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Episode 196: Attraction patterns, Control freak, Emotional blackmail
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all right I love your show been listening some time now the question I have is about an attraction pattern I seem to have I was married to a man for three years who is a recovering drug and alcohol addict fifteen years sober he was already sober when we met and I never saw him consume any substances however I believe that some of our relationship dynamic mirrored relationships that addicts tend to be in I've done a good amount of my own work in al-anon groups in any case we've recently divorced and there's another man who I've known for about 20 years I've always had a crush on him we have spent time together on and off over all the years not while I was married of course and we had very strong chemistry and had a lot of fun together we've recently reconnected and are exploring the beginnings of a relationship which we have never done mostly because of geography my question is this I think I'm noticing a heavy drinking behavior in the man in the new relationship it's hard to tell because right now we are long-distance and only see each other on weekends and have a lot of fun being out with friends and dancing etc so the question is is am i attractive to addicts what is going on in my genes that's making this happen I think if I could make sense of it on a brain level maybe I could handle it differently I'm also that I just want to add that I'm a licensed psychotherapist which I suppose could be helpful but my mom who I've never seen drank alcohol comes from an alcoholic system in a case what's is happening here for me oh man well I'll grab this one I'll just jump in there because this is very near and dear to my heart and my personal experience and and how I wasted a lot of time and energy and this kind of world of thinking the psychodynamic world of thinking of attraction patterns and alcoholic family systems and codependence and all of this all of these buzzwords and this way of thinking about this problem is very common and it's sort of just taken as the conventional wisdom on people who are attracted to addicts or find themselves recurringly in relationships with addicts and i I really ain't rouille believed for probably about 30 years that this is why I had the romantic troubles that I did good and that as a child of an alcoholic family system myself you know my father was an alcoholic addict that I was recreating patterns you know trying to speak love and these relationships that I didn't get from my dad like trying to trying to either it was always kind of unclear with all of these therapists if I was trying to recreate my childhood patterns or fix them like there's there's a lot of thinking and the sort of approach in this pop psychology approach that you're essentially recreating the pattern so it can arise so you can feel it which never made sense to me even when I was deep in this method of thinking so I get why she's asking the question this way and thinking about the problems this way especially with a psychology background but really this is just this comes down to personality like everything else does it could the attraction pattern is a pattern of attraction you have to certain personality traits so when we're we're saying that you know someone is more adventurous or more fun or more spontaneous so you have more chemistry with them these are all the words that you'll hear people talk about with relationships that are rooted in addiction that's just more openness it's less conscientiousness it's less stability these are the things that you're actually attracted to you're not attracted to the addict per se or the fact that he comes from an alcoholic family system that matches up with your alcoholic family system and therefore you're you're going to find each other to heal each other's wounds you just have the personality preferences that you have and so you're seeking that out in a recurring sort of way and those personality traits tend to travel with addictive gene they and certainly they can be those traits can certainly be very much exaggerated by addictive pattern so less conscientiousness means you were more likely to drink early and often in your early adulthood and if you have the alcoholic genes you're more likely to get yourself into that situation so that they're grouped together in these really complex ways that are that are again leading you down this path of thinking that you're attracted to the addiction instead of the personality but I think that you know this is a situation where the personality is being amplified by active addiction and that personality is is going to appeal to somebody who's attracted to someone who has sort of a wild streak and really has that tendency to be a junkie for a whirlwind romance all of that kind of stuff so I would say if you're if you're already having the sort of a spidey sense that you're seeing some heavy drinking going on and you've seen some evidence of that you almost certainly are especially if this is a an early thing and a long-distance thing where everybody's still more or less on on their best behavior and you're already sort of starting to see that and starting to have some concern about it I would say that that is your IQ trying to outweigh your preference for the more volatile adventurous hi chemistry relationship and and that is that is actually what you're signing up for with this relationship so I would just keep your eyes open to that and get into it knowing that that is very likely the outcome and you are not you are not destined to recreate this pattern unless you want to so that