There’s only one way to experience lasting fulfillment, love, peace, and joy.

The problem is that most men get this backwards. They think they have to make a bunch of money or achieve status in order to be worthy. But this causes burn out, an awful love life, and a relentless sense of depression.

The antidote?

Realizing you’re worthy of love right now. Not only does it unlock happiness, but you’ll have more success in your career too.

In this episode, I share how you can transform your life by believing you’re worthy of love with three separate and contrasting stories.

Listen to the episode now and unlock this “cheat code” for life in yourself.

 Show highlights include:


  • Why achieving your “best self” to attract unconditional love is an impossible feat that makes you unhappy and spiteful (5:02)
  • The “Internal Attractiveness” secret that destroys your neediness (9:33)
  • How repressing your sexual freedom when you’re younger increases your chances of having a mid-life crisis (12:22)
  • Why picking a wife for her “arm candy” value skyrockets your chance of divorce (and how to save your marriage if you fell into this trap) (17:23)
  • The dangerous “Power Couple” lure many entrepreneurs fall into that makes their spouses cheat on them (23:28)
  • How joy, peace, and inner freedom in your romantic life catapults your business growth (even if you’re already massively successful) (25:53)
  • The counterintuitive way being enough today helps you accomplish more in life (34:10)

    Does your neediness, fear, or insecurity sabotage your success with women? Do you feel you may be unlovable? For more than 15 years, I’ve helped thousands of people find confidence, fulfillment, and loving relationships. And I can help you, too. I’m therapist and life coach David Tian, Ph.D. I invite you to check out my free Masterclasses on dating and relationships at https://www.davidtianphd.com/masterclass/ now.

For more about David Tian, go here: https://www.davidtianphd.com/about/

    Get access to all my current and future online coaching courses by applying for the Platinum Partnership program today at:
https://www.davidtianphd.com/platinum

*****

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Note: Scroll Below for Transcription




Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast, where we answer key questions in dating, relationships, success, and fulfillment, and explore the psychology of masculinity. Now here’s your host, world-renowned therapist and life coach, David Tian.

David: Welcome to the Masculine Psychology Podcast. I am David Tian, your host.

In the previous two episodes, we’ve been looking at the problem of worthiness, of being enough, of self-worth, and we’ve touched on the concepts of neediness and core insecurities, the twin terrors—the fear that you’re not enough and the fear that you’re not enough for love—and we looked at what it actually means to be enough for love.

In the previous episode, we dove deep into the different kinds of value and distinguishing the many different other kinds of value from human value or what it means to be enough for love or to be worthy of love. We looked at how economic value, social value, sexual value, mating value, military value, political value, all different kinds of value are different from what it means to be enough or worthy of love, to have human values, what I’ve been calling it. [01:16.3]

We also went into unconditional love and its connection with value and in neediness, and we ended the last episode on the distinction between therapy versus philosophy, noticing how philosophy is a great handmaiden to therapy, but it’s the most important to have the unconscious emotional processing and realizing that that’s where the heavy-lifting is.

Intellectual understanding is great, but there are plenty of times—and I’m sure you can relate to—when you understand something intellectually, but you’re still hampered by the old way of thinking emotionally or at the unconscious level, so that the importance of therapy really kicks in at that point. [02:00.0]

Just noticing that that’s why there’s such a great importance placed on the therapeutic process over and over in this podcast, that the majority of the work and the transformation and the growth will happen through the emotional processing, and yet that the intellectual understanding that the intellectual part of it is actually the easy part. It is also the most straightforward one and one that we can do through just talking like this.

But if you really want to dive deep into what’s really at the source or underlying the patterns that you’re trying to undo or that you find yourself trapped in, that’s going to be in the unconscious, in the emotions, and that’s why the therapeutic process is so important.

Along the way, we pointed out the myth of earned love and how pernicious that myth is and how persistent it is, especially for achievers, because earning the love or the self-worth, or earning the attention or approval, or validation or significance, is the modus operandi for achievers. It’s built into the very concept of achieving and that’s the coping strategy that would be a default for an achiever. [03:13.8]

But it’s also embedded in all of the other coping strategies, whether that ends up being a rebel or a recluse or a pleaser. Whatever coping strategy you’ve settled on or defensive mechanism you’ve settled on will involve doing something in order to protect from some fear or earn, and the flip side of that is to earn, to attempt to earn love, connection, approval, affection, and so forth.

