Solving Approach Anxiety – a Critique of Starchild Illuminatus’ Advice
| March 3, 2013 | Posted by Koanic under Game |
Check out Illuminatus, post-KS encounter, discussing the problem of AA (Approach Anxiety, a PUA term):
AA is the tip of the iceberg. It is NOT “the problem” whatsoever.
What about after AA? So just ‘cos you approached you’ll suddenly be fine? Of course you won’t. There isn’t some promised land beyond AA. Just getting through AA isn’t like the gateway to Narnia or something.
The real problem for guys with “AA” is that they do not BELIEVE what they are about to do will work. And that’s because it won’t. If you feel that something might go well, it generally will. If you think it won’t, then generally it won’t. So you feel it won’t go well, so you don’t see the point in approaching. And you’re right. Guys then compartmentalize this as “AA”, to give themselves a diagnosis — something their thinking mind thinks it understands, something it can “work on”, and eventually “find a solution” for. Then you get a million posts where guys are asking, “How do I overcome my AA?”
First of all, this is a very Starchild-flavored exposition. It’s good, and Starchildren generally are at this. His goal is to get you to internally reframe your thoughts and values to view the entire interaction positively, not just the initial approach. He’ll do a great job deconstructing all the reasons you currently don’t – from his perspective.
And there’s the rub – you and he are almost certainly not genetically similar, you not being a Starchild, but a Neanderthal. So while he can influence and inspire you, maybe even help you, his model is ultimately not the correct fit for your hardware.
Rather than all this Starchild value weaving, I suggest a different solution – only approach Thal chicks.
Feel what that immediately does. It’s a tremendous weight off. Now here’s the second part: approach for the purpose of genuine friendship. You haven’t even decided you want the bang, so how could it be anything else? She’s a Thal, and that’s reason enough for friendship.
That, for me, does what reams and reams of PUA could never do. It takes away my “AA” and makes me genuinely excited about interacting with an attractive female again – beyond just the excitement of getting laid, which affects only a very small portion of my being.
Now, with that out of the way, I’ve been overly dismissive of the value of Illuminatus’ advice, so let’s go through and learn from him. This is very good:
Your disposition comes from your genes, your imprinting, your conditioning, and your education. That list is written in order of power, with genes being the most powerful. Imprinting is next, which mostly comes from your parents before the age of 7.
This is the basic reason why I had to add the massive caveat at the beginning:
Your conditioning is just stuff like “It’s rude to interrupt strangers”, which is actually pretty easy to overcome by practising (reconditioning) a new behaviour — as long as that new conditioning is not massively opposed by your genes or imprinting. But trying to condition a new behaviour when it’s actually the genes and imprinting creating your overall disposition of “this is wrong” is going to feel highly resistive and stressful.
My Neanderthal, K-selected genes and imprinting simply will not accept most forms of mainstream PUA behavior.
Yet guys who have good genes for socializing with strangers will find it easy to recondition the “It’s rude to interrupt strangers” rule because they have no resistance to it on the deeper levels. Throw in some good imprinting (alpha father role model) and you’re set. This is the reason why some guys fly after learning “Hey, it’s okay to approach!” and others are STILL absolutely resistive to it even after doing it a million times.
Translation: Mainstream PUA advice makes melons fly and Thals fall apart.
Genes are the major problem. Look into the Asperger’s spectrum — note how the majority of guys finding the seduction community display traits on that spectrum: introverted, overly-analytical, obsessive about specific things, addicted to collecting information, struggling to hold eye contact, difficulty relating emotionally to and interpreting the emotions of others, huge resistance to the social games other humans play because they are compelled toward HONESTY and do not understand these games which are based on inauthenticity… and so forth.
Illuminatus does all but name Thals here. Next he acknowledges Thal PUA burnout and terrible results ratios. He says our fathers are beta, which is true but also a K-selected stable childhood environment hurts game psychopathy capacity as well.
Tyler, the founder of RSD, is a fucking pain eating machine because he pushes through his Thal resistance to make it happen. But it is even harder for guys who have both Thal resistance and a K-selected upbringing. Tyler’s was very chaotic and r-selected:
He actually gets rejected a fuck ton, but just immediately goes to the next girl, and the next, until he finds a girl who likes him. My friend took an RSD bootcamp maybe 6 months ago, and said that at the beginning of the night, Tyler was pretty nervous and hung out in the bathroom for 20 minutes. Then Tyler told my friend “look man, I’ve been working on business stuff for weeks on end. I’m not in a social mood and I am nervous as fuck. So I’m gonna just approach girl after girl until I get into a social mood. This is gonna be awkward and suck. Here goes…”
So he approached the nearest girl, a fatty, with something like “heyyyyyy” *creepy stare and grabbing her hands*. He was awkwardly rejected. He turned to my friend and said, “that’s one.” He did the same thing over and over, with any girl, no matter how surrounded by dudes she was. It was less awkward each time, and the girls were less freaked out each time, and soon they were having 5 minute conversations, and Tyler kept doing this over and over until he was on top of his game, and getting great reactions from the girls… And for the rest of the bootcamp, he was “in state”.