that's my general yeah hmm that's great so it's a little depressing for for those people who are attracted to those personalities that just happen to become addicts on everything right yeah yeah open it that is uh that that is the most stellar explanation of that that that process that I've ever heard that is just outstanding no it is thank you anything uh we read eight oh yeah that's uh edition bronze that and then put that you know it's the first chapter of every book about a CoA and addiction patterns and everything else oh the Sun that's yeah up Jen yeah there's a huge I mean it's such a huge industry it's and I spent years in and out of a CoA this is adult child of addicts alcoholics if people are unfamiliar and also in al-anon meetings and you know I'm in recovery myself I'm six years sober I had inherited the Attic genes from from both sides of my family but particularly my dad so I've you know very steeped in 12-step thinking and all of this and just totally makes enough sense to keep you hooked into it for a really long time and I spent years and years trying to figure out why am i codependent why am i developed codepen well I'm conscientious and I'm agreeable that's what codependence is so if you're conscientious in here agreeable you're going to find yourself systematically getting into relationships where disagreeable low conscientious people particularly in an active addiction or looking to exploit your conscientiousness and your agreeableness and oh lo and behold your recur in a recurring pattern and you're you've got an attraction pattern to a certain type of person because you're trying to heal childhood patterns no you're not you're just you're in a personality equilibrium with shitheads so yeah that's that's what it is and you think you had a bit of lunch here there you go Jeff you're not busy this week and you can you come over and help me clean out my garage wouldn't want me telling you no so I'll go ahead and make that a priority how much there you go good all right yeah so so for people who whose personality equilibrium is maybe shitheads or addicts or other things like that where they stand are they kind of what's that yeah yeah where do they stand this is just like now now they've just because of the modern environment or they just you know not screwed per se but just it's going to be a lot harder to find a normal normal situation or what's yeah what's what I mean they think they have just led to find a normal situation as anyone else it's just not going to hit their circuits like it would for somebody else so your circuits get hit by what they get hit by and you can't rewire that you're stuck with what you're stuck with so I think you know people people can make different decisions once they realize that that's the tendency and that that's a the underlying logic of who they're attracted to but it's probably not that that awareness is not going to change who you get excited about and who you don't get excited about but you can make a what you can you know quote unquote beat your genes if you if you're capable of it to take a more rational decision and get into a relationship with somebody who may be a very very good value proposition in other ways but it isn't going to create that sort of excitement in your nervous system that you're only going to get from that low conscientious unstable open kind of person who may or may not also be in an active addiction pattern so if that's just kind of that just is what it is and and you you're able to exercise some some volition in that process that you can't change what you're attracted to d'arnot alright i teleported you could almost you can almost see this gradient of I mean even thinking about like if we even take if we take looks out of it god forbid bit good we we add books to the to the fire on this but just think about a gradient that goes from stable reliable conscientious not particularly open all the way to you know way open you know emotionally volatile etc and low conscientious it's like okay well on the right side things get really exciting okay on the Left I thank you yeah yeah yeah yeah yes the crazy hot matrix that's exactly what's going on you're right yeah it is and you know is this everybody is somewhere in that matrix and everybody's got kind of the Preferences that they have and it's um you know this is the the cards people are dealt so sorry Nate did you guys know that I actually had my middle name change because it used to be hora [Laughter] would put it terrible Scarlet Letter to carry in your hand alright alright let's roll it on Nathan it's going to say my middle name used to be a H but it doesn't stand for asshole it stands for aspiring horse so aspiring awesome I really have you given them in your hiring Horace well that's not for me to decide that's that's for that's for the ladies to decide here's the deal we've got a real horace in the room here and then we've got one that just watch out women you got one there pretending to be an aspiring I'm trying to beat my Jean yeah no I'm just really exciting and wild and fun like that but I'm really trying not to be that's it really go here just sit over here and read a really boring book and you know sip your you're lukewarm water we all presented different opposition the thing about being an aspiring a horse is that you've gotta be able to you can't just bluff the aspiring horace because that's not a very good sales strategy so you've got to like transform and doing a into a horse and oh yeah I've got a guy ten stains all over my shirts now and slide I don't use hair gel except for like the really big occasions you have great potential yet we're not giving up on you yet oh yeah alright well roll