flowboy

As I approach my 30s, I am reflecting soberly on the traps I can not afford to fall into anymore. Lack of consistency Living in a crazy dream future, forgetting about the present at hand Switching plans too frequently Putting a lot of pressure on myself to do a lot every day, unrealistic plans, leading to disappointing myself and weeks and months without action, wallowing in that disappointment, preferring to not think about it and do nothing, or make alternative plans. And endless cycle of hope and hopelessness. Basically, overvaluing future plans, undervaluing the present moment and doing things right in the present. At the base of this there is a feeling of failure. The unrealistic plans are to make up for the already perceived failure, the crazy fast ramp-up times of activity I expected from myself served to motivate me that my sense of being a failure was soon to be obliterated with action, and never felt again. The inevitable disappointment that followed such a plan felt too much like failure, which couldn't be tolerated, so I would quickly cover it up with a new plan, a different way of doing things, effectively blaming and replacing the method to escape the feeling of personal failure. And why is failure so personal to me, and the feeling of it intolerable, while someone else might be fine not meeting a certain goal? After all it's not a big deal. Failure is just learning, the only way to really fail is to quit, et cetera. Well, Gabor Mate states in his book Scattered that the ADHD adult lives with the pain of a failure which is much older than the first goals he remembers not meeting. A failure to get unconditional positive regard from a caregiver. Some attention that was needed but not given, some expression or emotion that there was no space for. This pain lives in the implicit memory, meaning the related events are not consciously accessible, but the emotional imprint is still there. What do I think? I have started to suspect that that could be true in my case. The reason that I suspect that, is that there's something 'off' in the communication with especially my dad. Intimate topics are to be avoided. We don't say that we love one another in this family. (or if we do, it sounds weird and forced) We don't hug. Me and my dad, we don't talk about emotional pain. We don't talk about bullying. We don't talk about feeling fear or threat. We don't talk about sex. We don't talk about dating, or how to navigate it. What would happen if we did? He would start to rant about negative experiences he had, ways people have screwed him over, he would let his pain out on me. I can see how this leaves no space for a developing child to share his own feelings and experiences safely. How I didn't even dream of talking about how fearful I felt about going to school. Do I know for sure? No, I don't, this is a hypothesis. I'm a huge enthusiast of Janov's Primal theory, which says that every significant childhood pain can be remembered and felt in therapy, the complete memory can be recovered, situation, feeling, sounds and all. And until you do, you don't really know how things felt, it's all speculation. And a theoretical understanding of your own conditioning does very little for healing. The awkwardness with my dad is a clue though. Another one is how I respond to one of my friends. He is one with a very stern, often disapproving or moody, invalidating disposition. It's easy to project father parts onto him. During the past week, staying with him and another friend, I notice that I'm scared to contradict or criticize him, for fear of a discussion escalating. And suddenly my friend B is mom, and my friend A is dad, and the feeling is exactly the same as the weird dynamic when I used to be at the dinner table at home with my parents, and the air is so tense. There's certain things I'm not allowed to say, or my dad will explode. First at me, then my mom will get anxious and hysterically come to my rescue.

People sort themselves by level of emotional maturity.

@Tyler Robinson I do it with clients sometimes because it never fails to bring clarity. Maybe it will help you reconnect to your intuition. It should be what is remaining after the other voices have had their say.

So I'm always viewing everything through the lense of shadow work and Primal therapy, because I am a big believer in helping people return to their natural state, undoing all the nasty survival mechanisms they had to collect in their childhood... BUT... That is my bias. It's unfair of me to say that using tricks or a list to learn to recognize trustworthy people is useless, it can still be useful. Maybe that is a pragmatic first step towards having better experiences with relationships. It is my belief that your intuition can still help you the most, and it must be possible for you to access that, as one never really loses it. Have you ever done parts work?

I know a thing or two about shadow work, you can ask me either here or in private about it, if you want. @Sine @flume My opinion is that the more Primal work is done, the more easily intuition should be accessible. Question to you guys: do you think that's correct?

@Tyler Robinson Didn't mean to say that so harshly sorry. It's very late at night here.

I don't think this list is very accurate. But I wouldn't be able to help you make it better, because in order to determine who is genuine, I just watch a person talk for a couple seconds/minutes and then I know. No idea how. You need your intuition back.

Why they exist is an entirely different question. One can only speculate. I like to try and find the evil within myself. I've certainly been mean to some people occasionally, when I was in high school. When I think back at why, I remember that I had been bullied so much that I had started to think, that it was the only way to survive. My quality of consciousness was extremely flattened, beaten down, because of the lifelong lack of social acceptance I had suffered. And so I said mean things to the weak and kicked at pidgeons. A desperate attempt to feel some control. This only happened 2 or 3 times in total, by no means was I a bully. But... if my suffering had been worse, and my upbringing more violent, I could have been. @Danioover9000 Have you never had the life beaten out of you, or the social rejection so much that you felt the need to be mean to someone innocent, just to blow off some steam or feel some control?

