Have a podcast in 30 days

Without headaches or hassles

Have you ever heard “nice guys finish last?” Imagine this: you’re super nice, know how to flirt with women, but after months of talking to an attractive woman, you get rejected. It always seems to go well until you fall in love with her, only to have it spat back in your face.

Most men after years of being the “nice guy” are fed up (and rightly so.) They decide to become an alpha male. They go to the gym, learn “game”, try their hand at pick-up artistry, and for a few dates they’re successful. But most of these alpha males hit rock bottom years into their new identity, only to be a repressed shell of their former self.

So if getting shredded and becoming an alpha male isn’t the answer, then what is?

On today’s episode, you’ll discover how to magnetize women to your presence (without being an alpha male or a nice guy.) You’ll also discover the 8 step process to open the floodgates to lasting happiness and true fulfillment.

Listen now!

Show Highlights:

  • The sneaky trait from “American Psycho” which blocks you from experiencing unconditional love and inner peace (1:51)
  • How preventing your girlfriend from putting a knife in the toaster sabotages your relationship with her (2:26)
  • If you have (this personality trait), discover how dating your mom could be more satisfying than dating Dua Lipa (7:07)
  • How dressing up like Jack Black unlocks a harem of women (and why dressing up like James Bond mutilates your chances with the exact same women) (16:53)
  • Why adopting the opposite of “Machiavellian gameplay” magnetizes women and worthiness (21:38)
  • Why consuming self-development content on YouTube eliminates passionate lovemaking sessions from your life (29:51)

Does your neediness, fear, or insecurity sabotage your success with women? Do you feel you may be unlovable? For more than 15 years, I've helped thousands of people find confidence, fulfillment, and loving relationships. And I can help you, too. I'm therapist and life coach David Tian, Ph.D. I invite you to check out my free Masterclasses on dating and relationships at https://www.davidtianphd.com/masterclass/ now.

For more about David Tian, go here:

https://www.davidtianphd.com/about/

Get access to all my current and future online coaching courses by applying for the Platinum Partnership program today at:

https://www.davidtianphd.com/platinum

Read Full Transcript

Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in dating, relationships, success, and fulfillment, and explore the psychology of masculinity. Now, here's your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast. I'm David Tian, your host.

In this special episode, we'll be looking at one of the most common profiles for clients and students that I see. This profile is so common for people who listen to podcasts and consume a lot of self-development, personal-development content on the internet and YouTube and elsewhere that I'm devoting this whole episode to it. Even if it's not true for you, very likely, you know someone or are close to someone for whom it is true.

For people stuck in this behavioral pattern, this, quote-unquote, “condition”, they're blocking themselves from ever experiencing unconditional love, inner peace, lasting happiness, true fulfillment, and this type of person, without therapeutic treatment, will not be able to succeed in a long-term relationship. [01:16.0]

Now, this may sound dramatic. I meant it to be so to grab your attention, but there is hope. I, too, used to be stuck in these patterns for decades, and I know so much about it because I experienced it from the inside, and I’ve got years of experience helping people through this. I've devoted multiple videos, seminars, I even have sections in my course on relationships, “Rock Solid Relationships”, that goes into detail on this dynamic and related dynamics. But it's been years since I’ve gone into depth on this in any of the free content, so here we go.

Now, the term that I find resonates the most with people and sticks in their minds is “compensatory narcissism”, but that's a mouthful and I'm going to start with “fixer” because that's a lot easier for people to just immediately understand and relate to. But the more nuanced understanding or term for it I would give it is compensating narcissism, compensatory. [02:16.0]

It's compensatory because you're using or the person uses narcissistic behavioral patterns and thought patterns in order to compensate for his core insecurities. On the surface, it might be easier to understand this type of profile as a fixer. As with all of our inner parts and their coping strategies, the fixer parts of us mean well. Fixer parts are commonly found among pleasers and achievers.

