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: If therapy is so hard, then why do it? That's a question that a few listeners have posed to me recently and I’ll be answering it in this episode. But first, let's refine the question. It's not that therapy is hard. It's that it's emotionally challenging, and experiences that are emotionally challenging are only not enjoyable or unpleasant to people who don't enjoy feeling a range of emotions.
If you mature enough that you can enjoy the beauty of sadness, of anger, of longing, instead of just experiencing those as pain, then you can enjoy the entirety of the therapeutic process, just as those who are out of shape can't understand how anyone could possibly enjoy working out. [01:07.4]
Similarly, the emotionally immature who can only tolerate, quote-unquote, “positive emotions” can't understand how anyone could enjoy emotional challenge or even enjoy the feeling of sadness. But I’ll take that perspective of the emotionally immature to start, and the question then is “Why do therapy if it's so emotionally challenging?
The first superficial response should be, you don't have to. If however you are living is working for you, great. Then why are you listening to this? Why are you following this podcast? Keep doing what you're doing. That's great. No skin off my back. But I'm assuming that you at least suspect that things could be better, so let me give you a deeper answer by way of a story.
On a sunny spring afternoon, 50 years ago, two young men stood at a crossroads. There were very much alike. They grew up in the same neighborhood, looked similar or equally popular, were graduating from the same university with the same degree and with similar grades, and they were equally ambitious and hopeful for their futures. [02:16.2]
Recently, these men returned to their hometown for their 50th reunion. From the outside, they still seemed very much alike. Both had gotten graduate degrees from top universities. Both became presidents of large companies. Both were members of the same country clubs and of equal social status, and both had children who graduated from top universities. But on the inside, there were big differences.
One of the men was clinically depressed, suffering from chronic health problems, recovering from three less-than-amicable divorces and disliked by his children. The other man was the most happy and fulfilled he'd ever been in his life, woke up each day with a sense of purpose and about to celebrate his 40th wedding anniversary with his wife, their three children, and their three young grandchildren. [03:06.0]
Have you ever wondered, as I have, what accounts for this difference in people's lives? It isn't that one man wanted it more, worked harder at it, or had more willpower or discipline. It isn't that one man was destined for happiness and the other for depression. It isn't that one man was merely lucky and the other wasn't. The difference is that one committed to the therapeutic process and learned how to heal and grow through his vulnerability and the other didn't.
The first man chose the path of willpower. At first, his hard work and discipline served him well through college. At his company, the overtime, all-nighters and weekends in the office paid off with promotion after promotion. That still small voice that spoke up whenever he was mentally exhausted started appearing more frequently. It said that he deserved to take some time off, treat himself better, get a good night's sleep. [04:01.3]
It was mixed in with another voice in his head that was more frenetic, that kept distracting him with what we'd call now in the modern era checking social media, surfing the web, indulging in unhealthy snacks from the pantry or tempting him with a new Netflix series. He called these voices the resistance, and he saw them as bad, harmful and destructive.
Since he was a child, he trained himself to respond to the resistance by overcoming these voices, subduing them or exiling them to a corner of his mind where he could keep them locked up and out of the way forever. It continually annoyed him that the resistance was never fully gone and would often return even stronger whenever he pushed himself the hardest.
At first, he succeeded in suppressing the resistance repeatedly, and then, over time, this conscious suppression became unconscious repression. As a result of his mostly successful repression of the resistance parts inside him, he accomplished a great deal in a short span of time, but he was constantly feeling drained, exhausted, and running on fumes, fueling himself with coffee, energy drinks, and adrenaline. [05:10.7]
But he couldn't rest because that would mean he'd never achieve his goals, which would mean he would never be worthy and he couldn't allow that. He kept beating himself up even harder to keep going. As he got older, he burnt out. The work wasn't meaningful to him anymore. He tried to just push through it as he had all his life, but it just made him even more depressed.
He had sacrificed his personal life for his professional life, so he started making up for lost time, showing up to happy hours after work every day, partying all weekend, and hooking up with new women every month. His work started to suffer, but he'd already learned how to power through the day and how to hide his hangovers well enough to just get by.
