Santiago

But... Have you tried it?? Do you enjoy sex that way? How?

Yeah I agree that it would have been better to stop since not engaging equals 0% chance, but what I am trying to say is that the scenario was destined to fail anyway(maybe if I stopped I had 0,5% chance), in my opinion the girl did a bad execution as ridiculous as that sounds... because either way it would have gone wrong... If i stopped my walk and tried to make conversation it would have been totally artificial and needy and we all know that neediness is an insta-turnoff for girls, and when I kept walking it gave me value(in her eyes) but avoided the interaction, so either way you are f*cked up. She could have for example: asked me a question from the bench like "excuse me, do you know where X is?" and then when I was already there not walking and interacting with them it could have gone much better, she could have complimented something from me or just waited me to do a move since we already held eye contact before and I could have tried something there. Anyway the idea of the post was to see if other guys have gone through the same and to see their stories.

Do you even avoid having sex with girls for nofap??? And if you do have sex with girls isn't that counterproductive nofap-wise?

Hi, just to give some context I am 26 years old and my brother 30, we live together and my dad lives with his girlfriend. My dad has prostate cancer, 2 years ago he had his prostate removed and he has been doing a hormonal treatment this time to prevent the cancer from growing up fast in case that it was not removed entirely. On monday his girlfriend called me, she said that the results of an exam were negative and that the doctor told him that cancer was going to strike again and that they didn't know where or when, it basically means there is metastasis and that the cancer can spread anywhere... The doctor told him to continue with the hormonal therapy. The problem is that my dad just told me and my brother that he had to follow with the hormone therapy and not much more, it seems like he doesn't want us to be sad and avoids telling us the whole story. I didn't ask too much too, because it seemed like he didn't want me to get too worried.. My question is, what should I do? His girlfriend told me not to tell him that she called me because my dad asked her to keep it a secret, and I think that he doesn't want me and my brother to be too worried about him. But at the same time I wonder if I should talk with him and ask him everything, so he tells me and I can get more involved with his problem and give him my support. The problem here is that I am very sensitive at the moment and if I talk with my dad I will end up crying a lot for sure and I don't know if this is good or bad, because my dad will see how I suffer and I don't want him to feel bad for me... After all I guess he is avoiding talking about his cancer too much because he doesn't want us to feel bad for him. What would you recommend me? anybody went through something similar?

Thank you both very much for your answers! I talked with my brother yesterday and he told me something that I was not considering.. maybe my dad wants to wait a little bit more and be 100% sure before talking with us, maybe he is waiting for the next exams (that will be in 3 months). Maybe he is not processing what is going on, or he is but he wants to be completely sure before telling us. So after talking with my brother I decided not to talk with him for now, but in the near future(after the next exams) if this continues like this I will talk with him explicitly about his cancer. Today I went fishing with him, I left my job before time (it's a flexible schedule) and went with him to the beach. It was nice, we had a good time and talked a lot. At one point I asked him how was he feeling, and he told me that he was excellent, enjoying his free time now that he doesn't have to work. I will be expending as much time with him as I can, I used to take him for granted and when we were together I was with my phone or not paying too much attention, but now every moment that we are together is much more significant for me, it's a shame that only after we are faced with situations like this one we start to appreciate what really matters and start to wake up from the zombie state that we live in. In a couple months I will be traveling with him and my brother as well as some friends, we already got the plane tickets, we will do a 2 day hike in the mountains and many other things, I am really happy about this since the last time we traveled together I was 15... I just hope nothing happens in between and that he still is feeling fine in 2 months.

