HealthyGamerGG - "I'll be alone forever"

Episode Date: February 24, 2024

In this episode, Dr. K breaks down a post from the HealthyGamerGG subreddit from an individual who is worried that their trauma from their past experiences will hold them back forever. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The world moves fast. Your work day? Even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work. Built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use,

helping you quickly write, analyze, create, and summarize. So you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more at Microsoft.com slash M365 Copilot. This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. Ready to refresh your wardrobe, Nordstrom has all the latest styles for spring, from elevated dresses and denim

to stand out tops and accessories. Discover the trends and essentials you'll reach for again and again. We've got brands you love like Waif, Princess Polly, Mango, Adidas, and favorite daughter. Plus free shipping, free returns, and quick order pickup make updating your closet effortless.

Shop in stores at Nordstrom.com or download our app. You have this idea of, oh my God, like this relationship with this beautiful. What a beautiful relationship. And then some unlucky human being has to pick up that mantle. Some unlucky human being with flaws is now trying to interact with you. But you're not interacting with them because you have a preconceived idea of what the relationship should be. Since I was in my early teens, sex, dating, and relationships were the most important thing for me. However, despite that fact, somehow the years passed me by and I barely had any experiences.

All the ones I did have were really negative and hurt me. Now, almost every time the topic comes up, in my life, I feel a sort of pulling pain in the middle of my chest that is overwhelming. And oh boy, does it come up regularly? It's in the movies, books, general pop culture, and just pretty much everywhere. My friends talk about the tons of experiences they had. no, they are not lying all the time. I'm 23 and I now feel like nothing I can experience in the future will be able to outweigh the pain that I already experienced. I just can't imagine anything that would justify the mental agony I went through so far, which might seem theatrical to some people,

but it is the way that I feel. Maybe I'm just a sensitive person. The disappointment with myself for failing at the thing that has always been the most important to me is sometimes crushing me. I'd say I break down because of it twice per month. I've been in therapy for a year now. Okay, strong work, hot G23. I mean that. It can feel like a vicious cycle where you're kind of stuck, or actually not a vicious cycle, more like you get trapped, you fall behind, and then you can't ever fix things. So we're going to start by taking some notes, okay, because there's a lot of things to understand here. So I'm going to start with this concept of something called the Peter principle. And the Peter principle is this kind of principle from management that says that everyone,

rises to the level of their incompetence. Now, this can be kind of confusing, but let's understand this. So let's say I work at a job and I excel at job number one. Then what happens? I get promoted to the next tier. And then I excel at the next tier. And then I get promoted to the next tier. And now I just do an average job, right?

This is equivocal. So I do not excel, at which point I stay over here. So instead of having me occupy a job where I have excellent performance, I'm occupying a place where I have mediocre performance. So this is kind of an interesting observation that they made in the world of business, that basically, like, if you look at a company that has 500 employees, everyone is like operating at a mediocre level because they've been promoted out of their best skill set. Now, you all may say, what does this have to do with this case?

So here's kind of a weird kind of perspective, right? So if you have a problem and you are stuck with that problem for a long period of time and you think you understand the problem, then chances are you actually don't understand the problem because the problems that you correctly understand are the ones that you fix. And the ones that you incorrectly understand will stay unfixable, right?

Does that kind of make sense? So sometimes what happens is people will have a problem for like 10 years, and they'll say this is an unfixable problem because it's been a problem for 10 years. But the reason it's been unfixable is because you've misunderstood it, which actually means,

it is quite possible to fix it. So one way to kind of think about this in the field of medicine is let's say I have a diagnosis, DX1, and then DX1 has three treatment options. It has T1, T2, T3, right? And let's say treatment one doesn't work, treatment two doesn't work, treatment three doesn't work. And then you conclude that DX1 is unsolvable.

