1.3 The Simplest Way To Heal Inadequacy
Planted: September 1, 2022
Last tended: February 25, 2023
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Video Transcript
So now that we’ve established that the cause of the Fetish is turning a subconscious perception that you’re inadequate into sexual pleasure, and that by healing this deep rooted feeling, the Fetish just goes away, it becomes no longer pleasurable. So what’s the simplest way to heal this? Maybe you have no reason to feel inadequate. Maybe you have a pretty good life. Maybe women like you, maybe you’re very intelligent, or you’re a really nice person or you’re talented or whatever. It doesn’t matter. Because this fetish comes from the perception of inadequacy, not actual inadequacy, it doesn’t matter how good your life is, or how far from being inadequate you are. All that matters is this subconscious feeling. And often for the reasons that we’ll see in the entire course, this subconscious feeling of inadequacy isn’t logical. It isn’t based on reality, it doesn’t make sense, you can be a great person, but still have a lot of perceived inadequacy. Similarly, you can be an awful person and not have any perceived inadequacy, the amount of perceived inadequacy that you have is not connected to how inadequate you really are. And it’s this feeling this perception of inadequacy that causes the fetish. So this is the advice that some people naturally jump to. What some people automatically assume is that by improving themselves by going to the gym by earning lots of money, or by improving their career, or by absorbing more knowledge and becoming even more intelligent, or relentlessly pursuing self development in some way, they assume that these things will make them feel better, that their feeling of not being good enough can be healed by becoming good enough. And this isn’t what happens. Because this feeling of inadequacy isn’t based on reality, the amount of perceived inadequacy you have is not connected to how inadequate you really are. So what if you actually aren’t good enough? Maybe you’re a piece of crap, maybe you have an awful life and a lot wrong with you. Maybe you’re really fat and mean with an awful career and just nothing good about you. Maybe you have an awful personality, and no women like you, maybe you simply are inadequate? Well, again, the Fetish is the erotic association of perceived inadequacy. That means it doesn’t matter how awful your life is, or how good your life is. It only matters how you subconsciously feel. There are people really at the bottom of the barrel who feel pretty good about themselves. And there are people at the top of life who still feel like they need to do better. It doesn’t matter how many things you have wrong with you, or how many things you have going for you. All that matters when it comes to this fetish is how you feel about that. And weirdly, this subconscious feeling of inadequacy can influence your real life, it can stop you from achieving what you want in life because you don’t feel good enough. It can make you turn to alcohol or even drugs, in some cases to numb your negative feelings about yourself and provide a temporary relief. Or we might stuff ourselves full of food to feel bad, feel better. And this feeling can make us socially anxious or susceptible to depression. Or if we don’t feel good enough, we can very easily become addicted to porn as it gives a temporary good feeling. This subconscious inadequacy can actually affect your real life in a negative way, making you an underachiever or alcoholic or fat or socially awkward or addicted to porn or a number of ways in which you actually are more inadequate. So this subconscious inadequacy can cause your real life to get worse. And if you feel that some aspects of your life are bad or inadequate, it’s almost certainly the subconscious feeling. That’s the real problem, because that’s probably what’s caused it. So it doesn’t matter who you are, or how bad you think some parts of your life is. It’s this subconscious feeling. That’s the problem. That’s what’s wrong. So if you try and solve this problem by improving your life, it won’t solve this problem. Going to the gym, becoming rich and successful, improving your social skills or whatever all of these things will improve you, but that doesn’t matter. They won’t necessarily change how inadequate you feel. And the funny thing is, is that you can never be good enough, because enough changes depending on how you judge that. Usually as soon as you improve, you’ll just become aware of more ways to improve. I mean inadequacy is relative. It’s relative to how you judge that an improvement never ends. And I’m just saying this because this is the trap that a lot of people naturally fall into. They think that by proving their real lives, they’ll sometimes somehow feel better. Or they think that they can’t feel better because they have an awful real life and it’s just not true. These things aren’t connected. You can never improve yourself to a point where you are good enough, because it’s not connected improvement doesn’t heal subconscious inadequacy. That’s not to say you shouldn’t improve. Of course, improvement is great thing to do. But if you want to heal the subconscious inadequacy, you don’t get that through improvement. Sure, improve