He got himself a girlfriend, and after a couple years they got married, but once the honeymoon period wore off, he got bored and restless. They had two kids in three years, thinking that that would reignite their love for one another, but actually it did the opposite. Now they had even less time for themselves and even more stress. [06:12.0]
At first, he turned back to work and doubled down on overtime, once again making promotion after promotion, but that too soon became routine, and he returned to the after-work happy hours and partying on the weekends. He neglected his now nagging wife and kids. Then he cheated on her multiple times, and then he caught her cheating on him. Then they got a divorce. Lawyers got involved and it got messy.
The long toxic cycle of burnout from stressful overtime at work, leading to drinking and partying and hooking up to settling down with one woman, to the honeymoon passion wearing off to having children in the hopes of reigniting love, to recovering his feeling of significance by throwing himself back into work, to coping with drinking, partying and cheating, to ending up in another nasty divorce repeated itself two more times, until there he was, just past 70, paying alimony to three ex-wives, suffering chronic health problems from his hard-charging decades, estranged from his children and living alone and lonely as an old bachelor. [07:22.4]
The second man initially relied on that same willpower and discipline that helped him excel in his school days. He was used to powering through the resistance to get shit done. That's how he approached his work at the company and that's how he approached his personal life, too. His career didn't leave much time for partying, but what little time he did have on the weekends and some evenings he made the most of. “Work hard, play hard” was one of his mottos.
As he entered his thirties, he fell in love with one of the women he was dating and they got married, but his usual willpower-centric approach to life—overcome weakness. Armor up and toughen up. Vanquish any vulnerability. Grit your teeth empower through challenges. Hustle, hustle, hustle. Man up and bear your cross in silence. Keep pushing forward no matter what. “How bad do you want it?” All of that—actually backfired when it came to his intimate relationships. [08:18.0]
When he finally noticed this, he claimed the ensuing emotional volatility, lack of straightforward directness in how she communicated with him, and her eventual emotional withdrawal, on the nature of women. He threw himself back into his work and tried to derive even more of his sense of significance from his career, but by now, he too was burnt out and he found his old job less and less meaningful.
He started catching himself, staring off into space, feeling flat, numb or hopeless. He had a hard time getting to sleep and his overall sleep started to suffer. But on weekends he would sleep in until the afternoon, and when he woke up, he would find himself even more tired than before. He found he was losing his temper a lot more often and easily. [09:03.8]
Sometimes the slightest provocations from a colleague where the women he was dating would set him off, and he would later reflect and be shocked at himself. When he went out drinking with his buddies, he got drunk a lot more often and would find himself provoking a play fight that would go too far. He found himself feeling anxious, restless and on edge.
Fortunately, the company he was working for started an onsite wellness program that included yoga, meditation and confidential workplace therapy. Enrollment in these was actually encouraged by his superiors, so he signed up for all of them. He immediately took to the meditation in mindfulness workshops and he became a twice daily meditator.
Meditation really helped to calm his nonstop vortex of thoughts swirling around in his head. He really loved yoga, too, which he found to be a good compliment to his usual weightlifting, and felt so much better after each session. He noticed his old urge to drink, party and hit on girls naturally dwindled. He didn't have that twitchy itch to act out anymore. [10:05.0]
He was drinking only one night a week or less, and at the urging of his yoga teacher, he hired an online nutritionist and replaced his old diet with healthy food and drink, which worked wonders on his waistline unexpectedly, but also, more importantly, on his energy levels. What ended up creating the biggest change, however, was the one change he liked the least at the beginning.
The first couple of therapists he got paired with weren't really that helpful. He actually got into a debate about morality with one of them, but he really hit it off with a third therapist he saw and started making weekly appointments. Once he hit the 10-session per year limit at work, he continued seeing his therapist weekly, offsite, or through video calls.