This idea of earning what we want and need, more importantly, what we need, is at the bottom of this myth of earned love, and closely connected to the myth of earned love is this trap of being your best self. On the surface, being your best self is great. It’s totally fine as long as you enjoy the process of becoming whatever this ideal you’ve set for yourself as your best self. [04:07.4]

But if the motivation or the main motivation for being your best self is actually to be your best self in order to be good enough or worthy of your ideal woman—which is very common among guys who are searching for material and somehow find me—or if being your best self is required to be worthy or good enough for whatever your dreams are, whether it’s to build a billion-dollar company or something along those lines, and only then will you be enough, so it requires being your best self in order to be enough or to feel like enough, then we’ve got this toxic pattern that we’ve been addressing the past two episodes.

That will destroy and completely sabotage your attempts at creating an intimate relationship over the long run and, more importantly, perhaps, just finding fulfillment and peace, and joy and happiness in your life, because what you don’t want to do in your life is to put off your self-worth or the feeling of finally being worthy of love until you become your best self—because, theoretically speaking, you will never be finished in being your best self because there’s always better, right? [05:20.7]

But even then the ideal that many people set for themselves as their best selves could take a lifetime to achieve, and even if it doesn’t, you still need to maintain it for the rest of your life, because if you slip from being your best self, then if that feeling of being enough or enough for your ideal woman is that you have to be your best, and you slip down from that and you’re no longer your best self, guess what that means. It means that you’re now no longer enough for this ideal woman or this relationship, or this goal or just feeling enough—and that’s a really horrible place to be in that you constantly have to strive to achieve to be enough, to strive to be enough. [06:05.8]

At first, for a lot of achievers, this is just their default approach to life. If you’re a young achiever, you may think, No, duh, this is just how the world is and too bad, suck it up and go out there and work harder. Fine, I mean, go out and try it. At some point, you’ll become exhausted, burnt out, and you’ll start to act out. If you’re wise, you’ll start to question the whole thing, and there’s another way.

There’s another way where you can become, and I’m going to appeal to the majority of my audience and maybe this is you listening, you can become naturally attractive. What that means is that whatever you naturally do, feel, think, what you naturally want to say is attractive already. It’s just you being you. [06:54.7]

Without having to try, without having to strive, without having to go out and earn it, but just you being you, and even more importantly, without having to strive or accomplish anything or achieve anything—or get good grades or get good marks, or win the trophy or work overtime, or make a ton of money—that you don’t need to do any of those things to be worthy of love, in that you believe that at a 10 out of 10 conviction, and on the basis of that, that naturally extends, that naturally leads to fulfillment, lasting joy, peace, and love.

When you truly believe that you are worthy of love, when you truly believe that you are enough for love, that basis, that bedrock foundation of your own self-worth, enough for love—you’re not loved for what you can do or for what you have or possess. You’re not loved for your clothes or your car or your six pack, or even for your witty repartee, or you’re not loved just because of your face or your muscles. You’re not loved for even just your intellect or your ability to get good grades or get the right answer—and you’re not loved for any of those things, what you can do or have, but you’re only loved for who you. That you exist is enough for you to be worthy of love. [08:23.5]

Love, first and foremost, for yourself and from yourself, pouring from yourself, that’s “the” most important thing. You might have heard about this, this “love yourself” theme, from psychotherapy or other well-meaning clinical books or resources, and it might have just gone right over your head because it sounded too airy-fairy vague, but there is a truth to it. Hopefully, by this point, and it’s the third episode I’ve devoted to this theme, it’s really sinking in how and why this is true. [08:57.8]

When it is true for you, if in the event, it becomes true for you, which I really hope for you—if you follow the therapeutic process, it can become a truth for you, if it’s not right now—that you are 10 out of 10 able to fulfill your own needs for love by loving yourself, and receiving and giving love to yourself and from yourself—and in IFS therapy terms, from your higher self or true self to your parts and your inner-child parts, your exiled parts, your managerial parts, your protective parts, and all your parts—and there’s love going around all around when you have your own needs for love truly fulfilled in yourself and the conviction that you are enough and worthy of love in yourself, then all of the neediness goes away, so that on scale one to 10, your neediness goes to zero.