Hey dude, I have been in the same boat for some years now. I stopped talking to all my friends because I just got bored of them, they just do drugs, eat trash food and watch tv to be happy... I am 26 btw. I am a virgin, I feel fine without women and all this time I thought that I didn't need a relationship to be happy, I am happy on my own, but lately I have been thinking that this makes no sense at all.. How can we say that we don't need to have sex with girls if we haven't tried it yet?? Maybe you try sex and it's much better than being alone and fapping. Just think that dating is one of the biggest dimensions of human life, at least that is how society puts it, so why not give it a try? and then after trying a couple times you can decide better if you really don't want to do it. Now a big factor in my life that has led me to where I am now is the absence of healthy relationships in my familiy, I have never seen a happy couple in my entire life, and so I have all this negative ideas about relationships in general. My parents got divorced, then my mother got married again and divorced after some violent years.. My dad is now with a girlfriend but they are about to break up.. My best friend has a psycho as a girlfriend and he is getting destroyed.. It really is discouraging, maybe this is happening in your life too. But the reality is that this people experience bad relationships because they are broken inside, my mother has huge psycological problems, my friend has 0 self-steem, my dad who knows... Anyway, I think that if we work on ourselves and build up our self-steem with some luck we might get a healthy relationship.. But yeah I understand the idea of trying to get to that point and doing all the work and then meeting girls and then finding the right one is just too much struggle... If I were you I would try to answer this: *Are you surrounded by unhealthy relationships? *What are the first 3 ideas that come to your mind when you think about relationships? *What would a girl think about you if she gets to know you? would she think that you are weird or (insert negative aspect about yourself here)? *Are you happy with your body? with your penis? would you be 100% secure naked in front of a girl? *What would a girl think if she finds out you are virgin? I have found in myself a lot of insecurities that keep me from trying to meet girls, and maybe they too apply to you, and you start to understand better why could it be that you are avoiding relationships. PD: I am starting nofap, just to motivate me to go out and talk to girls, maybe you should try it too.

As the title says I am scared about getting my first job, I have felt useless all my life, I have very low self-esteem. I feel like I will be asked to do simple things and I won't know how to do them and I will look retarded in front of everybody. I know where this issue comes from, it's from my childhood, my familiy was kinda separated because my dad liked my brother the most(I was an accident, a broken condom, I learnt this a few years ago and it might explain why my dad had more sympathy for my bro) and my mom had to balance things out so she always stood for me, that kind of disfunctional family dynamic caused a lot of harm to me and my brother. He is 5 years older than me, and he felt that my mother liked me the most(because she had to stand for me, otherwise I'd feel like shit if none of my parents liked me), so we fought a lot as kids, and I remember he always told me that I was useless. Everytime I was doing something he would come up and told me it was bad and that I was useless. This happened for years, and my brother was 5 years older than me so he was like an authority for me, that's why it had a big impact in my mind. Now, despite of knowing that I am smart and a very nice person, deep down in the subconscious mind I feel like I am worthless, and I have been acting my entire life as if I was useless, avoiding doing stuff, avoiding challenges, being shy, staying away from the pain, and so it's a self fulfilling prophecy, because now I am in 4th year of computers engineering and I know little, just the necessary to pass the subjects I had to pass. I never started any of the projects I had in mind because I feared failing at them, I feared not being good enough to do them, and now I feel like I am in disadvantage compared to my colleagues. I'm freaking out just thinking about working, I will have to be in a team of developers, showing that I am capable, doing stuff in front of others, being useful and responding to a boss. I will have to directly talk with the clients. I will have to pass a test before they hire me, and I feel like I don't know enough because I never practiced on my free time and I never did a personal project as many others do. I still don't do stuff in my free time because I lack motivation, probably because of this fear of failing and also because I'm not passionate about my career... What can I do to reprogram my subconscious mind? I need to get rid of this anchor that's holding me back in every aspect of my life. I know that positive self-talk like "I'm worthy, bla bla" if done consistently during months can help a little bit. I also know that doing visualisations helps as well, but I am not good with that. What else can I do?? Thank you very much!

Hey I came back to say that I have worked 2 different jobs this year(I left the 1st one cause the 2nd one was better) and that there were no problems after all, I am doing fine, it was just a lack of confidence and I was expecting them to expect more from me than they actually did. They knew what I was taught in college so the tasks were according to that.