it on king of control our next question is about the the term control okay so I often hear the term control thrown around and pop psychology and fiction it often turns up in dialog like one person's asking why the other did something stupid or self-destructive and the answer was it is being quote I just really needed to feel in control just for a minute or is there the notion that people will calm down when given the illusion of control what are your thoughts well if you think about this that that what there is facing any any human action is a is that you have a value that you're attempting to attain or to defend that's the only reason for any action at all and so in that pursuit there are probabilities of success that are associated with it and so obviously it doesn't doesn't bother us too much to bend down and tie your shoelaces the value is you're going to reduce the likelihood of stepping on your shoelaces and losing your shoe and your statistical likelihood of being able to tie your shoelaces is very high extremely high when you're an adult notice that it's less high when you're four years old and you're just learning and so the so there's a perceived probability of success that's attached to the value that you're seeking now if the value that you're seeking is substantially high enough and you're perceived probability success is low enough it's going to generate a discernable feeling that we call anxiety and like this is just me you know hanging out in bars and an attractor one comes in that's just generating but since we sort of know my Midlands horrors I'm not in a bar but if I were that would happen now the odd and so the so the notion of control is simply the notion that one has that one has a very high perceived probability of success over this outcome and so the so one may have it might be for example a bunch of social influence that we have over the outcome like no reason to have my you know daughter worried about whether or not she's winning the beauty contest because I bought the judges and so I don't have a lot of anxiety about it because I'm controlling the situation alright so your your anxiety is going to be relative to the degree of control or perceived probability of success multiplied by the the gene value that's associated with whatever to outcome we're seeking so a kid that's trying to tie his shoelaces in front of his mother's friends and his mother saying oh look at how Johnny katar shoelaces and he's just learned how to do it and he's not that good entity sometimes fails so now he's got a lot of anxiety okay and now at now as he's working diligently and focusing on this well everybody's watching as he he he fails and messes to that he can feel the sinking feeling and the anxiety in the embarrassment but then he his mom says we'll try again and he starts again and then he gets it right he can feel the excitement it comes with his increased statistical likelihood of success etc now we can be said that this is a that we're watching the degree of anxiety essentially is is the perceived probability of success times the amount of value that's in the equation here which is the esteem of the people watching and his mother etc now the do we seek quote control of course you do you you you want to have a very substitute for the word control substitute perceive probability of success and particularly that's going to be important with with respect to the notion of anything where there's a high value associated with it so you can see that in some wacky self-destructive thing constructed by Hollywood where someone says well just for a minute I needed that I wanted to have feelings of control that's why I did some crazy thing like in court or I just said this or did that well that's because you actually and yet it looks self-destructive in retrospect because what was really happening is the person simply took a tactic that they thought might be successful and they didn't do it in order to get the feeling of control which is what Hollywood might want us to believe the reason they did it is because they had an array of options and one of those options their brain calculated was the the best statistical odds of success even though other people might say what the hell are you doing that was exactly the wrong thing to do okay and of course it makes for great theater to to have someone do something that is that you can see how there are certain inputs like oh I don't know you drink some you're very thirsty on a debtor's desert island and you drink something you know what acid in it just to get the feeling of that you you were drinking some water even though you knew that it was destructive okay that would be a great sort of Hollywood prototypical kind of situation that the person is describing and it makes for great theater because the observer says oh my god you're making my do you can't yeah I can't believe you did that and so we watch in horror as a mistake is made and we ask why did you make that mistake and they tell us oh I wanted that feeling and control actually it's a fascinating thing to think that that nervous system was was defective in its ability to analyze cause memory and it in it trying on one component of the stimulus array and it well you know and and so therefore it bit on a on a red herring in terms of the actual control of the situation and wound up self-destructive okay like for example a great example would be telling a lie in front of the jury and so you like you're gonna get found out that you're just you know you're you make a CD and the brain is sufficiently unstable and sufficiently you know low conscientious that even though the evidence is all around that you're about to get cornered and nailed you