The High Status Male

The other day I received a sad letter from a guy who seems to have completely hit bottom in a social sense.  He wrote of having been unable to function around people since high school, of being the butt of universal scorn, humor and disrespect all his life.  Embarrassment and shattered courage dogged his every failed attempt to connect with women.  What this man described to me sounded more than just a case of ordinary rejection fear and more like full blown social phobia.  He talked about having been bullied, humiliated and put down by his peers and possibly even his own family while growing up, although it wasn’t clear to me if this later fact was true.  I would bet that his upbringing contributed in some way though, by instilling in him a high degree of shame about some critical aspect of his own sense of self-worth.

So I wrote him back, and now I’d like to share some of my thoughts with you concerning this issue of being trapped in a private hell of social isolation — at least from my humble layman’s perspective (a layman who’s read over 1,000 letters from shy and troubled men all across the world, however…).

Life-long, repeated negative re-enforcement of any stimulus — good or bad — has an almost hypnotic effect on the unconscious mind.  Relentless psychological abuse becomes a form of brainwashing that fosters chronic feelings of loss and helplessness, which then becomes deeply integrated into your soul.  It makes you begin to doubt what your actual value to the world and to the people in your life might even be — while drawing a line around what is and isn’t possible for you to accomplish by creating a high barrier of self-limiting beliefs.

A person who’s been mistreated all his life soon becomes something like a dog that’s been beaten since it was a puppy… until it ultimately learns to cower in fear of everyone.  In the case of people, we tend to lose trust in ourselves and our own natural talents.  You then begin to get caught up in a personal passion play involving the poisonous emotion of Self-Hatred.

How self-hatred works in the human consciousness is really pretty nasty because it causes you to make a ‘devil’s bargain’ in your head that goes something like this: focus on something that’s very important to you (money, respect, authority, friends / family, women or love) and deny yourself access to that pleasure by engaging in some manner of subtle self-sabotage (i.e., self defeating behavior), which then makes it impossible to bring these elements into your life.

For those of us with social anxieties, the self-hatred usually turns it’s destructive forces upon our desire to connect with others and have meaningful relationships with them.  The other half of the bargain has to do with green-lighting various other addictions “as compensation” for the pain being caused… such as drugs, food, chronic masturbation, etc.

Now the yin-yang of failure is firmly locked in your skull!

Your unconscious mind then sets about re-enforcing this distorted, dark image that it has created by having you act in bizarre or socially awkward ways that will cause this precisely envisioned reality of rejection and social scorn to form itself around you.  The subconscious, self-hating “you” can then look around and think: “see, I was right all along… you are a complete social incompetent, and everyone hates you!”. It has now become what they call self-referencing, having created it’s own proof that it is correct in it’s twisted view of you.  You have become your own “bitch” in a sense.

This type of mental self-destruction doesn’t have to focus itself on your social life either.  A person’s self-hating machinery can just as easily create a life situation where you are flat broke all the time (via low paying job, gambling, divorce+child support, etc.) IF it thinks that money is the most important thing in your life.  But for many of the socially inhibited, your self-hate has decided that love and companionship are what you really desire the most, and so THAT’S where this beast has targeted its point of torture.

The actual mechanics of social / romantic self-hatred in action are rather straightforward: you become convinced on a deep unconscious level of your worthlessness as a person… so much so that you begin to PRE-reject yourself in every little minor social encounter before the other person has even had a chance to make their own unique assessment of you.  You are helping them “see” what an LSM (low status male) you really are so they don’t get it wrong! Your behavior acts as a signal that broadcasts “worthless human approaching, get ready to laugh…” and is picked up and unconsciously acted upon by others.  A kind of self fulfilling prophecy.

Understand this: people are not mind readers. They watch for body language and verbal clues being broadcast from YOU to decide how they should be feeling about you.  Are you harmless or a threat to them?  Open or cautious, secretive or friendly?  What’s the deal with you?  This is how people reflexively think because meeting strangers always entails a certain amount of fear.  It’s inbred into us after millions of years of evolution where it has served our survival.  In modern societies where we are mostly protected from random strangers harming us however, it tends to get in the way of our social progress quite a bit.

So do you get what I’m saying here?…  people will pick up and then COPY however it is that you seem to regard yourself. Then they will attach this label to you (accurate or not) and it becomes their first and most powerful impression of you!

Remember what I said… people are NOT mind readers.  I’m stressing this because I want you to understand the vital importance of the signals that you are sending out with your behaviors and actions (not even necessarily with your words — you can make a “silent” bad impression on someone too).

Imagine for instance that you present yourself to someone when first meeting them as being powerful and genuine and charismatic, and they think to themselves: “Hmmm, this guy seems to have a high regard for himself for some reason (which they cannot know why yet), so I guess I’ll show him some respect until he gives me a reason to do otherwise”.

But if you present yourself instead as shy and ashamed and embarrassed for no apparent reason they will think: “Why is this guy acting like this?  What’s he hiding?  Why can’t he look me in the eye… is he a thief or a pervert or something?  He seems scared or ashamed of himself, and because he doesn’t seem to respect himself, then I guess I don’t like him either…”.