Uncurable, unfixable. But it turns out that what you really, need to do to fix this problem is recognize that this is a different diagnosis. You had the wrong diagnosis. And it turns out that you do T1 over here and then this fixes the problem. This happens all the time in medicine. This is why a lot of people think that medicine is about treatment. Medicine is not just about treatment. That's only half of it. Half of our training is in diagnosing the problem correctly. And so what I tend to see is people will have challenges like this, which I'm not saying these challenges aren't real. They are real. And there's a lot that we're going to discover here that is actually quite

logical. It's not illogical at all. It's 100% logical. But just because it's logical doesn't mean that it is correct. It just means that it is correct in a form. So let's understand this, okay? Hey, y'all, if you're interested in applying some of the principles that we share to actually create change in your life, check out Dr. Kay's Guide to Mental Health. It combines over two decades of my experience of both being a monk and a psychiatrist and distills all of the most important things I've learned into a choose-your-own-adventure format. So check out the link in the bio and start your journey today. Mistake number one, since I was in my early teens, dating and relationships were the most important thing for me. However, despite that fact, this is the first thing to understand.

Importance and success. Because as we will discover, something being really, really important to you makes it much harder to succeed, not much easier. Years passed by and I barely had any experiences. All the ones I did have were really negative and hurt me. Lots or not some, lots, let's use the word all. All experiences were bad. Hurtful. Okay. Now, almost every time the topic comes up, I feel a pulling pain in the middle of my chest that is really overwhelming. My friends talk about a ton of experiences. I'm 23, and I feel like nothing I can experience in the future will ever outweigh what I've already experienced. Okay. Now, people may look at this and they may say, oh my God, this person has lost all hope. They are wrong. No, they are not wrong.

They're not wrong at all. If you are someone who has suffered a lot and you think that nothing can make it better, you may be surprised how right you are, but don't give up hope. I just can't imagine anything that would justify the mental agony I went through so far, and you are correct. Justify the mental agony, okay? Which might see theatrical, maybe I'm a sensitive person. Don't do that.

Okay, we're going to touch on this. The disappointment with myself for failing at the thing that had always been the most important to me is sometimes crushing me. Ah, hold on a second, hold on a second, hold on a second. Now we begin to see. Okay, so here's the interesting thing. Here's the first thing that I'm going to point out. So because this is the most important thing for you, failing at it is crushing.

So this is very important to understand. Okay, now we're going to get to it. So here are our problems. Importance and success, number one. So a lot of people assume that if something is really important to you, it makes it easier to be successful. But actually, especially with dating, having it be. of hyper importance is one of the most negative things you can do for your chances for success. So I'll give you all, this isn't just dating. This is other things as well. Oh my God. I'm terrified.

I have to do well on this exam. I have to do well on this exam. This exam is, I have to do good. I have to do good. I have to do good. I'm so stressed out about it. I don't sleep. I study for eight hours and I think to myself, oh my God, this isn't enough. Other people know more than me. It has to be successful. It has to be successful. I panic myself. Am I doing well? Did I get that right? Did I get that wrong? I have no confidence in my ability. I second guess all of my answers on the test, and I end up getting a C plus. The importance of a thing does not necessarily improve its chances of success. And now we see a second problem when something is really important to you, okay? Which is that not only do you have the original, let's call it a failure, okay? But now since you failed at something, so there's just the failure itself, let's say I wasn't able to date. Okay, that's bad. But if this is the most important to me, then what I have it,

is a second part of crushing defeat that I've failed at the thing that is the most important to me. That is actually independent of the failure to date. Does that make sense? So there are two injuries here. Number one is failure to date. And number two is crushing defeat because number one. Okay. So I know this sounds insane. But one thing you can do in this situation is start to have this be less important to you. And we'll talk about what that is. Okay. So I'll give you all like, then people will say, but I'm, aren't I allowed to want what I want? This is important to me. And like, this is how I am. And I love it so much. But hold on. So back up a second. Okay. So a couple of things. So I learned this the easy way. So I got super lucky. Right. I decided to become a monk. So I had years and years of like,

I'd want to say five years of just pathetic attempts to date. And people will say, oh my God, five years, that's nothing. I've had 20 years. And it's not the number of years that you have. And this is kind of what I discovered is that there is a different way to do it. If I kept operating the same way I had operated, I would have gone 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. Right? A broken clock may be right twice a day, but it's wrong at all the other times.

