The poison of internal conflict

[Will_V]

Seduction is at its core about self-expression. Creating a bubble of your own self-expression in which a girl can express herself more freely than she could with anyone else. Self-expression, because it is made up of emotions, is contagious.

Have you ever seen someone at a party do something a little crazy and out there, and suddenly everyone flocks around and becomes animated and tries to join in? This is because being around that person, feeling their lack of inhibition and willingness to show the world who they are, creates the same impulse in the crowd.

But what about when you go to a party, or go out to meet girls, and you cannot get anyone to engage with you? Their expressions flicker with alarm when it looks like you might be about to interact with them, and they will close off their body language and move away. Or maybe you can start a conversation, but there is no intimacy, you cannot create any impulse in them to come closer and open up to you, and they appear to dither on the edge between walking away and continuing to talk with you. No matter how much you talk, things go nowhere.

The overwhelmingly common reason behind this is because of your internal conflict. Internal conflict is absolute poison for seduction and any kind of social interaction. And on the other side of the coin, uninhibited, free-flowing self expression is like a magnet, a hypnotic attractive force that creates an often unconscious desire in others to come closer and express themselves in kind.

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I don’t want to get too much into the weeds of social dynamics, but the way I see it, one of the primary driving forces behind any kind of social attraction is emulation. Human beings socialize in great part in order to experience new things through others. When someone appears happy and carefree, people gravitate toward them in order to experience being happy and carefree. When someone opens up and allows their self-expression to come through, others gravitate toward them so that they too may feel the wonderful release of social constraints and experience the expressions and impulses that they are forced by social convention to keep hidden throughout the rest of their lives. This does not require convincing – it feels so good that the mere exposure to an authentic example of it is enough to make someone feel strongly compelled to the same.

But what about when someone, instead of releasing their self-expression, hides or represses it? To begin with, this act usually produces a mounting feeling of agitation or anxiety in them – the opposite of the pleasure that is experienced by releasing it. A person in part knows themselves through their own expressions, and when expressions are repressed, a person can quickly lose sense of themselves, creating confusion and desperation as their reality becomes more and more unstable. Their identity is pinned down, unable to move.

Even if they were able to prevent negative emotion, they would not be able to remove the rigidity and deadness of their lack of expression. Because the human being is an effusive object that throws out multitudes of signals (mostly unconscious) out into the world that are picked up on and interacted with (also mostly unconsciously) by others. A lack of signal is in itself a clear and strong warning that something is amiss.

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So when someone represses their self-expression, they are typically overwhelmed with a feeling of anxiety and/or agitation. In social settings, they will work hard to push back against these negative emotions in order to appear attractive and approachable. But human beings are hardwired with an incredible ability, almost from birth, to decode facial and bodily expressions in order to understand the people around them. It is virtually impossible to conceal an emotion, especially one that is strongly felt. And the primary indicator that someone sees, is the appearance of internal conflict.

But why is internal conflict so bad for social settings and seduction in general? Even someone in a bad mood, or sad, or even aggressive, can be socially attractive in certain contexts. But internal conflict gets no pass, ever.

The reason, as you might have deduced, is that a bad mood or aggression are also forms of self-expression. No one is ever always happy – and being able to release negative emotion can be very pleasant. Sadness and aggression can be uninhibited and cathartic. But inhibition itself, by its very nature, cannot be uninhibited. Especially inhibition produced by fear and trauma is poisonous to everything around it, including the self. Because it is not the expression of anything, but the obstruction of the expression of something fundamental to the identity.

Internal conflict is the appearance of one fighting oneself. This is what inhibition is, fighting back one’s own desires, impulses, drives and affects. When this happens, it produces a strong repulsion in others, who of course desire to do the opposite, and wish to avoid the suffering of the inhibited person.

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But how exactly does internal conflict arise to put a spanner in the works of a social interaction or seduction? It is often not simple to understand where it might be coming from – because part of relieving the suffering of one’s own inhibition, especially inhibition that is created by trauma or some other involuntary origin, is creating the illusion that it doesn’t exist.

People who have spent a long time with trauma or self-denial of some kind have literally spent years fabricating the best possible illusion in which to spend their everyday lives. The denial has become so embodied in their identity that even if they realize its existence, they cannot find any corner of it on which to pull in order to begin to remove it. Because the denial is so deeply entrenched that it is no longer clear which part of their identity is reality or illusion. This is very unnerving and difficult to deal with, but though difficult and time consuming, it can be teased out in various ways, by allowing self-expression to come through – the good, bad and ugly, all mixed together at first, but eventually coming into focus in their separate elements, over a long period of time, through actuation in the expressions of the body.