When that happens, you are maximally attractive in terms of your personality on the inside. You can always improve on the externals. You can get better fashion, maybe eat healthier or be more fit or something like that, but that’s just icing on the cake. [10:06.0]

In terms of your personality, your level of neediness is inversely proportional to your attractiveness, and I went into more detail about that and I actually did that two episodes and I’ve dedicated other episodes to that neediness connection there. It’s realizing that if your neediness is inversely proportional to your attractiveness, especially as a man, and you can bring your neediness down to zero as a natural consequence of truly believing that you are enough for love, then that is the key to actually realizing your natural attractiveness and to being naturally attractive without having to do anything more.

I’ve talked a lot about the “do more” trap in other episodes in my video series leading up to announcing “Invincible”, the course, so maybe you’ve heard about that. This is the long term solution to it, which is the therapeutic process, which is why in “Invincible”, half the course is dedicated to the beginnings of a therapeutic process that will continue to work in the unconscious of whoever does their course. [11:08.7]

It’s also a major part of many of my courses in the “Platinum Partnership”, including and/or especially “Rock-Solid Relationships”, “Freedom U” and “Lifestyle Mastery”. These concepts that I’ve been covering over the past couple episodes that I’ll be explaining today through stories and case studies—and the therapeutic process that is at the core of the courses in my “Platinum Partnership.”—these are the only way to lasting fulfillment, joy, peace, and love in your life.

Just to head off one common objection I get on YouTube and as feedback from younger guys is, David, love sounds really nice, but I’m not really looking for that right now. I just want to have a flourishing sex life. I just want to have more options when it comes to dating. I want to have more fun. I want to have more sex with beautiful women. [12:01.8]

I totally resonate with that and I totally get that. Hopefully, people aren’t ashamed too much about their sexuality and can recognize that sex is a biological need and that it’s totally fine to be motivated for that, especially if you’re lacking sexual outlets, especially just a mere outlet. Even more, if you’re lacking sexual expression or sexual freedom. Sow your wild oats. Get it out of your system. Go through that phase.

It’s actually dangerous in the modern world to deny or repress those sexual desires or urges, and then force yourself prematurely into a committed relationship, and only later going through a midlife crisis of sorts, then becoming curious about all of the good fun times you missed out on because you settled down prematurely or earlier on and maybe missing out on a fun phase of life. Explore that, especially when you’re younger and the logistics are in your favor. [13:04.3]

But no matter if you’re young and think you’re primarily motivated by sex or the need for sex, or if you’re older and you’re confusing the need for sex and love, let me ask you this question—if you could get your need for sex fulfilled by just paying for it with a consensual sex worker, let’s make it in the ideal situation, a satisfied or happy sex worker, if you could do that, why don’t you go and do that?

A lot of guys would say, That’s not what I’m really after. I don’t want to just make more money, so that I can easily afford a good sex worker. I kind of chuckled because that’s often the reaction the guys get. “No, I want to earn it. That doesn’t mean anything to me if I have to pay for it. I want to be able to earn a beautiful woman’s love or liking or sex. It doesn’t mean anything unless I can earn it.” [13:53.5]

There you go. If that that’s you and you don’t want to just get your sexual needs met on their own by, for instance, a sex worker, then you’ll notice that your need for sex is bundled up and maybe has at its deeper layers or as a deeper foundation, other needs, other emotional, the need for connection or significance, or the need for love or the need to be worthy and enough because you feel like you have to earn it—and now we return to the myth of earned love. No matter what, you will eventually arrive at this point, because, otherwise, you would just meet your needs for sex relatively straightforwardly by employing the world’s oldest profession.

