The Reality Method 2.0

Identity-Level Beliefs and The Game

There’s an important question that I think is worth asking:

Why are you here?

I’m not asking why you are here at this specific website (I obviously believe you couldn’t be at a better place).

I’m asking, why are you reading about dating and seduction at all?

There are a couple obvious answers: “I was never taught growing up.” Or “I’m interested in a male perspective on women…” Or “I want to get laid more.” Or “There’s this one girl…” Or “Why is my girlfriend such a bitch?”

These are all great answers, but they don’t address the level at which I’m asking the question. They are surface-level answers. I am asking the question at an identity level.

I’m not asking “WHY are you here?” I’m asking, “Why are YOU here?”

That’s still cumbersome, but it’s the best way I can explain it in text.

The reason I ask is because a lot of guys are drawn into this field, just like any field, for reasons that will predispose them to failure.

For a lot of guys, learning about dating and seduction is like putting a band-aid on a gunshot wound; and even if they get “good” with women, they will still be hemorrhaging from that wound.

This post can’t seal up that wound. But it might help you realize whether it’s there or not.

The Hole
I want to share a quote from a classic Western that just about perfectly sums up what I’m about to say:

A man like Ringo’s got a great empty hole right through the middle of him…and no matter what he does he can’t ever fill it. He can’t kill enough or steal enough or inflict enough pain to ever fill it.
–Doc Holliday, Tombstone

Some people go through life just as Doc describes Ringo, with a big empty hole right through the middle of them.

Usually, this big empty hole is caused by wrong beliefs; things like, “I’m no good.” Sometimes it’s caused by trauma that happened in childhood; abuse, or maltreatment, or isolation. There can be a number of reasons for it. For some people, it’s depression; and sometimes depression is organically caused (genetically predisposed).

But whatever the cause, the outcome is the same: total, thorough, holistic emptiness.

Guys strive their entire lives trying to fill this void. They do it by going to Wall Street and killing themselves trying to make it as powerful wealthy brokers. They do it by spending hours in the gym to get a “perfect” physique. They use loads of cocaine. They get religion. They learn how to pick up women.

But no matter how many zeros in their salary, no matter how many square feet their house or how big their SUV, no matter how many inches on their biceps or how many girls they’ve bedded, these guys are, and always will be, essentially…..empty.

Unless something changes.

What’s wrong here is that these guys try to fix internal problems with external stuff. Although the Hole is an internal problem, a psychic wound, it is still a wound that can have very real implications for the body: some guys get ulcers, others get heart disease.

What causes the Hole is identity-level beliefs. And you can never fix identity-level internal problems with surface-level external aids. Believe me, I’ve tried.

Identity-Level Beliefs
We all have beliefs: about ourselves, about the world, about our place in the world.

We all have an “inner voice”: a still, small voice that speaks to us when no one else does, when no one else is listening. Our minds are always listening, and it is this inner voice that they are listening for.

If you don’t believe me, close your eyes quickly, and make your mind as blank as possible. Then listen.

Now open your eyes. What happened? You heard the inner voice. Maybe it said “I can’t hear anything.” Maybe it said “I’ll have a nap now.” Maybe it said, “Why did I just close my eyes because some guy on the internet told me to?”

The point is, it spoke to you. Your inner voice exists, and if you are not aware of what it’s saying, you will also be unaware of how it influences your behavior, your decisions, and ultimately your life.

(A lot of people in the self-help, self-improvement and psychiatry / psychology professions call this phenomenon of an inner voice “self talk”: the self, talking to itself. I use the two terms interchangeably.)

The Broken Record of Self Talk
Our inner voice is very good at parroting. It loves to repeat information. But it’s not very creative or original; unless it is specifically trained to do so, it doesn’t come up with genuinely new information very often.

Instead, it takes information from outside us, information and views that come from somebody else — our parents, siblings, schoolmates, teachers, coaches, rabbi or pastors — and turns them into little mantras that it then repeats for as long as we live.

Boy, we’re lucky if these external messages are good. If our parents told us we were special and worthy. If our rabbi or pastors told us that we would amount to something. If our teachers told us we could grow up to become whatever we want. If our peers told us we were “cool” and “funny”. If someone said “I really like you.”

But more often than not, these messages we get from other people are anything but good. “You’re lame,” say our peers in grade school. “You’ll never amount to anything,” from an older sibling. “I’m very disappointed in you,” from a pastor or parent. “You make me sick,” from a friend.

The inner voice takes these messages, good or bad, and latches onto them. It puts them on repeat. They came from other people, so they must be true, right? We can never see ourselves as other people see us, so we should trust what they say. They all seem to agree, so they must be right.

And, unbidden, the inner voice turns those small messages from other people, and turns them into the broken record of our self-talk. Whenever we face a challenge? “You’d better not try, you will just look stupid.” When we have a great opportunity? “You don’t really deserve it.” When we get accused of something in a relationship? “It is my fault. I make people sick.”

Over time, these messages become our unconscious mental habits. Over time, we come to absolutely believe them 100%, and we integrate them into our self-perception. They become ingrained in the actual physical matter of our brains. They quite literally become a part of us.

This is what I mean by identity-level beliefs. When your identity-level beliefs are positive, healthy, and realistic — such as “I am a good person, I am worthy, I bring something valuable to this world” and other such messages, this isn’t such a problem.

But when identity-level beliefs are negative, self-defeating, hurtful and wrong, BIG problem. These beliefs become “truths”, and those “truths” rule our lives with totalitarian authority. They shutter our perceptions, filter out positive interpretations, and trap us in endless cycles of fear, self-doubt, anger, and self-punishment.