Next Illuminatus talks about drugs, e.g. Phenibut, Tramadol, ecstasy, weed or alcohol, as solutions. They work, with side effects. Sports, exercise, sleep deprivation and meditation also help, as does maintaining social momentum.
I like his point about state = muscle relaxation, which is substantially true.
If you’re a hardcase, consider taking ecstasy for that first reference experience:
For “hard cases”, a drug can be pretty much guaranteed to have some sort of noticeable relaxing effect on physiology. So it can give them a glimpse of what they’re actually working towards, rather than have them continue following various guides that might be completely mismatched to their personality. E.g. I never really understood any aspect of what it’s like to be attractive to women until I took MDMA. Before that it was total guesswork, with horrible results.
This line is great:
That ties into another point I like to make that girls don’t really have “episodic” (factual) memory — their memory is just whatever they’re feeling that moment.
And this line is pure Starchild:
Whatever the “truth” (I don’t really believe in objective truth anyway, to be honest…)
A good insight into Asperger’s:
Asperger’s, by the way, is largely understood to involve over-activity or dependence on the left hemisphere.
I view autism as a deeper brain function, in which the mind is slipping into itself, imploding into numbers, shapes, colors. Asperger’s I view as a frontal face issue. See my post on the Asperger’s face. It’s testosteroney, an overlinearization and literalization that brings greatly decreased mental flexibility and omnidirectionality. It’s mostly personality and partially processing style, whereas autism is mostly processing style and partly personality.
Here’s an example of a strategy well suited for Starchild and possibly TM hardware, but not T front:
Finally, while I believe lowering your own pain is a noble endeavour, there must also come a point where you begin focusing on what you WANT as your major thought-feel pattern. I do this by visualizing what I want in life, during relaxed moments (e.g. following meditation or TRE, (trauma-releasing exercises)). It’s been working really well for me. Getting joyful experiences lowers pain anyway so this is another whole-system approach.
Sounds like Illuminatus is onto something very big here:
Serotonin was my first port of call, then opioids, and finally I now have a pretty good idea that it is actually GABA-B — because the phenibut state exactly matches these meditation bliss states. Correct sleep, and exercise, also have profound effects on GABA.
Finally, the diet. We know that many people, when going on ketogenic diets such as paleo, begin to feel euphoric, energized and “healthy” very quickly. It turns out that ketogenic diets naturally produce in the body a substance called BHB, which is chemically very similar to GHB, the drug “liquid ecstasy” which you (Chris) also promote as the greatest anti-anxiety drug. BHB and GHB both work on the GABA-B receptor (and the GHB receptor). So, it turns out, the right diet can mean that these “drugs” are being made in your brain anyway.
(Source: http://www.moodfoods.com/fasting-mood.html)What’s more, if you eat gluten (e.g. WHEAT), it raises glutamate, the brain’s primary excitatory neurotransmitter — which does the exact opposite to GABA. …
So, if Koanic is right, and we have these layover genes from the Neanderthals which favour a hunter/herder diet (paleo), then we’ve been trashing our own brains by eating human-made crops like wheat all our lives. Getting back to paleo and kicking out gluten (via kicking out anything FAKE), and sticking with it, means we could have our brain’s own version of the drugs I’ve been discussing in this thread sloshing around and keeping us in a natural bliss state we’re meant to be in anyway. By adding the correct exercise and sleep pattern, good posture, plus even just a really basic 10-minute meditation practice each day to break us out of modern society’s artificially-induced left-brain state, we can all potentially get back to brain superhealth and experience the states of relaxation and vitality we’re MEANT to experience anyway — beginning an upward spiral of mood and success — the opposite to the downward spiral many of us have so far had to live in.
I would tentatively add that for some Thals ditching starches in favor of dairy carbs is part of it.
-
Glenn
-
Wald
-
Glenn
-
Guest
-
Koanic
-
Guest
-
Koanic
-
Guest
-
Koanic
-
Guess
-
Koanic
-
Cesium
-
Koanic
-
Tsicar
-
Koanic
