Imposter Syndrome

[empath]

Tldr.

To sum up what is going in my head is I can get her in bed but am I really deserving of her?

Why I am asking this?

1. Affecting my seduction
2. Creating question if I cant have my end goal is it worth it?

So yeah how to make seduction you and normal you one person?

Atleast get 80% congruency?

Background
I was wimpy kid in school. Trying to change that I found girlschase.

Learned to socialize and get laid.

Still these changes were never permanent in me.

I make great first impressions.

Though once I spend enough time with someone.

Espcially in group of guys/friends.

I end up becoming the guy they joke about most yeah basicall a pasty.

(I guess partly due to value mismatch/ my taste in terms of fashion and food being different from them)

Partly due to my adhd brain - zoned out absent minded easy for people pick on me.

But partly because I am never able to sucessfully defend myself. When they start attacking me on above.

Only place I have been able to maintain relatively better image is with my office collegues.

(Maybe they don't talk about it in front of me and I don't have very long interaction with them)

Now until sometime before I was living in delulu and yeah I used to tell girls my flatmates etc are assholes not real friends ... I am not very close to them etc.

So they would not be bothered about their comment, if any they make.

I did not to answer I come as a high value.

But as my mind shifted from increasing notches to getting a high value mate.

Now I feel if I don't lay a girl on first date or lock her soon, I will lose her.


This makes me despo and needy infront of her why because need to lay her is coming not from desire but insecurity.


I feel secution tactics, push pull etc. are very effective for laying girls.

But now I am feeling inadequate and less deserving of a high value mate.

Again ending up pasty is not the only reason though.

I am not very ambitious person materially saying, I am ambitious in seeking pleasure etc.

But yeah basically I dont have habits that a good long term mate should have.

And since I want pick up girls for becoming girlfriend now.

I end up auto rejecting myself sometime.

Lastly issue of wealth and family background comes.

I am not very rich myself and my family is in a way say low middle class. (Marginally fucked up, deadbeat dad basically)

So yeah why parents of wealthy girl will give their daughter hand to me?

To sum up what is going in my head is I can get her in bed but am I really deserving of her?

Why I am asking this?

1. Affecting my seduction
2. Creating question if I cant have my end goal is it worth it?

Lastly, its not I am not trying to fix my underlying issues I am.

Like this year I started prioritizing other areas as well apart from girls.

But still I feel I will never achive it, because of my base nature and I will always be fakiing and break down in stress.

Because I am not someone who he pretends to be in the first meet.

Like I am very anxity prone and low in efforts and achiveing but when I am seducing I try to project myself as very chill person with idgaf attitude and who is very busy and ambitious who gets done a lot and lives a life of advenutre.

 

[superseducer]

Dude, I know what you are saying.

I used to have the same problem that you're mentioning, with friends being overly rude to me over time. What I'll say is that you have to really take time to analyze the aspects of your identity that you are attaching to and the effect that it is having on the actions and behaviors that you take.

Our ideas about ourselves, our self-concept is really just a constellation of smaller beliefs that we attach to what we consider "us". If you want to change that, then you have to hyper-fixate on what it is about yourself that you'd like to keep, your strengths, and then isolate the weaknesses that are causing people to treat you that way.

Get rid of your friends, or at least distance yourself from them severely. I would start meditating just to gain more awareness and make this process easier.

I would suggest reading atomic habits, because the change is not going to be one that is instantaneous, but instead going to be a slow crawl towards your idealized self.

You don't have to instantaneously become a leader, certain about yourself, or have the guise that you want to take figured out, but you should have an idea of what it is that you are working towards. Every time that you take an action that is closer to this idealized self and farther away from the you that you are now, you will be moving closer and distancing yourself from your previous self-concept.

It's important to realize that changing your actions is secondary to changing your ideas about yourself. It's amazing that you've been able to get consistent results with women despite not believing that you're the type of person that should be having these results, but now it's time to do the internal work at the same time that encompasses these underlying traits.

Stop doing things that you later hate yourself for, which I'm sure for you is mostly tied up into your position being reified by the friends and acquaintances that you have, figure out who you want to be by doing some deep diving and meditating, and then work towards it consistently, bit by bit on a daily basis and you'll be fine.

 

[superseducer]

Here's a quote from Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zarathustra", the chapter "Flies In The Marketplace"

"Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee to where a rough, strong breeze blows! Flee into your solitude! you have lived too closely to the small and the pitiful. Flee from their invisible vengeance! For you they have nothing but vengeance. No longer raise your arm against them! They are innumerable, and it is not your job to be a flyswatter.