I just watched the video "How to stop caring what other people think of you" a couple times, because this is a huge problem for me and it has been for maybe 2 decades now (I'm 25). In this topic I wanted to discuss the message of the video, I wanted to see if I am missing something or if my interpretation is accurate and also critique some of the points Leo made, as well as discussing the solution to this problem. I am expecting to get some feedback and hopefully expand my understanding on this field. First of all let's do a summary of the concepts talked in the video, as I understood it: We all subconsciously have a self-image which dictates what we are like, it says all about us, if we are attractive, if we are good people, if we are intelligent, etc. This self-image is mainly formed during childhood and it's composed of arbitrary experiences that we live in our life and how we interpret them. So we have this self-image and then we desperately seek to confirm it in the outside, the example used in the video is that of someone who has a self-image of a good person, someone who cares about other people and so this person will do anything to obtain confirmation from the outside that he really is a good person. He will try to please other people even at the cost of supressing his own desires. That's the whole concept behind caring what other people think of you, you care because you need to confirm this self-image you have made for youself and so you seek confirmation outside, from other people. Then Leo points out how much of a nonsense this is and that you can never win this game, simply because you can't control what other people think of you and even they can't control it, it's totally randomly generated in their minds according to their past experiences and mindsets, and according to how they feel at that very moment. An opinion of other person about you just says much more about the person thinking it than it says of you, because we tend to project our own insecurities and mindsets over other people. Finally Leo says that to fix this issue we must repeat this phrase: "I am completely independent of all the good and bad things that other people think of me", in order to reprogram the subconscious mind to stop worrying about other peoples thoughts. He also says that we must convince ourselves how much of a nonsense this is and how useless it's for us. And he suggests doing some practical exercises that go against your people pleasing problem like for example taking a long time to decide for your order in the subway queue while people wait impatiently behind you. So, first of all, what do you guys think, is my summary accurate or am I missing something? Secondly I want to point out that I disagree with a couple things in the video: First of all, the examples used by Leo in the video talk about a positive self-image that you are trying to confirm outside. I think that he should have pointed out the fact that this is not always the case, in fact we usually are more worried about the negative parts of our self-image, and so we try to get validation from the outside proving that the self-image is wrong, which is the opposite of what was talked in the video. Also he went a little too far with the people pleasing part, he talks a lot about this, the video should be called how to stop people pleasing. I am not a people pleaser but I do struggle a lot with caring too much of what others think of me. I used to be a people pleaser but that's over. So for example I walk down the street and if I see a girl I am checking if she is checking me out, just to confirm my self-image that tells me that I am attractive, and I give a shit about that girl, I don't care if she enjoys looking at me, I just need her validation to confirm my self-image, if she checks me out and likes me physically and then hates me for some reason I couldn't care less, I don't care about her, just want my validation, I am not there to please her. That's an example, I just wanted to point out that you don't need to be a people pleaser if you care about what others think of some aspects of yourself. Finally I wanted to talk about "the cure" of this problem. As far as the video goes and what I got our of it, Leo just suggests understanding how this game of caring what other people think of you and seeking their approval is useless, you can never win and it even doesn't make sense. So let's say that you consciously understand this, because it's quite easy to understand to be honest, it makes a lot of sense. And then let's say that you actually repeat the phrases about stopping to care of opinions. Then what? your self-image won't suddenly dissolve, it will still be there, is this procedure so effective that despite of my negative self-image being there I will stop trying to prove it wrong through other people's reactions? Is that it? as simple as that?

Hi, I am "stuck" in this area in my life, and according to Maslow I need to get friends, love, sexual intimacy, etc. The thing is that I haven't found any worthy friends yet, I even ditched all my "friends", I stopped talking to them like 6 months or 1 year ago because I noticed that they weren't real friends, just people I hanged out with sometimes, and that they are very very unconscious, their only pleasure in life is sex, drugs, tv shows and food, all the meetings used to be to drink alcohol, smoke weed, eat trash food and watch a movie or something like that. So yeah, really useless relationships which I got rid of, but now I am left with 0 friends, which for me is not a problem, I am a very lonely person and I love being with myself and introspecting, thinking about life, I love thinking and I love my imagination, I don't need human interactions as far as I'm concerned. In the area of love I'm in the same place, I'm 25 and virgin by the way, didn't have sex yet because of a wrong psychology, wrong mindsets, insecurities, and also a lack of interest in investing time and effort in it. But I also feel fine here, I can masturbate if I feel urges and I don't feel empty at all, I don't feel that necessity of feeling loved and having a companion, I felt that void a couple times like 7 years ago, but no more. I find relationships a waste of time, specially since nobody I've met thinks like me. I am an alien in this society, I love psychology, I study weird self-actualization things, I don't watch tv at all, I don't watch sports, I don't do sports, just gym, I have nothing in common with society. Every time I am around people the conversations are soo boring that I end up daydreaming, playing with my thoughts or studying how the people around me behave which is much more interesting than the conversation. So I am opening this thread because according to Maslow's hierarchy of needs I can't keep going in my self-actualization journey unless I solve this, which for me is really hard to solve btw, because in the first place I don't feel like there is a problem to solve. I even got much more time for my self-actualization thanks to this "lack" of relationships... Is it really that important?? Even if I feel just fine on my own and I enjoy my free time doing things to better myself?