yourself, but not to heal this subconscious inadequacy. Because your real life and how inadequate you really are is not connected to how inadequate you feel. Now, there is one exception to that, which is shame. Shame is an emotion which tells you that something is wrong. Shame tells you that you need to be doing something different. That’s why we have it, it’s actually very useful, and shame will make you feel inadequate. In fact, in a lot of the books about this subconscious inadequacy, they refer to it as toxic shame sometimes, which is an interesting way of looking at it. It just means shame about yourself, not for any real reason, just general shame about who you are. That’s just another way of saying subconscious inadequacy, right? Not feeling good enough is like having toxic shame about yourself. So toxic shame is subconscious inadequacy. That’s what we talk about in stage two of the course. But this shame is what can cause the problem in the first place because it can be internalized. It can be stuffed down into the subconscious and it can stop being a healthy human feeling. And it can start to become this toxic shame this state of being this state of thinking that you are all feeling subconsciously that you are inadequate. So shame is the exception. Although I’ve spent a good five minutes explaining why improvement doesn’t change how you feel it does in any part of your life where you feel shame. So don’t ignore the shame and do improve on areas where you feel shame. So let’s turn our attention to action. Now. You probably want results right away. Firstly, we need to heal the core of the problem, which is, as we’ve just established is this subconscious inadequacy. And, as I’ve just said, you heal this not by changing your life. But by realizing this, this sense that you are not inadequate, you heal, you heal this subconscious feeling. But before we get there, we need to actually prevent it from getting worse. Because this is what happens all the time, more shame becomes internalized. There are things that create this sense of inadequacy over and over again, we need to actually prevent it from getting worse, before we can get it better. So that’s what we’re going to start by doing. And this is another interesting thing, porn can cause this problem, or it can be the thing that pushes you down this path, almost the trigger for this fetish. So the first thing that you’re going to need to do to heal this is to try to stop watching porn. Masturbation is normal and fine and healthy. So do that just don’t watch porn. As I explained in the conditioning section, there is a link in your brain between arousal and this fetish. And every time you watch porn, that link is strengthened. So you don’t want to do that. Just stop watching porn. To heal the core. Now this is a bit weird to talk to someone you’d like to talk to more. The reason behind this, basically, in our lives, we have people that we really like and we really respect. But for some reason, we don’t talk to them, you may have old friends that have kind of drifted away and you’ve lost contact with them. You may have people that you really like and want to talk to you more, but just don’t. And sometimes the reason for this is that we can think that they don’t want to talk to us, we can think it would be weird to talk to them or basically that we’re not good enough. That’s where this sense comes from. And if you feel like you have that in any any areas of your life, then the first thing you can do, just to take a very simple step towards healing this is just do it anyway, just to talk to someone that you’d like to talk to you more. Maybe that means getting in touch with a friend from your past that you’ve lost touch with. Maybe it means talking to a work colleague that you don’t talk too much, whatever. If you can identify anyone in your life that you actually would like to talk to more then this is just going to bring this sense that you are good enough into real life very quickly and very simply and it is something that you can take action on right now. The other thing that is that you can do to heal both these things the core and the cause. You can take five minutes in silence, just to focus on yourself. One of the things that happens as a result of this sense of subconscious inadequacy is that we can become disconnected from ourselves. This is quite a complex topic, and I obviously do talk a lot about that in this course. But when you become disconnected from yourself, you can lose an awareness of what’s going on in your body. So, the first thing you can do to heal this right away is to reconnect with yourself and ask yourself okay, right now, are you hot or cold? Are you tired? Or energized? Are you stressed? Is there any tension in your body? Are you hungry, or thirsty? Connecting with yourself is one way to heal inadequacy. Are you bored? Probably I’ve been talking for quite a while. Let’s get on to the next stage. See youMaybe the reasons behind your sense of inadequacy are true. Maybe you actually aren’t good enough. Maybe you’re a piece of crap. Maybe you have an awful life and a lot wrong with you. Maybe you’re fat, mean, with an awful career and nothing good about you. Maybe you have an awful personality and no women like you. Maybe you simply ARE inadequate.