There is another obstacle with repressed emotion in the context of social interaction or seduction. And this is the fact that in creating a desire in someone else to become intimate with you and open up to you, you must experience that same desire yourself in relation to them. After all, seduction is done not by command but by example. And so in opening up the lid of your own emotions (so that she can do the same), you release the forces of repression, and the negative emotions spring up and overwhelm you. So you are forced to slam it back shut in the fearful realization that you are unable to deal with them. And of course, this makes her slam her own lid shut, and after something like that it is virtually impossible for things to recover.

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Internal conflict is the death sentence of social interactions or seductions. The only people who can bear you in these instances are those who have loyalty to you – your family and close friends – and even they may struggle to maintain the desire to be around you.

This is because the currency of social interactions is the contagious set of experiences that someone can have by being around you and interacting with you. And if all you can offer them to emulate is the profound suffering of the unexpressed emotional mind, they will steer clear of you no matter how much you think you want to have a good time with them.

If you want to avoid this, there is no room for illusions. For the one who suffers most is the one who has not only inhibited themselves, but denied the reality of this inhibition, so that they cannot see in the negative reactions of others anything but abject malevolence and rejection of their value as a human being.

If you wish others to meet you, you must meet yourself first in the way that you wish to be met, and receive yourself in the way that you wish to be received. The mind cannot hold contradictions.

 

[Zoro]

Excellent stuff. Really timely for me personally as well, since I've been thinking about this deeply lately, but in a different context.

I would add that living in alignment with self-expression leads to greater success in all areas of life. I am currently going through a similar process and am doing my best to approach life on my terms, without conditioning or external programming overriding internal drives.

The tricky thing is putting it into practice. I've been working with a friend of mine who is a talented therapist and we have made breakthroughs. It's amazing the things that happen when living life more in-tune with myself. Already I've had new business opportunities, less stress, and more confidence and trust in my own perspective and vision for life. The greatest successes in my life have come from times when I am living this way.

But I feel like there is such a thick layer of conditioning or at least ingrained habits that rebuild the conflict slowly... too many times I've recognized the need to address this, only for the tide of internal conflict to rise again.

I could benefit from understanding how to resolve these internal conflicts and live in the way you are advocating..

For seduction and beyond.

What would be your recommendations for this?

 

[Bismarck]

I would add that what you call "internal conflict" @Will_V is what comes off as "incongruence" to girls.

It is the antithesis of charisma because you cannot connect with someone else since you repress yourself. Additionally, you are in your mind, expending resources to keep up the façade, so you cannot fully focus on what the person in front of you is saying.

 

[ElderPrice]

If you wish others to meet you, you must meet yourself first in the way that you wish to be met, and receive yourself in the way that you wish to be received. The mind cannot hold contradictions.

Bingo!

 

[Will_V]

Excellent stuff. Really timely for me personally as well, since I've been thinking about this deeply lately, but in a different context.

I would add that living in alignment with self-expression leads to greater success in all areas of life. I am currently going through a similar process and am doing my best to approach life on my terms, without conditioning or external programming overriding internal drives.

The tricky thing is putting it into practice. I've been working with a friend of mine who is a talented therapist and we have made breakthroughs. It's amazing the things that happen when living life more in-tune with myself. Already I've had new business opportunities, less stress, and more confidence and trust in my own perspective and vision for life. The greatest successes in my life have come from times when I am living this way.

But I feel like there is such a thick layer of conditioning or at least ingrained habits that rebuild the conflict slowly... too many times I've recognized the need to address this, only for the tide of internal conflict to rise again.

I could benefit from understanding how to resolve these internal conflicts and live in the way you are advocating..

For seduction and beyond.

What would be your recommendations for this?

This is a good question and something I am very much still exploring in my own life.

I always return to meditation when it comes to psychological problems, because meditation is fundamentally about gaining perspective, and you can't fight a battle that you cannot see. A lot of times simply perceiving something well enough is enough for it to lose a lot of its ability to control you. Meditation enables you to gain some measure of understand about what it really going on under the surface.

such a thick layer of conditioning or at least ingrained habits that rebuild the conflict slowly

This is a very crucial point. For me, the thing that rebuilds internal conflict most quickly are mostly-unconscious thought loops that are rooted far into the past or the future, that create a sense of unease that spills over into everything I do. And then this negative emotion feeds itself on every small obstacle or defeat that I would otherwise easily move past, until it's no longer clear in what it is rooted.

I'm reading the book The Body Keeps The Score at the moment, and while I haven't read enough yet to really understand what the book is about, I was thinking yesterday about how the mechanism of 'trauma', which sounds like such a dramatic and violent term, is actually present in very subtle and mild forms in relation to events that people might not consider to be all that relevant or negative, but which nonetheless have some powerful relevancy to identity.