Growing up, fixers learned to link love and intimate relationships and loving relationships to the feelings that come from taking responsibility for someone else's behavior, thoughts and emotions, most notably, they're parent figures. For example, fixers associate loving relationships to the feelings of being self-sacrificing or trying to please their parent figure who is hard to please, or being emotionally nurturing to a parent figure who doesn't reciprocate at the same level. [03:16.8]

It may seem strange that we keep being drawn back into those same patterns that actually hurt us, being drawn back to them in adulthood when they originated in our childhood. But this is actually quite common. In psychotherapy, it's called repetition compulsion. What we don't complete, we will repeat. In other words, our unconscious mind continues to search for resolution to the unresolved core issues in our lives. It's like a virus trying to complete a command, but the last line in the code puts the operating system into an endless loop.

Another way to look at the same phenomenon is looking at it from the perspective of a comfort zone. Repeated situations and dynamics from our childhood become our comfort zone even when they're objectively harmful, like a wild animal caged up for too long and only released into the wild too late. We, too, seek out the familiar certainty of our cages, our comfort zones. [04:11.5]

Psychologically, our cages include not only the harmful situations in dynamics, but the very defense mechanisms that we developed to deal with them, our coping strategies that may have worked at that time long ago, but are now, as adults, are no longer. They're now maladaptive for us and also prevent us from facing our core issues. Because they protect us from facing the danger and pain head on, they also blind us to the true nature of our issues and situations.

Because of this repetition compulsion, fixers are drawn to people who are unable to meet their emotional needs, in the same way their parent figures were unable to meet their original emotional needs. Here are just a few examples of how this neurotic cycle can play out in fixers’ lives. [05:00.6]

Fixers may find themselves pursuing and remaining in relationships with partners who are emotionally erratic, traumatic, like a lot of drama, and partners who need their help, advice or emotional support, while their partners themselves fail to take any significant steps to actually help themselves and fail to reciprocate care in any meaningful way. These partners might say a lot and promise a lot, like, “Yes, I promise to change. Yes, I'm going to work on myself,” but then they take few, if any, lasting or significant steps to mature or progress.

Fixers may pursue and remain in relationships with partners who are emotionally depriving, covertly abusive or controlling, and not only put up with this treatment but are even continually forgiving of it and rationalizing it a way for the partner.
Fixers may find themselves giving a lot to their partners while not asking their partners to meet their needs, all the while hoping the partner will eventually decide on her own to meet his needs out of appreciation for seeing how much the fixer did for the partner. [06:09.6]

Fixers may eventually find themselves living through and for their intimate partners, doing whatever they can to avoid emotional and physical abandonment and rejection, being dumped, even if this sometimes leads to clinging, smothering or jealous behavior, which, of course, produces the opposite effect that they were hoping for and ends up driving the partner away.

Fixers who are achievers can often find themselves overachieving and seeking perfection through their careers or through partners who they think will please or impress other people. Despite the best of intentions, fixers end up in a vicious cycle that they're cursed to repeat over and over.

Fixers are compelled to find and win over intimate partners who are emotionally unavailable or conditional with their approval, in the way that their parent figures were in their childhood. Because the partner is emotionally unstable in this way, of course, the relationship is doomed to fail. [07:07.7]

Otherwise, if the fixer ends up with someone who doesn't resemble their parent figure in this crucial way, to the fixer, the relationship feels unfulfilling like a hollow victory. They get bored, there's no chemistry, and this means that they'll be turned off down the road by actually emotionally-stable or reliable partners.

Whether they end up with an emotionally-unstable partner who matches their neurotic patterns or they end up with someone who is stable, but bores them, in the end, the fixer core neediness remains and these relationship failures, in adulthood, end up creating painful what psychotherapists call “narcissistic injuries”, like ego pains, which trigger the original unresolved core issues underlying these patterns in the fixer. [07:56.0]

After this happens enough times in a row, the fixer is finally forced to face the pain of the unfinished business, the unresolved core issues, and the coping mechanisms and the flimsy facade finally crumble, leading to a feeling like hitting rock bottom and being as hurt as a wounded child. You may be acting like a wounded child, because, in fact, the inner parts that are trying to cope and protect the vulnerable parts holding the most pain are actually still, psychologically, like a child still stuck in that time long ago when the original wounds first happened.

