If you’ve had some life experience and an open set of eyes, you know:
Healthy relationships are few. Toxic, triggering relationships are many.
Especially in modern Western society’s spiritually drained dating culture.
Don’t act like it’s all going well for you.
You’re browsing a dating advice website for a reason.
Someone has hurt you.
And that’s okay.
Conflict and abuse in relationships are necessary crucibles for us to go through, whether it’s with a close partner or family member, a friend, or someone we know for whatever reason – work, school, a hobby or social group. These are our opportunities to decide who we’ll be – either we give in to the toxic patterns and perpetuate them, or we learn to say NO to them and break the cycle.
I personally am extremely grateful for all the abuse and hurt I’ve suffered (and given out) in my own relationships. It’s not only made me hyperaware of every red flag in the book (once I decided to take responsibility for my side of things), but it’s one thing that makes me a competent dating/relationship coach.
Through these experiences have come priceless lessons – how to be a man in spirit, not just body. How to recognize manipulators and transcend their games. How to gently guide someone who’s choosing to grow, instead of doing it harshly or trying to save someone who wants to stay a victim.
That Savior complex has been my big trap these last few years, and I’ve only become fully self-aware about it at the start of 2022.
I’m a friendly, open guy. I accidentally make connections wherever I go regularly – gyms, cafes, websites, stores…
Not people I’m super tight with or anything, but they trust me to be cool, and I get the occasional free stuff because my vibe is just so great.
But in my slightly closer, slightly more vulnerable relationships these last few years, the vibe hasn’t been so great. I’ve been in codependent dynamics with some emotional vampires – people I was trying to save, trying to lowkey mentor, but who’d use me for that attention, bait me with the possibility of them changing for the better, but never fucking do it. But I’d stick around, because maybe TODAY is the day when they…
Yeah, those relationships made me respect myself less and I swiftly removed all those people from my life when my conscious mind registered how much self-respect and integrity they DIDN’T have.
Took me at least 5 of those to really learn my lesson.
As much as I wished I had higher-quality, more responsible people in my life, I would always attract people I wanted to save. Because the fantasy of saving them, helping them improve their lives made me feel important.
Those relationships hurt.
And ya know what?
I consented to exactly that.
I invited these emotional vampires into my life.
I wasn’t a naive, helpless victim who they preyed on. I would unconsciously seek these people out and prey on THEM, then they’d prey on me in return. I craved my advice-giving fix more than anything. I’ve also learnt that me constantly being caught up in work isn’t a bad thing (as long as I give myself space to relax when I gotta)… but it hurt me when I was using this business as an excuse to indulge my Savior complex all the time.
So what’s this mean for YOU?
Well.
I have a harsh fucking lesson to give you, so let’s be blunt and quick about it:
Every toxic dynamic in your life is YOUR FAULT
A bad relationship takes two people, not one.
Abuse and manipulation are co-created, not simply given from an oppressor to a victim.
I say this not to excuse it, nor to “victim blame” (the arguments of which may or may not be grounded in reality, but people with victim mindsets do enjoy being victimized)
I say this to explain how unhealthy relationship dynamics work. Everyone knows predators prey on the weak and vulnerable, but few people talk about how this predation makes predators of the prey who survive it.
A predator’s psychic energy carries over into its prey, and said prey becomes its own breed of predator, covert and shadowy as it may be. Or perhaps it doesn’t become a predator, and this dynamic only reveals the predator that’s already within.
An unhealthy relationship isn’t made of a healthy person and an unhealthy person. These two have no common ground, no aligning energies to create a bond from.
If you’re a high-quality individual who naturally falls into relationships with low-quality people, YOU ARE NOT AS HIGH-QUALITY AS YOU THINK YOU ARE.
But before you mistakenly assume I’m blaming you for all the shitty things that have happened to you…
It’s not your fault your parents didn’t love each other, or that your teacher molested you, or that your ex abused you and controlled you, or that the boys or the girls back in school ganged up on you and hurt you and excluded you, or that someone you trusted with your life ended up using you and betraying you. You didn’t get to decide how these people wanted to act. They make their own choices about who they want to be.