Okay, so we come back to this fundamental need, the need to be enough, and this fundamental fear, what I’ve been calling the twin terrors, the two terrors, the two fears—the fear that you’re not enough and the fear that you won’t be loved—and together they are the fear that you’re not enough for love and that is a fear that all of us have and share from the beginning. The question is not whether you have ever had that fear or those fears. It’s, how are you addressing them? And how are you meeting the deeper need that is embedded in that fear, the need to be enough for love? [15:15.5]

I wanted to bring up a few case studies to help you understand, to illustrate how this works in day-to-day real life. The first case I want to bring up is Bruce.

Bruce is a really complex man. By the time he came to see me for client work, he was in his sixties and he was incredibly successful. He was in the finance world and made a ton of money, but then he lost his drive for it, but he stuck with it. Even though he stuck with it, he had from the beginning, from his childhood, this desire to be creative through the arts and to have artistic expression as a major way for him to feel happy and fulfilled, and to feel joy in life. [16:06.8]

But like most achievers, he grew up in a household that prioritized academic achievement, so these artistic pursuits were fun hobbies that kind of rounded out your character or your profile, but could not ever serve as the main career that you are pursuing.

He ended up in an engineering and tech role at Stanford, starting out there and then moving into finance and kind of at the intersection of those, and has done really well for himself. It’s not like he hated those fields. Obviously, there were parts of those STEM fields and finance fields that he really enjoyed, but after so many decades doing it and even at the beginning, he wasn’t that passionate about it.

But he especially became disillusioned with it, especially in the world of the finance, when he was on the inside and at the very tippy top of it and saw the kind of—how would he put it? The kind of self-serving nature of the machine of finance and the economy, and so on. [17:07.0]

He really just wanted to spend his time and his effort in creative expressions, which he did on the side all the way through his life, but he al felt that he was always pausing, putting them on hold prematurely, and one of the reasons he came to see me was his marriage—he was on his third marriage by this time—was falling apart.

Over and over, it was the constant theme through his relationships that kept getting more and more severe and extreme, which was that he was attracted to women that he could kind of show off as arm candy, so to speak—and this is a common theme, by the way—someone who is just as driven and would look really great in terms of status among his peers at work and in the professional worlds he was in, but who actually was, just as he was, insecure about who he was, because he felt just like she was. They had to earn their worthiness. [18:09.0]

The way that Bruce earned his worthiness was by diving full on into all of these external worldly achievements and he found women, a mate, wives, who repeatedly, over and over, were also really powerful, like powerhouses in their industries and they were industries that were, from a traditional perspective, very respectable.

The whole time, though, what he really wanted to do was to pursue his creative, artistic expressions, and he felt trapped. He also discovered that his marriage, yet again, once again, was losing all of its passion and, even more, she was becoming very abusive—because what happened was that Bruce was not fully integrated. [18:56.4]

That is, he had these parts of himself that were alive in creative expression, but didn’t get the light of day or only got to be explored a half-hour a week or something along those lines, and he was kind of dying on the inside because of that, and on the outside, he was striving. He was being an achiever, an ultra-achiever, but he wasn’t fulfilled.

Over time, his woman, his mate, his partner, sensed that, and at some unconscious level, was losing respect for him more and more. Then she started to bully him and then he would take that big victim role, and eventually by the time he came to find me, he was over a decade into that third marriage and it was very abusive emotionally and verbally, and even to some degree, physically. This is the bind he finds himself in, when he first came to find me. 

Now, the amazing thing over the course of the years that we worked together was that he was able to extricate himself from his professional obligations in a way that he was able to tie the knots in a way that satisfied him. [20:04.6]

Then he was also able to build a new career of creative expression, and, at the time—he was also with his wife at the time—was coming to terms with the fact that he probably would have to separate yet again. But because for the first time in his life, he really embraced those parts of him through our work and our time together, and just watching the blossoming of those inner-child parts that really responded to creativity of artistic expression, and giving voice to those and giving expression to those, and really prioritizing those parts of him that brought him so much joy and fulfillment and spontaneity, and allowing the achiever parts to relax and retire if they wanted to—in his mind’s eye, they went off to a beach or islands and were able to have a vacation because they’d been working so hard for so long—and his creative artistic parts really came to the fore. [21:00.6]

He was surprised to find that his wife had a newfound respect for him and it took quite a while for that shift to be evident to her, but then she really reached out in strong way to him to let him know she didn’t want to get divorced, and now they’re in this process of reconciliation, potentially, and we’ll see where that goes.