The only solution, the only way out of this trap of this vicious cycle for the fixer and for the fixer’s partner is the seven-step therapeutic process that I’ve covered in other podcast episodes. The seven steps, just by way of quick review, to get the details, you’ve got to go to the actual episode that I devoted to the seven steps.

The first step is to discover, discover your protector parts.
The second step is to access. Access enough energy of your higher self. [09:00.5]

The third step is to befriend. That is to befriend and understand your protector parts.
The fourth step is trust, to build trusting relationships with your protector parts.
The fifth step is to unburden, that is to unburden the vulnerable exiled parts and their protectors.
The sixth step is to integrate, to integrate the newly unburdened parts.
The seventh step is to train, to train consistent access to more of your higher self.

Then the bonus eight step, which is also necessary, is to repeat the whole seven-step cycle again, and each time you repeat it, you grow deeper and there are deeper levels, and so forth.

Again, I first point you to the episode on the seven steps, and then if you actually want to go through the seven steps, a great way to do it is through my recorded courses, which you can access through the Platinum Partnership.

You can also do it, in the long run, over the course of several months or years, with a very good IFS therapist or a very good therapist who does a kind of experiential therapy that involves parts, like Gestalt Therapy, for example. [09:59.6]

Okay, now let's turn to the flip side of the fixer strategy just to hone in on why this is so dangerous and harmful. On the flip side of the fixer strategy is the predatory strategy. Both the fixer and the predator are narcissistic since both of them are manipulating the other to get their needs met.

The predatory strategy is classic narcissism, classic narcissistic personality disorder, an excessively self-centered me-first focus, a deep need for attention and admiration, and a lack of empathy for others. While appearing more like the victim on the outside, the fixer is also narcissistic. The fixer uses the relationship partner to meet his craving for attention and significance. Although the fixer chooses a kind of seemingly self-sacrificial martyrdom, he's just as self-centered. His show of empathy is in the service of his martyrdom strategy to guilt or emotionally blackmail the other to meet his own emotional needs. [11:01.0]

Another term I like for this kind of narcissism is one-down narcissism, as opposed to the one-up narcissism of the classic narcissistic personality. The compensatory narcissist, the fixer being a type of compensatory narcissism, let's call it the compensating fixer and the pure predator, right? The one down and the one-up narcissists, they actually make a perfect pair.

They're drawn to each other because they complement the other in a dysfunctional way. They're both stuck in their own neurotic patterns that are largely automatic and unconscious, and they have their origins in coping strategies that they adopted as children in response to perceived trauma.

Fixers blame themselves for things that go wrong because that is their unconscious comfort zone, and predators like to blame others. Fixers habitually give without taking. Predators like to take without giving. Fixers feel like they don't have a right to say what they feel. Predators feel entitled to say whatever they feel, whenever they want. Fixers are looking to self-sacrifice in a relationship. Predators have little empathy and are focused on themselves in a relationship. [12:08.0]

The world of self-development and personal development, and learning about dating and dating dynamics, that world appeals to both the predator and the fixer, especially. The predator sees these as ways to acquire more tools to manipulate others to get what he wants. The fixer sees these as ways of shedding his shameful self and acquiring a new idealized version of himself.

Generally, the fixer values this more than the predator, because the fixer views all this as improving his very being, not just some extra tools in his belt, so fixers have a much higher attraction to personal development, including learning how to pick up women once they discover that it's something you can actually learn.

Many guys, myself included and perhaps you, too, if you’re listening to this, are drawn to learning about dating-social dynamics relationship, dynamics and psychology, because it fits in so well with the one-down position that was our comfort zone. They're used to taking responsibility for the success of a relationship or even taking responsibility for the success of a social interaction. They're used to caretaking the other person. [13:20.5]

The type of men who would naturally be drawn to personal development and learning dating are fixers, generally, of some kind, nice guys with caretaker values. I call them also white knights or rescuers, guys who chronically idealize women and put women on pedestals, seeing them as princesses or damsels in distress, or pure or virginal beings requiring the utmost respect and white-glove treatment at all times.