So this is how we need to approach dating. So basically what I did is decided to become a monk. And then I no longer, I gave up the importance of dating. This is not for me. And paradoxically, this helped me become more attractive. Because I was so caught up in my own stuff that it was like stressing people out and I wasn't my best self and all this other stuff that people talk about in dating. So let's talk a little bit about how to make dating less important. Now, the first thing that's going to happen is if I talk about making dating less important, there is going to be a toy.

of disagreement. No, Dr. K, it's the most important. How dare you tell me to value? Oh, my God. This is important to me. It's all I care about. Yeah, so let's understand what happens. So when you have very little experience dating and you care a lot about dating, what happens in your mind? So you start to build up fantasies, right? So how does the mind know when you say this is the most important thing to you? So let's understand this for a second. Okay. We'll get to. how to incorporate important. So let's just understand this. If someone has no experience with dating and they say getting late is the most important thing to me. Having a relationship is the most important thing to me. What is it that's important to you? Like literally, what is it? It's the

relationship. But have you ever had a relationship? How can you value something that you have no knowledge of? Just think about it for a second. Right. So if someone's like, oh yeah, like I have dreams to be an Olympic athlete, like I have dreams to be an Olympic athlete. It's everything in the world to me. And so I recently saw this interesting article that the day after Michael Phelps, I think, won like four gold medals or something when the Olympics was over. He wakes up the next day and he's suicidal. This guy's crazy. So the first thing to understand is that if dating and relationships are very and very, the most important, oh, I want love. This is what I need to be fulfilled.

I have this ache in my heart. I've been there, right? I had it too. So if you're, just think about this, okay? So if this is really important to you, what is it that your mind thinks this is? And what tends to happen when we value something that we have no experience over is we construct a fantasy. And the moment that you construct a fantasy, you have really set yourself up for a lot of problems. Because the reality will be different from it.

So instead of even like a neutral experience, so now we'll get to a couple of things, okay? So once I construct a fantasy, let's say that this is a relationship is the most important thing to me. There are 100, right? And then I have a real experience, which is normal, which is a 50. But what do I see? I see a minus 50. Now, if you're someone who does this, your mind will rebel against this idea 100%.

No, Dr. K, you don't understand my situation. My situation is different. But let's just take a step back and I'll ask you, forget about your situation. Let's just understand the general principle. When you have no experience of something, how on earth can you value it? Or you have very little experience of it.

How do you understand its accurate value? And so the problem is we create all of these fantasies. really, really important to us. And when something becomes important to us, we run into all kinds of problems because this is an average normal experience, which looks like a minus 50 in your book. So you're starting, you're opening the door to negative bias. You're also opening the door to stress, which is going to make you less attractive. This episode is brought to you by CarMax.

Want to buy a car the easy way? Start at CarMax. Want to browse with confidence? Get prequalified with no impact on your credit score and shop within your budget. from luxury to family rides. CarMax has options for almost every price range, including over 25,000 cars under $25,000. Want to get started?

Head to CarMax.com for details and get pre-qualified today. Want to drive? CarMax. You are looking for something in particular instead of letting relationships be organic. And since I decided to become a monk, all of my romantic interactions, have been like relatively organic, right? So this is what tends to happen when you have a lot of people, when you see these people out there who are like, I don't understand how this person keeps on finding

relationships and like where they're meeting people, like they just seem to be so good at it. And I think that there is a natural organicness to relationships. That's how human being, that's how human relationships are designed to evolve. And once you start adding importance and stress to the relationship, it really sabotages your chances. And there's one other source of sabotage that importance in a relationship causes. Okay. So the more important you think it is, the worse off it is. There's one other person that this really harms. And that is your prospective partner. So when a relationship is the most important thing to you, oh my God, this is what they mean to me. They mean that there's love and there's commitment. And there's like someone on your team all the time, someone there for you

whenever you need it. And then you have this idea of, oh my God, like this relationship with this beautiful. What a beautiful relationship. And then some unlucky human being has to pick up that mantle. Some unlucky human being with flaws is now trying to interact with you. But you're not interacting with them because you have a preconceived idea of what the relationship should be. This is what I want. I need all of these things from related. And then some human, just a human, just a person is like, I don't know how to handle this. Like, I can't make this person happy. Or like, this is weird. So they feel all of that pressure and it pushes them away. So paradoxically, the first thing that you need to do, if relationships are the most important thing in the world to you, is make them less important.

