Modern Wisdom - #310 - Adam Lane Smith - 15 Harsh Psychology Truths

Episode Date: April 19, 2021

Adam Lane Smith is a psychotherapist an author. Humans are not transparent to ourselves. We are complex creatures who operate on ancient programming. Having spent years and years as a practicing psychotherapist for men, women and couples, Adam has come to learn some insights about us which he put into an epic Twitter thread and that's what we go through today. Expect to learn why women are disgusted when they learn how the male sex drive works, why having an asshole for a child is your fault, why performative sex stops a woman from orgasming, why depressed men probably don't need medication, the truth about overcoming sexual trauma, how your brain stops you from having sex with your sister and much more... Sponsors: Get 10% discount on your first month from BetterHelp at https://betterhelp.com/modernwisdom (discount automatically applied) Get perfect teeth 70% cheaper than other invisible aligners from DW Aligners at http://dwaligners.co.uk/modernwisdom  Extra Stuff: Check out Adam's original Twitter Thread - https://twitter.com/TheBrometheus/status/1381710882225328135 Check out Adam's Website - https://adamlanesmith.com/  Buy How To Get A Girlfriend - https://gumroad.com/l/htgagf  Get my free Ultimate Life Hacks List to 10x your daily productivity → https://chriswillx.com/lifehacks/ To support me on Patreon (thank you): https://www.patreon.com/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi friends, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Adam Lane Smith. He's a psychotherapist and an author and we are talking about 15 harsh psychology truths. Humans are not transparent to ourselves, we're complex creatures who operate on ancient programming. Having spent years and years as a practicing psychotherapist for men, women and couples, Adam has come to learn some insights about us, which he put into an epic Twitter thread. And that's what we go through today. So, expect to learn why women are disgusted when they learn how the male sex drive works, why having an asshole for a child is your fault, why performative sex stops a woman from orgasming, why depressed men probably don't need medication, The truth about overcoming sexual trauma. How your brain stops you from having sex with your sister and much more. Most of the time, the internet is a cesspool where people just call each other names. But every so often on social media, I stumble

across something like Adam's awesome Twitter thread. I reach out to him and this episode is so good. It is uncomfortable. There are things in here that you don't want to know, but not knowing them doesn't make life any better, and in fact knowing them can allow you to account for them and overcome them. You've also got a great opportunity to practice a little bit of mindfulness as you're listening to this, and as different emotions come up while you're hearing all of the harsh truths, you can ask, where's this coming from? Why is it that this particular insight about human nature makes me feel this way? Is there something that maybe I need to look at, but maybe this is an identifier that I've got some self-work to do around this particular area, or that particular area? I am, I loved this episode, even though it is,

uh, it does make you cringe at times, but these insights around human nature, I think are endlessly fascinating. And I really hope that you enjoyed them as well. But now it's time to learn some harsh psychology truths with Adam Lane Smith. Welcome to the show. Thank you for having me. What makes you a voice of authority on harsh psychology truths? Well, I've spent a lot of time around people who are messed up. No, actually, I am a licensed psychotherapist in the United States. Nothing I'm going to say is going to be any health care advice, but I've been practicing for years and years. I've worked in correctional settings. I've worked with inmates in for the death penalty for severe crimes, I've worked in low income, clinics, treating families that no one else is going to treat. I got a lot of the most severe cases put on my plate. My specialty is post-traumatic stress disorder and attachment theory, especially the way those two things intercede. So when I talk about psychology true, that's what I'm speaking to as my personal experience. It just happens to be that lots of the truths you've learned are also harsh.

Unfortunately, yes. The truth can be harsh when you hear it. It's good to use it, but it can be harsh to burst people's bubble. You are going to use the word attachment a lot. So the way that this came about, you've posted a fantastic Twitter thread, which will be linked in the show notes below and everyone can go and see 10 times the amount of harsh truths that we're going to get through in this episode. But one of the words that's going to come up a lot is attachment. Can we define our terms before we get started? What is attachment? Absolutely. That was a question I got a lot during that thread. Attachment is the way that two human beings securely connect to each other.

It's the belief that someone will care for you, that someone will put up with you, that someone genuinely wants to help you, and that if you make a mistake, the other person's going to give you an opportunity to correct that mistake. It's the belief that your relationships are secure enough that they can't be just blown up by accident, and that other people aren't trying to exploit you. Healthy attachment is built on love, it's built on mutual sharing, and it's built on understanding. So if I hurt you, you're going to give me an opportunity to say, Adam, that really hurt me. You know, this is what I need from you going forward so we can continue that relationship.

And we're not trying to exploit each other and get everything out of each other that we can. We're trying to go forward so that both of us are benefiting mutually. Even if we over give to the other person, that's fine because we trust they'll do the same for us. Someone with an attachment issue, the fundamental belief underlying that is that they are not worthy of love, that there is something deeply wrong with them deep down on the inside, and that everyone else can see it But they have no idea what it is so they can never let that out They can never share anything inside of them with other people and they're just going to be stuck in a series of trying to earn Love from other people earn approval from other people and earn so much that that other person will read their mind

Figure out what they need and then do it out of gratitude. Without ever learning who you really are on the inside. That's detachment. That's what I call detachment. It's not something that's very well studied. There's very few experts doing it. I'm one of the few people in the United States really covering this topic. Another one is Dr. Robert Glover. He's a genius surpassing my work, but it's something that needs to be studied because this attachment underlies so much of mental health. And we treat mental health from the disease model more than we do from a symptomology model. So instead of looking at depression and saying this person has depression, that's a disease,

we need to fix the disease. I would look at depression and say, what is that growing out of? What purpose does that serve and what's the underlying issue? In my case, it's almost always attachment. Got you. That's interesting. Yes, we're going to go through attachment a lot. So let's get into it.

We can do the first one. I've curated a list of some of my favorites from that tweet list, and we're going to get through as many as we can. And like I say, if the listeners want to play along at home, they can go and check out the full tweet for the DVD extras and the behind the scenes stuff. So the first one, most women are disgusted when they finally learn how the male sex drive works.

Then they test to see if it's true. And when it is, they start to like the new power they hold. How does the male sex drive work? How do they test if it's true? What's the power? So the male sex drive works on stimulation. It works specifically on external stimulation. You and I, we've seen a tract of woman,

we often become aroused. We see her doing something, this is right, this is how pornography works. You've seen a tract of woman, you don't even know and you become aroused. Now you are aroused and you need to relieve that arousal. And then your brain starts checking off lists, okay, how can I relieve this arousal in a way that is least socially damaging?

So we go through the checklist. You and I could see two rocks together and say, hey, that kind of looks like breasts. And then we start thinking about how, okay, when can I get back home to my wife to take care of this. That's how the male sex drive typically works. It's a little more nuanced than that but typically we see something or hear something we become aroused, we need to relieve it, we find a way to relieve it. Kind of like monkeys. The female sex drive typically does not work that way. Now you've got hormonal differences throughout the month but just looking at a general overview, where the female sex drive tends to work

is built on emotional intimacy. So a female sex drive, a woman will become attached to a man, or a woman, or whatever, maybe. They become attached to a person, and then they experience sexual feelings toward that person. From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense, because we, 10,000 years ago, hunting mammoths in the Neolithic age,

we're gonna try to populate our seed to as many women as we can. Women need to be very selective because having a child during that difficult time was going to, it's a huge risk and a huge resource investment. So they're going to look for the best partner who has the best qualities,

who's going to stay and be securely attached, attachment, and then their sex drive will activate toward that person and they will want to engage in sexual relations with that person. So that's not just the cultural phenomenon or even kind of the front-brain phenomenon that we as modern humans understand that women have, the way that they're able to step into their own programming and say, well, I can't sleep with them on the first date, I'm not a slurred, all of the cognitive reasons. But what you're saying is that there's actually a more source code, a base level of this, which actually acts as a gatekeeper to arousal for women

that doesn't permit them to be aroused until some man has crossed this threshold. It's so fascinating how a lot of the cultural artifacts and the behavioral ways that we operate are just weird projections of what the genes wanted us to do in any case. Isn't that amazing? It's wonderful. I practice evolutionary psychology.

It's where I get a lot of my basis from. It blows people's minds when you share these things with them and say, okay, our brains aren't meant for modern day cubicle world and therapy world. Our brains are meant for 10,000 years ago, neolithic age. We're barely discovering that if you eat corn and poop it out, new corn will grow next year. Barely figuring that out.