just go ahead and Bluff for a second anyway and that you know and we look at that like oh my god now you just added perjury to the list of the problems and so this is this is actually the analysis of what the person is referring to and so it it actually is a is a nice recurrent motif that you'll see in Hollywood because it it has the observer like take a deep sharp breath and say oh my god I can't believe you've been on that and so we can we can have that feeling as an observer that we're observing a mistake and that we would not have made that mistake but there's something curious and fascinating when we watch people make mistakes that we think we know that there is a mistake and we're seeing a brain that might be similar to ours and we watch that they bite on it and that they have that they cost themselves perhaps dearly in that error and those are instructive moments for observers they're like why isn't that in really important yes not only is it important to notice that we might bite out something like that but it's also useful to know that our friends family when in the collection under the pressure might make a similar mistake and therefore we have to add that into our calculation in terms of the outcomes of may a complex social variable so if we had a tribal situation where there was essentially a jury and cross-examination and we had watched people make this kind of mistake then we thought that our child was in that situation I've got a 17 year old son that is now in some hot water and we're thinking you know what uh-oh he might perjure himself he might be very tempted to do that and that would actually be a mistake and so this is this is why these kinds of incidences are of interest to humans and that's I think that's why it's a recurrent theme in fiction that's fascinating all right yeah Hollywood Hollywood was that so like a supernormal stimuli of a social situation yes right exactly yeah that's right very good all right our next question hi okay right I'm a male early 20s I've been on a whole food plant whole plant foods diet for about one and a half years now arguments I can handle I'm pretty disagreeable but my family has been emotionally blackmailing me having what amount to interventions with my mother crying them saying that I'm wasting away and I will one day find myself in an ambulance I'm 5 foot 9 inches in about 132 pounds I lost about 20 pounds early on and have not lost any more weight for over a year I've always had low muscle mass even when working out I've come to think that I'm just naturally low on that bell curve but for a year hmm I've finally been able to do proper push-ups pull-ups and the like and generally feel fine I feel distance from my family and I've come to dread spending time with them what can I do hmm I've uh I've taken lately yeah I've taken lately too calling myself a personality deterministic just like nervous I identify in the world and it's actually like the generally the first lens through which I look through really any problem for myself or through a question like this and so I you know it sounds I feel like I answer all questions with its personality its personality but it is personality this is this is not something I mean we talked about this a lot last week on the on the show about the pleasure trap and upcoming Thanksgiving struggles and all of these kinds of social dynamics that people deal with with their families being being really disagreeable in status sufficient in the face of dietary change so you know you can go back and listen to some of some of that advice we have lots of strategies that might be useful in the moment you know you can you can frame it as an experiment you can blame big Louie all these things that we talk about but there's really I mean there's there's no you're not going to you're not going to change the the fundamental Blackman but you know you call it emotional blackmail and this level of manipulation these sort of intervention strategies that they're going to in the face of this kind of challenge this is just this is personality this is these they're massively overreacting to a situation that is not that dire you're perfectly healthy you see you you're at the low end of of a healthy BMI but you're a healthy BMI and you've only been doing this for a year and a half and so you know part of it is that they haven't had a lot of time to adjust and they may simmer down over time and so getting through this first holiday season is going to be the the gnarliest on that front um but yes I would say this is this is a case of just limiting your interactions around this problem and potentially limiting your interactions with them in general I mean if you if you're if you dread spending time with them then you need to spend less time with them just because you're related to someone doesn't mean you owe them your time and energy not at the holidays or any other time and especially when they're putting your choices about how to live your best life at odds with their happiness in a really emotionally manipulative way so on the off chance that they just need some education and they they really are kind of you know all worked up and think you're making some terrible health mistake and you haven't followed your teaching gene and really educated them and you think that they little bit of education would help and you can just give them give them a nice Christmas gift but you know book um a session with with dr. Lyle you learn do that right Doug yeah that's that I think it should be a half hour I don't think I'm one hour but a minute and you know if they don't take you up on it I'm sure you give them their money back absolutely that that's actually an ingenious idea