The Reality Method 2.0

The Therapeutic Effect of Pickup

This is one of those articles where I’m going to have to ask you to bear with me to the absolute best of your ability.

What follows is dense, somewhat academic, and decidedly un-sexy, but — for the alert reader who has some experience with pickup, therapy, or both — I’m hoping there will be a glimmer of recognition of some of the concepts I set out.

Relationships as Patterns
Let’s face it — our relationships tend to fall into patterns.

From the battered woman who just can’t seem to stop falling in love with abusive assholes, to the straight-laced guy who is highly attracted to drug addicted women, to the beautiful virgin who runs through guy after guy, discarding them all before they have a chance to get into her pants, all of us are surrounded by examples of people who seem incapable of escaping obvious patterns. If we are particularly self-aware, we will come to realize that we ourselves are examples.

If we don’t do anything deliberate about it, we tend to meet people who seem “perfect” for us at our current life stage, mental state, and level of commitment.

This isn’t hocus-pocus. It has to do with our highly evolved mirror neurons, and how they interface with the minds of others around us. It also has to do with our neurological patterns, which are most often the result of the dominant patterns we have been exposed to during our lives.

What the seduction industry calls “vibe” or “subcommunication” is actually a mentally-generated field of information that everyone around us can pick up and interface with. Those who are particularly sensitive to these fields are called “emotionally intelligent”, “empathic”, and sometimes “truth wizards” (but that’s a topic for another post).

(If you have trouble swallowing the above, just try it: go out at night and convince yourself, really convince yourself, that your girlfriend just broke up with you and you’re sad, and want to be re-validated in some way. The next night, convince yourself you’re King of the World, International Playboy Extraordinare, and nobody’s bad mood can touch you. Then compare the types of interactions you had on the two nights and note the differences.)

Our patterns change and evolve over time, as a result of continued exposure to the world and to others, and our choices and behaviors when given opportunities to connect with others. Because of the way the brain works, it is incredibly, terrifyingly simple to continue to repeat the same mistakes we have always made, ad infinitum, and thereby lead lives full of misery, discontent and stagnation. Nothing, in fact, is more normal.

On the other hand, we may decide we’ve had enough of the same old shit, and that if we want a different result, we’d better stop practicing the same behaviors and expecting things to turn out different this time (the very definition of insanity, in fact), and we either get ourselves into therapy, or make a decision to get this area of our lives “handled” by going out and meeting women regularly, etc.

It is at the intersection of psychotherapy and psychopractice (better known as “sarging” or “going out”) that this article takes place.

Relationships as Therapy
In talk therapy — whether it be cognitive behavioral, Gestalt, Freudian psychotherapy or any other flavor — the goal of work around the topic of relationships is usually to move the client from a less healthy place to a more healthy place.

Whether this is in the context of an ongoing relationship or marriage, or the movement of the client from one a string of less-than-ideal partners to a string of more-than-ideal partners, the goal is the same: greater health, happiness and sanity on the part of the client as well as, ideally, more egalitarian relations with their partner(s).

Usually, this process includes training and coaching around how to recognize our own relationship patterns. What are our own “issues” with “doing” relationships? Are we afraid of commitment? Do we have problems getting close? Do we let others get too close, and take over our lives? Do we fall in love too quickly, and cling too tightly, driving our partners away? Are we attracted to people who treat us poorly?

Once these patterns are identified on-the-couch, there is usually some concurrent effort to recognize and change them, off-the-couch, in the client’s everyday life. This interchange between observation of ourselves, reflective feedback, and the guidance of a trained and objective 3rd-party observer comprises “relationship therapy” as usually performed, whether in a couples setting or by a single person.

Therapists, no matter what their degree or licensure, can help their clients by asking key evaluative questions that help build self-awareness, suggesting alternative explanations or interpretations of events, modeling adaptive behavior, and reality-checking a clients’ wordview and actions.

Sarging as Therapy
Although it wasn’t “designed” with this purpose in mind, the seduction industry and, in particular, its practice of deliberately and systematically going out with the intention of meeting and seducing women, duplicates many of the efforts of talk therapy.

Sarging is the “practice” part of therapy, the “homework”, supercharged and put on steroids. The “newbie missions” that are frequently suggested on seduction chat boards are desensitization exercises, meant to both move the subject to adaptive action, and simultaneously get him generating a narrative about his process, a narrative that will be instrumental in his organization of a “new story” that will continue to provide impetus for his moving forward, long after the “newbie mission” is history.

Without sarging, we as men (just like women) tend to “fall into” relationships, or have them “fall into” our laps: the women that we are most strongly attracted to, to the point that our normal withdrawn and retiring tendencies are broken and we actually make the effort to meet and get to know them, are also those that fit most perfectly into our default relationship patterns. That means that our “chemistry” will be strikingly unique and terribly strong — but it also means we will be forced face-to-face with our foibles in the most ostentatious way possible. We will not have a trouble-free association, free of drama; we will have a knock-down, drag-out Act VIII Life-Changing Extravaganza of Emotional Turmoil. And, because it’s what we know, a part of our brain will Love Every Minute of It — despite our constant bemoaning of our fate to every nearby sympathetic ear (women are especially good at this).