That's what our brains are meant for. They're not meant for this modern day, okay, I have a condom. That's not really how it works. And the female sex drive is built to keep them and their children in the species alive. They really are the sex gatekeepers in that regard. Now that tracks down to what

the woman believes she is worth. So if she has attachment issues and believes she is worth dirt, she might have sex on that first date with multiple partners just desperately trying to get them in, earn their approval, earn their attention. So if you have a cultural... So if you have a cultural... So if you have a cultural... So if you have a cultural... So if you have a cultural...

So if you have a whole culture of women with attachment issues and they're driving the value of sex down through the floor, well, I'll leave that to your imagination. Yeah, okay, so they learn how the male sex drives works. Are women disgusted when they find out that men are so kind of shallowly turned on? They don't typically, when I work with them, they don't believe that. So I worked with a lot of couples and I would explain this to the female partner and she'd say, no, there's no way. A man, two rocks, a man couldn't see two rocks and be a triad.

No, and then she'd look at him and he's sitting there like, and she starts to realize, okay, wow, this actually may be true. And then they'll go home for a week and then they come back the next week and she's like, just say, oh my gosh, you were so right. Like yeah, that is how he works. I'm realizing it. And then they start to realize, wait a minute, that's how he works. I can just like that.

All I got to do is flash a little skid at him and I have all and then they start picking that up. A lot of women who go into sex work, go into strip clubs and whatnot, they report feeling tremendously empowered. Part of that is because they learn very quickly how the male sex drive works. And they can just boom like that. If they wanted that guy to drop 10 grand,

well, they can do it. And they can make those men a proof of them, get that approval. For them, it's an instant win button. They just hit the butt. They flash a little skin, they hit the button. He comes over to her, women perceive male sexual attention as love and affection, because again, that's what they would be doing. If they were giving you sex, it would be giving you love and attention and saying,

you are a good partner, I want you. When a man gives sexual attention, it's like, hey, I need something right now, you're the best, you know. That's how they perceive it. So they're perceiving it as that love and affection. So that leads all kinds of problems. But yeah, it gives women tremendous sense of control when they can push a button, anytime they need affection and validation, they know how to push that button and that,

I've seen that improve marriages 10 fold. 70% of divorces are initiated by women, but as a couple's therapist, I've never seen even one divorce where the husband didn't have attachment issues. How did those manifest? Yeah. So the 70% statistic you can pull that off online. Roughly 70% of divorces are initiated by women.

Actually, why do you think that is? You know, it's interesting. Men with attachment issues, they tend to just stick around until they can find something better, but a lot of men don't. A lot of men just sit in just coast or sit in stew and they think this is the best I'll ever get. Women, as they have children, a lot of women typically, if both partners come in with attachment issues, neither one believes that they're worthy of love, and they think that they have to keep

everything secret and locked away. And then earn love, when the woman has a child, she starts to crave for the husband to be attached to that child. And when she finds that he's not able to, she sees the child growing up being anxious, being stressed, saying, my wish dad,

he spent more time with me. And she starts pushing him to do that. But they joined when they both couldn't do that. So it shifts her attachment a little bit and it starts to make her resent the husband and resent how he treats her. She puts more pressure on him. He starts feeling attacked.

He puts more pressure back on her and attacks without understanding what she's doing or why. Oftentimes, I treat it a lot of partners where the women are in their late 30s, early 40s and the marriage just detonates because the children hit, you know, 13, 14 years old and she figures, they're old enough, they could survive a divorce. I can't do this anymore. He's hurting the kids emotionally hurting them by not being attached to them. He's yelling at me, I'm out of here. And the guy's like, whoa, what are you doing? Hey, we were fine.

Nothing has changed. I'm the same person I was at the beginning. That's usually what I see is the woman tries and tries. I've written a book, I'll plug that, called Exhausted Wives, Be Wildard Husbands, where the woman has tried everything she can to make him change, and he is completely bewildered about why she's upset. That's the most common dynamic and divorced dynamic and attachment dynamic that I've seen is where the woman just tries and runs herself to death and he will not change because he doesn't understand what she's trying to do. What's the way around that? How can men be more perceptive and women be more effective? It's not even that.

Again, going back to 10,000 years ago, men tend to be active creatures. We act upon our environment. We go out and we see a problem, we go out and we hunt. Everyone's hungry, I'm going to go hunt to mammoth. We see a problem, we find the solution. That tends to be what we do. Women tend to be reactive creatures. They see something here and they react to it.

They see us going out and acting. They react to us and figure out ways to embrace that and utilize that. They react to their environment, just just typically as a general overview. Women can almost never change men in that regard. You pressuring him can almost, will almost never change him and saying, I need to feel this. It just doesn't work. That's why a lot of men once the divorce is initiated. Suddenly he panics and he says, okay, now I need to change. He sees a problem and now he's got a lot of men once the divorce is initiated suddenly he panics and he says okay

Now I need to change he sees a problem and now I've got a solution right there's something to face He doesn't get it when it's like well, you should just talk to the kids more Why why do I do that that's not what we do in this family? He doesn't act until his environment changes and he sees a problem and it forces him to act So a lot of the work is educate when I did couples counseling, a lot of it was educating the men on why what they're doing is a problem, why there is a problem, and then how to solve that problem. That was a lot of what it was. And then the female partner typically, once he changes, she begins to respond to his new changes. He's providing more emotional intimacy because

the attachment piece, the female sex drive works on emotional intimacy. So when you see a partner get a couple get together and they have all the sex at the beginning and then the sex tapers off to zero and they have it once a month or every other year kind of thing, that's because the female sex drive has now dried up because hers has built on long-term emotional intimacy after the initial short burst. So that she she responds to him. So the way to fix that when I said I've never seen any

couple with whether man didn't have an attachment. I might have been exaggerating a little bit there for Twitter, but the vast vast majority of couples I've ever worked with the man has an attachment issue. The female often does too, but I've never seen a woman even a Really broken woman. I have never seen her divorce a healthy man I've never seen that in all my couples counseling years I don't know if that's because women just innately recognize that value so they'll continue to respond to him until they change I

Have seen it where the man had sort of attachment issues and had autistic features and wasn't fully equipped to engage with those emotional aspects. I have seen that, but even then it wasn't divorced. It was just she was the female partner would rage out of control with these emotions and he would just not know what to do, but there was actually no talk of divorce. So, yeah, that's typical where that comes in. If the man is incapable of forming those emotional connections and feeding that emotional intimacy, eventually a female partner gets exhausted and she calls it quits and he has no

idea why, because it seemed like it was working just fine. And that brings me on to the next one, which is husbands who complain about having zero sex, having no idea how the female sex drive actually works. I'm going to guess that this is actually interlinked. Yes, it is exactly. So I've worked with a lot of couples where they have sex once a year, which is horrifying to contemplate, but it's often because the husband number one doesn't ask. He's waiting for his wife to jump on him like a jungle predator. And so he tries to figure out how to just entice her by giving her things or, you know, flash an or whatever, but he's not recognizing that by diminishing the emotional intimacy, he's actually killing her sex drive.

It's not that she just has no sex drive. He's actually sending the wrong signals when you don't talk to her about issues, when you don't talk to her about some feelings. I'm not saying solving uncontrollably in her lap, but when you don't open up and express who you are on the inside, the message you're sending is that you don't trust her. You don't value her as an advisor, as a partner, and that you aren't intending to stick around for very long. So long a longer scale, the message you're sending is, I'm going to find the next 19-year-old

blonde girl who wanders by, and I'm going to go follow her instead of you, so the woman starts to disconnect from you. That is interesting. I think so many of the points that you bring up today are to do with the fact that the ones to do with couples at least, to do with the fact that men presume that women operate on men's programming and women presume that men operate on women's programming. We try and extrapolate out the way that we feel, what I would want, what I would do, men want to come in solutions oriented, women want to come in and make everybody food or whatever

it might be, and neither of the people want that. And this is, I think, one of the reasons why I have so much love for the evolutionary psychology movement and also for threads like the one that you wrote, because it doesn't actually take that much to just be able to see. It's like learning a cognitive bias as soon as you learn, as soon as you learn availability bias, or as soon as you learn the fundamental attribution error, you think, that guy's not an asshole. Maybe he was just late for work. Yes. Like, you know, I mean, when you get cut up in traffic, the classic examples. So yeah, I think, um, that's why that's why it's important important because only with the awareness, can

you actually start to progress through these things? This next one is one of my favorites. If your child is an asshole, it's your fault. Even if it's the other parent's fault, it's your fault for picking them. Take some responsibility. Correct. So I say that healthy people don't typically pick unhealthy partners. If your partner is unhealthy, something about you was either unhealthy or naive and not aware of what needed to happen. We see a lot of that generational issue here in the West. I have a whole talk I give about how attachment has been breaking down and degenerating here in the West since 1918 since World War I. It's been a systematic just breakdown of attachment here in the West. I'm gonna get into that today because that'll take up the whole hour, but

Yeah, that's that right there Boy my brain wandered off it on that path. Why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is, why is it, why is it, why is, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is it, why is, why is it, why is, why is it, why is, why is, why is it, why is it, why is, why is it, why is it, why is, why is, why is it sees itself as every cause as the point of origin for everything that happens to it because it's learning about gravity, right? If I drop my sippy cup of the side of my high chair, it hits the ground and it splashes everywhere, I made that happen. The child is learning about cause and effects, so it also blames itself for everything. So when we put a child in daycare, we're abandoning the child for 12 hours a day, then when we're around it, we're exhausted.