because yeah I have certainly done things like that before and sometimes usually I can disarm people on the other side that are very defended and so yeah you can send them a Christmas email and or if you're talking with them that would be you know obviously fine but you could send them a Christmas email but it essentially says you know I really understand that you're anxious about this and I can really respect and I appreciate you know how much anxiety you have because I know that you think that I make a mistake the you could be right of course but it's also possible that there's things that you don't know which I've tried to describe but you know I don't I don't have the kind of knowledge that some other people do have on this topic and there is an individual that actually knows a lot more than I do and the good news is is that he has agreed that he would have a conversation with you to just try to answer any questions and try to help you understand where I'm at and why I'm doing what I'm doing and so you know I've got this session for you it's on you know I don't know December 28th you know Merry Christmas and and in the commission is to not call doctor while then that that's fine and you know it won't cost me anything then because he's agreed to refund it if you don't use this but I would really appreciate it if you would if you would or for my benefit if you would just take 30 minutes out of your you know busy life and and maybe just have a chat with the doctor okay that that's it as friendly of a you know we just take their hand and put it right on the shock plate just like a Milgram study it's like listen you know we're trying I'm trying to help you okay and so we do that and if it does it works out great because I you would if they're if they're amenable then please you know send me an email and I will be mentally prepared I'd be prepared anyway for if someone called me up in a you know anxiety and in anger and frustration and and twists it up into an just not about their son wasting away with a with a bill very similar to mine yeah so so yeah I think that's a gen I think that's a great idea and we will we'll call that one good that one's cooked that's the soft chance but we're not just dealing with you know disagreeable Wolverines here which might be you guys you know if you do that if you value those relationships and you if there's something that can be salvaged here through some methodical education from you know sort of outsourcing that conversation to to may eminent dr. Lisle that it's worth worth a shot but that's about that's about the only strategy that you've got in the toolkit here and other than that it's disagreeable distance all the way like you don't don't put up in the path of this kind of emotional blackmail and manipulation and just let them just let them accept it over time and maybe they will and maybe they want but it's your life and your time and your energy yes now you have to also the aspect of what I call Chinese water torture and you can give them the same recommendation four months later and give them another four months later okay so sometimes they need to be seated and have to think it over and you know very often what seems like something that are resistant to they wind up wearing down over a little bit of time and I might end up having that conversation with them next August and then then much to their surprise they they learn a great deal and then when they learn that learning things is is the method by which human action changes so that's that's the that's what is required in this situation is there greater enlightenment and this is a good pathway by which that could happen yeah fabulous I got it I suspect right while you're gonna get you're gonna get a few of these all right oh well so I'll start there I listen dr. Hawks available to trust me there you go you're a lot more tolerant of this incredible personality than I sometimes people wouldn't know that about my vote you can't shut it down shut it down back away slowly yeah there's nothing to be done yeah all right what else we all right I think we have our final question or maybe maybe second-to-last depending on the answer so dear dr. Lyle dear dr. hawk I am a 37 year old man whom I thought was attractive make decent money and I'm highly intelligent I'll be testing for Mensa soon if I can escape the ego trap and my fear of failure because I'm right on the cusp I'm highly open moderately disagreeable highly conscientious and moderately neurotic I'm successful in most areas in my life despite the chaos that was my highly open younger years my May mish my main issue is romance I was the lead singer in the band when I was younger and had a vast social network so that casual mating was incredibly easy with women I should have had no chance with even for pair-bonding well I moved about 10 years ago so that social status has completely disappeared I find myself unable to ever to even gain the interest of women that I find attractive and the only women I can even get to a first date are women I don't really find that attractive it's honestly getting the point that suicidal thoughts are creeping up again almost daily though I have too much that depends on me to ever truly go through with it is there any way to actively lower my standards so that I can find some measure of romantic happiness I know I'm probably grasping at straws here but I just want to defeat the Miss calibration in my head that tells me that I can do better because all signs point to the fact that I can't any advice you can give would be much appreciated boy isn't that this Jen isn't this fascinating question it is a fascinating question really this is you and then watching yeah maite