After several months of weekly therapy along with daily meditation and the other healthy lifestyle changes, he was out on a date with his girlfriend who he'd been dating for many months already when she remarked smiling and looking him tenderly in his eyes at how different he seemed now, calmer, steadier, less restless, less stressed, and what she appreciated the most, he was a lot more present when he was with her. [11:10.6]
As he reflected on these encouraging words from her, he was very pleased. He was sleeping through the night, something he hadn't been doing since he was a child. He was definitely happier and calmer. He was enjoying just being, instead of feeling like he had to always be doing something with a future payoff. One change was off-putting, though, which was that he caught himself crying at odd moments of the day.
In therapy, his therapist helped him get in touch with the pain he was holding onto from childhood, which had to do with the exactingly high standards he believed he had to meet in order to earn his parents' approval and love. The therapist referred to this little boy version of himself and his memories as his inner child, and with his therapist’s guidance, he helped his inner child understand the bigger picture that his parents were acting out of the weights of the shame passed down from their parents, who were coping with the burden of shame handed down from their parents, and on and on, that he was loved, not because of what he could do or had done, but just because of who he was. [12:09.3]
Over the weeks as he encountered and was able to be with his inner child parts in this way, the tremendous pressure and weight of having to achieve significance or be better than others, or to prove himself or become somebody or to do something great in order to be worthy of approval or connection or love, these gradually but miraculously dissolved. He was able to be and stay present in the moment. He realized he wasn't very good at relaxing, recovering, and staying present, and it took him a while to learn how to relax, as strange as that sounded to him at the time.
At the start, even when he was supposed to be mindfully present, he automatically began searching for some target to aim at, some goal to strive for, some competition to conquer. He discovered that this relentless but obsessive focus on improving himself, vis-à-vis some elusive standard, actually took him out of the moment and into his head. [13:08.8]
Over time, he gradually cultivated the ability to be fully present and mindful in the moment without neurotically checking if he was progressing to the next goal post of significance. As he gained more experience at staying present, he discovered he was able to have fun and be happy, without requiring any achievements or accomplishments at all. Instead, it was all about connecting with his loved ones, with his friends or with nature. He finally learned how to sustain pure enjoyment in the moment, without an agenda or requiring a goal to distract him from being in the present.
He and his girlfriend got married, and a year later, they had their first child. The day his first baby was born changed his life. When he looked into his baby's eyes, he felt so much love flowing from him unconditionally, he knew he would be willing to lay his life down for this child that it was overwhelming. Suddenly, he'd found an even deeper purpose for his life that went beyond his own existence. It was to give and receive as much love as possible, starting with his newborn child and his wife, whom he already naturally loved. [14:17.8]
His love for his baby had opened the floodgates of love he had been holding back in himself out of fear of it not being returned. So much love came pouring forth from him that he easily extended it to his other family, his friends, and his colleagues. He began responding to ads for nonprofits in his community and donating money anonymously and contributing some time each weekend.
He was loving without any expectation of return, something he never thought he could experience before, and since he didn't think it was even possible, he never bothered to even aim for it. But now this outpouring of unconditional love triggered by his baby's birth transformed his experience of life completely. [14:59.7]
It also flowed into his work of the company where he focused on the bigger why and the mission and delivering more value to the clients and customers. He discovered a newfound passion for what they were doing, which drove him to spearhead the development of new innovative product offerings, and eventually propelled them to be promoted as vice president of his division and then president.
Despite taking on much more demanding roles in the company, he no longer handled his inner resistance his old neurotic way, which relied on willpower and discipline to force out and exile his resistance, which led to even greater repression. Instead, when these challenges arose, he was able to go inside himself, discover the part of himself that doesn't want to and the part of himself that says he has to, and appreciate them for their positive intent and listen to and respect their points of view, and empathize and sit with both parts of this inner conflict, which eventually resolved itself naturally without strain.
He discovered an even greater purpose to his life beyond just his career calling our mission. What makes his life worth living was, in his words, the moment-by-moment experience of it, savoring the grace available with each breath and the opportunities to give and receive love. [16:16.2]
Two men who took two different roads to success. They both started out on the same road of willpower and discipline, but the first stayed on this road even as it turned into a road of repression, becoming tortured by his inner conflicts, while the other man took a new road, one marked by love and connection, vulnerability and tenderness, joy and fulfillment, and in so doing, redefining what success meant for him.