Guys who had enmeshment issues with their parent figures, most commonly their mothers, like Mama’s boys. Guys with parent figures who are weak or distant, or avoidant or narcissistic. Guys with overbearing, excessively strict or harshly demanding parent figures, like many Asian-Americans and Asian-immigrant families. Guys grew up as parentified children who had to act as the adult for their immature parents, and guys with just generally low self-esteem, low self-worth or deep insecurities, who are used to making up for them by overcompensating. [14:21.1]

You can see there are many different ways, many different entry points to adopting the fixer coping strategy. Also, just as a note, you know I'm focusing on the men because that's the majority of my current audience. In doing so, I don't mean to exclude women from the same patterns.

In fact, it's more common to find women in the caretaking fixer roles. It's relatively easy to find examples of these. Cases like this are all over tropes in movies, music, and literature. It's like the good girl who keeps falling for the bad boys. In my work, I’ve been trying to shine a spotlight on how prevalent this dynamic is also among men in relation to “bad girls”, so to speak, quote-unquote, right? Women who have adopted the predatory role as a default way of interacting with others, especially in their dating lives with men. [15:05.7]

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.

Let's look even closer at the case of the fixer male, who picks up personal development, self-improvement, and I would lump into that the pickup, trying to learn dating that would generally lead people to find dating advice on the internet, right? This is the guy who pursues this project of improving himself in order to earn more female interest or female attraction, and they learn through these e-books, YouTube videos, whatever, that the caretaking rescuer nice guy doesn't do it for women. [16:16.2]

Women don't respect that vulnerable guy and maybe, at best, only pity him, the nice guy, and they're often lured in by the possibility or even the promise of attaining, instead, a narcissistic ideal, becoming the, quote-unquote, “ultimate man”, the mythical alpha who always has a cocky, funny answer to anything, who can push-pull with ease, who can banter and flirt like it's nothing and make women giggle and preen to hide their lust for him. The guy with the arrogant swagger, that leader of men who commands respect from other tough or rich guys. The protector of loved ones who is also the life of the party, the stereotypical James Bond figure.

The one-down compensatory narcissist ends up trading one narcissistic ideal for another, going from the fixer strategy, which he discovered wasn't working for him, to this newly-discovered predatory strategy. In doing so, he's just switching from one faulty coping strategy to another, but he's thinking he's trading up. [17:15.7]

Most fixers lack the drive, persistence, perseverance to actually make this switch, doing it the way that personal development, life coaching, self-improvement does or recommends, generally, a brute-force method, which I’ve criticized in many other episodes. This brute-force method, right? It actually takes a tremendous amount of effort and time, and grit and discipline and willpower, in order to adopt this new persona in a very dramatic way.

It's very different from the original fixer nice guy that he was acting as before, which wasn't his true self either. It was just another attempt to get his needs met and now he's going to try this new thing. He's going to switch it up. He’s going to adopt the patterns of the predatory narcissist, and in so doing, that's what classifies him as the compensatory one. He's not adopting the predatory behaviors and patterns in a natural way. He's doing it because he thinks it will work better. Later in his life, he's doing it because he thinks it'll work better to get his needs met. [18:17.4]

Doing this, this switch, requires unearthing and unlearning decades-old automatic patterns of thought, feeling and behavior, and then replacing them with new patterns of thought, feeling and behavior that need to be repeated consistently over and over through a long span of time, until they're fully assimilated and internalized.