Secondly, if you're like, I don't want to do that, right? If you're so clinging to that, that you cannot change that, then examine that for a moment. And then the second thing that you can do, even if you don't want to make it so important to you, if you don't want to make it less important, There are other things that you can do, which is observe these three things that I've told you. So when you make a relationship super important to you, what do you construct in your mind? How does your fantastical construction affect your interpretation of real experiences? Chances are it'll be disappointing. How does it affect your stress level when you try to engage in this?

Because relationships are supposed to be fun, right? That's the whole point. is everyone's like laughing and having sex and cuddling and maybe getting married and going on vacation and finishing each other's sandwiches. This is what a relationship is supposed to be. That's why you want it so much. But what is it like for you? Right?

So as you bring that stress to the table, you're going to shoot yourself in the foot. Not saying it's easy. I'm just saying that this is a very common problem where people will make relationships so important to them and then they end up shooting themselves in the foot. Let's look at number two. How to make relationships less than first. So now let's understand this, okay? If you want to make relationships less important, here's what you got to do. Number one, just notice what this relationship being so important to you means.

And so just ask yourself, okay, if this is important to me, what does it mean to be in a relationship? Like, what is the significance of being in relationship? And also, like, what does it, who am I if I'm in a relationship? And then like, who am I not unless I'm in a relationship? So how do you see yourself if you are in a relationship? you are in a relationship or not in a relationship, right? And that's when, like, we'll start to see that there's a lot of stuff that you attach. So you need to just look at that kind of stuff, okay? What is the, what do I think a relationship is? And then once you have it, once you answer that question,

then ask yourself, where did I get this idea? And I'm not saying that the idea is going to be wholly fictional, because even our fictional representations are rooted in, in reality. But you need to just, like, look at what your mind is doing. If you're so caught up in relationships, Right? And then the last thing, this is what's really important. So if something is important to you, I don't know if this makes sense, but for people who are the important relationships are so important to them, there is an ache or a hunger. And this ache and hunger is so profound. This is why you can't make relationships less important for you. Because on some level, you are starving. You're hungry. There's something deep down inside you that is unfulfilled. And the thought of having that thing unfulfilled,

for the rest of your life. If you decrease the value of relationships, oh my God, it'll be unfulfilled for the rest of my life. That hunger will always be there. That hunger is unbearable. This is why it's impossible to make them less important. Because you have that ache, you have that hunger. And to really understand where does this come from?

And this is one of the weird things that I found as a psychiatrist is that oftentimes we look at these things like trauma. We say, oh, my God, like this sounds like a case of trauma. Like, this person must have been hurt very deeply when they were used. young. And they look back at their lives and they think to themselves, okay, I never had anything like that. There's no smoking gun in my childhood. My parents were pretty chill. They were pretty loving. They're still together. I don't know where this hunger comes from. And so sometimes I will explore the concept of past lives with people like my patients, right? And there's all kind,

like, who knows where it comes from? Maybe it doesn't come from this life. I'm not saying their past lives are real or things like that. I think there's therapeutic value to operating in whatever frame a patient considers helpful. Right? So if they believe in God, we talk about God. If they don't believe in God, we don't talk about God. It depends on the patient. But for you, just because you can't find the answers, expand your horizon a little bit, right?

It comes from somewhere. All things come from somewhere. Nothing is random in the world. Cause and effect. So really explore that hunger, because this is going to be what makes it really hard. And if you do these four things, this is going to be the first step

to really understanding how to make relationships less important for you. Because as it turns out, relationships being important may actually sabotage your chances of success. And we see this a ton in our coaching program. So we've had about 12,000 or 15,000 people go through it now. And like a lot of times they'll come in with some problem that they think is really, really huge.