But, more importantly, for Bruce is the happiness and fulfillment that he found through this creative artistic expression by finally realizing that without these achievements, he’s still enough. He doesn’t have to cling to these worldly achievements, these external accolades, in order to feel like he’s enough for love or enough for the woman in his life, because if he were to cling to that, he’d feel dead inside.

Yet the thing that’s making him dead inside is the things that he’s counting on to be worthy. In fact, the things that he’s counting on to be worthy of the woman are the very things that are causing him to not have passion in his relationship and for the woman to lose respect for him. [22:02.5]

Then when he was able to bring out those creative, artistic parts that had been dying to come out for so many decades, the marriage took a new turn, and we shall see how it goes. We’re continuing to do this work and it’s just been an amazing thing, witnessing the transformation in Bruce, of coming to terms that the achieving parts and the pleasing parts don’t need to do this work in order for Bruce to be enough for love.

Do you struggle in your interactions with women or in your intimate relationship? Are fear, shame, or neediness sabotaging your relationships or attractiveness? In my Platinum Partnership Program, you’ll discover how to transform your psychological issues, improve your success with women, and uncover your true self.

Get access to all my current and future online courses by applying for the Platinum Partnership today at DavidTianPHD.com\\Platinum.

Now let me tell you about another client whose name is Ben or Benjamin. [23:14.0]

Now, Benjamin when he came to me was a very high-powered entrepreneur. He had started multiple companies and multiple ones exited, and he was moving into a more of a VC role, and a big drive for him, a big motivation for him was to find a woman that he could be a power couple with. I spent a lot of time helping him to see how this was a narcissistic goal, but he wouldn’t have it. His parts wouldn’t let go of that.

He eventually got into a relationship with a woman that he had been chasing for many years before he met me and they became what he had in his ideal, this kind of power couple. She was physically attractive, vivacious, vibrant, and the kind of woman that he thought he could really show off to his peers and feel like he finally made it, like, Now I’m enough. I not only have the money and the influence, but now I have this hot woman on my arm—and it’s kind of a trophy wife, right? [24:14.5]

This was his girlfriend who then, over the course of couple years, cheated on him not only once, but repeatedly, and because having this trophy woman was such an integral part of him feeling like he was enough or worthy of love that he kept taking her back, even though she would each time cheat on him in a more egregious way that was more in his face even more each time and hurt him even more each time as.

Eventually through some coaching and just gently staying with him through this process, helping him to see how dysfunctional and unhealthy this relationship was and being with those parts of him that were driven to achieve this narcissistic ideal, we were finally able to help these parts relax enough to address this lack of self-worth, so that, finally, when he was able to have that belief that he was enough for love just in who he is. [25:14.8]

Not needing an attractive woman on his arm to be enough, not needing a ton of money to be enough, not needing to be featured on the cover of any magazines to be enough, but just in who he is, he’s enough, regardless of all of the trappings of entrepreneurial success that he had in his mind that he also had as an ideal passed down to him from his parents and from their parents before them, passed down through his lineage, that he was able to let go of all of those demands and that just he and who he is himself since he was born, was already enough for love.

From that place, he finally became free inside, psychologically, internally, finally free of all of the demands and all of the requirements and all of the conditions for earning that love that he had been yearning for since he was a child. [26:08.7]

Surprising to him even, but even to me, his professional success just skyrocketed in the past year and beyond levels that he had ever achieved in his life, which was even a kind of a surprise to me. I didn’t expect that as an outcome and it wasn’t a necessary outcome.

I was so happy be about his joy and his peace and his inner freedom, but it also paid off in his professional life and he has become even more successful, which really validated those parts of himself that were these achiever parts, these entrepreneurial parts that were so driven from Dad’s, his dad’s inner limiting beliefs and so forth and burdens. 

