Winning difficult frame battles

[Ragnarok]

Hey guys, I need to get something off my chest and also seek advice. Its probably going to be a long post but I will make a TLDR at the end. This post was inspired by Chase's experience with a difficult business partner.


So, when I entered high school I was the biggest nice, shy guy, and I didn't really have many social skills and even worse I didn't have a good understanding of my boundaries or dealing with disrespect. As you can imagine, it was tough for me to make friends. I met this one guy lets call him J for the sake of the story who was a total natural with girls, very popular, and has great social skills and an art for manipulation. We became friends in an unusual way where he would take me under his wing and teach me social skills, girls etc. We have a mentor- mentee relationship but reflecting its more like a codependent relationship where I am the one down. He has an incredibly aggressive, dominant personality that I was trying to learn and emulate. He basically invited me into his friend group and my social skills grew but he and I hung a lot one-on-one where it felt like a relationship without boundaries because he would disrespect and if I fought back he would tell me to just listen to him and remember all that I have done for him. For the years of high school, that was fine because I was a dumb kid and didn't know any better and my parents didn't really care too much and he often paid for me or drove me home. Essentially, I basically owed/ owe him a lot because he was really there for me.
I found game and girls chase and mark manson all self development my last year of high school and I have been improving like crazy both socially and with my fundamentals. Somehow despite his nagging, I went to college out of state and was free of him for a while. In college, I finally dated a girl, but I couldn't handle the relationship and there were issues that you can clearly see in my other posts. The whole time he told me to listen to him and break it off but I stubbornly held on using the material I learned to make the relationship work but she just wasn't a good match to begin with my screening of her was bad. Anyway we broke up near the end of college, he helped me through the break up, but didn't let me forget the fact that he was right about her and he used that to prove that I should listen to him and that I am not ready to make decisions on my own and that I need his guidance. I started hooking up with many more girls since then both girls that I got all by myself and some that he "helped" me get. I had to move back home because I am applying to medical school with a gap year which requires me to live at home. I am back home but now I have a stronger sense of self and identity and Hector taught me a lot about demanding and maintaining respect.
Now the central crux of this situation and the question I have for all of you is the following. Whenever we get into a disagreement, J always says" After everything I have done for you changed your life paid for you transformed you from a loser to a winner making your whole social life you should be willing to do anything I ask at anytime" every argument we get into he pulls the whole I did everything for you nothing you can do can ever repay me for all that I did so keep doing everything for me to maybe make up for the enormous things I have done for you. I don't know how to combat this argument and I can't win this difficult frame battle of him forcing gratitude on me. I don't really have much freedom because I have to deal with this difficult frame. So my question is do you guys have any way to demolish this frame or this issue. I am ready to walk away and be done with this relationship and take responsibility for my own actions and emotions and have an inner locus of control and make brand new friends and all that. The problem is he is like you need me and I refuse to continue to teach you and you are missing out on this and that and its hard for me not think he is right because I see all the success that he gets. He still has a lot of value to me but I don't know if thats worth sacrificing all my freedom. I making this post to see if there is an alternative solution to just starting over. I live in a smaller town and everybody knows everybody so it will be hard to start over and he has a lot of influence in the community of people my age. do you guys have any solutions on what to do? Thank you


TLDR

I have a mentor who taught me game, social skills, gave me all my friends, paid for me, and walked all over me in the past. He has a lot of value in terms of a friend and mentor but I have no freedom and he constantly reminds me of all that he has done for me and that nothing i can do can ever reach the level of what he has done for me and he basically made my life so i should be grateful and repay him by doing whatever he wants and not focusing on doing what I want and my own will. How do i demolish his frame and find a better unshakeable argument to combat his or should i wait it out till we both move for professional school because it will be hard to start all over. Let me know what you think. Thanks Guys

 

[Marcellus]

Hate to say it brother but you're being an absolute bitch right now. It's your life, start living that shit. If you don't wanna do something then don't do it, I don't care how much he helped you. If you don't want to do something don't do it.

Also to answer his frame just say "Look I'm absolutely grateful for everything you've done for me but I'm gonna say it to you one time, If I don't want to do something I'm not going to do it and that's it!"

He helped you heaps and that's super nice of him but..... it's your life. Start enforcing boundaries.

 

[Fuck This]

This addresses a lot of what you talk about....

 

[trashKENNUT]

FT,

Thank you for linking this. This triggers a lot of the reasons why i write blunt stuff and why i "insult" women on instagram. Kind of fun actually, insulting people.

Tried to explain from all angles when people are offended but people are dumb. More dumber than me, which is shocking.

It reminds me, that I really mean equality, liberty, freedom and justice. Actually, it's not justice but rather empathy. Like having empathy when girls are forced to work in a location due to stupid bullshit quota or that they have no jobs and they have to work in a place where carrying stuff is common.