And then what the coaches are really good at is like helping them understand, okay, wait, the way that you are playing the game is actually what's creating the result. It's not that the game is rigged. It's that you're misplaying. You make the same mistake over and over and over again. And then somehow as like they understand this stuff, then they like start to get better. And then suddenly they're like in relationships. It's weird.

We've seen it a ton. Okay. And these are like people from our community, right? So this isn't just like some other theoretical fictitious person who spends more time on LinkedIn than on Reddit or Twitch or YouTube or whatever. So like this is like us. Okay. So really you have to understand what strategy you're using to play the game. And then you'll be surprised that if you can reduce the importance of the relationship,

It frees you up more and it makes it more accessible. But if you're approaching it from a place of stress with high expectations and low self-worth, this is a recipe for disaster. Let's just think about it, right? If I were to tell you, okay, hey, like this person wants to get in a relationship, oh, tell me about the person. Well, they have super high expectations. They have fantastical ideas about what a relationship should be like. They have super low self-esteem.

They're stressed out a ton about relationships. And they feel a crushing sadness every two weeks. weeks that is crippling for them. How optimistic would you be? Right? And some of these things are in your control. Notice I didn't say, I'm not disputing that this person had negative experiences. All the ones I did have were really negative and hurt me. We'll get to that in a second. Let's talk about it. Let's forget about it a second. Let's talk about now. So this is kind of bizarre. But when you really want a relationship, why is it that what little experience you do have is so painful and sucks, right? That's what we see. Is that like, oh my God, like,

All the experience I've had are hard. So we can talk about something like cognitive bias if you all really want to. There may be some degree of cognitive bias here. There's good evidence of that. But here's what tends to happen. When you are desperate for a relationship and you feel like you have low self-esteem, you do a very, very interesting psychological thing, which is that you remove all of the healthy relationship possibilities

from the equation before you even get started. You discount all the people that would lead to a good. good relationship. So I'll give you all a really interesting example for this. When I graduated from college, so I was a fifth year senior, right, finished with a 2.5 GPA. I applied for research positions because I had a degree in neurobiology. I applied to 131 research positions and I got rejected from all of them except for one. The one research position I ended up getting was at Harvard Medical School's OSHA research center. And I was really surprised because I was like, holy crap, I applied to University of Texas, San Antonio, and like Texas Tech University for research positions.

And I wind up going to interview at Harvard. And then I kind of asked a couple months later, I was like, how did I get this job? And they were like, you were the only one that applied. I was like, what? So there is a glut of mediocrity. What happens with people is they tend to undershoot where they actually are. So you have to understand this, okay? If you have low self-esteem, do you accurately

gauge what your worth is. Of course not. That's the whole point. It's low self-esteem. Like, you think it's accurate, but you think a thousand people have low self-esteem, are they accurately judging where they are? No, they're not. So then what happens is you have the possibility of a relationship with someone. And I see this a lot, especially in the people I work with, because the people I work where they're all broken. So they look at someone on a dating app and they're like, that person isn't broken enough. That person wouldn't ever want to date me. Oh, my God, you're so telepathic? My God, you know this person so well. You know what preferences are, you know what they're attracted to. No, but they put something in my dating,

in their dating profile that I don't fit. Well, like, that's a little bit silly because the only things we put in dating profiles are things that don't relate to the success of a relationship. I know that sounded weird. It's all rephrase. So dating profiles are restricted with the kind of information that you can put. And do dating profiles capture the actual variables that lead to successful relationships? No, they don't. Right? There's all kinds of variables that lead to successful relationships, like shared emotional experience the first time you meet. That's not, you can't put that on a dating app, right? Everyone assumes that it's different.

There's a shared religion and everybody who wants like, you know, I want to be a sugar, daddy or I want to be a sugar baby and somebody else wants to be a sugar mama. And like as long as the babies and the mamas and the daddies all get together, everybody's happy. But that's not actually what leads to relationships. So the first thing is when we have low self-esteem, when we think that, oh my God, this is like, I'm not good at this. The biggest mistake that we make is we remove all the people that are too good for us.

