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| Things I Learned in Therapy (Inner Game) https://www.pick-up-artist-forum.com/viewtopic.php?f=25&t=121093 |
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| Author: | Monkey [ Sat Nov 19, 2011 6:11 pm ] |
| Post subject: | Things I Learned in Therapy (Inner Game) |
So, my self-esteem sucks. And I don't mean my confidence. I don't mean my inner game. I mean my actual self-esteem, the core belief that I am a person worthy of love, respect, dignity, liberty, and all the other good things that people who don't suck should have. I have a really strange belief that says that the happiness I bring to other people is the only worth I have, and that's become a problem in recent times. It doesn't really effect my game much (pick-up makes both me and the girls I'm seeing pretty happy), but it does create some issues at home and at work. Pick-up is pretty good at a lot of things, but one of the things it has never been good at is solving a person's psychological issues. I can't count the number of times I've seen people post requesting aid with a deep psychological problem, and then refusing to make the changes needed to get that problem dealt with. It's actually sort of disheartening that people think and hope that a set of tools designed to help someone get better with women is going to solve all of their problems. That simply is not the case. Pick-up does have some solid band-aid fixes, though. There are a lot of tools for temporarily ignoring the base issues that are holding you back, but there aren't a lot of long-term tools available through the pick-up arts for permanently addressing deeper, core issues. I can pretend I have high self-esteem. I'm really good at it. I've been a salesman a long time, and a pick-up artist for over five years, now. If you can't pretend to be a self-assured, confident motherfucker, you aren't going to make it very far in either of those fields. But I found that my self-esteem was a recurring problem. Being good at making people buy stuff didn't help. Neither did being good with women. I had to get good with me, and that's not really something the pick-up arts are designed to help you with. Having rock-solid inner game doesn't actually require you to fix anything, it just requires you be able to ignore your issues long enough to get laid. And that isn't good enough for me anymore. So in this post, I'm going to write up a few of the things I've learned about having piss-poor self-esteem in the hopes that it will help some people out there get over their crippling self-limiting beliefs. Go Fucking Talk to Someone For real. Go talk to a therapist or councilor. Most major cities have a service that offers free counseling, and you should make use of it. Even if it's just to get something you think might be an issue evaluated. See, you're probably not an expert in psychology, and even if you are, you know for damned certain you shouldn't be self-diagnosing (you're not exactly an unbiased party). You don't have the tools you need to get to the core of what is going on in your brain. You don't have the training, the experience, or the detached point of view that are needed to get a clear idea of how best to adjust course. You don't have a clear idea of your own progress, because the beliefs of a person with low self-esteem emphasize the bad and discourage the good. You cannot do this alone. You need help. And that isn't a bad thing. That doesn't make you a beta male or whatever. I mean, this entire movement is just a big group therapy session half the time. You came to the pick-up arts looking for help in a thing that is personal and close to your core; you can do it again and get your thinking right. This is Hard Seriously, going to therapy is really fucking tough. I hate it. It's a chore, like washing dishes or doing the laundry, except that I have to go to the other side of the city to do it, and the dishes want to know how that makes me feel. Talking to strangers is hard enough already. Even after years of experience, I still get a flutter in my belly when I think about making an approach. Talking to a stranger about things that are really deeply personal is one of the most difficult things you can do. It means exposing yourself and making yourself vulnerable. For this process to work, you have to be weak. You need to understand that you are not in control of what is going on in your head sometimes, and that to get control back is going to require you to open yourself up in a really uncomfortable way. I did a thing about a year back called "The Human Body Project." This lady came up from Lethbridge during the Fringe Festival and got naked in front of us. It wasn't a sexy thing; she was just an average-looking woman in her forties, a mother of two, and she was scared shitless. She stuttered and stammered and just sort of lurched through the first bits of the "show," explaining who she was and why she was getting all full monty in front of forty complete strangers. "This is really uncomfortable," she confessed. "And that's sort of the point, to learn to live in those uncomfortable places. To be vulnerable and afraid and realize that being vulnerable