We don't have time to take care of it or engage with it emotionally. A child starts to, child's brain says there must be something wrong with me that's causing that. If we abuse a child, the child's brain says, what am I doing that made this person hit me? Things like that. The child's brain is thinking that. So if you are a great parent and the other parent is an asshole, child's

brain says 50% of people are going to treat me horribly and that parent is the honest one. So maybe the nice parent is just being nice to me. Maybe it's a 50-50 shot or maybe I really don't deserve any love at all. So I see this a lot when I work with single moms who bring their children in about 10 years old. Suddenly they have this massive outgrowth of anxiety and they're not sure where it's coming from. They picked a partner who is going to hurt their children emotionally at least and now the child is grappling with these attachment issues under the surface. It is still that parents fault for picking that partner.

You don't have to feel bad but you probably should own up to it. Don't sit there and yell at the kid and say, hey, what's wrong with you? I've been a good parent. I see that a lot. That defensiveness. If I've been a great parent, why are you this way? I should have made up for the other guy. You've been a good parent one of two. You've been 50% of a good family.

That's another way to look at it. Correct. So I'm not trying to slap single moms with guilt there and say, you know, your deadbeat, the deadbeat dad is your fault. It's not what I'm aiming for, but you do need to take ownership of the fact that one, you picked him. So you have to, a responsibility to listen to that child's hurts. Let that child vent at you sometimes. Don't take it personally that you're not super mom. Don't take it personally that you're not both mom and dad. Take some ownership of the bad relationship that you brought this child into. You don't have to saturate

guilt, but take some of that ownership and give the child permission to act out in a certain way as they solve their problems and their wounds. Otherwise, they won't solve their problems and their wounds. They'll come at you with these problems. You will reject them because you're being defensive and that will create two bad parents that this child now has to overcome. Yeah, serious. I mean that that that that is uncomfortable. Obviously we these women who are raising two kids and working two jobs and doing all this sort of stuff. It does from the surface it can sound

uncompassionate to say, well, you did choose the father, but the bottom line, that is the truth. You did choose the father. And the ignorance of the fact or bearing it under the rug isn't going to make it go away. The only way that you can account for whatever has occurred and the effect they're in is by admitting, okay. And I think this is, I had this conversation the other day, I think this is why the rationalist movement, is sort of post-scientific utilitarian, learn all the cognitive biases by your hacking movement. I think that's why it's got so much momentum at the moment,

because it allows chaotic individuals who are very untransparent to themselves and don't really understand how the world works, surrounded by infinite complexity. It allows us to feel like we can just bring a tiny bit of that world under control again. I can just try and wrangle some of this chaos into order. And, again, these are the psychological cognitive biases. Okay, next one. It's okay to be sad. That doesn't mean you're depressed. It's okay to be sad. That doesn't mean you're depressed. It's okay to be worried. That doesn't mean you're anxious. It's okay to experience trauma. That doesn't mean you have PTSD. Not everything is a diagnosable issue. So diagnosis has to have multiple pieces. You have to fit the full criteria. And some people can fit the full criteria of a diagnosis,

but it also has to impact that quality of life, especially in work function, occupation, school, relationships, it has to cause a detrimental effect that crosses a threshold. That's what gives you a diagnosis. So you can experience a traumatic event and not have post-traumatic stress disorder. You can be sad for a lengthy period of time and not have full depression, especially if

it's not impacting those qualities. Now we tend to over-diagnose here in the United States and say, I've been sad for three days, I have depression, but that's not the case. If you're fully functional, you most likely do not have diagnosable depression. That has skewed a lot as we've jumped into the effect of trying to treat things in advance before they get too bad. But again, we treat depression as a disease here in the United States at least.

So you're trying to treat a disease isolated from the rest of the individual and say it has nothing to do with your life. Let's just throw medication at you. So there's kind of a fine line you need to walk there. But it is really okay to be sad. The DSM that we use here in the United States Diagnosis, just as its manual,

gives at least two weeks of consistent sadness for grief. What we call be, for you to think. There was the grief exception, wasn't it? Yes, yes. So we give two weeks in the United States. There was a minimum. That's how long you're allowed to be sad when someone does.

It has to be a minimum of two weeks of grief before you even qualify for a diagnosis. It can be longer. It can be complicated grief. But two weeks of grieving is more or less what they have assumed is the average here in the United States. That doesn't cross a threshold.

So yeah, you can, when someone dies, you're going to be sad. You are not instantly depressed the moment someone dies. You're not instantly, just because you're worried a little bit. You shouldn't really call it anxiety as much because that is such a clinical term and say, I am anxious, I'm feeling anxiety right now. You can, it's a lot better just to use the word and say, I'm worried right now. How long has it been, everybody that's listening,

how long has it been since you heard someone say that they were worried versus that they've said that they're anxious? I'm anxious about this thing that's coming up. Well, are you worried? Because the specifics of that, I imagine from someone who understands the clinical side of this are actually quite important,

but the phenomenological way of how it feels, it's just someone using different words. It's just someone getting a synonym that the saw is out and deciding to use a different word. And it might be okay to say clinically that you feel anxiety in that moment. You're not diagnosing yourself a generalized anxiety disorder. But using clinical words in your self talk and to discuss yourself using those clinical words just hammers them home and makes them such a reality. I have anxiety right now. Well, okay, but let's back up a step before you go to that extreme of a step and just say,

what kind of anxiety is that? Are you just worrying? Are you nervous? Or all these other words we use to use, don't go the full diagnostic word on yourself if you can prevent it. If you don't have to say, experience trauma, maybe that is a fairly scientific way, but maybe you just say, I had a really difficult experience. There was a challenge that I faced, and there were some really bad pieces to it, but you know what, I'm doing better now. I think everyone needs to cool it on some of the diagnostic words that we use, even some of the scientific words that we use on ourselves.

Are they effective? Are they correct? Maybe so, but it doesn't do us any good to go around pathologizing everything that we feel either. Correct, that's exactly what I had in my head. It feels like mon culture kind of upregates or up scales, the severity and this cleanliness. And I think part of it stems from what I was talking about earlier on, people wanting

to wrangle that chaos into order. If they can give it a label that sounds official and professional and medical and like there's a diagnostic for it, it's like, well, at least I know, I can't control this chaos, but at least it's got a name that can be understood in the medical community, as opposed to, and also maybe part of it, I think this actually might be a big part of it. Maybe part of it is that people want to justify why they're so affected by negative emotions and by giving it a grander sounding name, a more catastrophic sounding name, it almost legitimates the fact that they're affected by it. I don't want to admit that I'm

the sort of person that gets just worried and actually would be worried about something. I don't want to say that I'm the sort of person that would be sad about something I would experience trauma. No, no, no, it has to be depression or anxiety or PTSD because it legitimates how affected I feel by giving it this brand of term, the contrasting effect actually helps to relatively bring it down. Yeah, it also forces the other person involved in that conversation hearing you describe yourself that way. It forces them to validate you and take you seriously and take that because otherwise they're denying anxiety, they're denying these clinical terms.

I think we've weaponized a lot of those diagnostic criteria as well to try to force reactions out of other people. Most depressed men probably don't need medication. Even the ones who do need it more than, even the ones who do need it more than just medication. Depression men need purpose, a mission, and the power to accomplish that mission. Give a man those three things and he can crawl over broken glass with a smile. So male depression, from my personal experience, treating it, but also from everything I've read from research that I've read, male depression is different from female depression. And that male depression tends to focus on learned helplessness, powerlessness. Men need a mission in life and they need to believe that they can go fulfill that mission. They need to be able to take steps.

There's a reason that impotence is such a big deal for men. Not just sexual impotence, but emotional impotence, life impotence. You need to be able to go out and do what you need to do. You now have to have a purpose in life and be able to accomplish that purpose. And if you can do that, look at men in, I was just reading an old document from World War II, actually, it was discussing the bombings in London and the psychological impact of that, of men who were hospitalized prior to the bombings, hospitalized for severe mental health problems, schizophrenia, major depression.