People perform these gymnastics of the mind instantly and effortlessly — almost like an instinct.  That’s why first impressions are so darn critical… we all have sensitive antenna that (we think) allows us to identify the unsavory or undesirable personalities around us immediately.  You cannot defeat this universal character of human nature, you have to learn how to play it instead.

So here’s the pattern the typical LSM develops over time: You’ve made a sweeping, negative shame-based judgement of yourself, taught yourself to hate yourself for being this “horrible” person, and then developed a ROUTINE that runs with machine-like precision to torture yourself in the cruelest way possible.  This monster is on public display for everyone to watch it work, adding to the humiliation.

Your actions and nervousness then transmit these negative self-judgements for others to pick up upon and reflect back at you.  …But it is YOU who were originally responsible for everyone’s low regard because you were the first guy to make this judgement of yourself!

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Now there are two basic ways to go about changing all this cyclic poor thinking in yourself — you can either seek out the kind of therapy or self-help that tries to root out the original past hurts that have molded your personality into its’ present crippled form…

Or, you can begin to look at your awkward social behaviors simply as a collection of bad mechanical habits that you’ve consistently repeated over and over to the point where you’ve become like a droid running on unconscious auto-pilot.  The task then becomes one of trying to replace these bad mechanical habits with more useful ones that advance your social status rather than tear it down into the gutter.  How to turn around a life in the process of failing in this way?  I suggest using the following resources which together probably won’t cost you more than a few bucks:

First, get yourself schooled-up on the nature of self-hatred, almost in the way that a therapist would understand it.  Learn to break the back of your own self-hate by digging out the mechanics behind it — and then learn how to become self-compassionate instead (because this is the only true answer to beating self-hatred).  Look at the top Amazon listing that I have provided for you here on this PUA Resources page:

Compassion and Self Hate
By Theodore I. Rubin, M.D.

This book is absolutely fantastic and sits on my own bookshelf here at home (as do the other two books listed below).  It will open your eyes to the insidious nature of this powerful negative mind-force.  You don’t have to be a crazy self-mutilator wielding a razor on yourself to be classified as self-hating — we actually ALL have a little bit of this issue going on within us to some degree… as you’ll be amazed to discover reading this book.  Your own may be pretty big, but it’s not insurmountable.  Compassion and Self Hate lays out concrete examples of how to identify and correct this mental problem in yourself.

Next, develop an understanding of the intricate framework of self-defeating behaviors that support all the bad habits that have come to exist exclusively to torment the “hated one” (…ah, that would be YOU!).  SDB’s are the tools through which self-hatred manifests itself in your physical reality. It’s those collection of behaviors and attitudes that creates the reality around you that matches the distorted image of who you are in your own mind.  In the case of the socially awkward of course, that would be all those behaviors that turn women off and cause them to reject us romantically!

Here’s a great book to teach yourself all about SDB’s:

Self-Defeating Behaviors
by Milton Cudney, PhD & Robert Hardy, EdD

Finally, go really deep inside your head and discover what toxic shame is all about — and especially understand the power that this vicious emotion has to quietly sneak up on your consciousness and completely take it over:

Healing the Shame that Binds You
by John Bradshaw

Whereas learning about self-hate and SDB’s can answer the question of “how”, the idea of toxic shame answers the question… “why”? This incredible book by John Bradshaw is the one seminal work of invaluable self-help that started me off on my own path to self-recovery, and I give it my highest recommendation.

All of these book recommendations that I’m making to you come from the heart and are completely non-commercial BTW (I’m not an Amazon affiliate presently).  These books are not just full of positive rah-rah bullshit either — each one offers a rational explanation for the thinking inaccuracies that have taken over your mind (and that’s actually all they are: mere thinking inaccuracies.  No need to make your problems any more amazing than that — it only gives them more power than they deserve.)

These thinking inaccuracies simply need to be 1) understood in theory, 2) identified as to how they operate specifically in your own life, and then 3) corrected by re-framing them into positive mental structures that replace the lousy thoughts that are presently filling your head.

Lots of work to chew on I know — but you’ve likely spent years cultivating the man who you presently are, and you can’t just turn it all around overnight.  Try to break this “inner work” up into manageable parts and work on little bits of it at a time in order to keep yourself from becoming over-whelmed and discouraged.  Celebrate every little victory and achievement along the way to making your own positive changes and keep yourself motivated!

Bottom Line: If you’re buying a lot of various different materials on meeting women and dating and you’re still not having any luck with most of it, then it might be worth starting farther back down the timeline and begin tackling some of these more basic fundamentals that underlie your personality, first.

My own and these other PUA materials will then begin to make a lot more sense to you once you’ve removed some of the mental blocks that could be preventing you from taking the REAL ACTIONS that you need to take in order to become more socially skilled and good at this stuff.  I’m talking about those scary things like live practice which goes beyond just reading about how to score with women.  Your courage will improve as your mind clears.