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.
If you have a copywriting background or a business-writing background, you might recognize the structure of this tale of two men taken from the famous Wall Street Journal ad that ran for decades, and it's a really handy way of illustrating the common path that many achievers take, and then the road less traveled, so to speak, that will actually lead to fulfillment and a much more meaningful type of success.
In the description of the life of the first man, you can find a common trap that befalls many achievers and which doomed that first man. It's the achiever's curse, which the first man got stuck in and, just like with quicksand, sank deeper and deeper. [18:04.2]
With quicksand, the more you struggle and resist, the deeper you sink into the muck and mire, and the way to free yourself from it is not to strive, but to stop fighting it, relax, take deep breaths, lean back and make your body as light as possible. Then reach out for someone or something that's solidly planted to grip onto and pull you out.
The amazing thing about quicksand is that as long as you don't struggle, you'll float. Quicksand is a combination of fine sand, clay and salt water. Human bodies are not as dense as the quicksand and will, instead, naturally float on this thick stuff. But quicksand is very sensitive to small variations and stress. At higher stresses, it liquefies very quickly, and the higher the stress, the more fluid and watery it becomes, which causes someone moving in it to sink deeper and deeper. [19:00.6]
Like quicksand, the achiever's challenges in life will slowly but inexorably take you under, but only if you keep thrashing in it, only if you keep trying to strive through it. Instead, if you begin by sinking into a calmer, lighter state, leaning back and relaxing, you'll begin the gradual process leading to your freedom. The good news is that you already have the natural ability to float above the stresses, and, obviously, this is an analogy, to float above the stresses of life. You just need to recover it.
In case you can't tell, this is an analogy. Quicksand is like the achiever's curse and the way out of all of this stress, all of the problems, all the muck and mire in life. It’s not the achiever's way, which is the hard striving, because then you will sink and it's just a matter of time. You are already sinking, if you're a striving achiever, and you won't even realize it until it's too late, because that's the nature of quicksand. [20:04.8]
The way out of it is to take the road of self-acceptance of the therapeutic process, which will feel like the opposite, and it will trigger a lot of achiever parts because they'll begin to freak out, out of their fear that if they don't continue to thrash about, then they will die, which is actually the opposite. They'll die because they keep thrashing about, because they keep relying on willpower and discipline and striving. In the long run, it becomes toxic.
The way out of it is to relax, become lighter, lean back, calm down, and from that state, the way out will present itself naturally. While it may seem as if I'm saying that the road to fulfillment is easy, it's not. It'll take a lot of effort and time to cultivate a feel for navigating this completely new way of living, of seeing the world, of seeing yourself. These are fundamentally different paths and they'll feel completely different from the inside. [21:04.4]
It's like mastering a new instrument. Just because you know how to play the drums and have been slaving away at the drums for decades doesn't mean you can play the piano. Even though they're both technically percussion instruments, playing the drums feels very different from playing the piano. It's also like mastering a new language. Just because both English and Chinese are both languages doesn't mean that if you've been speaking one your whole life that you'll naturally be able to speak the other. If you've been speaking English your whole life, suddenly trying to be fluent in Chinese will feel completely foreign, obviously.
Nor do I mean that the road of fulfillment is about always being in flow or some other such performance-based concept. There may be times when it comes naturally and you're able to be fully present, immersed in the enjoyment of something like a flow state, and there will be times when the next step along this road feels like pulling teeth or maybe like crawling through a dark tunnel, deep in some dungeon-like mine, or maybe it feels like your skin is burning in hell, and, hopefully, you'll remember that just as Churchill said, “If you're going through hell, keep going.” [22:10.5]
Of course, there are beneficial aspects to the willpower and discipline approach to life, especially when it comes to getting shit done that you just have to do for whatever practical reasons, and a major part of growing up is learning how to power through discomfort, cultivating long-range planning and developing the discipline of consistent follow-through.