Hey guys, I'm into healthy eating and going to the gym, building muscle. To achieve my gym objectives I should be eating lots of protein per day, for example according to my macros right now I should be eating 175 grams of protein per day. But I also want to eat healthy and whenever I find a source of protein there are hundreds of articles on the internet exaplaining why that food is carcinogenic or other unhealthy stuff... Meats, eggs and dairy are carcinogenic according to different studies. So what the hell do I eat? only beams and lentils?? Gluten is also bad, so discard bread and pasta. What now? PD: organic food in my country is veeery expensive, when I advance in my career and start earning more money I might try that, but for now I can't afford too much of it.

Thank you very much for sharing your experience! Ok, so, going over the list of recommendations: 1)See a psychologist: I went to a psychologist during half a year in 2011, and it was very usefull for bringing things out of my subconscious mind and being conscious about them, for example my confidence problem came to the surface one or two years ago and a thing that helped me a lot to discover it was remembering the talks I had with my psychologist that a lot of times revolved around me caring too much what other people thought of me. The thing is that I don't know if a psychologist can help you to reprogram your subconscious mind once the problem is discovered, since the subconscious mind is not really affected by talking with somebody, but more with imagination and other kind of stuff. But I will try it anyway. 2)Get out of home: Good news, I will move to a new apartment with my brother in a month. I don't have problems with my brother now, it was when we were kids, now he is 29 and I'm 24, we get along fine. 3)Self help/visualizations/affirmations: I've been watching self-help videos and reading books since 2011 and it has done little for me, it's more like mental masturbation. I should read "the 6 pillars of self-steem" and "psycho cybernetics" since those 2 books directly address what is happening to me and how to solve it. I need to organize my day better because I waste a lot of time, and start reading those. About visualizations, I've never done them, I don't really even know how to do this visualizations, but I will improvise, I get an idea of how it can work. Affirmations do help, I had one period of success with self-help, a period where I was waking up at 6am, eating healthy, doing exercise, meditating, I was in a peacefull state of mind all day long and felt great, and it was a period where I was doing affirmations every day, so it evidently helped. 4)Become ambitious: This is a good one, I didn't think of it. I will try this. 5)Meditation: Works in the long term, I need to train this habit again since it helped me in the past. Your tips are usefull, but they are oriented in the long or mid term, and I need a fix for the next two weeks haha, which I know that is quite impossible.. Maybe visualizations and affirmations can help me in the short term. I will keep your advice in mind, thank you very much!

I am getting away from my friends, stopped contacting them and only answer if they contact me directly. I'm doing this because when we get together they just drink, smoke weed, eat burgers and all kind of junk food, that's their definition of fun, for me it's really boring and lame. This is not as much of a problem for me since I am a very introspective person, I love to observe my own thoughts, to be in nature, to read about fitness, self-development, nutrition, science, etc. I am fine being alone so yeah, no big deal. But from time to time I do wonder if this could be unhealthy for me, I feel completely fine but maybe I am unaware of it's cons...

Wow that's pretty cool! I never thought that somebody from here would get a couching session with you, we are just a 3 million people country, pretty amazing, thanks for letting me know Leo.

I guess I'm the only one from Uruguay...

The reason why you are stuck in life is probably because you have a cocktail of: negative self-image + negative habits + negative mindsets/beliefs. I'm in the same situation and it all boils down to those things. If you are totally unaware of your inner thoughts and processes and why they happen, where they come from, etc. then going to a psychologist will surely help. I will do so starting this month. You are 27, I'm 24, we are still young enough to reverse this situation.