But it’s your fault that these wounds are holding you back from your higher potential. You didn’t choose to receive them, but for every moment you refuse to take responsibility for them, you are choosing to perpetuate them. You are choosing to be possessed by them, and to let them define your life.
Every time you let a toxic pattern of yours go unaddressed, you are choosing to become your own breed of predator, and to be controlled by the psychic energy of those who’ve preyed on you in that season long passed.
Think of the woman who’s been sexually abused, and now seeks out easy, degrading, dissociative sex with more men who’ll use her, or has an “all men are potential rapists” mindset.
Or the man who grew up bullied and neglected, who now takes out his pain seeking “inferiors” to bully and neglect.
Or the girl who complains all attractive guys are emotionally unavailable and can’t commit to one girl… when she herself is emotionally unavailable and dating multiple men without getting truly vulnerable… AND actively seeks out these exact emotionally unavailable guys.
Or the “former” Nice Guy who was treated coldly and cheated on by his ex… And now wants to flip the dynamic – He’s seeking out naive, needy girls to coldly play around with.
These people may be good at heart beneath the trauma, but they’re weak and self-unaware, which makes them untrustworthy.
This is no “us vs them” mindset. Every single one of us has some degree of trauma that’s fucked up our relationships. The difference between high-quality people vs low-quality people isn’t how much trauma we’ve suffered, but how much awareness and responsibility we’ve chosen to have for it.
It’s an easy platitude to live by in theory, but in practice, you’ll find most people are chronically incapable of handling their own wounds, even supposedly “good” people. The only thing that snaps them out of their self-destructive trance and inspires them to be selfless, is having children, and even that often isn’t enough to make them have some damn self-awareness, thus, generational trauma continues.
“We all make mistakes, nobody’s perfect, we all have a past” is another easy platitude to live by in theory. But far too often, it’s a self-serving excuse, objectively correct as it is. People say this to avoid responsibility, not to take it.
Next time you find yourself complaining about someone in your life, watch yourself.
The behavior you’re complaining about behind someone’s back instead of to their face is the behavior you’re tolerating. This is a situation you are co-creating, consenting to.
Complaint is a spell. Complaint invites vampires into your life, internal as it may be.
If you’re inviting people with victim mindsets into your life, this is no accident. You have victim mindsets in YOURSELF you’re unaware of, and every time one of these people triggers you, pisses you off with how they act, this is your opportunity to either heal or perpetuate the pattern of victimhood.
These bad relationships are meant to trigger us. Again and again and again. Until we learn our lesson. Until we learn to say NO to everything within us that resonates with similarly broken people.
Can your woman be saved?
If you have a deep understanding of how women work, then you know exactly why so many modern Western women, old and especially young, are:
- Commodifying their sex
- Ruining their hormonal health with SSRIs and hormonal birth control
- Prioritizing their careers over family (and paying dearly for that decision in their 30s and beyond)
- Denying their feminine nature, LARPing it at best, choosing emasculated boyfriends they can lead around on a leash, or attention from armies of Internet strangers, instead of surrendering to masculine men
The men in their lives have failed them, denied their own masculinity, and made them feel unloved. So these women latch onto cultural movements that make them feel seen, valued, possessed.
They believe that to be loved, they must be weak and self-victimizing. They must give themselves up easily. They must be energy vampires. They must hold men at arm’s length and demand everything of them, giving nothing back in return.
And through this, they perpetuate the cycle of predation, of energy harvesting.
I don’t recommend you make excuses for these women, or sweep their wounds under the rug just like they do.
I recommend you trigger them. This is your job as a man.
Upsetting a broken woman, even to the point of tears or anger, is more loving than cowering to her trauma and letting her keep wallowing in it, unaware and stuck.
Broken people perceive masculinity – strength and integrity under pressure – as a triggering force. They are offended and put off by it. Good.
The “nice guys” among us who fear saying “no” to a woman, who fear her disapproval will be offended by what I’ve said in this section so far.