calibration for good reason like this yes this is why you know when we talk about personality mattering so much it does but your your life history does matter I mean your when when this is the role that the environment does have to play so this guy has been biased in the direction of his life experience and it continues to color his calibration in a really relevant way yeah I would say I guess it's a yes many people would listen to this story and say yeah why aren't you in a band now then get back there and get ya haha get back get it get the band back together you know remember the lead singer and you still got pipes then I'm not sure why we would have abandoned that strategy that was so successful yeah yeah so that's a that's something to question what we're doing and if you're trying to join Mensa I just don't think that's a good place to find a yeah you're not true for bad mates even then yeah I think that I think that what we're seeing is is that the person took advantage and very effectively of a strategy that I called stack the deck so stack the deck is is a way to do essentially bias your relationship to the social environment in a way that that helps aid your competitive situation with respect to human sexuality and so this is why just recently I had a an older woman trying to figure out how she was ever going to get a husband and she was in a little bit of a sort of a pretty dry spell for a period here and she wound up almost accidentally getting involved in a collect table and the collectible was something that a lot and then collect and so as a result she got herself behind a little booth at a collectible Fair and got hit on all weekend huh okay that's what I call stack the deck this is a replay of situation that I had probably 15 years ago where a woman that had lost her husband the husband had been a really of one of these guys that knows everything about cars I can't remember what type of car was it again it might have been Corvettes or something like this and so it turns out that this lady knew a tremendous amount about Corvettes and so she in the middle of our session we were trying to figure out how she could stack the deck and she said you know I should just go to car shows I know so much about Corvettes and these guys you know just want to talk all day long about these things this is not going to she instantly yeah this was a beautiful example clinically of watching someone's self-efficacy change instantaneously from low self-efficacy facing a light of inner 60s of indefinite loneliness to literally eighteen seconds later as she starts to Glock through her as her brain analyzes in its mind's eye and its imagination replaying data it was already in the system for many years earlier and now rewire you're essentially we analyzes the cv and her perceived probability success firing instantaneous excitement confidence and and motivation to do this instant a this is one of these I would I would explain this to to my colleague in years past dr. Richard Seidel with who one day we'll hear from on this podcast about how that this will happen when you get it right and he even started doing this you know two decades ago and and he loves it just as much as Jen and I do that there's nothing like getting one of these where you get it right and you and the person CD on a whole area of life suddenly changes because they now seek see how it is they're going to solve a problem so so I recently got a replay on this is this is this woman sort sort of halfway was hoping that it might happen and then it happened just like she was hoping only way better than she thought ie fish where the fish are so fascinating yeah where where are where is their casual mating female opportunity answer in a place where there's alcohol and music okay and and where you're creating the music and it's a fitness indicator so this is of course an excellent place to be if it makes sense for you at this point in your life if you don't have vocal chords anymore and you're gone then so about rhythm and you've got cool and you know music you know time to learn the guitar maybe the if not what was what we're actually watching inside this person's nervous system is an open loop that the too much of them brains neural circuits that are attempting to solve the problem and if you think of the the nervous system something like a thermostat in other words the the discrepancy between what we're getting now and what some of the neural circuits believe that we could get generates that Delta just generates both neurological and physical action that is designed to cause behavior that closes the distance between what we are getting now and what we think we should be getting that's that's how that works so young man who thinks that he could be a basketball star by watching other people I'm comparing his general physical gifts to others then he looks at that and says I think I could do that successfully so if you're 13 years old and 6 3 and you can jump really high I expect it's not too long before you're on the basketball court because your your brain calibrates the the what you getting now and what you could be getting and it runs the CV on that and generates motivation so when you are puzzled as this person is now he's finding out that gee it wasn't just his good looks in front of the band it was a more complicated combination or you know a lick sir of his display that was driving the success so now we're not sure what about that was what it was but we know that it wasn't just his handsomeness and his his basic personality when women are sober okay so as a result what we want to do is we we may want to take that very seriously if you've got those chops to to go back into the