A NEW PERSPECTIVE ON PICKUP

[Angelo D]

I am 22, quite good looking with a good personality but have always struggled with women, which has affected my confidence and my feeling of belonging.

I did a year of pickup but had not achieved much success and seemed to have stalled. I realized my university offered free therapy to students and was just barely wise enough to think I might benefit from looking a little deeper at what was going on.

I had the awesome luck of being assigned to a therapist who was a former pickup artist. I got from him that it is common for men who have the raw materials to attract women but mysteriously struggle endlessly with the endeavor to be averse to true vulnerability.

I thought that by walking up to strangers and hitting on them I was being vulnerable but learned that you can be invulnerable in anything you do, including pickup. I would suggest most men doing pickup and getting nowhere are operating under an illusion of vulnerability.

Invulnerability is caused by fear of hurt and feelings of unworthiness, and this goes back into our pasts. I was able to release a lot of the hurt that I was hitherto unconscious of and shed tears many times in the process, something I totally did not see coming but was very healing. Successful dating is much harder with massive fear of being hurt, so releasing it has done wonders; and dating can be as simple as being yourself, but if you have blockages to being authentic, such as fear of being hurt like you were in the past, you either need to heal or need to get really good at seductive tactics. To date successfully, you clearly don’t need superhuman seduction abilities, you just need relatively decent social skills and the openness to be yourself without that gnawing feeling like something is going to go wrong really soon when you’re “talking” to a girl. And if you have this, you know what I mean, it says “you remember what happened last time you were talking to a girl… it got ugly and painful… oh god, I hope this one doesn’t turn out like that.”

If you have decent social skills and mysteriously suck of with or are shy around women, or self-sabotage opportunities, I recommend exploring this via therapy. Pickup is a valid route too but eventually you are going to have to come to terms with the hurt you have felt, and let’s be honest, it’s there. Therapy seems to be much more effective, much more quickly at healing hurt than using pickup to “fuck it out of you” I guess. I personally will take lessons from pickup, like that I can practice flirting (a good and useful skill), that I can talk to pretty women, and its optimistic attitude that I truly can create a successful dating life; but no longer feel the need to develop some RSD Tyler style personality. If you have poor social skills, you may need more of a boost and a long list of pickup lines might help you get on your feet a little better.

You won’t be able to attract every girl anytime anywhere if you are being yourself, and honestly not if you are a solid PUA either, this is sort of a fantasy. It seems to me a much better approach to realize what exactly is holding you back, become aware of it and your patterns, consciously choose something else and then have the freedom to choose what your dating life should be. It will likely end up unfolding in a way that is more in line with your authentic personality, and you are in for many more surprises if you appropriately apply this to your life, to the point where you can throw your current ideas of what your dating life should be out the window, because they were likely created by you from a place of hurt.

I think this post is relevant to many of you on this sub-forum, and so I recommend a therapist, not just thinking about this for ten minutes and then moving on.

what you think of my perspective?

Edited March 31, 2020 by Angelo D

[Gili Trawangan]

Good post. Those who feel the need to learn strategies to get women i.e. PUAs usually come from a broken place: childhood issues, trauma, low self-esteem... these things need to be dealt with internally, simply trying to seduce more and more women will not work, even if you are "successful" at it.

Only by facing your past traumas can you eventually get to a place where you are simply comfortable with yourself and with others, including women.

Of course, experience in seduction doesn't hurt when it comes to attraction, but that doesn't really provide fulfillment.

Good work on your part taking that step, most guys take years to realize this.

[universe]

Right on. This is the missing ingredient.

You can only put on a mask and a facade for so long. As long as you are having accumulated emotions stuck in your body you are gonna have a hard time in life. Releasing these emotions will set you free.