In many ways, it's like getting an addict out of an addiction, but instead, it's actually putting them into another addiction. Even during this process, in order to actually make it to the other side through this willpower-discipline method, he has to still consider himself like a recovering addict, trying to resist his old patterns. On many days, he hardly even notices that he has to use this resistance, but on the bad days, it takes all his willpower to resist going back there, going back into those fixer patterns. [19:06.6]

That's what it's like for recovering fixers who are trying to compensate for that, fixers who try to overcome their neurotic patterns through sheer grit and discipline. It takes a tremendous amount of willpower. In the end, the fixer is merely trading one maladaptive coping strategy for another, which is why that strategy doesn't work in the long run, though they end up, these fixers, early-stage fixers, end up looking up to the compensating narcissists of which I used to be, so I get it. I’ve been on both sides of that.

The short-term benefits from doing the strategy switch, which is very difficult to do and few make it, but there are obviously short-term benefits. Short-term benefits. These short-term benefits are enticing and often are dangling in front of the fixer as a kind of carrot to ignite the momentum to move in that direction. Often, the fixers are unaware of any other solutions or options such as the seven-step therapeutic process that I’ve been championing. [20:05.3]

When the fixer begins his self-development journey, he trades in his one-down narcissism for a new one-up narcissism, and in so doing, he's now a compensating narcissist, right? He's a compensatory narcissist. When he trades the one-down patterns for the one-up patterns, he gets new one-up narcissistic goals, new one-up narcissistic ideals, even new one-up narcissistic pains, injuries.

He does this because he hopes that, by taking and entering and adopting the one-up predatory role, he'll finally be able to get the love, connection and sense of worthiness that he's been craving as a fixer all his life but that have always eluded him. This is because he keeps pining after one-up predators out of this repetition compulsion, but, of course, he understands none of this consciously, or even if he does theoretically, he doesn't know any way out. [20:57.1]

At first, he feels better because being one up generally feels more powerful, dominant and in control than being the one down. It's like giving an addict a hit, right? If you are in the one-down position and you do all this personal development and get your life together, at first, it feels really great because you don't notice the compensating aspect of it, but this high is just temporary and this whole project is just another elaborate way to overcompensate for his unresolved core insecurities, and the whole thing will come crashing down like a house of cards later on.

The former one-down narcissist who now adopts one-up narcissistic patterns in order to avoid confronting his core issues is what I'm referring to as a compensatory narcissist. Over time, the classic narcissistic patterns of Machiavellian gameplay and deceitful manipulation can only stave off these feelings of core unworthiness for so long. Relatively quickly, the new compensatory narcissist has to up the ante in order to get back that feeling of dominance, certainty and control. [21:58.3]

The compensatory narcissist suffers then from the same addiction and ensuing problems as the classic predatory narcissist, and even in an innocent way, pursuing the self-improvement journey in order to compensate for your insecurities. Not because, not purely because you enjoy the activities and you love working out and you love the meditation itself, even if it didn't bring about this narcissistic ideal you. You are doing it because you need to be, because you're ashamed of the way you are now, you need to be that narcissistic ideal, in order to feel worthy of and enough for love. If that's you in the sort of innocent way, it's not like you're purposely manipulating anyone, even then, that becomes this other veneer and it also is entering you into the same patterns as a compensatory narcissist.

You can obviously also become compensatory narcissism out of being burnt by women, by being cheated on, lied to by women, and you can see that this leads into these subcultures of the Red Pill, the incel, the MGTOW, and in a similar way to how it creates and engenders the PUA subculture. [23:09.0]

In the case of learning pick-up, attraction or dating, these new compensatory narcissists begin by seducing female fixers, right? Looking specifically at the male dating context. Then these targets are a lot like they were before they learn how to become one-up narcissists. That's the first set of victims, sort of like the image that I use is of vampires where there's a wannabe vampire because he wants all the power that comes from being a vampire. You get all that strength and all that immortality and whatnot, and he thinks that if he gets that, then he'll feel amazing. He'll finally feel like he's enough and powerful. Then he gets it, and so he then starts with preying on the weakest victims, right? Maybe animals or something in the forest, and he works his way up.