Some of them were catatonic in mental hospitals, prior to the bombings. There were documents showing that those men, some of them got up and started driving ambulances. They got out of their catatonic state and started driving ambulances through the street, helping with rebuilding, helping with keeping people safe. All of a sudden these men came back to life because now they had a defensive war to fight, a clear, clear win fight, a clear win state

and a clear losing state and they could do it. They had something in front of them and they could accomplish. This is why women men are crushingly depressed. We try to do anything we can to make us feel like we can accomplish something. So a man who is agonizingly worried about something in his life and feels like there's nothing he can do about it will all all of a sudden, obsess over the smallest little project in his life that makes no sense to anyone else. It could be a video game, it could be miniature little painting, miniature soldiers, it could be anything, but that's what he can control. And he has to have that sense of control

for him to have life purpose. Now a lot of that purpose comes from our relationships with other people. We need to have, right, it can be that protector and provider role of, I'm a man and I'm protecting and providing for my family. So when we lose a job, we can't provide for our family. Now we feel like our mission is lost. There's no hope of providing for our family as our job search for drags on and on and on. We're now useless. The depression starts to set in as we get what's called learned helplessness of, I will never get a job, it will never get better. That's really the piece. There's nothing I have no mission,

no purpose in life starts the depression. Or there's nothing I can do about it that starts the depression. Then there's, and it will never get better. That's what starts the suicidal depression of suicidal thoughts of if I'm never going to get better and it's never going to stop then what what else should I do? Why does you stop this pain? That's really what starts rolling in that male suicide. And providers typically treat male depression as they would treat female depression, which is more built on women are men are problem solvers, women are

relational typically in their thinking. Women female depression typically comes from not feeling loved or feeling useless to the people that you love. That's what female depression tends to come from. They need to be loved and they need to feel useful to the people that they love. If they have those two pieces, women can overcome just about anything. There's cases of women overcoming, women experiencing sexual assault and having no PTSD whatsoever. Female POWs, I was reading a report on a female,

American female POW over in Iraq was captured and hell hostage and raped numerous times. I think it was Iraq and then released and they checked her for mental health symptoms and she said, you know, yeah, it was bad But the sexual assault wasn't the biggest thing in my life as she was flying home to her husband and she was just Glad to go home and they checked her and evaluated her numerous times That's something that we we think of like how could someone endure that without? No, they checked her multiple times

She said you know I have a loving husband and children I'm gonna go home and take care of them boom she was useful to her family and she was loved by her family um we treat male depression like female depression we try to make men feel validated we try therapists often try to make men feel validated. We try to make men feel like people care about them We try to make men feel the way women want to feel and when men don't respond to that We shame them for not going to therapy We tell them men are just stubborn men just don't men would I saw a post on Twitter not long ago men would rather lift weights than go to therapy

Well, yeah, because that makes them feel powerful One of the number one things when men are depressed, that I encourage them to do is start lifting weights, because you can see the physical changes in your body and you feel powerful again, you say, I can make this change happen, well then I can go make that change happen. That's the number one way to get men back in and start focusing on their body.

So that's that one. Yeah, male depression is 100% different. I love that. I have never met a young woman with sexual trauma who didn't believe it was somehow her fault. Part of this is the need to believe she can prevent it in future, admitting it's beyond her power is worse than feeling guilty. So this goes back to the male sex drive and women not understanding it. When a woman is raped, young woman typically, she says, why did he feel emotionally toward me in that way?

What did I do to inspire his emotions toward me? Because again, female sex drive is driven by emotion. How did I make him hate me so much? And also, does, and also feel close enough to me to rape me? That's the female, it's often the female thinking. So their first thing is what did I do to encourage him? How did I encourage him? It could be a guy that grabbed her and dragged her in an alley

and she'd never seen him before. And she will still say, what was it about me that encouraged him to do that? Empowering, I hate the word empowering because it's used so often. Now, but it really is, empowering a female trauma victim by helping her understand how the male sex drive works. One of my other tweets in that thread that drew anger like a lightning rod was talking about

helping female sex trauma victims understand that rape is not personal. And, man, I got so many angry messages from from why do you think that was because it's shocking because it is personal to them and this female sex drive is incredibly personal focused on the person of course, but to the man it could have been if you'd replaced that person with somebody else right place right time same incident would have occurred even more than that for a man to commit rape he doesn't see the woman as a person,

he sees her as an object to be used. So he, it is not personal to him, any more than him shoving a chair with his foot was personal. The rape was not personal to him. It was just something that he just did to relieve that and feel powerful, usually feel powerful himself, all those things that they boil over in bad,

really bad ways. But, yeah, women are, when I say, you know what, you need to recognize that rape was not personal and it had nothing, it actually had nothing to do with you. You were just the most convenient victim in that moment that he was able to grab and use. He was able to groom you, he was able to get a hold of you, but it had nothing to do with you. And when they recognize that, they fight it tooth and nail most of the time because that doesn't make sense to their way of thinking.

Like he had forceful sex with me. Why would he do that if there was no emotional attached to it? Another piece of it is the female body experiencing sexual assault, often will orgasm, not because she's enjoying it, but the orgasm forces the cervix to dip down into the vagina, into the bottom of the vagina, and drink up, essentially drink up the semen that is there, and pull it up into the uterus. So an orgasm actually impoles that semen into the uterus at a greater level. That stimulates that birth. So the female sex drive, again, 10,000 years ago,

not sex drive, the female sexual reproduction. 10,000 years ago, if she's going to be sexually assaulted, her body will say, I'm at least going to get something good out of this and make a child with this, because if this guy has power enough to do this, then my child will have some sort of power. It's a weird, what line to walk. But if she's able to do that, her body will then take the horrible thing that is happening and create this life from it and draw some good out of it.

Crazy. That is the female body drawing good out of this horror that is happening to her. And that's one of the positive explanations for why some sexual assault victims will orgasm during? Yes, that's often why is because it's their body forcing them to. They don't enjoy it, and they feel so deeply ashamed afterwards. So when I would work with female sex crime victims, I would say, I would get them to a point where they were comfortable and I'd say, okay Did you and I would explain all most women experience an orgasm against their will not because they enjoy it because the body is Designed to do that and they feel a lot of shame around that as if they secretly liked it somehow

Did you did you have that experience and most of them will? They'll start crying and they can't speak and then they'll say yes I did and I walk them through like that is okay, that is not me you enjoyed it. Your body was designed to have that orgasm so that you could pull something good from that horrible thing that was happening. This is why it happened and then once you have that orgasm you get a flood of oxytocin which bonds you to the person that is sexually assaulting you at that time.

So then they develop a complicated feelings toward that person. If that person was someone they knew before, they feel attached to them and they say, well, I really hate him, but I don't know. Like we had that moment, their brain forcibly bonds them to that person. And this is Stockholm syndrome, because if a woman 10,000 years ago was captured from her tribe and then raped by a guy, her brain would start bonding her to that guy and would have a child and then she could survive in this new tribe and raise that child if she had to. It's not pretty. It's not pretty and it's not justification for anything but that is the mechanism from

an evolutionary perspective, that's why that's happening. And that infuriates female sex crime victims when you talk to them the first time because they can't wrap their brain around how he could be acting upon her, like a chair, and how her body could be doing that. Betray has so much. Correct. Her body betrayed her, and he betrayed her. But once they come out of that and they realize those things and they accept them. Oh, there's so much healing That's I can I can get Women who cannot have sex after sex after rape they cannot have sex with their male partners without all these flashbacks I can get them to the point where they can initiate sex and have a fruitful, wonderful sex life with their new partner with virtually zero flashbacks or issues and use those things

to actually develop more intimacy with their partner in the future as long as they accept those earlier components. Those are the pieces that are missing. They have to understand those two pieces. Why their body did what it did and why that person did what they did. If they can understand those, there is so much healing in those. How much do you think that natural predilection for the body to respond in that way to aggressive sex leads into rough sex being a desire for certain women consensually. Yeah.

It isn't necessarily that the rough sex is activating the orgasms. Rough sex, a lot of the rough sex, what it does, is it, how do I want to express this? It expresses to the female partner how strong and ready the male partner is. So it's more psychological then than I would say so. It's dominance.