But over the long run, unfortunately, years or decades of this willpower and discipline approach to life leads to a buildup of layers and layers of repression. The human brain is like the rest of the human body. If you don't stop to tend to the wound, but, instead, just bandage it up and, by sheer force of will, persist beyond the point of pain, you may get the task done in the short term, but in the long run, unless you stop to clean and heal the original wound, you'll need more and more bandages and more and more willpower, just to keep going. [23:09.0]
Imagine, taking this analogy further, that you need to keep going and either you don't know how to clean and heal the original wound, a deep cut in your knee, let's say, or you aren't able to take the time to rest and recover, required time that becomes longer the more you ignore the knee wound. Then you become so used to adding just another bandage on top of the older bandages that you end up forgetting the original wound was even there in the first place.
Meanwhile, the original wound left untreated for so long and with most of the dirt and blood still in there from the fall becomes infected and then starts rotting, and you don't even notice all of this rotting this whole time because of all of the layers of bandages that you've been placing on top, which covers up all the puss and keeps it out of sight. You only notice the lack of mobility and the pain that gets triggered whenever you move in such a way whenever you touch it just so and you bend your knee or your knee hits the ground or something. [24:05.5]
As you only barely recall the original wound and how you got it, and you just end up living with and adjusting to this handicap, eventually, it just becomes a part of your life like it's always been there and that part of you has always been like that. Even worse, though, is that the infection now is spreading to the other parts of your body so that, over the years, the pain is no longer confined to just where the original wound was in the knee, but is now affecting your whole leg and making it painful to stand or sit.
The obvious thing to do is to go to a good hospital and get the knee properly cleaned and dressed. However, because of the infection and the rot and how far it's spread, one visit isn't enough. You'll have to go back every day so that the nurses can clean and dress it properly, and it'll hurt because they have to debride or scrape off all the infected skin and rot and pus that has accumulated over that time.
Yet, at least, thank God, you don't have to amputate your leg, but along with the course of antibiotics, you do have to tend to the wound, disinfect it and redress it every day or multiple times a day, ideally, with the help of people who know what they're doing, medical professionals, and you'll have to keep this going for many months or maybe for years to come because of how long you've just let it rot there. [25:16.5]
But, gradually, the infection starts to clear up and the wound begins to heal, and new healthy skin starts to form and the pus becomes less and less, and you start to regain your mobility and experience less pain whenever there's pressure there and as you move about your day.
Then, one day the doctor tells you, “Okay, you're done. You don't have to come in anymore,” and now you have a newfound appreciation for the function of your knee, for the healthy functioning of your knee, and you want to see how much further you can take it. So, you hire a fitness trainer and you learn biometrics and jumping, and you increase your knee mobility and you use your knees in martial arts and the sky's the limit on this. [25:58.0]
That's another analogy, right? For those who aren't natural with analogical thinking, let me translate this for you. The original wound on the knee was the original traumatic events that occurred and the decisions that you made back then of how you had to be in order to get or keep the love connection and approval, or affection or attention of your parental caregivers or of your loved ones that you craved and needed love from back then just to survive and to thrive.
Hopefully, I’ve answered that original question of why should I go through the therapeutic process at all if it's so hard? You know the superficial answer, the first answer should be, you don't have to. Just do whatever you're doing now if it's working for you. I'm not in the position of persuading anyone. I'm assuming, if you're here listening, if you've come to me for help or looking for advice, you are already realizing the limits of your current approach, and here's the approach that actually works. If you think there's this other approach, by all means, go, try it and keep going until you are convinced that those other approaches don't work. [27:02.6]
You can do what everyone else does, which is just grin and bear it or try harder, work harder, repress your emotions more, pull all-nighters, and try it. That's just common sense, right, if you haven't tried that already? I don't know, that's what most of the world is telling you and that's what most people are trying to do. They're trying to strive for success in the hopes that that will bring happiness and meaning and fulfillment in life, so that they can finally feel worthy and enough and significant.