and afraid isn't going to actually hurt you." She invited people to get naked and join her, so I did. It was really, really uncomfortable. Sometimes you just have to saddle up and do the uncomfortable shit. Push yourself to do it whether you hate it or not. It's like dentistry (another thing I've been dealing with recently, but that's totally a different story); it sucks to go to a therapist, it sucks to talk about personal shit to a person who doesn't know you from Adam; but it's fucking worth it for your long-term health, and by the end you have shiny new teeth... wait... Talk About Pick-up I don't necessarily mean talk about pick-up as in "So, I'm totally learning to pick up girls. Hur hur." I mean that it can help to talk about other avenues you've taken to deal with things that aren't going the way you want in your life. If you've so much as taken the first couple of steps into pick-up, you've made some pretty serious changes to the way you do things. You've sought help. You've made conscious changes to your behavior and made changes to the way you think. These things are incredibly helpful in creating a framework for change. Do the Work This is, ultimately, about you. No one can solve these problems for you. No one can make the changes that need to be made except you. You are the only one who can do what needs doing, so you're going to have to go into this with an eye towards solving things, and solving things for yourself. Your therapist is there for a few reasons. You need a therapist to make sure you're going in the right direction, to make sure things are progressing along a path towards eventual health. You can't really be the arbiter of that. He or she is also there to make sure you have the tools you need to make the changes that need to be made. That's it. That is the whole of their job (not to knock on them at all; it's a hard fucking job, and it requires a level of knowledge regarding the human psyche most pick-up artists wish they had). So you're going to have to do the work. You're going to need to do stuff at home that you don't really want to do. You're going to need to make changes to the way you do things, and those changes are going to be uncomfortable. You are going to need to take some initiative and get shit done for yourself. This is one of the biggest failings of therapy, honestly. It relies on you to get shit done. Whenever a process relies on someone doing stuff that isn't fun, the process is more likely to break down than not. Make sure that doesn't happen. The Process The process for getting over crippling low self-esteem is similar in a few ways to getting over any self-limiting belief. My previous advice on this subject has always been "Lie to yourself until you start to believe it. Then lie to other people, and have them affirm it, because they will." Now, though, I have a process that I can describe for getting over self-limiting beliefs, and I'm going to share it here. Steps: 1. Understanding 2. Reframing 3. Find Evidence 4. Adjust Rules and Expectations 1. Understanding Before you can begin to change a belief, you need to understand why that belief exists. Every belief you have about yourself has a reason behind it. The self-limiting beliefs you've developed are self-limiting because it made sense for you to limit yourself at one point. You don't develop these beliefs out of nowhere. If, for instance, you have a belief that women find you unattractive, you probably have a solid reason for that. Maybe someone rejected you when you were younger, or you never had a date to the school dance or whatever. At the time it happened, that was a good reason to have that belief, but it's a belief that, very honestly, holds no water today. Why? Because there are women who find you attractive. I guarantee this. From the fattest slob to the hardest-cut neat freak, girls find you attractive (or will when you present them with an attitude that they find attractive ^_^ ). Having this belief no longer makes any sense, but you have it anyway. Understanding that the belief doesn't make any sense, knowing that the things you are thinking or feeling are not logical or healthy, you can begin to change them. 2. Reframing Knowing why you have a belief isn't going to change it for you, though. You need to change that belief into something new. You need to take a belief that sucks and turn it into a belief that rocks. How do we make that happen? Take a look at the belief itself and turn it against itself. Using the above example, "I am unattractive to women," is the current belief. Depending on how far we want to go with this, we could change that belief to "I am a person of average attractiveness," or "I am attractive to women," or "I am the hottest shit around," or "I am the hottest motherfucker ever born, and women worship me." Some of these are better than others, but I'm not here to judge. ^_^ Once you've got the belief you want to have figured out, write it down. Put it somewhere you'll see it a lot. Make sure you're reminded of it. Set a reminder alarm on your phone. Keep it in mind as much as you can. Then, find evidence to support it. 3. Find Evidence Every time you have evidence for the new belief you