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, and it is my honor to be welcoming you to this episode.
In the previous episode, we went over the number one biggest factor when it comes to a man's attractiveness to women and that is his level of neediness, and that is super important because, the more neater you are, the less attractive you are, but also the less needy you are, the more attractive you are.
This helps you to circumvent the “do more” trap—where the more you do, the less attractive you'd be or you are, or the more you do, the more needy you are, or the more needy you feel, the more neediness you project—because what we're doing here is not doing more. In fact, what we're trying to do here is to make you more attractive naturally and effortlessly. It’s simply to be less needy. [01:05.7]
If you're able to overcome or cure your neediness, then you will automatically effortlessly out of that become naturally more attractive, and that's actually the easiest way to go about becoming more attractive rather than the arduous self-help, discipline, willpower approach of trying to do a lot more.
Instead, we're actually going to do less because you're going to be less needy resulting in you being more attractive. This is a kind of negative project in which we're just removing neediness and, as we remove more neediness, more attractiveness arises, so it's pretty powerful. [01:44.5]
What you don't want to do is to get stuck in the lie of the “just the tips” myth, which I’ve covered in a few episodes already, so I'm not going to go into detail on it. But just as a way of review, the “just the tips” myth is my funny way of putting this myth that guys are just sucked into getting just tips of trying to hack dating or thinking even that the superficial level of tactics or techniques on what to do or what to say is the most important thing, when it's not at all, when, in fact, they'll often find ineffective tips, but, even worse, that following just the tips or just getting superficial advice on tactics or techniques on what to say or what to text or what to do is actually going to not just be ineffective, but actually be dangerous, because it will lead down the wrong road.
It will lead down the road of trying to pretend like you're something you're not and trying to cover over your toxic shame or your insecurities, or your core neediness, to pretend like you're not needy when you actually are deep down inside, which will actually make the therapeutic process harder in the sense of now there are more layers of repression that you'll have to get through to get to your true self and to get to your vulnerability. [03:01.5]
Okay, so it's actually worse than just simply not working, because the tips don’t work, most of them, but in addition, it actually is worse. It actually is dangerous because it makes things worse in the end. You don't want to go down that road.
Here's a better way. Let's go right to the root of it of what's actually causing the unattractiveness, what's actually getting in the way of your being naturally attractive, which is neediness. If you can focus on the neediness and reduce that, so, again, the less needy you are, the more attractive you are—which, by the way, I'm going to credit my friend, Mark Manson, for first pointing that out to me over a decade ago that, the less needy you are, the more attractive you are—and then figuring out what actually is neediness and how do you go about getting rid of the neediness, how do you go about curing that neediness.
That's where we get into the therapy, the therapeutic process, which I believe is the most effective and healthiest way of doing that and doing that permanently, not just pretending like you're not needy, which is what the pickup tactics or the red-pill advice is of just papering over your neediness with “do this, say this” to get a certain result, but instead going to the root of the matter, to the source of it, to the source of the actual neediness, and that's what we're after here in this episode. [04:20.2]
In this episode, we're going to get into how to cure your neediness, so to speak, and that is in meeting your own needs, learning how to meet your own needs. That's what this episode is all about. There are three parts to it.
I'm going to first go over the 10 universal human needs. These are the needs that all of us have. If we're human, we have these needs.
Then the second step is to understand how we are currently trying to meet our own needs. I'll walk you through the process of discovering that for yourself.
Then the third step is to get to the only true cure for neediness. What is the only true way, reliable way, the only real way of meeting our own needs in ourselves? [05:02.5]
Okay, those are the three steps that we're covering today.
Let's dive into the first one. Recall that the more needy a man is the less attractive he is to women. Why? It's because his neediness conveys that he requires others to meet his needs for him and that he is unable to meet his own needs himself. He's not confident. He's not sure that he can handle whatever challenges life throws at him.