It validated his trust in his true self that not only can you find happiness and love, but you can also, along the way, still achieve financial success because he’s having fun and he’s really enjoying the new projects that he has poured himself into. [27:05.3]

Now let me tell you about a client named Vic. Many years ago, I started working with Vic and we worked together for a number of years and we’ve kept in touch since then. One of the biggest breakthroughs I had with Vic, when he came to me, was driven by a need to appease his parents and his parents were very conservative. They were from an Asian family and had a very close-knit community, so according to Vic, his parents were constantly stressing about how other people would view them.

Vic had all of these expectations on his head to become ultra-successful like his older sister, who was a very successful surgeon, and he felt like he had to step into those shoes and either be a doctor or a lawyer, or a very rich businessman. He wasn’t that great scholastically or academically, so he went with the businessman route. [27:57.3]

The thing was his greatest passion was actually this other hobby of his. He was a craftsman kind of artisan, artisanal craftsman, and that type of artistic work was not mainstream, for sure. It wasn’t a reliable job or anything like that. But he loved it and he did it in his free time and he did it on the weekends, and he did it as a part-time job starting from his late-teens and into his twenties as a way of making extra money. He did pretty well considering it was his part-time job in this hobby of his, while he was still pursuing his degree and then going into business and trying to move into a startup, co-founding a startup.

The thing was here he was trying to learn coding and all kinds of things that he really didn’t enjoy, but he felt like he had to in order to bring pride to his family and to live up to their expectations, but every day that he was devoting to the startup—not every day. Some days were fun, I think, for him, especially the ones that involved speaking in front of an audience or coming up with creative ideas, but a lot of it—was a kind of drudgery and a kind of lack of meaning that ate away at him. [29:14.2]

When he came to work with me, he was in that phase—and I noticed that it was coming from trying to live up to the expectations foisted on him by his community, especially by his parents who were trying to live up to that because of their own fears—and as he was able to do the work of letting go of the burdens that were passed down to him, and then of his own burdens that he was being so hard on himself and his achiever parts were being worked to exhaustion, and allowing them to be able to step back enough to work with the vulnerable parts who just wanted connection, love, approval, attention from his parents who were mostly absent in his childhood at their work. [29:52.5]

As he was able to give himself that love and that feeling that he was enough just in who he was, that he didn’t to do all of this extra stuff, especially stuff he didn’t really like or felt was meaningful, he was able to have the courage to let go of the business work that he had taken up, which wasn’t fulfilling him and he didn’t find meaningful—which was already kind of failing anyway, partly because his heart wasn’t into it anyway—and flung him sell fully into the pursuit of making a business out of his hobby, which was this artisanal craftsmanship.

He started to go to these trade shows and he opened up a shop where people could come in and buy his products, and then, over time, he was able to put together a really successful shop that got featured in a lot of magazines. The thing was just getting the shop up and running required quite a bit of capital and no one believed in him except his very good friends growing up, so thankfully, he had these great friends who were also going through their own journeys of trying to resist the burdens or trying to let go of the burdens that were foisted on them by their culture, their community, and their parents, and they supported him. [31:08.8]

He was able to succeed to the point where his shop flourished, and then, even during the COVID pandemic and the lockdowns that he endured, and their community and the country endured, he was able to open up new shops during the pandemic, which was astounding and they are flourishing and the launches were huge and they’re doing really well.

His heart is in it. He’s finding so much meaning in the day-to-day work and, along the way—and I’m just saying this, along the way—he met the love of his life and got married. That’s almost an afterthought. I mean, part of why he was coming to me was, not only was his work killing him, but he was having a really tough time in his dating life. That was the main reason he came to me, and then I had identified how his work was eating him up from inside and that was a major reason why he didn’t have that self confidence that would carry him through in his dating life. [32:02.3]

Once we addressed the therapeutic issues that he was facing of having to have these, having to live under the burdens of these that these achiever parts were trying to meet and were so exhausted, and helping them to let go of those burdens through this therapeutic process that naturally, as a result of that, he was able to get his dating life going just as a sort of a matter of course, just through his day-to-day life and meet the woman of his life. They’ve had a son together.