This is very often why we cut off fuck buddy relationships before they’ve truly “run their course”. Our explanation is usually some backwards-rationalization that is about the woman (”she smoked” or “she wasn’t smart enough”), but in truth, we may have been simply bored stiff by the lack of drama, by the fact that our arrangement with her just worked.

The very act of going out with the intention of meeting and “picking up” women based on some rather arbitrary criteria (say, looks) instead of much-less-arbitrary criteria (say, natural attraction) will yield different results than the act of sitting around and waiting until “the right girl” comes along. The right girl for what? For doing what you’ve always done in relationships, of course, only this time, you might just get it right.

Putting Your Relationships on Fast Track to Health
The reality is that most people, unaware that this dynamic even exists, will continue to spin their wheels in their relationship patterns, simply because (I theorize) the human attention span is not long-term enough to construct an accurate picture of the patterns that occur across relationships, especially when those relationships are typically several months to multiple decades long, and the “down time” between them can be on the same time scale.

So, what’s a rationally-minded, forward-thinking guy to do? Get into therapy. Or go sarge.

For a lot of people, therapy isn’t a cost-effective way to address the problem. For just as many, taking seminars and boot camps at $1500 to $3000 a pop isn’t either. That leaves either the value of cost-effective personal coaching (which is more less the cutting edge of the industry right now) or going it alone.

Now, I would pause to note at this point that “relationship experts” of all stripes (authors, speakers, and even those in the helping professions — the aforementioned Psy.Ds, MSWs, LCSWs, and “certified counselors”) actually make their living off you taking the absolute longest possible road to recovery. The longer you are struggling, the longer you are in dire need of their services, and the longer you will provide a steady stream of income for them.

In addition, plenty of other professionals — lawyers, mediators, and the entire criminal-justice industry — make their living off divorces, custody battles, child-support fights, and all the other social cruft that follows failed or failing relationships.

I realize this is a pretty dim view of things, but it needs to be said — while I believe therapy can be enormously useful, it is not, in my opinion, currently designed in such a way to provide maximal value. Luckily, where it falls short happens to be in exactly the area that the seduction industry is strongest — the action-and-results-oriented, get-up-an-do-something field of “sarging”.

Sarging, and/or studying seduction in general, is powerful because it exposes you to so many possible combinations of minds in a (relatively) short period of time. It exposes you to intimate relationship with types of women you would otherwise never meet, instead of just the types of women you know and like (even though they may be very bad for you).

Anecdotal Example: whenever I sarge more actively, I begin to get into casual, short term relationships. These will be perfectly hot girls I am able to close same-night, or 2nd day. We have perfectly decent (though occasionally pedestrian) sex, and the women gradually become more and more attracted to me (as a result of the repeated episodes of sex). Eventually, one of us will get bored of the other, and stop returning phone calls. These relationships or mini-relationships or fuck-buddy arrangements, you might say, are characterized by

1. Lack of jealousy and commitment
2. Lack of passionate or emotionally heated highs (and accompanying lows)
3. Featureless conclusions (whether they be a gradual titration of contact or a fast, clean break as abrupt as the beginning)

When I sarge less actively, I still have women around — but the relationships that result are fewer, farther between, deeper and more intense. They are typically also slower to start, but feature much greater chemistry, including mind-blowing sexual escapades, higher and more intense levels of attraction, and tumultuous conclusions. In contrast to the “casual” category above that results from sarging, my “natural” relationships are characterized by:

1. High levels of jealousy and commitment
2. High levels of passion and a full range of emotional highs and lows
3. Storied and tumultuous endings (usually gradual and “messy”, complex, or otherwise complicated, but sometimes also devastatingly final).

Now, I’m not saying my experience has to be everyone’s; but like all generalizations, this one is no less useful for its myopic focus.

The general idea I’m advancing is that the difference between natural attraction and created attraction matters, even if your relationships don’t look exactly like mine as presented in these examples.

What is Attraction? Natural vs Created
Now we’re hitting pay dirt; what follows is the distinction that makes the difference.

Attraction is just a word which expresses an answer to the question, “How well do your keys fit my locks?”

Natural attraction is a dowsing rod for finding our buried patterns, for finding the people who will allow us to most perfectly express, play out, and otherwise confront our existing imperfections. Unless you are deliberate about, 100% of the longer-term relationships you get in will come about via this method.

Created attraction is what pick up artists become masters of; it is a matter of evaluating the woman to determine the appropriate key-shapes, and then jamming custom-made keys into those holes, much the way a safecracker will carefully listen for the telltale clicks of tension in the tumblers while divining the appropriate combination sequence that will yield the gold.

The art and science of leveraging created attraction to create new relationships with new women that you otherwise would not have been able to is, for me, where pickup becomes a supremely healthy, even therapeutic, pursuit.

Related Articles:

• Sex, Validation and Self-Concept
• The Power of Emotional Communication
• Laying the Groundwork for Harem
• Why Pickup is Such a Big Deal
• Why You Should 'Sarge'