In effect trauma seems to be the trapping of thoughts and emotions in buried, isolated pockets of the psyche such that they drain the energy of the person and suddenly release it, or otherwise cause some effect on the countenance, in relation to some event that happens in the normal experience of the person.

I believe this mechanism occurs with all kinds of everyday thoughts, all the time, and through meditation, through quieting the mind and observing what pops up of its 'own volition' we can cause these thought loops to be freed and lose their impact.

The way I think of this is that our mind is like a room with a door on it, and we are inside sitting at a computer, with headphones blaring something loud in our ears, and bright images flashing across the screen. These thoughts loops bang on the door constantly. But we cannot hear them well, and even when we hear them it's easy to pretend they aren't happening, because we are distracting ourselves so well. But if we take the headphones off, and turn the screen off, the banging is clear and loud, and we can easily see where it comes from, and as soon as these loops perceive that they are perceived, their banging becomes weak and self conscious, and as we move closer to them and examine them, their communication turns from banging and mayhem to some kind of relevant message about the state of the self.

It's incredible what the quiet, tranquil mind is capable of - crystal clear self reflection, and a deep power in all its impulses and communications. Until we are in that state it's very hard to formulate any good kind of response to negative emotions.

 

[Will_V]

I would add that what you call "internal conflict" @Will_V is what comes off as "incongruence" to girls.

This is absolutely correct. I wanted to talk about this but ended up not doing the best job of separating the concepts of inhibition and internal conflict.

Internal conflict is what happens when someone tries to disguise the effects of inhibition. Inhibition creates anxiety and/or agitation. It is in trying to hide the latter emotions that we create internal conflict.

In trying to hide negative emotions, we may be driven to try to force through behaviors and expression that we don't really feel, that aren't rooted in spontaneous self-expression, and are instead rooted in fear and desperation, and exactly as you say, this creates a feeling of incongruence and heightens the internal conflict as the true expressions of the psyche clash with these parodies.

Another thing I wanted to say about internal conflict is that it is fundamentally an attack on one's own self (hence 'internal' conflict) and while it is always possible to respect and admire someone who highly values themselves, though you may not consider them to be the best kind of person, it is very difficult to respect or admire someone who does not even believe in themselves enough to be on their own side, even if they may be otherwise a great person.

It is the antithesis of charisma because you cannot connect with someone else since you repress yourself. Additionally, you are in your mind, expending resources to keep up the façade, so you cannot fully focus on what the person in front of you is saying.

Very true. Charismatic people are extremely unconflicted in their self expressions, which makes everything they do resonate powerfully even when it is said or done gently, whereas other people might expend a lot of energy and completely fail to get or maintain anyone's attention.

 

[orkie123]

This post resonates a lot with me. I have a lot of internal conflict on the type of person I want to be. If you asked different circle group of my friends about me, I feel like you would get totally different answers. I feel like I put so many masks that I don't know who I am myself. I'm not totally against this, I like that I can switch from introverted to extroverted but I'm so inconsistent that even if people like me initially, it feels like I cannot maintain it for long.

I've tried to write down my values, how to act in certain situations, how to stop saying/texting stupid stuff "to entertain myself" and then regret it after facing the consequences of the action. One example of that is over teasing. It feels sometimes that I meet someone and make fun of every 3rd thing they say. I've managed to change and improve many aspects of myself, but this one has been so difficult. I feel like I've lost so many opportunities in all areas of life for just talking too much crap I don't even believe in. Luckily I don't care much about politics and taboo topics or else I would get burned to a stake for ideas I said because they crossed my mind and I blurted them out without thinking.

 

[metalbird]

I want to quote Skills' post:

I already have a ultimate guide for getting and keeping a girlfriend that i had the rld write for me couple of years back, it is really good... But unfortunately, onitis is not a rational process is an emotional one... Let me explain, you can know any guide, and write down what you want and you don't want.... But once you catch onitis you will throw your laundry list out the window.... Let me give you an example lets say you have a laundry list and you know by heart the guide i just linked... You go to a club and meet Amber Heard and you catch onitis, GAME OVER!... But skills i am different, nah onitis is a bitch, when i refer to onitis i don't refer to the traditional community onitis but catching feelings. However, there is a way around this is to be so discipline and stoic that you are able to suffer through the onitis but never force things and be able to let go if she does not comply with your frame and your goals.