Neediness comes from having unmet needs and then seeking to get those needs met through the other person, and that's what conveys the neediness. Then it becomes obvious. In the previous episode, I listed out a bunch of typical symptoms of neediness, so you can see it in yourself and know what to look out for. The typical needy man is trying to get women to meet his needs for him. That could be just getting a woman to like him, so that he feels good about himself, or her attention, approval or validation, so he feels worthy or enough. [06:04.8]
The problem is this is a kind of parasitic approach that he's taking towards her and her own mind would reject this parasitic approach on her. That's why there's a gut-level almost visceral reaction in especially attractive women to this type of needy behavior in men, because, at a gut level, they already feel that he's trying to make use of her and manipulate her to get his needs met in this way.
The first order of business in making a meal more attractive is to plug the holes in the ship, so to speak, to stop the boat from sinking any further. You can do this by getting clarity on his unmet needs and showing him how to meet those and himself. This can be done in a surface-level way through cognitive behavioral therapy and coaching, and at a deeper level through strengthening the relationship of his higher self to his various psychological parts. [07:00.2]
Both of these processes are ones that I cover in my online courses, which you can get access to, all of them, through the “Platinum Partnership”.
Okay, so there are 10 universal human needs and I'm going to walk you through them very quickly, like a really abridged version of these. Let me first start by giving you the list. They are a security, variety, spontaneous play, restraint, the need for limits, significance, autonomous competence, connection, love, growth, and contribution.
Okay, so you're probably not going to remember all of those. I just rattled them off there sort of like a table of contents, so you know what's coming, but let me go into detail on each of these and explain how they come up or typically come up in people's lives.
At the start of our lives, the most pressing need and the one driving our tiny existence then is for security or certainty. A newborn is literally unable to provide food or shelter for himself and literally needs someone else to meet those needs for him. [08:01.3]
Once the need for security or certainty is met consistently, such that the baby is certain that food and shelter will be there when needed, then the next need to come to the surface are the needs for spontaneous play and variety. You can see this natural tendency to play and the seeking out of novelty in young children. If it's not abused or traumatized out of us, we humans can develop our natural instincts for spontaneity, for play and variety in powerful and beautiful ways.
Then once there's enough playtime and once we're exposed to enough novel elements in our lives, then comes along the need for limits and restraints. We can see this in children when they hit the so-called terrible twos when they're still figuring out where the limits of their power and control are. No longer can they just command with enough crying, just command food, milk and cuddles to appear.
Now, there are big enough that Mommy and Daddy expect them to behave in ways that require some self-control, but this is necessary to prevent them from becoming a highchair tyrants or sadistic bullies, or on the other side of the spectrum, becoming coddled cowards or spoiled weaklings. [09:10.5]
Once children develop a sense of healthy limits, then they're able to be even freer to meet their needs for play and variety. It's like knowing what the rules are and where the boundary lines lie on the football field makes it easier to lose yourself in the fun of the game and then to flow while playing. Notice that as later needs are met, it makes it easier to meet the earlier needs in a fuller or richer way.
Okay, so after the child understands or adopts limits, healthy or not, the next to come to the fore are the needs for significance and for autonomy and competence. These two needs, the need for significance and the need for autonomous competence, are often developed together because a common way to achieve significance is through developing competence.
Notice that, almost always, children pick up the belief that they need to do something to achieve significance and to achieve significance, right? That they're not significant just in who they are, but that it's something else they need to go out and get. [10:08.7]
This results from falling off the fine line that even parents have to walk between affirming the child's sense of intrinsic self-worth, and many parents, they don't even realize this since they don't feel an inherent sense of self-worth themselves, so it's practically impossible for them to reinforce that in their own children. Right, so there's the fine line between affirming the child's sense of intrinsic self-worth and motivating the child sufficiently to excel at activities that the child is not naturally interested in such as most school homework, right?
Then the next need arises as we develop a track record of competence and start to feel significant, at least sometimes, and that next need is connection. The more significant you are, the more separation you naturally have from the rest of the pack, the rest of your social circle, so to speak. This is built into the definition of significance. That's part of what being significant means, right? That you are a special or extraordinary, or better than the rest, or at least that you feel that way or that you're set apart from the others. [11:07.8]
Thus, achieving this special status ends up, ironically, resulting in alienation from others being set apart in some way, right? Often this results in graduating to a cohort of equally special peers, and after the initial euphoria of getting into that new group, the same pattern of doubts and competition sets in. To keep meeting this need for significance in this now new context, this new cohort, the striving for separation from others comes roaring back, right? And this is felt even more acutely because now the new pack keeps getting smaller and more rarefied, more competitive. The irony is that those who feel the most significant were also those who are most disconnected often in their lives. That is as long as they're unable to meet their own needs themselves, of course. [11:58.2]
Then our need for connection can be met, not just through relationships with other human beings, but it can also be met through interactions or relationships with animals and pets. It can also be met through experiences of oneness with nature or the physical universe, or even the spiritual realm.