Faster? If you can internalise one healthy habit a month you are doing perfectly fine, imagine in 10 years what your life would look like.. that's 120 new healthy habits!!

I am getting away from my friends, stopped contacting them and only answer if they contact me directly. I'm doing this because when we get together they just drink, smoke weed, eat burgers and all kind of junk food, that's their definition of fun, for me it's really boring and lame. This is not as much of a problem for me since I am a very introspective person, I love to observe my own thoughts, to be in nature, to read about fitness, self-development, nutrition, science, etc. I am fine being alone so yeah, no big deal. On the other hand I admit that I would like to have real friends that were also into self-development, that way I could have substantial and deep conversations with somebody, and at the same time we could both share our learnings and motivate ourselves to become better. But well, not having them I still feel fine.

Thank you very much for your input guys. Right now as I said before I'm not strong enough to confront her and tell her all this, so I'll just start slowly hinting at her that she doesn't own me and that I do whatever I want in spite of what she tells me to do. Today I started doing it. I will go to a psychologist too, that might help me to get emotional strength to face her in the future. This post has been really helpful so far, thank you very much community! I'm learning lots of stuff I didn't know and hearing about your stories helps as well. PD: The other day I was feeling overwhelmed with all my problems and I contaminated this thread with some paragraphs, I deleted them so we focus on the relevant stuff here: my relationship with my mother. @Josemos feel free to delete the last post you made, so we don't deviate the discussion to other topics.

Thank you very much for all the support people, it's been really helpful and I'm learning more and more about this. Today I did one of the best things I think I could have done, I met with my aunt (the healthy one of the 3 sisters) who I have really admired the last years, she has a successful career, has money, 5 kids, a relationship, hobbies, she stays fit, has a great energy and positive personality, and she managed all this having 2 narcissistic sisters and a narcissistic grandmother, so yeah she is a role model for me. We exchanged our points of view about my mother, we agreed on everything, I even found out about more things that I didn't even know. She also found out about other things because we put the pieces together with what she knew and what I knew from both perspectives. She was very supportive, she told me to go to a psychologist asap which I will do since I know I haven't been able to overcome my problems for the last 4-6 years despite of being aware of them, awareness is not enough (but is crucial tho). She taught me about her defensive techniques of letting go and just accepting how they are, don't be angry about it and don't enter in their games, just do your thing. She also offered to confront my mother and tell her everything we all felt about her. But after thinking it for a time we came to the conclusion that she had too much power over me at this moment and I wouldn't be able to resist it, she would manipulate me and make me feel guilty and it would end up being negative for me.

Thanks I will search that, since yesterday I've been reading about NPD and lots of things make much more sense now, I'm connecting many things that I have observed throughout my life in my mother's behavior and my behavior in relation to her, but not all of them seem to fit with a narcissistic. I just casually looked at that term "scapegoat" for 2 minutes, I will read more later on because now I need to study. Anyway from what I read I would say that I was her favourite and my brother was my dad's favourite, my mother later on explained us that she had to be on my side because our father was making differences between us and he supposedly preferred my brother, so to balance things out and help me she chose to get on my side. She also said that sometimes she would privately talk with my brother to explain that she had to be on my side because father was on his side, and if she didn't get on my side I would feel abandoned. So she reckons this difference that she made, and it was completely conscious and undestandable I guess. We had this kind of division in the family when I was a child, it was me and my mom vs my brother and my dad, at least that's how I felt it, I can't really remember things well at that age. But my brother agrees on this one and he is 5 years older. I don't really remember my mother putting down my brother in any sense, it's like she got all fucked up after I was maybe 8-10 years old, maybe on the beginning she wasn't yet as narcissistic as she is now, or maybe I just don't remember well how things were before that... My brother also agrees that she was normal before, or at least much better than she is now. As I said before I see some characteristics in her, but not all of them. Maybe she just has another kind of pathology that shares similar characteristics.