However, when this newly-minted compensatory narcissist wins these easy targets who seem, in comparison to now the compensatory narcissist, in comparison to him, they seem innocent, malleable, trusting, he then can't enjoy his newfound “success”, quote-unquote, for very long. The new compensatory narcissist still has inner parts that identify with the female fixer’s position. [24:15.5]

He might feel some degree of guilt and shame for using these new one up tools on her, which will lead to some degree of self-loathing and guilt. At the beginning of his self-development journey, these more vulnerable inner parts will still be near the surface of his consciousness. But after more time in practice using the new one-up narcissistic methods, he will have had to suppress these vulnerable inner parts more and more and exile them, shove them deeper into his unconscious.

They will reappear when his new one-up protective mechanisms fail in a major way, like when he hits rock bottom, and they'll come back. They'll come roaring back with vengeance then with all the bottled up energy from being held back for so long. But until then, they will get shoved under by the parts now handling this new coping strategy that he adopted from learning the narcissistic one-up methods. [25:05.2]

Staying with the case of men, learning how to attract women, the turning, so to speak, of the new compensatory narcissist, right, similar, in many respects, to the turning of a vampire-loving human into an actual vampire, this is marked by graduating from the low-hanging fruit of the female fixers to the bigger challenge of female predators.

This is because the compensatory narcissist will not be satiated for long by basic fixers. He needs someone more narcissistic, selfish and emotionally-manipulative than himself in order to generate the old intense chemistry that he's used to and still craving unconsciously back when he was in the one-down position.

When compensating narcissists were fixers, it was easy to find people more selfish than himself, because, as fixers, they could experience chemistry at all levels of narcissism, from the most basic nascent to the most severe. But compensatory narcissists are higher up now, higher up the predatory ladder themselves, so the only people who can now create that intense chemistry of one-down/one-up for them are more extreme predatory narcissists. [26:06.4]

These are people who have been one-up narcissists since they were very young, and you'll find the story for female, like more female pure narcissists, is that from the age when they grew breasts, they were being leered at and a hit on inappropriately by uncles or men, adult men. They've learned to read people very well and, for them, one of the protective strategies that they really focused on and made as one of their main things was to manipulate that, and since they were at a young age, assuming an almost purely predatory role as an adaptive strategy to deal with the pain and the painful feelings maybe of being sexually abused, taken advantage of leading to toxic shame from these formative traumas.

As a result, they're much more experienced at being narcissists than these late-blooming compensating narcissists, like men, in other words, who figure, find personal development in their thirties, forties, fifties, and dating advice and, and try to adopt it then. [27:05.1]

Compensating narcissists will keep unconsciously searching for the bigger fish, unsatisfied with the smaller catches, the whole time not understanding why, and may even become frustrated with themselves that they can't be happy to settle down with the nice girl who loves them, treats them well and is always there for them whenever they need. Instead, they keep going for the drama girl.

The sad fact is the better the partner treats them, the less excited and attracted they are. If the compensating narcissist still has a conscience, he might stay with the fixer girl out of guilt, but it will quickly become less and less passionate as it will be less and less chemistry, since the fixer can't trigger the compensating narcissist in the way he hopes.

This cycle of seducing someone higher up the predatory ladder only to become dissatisfied once he feels like she's now suffocating to him and then developing a wandering eye again can continue for years, until the compensating narcissist finally meets a much more advanced, pure predatory narcissist, who is so much more experienced in the predatory role that they're able to experience and sustain the fixer-predator chemistry for a much longer period. [28:08.2]

Over time, the acquired predator, this compensating narcissist, is no match for the pure predator and will eventually crumble or, more likely, implode, right? The downward spiral once the compensating narcissist has finally met his match is even more vicious than any he's ever experienced as a fixer until now, because now he's playing in the higher-stakes games, and, more importantly, it will seem as if there's no hope, no way out, no exit, no salvation.

You'll know you've been in this when it's just really incendiary drama happening in your relationship. The compensating narcissist will think he's worked so hard building himself up over all the years, only to end up in the same place he was back then.