But if you haven't tried that, then go, do it, because that's a really tempting myth to buy into and it's everywhere in the culture around the world, so it's going to be really hard to resist that if you haven't even given that a shot. Most of my podcast episodes are talking to people who are, have already tried that, and many people who have tried it who come to find me have already succeeded in this, in the worldly sense. They’ve made lots of money or they've climbed the corporate ladder or whatever it is, and maybe even beyond their wildest dreams. [28:01.8]
Yet they still find themselves empty and life lacking meaning and fulfillment, and unable to hold onto love and not even understanding what love is, and instead, living a life of anxiety and stress, and this being it. They have no other answers because they've already tried what society has been telling them. They've already tried what their parents modeled and have been telling them. Now they're at wits end and, I suppose, they go then searching online and somehow find me. Now, hopefully, you are at that point in your life where you're willing to try something completely different and it will feel completely different.
The road of fulfillment feels, from the inside, completely different from the road of striving for success. Ironically, it's a lot scarier. Going back to the quicksand analogy, if you're in quicksand, our instincts are to swim out of it, so we start thrashing around. We start making strokes, right? Breaststroke or backstroke or whatever, because that's what we're used to. We think it's like water and we're trying to swim out, and then we just keep sinking deeper and deeper, and that's obviously the wrong way to do it. [29:06.1]
The right way is completely counterintuitive, but it's a lot easier actually, as long as you can embrace the fear, the fear that naturally comes from trying something that you're not used to that's counterintuitive, and that you, for the first time, as an adult, are trying something that you're not certain which way it's going to go and so you have to have a certain degree of trust in the process and you only need this minimum level of trust to just get started.
I also want to just throw out a caveat there that the therapeutic process is not just therapy. A couple episodes ago, I went into how if you're just looking for a therapist and you think a therapist will save you, it won't work, and I would say, the majority of therapists, more than 50 percent of therapists, I would say, are probably not good therapists, so you’ve got to be careful in selecting a therapist. [29:58.0]
But even more than that, the alone is not enough. The therapy alone is not the therapeutic process. It's just a part of it. I would also add in there all kinds of other disciplines that will help, like meditation, like a mindfulness practice, like learning how to master your emotions, like getting the knowledge, and that requires some information and learning that so that you won't resist it and that you'll at least have the bigger picture, so that just like knowing intellectually what to do when you're stuck in quicksand, it will help you, especially if you have many intellectual parts that are dominating your life, that will help you to relax if you know, at least theoretically, that you're not supposed to be thrashing around and that's why you keep sinking deeper. That'll help you to take those big deep breaths and relax, and kind of flow back and lean back so that you can get out of the quicksand rather than sinking deeper into it.
But it's also not just any one of those things, it's definitely not just reading a bunch of therapy books and getting the head knowledge. You've got to integrate them all in the right way to facilitate, in the most effective manner, your therapeutic journey, your therapeutic process. [31:08.7]
Of course, I’ve made a whole bunch of courses on this that I’ve been developing for several years, at this point, almost a decade, and those are all available inside the Platinum Partnership. I also offer therapeutic coaching, though my client list right now is full and there's a waiting list, but you get on that waiting list. There might be a two to three month wait, but you can get on the waiting list. I also have many courses at various price ranges for everyone that will help you through the therapeutic process, so take advantage of all those. Go to my website, DavidTianPHD.com and poke around.
You will have to take responsibility to invest in yourself in this way, in going through the therapeutic process, because it's not natural. It's not automatic and it's definitely not something that you just pick up and do it the right way from society. Schools aren't going to teach it to you. Very likely, your parents don't know how to go through it and haven't gone through it themselves and they've just passed on intergenerational burdens onto you, so if you do nothing, it's not just going to happen naturally. You actually have to take responsibility to make an effort and to invest in yourself in this way, and actually go through the therapeutic process properly. [32:13.7]
All right, I’ll leave it at that. If you want to learn more about me, about my work, go to DavidTianPHD.com. Thank you so much for your comments and your feedback. Your feedback is what drives the new episodes and that's where I draw my content from, so please give me feedback. Let me know what you thought of this episode and any of the previous episodes. I’d love to see your comments. If you liked it, hit a like on whatever platform you're on, and if you enjoyed this, share it with anyone that you think could benefit from it.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. David Tian, signing out. [32:45.7]
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