same type of arena and see what happens and and essentially because your brain will recalibrate to some degree if you have continued failure after all of your all of your reasonable options have been spent okay so if you think that you're worth tonight a young man with a big streak of arrogance come yeah big streak of arrogance coming out of a fine University that wasn't Harvard Jen but I mean it was pretty good the thought he was going to make this pile of money when he came out and so he had to find out that he was wrong that he had overestimated what he thought so he sort of was turning up his nose at job offers and then finally he had to take one that was down at the level of the people that he'd been turning down earlier because he found out that he was miscalibrated okay so this is not a disaster it's just a reality that we have to face and it's uncomfortable to go through the the essentially downgrading process and so it doesn't feel good to go through that but once you go through it you situate to it and you're okay you're fine and so the is what this individual is essentially seeking is tabbed that process work but the only problem is he hasn't done the best job of filing his job application and so as a result his brains got an open loop in there saying hey we haven't fired our best shot yet so why would we be giving up and so that this is why I would tell it tell you that you're the reason why you're struggling with this and that you don't have inner peace is because you literally haven't even returned to the to the arena of your previous outstanding successes so I would suggest that you do that first and then see what happens yeah and he probably the way that he's phrased this question where you know his his great success that is behind him I was in a different place and he's moved since then I suspected a lot of little little components to why he feels that he recreates the magic of his youth and boy likes it you know right and at a time and a specific social network but part of part of that recalibration process and closing the loop for him is discovering that you know he's going to have significant mating advantage I mean I've lived in so many sleepy little towns where the open mic night at the local you know crappy little bar there's enough cachet associated with getting up on that stage and playing a few songs I mean the guy at the hospital who plays the guitar has a casual mating advantage over any other guy at the hospital so there's there's a process that he needs to probably go through where he can recognize that he he can he can play a higher game and and do better on the market than he's doing right now without recreating exactly what he had in the past which is part of the nature of the trap that people get into they know that they can't do exactly what they did before but what you can do is some approximate which will which will very magically in the nervous system recalibrate to this very peaceful place for you where you do realize that you're giving your best to the competitive problem and inviting the best that you actually get in return and everything just normalizes out from there but it's probably not going to look the big rock band you were in in the other city ten years ago right I think yeah we can smell the possibility of the ego trap essentially yeah I'm worried about facing what the Delta is between what the Nano experience could be versus what the old one was and there there's nothing no and probably no better psychological escape in the world then gritting your teeth and getting your way through the ego trap that totally the relief the relief of being on the other side of the ego trap is immense so that I would say grit your teeth and and let's go let's go find out where we're really at right now because right now we don't know yeah yeah yep no lovely accent that yet this guy was a singer ten years ago is it possible that if he gained a bunch of weight maybe 30 40 pounds that this would also affect his mating prospects or for males doesn't really not matter as much oh wait I don't need all these things good yeah but like a bandit if he was good go ahead change yeah just it's going into his estimate of of that comparison to that past success and he's you know in some and whether he looks different or his voice has changed or you know he doesn't have the same friends around all of these things go into that analysis of whether he can recreate that magic or not and so that's the nature of the ego trap is if you if you can't if you don't have great certainty that you can do it at that level you're not it's the correct choices not to try not to take the status risk so he's still coasting on the great success of the past to some degree where he had proven himself in that arena and to take the chance on going out there and just being another guy at the open mic night maybe maybe more overweight maybe you know having deterioration in his voice whatever it is than that that's all getting plugged into that decision matrix understandably but that that once you actually confront that this is what people don't intuitively understand because it doesn't make intuitive sense not make intuitive sense that if you confront it and you go realize that you you don't you can't compete at the level that you competed before that you're competing at a lower level that you don't expect the piece that comes to the nervous system as a result of that but it does come so that's something people just kind of have to take on face and lean into the self-esteem process that is part of that rather than living their lives in the ego trap which is a terrible way to spend your life
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