You're displaying dominance, which means you're the kind of person who has dominant features, which means your children will probably have dominant features and that emotional dominance to survive in a neolithic age 10,000 years ago. So multiple orgasms to try to get as much of that that seeming up into the uterus is possible. There's some people, there will be some people, they won't because everyone that listens to this podcast clever, but there might be some people who stumbled upon this podcast and go, what are they talking about? Like rough sex is just rough sex. And like, what do

you mean? He's like, no, no, no, no, no, no. What you think is happening and why you like the things you like aren't the reason that you like them. You are the puppet on the end of the strings that your genes are playing around with. It is. That's, that, this is why, dude, I could go on about evolutionary psychology forever because it's so fascinating. It's even more complicated than that because the female sex drive during most of the month is fairly neutral and it likes her partner. The female sex drive during drive during ovulation period,

she has more of a desire for males with masculine, sharp, angular features, and more rough sex during the ovulation period. And then during menstruation period, she is looking more for male with softer features, different, completely different from the male that she was looking for during ovulation, and very different sexual activity also during that time.

So during the time of the month, women are also looking at different kinds of sex and even different kinds of partners. And even beyond that, during pregnancy, before pregnancy, saliva, they have women taste saliva samples from different partners, and women with before pregnancy prefer the saliva taste of partners from a different genetic pool than them After pregnancy, they prefer the saliva taste from partners from a similar genetic pool to them and even closer into like Very very similar down almost family So this is why a lot of women during pregnancy are disgusted by their husband smell and taste and everything This is why a lot of women during pregnancy are disgusted by their husband's smell and taste and everything, because her body is now saying, okay, I got pregnant by this guy

over here. I need to pull back to my core family and tribe to raise this child and be maximized by my safety and this child safety. So she's like, a lot of women sometimes won't even let their husbands touch them during pregnancy in the sex drive tanks, but she doesn't want to say like, hey, you discussed me and you smell bad. But my genes are telling me that you do. My genes are telling me to get the hell away from you.

So you were I learned in Steve's to Williams, the APU understood the universe. Have you heard of the Western Mark effect? No, I haven't. Okay, so the Western Mark effect is the mechanism by which incest is avoided. Oh, yes, okay. What happens is during the early years of childhood, you and the other children of your age that you spend significant amounts of time within your family, you imprint on each other in a way that causes your body to find them sexually repulsive, essentially.

Now, the problem comes when you and a biological sibling have been separated at birth, then you meet back up, so you've avoided this western mark window, and then you meet back up later in life, and you find quite to your dismay, that you may be physically and sexually attracted to this person, even though all of the ethics and the morality and the culture tells you that it's wrong, and everybody else doesn't want to have sex with their brother or sister, so they know that it's wrong. Correct.

But the western market effect is this window. I can't quite remember how long it goes up until. Yes. is this window. I can't quite remember how long it goes up until. But yeah, so you see non-genetically related siblings, perhaps like cultural siblings that have been put together social siblings that have been put together in the same house when they've grown up, who have every right to have sex with each other, being completely repulsed and perhaps a separated sibling come back into the picture and then be an objective sexual design. Yes. Oh, it's huge. I didn't know that's that's what the name of that.

What's the more perfect? Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for the education. Um, no, but I do know that it's it is astounding. The number of, um, children and especially daughters who reunite with fathers who were never in their lives who then have sex with those fathers It is astounding. It is noteworthy if you go look up the statistics on that. Why do you think that is? Well, it really depends on where she is in her cycle and that emotionally Being having your father pulled away from you We often as humans we get our sense of self-worth from our opposite sex parent. So if she grew up without that father,

her brain is telling her that I am worthless, no, it might even my dad didn't want me. So getting back with him as an adult or as a teen, there are so many complicating variables. And if she has gone out and sought that sexual attention from other people as a means of validation, then she gets back with that father and then that's the ultimate way to get that ultimate validation from him as a man. And she doesn't know any better, she hasn't passed that,

that Western Mark window. It creates so many problems for those young women. If you go look at the statistics with the number of young women who reunite with a distant father, they were not raised by and then have sex with him. It is, it's something that no one wants to talk about because it's so deeply uncomfortable, but it's, yeah, it's real men. Women don't trust an unstable or unreliable man. It's not the whining, flaking, lying, sneaking, or excuses that specifically erode her trust. These are symptoms of a deeper instability that rings all her alarm bells. She can forgive specific behaviors, but not the underlying issue.

Mm-hmm. It goes back to 10,000 years ago. What is going to keep her child alive? A man who has integrity tells the truth, does what he says he's going to do. Solve problems, conscious, honest, capable of emotional intimacy and connection without being pathetic and sobbing on the floor. All of those features tie back into, okay, he will keep me and my children alive. Because 10,000 years ago, if you're pregnant, as a pregnant woman, you're not going to waddle with a spear, pick up a spear and go waddling out to fight a mammoth. Picture a group of 10 pregnant women with spear is trying to fight a mammoth. There's a scary thing over here. Well, there's something very wrong with that picture

because every one of them that dies, now there's two lives being lost. You don't want that 10,000 years ago. You don't want that now. Which is why we don't have pregnant, typically we don't have pregnant women on the front lines in a battlefield. That's a failure of a society is if you're pregnant women are on the battlefield. So, yeah, women are looking for that stability. Women are looking for that in a male partner.

And if you don't provide that long term, her body just says, I can't have children with this guy, so it shuts down the sex drive. And then she starts sort of distancing from you because you are so unstable, she can't trust that in you. So this is the thing that young guys don't understand about going to the gym. So the signal of going to the gym, they think that it's to do with right, I'm going to, I'm going to look good and the aesthetic that what it is, the feeling of my body is what's going to attract her. What I've come to realize or at least believe is that it is far more the signal of what sort of a person am I to be the sort

of person who can build this sort of physique? I'm conscientious, I'm reliable, I'm consistent, I'm able to have self-reliance, I'm able to make goals and achieve them. I'm healthy, I have surplus calories, I have surplus strength, I have surplus testosterone. If you find me sexy by the culturally defined, this is what a good body should look like plus V-taper that's already embedded blah, blah. The sexy sun hypothesis

suggests that we are going to have children who will also look like me, the other women will also want to have sex with which will continue our genetic lineage more quickly blah, blah, blah. So it's much easier to say to guys like get big arms like big arms equals lots of women But it's it's a little bit more secondary and third order than that Absolutely, you know a healthy woman is not gonna see an attractive stranger and try to have sex with them in a bathroom So the women you're going to attract by being handsome like that who will have sex with you on the spot Are not gonna be the healthy women you want to have a relationship with. But women are visually attracted to men. They are. There's a component there, but they're not going to have sex with you because you're hot. That

sort of opens the door, but you're 100% right. The messages you send to women are much more important than how you look. That's why we see a lot of very attractive women with very ugly men who happen to have good other features, usually money, but good other features. Think about the thing that I always use is think about the funny guy friend that you've got. He's never single. If you've got that one person that can always crush a conversation, really, really funny, he's always going to have a girl because he's able to add value.

That's exactly right. You have to go. If you, if, you know, and I teach, I have a whole course that I teach on, to teach young men about how to attract healthy women and what they actually want from you and it's not what men think. If you want to attract healthy women, go back 10,000 years and say, what would women want 10,000 years ago and why would they want it? Well, they'd want men with good social skills. So it could be good leaders and to unify the tribe and have good emotional intimacy. They want men who have good availability emotionally, but they're not pathetic and fall apart at problems. They want men who solve problems and aren't decisive, are decisive without being tyrants and hurting

people around them and telling you to shut up. They want men who are pretty physically fit, who keep themselves up. They want all these different features. And the more of those boxes you check, the higher quality of female partner you're going to be able to attract. That's just how it is. If you have $10 billion in your bank account, all of a sudden you're paying. Yeah, resource acquisition. Exactly. But if that's all you have, you're going to only attract a certain type of woman. So, here's the more the boxes, the more the boxes you check, the better.

One that I was told are found out in, this is also in the APU understood the universe. The body positivity movement in 2021 specifically for women is claiming that our standards for beauty are culturally constructed. So there was a ton of meta-analyses that have been done around that. And what's been found, this is quite interesting. So the optimal size for women that has fluctuated a little because women metacreatures right Renee Gerard found this out like we we do imprint we want what we think other people want us to want almost in a way and the size of women has fluctuated not by much but the preferable size has changed a little bit but the thing that hasn't changed is the waist to hip ratio and the

waist to hip ratio across all cultures, all times and all countries is always around 0.7, always around 0.7. So it doesn't matter whether you are a thicker girl, thinner girl, whatever it might be, like if you can hit that hourglass shape with the 0.7 waist to hip ratio, you're winning. And yeah, that was, that is controlled for as many different variables as you can get pretty much. And yeah, 0.7 number to hit. That's so funny. And it's true.

And what I always tell women, when I work with women with low physical self-esteem, I always say, look, you don't need to be a skinny Barbie doll type because then you'll only attract skinny Barbie doll guys who they like skinny Barbie doll types Every guy has a type you have a body type Maximize the effectiveness of your body type and attract men who love your body type and they will worship the ground You walk on just just make your body type work for you and that's really what we should be teaching women Not that everything is perfect and nothing is wrong It's maximize the the health of whatever body type you have if you're a big thick woman with big And that's really what we should be teaching women. Not that everything is perfect and nothing is wrong.