Thank you all very much for the input, it's really helpful and eye opening. I didn't know the name of the pathology and now I do(NPD), which gives me more tools to search for information and techniques to solve this problem. The thing that freaks me out is the idea of having absorbed some of the disfunctionality myself by asociation, I don't want to end up like her, and definitely this is something in her familiy that has been spreading like a cancer. Her aunt used to dominate all the family getting sick on purpose and manipulating them to get what she wanted, she was always negative and in a victim role to obtain attention and get things done, this was observed by my own mother(she is the one who told me this), but even if my mother noticed and hated this kind of behavior now she has become one of them without even knowing it, so it's definitely contagious, even more because my mother's sister also has the same type of personality, so this is a family disease. I have definitely noticed some narcissistic behaviors in myself, so it's most likely that I am a narcissist to some extent already, if I don't correct this soon I could completely destroy my life like my mother, her sister and her aunt did. I was just reading this article regarding contagious narcissism: http://samvak.tripod.com/narcissismbyproxy.html and I'll just quote a small part of all the article that I could identify myself with: "A casual encounter with a narcissist is likely to leave a bad aftertaste, bewilderment, hurt, or anger. But these transient reactions have no lasting effect and they fade with time. Not so with more prolonged interactions: marriage, partnership, cohabitation, working or studying together and the like. Narcissism brushes off. Our reactions to the narcissist, the initial ridicule, the occasional rage, or the frustration – tend to accumulate and form the sediment of deformity. Gradually, the narcissist distorts the personalities of those he is in constant touch with, casts them in his defective mould, limits them, redirects them, and inhibits them. When sufficiently cloned, the narcissist uses the people he affected as narcissistic proxies, narcissistic vehicles of vicarious narcissism. The narcissist provokes in us emotions, which are predominantly negative and unpleasant. The initial reaction, as we said, is likely to be ridicule. The narcissist, pompous, incredibly self-centred, falsely grandiose, spoiled and odd (even his manner of speech is likely to be constrained and archaic), often elicits smirks in lieu of admiration. But the entertainment value is fast over. The narcissist's behaviour becomes tiresome, irksome and cumbersome. Ridicule is supplanted by ire and, then, by overt anger. The narcissist's inadequacies are so glaring and his denial and other defence mechanisms so primitive that we constantly feel like screaming at him, reproaching him, or even striking at him literally as well as figuratively. Ashamed at these reactions, we begin to also feel guilty. We find ourselves attached to a mental pendulum, swinging between repulsion and guilt, rage and pity, lack of empathy and remorse. Slowly we acquire the very characteristics of the narcissist that we so deplore. We become as tactless as he is, as devoid of empathy and of consideration, as ignorant of the emotional makeup of other people, and as one track minded. Exposed in the sick halo of the narcissist, we have been "infected"." So that's where I am now, at first I was feeling really bad about my mother, I felt like she was a victim really to all that was happening around her and that she didn't deserve it, later with time and observation of her behavior I began getting tired and starting to question her behaviors, but then I would feel bad for doing this to my poor victim mother, as if she hadn't have enough with all her problems... But now I am on a stage where I am starting to get soo fed up that I kinda hate her in like I can't take it anymore, but at the same time feel a little guilty about it, and even doubt if I am right or wrong. As the article describes above, this is supposedly when "we have been infected"... On the other hand, after reading some articles and watching videos I can't identify all of the characteristics in my mother, just some of them. Maybe you can have the condition to some extent and not fully developed, I guess that explains it.

Just after reading the post I noticed I wrote this: "If it's my birthday isn't it my right to chose what to do? she is selfish" which sounds kinda selfish from me too. Actually I've been struggling to identify if I'm actually being selfish in some situations regarding judging my mother or if I'm right, and I know that probably if I have this doubt there's a good chance that I'm being selfish. I've a hard time identifying what is ok and what not regarding my relation with other people, for example should I cut my mother off completely? or is that selfish and she doesn't deserve it? did I use her all my life and now as I don't need her I just dump her? Those things go through my mind, like I can't actually be sure if my mother is super toxic and I'm right or if I'm being selfish with her, and she is just going through a bad moment. I also am aware that I'm way too low on the personal development scale, I have a lot of things to fix, so I might as well be miss judging her and maybe judging her from my own defects and projecting them over her, I know that this happens with people, why couldn't it happen with me? So yeah I have lots of doubts, the only thing that validates me is my brother who also thinks she is very very toxic.