All of what's been said about charisma, emotional contagion, and lack of repression / internal alignment are true. However, it's almost impossible to completely integrate your monkey brain and your lizard brain such that you will always have internal alignment -- although you can train this. For example, maybe your lizard brain wants to eat donuts all day, but your monkey brain knows it's bad for your health... if you're not used to dieting, you will have internal conflict when you see a donut... but after training a response (either consistently eating it or consistently not), you will no longer feel conflicted about it, rather you will feel your lizard and monkey brain in alignment. But I digress.

With women, you might get internal conflict in places like:

• your lizard brain wants to fuck her without a condom, but your monkey brain says 'wrap it up'
• you are full of oxytocin and in the middle of pair bonding, and you want to discuss the future with a girl... but you know it's too soon
• you start to feel jealous or scared because a girl is slipping away... but you know trying to grasp her will only accelerate the process

While it's fun to imagine going through life completely unrepressed, in full emotional expression, it's hard to imagine the reality of that not being completely disastrous. Sometimes the awkwardness of internal conflict is better than blurting out "unhelpful" emotions. Do you guys agree?

 

[Will_V]

I want to quote Skills' post:



All of what's been said about charisma, emotional contagion, and lack of repression / internal alignment are true. However, it's almost impossible to completely integrate your monkey brain and your lizard brain such that you will always have internal alignment -- although you can train this. For example, maybe your lizard brain wants to eat donuts all day, but your monkey brain knows it's bad for your health... if you're not used to dieting, you will have internal conflict when you see a donut... but after training a response (either consistently eating it or consistently not), you will no longer feel conflicted about it, rather you will feel your lizard and monkey brain in alignment. But I digress.

With women, you might get internal conflict in places like:

• your lizard brain wants to fuck her without a condom, but your monkey brain says 'wrap it up'
• you are full of oxytocin and in the middle of pair bonding, and you want to discuss the future with a girl... but you know it's too soon
• you start to feel jealous or scared because a girl is slipping away... but you know trying to grasp her will only accelerate the process

While it's fun to imagine going through life completely unrepressed, in full emotional expression, it's hard to imagine the reality of that not being completely disastrous. Sometimes the awkwardness of internal conflict is better than blurting out "unhelpful" emotions. Do you guys agree?

Seems like you're saying something like 'it's good to not have internal conflict but sometimes you need to be disciplined', is that it?

The internal conflict I'm referring to here is the conflict of repressed self-expression, not repressed instincts or repressed logic.

The way I look at it there are three aspects to the psyche here:

1. The base instincts (what you call the lizard brain).
2. The conscious, critical, self-managing voice (what you call the monkey brain).
3. The free self-expression of your overall personality and nature

Now these don't operate completely separately, and are certainly not easy to separate in practice. But out of all of them, the third one is far more the real you. The base instincts are unconscious, primitive, and reflexive (though absolutely fundamental to the operation of any person or animal). The self-managing voice is typically either partly or completely co-opted by the a person's concept of rules, social norms, and the identification of future threats (again, you can see it is not really you). But the self-expression is fundamentally you, the music of your spirit, if you will - the collection of things that represent your curiosity, your openness, your enthusiasm for life, your individual character and nature.

In Freudian terms, (very) roughly speaking, the analogy for these are the id, the super-ego, and the ego. If you look up the meaning of these, you can see that the ego functions mainly as a means of mediating the urges of the id and the super-ego. In effect, the id says 'go', the superego says 'don't go' and the ego comes in, looks things over, and decides yes or no.

That might make the ego sound different to the terms I used - 'curiosity, your openness, your enthusiasm for life, your individual character and nature' but if you think about it, these aspects of a person are completely linked the ego, because someone who has no impulse control on the one hand, and someone who is attacked excessively by their conscience on the other hand, are very much unable to express these parts of themselves in any real or refined way.

Think of it like a horse. A horse that is wild and out of control is just an animal. A horse that's been whipped half to death is just a cowering, miserable creature. But a horse that is trained carefully, allowed to express itself in a refined way, becomes something incredible, with a strong spirit, a pleasant nature, and is a wonderful companion to be around.

So don't think of discipline, stoicism, and a healthy level of self-criticism as being the same as internal conflict, it's not the same. Internal conflict (in terms of what I'm talking about) is very much the monkey brain, the superego, the part of a person that opposes their forward movement for apparently 'good' reasons, tries to drown them in self-doubt and fear, and primarily takes them away from the expression of their nature.

This part of someone is necessary for their full character, but it must be managed by the ego - the throne of self-awareness that none of the other parts can touch or manipulate. Then it - the superego - becomes merely self-control, and the id comes out as a powerful and graceful drive, and all the more subtle parts of a persons nature are free to come out without being overwhelmed.