It's maximized the health of whatever body type you have. If you're a big, thick woman with big muscles and everything, cool, go for it. There are dudes who will fall all over themselves to win your heart. Just maximize the healthiness of that. Because female health and fertility, if you look a lot of the female beauty standards

that men follow, it evokes, it displays fertility. Long hair means you have really good nutrition. Long healthy hair means you have such good nutrition and fallate and everything in your diet. You can grow this huge luxurious mane that doesn't look nasty and scraggly and broken off. That's just one aspect of female beauty that shows fertility.

Here's another thing that I learned about symmetry in faces. So the signal that symmetry in faces, we look at symmetrical faces and we think someone like Brad, I think Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie were one year or so they were voted like the most symmetrical faces statistically, if you were to do a statistical analysis of their faces, they ended up being, and it's very expensive, genetically, to be able to create a symmetrical face. It's

actually much easier to create a lopsided face. So the reason that we like symmetrical faces is not just that we tend to like things that are neat and orderly, it's that it is a signal that this person has strong genetics and also you get the sexy son or sexy daughter hypothesis through that as well. This next one is cool. We've done away with teaching children to build character. Now we instruct them to assemble an identity from things they hope will make them interesting enough to earn love. Yes, so this goes back to attachment. And it goes back to my, you know, attachment has been systematically broken and dismantled worse and worse with each generation over the last hundred years here in the West. We've reached a point now where people don't believe they are worthy of love as an innate human being.

We don't have innate human dignity much anymore. Now it's built on what are, what were you born as? What skin color were you? What experiences have you endured? Things that have happened to you innate features as what we look at and we define ourselves now by innate features and by things that have happened to us. In the old days, 100 years ago, people used to define themselves based on their experiences that they had set out and created for themselves. You were the vanquisher of whatever it might be. You were a baker. You had set out and made this career. But you were also the type of character you were. Your moral character defined who you were. And it was based on your actions and not only the good things you did,

but also the mistakes you made and how you made up for them. Honor is a system not only of perfect behavior and honor system, but it's also built on how you respond to challenges to your honor and how you respond yourself when you make a mistake. A man's honor is not just he's perfect.

A man's honor is he usually does the right thing and if he doesn't, he makes it right and he makes a man's and it comes out better than it was before. We call that man honorable. That's a lot of work and that requires people to put forth a lot of effort and it's hard and it's not fun. And so we encourage people and we say, you're not a good person, the belief is, we're not a good person anyway.

So I won't stand up when things go right. I don't have courage. I won't do the right thing. That's not who I am. I'm not a good person. So this is the belief. I'm innately flawed. So I'm always going to prove that I'm worthless.

So instead, I will pick things that make me interesting, and I will tell people that I am interesting because of those things, and I will get attention. And that is what, that's a lot of the system that you see nowadays with a lot of identity politics. The reason people distill themselves down to a feature about them, this is the genitals I have, these are the genitals I like, this is the color I am.

That's not who they are as a person, but it's who they make themselves, because they are afraid on the inside, usually, that they don't have any more moral fiber than that, so if they pretend to have more moral fiber that engage in a moral, this is my character, they're going to lose. And because they have that innate insecurity about morality on the inside, they can point

out the sins of other people against the identity code and say, you are a sinner because you don't respect other people's identities. That makes you a bad person. And by pointing it out, I am pointing out what a good person I am because I know the rules so well that I can enforce them on you. That's how that is built. That's exactly how that is built. It comes down to attachment once again. Dude, that strikes on something that I learned in Robert Wright's The Moral Animal, and he says, the reason that people love scandal and to see the downfall

of others is it allows them to feel the indignation, the moral emotion of indignation whilst having to do nothing moral to earn it. Yes. Holy shit if that's not the truth. I just put the book down when I read that. I was like, Scandal allows us to feel moral emotion whilst having done nothing moral to earn it. Like that is just such an amazing insight. And I really think that what you just said about people who perhaps internally don't have a massively developed sense of self worthworth, identifying with group

characteristics and pointing out the flaws of others to be able to identify with their group characteristics. This is the signal increasingly that I am seeing this sort of subtext tacit signal that I'm seeing when I encounter people mostly online because I live somewhere where there's rational people. When I see them online, the first thing that I think now is I wonder what that person's hiding. I don't trust that person's moral fiber because I don't know people who genuinely are honorable and virtuous and have integrity who act in that sort of a way, who speak in that sort of a way. And speak in that sort of a way.

And the first thing that it makes me think is like, you probably don't like yourself all that much. You probably have abandonment issues, attachment issues. You are probably inside ruthlessly unconfident that you are to be liked or loved or competent that you have any merit to be able to achieve something in this world. Perhaps there's the learned helplessness that we said earlier on the fact that look I can't compete. I mean this is is this not the craziest thing that most people who complain about status hierarchies use complaining about status hierarchies to gain status by being outside of them. Like that I'm not going to play your capitalist

meritocracy game. What I'm going to do is I'm going to take one step out and play my own capitalist meritocracy game, but in a new set of rules where I just do criticism. And again, it comes back to feeling moral whilst having done moral, nothing moral to deserve it. Correct. Ex-absolutely. Uh, you are better than your worst mistake that you still measure yourself by the fact that you're still bothered by it proves that you're better than you were then. This is a lesson for all of us, not just with attachment issues, but a lot of

people are haunted by a mistake that they made in the past. And the fact is, if you are haunted by that mistake, you now recognize what a deeply terrible mistake that was. And if you were faced with it again, there's almost no likelihood that you would do it now. But we still measure ourselves by it. We still remember it. We still think, man, if people found out about that, they would laugh at me.

They'd be mad at me. We are crushed by it. And what I tell people is when you make a mistake and then you feel bad about that mistake and you learn from it, the person you were is now dead and you have grown out of that new person much like a butterfly out of a cocoon. You are a new person because you've reached a new moral threshold. You've identified a new line in the sand You will never cross again. That's really where that comes down to

It's a hard thing to accept. It's it is the core of forgiving oneself I've learned from that. Here's what I've done about it And that's what I tell people who are haunted by a mistake is to say what have you done about it? What would you tell the people if the people you hurt back then came back and said, you did this to me? What, not, not how would you excuse it, but what would you say to tell them and show them I made it mean something? Make that mistake mean something by changing who you are fundamentally and how you approach other people, not just reactively but proactively, make it mean something and that definitively proves that you are a different person now. That's really where it comes down to.

Isn't that why we love the zero to hero stories or the bounce back stories? Yes, it is. Because it makes their early life mean something and it shows that we can do it too. The dying artist or the failing comedian or the sort of homeless musician, you know, these sort of these tropes that we have of the people who have the talent and maybe they did something bad in their past but then they come back to do something else. There's something so romantic about it. Rob Henderson, my buddy who does a lot of evolutionary psychology and sociology, he tweeted something the other day

saying that the most popular narrative on the planet is a, it's got a name and I can't remember it, but it's basically from high to low back to high. So you can, I was gonna say wolf or Wall Street but he didn't bounce back to high. Actually, he was always high. So, but there's a different sort. But yes.

Hercules. Hercules would be a great example of that. Right. Someone that is, then isn't, and then is again. Yeah, I think it's setting an example for us. This is another one of the reasons why I think that people love TV shows that have romance in them. Even if the TV show has nothing to do with romance, it's a doctor's surgery, it's a comedy about nerds doing nerds at a university and researching stuff and things like that. There always has to be a love interest. Why does it have to be a love interest? Because falling in love is so fundamental to our understanding of the world,

that it gives us hope that even if these useless flawed creatures that I see on TV and I feel like a real people, if they can do it, then there's hope for me as well. Yeah, most definitely. And we love healthy people, love to see other people triumph. And even unhealthy people, part of them loves to see other people triumph. People like them. If you're geared 100% toward earning approval from others out of constant fear of abandonment,

then sex becomes a performance based on fear of doing it wrong and the other person abandoning you. orgasm can be almost impossible under those conditions and there's a second one to this. female rousal is based on emotional intimacy, which you went through early on and perceived security, which attachment issues undermine. and if all of her sex is a performance, there's no focus on her own body. it's on maximizing approval earned by boosting her partner's pleasure. Mm-hmm. I worked with a lot of young women who had never experienced an orgasm. And when

I say young women, I mean women in their late 20s, early 20s and late 20s who had never experienced an orgasm, who had been with the same partners for sometimes for years and years. Sometimes they were married and never experienced an orgasm. Because for a lot of them, sex was a way to earn that love and approval and feel like he really loved her. That was her way of saying, he wouldn't have sex with me if he didn't love me because my sex drive was built on love and care, so he must love me if he's having sex with me. And they were so focused on doing it right and making him happy. And that was her way of earning his love and approval that they had never experienced

an orgasm. Because most women have to not work at it. It's a chore, but I mean, there's a process of having an orgasm for a female, typically. And if you're not engaged in that process, odds are good. You may not have an orgasm at all. So it was by teaching them to step back from sex as a performance art and step into emotional intimacy with a partner and recognize that men typically like it

once in a while when their female partner has an orgasm most men care, teaching them to engage with that process as an intimate moment and give some of that validation back to their male partner by allowing him to give you an orgasm. Instead of believing many women do, believing feeling as if having an orgasm and working toward one is a chore for him that he's not going to want to do so that he will be turned off by you and not want to have sex with you anymore because you're forcing him to help you have an orgasm. Man, that's a terrible chore to do.