The example I’ve been using is a man learning how to attract women with the same patterns and cycles, however are true of any self-development journey. It could be making more money, getting a better body, creating a baller lifestyle, becoming superior in your spirituality. That's based on anything other than love of your higher self for your own inner parts. [29:11.0]

They'll work so hard for many years trying to create these narcissistic ideals, these “the best version of yourself”, only to experience the low as so much lower when they eventually hit rock bottom. Only when they've hit that low and can see no way out by using the standard one-up/one-down game-playing by evaluating their self-worth through accomplishments, achievements, or doing rather than being, trying to earn it, only then will they finally be in a position to sincerely, authentically, and painfully face the parts of themselves that they've been trying to disown, lock up or exile away, along with all the painfully emotions of vulnerability that they've been trying to repress.

In the case of guys learning how to attract women, it's even worse because the views and approaches they pick up from most e-books, YouTube videos, online courses in this area, they condition, reinforce and magnify in them their tendency to blame themselves for what goes wrong in social interactions, dating situations and relationships, because they're studying how to improve their results with women even more than regular fixers or guys not learning game. [30:17.6]

Guys learning game come to believe that how the interaction goes is their responsibility. Aspiring pick-up artists and guys trying to learn dating dynamics blame themselves to a higher degree than other guys by thinking every outcome in a social situation should be under their control, and not just in a social situation, but in a relationship. They're taught explicitly or, more often, implicitly, that whether a date goes well is solely up to him, his responsibility, and if it didn't go well, here's all these things he should have done instead.

The ironical nature of the compensating narcissist is that while, on the surface, as a result of trying to occupy the one-up position, he appears to be more independent and less needy, but, in reality, he's overcompensating that much more for his underlying core insecurities by becoming a guy who takes responsibility for how the interaction or relationship goes, purely his responsibility, and blames himself even more than the run-of-the-mill fixer. [31:14.6]

The guy learning dating dynamics overcompensates even more than the average guy, and invests even more time, effort, and psychological energy into projecting a false self to hide from himself and others, his deep insecurities. On the surface, he might appear cool and collected, but under the surface, the compensating narcissist becomes even needier, because the underlying insecurities are still there unchanged. But now he has erected a much bigger psychological edifice to hide his vulnerability, both from himself and from others.

The more compensating layers, compensatory layers of outward swagger that he can add on, the more hidden and exiled his vulnerable parts become, even or maybe especially to himself. In other words, he's often unaware of his own vulnerability or core insecurities. This is because his false self is doing the job of protecting him from facing his inner child parts, which hold the pain of his unmet needs over all these decades. [32:15.2]

Only when he hits rock bottom, when the facade of his false self crumbles under pressure, will he then be forced to face the parts of himself that he had been avoiding, repressing, exiling, or hiding from himself. If any of this resonates with you, please go to the “Seven Steps of the Therapeutic Process” podcast episode I did. Take seriously this condition that you might be in. If you're in the high of it, you wouldn't have listened to this point.

Hopefully, this resonates. If it resonates with you, that means you or the person that you're thinking of at that point when they might be receptive to a way out. That's the tricky part about narcissists. You get this precious window of opportunity when they've hit rock bottom. When they start coming on the up, then they're not able to take this in. [33:04.5]

So, if you're open to it, check out the episode on the seven steps of the therapeutic process. Check out my Platinum Partnership. Look into getting a very good IFS therapist or a good experiential therapist, and take this seriously.
Thank you so much for listening. I know this one was pretty deep and might have seemed heavy at times. I appreciate so much that you listened to the end here, and I appreciate any feedback you’ve got, any comments. I feed off your comments, so please let me know what you think. Hit a like, and if you like this at all, share it with anyone that you think could benefit from it.

Thank you so much for listening, again. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out.

This is ThePodcastFactory.com

Have a podcast in 30 days

Without headaches or hassles

GET STARTED

Copyright Marketing 2.0 16877 E.Colonial Dr #203 Orlando, FL 32820