And then we're left with all the people who are a little bit busted. And then no wonder we have negative experiences, right? Because you're selecting the one person that feels safe to you, which is someone who is unable to have a healthy relationship. So we see this pattern. It's been very well studied in trauma. So when you have children who are abused, they will date people who are abusive. Why? What's going on there?

It's because when someone, when there's someone who's not abusive, the person gets so confused, they'd never consider dating them in the first place because it's weird. That person's too good for me. Or they get scared by the lack of abuse. When is the other shoe going to drop? This person is being really nice. That must mean that they're going to be really nasty to me later. And you may say, but Dr. K, why would you think that? Just think about it for a second, right? In someone, if you're a child who grows up in an abusive household, usually your parents are not all nasty. They're humans, which means that they also experience guilt. So on one day, you're abused and, And on the next day, your parent is like, I'm so sorry, here's a PS5. Let me make it up to you. And then a few months later, they start drinking again. The abuse starts. They feel guilty. They're 30 days sober. The gifts start coming.

And so what does this person start to understand about gifts? Holy crap. They're tied with abuse. And so then you have a healthy partner who starts giving you gifts. And you're like, oh shit, I better run. Because there's another aspect of this, if you struggled with abuse, is that when you meet someone that you really, really like, who is not abusive, but the thought of this one good person that you really believe you could love and could really be the one who is not abusive,

the thought of that person one day becoming abusive is so scary that you just retreat from the relationship. I can't afford to lose all hope because if this person turns out bad, if this good apple turns into a bad apple, then all of my hope is lost. So that you leave. Let me preserve the idea of a good apple out there. And so part of the reason that we have such negative experiences, if you have low self-esteem, who are you going to feel comfortable engaging in romantic relationships with, asking out on dates? Right. So then we have this real problem where, of course, your experiences are negative, but that's because of who you're selecting. And then people may say, but I have this idea like,

but I fell in love. Oh my God, I fell in love, right? So this is the fantasy again. Falling in love is the stupidest thing you can do. It's like the whole point is that the biology of your system doesn't give shit about the long. term consequences and whether this is going to be emotionally good or emotionally bad. It doesn't care. That's how we're wired. We're wired to think about like ignore the consequences literally. Our brain is wired to like, oh my god, I'm in love. I guess I better shut off all the parts of my brain that allow me to calculate risks. Oh my god, I'm in love. Oh yeah, all those red flags. They're just personality quirks. It's just a phase. I can I can fix him. I can fix her. I can turn, with my help, oh my goodness, they will turn into such a delicious peach pie.

Oh my God. We start to ignore all these things. And so this is why we have negative experiences. And so this is also why people say, work on yourself before you start dating. Now, if only that worked, the sad truth of the matter, and we know this from studies on attachment theory, is that oftentimes if you're so busted and you have low self-esteem, you can't necessarily fix that on your own. I mean, a lot of people do, and I think it's a worthwhile endeavor for you to try to fix it on your own. But the sad truth of the matter is that we know from, you know, lots of research on psychotherapy and stuff like that, that like oftentimes we need corrective emotional experiences to heal that trauma. And those corrective emotional experiences are provided by other human beings.

And this is something that we don't like to say, especially in the West, because we have this culture of independence. I should be able to do it myself. But like, that's not how human beings were wired. We were wired as a tribe, right? It's a multiplayer game. You can't solo all the content. And now people are going to be like, okay, but does that mean I'm screwed? Because now I have to rely on other people and I have to work on myself. Like, I don't understand. What are you telling me to do? Doc, I'm telling you it's a slow process. Understand the nuances of it. You can't just work on yourself, but you should work on yourself and also recognize your relationship patterns. Right? How is it that I wind up in the same place over and over and over again? And whatever answer your mind,