It’s been beautiful to see all of that happen over the past few years, actually the past couple years, so it was really exciting to see that, all stemming from this breakthrough in believing that he was enough—enough for love, enough without having to do all of this other stuff and get all of these other achievements and accolades, and all of earning his significance, but that he was already enough and worthy from the moment he was born. [33:03.3]

Having that belief really sink in for him actually then allowed him this freedom to motivate him to go out and achieve, not only at a high level and exceed any of his prior achievements, but even more importantly, in a pursuit that he found meaningful and immensely enjoyable and that flowed out of his natural personality—most importantly, finding love, fulfillment, joy, and peace in himself, and then being able to share that with the love of his life and now his new child.

These are some examples of what can happen. I actually had another story I wanted to share, but in the interest of time, maybe I’ll be able to share that in another episode. Just so many of these case studies I can pull of what happens, the amazing things that happen in a person’s life when he or she fully believes that they are worthy of love in themselves without having to go and do anything to earn it. They’re not loved for what they can do. They’re not loved for their possessions. They’re loved simply because of who they are, because they exist, because they are. [34:09.0]

Hopefully, the case series I pulled out here will directly address the objection that “Oh, then that would mean you’d be lazy.” Right? This is the great fear among macho men in this kind of toxic masculinity. If everyone believed that they were enough, if everyone believed what Mister Rogers had been saying through his show, you are enough for love just in who you are, then everyone would just be lazy bums lying on their couch, watching Netflix, and Cheetos dust all over their chest.

I’ve seen over and over and over that that is actually not true. The reason they end up in those situations as a lazy bum is they’re not actually lazy. What they’re doing is in another response to believing that they’re not enough. They’ve just given up and their achiever parts have not picked up the slack, so to speak. [34:56.3]

You can see it more easily among achievers because that’s the general profile that I work with, but it’s the same thing on the other side of it, the recluse or the one who has just sort of given in to just staying hidden in the basement, not trying because then he won’t ever be proven that he’s not enough, so he doesn’t have to face that fear, but either way, it stems from this belief that you’re not enough.

I have many achievers among my listeners. If you’re an achiever, hopefully this resonated with you over the past few episodes and, hopefully, some of these case studies did as well. For many people, the biggest issue is that they might be able to give intellectual ascent to it after hearing about it and thinking about it—Yeah, it’s got to be. It can’t be that love has to be earned because then it wouldn’t be love. Therefore, it must mean that love must be unconditional. But then that would mean that I’m worthy of love without having to do anything. That means that I was worthy of love since I was born or maybe even conceived, so if that’s love, then that’s wonderful, but I don’t feel it. I’m still laboring under these old burdens, so I can give intellectual assent to that idea, but it’s not bringing the attendant emotional transformation or emotional change. [36:14.8]

Great, that is true and that’s something that I brought up in the last episode, that maybe you don’t feel it. Maybe you’ll get it intellectually, but you don’t feel it emotionally. That’s what the therapeutic process is for because what’s really at stake here is what’s happening in your unconscious mind and at the level of your emotions, your emotional processing, as well as unconscious thoughts and beliefs, and images and patterns, and those are addressed through the therapeutic process.

A great way to start on that is through the recorded courses that I’ve got in my “Platinum Partnership”, which also comes with a coaching call currently. You can also, if I have some availability, you can see if you can work with me in private therapy. Also, I recommend that everyone find a good IFS therapist and you can google IFS Therapy Directory and find the directory, and look up a therapist in your time zone and email a bunch of them and see which ones you fit well with. [37:10.7]

I’ve actually done another episode on how to find a good therapist, and beware that just like any other domain experts, there are some who are good and there are some that are not so good. There are some things to look out for, but give it a go. There’s a whole directory of experts waiting to help you.

Hopefully, whether you follow through and I see you in the “Platinum Partnership”, or you come to work with me or you work with someone else who is good at what they do at the therapy, whether you at or not, hopefully, I will see you somewhere on the internet.

Thank you so much for listening, and I would really appreciate any kind of rating on Apple Podcasts and any kind of feedback that you’ve got. If this has helped you in any way, please share it with anyone that you think would benefit from it.

I appreciate all of the engagement so far, and thank you so much for listening. I look forward to welcoming you to the next episode. Until then, David Tian, signing out. [38:05.0]

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