But a lot of women have that feeling internally when they finally verbalize it out loud, they realize that's really silly. But for any women listening to this who have never had an orgasm, really think about that, really think about that, how much emotional intimacy you actually have in your sexual encounters if you are having no orgasms. I mean, you have to have one every time, but if you have zero, probably not a lot of emotional intimacy there. Think as well, everybody has done something, an activity where they should have been focused on the present, on the visceral, on what is occurring, but haven't been able to get themselves out

of their own head. They've been in a work meeting, a really important work meeting, or a job interview, or anything. And they should be concentrating on what the other person is doing or saying and they can't stop thinking about why they're thinking and then they think, oh, I'm the sort of person that thinks about why they're thinking while I'm supposed to be doing and it just starts getting louder and louder and it spirals up and up and up and up and I imagine that during sex that's probably what a lot of women that are doing this sort of performative sexual

act, are thinking, they're thinking like, am I, I should do this? And then it's been, maybe it's been 30 seconds, and then it's been this. And you're like, all of these bizarre narratives that we tell ourselves. And I imagine that that must be super, super common, especially if they maybe don't have a ton of body confidence or just generally have got themselves into this habit. Big time. One time one thing that I ask women who have not had an orgasm or who almost never, almost never have orgasms. One thing I ask them that ruins sex for them is, what are you getting instead? What is it you're going into sex looking

for instead of an orgasm? And plenty of women, plenty of healthy women will say, well, sometimes I just go into it looking to care for my partner, I'm getting emotional intimacy out of it, but not every single time. Not to the point where they never have any sexual pleasure in orgasm themselves. If you are forgoing sexual pleasure, what are you trying to get instead? That usually ruins sex for a lot of insecure women right there. So, because then they set that narrative starts running in the back of their head while they're having sex, they start thinking, what am I getting out of this? Oh no, why am I on so insecure? Sorry for that. The last one, insecure men spend so much time trying to please their wife the way they

please their own mother, that they force their wife into a mother role, then they wonder why she doesn't initiate sex anymore. So attachment, like I've said, comes, it starts when you're born, it starts the moment you're born, babies know their mother smell, they know her taste, they know her voice, they know everything about her. So if you are adopted out at birth, your brain starts telling you, hey, something's not right here, and it starts forming, okay, why did why was I abandoned, why was I lost, why didn't my mom keep me? So I've seen a lot of men with birth adoptions straight into loving parents that have horrible attachment problems and never quite know why.

But a lot of men are raised by single moms, depressed moms, detached moms, anxious moms, traumatized moms, and the child, because that shapes how moms acts and responds and the energy she has for the child and the words she says and the lessons she teaches, it shapes that young man typically to have attachment to she himself because he says, why is she acting this way? Well, it must be my fault. And so he pleases her by being a good boy. He pleases her by never putting too many demands on her, never being messy, always doing his schoolwork, always doing what he's told. He pleases her that way and that's how he earns her approval. When he goes into marriage, that's all he

knows how to do is to be a good boy. So he goes into marriage and tries really hard to be a good boy. And that's not what women are looking for in a male sexual partner. They want a man who is confident, a little bit dominant without being domineering. That's why a lot of women are looking for a dominant male partner. Feminists, some of the feminists I've treated have been some of the most obsessed with finding men who will just crush them with dominance, especially during sex, because they're really looking for it and they don't think they're worth much often. That's neither here nor there, but that's what women are looking for.

Again, 10,000 years ago, are they going to want a good boy or do they want a strong, confident man who takes charge during problems who proactively finds and solves problems, who doesn't fall apart if she gives some criticism, who does more than just go out and earn a paycheck. No, they're looking for that. They're looking not for a good boy, but for a strong man. So they go forward and they try to good boy

their way into sex, they try to good boy their way into everything that they want, but they're afraid to ask for sex. So they have to do 10 nice things for her and they are so sure that she will be so overwhelmed by the night, the good boy things he does that he will earn sex with good boy points. And she will initiate the good boy sex, not they don't even have to, she'll just jump on me. And when that doesn't happen,

they get resentful toward their wife. And she has no idea what he's doing. And he just seems really unconfident. And so she's not super turned on by him, but she'll have sex with him if he asks, but he never asks. He just punishes her for not having sex with him. So it just erodes the core of that relationship. And over long enough, period, he goes from being a good boy to being a really resentful mean boy who treats her like crap, because he thinks that she has betrayed him by not doing what, by not rewarding him like a good boy like his mom would. So those men often they stay emotionally monogamous to their moms their whole life because at

least with mom I can win love by spending my good boy points. I can't earn love for my wife with good boy points. So the wife and the mom are often in a constant battle too. So emotionally monogamous I really like that. I think I stole that from Dr. Robert Glover, if I remember right. That's really cool. Just a bookend, a lot of the conversations we've had today been around relationships. What are some of the main errors that you have seen clients of yours making when they've been setting out on relationships.

What are the main things to avoid doing? Not having deep conversations up front. I tell people, like I have a video course that teaches young men how to have a first date with a woman that will set them up for having a wife, basically, how to turn a first date into your wife. It is all about doing the opposite of what detached people do. You don't hide everything who you are on the inside and your goals and your points because you're not bad. You put it all out there.

You say, here's who I am. Here's what I want. Here's my mission in life. Here's the kind of partner I'm looking for. On the first date, boom, you lay it on the table and say, here's everything about me that I have not all the bad things, but here's everything about what I want.

What do you want? And you approach it like they did a hundred years ago, they'd get to parents would get together and have a discussion about, okay, is are you right for our family? Should we, and they'd arrange these matches, you have to do the same. You have to go out and courtship. Instead of dating, don't date. Dating is worthless. You were just spinning your wheels and having sex with people that you don't care about and that they don't really care about you. And

it's not going to work out because you're probably going to have meet people who have attachment problems. People who have a healthy attachments don't tend to date. They do courtship instead, which is, I'm really interested in you. You have good features, good enough that I'm a romantically attracted to you and sexually attracted to you. Here's what I want in a relationship. Here's what I'm looking for in the long term.

How do those match up with who you are and where you are? And then you have that conversation. If the other person is able to fully open up and say, yep, this is who I am. These are the pieces of myself. This is what I'm looking for. They don't have to have a 50-year plan with every step perfect, and notebooks filled with it. But if they're able to have those conversations, fully open and share who they are in a confident manner, they probably don't have attachment issues either. So you're vetting them for attachment issues at the same time. And if you're not able to have those conversations, you may have attachment issues either. So you're vetting them for attachment issues at the same time. And if you're not able to have those conversations, you may have attachment issues also. If you're

having those, you're displaying, if you're having the conversations, you're displaying that you have good attachment. So yourself from having a conversation with you, I don't know if you're single or married or what, but if you've come across as a very calm, confident, assertive person, you're not, you're not timidly waiting to see if I'm done talking, right? You're having these conversations. You're educated. You're fit. I can see the muscle outline in your skull,

so you look pretty fit. You probably would go on a date with a woman and layout exactly what you're looking for. You'd probably say, hey, you know what? I don't want to waste a lot of time. Here's what I'm really looking for. Is, you know, I just, I want someone who is going to be a good mother for children.

I'd like that children down the line. It's good to have that discussion on the very first date so that you don't get to date, you know, 500, six years in and say, hey, how do you feel about having kids and discover you're completely incompatible? Chase down those compatibilities on the very first date, do it. That's what dinner should be for. And then don't have sex on the first date because if the other person is giving you sex on the first date, they probably don't have really good boundaries or sense of self-worth, especially looking at again how the female sex drive works. If she's jumping into a risky relationship

like that, then might not be the best option. Not saying every woman who has sex on the first date is a bad woman, but just tendency is there. Just be aware of the trend. Myself, when I applied all that with my wife, I've been married. Oh, boy, I think I've been married 12 years now, well, past 12 years. My wife and I, we were engaged to be married within two weeks of having met. No way. Like, we pounded through the conversations of, this is what I want. These are my religious beliefs. These are my convictions. These are my principles. This is my plan in life. This is where I'm aiming. And at the time, I was 22, I think. I didn't have everything in line.