@Danioover9000 So why is "doing nothing" not an option, when it comes to "dealing with them"?

https://edition.cnn.com/2022/03/28/politics/trump-putin-ukraine-russia-smart/index.html An entire article devoted to accusing Trump of admiring Putin. Written by an adult man, apparently.

@Danioover9000 What I meant was: I'm not willing to watch an hour of stuff just to determine what your exact question is. To answer "how to deal with", first we must know "why to deal with" Why are haters, trolls and critics a problem? What I often see on videos is, that after a period of negative comments, eventually the positive comments get voted to the top. Good wins out over evil, even in the comment section. So what's the problem?

By that logic, we should also just execute people who are severely mentally ill or mentally disabled to the point of needing constant supervision and care, it's an equal drain on resources. Someone who has been violent and dangerous, is usually mentally ill or severely traumatized. They could be diagnosed and medicated, and even if their condition is irredeemable, which it often is not, they could be kept docile in a facility. So are you saying that people who have never hurt someone, but could be dangerous, because they are mentally ill or mentally disabled, should be shot in order to save resources? Or are you fine with spending money on care facilities for people, even life long, except if they have committed a terrible crime? In that case, this is just motivated by retribution, not this utilitarian rationality which you claim. Because the only difference is what they have done in the past.

Good thing that natural instinct kicks in at a certain point so the complicated stuff can be forgotten again

wow!

@petar8p Yeah. Just lay your fingertip at the entrance and do nothing. Look your woman in the eyes and make sure she knows she doesn't have to do anything, and can express anything. Wait. Wait more. Then you will see.

People who are good at spotting authentic intent don't use tools or strategies. What makes you think you should? The reason there's no tools, strategies or tricks, is because the only tool you need is already in your possession - intuition. Everyone has one, and whether you call it a gut feeling or intuition or inner wisdom - it's ALWAYS there. HOWEVER: some people have grown up in a situation where the only way to survive, was to ignore one's gut feeling. A deeply ingrained, unconscious pattern of ignoring one's own authenticity gets established, when the parents are not authentic or honest or trustworthy or unpredictable, or when the parents demand from the child to deny its own needs for free expression, love, attention, and exploration, and sacrifice that to serve the parent's need of self-importance, care, or attention. Put simply: growing up with an unsafe parent, makes the child gaslight itself into burying and ignoring its intuitive sense. After all: if you're dependent for your life on your parent, you are completely helpless, how can you process the information that your gut feeling says that your mother or father is untrustworthy or uncaring or lying, or even dangerous? That is too much to handle. It's a choice between something that feels like death (knowing your caregivers aren't safe), or survival but burying the intuition. This is how a child comes to gaslight itself. This is how adult women keep picking the wrong partner over and over again, end up with untrustworthy men who lie, manipulate or even physically abuse. In the beginning they say all the right things and all seems rosy. Then, they turn out to have the same untrustworthy or abusive dark side that all the others had. How does it happen? Women possess the most sophisticated lie detectors. However, some have learnt to turn it off, as a response to childhood trauma. These women are desperately and eagerly looking for a man who will finally be trustworthy, because by their mid-twenties they have had a lot of betrayals already. This desperation and vulnerability is detectable by untrustworthy men, who also have childhood trauma, who have been misshapen by their defective parents into people for whom manipulation is the only way they know how to get love. Traumatized and imprinted with the unhealthy psyche of their own parents, perhaps full-blown narcissists, they smell this desperation and vulnerability and feel attracted to the signs of this. The women, cut off from intuition through childhood trauma, don't see the red flags and feel attracted to the words and manipulations that these men have learnt to say, while not hearing what their gut is screaming. And so the childhood trauma dance continues. Here's the good news: it's possible to learn to listen to yourself again. Access to intuition can be re-established. This is what you should focus on, if you want to solve this problem. Becoming highly intuitive. Doing shadow work, Primal Therapy or other trauma therapy is probably very helpful to clear out the toxicity that is blocking your inner knowing.