Most importantly, the most profound and powerful way that we can meet our need for connection is through strengthening the connections among our many psychological parts, and between our higher self and our psychological parts. At a basic level, most of us instinctively understand the need for connection because we know what it's like to be with good friends and we know the loneliness that can come from feeling like we have no friends, and we also know what it's like when we have enough friends and now we still want more. We feel something deeper for another than mere friendship or maybe the friendship grows into something bigger, and this is when our need for love often comes to the fore. [12:56.3]
The surprising truth is that our need for love trumps all the other needs and also comes before even our need for security. You see, if you have love, we can be content even without the other needs met, and if we do not have love, but have all the other needs met, our lives will in the end still be unfulfilling, unsatisfying, and largely meaningless.
To immature people, this wouldn't make much sense because when immature people think about the concept of love, they often think of a Romeo and Juliet kind of infatuation. Most young single people's experience of what they think of love is actually often a mix of emotions that are dominated by attraction and admiration and validation, and if they've been on the receiving end of real love, maybe from a parent figure or a wise sibling, or a grandparents or even a pet, they're often too self-involved to experience the fullness of it. The love just sort of bounces off them or it goes right by them, which wouldn't bother the giver of love very much because love by definition is unconditional and not looking for a return. [14:06.2]
The phrase to love and not need it to come back is almost a tautology. A love that requires the recipient to love back is obviously not love. It could be attraction, affection, a conditional contract. It wouldn't be love. It's safe to say that love is rare and, practically speaking, it can really only be directed in a sustainable and deep level to maybe a dozen or a score of people at any given time.
It really depends on how abundant your own emotional resources are at the time, because there's only just one you and you've got the same 24 hours seven days a week that anyone else has, and imagine you unconditionally love six people. That's already quite a lot. Then imagine if you were to say that you unconditionally love an entire village of 1,000 people, and then you still have the same four hours a day, seven days a week, so how much does that one out of 1,000 kids in that tribe or whatever actually get of your love? [15:10.8]
When it gets beyond a certain number of people that you direct your unconditional love towards, it becomes so attenuated, so thin, that it becomes divided up into small bits that it almost becomes meaningless, right? It's important to decide and to pay attention to who you decide to give your unconditional love to.
Sometimes people think that the unconditionality or they misinterpret the unconditionality part of unconditional love to mean indiscriminate, like you can love anybody anytime or whatever. Right, so unconditional, give it out to anyone. That's not obviously what unconditional means.
Unconditional means that when you decide to love somebody, you love them unconditionally. You accept all of their parts and you love all the parts of them. That's what that means, and if it's true unconditional love, it's often flowing from a place of abundance and that's something we'll get to when we get to the last need that comes online. [16:07.0]
We see that it's wise to be judicious in selecting who to allow yourself to love in this powerful way, and regardless of whether you think love is practical or prudent, there's no denying the appeal of such a thing or how nice it would feel to be on the receiving end of such an emotion.
Indeed, that's really the most important need we look to have met. From the moment we enter the world, we perceive our caregivers’ love through their meeting of our needs for security, variety, significance, etc., right? The other needs are in mediating roles for the foundational needs of love. The primacy of love pervades all of our human psychology.
If our parent figures were wise or just lucky, they might have been able to meet all of these needs in turn as they arose, and if there were stable parents, they might have been able to meet them consistently over time and this would have set us up for a more secure attachment style. [17:05.5]
Only once these earlier needs are met do the two most mature needs of growth and contribution come online. To a certain extent, a lower level of growth is met by meeting the need for competence, but this higher level of growth is not so easily satiated, right, for once the person feels competent, the desire for more growth ends.