comes up with, that is wrong. If it is an answer that it is already given you, it is wrong. It must be a new answer. This is the nature of diagnosis and treatment. If you have one diagnosis and all three treatments have failed, consider a second diagnosis, right? And this is what we see. So I've worked with people who are in cells and they have this belief that because their jaw is whatever, they will never have a date. It's impossible for them to find love. And they all believe this. And this is where you have to be super careful because if you have a diagnosis that is unactionable, you're screwed, right? And we have those in medicine. We have things like stage four metastatic cancer. We have secondary, progressive, multiple sclerosis. We have ALS. Right? We have stroke where like you lose a chunk of the brain and it doesn't really come back. Like brain doesn't regenerate much. But usually with some of these problems that we see a lot with dating, a lot of these are very correctable. Because the problem is not actually in the world. is in the way that you perceive and interact with the world. And that can change. We know, for example, that people who have borderline personality disorder, probably about 90% of them will get better within a

decade. The specific numbers vary depending on the study or whatever. But a big part of that can be a single healthy relationship for two years leads to 50% of people being in remission from BPD. So I know that everyone's like, just work on yourself. You can't fix yourself first and then engage in relationship. It's great. Give it a shot, by all means. But if it doesn't work, it's not like you have to fix yourself first and then enter a relationship. The two need to be concurrent, probably. And the most important thing is pay attention to your patterns that got you here in the first place. So we talked about the importance and success. We also talk about all experiences were hurtful, right? Now it's talking about pulling pain and nothing will make it better. So when we have negative emotional

experiences, this emotion gets stored in the body and in the mind. And we tend to have these physical sensations. So what tends to happen is that anytime we have overwhelming negative stuff, our brain and body are like, we can't deal with this. So we push it down. We wall it off behind psychological defense mechanisms. We'll do things like self-medicate with substances, with, you know, video games, porn, whatever. And then all those emotions get shoved to the side. And then we enter this kind of thinking that nothing will make it better and nothing will justify the mental agony. And this is actually 100% logical because thus far, what have you experienced that would make this pain worthwhile?

Nothing. So you have no frame of reference, right? All you've been taking is bitter medicine every day. And you're like, I can't imagine any situation in which I would ever want to put anything into my mouth. Because all I'm eating is bitter medicine every single day. And it's like, yeah, you've never tasted a mango or a BLT or whatever. Like it would make sense that you've never had an experience that would make it, nothing

will make it worthwhile. Right? So if you've never had that experience, of course nothing is going to make it worthwhile. That doesn't mean that nothing is theoretically out there. And this is another bias of the mind that we have to be careful about. The mind operates under the assumption that my experiences are mirrors of objective reality. But that's not true, right? Your mind just constructs whatever reality it's got.

And that's the best it kind of does. And so it is okay for you to think this way. And just because you think that way, because all of your experiences up to the age of 23, have made it so that nothing is worth the pain. So be it. But that's just all the experiences up to 23. Arguably, you've got about 60 years left, right? So you've got, let's say you started puberty around 14. So you've been doing this for, let's say, a decade. And you've got six of those left.

And so things can change. So this is where we strongly recommend things like, you know, emotional processing. And this person is in therapy, which can be very helpful. But I'd strongly recommend that if y'all are in therapy and you have a problem like this, like this is what you work on in therapy. I used to think this was obvious until I realized that a lot of people don't, it's not obvious, actually. That when you are in therapy, you are working on something. And what a lot of patients don't realize is you can pick what that is.

It is your therapist's job to fix what you want. And then a lot of people may be like, but oh my God, can they fix me? Yeah, like that's our job. Like, that's what we're there to do. If someone comes in and says, hey, I've got OCD and I wash my hands 15 times a day and my hands, I keep on getting infections. The therapist's job is to help you with that. Or if it's something like this, their job is to help you deal with this pulling pain in your chest so you don't have to walk around with it all the day long. So a lot of people will go into therapy and then like their therapist does like ask some weird open-ended question and then you just talk about you, you think you're supposed to be, you're doing what you're supposed to be doing in therapy instead of actually doing what you want to do in therapy.

Go and do what you want to do. And then the last thing that you have to be super careful about. This is the most devastating thing. Okay. So sometimes when all this negative stuff happens, we end up with this sentence. Out of everything in this post, this is the most damaging thing.