Not to mention, a man in a codependent dynamic with his mom who has him by the balls, is not exactly someone a woman would view as ready for marriage... any woman you would meet, would probably demand that you dial back this codependent relationship with your mom first, and rightly so. I appreciate that this is easier said than done. If this is what you grew up in, this toxicity is the water and you are the fish. You're not aware of it - at the same time, any other fish you attract will be in the same water. Until you do some therapy to realise the extent to which your childhood with this dynamic with your mom has soured your relationships with other women, and release the grip she has on you... the women you get into relationships with, will in all likelihood share some unpleasant characteristics with your mother. TL;DR: - Break free - Find a good therapist or counselor who has experience with toxic family systems and childhood trauma - Go to therapy at the same time as carefully starting to date women, and teach yourself by experience and with help of the therapist what healthy dynamics in relationships should look like. I'm not recommending you therapy because I think you are bad and must be fixed, but because it's a good thing to do for healthy people, and also because people who had toxic dynamics with their caregivers tend to end up in codependent and toxic relationships again and again, until they properly deal with that history. It's just because the imprint is off. If a baby duck hatches and sees a shoe instead of its mom, it will follow the shoe around instead of its mom. If a baby human is born and sees a controlling, covert narcissist mom for the first 9 years, it will follow around controlling, covert narcissist women forever until it finds a good therapist with experience in C-PTSD, childhood trauma and toxic family systems. I can recommend you Patrick Teahan's YouTube channel.

From what I've been told, it's not even about anticipation of me doing anything. Just about me being there and not going away. The feminine goes crazy for a stable masculine that does not move.

Yes, soul mates exist, I have found mine. Or, a crazily compatible one that I wouldn't trade in for anyone. Whatever your concept of it is. Here's what was true for me, and is perhaps helpful: She was better at picking me than I was at selecting her. Whenever I would purposefully socialize to meet women, I would do all these behaviors that "worked" somewhat on the women I was accustomed to meeting, but doing that I could have come on way too strong, repelled, or even ignored the woman I'm with now, because she would not have responded so well to my somewhat-inauthentic extraverted mask. But she found me through the way I put myself out there. In other words, if outbound marketing doesn't work, try inbound. Let more people see you, the real you, and wait for women to come find you. Of course this still requires you to express yourself honestly and make yourself vulnerable, but it's less direct sales and more brand marketing. It's worth a shot.

@petar8p thank you for your effort to bring back some balance/nuance What I recently learnt works really well is being present, but not moving. So my finger is at the entrence, just.. resting, waiting for the vagina to get curious. Then at some point it will get excited by my patient presence and start to get wet and literally suck me in. And I let it, but I still don't really move much, and my finger is not rigid. It's just there.

Rather than letting our egos feast on someone's humiliation and pain, let us introspect and see how we can use this for self-improvement. What did he do wrong and where am I doing that? I'll start. What I've heard is that he spread misinformation on his show without being careful who it might affect. Basically letting business and viewership come before responsibility and care. Where have I done something similar? Lemme think. I've told a story on my YouTube channel about a conversation with a friend, and I uploaded before I thought of checking with him whether he'd want the story public (he was fine with it) I've let some things that my friends told me in confidence, or in the container of a men's group, slip to my girlfriend in the past. Have gotten better at that since I'm sure I've said lots of insensitive or incorrect things in private to friends, that could have caused a lot of hurt if I had let them slip from a position of authority on a massive platform. It's a small example, but you get the point. Not that he's innocent, but that none of us are. If you'd like to join me, post: your interpretation of what the misdeed was an example of where you've done something similar

These are your bars that you are behind. Mental, self-created ones. Only you can break them. Reach out for help if you can't do it alone.

You're conflating life challenges with abuse/dysfunction, and falling into black and white thinking. You can have good, healthy parents who know how to support you in overcoming your own obstacles. So no spoiling, but also no dysfunction. This is what creates the happiest successful adults. There's people driven by a bad childhood, who accomplish a lot, but they're not any happier than you. Because of their dysfunctional childhood. So be careful who you envy.

@Gabith Same here. For me it's related to the weather. Maybe for you as well? If I feel confident, I know it's going to be a sunny day, at least at some point during the day. If I feel like shit, I know it's going to be a cloudy day.

@at_anchor Speaking as someone whose parents made him weak and defenceless against bullies Sitting at your laptop discussing with online strangers and philosophizing about suicide is not going to help you. You're in a situation where you're not happy. Are you physically trapped? Behind bars? No. So stop letting this situation defeat you and take some action. You have legs. Walk away. You have a couple hundred dollars, or the ability to borrow them, so use that. Go volunteer at a farm somewhere far away, the physical work, nature and change of environment will do you good. https://wwoof.net/ Yes, you're going to disappoint your parents. Fuck them. When death starts to look attractive, you need to be aggressively selfish for a while and not care who disapproves. Just get away, what do you have to lose? You don't need anyone's permission, and don't let anyone tell you that you're ruining "your future" forever. Break free. It will be the best year of your life, and you'll be much clearer about what you want after that.