We've all felt what it's like to aim to get it handled, right? For instance, I often hear guys say that they'll set aside X amount of time to get good at social skills or dating skills, or emotional intelligence, with the assumption that once they attain that desired level of competence, then they won't have to spend any further time on it or continue to develop that skill.
This is an immature mindset, as it's very difficult to maintain a skill level without practicing it frequently. In this way, life is like a backwards-moving travelator, like at the airport. If you stay still, you'll end up just moving backwards. That's the nature of biological life. If you want to maintain your position, you'll have to keep moving forward. If you want to increase your speed, you'll have to exert a lot more energy against the backwards momentum. [18:12.3]
The need for growth is the need to experience the pleasure of progress in itself, apart from whatever results it gets you, so that in that way, the path becomes the goal and that's actually a human need. It is a more mature or more spiritual need that's a universal human need.
The final universal human need that comes online is contribution and you'll see this as an aspect of maturity in your experience with love. The more you meet that need of unconditional love, the easiest way to meet that need for unconditional love and the only surefire way to do it is by giving it.
When you give unconditional love to someone else or to others, you are at that very moment, as you're giving it, feeling unconditional love right then and there, and you'll notice that, in contributing to others, you get your own need met as well. Not only do you meet your need for love, but in contributing, you're growing, so you meet your need for growth and you'll meet your need for contribution. [19:14.8]
You’ll notice that, as you're meeting this later need, the higher needs, you also meet the lower needs more fully, part of that principle I pointed out earlier, and contribution. There's so much to say about this. I'll be covering these needs, especially love and contribution, later on in other episodes, but I just wanted to canvas them all there for you, so that you see them all at once, so you've got that perspective.
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.
Moving on to Step 2, now that we have that list of 10 universal human needs in mind, the next thing to do is to discover the order in which we prioritize these in our lives, and this does not mean the order that you wish or hope that they were in, but the order in which you actually have been prioritizing them, the hierarchy of needs that you have been operating with in your life so far.
The order in which they're driving your life makes a huge difference for how your life goes. Somebody whose life is led and driven by the needs of security and of significance is going to have a pretty miserable life. I mean, the need for security is coming from a place of insecurity and he's going to try to get that insecurity met by trying to achieve it by trying to achieve significance, so security and significance is a bad way to go. [21:14.4]
You might even have somebody whose top two needs are security and variety, and those are going to be very contradictory, so he's going to be almost having a bipolar existence. Somebody who, for instance, has significance as their top and then variety is probably going to be a very risk-taking type of person, who just in order to feel significant or important or worthy, they've got to have a lot of why do you in their lives and they can't ever settle. This is going to be a recipe for dissatisfaction and discontent in a lack of calm and peace in his life.
These are all different examples. Again, I go into a lot more detail on this in my courses that are more in depth, for instance, “Invincible”, “Lifestyle Mastery”, “Freedom U”, “Rock Solid Relationships”. They all contain in-depth exploration and help you discover your own hierarchy of needs. [22:05.0]
It's important to realize that we can't just think in a vacuum from your armchair, so to speak, your hierarchy of needs, right? In order to discover what your hierarchy of needs is, which needs have been driving your life unconsciously, you've got to go through a special process to speak to your unconscious to actually access that in your unconscious. It's sort of like an operating system, and to access it, you’ve got to access the OS that's hidden in your unconscious.
That's why in, for instance, the course “Invincible”, and all of these are, by the way, a part of the “Platinum Partnership”, but in “Invincible”, there's a process by which we use embodied cognition. You're using your face or voice and your body and going through a process, where you're going to call out of your unconscious to discover your unconscious hierarchy of needs, so that you can then begin to work on them. [22:58.2]
A big part of the therapeutic process is taking what's hidden in the unconscious and bringing it out into the conscious, bringing it out into your consciousness, so that you can actually work on it, as if you're unconscious of it, literally. What that means is you don't know that it's there, so you can't work on anything that's still stuck in your unconscious. You've got to bring it out into the open, so that you can reflect on it, reconsider it, and redesign your hierarchy of needs, so that you can have your needs in the order that would make your life go better for you or in the way that you want to live.