They create The Hole.

If your identity-level beliefs are damaging and self-defeating, no amount of material or socially-approved success will fill The Hole. It will work just like the real black hole in cosmology, and suck in everything you throw at it.

Success and external validation may feel good for a while, maybe even years….But on your deathbed, the Hole will still be with you, and every day you are alive and do not address it, it will suck up psychic energy.

A Simple Test
What follows is a simple test that I recommend for anyone who wishes to examine their identity-level beliefs.

Close your eyes and clear your mind. Then ask yourself this one simple question: and listen carefully for the answer, the first, immediate answer, that springs to mind, for the following question:

“If I were just to sit, alone, in an empty room for the rest of my life….Without accomplishing anything, without earning any money, without fucking any women, without having kids, without receiving any awards or accolades, without even having another word of conversation for the rest of my days….would I still be a valuable, worthwhile human being?”

If the answer is Yes, congratulations.

If the answer is No, you may want to explore your identity-level beliefs further.

Retraining the Inner Voice
What follows are two facts about the mind that may be useful as a starting point to sealing The Hole.

As I noted above, this post is not intended to diagnose, treat or cure any physical or psychological illness. I am not an M.D. or a practicing psychiatrist.

On the other hand, the two pieces of information below have been crucial in my own development, and have helped many others, according to anecdotal evidence.

So take from them (like anything on this blog) what you will.

1) The mind is good at following orders. Self-talk is just orders given by our inner voice, and once it gets those orders, the mind sets about directing the body in ways that confirm them.

If the self-talk message is “You suck at basketball,” the mind creates a pattern in the body that causes anxiety and clumsiness whenever you are called to perform on the basketball court; and hey presto, the body performs poorly at basketball. The order has been followed to the letter, the negative self-talk has been proven right, and the pattern is reinforced. “You suck at basketball” becomes not so much a suggestion as a rule.

Now, the particular piece of self-talk in the example really isn’t a huge problem for anyone but NBA players, but when the self-talk message becomes “You suck at life,” instead of “basketball”, it creates a HUGE problem.

The implication of all the above is that the mind will follow positive orders as well as negative ones. So saying “I am really good at basketball,” will cause the mind to engage the body in an attempt to prove that message true, just the same as if the message were negative.

Of course, if you’re not already good at basketball, the training process to actually produce the good results may take some time, and that fact speaks to the mind-body interaction that I will address more thoroughly in a moment.

2) The mind is dualistic. If you tell the mind, “Be good,” it will be bad. If you tell the mind “Whatever you do, don’t think about a pink elephant right now,” it will think of a pink elephant immediately.

So if you tell the mind, “I believe I can fly,” It will spit right back, “You idiot, you can’t fly”; if you say “I believe I am worthy,” the mind will spit back “No, you’re not worthy at all. Don’t kid yourself.”

Although you might not remember it, your mind furnished this token resistance to the negative messages you got early on; but their repetition took hold and overwhelmed that resistance.

To re-program your brain, you are going to have to not only flood your mind with positive messages that are oppositional to the negative self-talk that is habitual; you are also going to have to phrase those oppositional messages in a way that the brain can’t argue with.

So, instead of saying, “I am a good and worthy person,” (which the brain will instantly contradict)

Say, “I feel happy knowing I am a good and worthy person.” This will confuse the brain, since even if it contradicts the antecedent statement, it is still affirming the consequent (”No, you feel….sad?….knowing you are a good and worthy person….?”) and therefore tying itself into confused knots and failing to make sense.

This structure allows you to do an end-run around the mind’s automatic dualistic defenses, and slip positive messages through the negative defensive screen, interrupting the negative cycle that is in place, and creating enough mental space to start building the positive self-reinforcing cycles that will actually improve your life.

For a more in-depth discussion of self-talk, and how to organize it for your benefit, see How to use Self-Talk to Improve your Game.

Identity-Level Beliefs and The Game
Obviously our identity-level beliefs have roots in reality; if they were built by messages given to us by others, and can be re-programmed and overcome by messages we give to ourselves.

Returning to the basketball metaphor above: if you are not physically coordinated enough to be good at basketball, changing that belief itself won’t instantly change the reality of your lack of coordination.

What it will do is give your body the space necessary to learn the physical skill of coordination necessary to excel at basketball; an interruption from the disruptive patterns of anxiety and fear that previously de-railed all attempts to learn the physical skills.

It’s the same with interacting with women. Most men, especially in the West, are given messages not only about themselves, but about themselves in relation to women, that cause patterns of fear, doubt and shame when it comes to approaching or interacting with beautiful women: Men shouldn’t ask for sex, we shouldn’t approach strange women.

These patterns do need to be changed, mentally, before one can achieve success — but, on the other hand, forcing oneself to walk up to an unfamiliar beautiful woman will start the process of changing those patterns from the outside (assuming the outside reality isn’t a slap in the face or a thrown drink).

Ultimately, the best news of the day is that these are your internal beliefs, and therefore they are ultimately under your power. Every time someone offers you a nugget of analysis about your person or personality, you can choose to accept it or reject it. No matter how damaged or disastrous it may currently be, it is never too late to build, or re-build, your own identity.

And that is an encouraging thought.

Related Articles:

• Using Self-Talk to Improve Your Game
• Emotional Self-Regulation (Changing your State)
• How to Build Confidence
• Sex, Validation and Self-Concept
• Journaling for Self-Knowledge