have, write it down. Remember it. Make sure you have it with you. Every single time. This is important for a few reasons. The first is that it is really, really tough to find evidence of a belief you don't have. I didn't actually believe this at first, because it seems silly. Of course I can find evidence for something as simple as "Having me in a person's life is a positive experience," right? Not so much. In a good week I found four pieces of evidence. The second week, I put out an open call on Facebook asking for how I had had a positive effect on people's lives. The results were actually pretty astounding. Everyone from my brother to a bunch of people I hadn't talked to in ages responded (and a bunch of folk I expected to respond didn't), and I was suddenly flooded with examples of this belief I've had for a long time being very, very false. I _still_ have trouble finding evidence of the belief I'm aiming for. So having a record of it is important. Also, you will forget the points that go against the belief you have. I'm serious about this. You will actually just forget. It's fucked. Your brain will latch on to the things that affirm the belief you already have, and fuck the rest of it. Having looked over my list of things I'd done that were a positive experience for people was a really strange thing, because even the four pieces I had found myself were forgotten between writing them down and reading them again. Write down your evidence, then reference it once a day. Learn it, accept it into your core. In pick-up terms, internalize it. 4. Adjust Your Rules and Expectations One of the most fucked up bits about having a belief that's out of whack with the way the world really works is that you develop rules and expectations to keep those beliefs standing. They can't really stand up to scrutiny on their own, so you need to prop them up with these crazy unrealistic expectations. As long as you're living up to those expectations, everything is peachy keen. As soon as you come into conflict with these expectations, though, the belief you're trying to replace gains some credibility. Let's say you have a belief to the effect of "I am not a good pick-up artist." In order to deal with that belief, you work extra hard. You're beyond reproach. No one works harder or gets better results. You are fucking perfect. Your approaches are top notch, and you see a fair bit of success in your attempts. But when you don't live up to that standard you've set for yourself, when your very high expectation of your own behavior comes into question, it affirms the core belief that you aren't any good (even though, given the amount of work and dedication you've put in because of that belief, you are likely better than the vast majority or rAFCs). The rule, the expectation that says "I have to be the best pick-up artist I've ever seen, or I'm crap," actually serves to reinforced the negative belief that you are not a good pick-up artist. That isn't to say you shouldn't have goals or aspirations. If you set a goal to be the best pick-up artist in your region, then have at. That's fucking noble. But if you fuck up an approach, or the interaction goes sideways halfway through, you should be able to laugh it off and move on, as opposed to kicking the crap out of yourself for being an idiot/worthless/horrible/unattractive/whatever. There is a pretty distinct difference between having a goal and expecting perfection from yourself. So the fourth step here is to readjust those expectations, to examine the rules you have in place for your own behavior and change them as needed. Come up with a list of realistic expectations, and some goals that come with them (one of your realistic expectations should probably be "It's okay to not achieve my goals right away, or at all"). And then have your counselor or therapist look over your list and let you know if you're off track on any of them. Chances are, you've already gone over this sort of thing with him or her before, but it's always good to check in with an objective (trained) party when trying to determine if you're being realistic with yourself. We have a tendency to expect more from ourselves than is good for us, even when we're trying to be realistic. Anyway, that's my current system for eradicating self-limiting beliefs. It is a lot like the "Lie to yourself until you believe it, lie to others and have them reaffirm it," system, but with a bit more depth. I may actually put together a full-on training module about self-limiting beliefs in the near future. |
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| Author: | $uave [ Sat Nov 19, 2011 6:19 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
Well...I haven't read it all, but judging by the quality of your previous posts and the words that had bigger font size this should be gold. |
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| Author: | J Slay [ Sat Nov 19, 2011 6:49 pm ] |
| Post subject: | |
This is gold. Great post! |
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| Author: | Ezo [ Sun Nov 20, 2011 1:33 am ] |
| Post subject: | |
Very important post monkey! Thanks for posting it! |
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