For example, achievers tend to have their needs for significance, autonomous competence, and security or variety, as the top driving forces in their lives. But a life lived in the service of meeting those needs primarily and above the other human universal needs, such as love or connection or a spontaneous play, is ultimately going to be an unsatisfying and unfulfilling life.
In addition to the hierarchy of needs that we have, so in addition to the order in which they are important to us, the order of importance they are in for us, and the importance in terms of driving our lives operationally what's the hierarchy of our needs, and that'll tell us a ton about ourselves. [24:12.2]
Also, if you learn her or the other person’s hierarchy of needs, you'll learn a ton about them, and it's really important when you're in relationship to know your spouse or your partner's hierarchy of needs, so that you can help them meet their needs, so you can meet theirs and you can do a better job of helping to meet their needs alongside them, encouraging them to meet their own needs.
In addition to the hierarchy of needs, you also should look at the conditions or rules by which you meet those needs or get those needs met, and this structure of needs and rules I have learned through the Tony Robbins coaching certification course. Props to Tony Robbins for developing that, but he's also borrowing from all of the therapy that focuses on these, which is all psychotherapy, from the very beginning of you looking deeply at needs, but this idea of looking at the conditions is really important. [25:08.0]
How are you going about meeting, for instance, your need for connection? If you require other people to meet your needs for, in this example, connection, then you're always going to be needy. You might not notice your neediness because you happen to have some friends with you, but when you don't have any friends or when they are not meeting your need for connection and maybe they're being douchebags or whatever, then you feel, Oh, I don't have this need for connection met anymore and I feel lonely or rejected. Right?
That's another example from significance. Often rejection has to do with significance that if other people approve of you, look up to you, etc., give you props, then you feel good about yourself. That's a bad way to go. That's a recipe for discontent, unfulfillment. It's a recipe for unhappiness and it also is a recipe for neediness, so bringing it back to neediness, right? [26:00.5]
You will notice that when I say you're able to cover over your neediness momentarily or temporarily with tips or tactics or whatever, it's because, in that moment, even if the tip is effective, which most tips aren't, but if it's effective, what you're getting is just simply like an alcoholic getting some alcohol or like a drug addict getting some drugs. In that moment, you don't feel your addiction. You don't feel your neediness, but it's still there.
It's actually worse, like I shared in the last episode, if you actually get the tips to work for you, because now you're just adding another layer of conditioning, getting you hooked on the wrong way to go, getting you hooked on that wrong stimuli. You'll notice that as you remove the need for others to meet your needs for you, you'll discover your root neediness, and then it'll be more obvious to you that that's not going to work. [26:58.3]
Going back to, again, the examples of significance and connection, the question for you is how are you getting these needs met? The thing to do is to go down that list of 10 needs. First, you’ve got to order them in the order in which your hierarchy of needs is. Which needs have been more important in your life, operationally in your life? Again, I cover that in the course “Invincible” and lead our students, our guys, through a process to discover that for themselves.
Once you get your hierarchy of needs, then you go through, starting from the top need and working your way down, each of those needs to discover which conditions are in play for each of these needs. What rules are there for you? In other words, let's say your top need is security. What does it take for you to feel security? And so you list those out.
It might mean, in this case, security, somebody else telling you or being there for you, telling you you are secure, right? If you need that, you're now dependent on the other person, right? Then your self-esteem, your peace and happiness is at the mercy of somebody else, and no wonder you're needy. You're literally needy. You need them to meet your needs and that's why you feel needy. [28:05.0]
That's why you're never actually happy and independent and content, and that's why you're never attractive naturally. You're just covering over your neediness momentarily when that person happens to meet your needs for you and that's not a position that any mature person wants to be in. Maturity means that you are able to meet your own needs. You learn to meet your own needs for yourself, in yourself.
