will hurt you in a way that you can’t assimilate or recover from, or that you can’t attend to for yourself, and you don’t need her or anyone else to meet your needs because you can meet your own needs in yourself that your higher self can meet the needs of all of your parts—and that’s for life and you continue to grow from meeting your protective parts and their exiles, helping them to unburden and grow, to the next pair of protective parts and their exiles and so forth. It’s a constant state of growth and progress, and learning and evolving and transforming. That’s what you want, and if that’s what you want, these online courses are for you. Check them out while you can. [36:59.5]

In the next episode, I’m going to be getting into why relationship success hinges on your values, so come back to the next episode to get into that.

Thanks so much for listening. If you liked this episode, please share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it or anyone that you think would like it. Thanks so much for listening, and I’d love to hear from you. Until the next episode, David Tian, signing out.

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