The article reminds me a lot of bad memories, but reaffirms a lot of solid ground beliefs that i am standing on. Thank you for the article.

Zac

 

[Chase]

Ragnarok-

That's a very difficult situation. Where you have a guy who has provided a ton of very legitimate value to your life... but then he holds it over you all the time and is an ass about it.

Important first steps are understanding his mentality. I don't know the guy, but based on similar folks I have known and your description of him, most likely here are a few relevant details:

• He gets a ton of validation out of teaching you and seeing you succeed. It is a proof-of-concept for his methods and shows him he is a sharp dude who knows stuff that other people don't know. You're the guinea pig / proof-of-concept for that. This also benefits you, because you get all this super valuable training and mentoring from him that is off-limits to most people, for free. But it's not a one-sided transaction. He also gets to see his lessons work and his mentee develop.

• He likely genuinely believes 100% of your development is due to him. Most likely, he internally takes credit for all the gains you've made. In reality many of those gains also owe at least in part to Mark Manson and GC and other game and self-development stuff you studied, and in large part to your own work/application. But in his eyes all these things are footnotes: "Sure maybe you got a few good tips here and there from those other things, that's good. And yeah you did the work and made the progress - that's why I picked you as a mentee! But let's be honest: the foundation of what you are and the model for you to follow, that's all me," he says. And that is how he legitimately sees it.

• He needs a "follower" and if you're not it he will get someone else. Not all followers are created equal. One who is pliable and listens to what he says, then goes out and applies it and excels, is extremely valuable. Ideally that follower will praise him and show gratitude, but even just seeing his follower's success makes him feel accomplished and proud. His real goal is to be a leader, and having a loyal follower he's done everything for and who worships the ground he walks on is a big part of that. The tension in the leader-follower dynamic is the best followers are always guys who sooner or later are going to go off and be leaders themselves someday. Followers who will remain followers for life are never as satisfying to have as those who are leaders or potential leaders in their own right. If you leave, he will replace you -- but quite possibly with someone who does not measure up to the "follower standard" you set. Though he will tell you that person does... because he will want you to feel like you made the wrong choice, screwed up, and missed out, and now this other guy he's training is doing even better.

The keys are making sure he understands:

• You absolutely appreciate his mentorship and there's no way that would change or get forgotten
• You continue to view him as an immensely valuable dude and love learning from him
• You're also doing other things now and those things are good too

Just remember with this personality type, sincere flattery is your friend. He wants recognition for the value he's provided. He wants to feel recognized and appreciated. Your mission is to create some space for yourself without making him feel that a.) you no longer appreciate what he's done for you or b.) you no longer view him as someone worth learning from about the thing he excels at.

The challenge is he's going to see any reduction in devotion from you as a sign of potential abandonment (he's probably borderline -- very easy for a man with BPD to do very well with women, but it comes with a host of interpersonal issues as well). Which is going to cause him to try guilt-tripping you, try other dramatic ways to suck you back in, and then possibly if he feels like he will not be able to keep his hold on you to just treat you like you're dead to him and completely flip his emotions toward you ("Whatever. You're dead to me").

The easiest way to disentangle while preserving the relationship in decent health is if you can continue to credit most of your success in XYZ area (women, social skills) to him, while also showing him you are progressing in a field he knows nothing about. Easiest there might be medical school... like "Damn dude, this was another great night of socializing. You've taught me so much tremendous stuff here. Tomorrow, it's back to brushing up for my MCATs."

And then he just understands that okay, you've got MCAT studying until the weekend now. So you're going to be out of touch until then. Or whatever. Create boundaries that have nothing to do with him being overbearing or you moving in a different direction than him on the social/ladies front, and everything to do with things are happening in your life and you've gotta deal with them.

If you can disentangle that way, then you can move toward him being able to respect that you have other things (medical school) in your life you're focused on that he is not a part of. So he will respect those boundaries. While still allowing him to have the validation of knowing he's the principle/primary contributor to your social success.

Basically transition the relationship from where he views it as "Ragnarok is my follower and mentee" to "Ragnarok is this guy I mentored in game and socializing who then went on to be a doctor. So now I know this doctor whose social success is indebted to me", which is really a big thing this kind of guy wants -- powerful, successful friends who appreciate what he's done for them and are in his debt.

He has legitimately helped you tons from the sound of it. His main fear now is that you will forget it, or that you will decide you are someone else's student now and not his.

So long as you don't tell him something like "You helped me a lot, thanks, but now I'm on this Mark Manson Girls Chase stuff" you should be fine. Just let him keep his place as your social/seductive mentor, pay him the dues you owe him, while creating some space and boundaries with something else he's not a part of (like medical school applications and prep).

Chase