Take an example of connection. Security is easy, hopefully. If you're a man who's now independent, you've learned to fend for yourself. You have enough money in the bank that you can take care of yourself. You have developed enough competence that you feel pretty confident that you'll be able to get a job, if you get fired, etc., etc., right? You can feel secure. It might even be, if you're in a place that's dangerous physically and there's physical danger, that you can defend yourself and so on, right? These are all ways that you, within your own power, are able to meet your own needs for security, and then you can just work your way up. Security is the most basic one that comes online first. You get into security, variety, play, restraints, significance, etc. [29:07.6]
Eventually you get to connection and that seems odd for people to be able to meet their own needs for connection. You can, and there, also, you can meet your needs at a more intense level and a less intense level. I might get my need for connection met, on a scale of 10, maybe four out of 10, by just being in a place with other people.
This is very different from, if I were in solitary confinement in a jail right now, I have no freedom, but also I have no connection because I’m literally in solitary confinement, versus if I go from solitary confinement to sitting in a busy Starbucks. You can see already that just sitting in a busy Starbucks can actually help meet my own need for connection and that's within my control. I can go there and sit there, and get a drink and just soak in that connection with other human beings that are nearby and there's that buzz of activity. [29:57.8]
I can also meet it, as I mentioned earlier, by going into nature and communing with nature and feeling oneness with nature or the natural universe and so on, and feeling connected there, right? I can also experience it by connecting, and this is now getting to the third point, the only true cure for neediness is being able to meet your needs in yourself.
Notice that you have many parts. We are all composed of many psychological parts and the only sure-fire way to meet our needs at a very high level of connection and love and so on is by—and let's take the example of connection—feeling that connection between our parts in our higher self or true self, and even then feeling the connection between our parts, between our parts, one part to another part, and feeling already inside you, within your flesh and blood, brain and your body, that you already are composed of many parts psychologically and that when you feel connected to them, and most importantly, when they feel connected to your higher self and your higher self feels connected to your parts that that need for connection is met on a 10 out of 10. [31:07.0]
I know, for a lot of people, this is hard to even conceptualize, like, What are you talking about, David? That sounds like bullshit. I totally get it. However, I’m telling you about it and there's plenty of empirical evidence for this and this is the language of IFS therapy, and you can look that up on the internet and there's a lot of empirical evidence for this. This is something that you can explore.
Keep the hope for this. I'm just saying, would you be interested in something like this, if it were possible? I’m just opening the possibility that this is there. Hold out that hope. Okay, so if you're willing and optimistic to explore it, you can get started in my online courses. The easiest way to do it is through the “Platinum Partnership”, which will give you access just to everything. [31:50.3]
You can also explore it by looking up a therapist in your zone through the IFS Therapy directory, which you can just simply google, “IFS therapy directory”, and then one of the search fields in it is locations. I recommend you do it by your time zone because you can do IFS therapy through Zoom or even through audio, though it would be better through video. You don't touch each other, generally speaking, so you won't need to be there in person.
Then you can take advantage of all of the world, and especially if you're flexible with your timing and you don't mind getting up and doing a session at perhaps an odd timing, then you have access to all the therapists in the world who do IFS therapy and I highly recommend that modality. Of course, if you work in our courses, our online courses, that will accelerate the whole process for you.
Okay, so to recap, in this episode, we covered the 10 universal human needs, and how they arise and what they are.
Then we also covered how we meet our needs currently, which is by discovering your unconscious hierarchy of needs—again, you can do that through a process that I take guys through in “Invincible”—and to pay attention to the conditions for each of your needs. What does it take for you to feel that need or to get that need met and how many of those conditions are entirely within your control? That's a really important element to pay attention to. [33:13.8]
Then, finally, we covered that the only true cure for neediness is your higher self, the connection that your higher self, in the presence of your higher self, with your parts. That naturally leads to the next question. Then how do I access this, this mysterious higher self that is able to meet all of my needs fully within me? That's a very good question and that is what we'll be covering in the next episode.
Okay, so those are the three points I covered in this podcast episode. Just before we finish, I want to tell you about the story of Bill. Bill came to me first a few years ago, looking for dating coaching because he got burned by his last relationship. [34:00.8]
It turned out that Bill was a hugely successful entrepreneur. He has started and exited multiple companies to the tune of multiple millions and was already working on this next company. He was very success-driven and one of his biggest needs, as you can imagine, the top need for him, was significance, but he was also being driven by his need for security, and so he needed to be a power couple. That was his key phrase, “We've got to be a power couple,” and other people, he gets off on other people seeing him with her, with this mysterious girl.