But only by being triggered, can we become aware of our unconscious wounds, AND HEAL THEM.
“Triggering” has a negative reputation among spiritually weak people. Sucks for them that LIFE is painful and triggering, and avoiding its harsh realities does us more damage than facing them.
Some people understand this better than others, and there’s a simple way to discern who’s who. Who’s trustworthy… And who’ll sell you out to save their own skin. Judge people by how they act during conflict. It’s easy to put up an image of being a good person when things are easy, but when the pressure’s put on, the true diamonds are revealed. The more you make excuses for broken people perpetuating their cycles of trauma, the more they’ll be doing exactly that.
As long as you’re a product of your trauma, you will not let it go. People with victim mindsets enjoy being victims beneath their complaints. It makes them feel important. Every time someone yammers on about all the bad things that have happened to them, about how all men are evil, about how women are incapable of loving men as they want to be loved… They enjoy the pain. It gives their life meaning. Giving it up would mean giving up their identity.
Yet everyone has been traumatized to a degree. Perfect men and perfect women don’t exist. You will never find a woman to date who takes complete responsibility for her own bullshit, harsh as this pill may be to swallow. Soulmates, and good relationships in general, are not found. They’re BUILT, and often from less-than-ideal materials, and less-than-ideal experiences.
If you know anything about female nature, you know this:
Women do not take responsibility for their own growth unless they’re channeling masculine energy.
So when you’re with a woman who’s traumatized, acting poorly…
You will need to trigger her, then let her decide whether she’s ready to be saved.
Only in these moments will she truthfully reveal how much she’s willing to love herself…
And how much you’re willing to love her.
Do you want her to change who she is deep down to please your ego…
Or do you want her to hold more strongly to who she is as a woman, who she is as a holistic person?
Women in the former category won’t change for the better, because saving herself would mean losing you, would mean losing her relationship to you, even if you’re not the man she’s meant to be with. Becoming what you desire would mean becoming someone she isn’t, which is impossible.
These women will leave you once you trigger them, hopefully. They won’t fix themselves immediately, but perhaps such a woman will be inspired to find a man who loves HER, and do her healing with him. Some will choose to heal. Some will choose to stay victims. Women make this choice for themselves on a soul-level.
Women will only improve themselves for a man who deeply desires them, who is willing to love and keep said woman because she is who she is, not because she gives him sex or cuddles or attention.
Modern Western women will only save themselves after their male counterparts save themselves first, and become the leaders, the warriors of Truth their masculine essence demands they be. Again, the reason so many ladies are broken, self-victimizing, and emotionally avoidant these days is because they believe that this is how they earn love and attention – what their feminine essence craves.
The first step to inviting healthy, mutually giving relationships into your life is to rediscover your masculinity for all its dimensions – the part of you that’s a horny ravisher, the part of you that’s a violent killer and a protector, the part of you that’s a provider, the part of you that’s a mature father, the part of you that’s a curious and playful little boy, and the part of you that’s a woman.
Otherwise, your intimate life will be a carousel of emotional vampires, sucking the purpose and life force out of you. Making you think you have to play 4-dimensional chess to get your needs met, instead of bringing challenge and integrity and boundaries and structure and fertile soil into your life.
Feminine energy is transformed masculine energy, and the quality of your woman’s feminine energy is a mirror to the masculine energy you can bring into her life.
Anyhoo.
Hope this article gave you something to think about.
Now, if you’re lost, if no one ever taught you how women work, nor to view your own masculinity in a holistic, integrated way… You can either wallow in your trauma, forever be a scared, approval-seeking teenage boy in a grown man’s body…
Or you can Do The Work.
You can choose to be your most masculine, most aware, most present, most loving self.
Work with a guy who already GETS IT, a guy who’s already fought his demons and other people’s, and who’s gone from being a typical traumatized, dissociated, sexually unaware modern man, to simply a man. A man who GETS IT. A man who attracts attractive women.
It’s in you, brother. It’s always been in you.
When you’re ready to see it with all 3 of your eyes, save yourself, then come see me.
– Ben