It doesn’t actually matter. The cuckold fetish is the eroticization of perceived inadequacy. That means it doesn’t matter how awful your life is, or how good your life is. The only thing that matters is how you subconsciously feel. I’ve met people at the bottom of the barrel that feel pretty good about themselves. I’ve met people at the top of life who still feel like they need to do better. It doesn’t matter how many things you have wrong with you; all that matters when it comes to this fetish is how you feel about that.
On the other hand, maybe your life is pretty good. Maybe you’re nice, intelligent, and very good with women. Maybe you have a very fulfilling career and a hot body.
It still doesn’t matter. The cuckold fetish is the eroticization of perceived inadequacy. It doesn’t matter the state of your life, or how far from inadequacy you really are. All that matters is the subconscious perception. You can have a great life but still have a lot of perceived inadequacy. You can have an awful life and not have any perceived inadequacy. The amount of actual inadequacy you have is not connected to the amount of perceived inadequacy. And it’s the perceived inadequacy that causes the fetish.
So going to the gym, getting ripped, becoming rich and successful, improving social skills etc. All of these things will improve you. But that doesn’t matter. They won’t necessarily improve how inadequate you perceive yourself to be. Because this subconscious feeling of inadequacy is not connected to how inadequate you are in real life.
One thing that does matter is shame. The feeling of shame IS directly linked to the subconscious feeling of inadequacy. Shame makes you feel like you’re not good enough. So, if you have areas of your life that make you ashamed of yourself, that’s a clear signal that you DO need to improve on them. Things like obesity and alcoholism are common, and so is underachievement. So, fixing the shame and improving on these things can be a fast way towards feeling less inadequate. But it’s that feeling that’s important.
Weirdly, if you have something like this – an addiction to food or alcohol or a tendency to underachieve and never fulfil your full potential – or anything else that makes you feel inadequate – these things can be CAUSED by a feeling of inadequacy initially. That subconscious feeling of inadequacy can make us turn to alcohol to numb our sense of low-self worth, or we might stuff ourselves full of food to feel better, or we might prevent ourselves from fulfilling our full potential because we don’t feel good enough.
That’s why it can be so hard to change these things. It’s actually the feeling that’s the problem. The subconscious perceived inadequacy can CAUSE the actual inadequacy. We’ll go into this further in stage 2.3. Usually, just by fixing the subconscious perceived inadequacy, things tend to sort themselves out quite easily.
Some people don’t have anything that makes them inadequate. They may be super-achievers with a lot going for them. Yet, they still feel a need to improve. This is also driven by a subconscious sense that they’re not good enough. Self-improvement gives them hope that one day they will be good enough. But you will never reach that feeling through self-improvement, instead you need to tackle the subconscious feeling of inadequacy. So for them, the advice of “Improve yourself!” won’t work. That’s what I try to warn against in this video.
You don’t “become” good enough. You realise it.
Inadequacy is relative. As soon as you improve, you’ll become aware of more ways to improve. It never ends. You can never improve to a point where you are good “enough” because “enough” changes. You don’t “become” good enough. You just change the subconscious.
Subconscious inadequacy is not fixed by improvement. It’s fixed by healing the subconscious.
ACTION PLAN:
Porn is probably a cause, at least for 99% of you. Repeated porn usage over time leads to seeking out progressively more hardcore, taboo, or shocking content. This is how porn can be a major factor in this fetish. Porn can also make you feel inadequate.
So stop watching porn. Masturbate with your imagination. Don’t think about anything that makes you feel shame, because that can lead to even more subconscious inadequacy!
Talk to someone you want to talk to more.
Take 5 minutes to focus on how you feel. Are you hot or cold? Are you tired or energised? Are you hungry or thirsty? Connecting with yourself is one way to heal inadequacy.
OR go to my optional interruptions from the main course (1.4 Aversion & 1.5 Covert Sensitization), where I talk about the other methods of changing fetishes which I don’t think are that great (but do work).
Source
Author(s) || Connor McGonigal
Website || howtostopbeingacuckold.com
Article || 1.3 The Simplest Way To Heal Inadequacy
Date || Between January 27th and November 14th, 2018
tags: [“evergreen”]
contributors: ["Connor McGonigal"]