When he first worked with me, he hadn't yet gotten into the new relationship. He was just working out getting over this ex, which was easy for me to help them get through, surprisingly for him. It was a pretty straightforward process for me. I've done this for hundreds of guys and thousands online to help them recover from their ex quickly and to bounce back and move on with their lives into something better. [35:01.8]
In that period, when he was still single, just describing what his ideal life would be like, a big part of it was being a part of a power couple and he described his ideal mate, ideal woman, in terms of significance. It wasn't even so much that the two of them would spend times of intimacy and connection, the two of them, but more importantly, that others would see them together and will look at them and think, Oh, wow, look at them.
They're so powerful. They're a power couple.
It was really tough for me to show him how toxic that value system was and how driven by this need for significance was so dangerous for his own happiness and for the relationship that he ends up in, and he didn't listen. He didn't understand. He thought I was being sort of wishy-washy. Wishy-washy is the wrong word. He thought I was being lovey-dovey or whatever, kind of cookie airy fairy. He was like, Thank you so much for all this great coaching and I’m ready to get this girl. [36:02.5]
He did pretty quickly, got into a relationship with a woman that he could show off and did do that ego gratification. It gave him that ego validation that he was able to take around like a trophy girlfriend, so to speak, and then lo and behold, comes back to me several months later with stories of these epic fights where she trashes their hotel suites. Then they, of course, make up and then they go on another trip and have this whirlwind romance, and then they have another epic fight and it's just this up and down dramatic battle.
He was coming back very battle-weary from just these several months of this intense kind of Alfie-esque, if you've seen that movie, type of dramatic relationship. Of course, you would end up in this because your relationship, Bill, is driven by significance. It’s in validation. It's not actually about intimacy or connection. That's because Bill didn't actually understand his own needs and what was driving him. [37:01.0]
He bought, uncritically and largely unconsciously, into the value system that was very toxic passed down from his family and his peer group, and overall society that he was raised in, and just took it for granted and did it uncritically, until he got into relationship after relationship of these epic dramatic fights and breakups, and just got really nasty.
Then it was really when he hit rock bottom that he finally was willing to look himself in the mirror and look deeper at the fact that he was being driven by significance, and this was after years of tumultuous, really epic, destructive relationships that were getting worse and worse over time.
You don't want that to be you. You don't want to wait until all of that accrues. Now he's just beginning his therapeutic journey, but, hey, that's what it takes some times and that's what it took for me as well, getting into toxic relationships that were intensifying over time because of all of those extra layers of conditioning and repression that we add on by overcompensating with tips, tactics, techniques, strategies, methods, and all of that. [38:10.4]
That is just surface-level hiding of our core, deeper insecurities and neediness, instead of going right to the neediness and addressing that. Why are those needs not being met, and how have we been trying to get them met in the past? Why is that toxic and not working? What's really there at the root of it?
I'm going to be getting into that in the next episode about the only true cure for your neediness, which requires your higher self, the presence and leadership of your higher self. I'll be covering that in the next episode
If you are interested in skipping all of those years of heartache of just adding on layers of repression, and if you're interested in skipping the typical route that everyone else have, the only other route that other people have—which is years of weekly therapy to discover their needs, to discover the parts of them that are not having their needs met, that are holding all the pain and vulnerability, unburdening them, healing them, and then growing from there and from each of those parts and so on, right? This is going to be years of therapy for the average person—you can speed up that whole process of therapeutic growth and healing by taking advantage of my online courses. [39:18.6]
Obviously, the “Platinum Partnership” gives you access to all of them, so I would recommend that. Check that out if that interests you and skipping all of those years of pain and heartache, and even years of weekly therapy. You can accelerate the whole process by going through my online courses.
Thank you so much for listening, and if you enjoyed or benefited from this podcast, please share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it as well. If you liked it, please leave a review on iTunes podcasts and that really helps people who are on the fence about whether to give it a listen and this will help us spread the word.
Thanks so much for listening and following, and I will see you in the next episode. Until then, David Tian signing out. [40:01.0]
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