So when we go through life, we have experiences. And this part of our brain called the default mode network takes these individual experiences and makes a conclusion about me. I'm just a sensitive person. So when I was growing up, for example,

I thought I was unathletic. And how did I arrive at that conclusion? Well, I was last to be picked on the basketball team. I was last to be picked on the football team. I was last to be picked for anything. And I was never the winner of any sports contest. I never came in first when we were running.

And so I concluded, oh, I'm not bad at basketball. I'm not bad at this. I'm not bad. I am unathletic. So then what happens is once I start to think, oh my God, I am unathletic, then opportunities arose later in life where they were like, hey, do you want to do this thing? And I was like, nah, I'm not athletic. It's not for me.

It's not who I am. And so then what happened is I stopped engaging in athletic activities, which then reinforced the idea that I'm on athletic. Because everybody else is doing athletic stuff and now I'm just playing video games all day. I'm on athletic. Now, what's wrong about this? Maybe I was on athletic. No, I came to an incorrect conclusion. I was a six-year-old competing against seven-year-olds or even eight-year-olds. That's why I was last. It wasn't that I was unathletic. It was the deck was stacked against me. I was placed into a physical bracket where people had were like physically larger and faster and more coordinated. And by the way, I had a year of practice over me, right? So then we're in like big trouble.

So the one thing you've got to be super careful about if you are in this dating hellscape is be careful about what conclusions your mind draws about you. And you will have what appears to be the right evidence at the time to form that conclusion. Don't misunderstand this. I'm not saying that you're not logical. It's that you have incomplete information. So it was also a logical conclusion for a five-year-old think like, okay, like I'm on athletic because I suck at all this, clearly. But I didn't have the frame of mind to think,

oh, like I didn't think to myself, how much older are these kids, right? Maybe that has something to do with it. So be super careful about making meta-level conclusions about your identity from dating because chances are they're not correct. Doesn't mean that they're not logical. They're just incomplete. So if we had taken you and put you in a different circumstance or strengthen your skills in some sort of way or sent you to therapy or whatever else, it's very possible that you would be in a different scenario right now. And all of those actions can still be taken. And then the last thing that I'll talk about is, you know, the disappointment with myself for failing at the thing that had always been the most important to me. So this is the problem of two arrows. This is the problem of like, okay, not only do I have a setback in life, but now I am beating myself up because I had a setback in life. And so now you have two things to overcome.

So I know it can sound really, really challenging that if you've been in this situation where you can't recover from your terrible dating experience. I'm not disputing that your experience has been terrible. I'm not saying that things aren't hard. I'm not saying that the mental agony you've experienced is false in any way, shape, or form. But my consistent experience working with people from all walks of life. And this includes people who are in prison, people who are homeless, and people were billionaires. I've seen the whole spectrum. And what I found, the one thing that we fail to understand, the one most common mistake that human beings make is that they do not understand how their actions shape the world that they live in.

And this becomes even more of a problem because as you stop believing that your actions shape the world, right? It's kind of like this external idea of, okay, everything is determined for me. Then you give up on your actions actually having any sort of impact. And then you stop, you start ignoring your actions. And once you start ignoring your actions, you ignore the one thing that can actually fix things for you. So look at the way that you're playing the game. Really ask yourself, question yourself, how can I do this differently? And what the real thing that's really fascinating is it's not, and then people will go post online. They'll be like, what should I do? No, you need to look at your thought process. Even before you post,

look at all of the assumptions that you have and how your mind arrives at those conclusions. Because posting things online is a terrible way to get advice. And why is that? It's because what you post is going to be biased by your mind. You're not going to get some objective thing. If you guys know what I'm talking about, you go to some, you know, political subreddit or gendered subreddit and it's just like it's an echo chamber. And people post one way. No one ever says like, hey, maybe you're making a mistake here. It's always like, oh my God, like everyone else is terrible and you should break up with them right away.

Like this is a huge red flag. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At first citizens bank, we're fit for your ambitions, whatever shape they may take. Whether you're planning for today or tomorrow, we've got the flexibility and know-how to help you reach your goals. Because we're built for what you're building. First Citizens Bank, fit for your ambition. Learn more at firstcitizens.com slash ambition.