I didn't have a perfect life vision. But I was able to tell her like, this is what I want. And this is what I'm looking for. And she said, that's exactly what I'm looking for, too. And it just clicked. So we her like, this is what I want and this is what I'm looking for. And she said, that's exactly what I'm looking for too. And it just clicked. So we were like, okay, I want you and I don't want anyone else to have you. So let's get engaged. And we got married 11 months after having met. So two weeks we were engaged and then we were engaged for a full year to watch each other

go through some crises because you don't really know who's who, who someone is until they go through a crisis. And you vet them that way. You see how they act or do you? You see how they act or are there people? You see how they talk about other people. That's really when you get to know someone is when they're out of, when things are out of their control, how do they react? So 11 months in, we got married. And yeah, we just had our 12 year wedding anniversary a couple months ago. So we have three kids. She wants at least seven more or as many as she can steal off the street. I don't know. Adam, man, what an awesome story. I'm so happy for you, man. I'm so happy for you.

And I, and, and I, and that's what I try to teach young men to do and, and, and is find a woman who is so healthy that you can figure out within two weeks if you want to marry her or not. And then make the commitment. Don't hide. Don't sit for six years. You know, the people who who are together for six years and never get married and she's waiting for a ring. Dude, do you want me to throw in one hour and 18 minutes into the podcast? Do you want me to throw in two of the most uncomfortable truths that I've totally forgotten about? The first one, you may be familiar with the co-habitation effect. Yeah, so the longer that you live with someone before you get married, the shorter the marriage is going to be on average, essentially. I wonder, there seems to be a lot of controversy,

or at least there doesn't seem to be a defined answer for why that's the case. One of them is that it's a potential signal that you are good for me, but I'm going to keep the door open for now by not committing to you formally. Are there any other explanations? I know that matches up with the more partners you've co-habitated with before marriage, the less likely you will be to get married, or the more likely you are to have a divorce if you do get married, accepting the first one.

If that is the first person you've ever cohabitated with, it may or may not have that impact. One thing that is also considered is, again, females when they have that orgasm with a partner, there's that oxytocin release that bonds them to that partner. We're actually not allowed to study if that over a long enough time affects a woman if she has sex with multiple partners.

There isn't research that I know of that's been done. Here in the United States, the APA, the American Psychological Association, here in the States, back in the 80s, there was some research that they were going to do, and that research was been, as you British people I think would say been because it challenges the female empowerment dynamic of you can just have as much sex as you want don't worry about it and don't be tied down to a partner. So it's really hard to find any research that studies if a woman having sex with multiple partners actually can cause relationship damage or mental damage for her. But the little research that exists

does seem to indicate that there could be a feature there. There could be a component. Whether that's based on the oxytocin bonding, destroying her ability to bond to partner securely, or if it's just that she's more, some people say she's more aware of her options. So she keeps options open. Good or bad.

I mean, it didn't really matter why it's happening though. There seems to be a correlation. So I'm going to do another one. So the single biggest predictor of extra marital sex is premarital sex. The more partners you have before getting married, the more partners you have when you're married. Frequently, and it's one of the biggest indicators of divorce, actually, interesting also, just because, again, if you look at attachment, a lot of especially female partners, it's

cheap and sex for them. They need sex more because they don't think they have any character quality to draw a man, so they have to use the sex to draw him in. And then once they have that relationship and that marriage, so they have to use the sex to draw him in. And then once they have that relationship and that marriage, then they're down to nothing because they've given him sex. Now it's a marriage and they have to build a marriage based on each of their characters and she doesn't have character. And either just he probably, because he's picked this form. It was built on sex and never ever talking about who you really are on the inside.

For both partners, because again, he picked her. He picked a partner who was okay with never challenging that and never getting super close. Both partners said, yeah, you don't ever want to get closer. Have that discussion? That sounds great to me. Yeah, for no reason at all. I swear. Yeah, that's so yeah. Honestly, premarital sex, a lot of it does come from those attachment issues. There was one that we haven't covered in this one, but we may do, if I'm super keen to get you back onto this, been awesome. But there was one that you talked about to do with people presumed that you have to have sex before you get married to work out whether you're a good sexual match with your partner, but I mean, that's a whole, another rabbit hole to go down. I'm going to leave you with

my favorite one, or my least. I can't work out if I'm satisfied or terrified or whatever it is with these truths, but every time I learn them, I think about them a lot. This one is another Robert Ritism from the moral animal evolutionary psychology. It was talking about one of the reasons why a couple who has been together over a significant period of time, so you're talking like four years plus six years plus and hasn't had children can find themselves falling out of love even if they meant not to have children and were planning on waiting. And this is the evolutionary programming coming in and saying, hang on, you've pair bonded with this other human for X number of years and a baby hasn't arrived. Something's wrong. Something might be wrong with them, something might be wrong with you, something might be wrong with the way that you two interact,

but there is an issue here. And we know, jeans, jeans know, if we get you to leave, if we get you to leave by making you no longer attracted to them or loving toward them, that you can try with someone else. And then maybe if the problem was them, you will have the problem fixed, you will be able to have children. Because for all of evolutionary history, we've not had contraception. So if babies weren't happening, presuming that you were having sex, I mean, you could have a celibate relationship and still this would come through because the only reason that you are here is because you are the head of the pin of an unbroken chain of evolution and breeding that goes all the way back four billion years.

And this is one, man, I see a lot of my, a lot of my buddies who are very happily in a relationship with a girl, maybe meet them at university or meet them in their graduate job or something like that. And they're still with them in their approaching 30. And they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, we're, you know, we're thinking about we're going to have kids maybe towards setting. And I'm like, dude, you are dicing with relationship death here. Yeah. I've seen, and then the woman leaves him and goes to someone else and instantly gets pregnant. I have seen that a lot in my practice. They they split up and she gets a new partner and is instantly pregnant. And you kind of wonder like, okay, who's in the driver's seat in her head?

Right? Is it the brain or is it the womb? Which one's in the driver's seat there? All of us have a lot more animal in us than we're willing to admit. All of us are a lot more neolithic than we're willing to admit 10,000 years ago. We are rational beings, there's more to us than that, and we need to recognize those instincts that exist at the very least, so that we can manage some of the problems that might arise in our relationships if we aren't aware that those things are creeping up on

us. Adam Lane Smith, ladies and gentlemen, where should people go? They want to check out your courses, your books, what's your... Oh, yeah. Well, I'm Adam Lane Smith.com, where you'll find everything. I have psychology articles on there. courses, your books. What's your goal? Oh, yeah. Well, I'm Adam Lane Smith.com where you'll find everything. I have psychology articles on there. I've got books. I've written.

I've got courses. I am on Gumroad. If you find a lot of courses, I've a course called How to Get a Girlfriend. It's one hour or more. I think I keep adding to it video course. Teaching young men exactly, evolutionarily, what women want. No matter what kind of woman she is or where she comes from. What does she want from you and how can you get a girlfriend and how can you turn her into a wife?

And also how to weed out the unhealthy partners. I teach that there. My book that I've written about attachment is called Slaying Your Fear. It's on Amazon, all kinds of all the different geographical Amazon stores. It's one of the number one anxiety books on Amazon for a period of time, brief period of time. But it walks through what is attachment. Why does attachment matter? What happens when it's broken? How do I fix it?

And it walks a person through fixing that attachment. It's only about 100 pages. I think it's $6 for the audio book. And it's about two two hours. It's short but it is punchy and right to the point. I highly recommend that for anyone who has heard anything on this podcast that thinks that it may or may not apply to them. I do always have to give a disclaimer. Nothing I've said is health care advice. I'm not giving you therapy advice. If you have any issues that you feel are your issues, please seek professional help. Don't diagnose it through this course, through this podcast that we're doing, but I hope this has

been educational for people. Dude, you've crushed it. I hope that you continue adding to that thread, so I've got an excuse to bring you back on soon. I have continued adding, even adding to that thread, I think yesterday. Dude, it's linked in the show, and it's below. If you want to go and check out Adam's entire monstrous 100-tweet plus threads now, which is growing and growing and growing, that will be linked plus how to get a girlfriend slaying your fear and everything else. Dude, thank you so much. Yeah, I'm fed.