Innumerable are the small and pitiful ones; and rain-drops and weeds have been the ruin of many a proud structure.You are not stone; but already have you become hollow from many drops. You will yet break and burst from the many drops.

I see you exhausted by poisonous flies; I see you bleeding and torn at a hundred spots; and your pride refuses even to be angry. They would have blood from you in all innocence; blood is what bloodless souls crave — and therefore they sting in all Innocence. But you, profound one, you suffer too profoundly even from small wounds; and before you have healed, the same poison-worm crawls over your hand.

You are too proud to kill these gluttons. But take care lest it be your fate to suffer all their poisonous injustice! They buzz around you also with their praise: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want to be close to your skin and your blood.

They flatter you, as one flatters a God or devil; they whimper before you, as before a God or devil; What does it come to! They are flatterers and whimperers, and nothing more. Often, also, do they show themselves to you as friendly ones. But that has always been the prudence of cowards. Yes! cowards are wise! They think much about you with their petty souls — you are always suspect to them! Whatever is much thought about is at last thought suspicious.

They punish you for all your virtues. They pardon you entirely — for your errors. Because you are gentle and of honest character, you say: “Guiltless are they for their small existence.” But their petty souls think: “Guilty is every great existence.” Even when you are gentle towards them, they still feel themselves despised by you; and they repay your beneficence with secret maleficence. Your silent pride is always counter to their taste; they rejoice if once you are humble enough to be vain. What we recognize in a man, we also irritate in him. Therefore be on your guard against the small ones!

In your presence they feel themselves small, and their baseness gleams and glows against you in invisible vengeance. You did not see how often they became silent when you approached them, and how their energy left them like the smoke of a waning fire? Yes, my friend, you are the bad conscience of your neighbors, for they are unworthy of you. Therefore they hate you, and would rather suck your blood. Your neighbors will always be poisonous flies; what is great in you — that itself must make them more poisonous, and always more fly-like. Flee, my friend, into your solitude — and there, where a rough strong breeze blows. It is not your job to be a flyswatter.

Thus spoke Zarathustra."

 

[Stark]

You need to see yourself in a higher light.

There’s no guarantee that seeing external success would elevate your self concept.

As Maxwell Maltz found out the hard way, even after remarkable physical changes in appearance, some people felt they were ugly. The conclusion of his work is that a person’s success is directly correlated to how they saw themselves ‘internally’.

There are 2 guys that I know who are literally Gods of daygame . However if you saw them in person you wouldn’t do a double take. But if you happen to watch them for a few moments or even talk to them you’ll see they have a superior posture, vocal tone and sense of reality.

Youtube ‘reality distortion field’ and see how Steve Jobs used this concept to deliver captivating keynote addresses.

You’ll need to believe beyond the shadow of a doubt that you’re the hot shit. There’s no other man who can approach girls in the blink of an eye. Look her in the eye and tell her things that make her panties wet.

I must admit Psychocybernetics is not the meterial which will help you put this into practical use.

What helped me was Arnold’s autobiographical ‘Education of a Bodybuilder’. The first half of the book is all mindset and how he literally thought things into being.

I kept re-reading that for 6 months. Implemented his mindset, got seriously jacked(though that was not a goal before picking up the book) and transferred the same self concept to seduction.

It has worked really well. If you don’t want to read Arnold, look for someone similar with an arrogant cocky mindset about life and winning. Very hard to find these types in the modern world. You might have to go back to 80s.

It’s almost like method acting. Transplant their mindset into you just like Heath Ledger did for portraying Joker. With his daily notebook ritual if you want to go all in on this

 

[Will_V]

Tldr.

To sum up what is going in my head is I can get her in bed but am I really deserving of her?

Why I am asking this?

1. Affecting my seduction
2. Creating question if I cant have my end goal is it worth it?

So yeah how to make seduction you and normal you one person?

Atleast get 80% congruency?

Background
I was wimpy kid in school. Trying to change that I found girlschase.

Learned to socialize and get laid.

Still these changes were never permanent in me.

I make great first impressions.

Though once I spend enough time with someone.

Espcially in group of guys/friends.

I end up becoming the guy they joke about most yeah basicall a pasty.

(I guess partly due to value mismatch/ my taste in terms of fashion and food being different from them)

Partly due to my adhd brain - zoned out absent minded easy for people pick on me.

But partly because I am never able to sucessfully defend myself. When they start attacking me on above.

Only place I have been able to maintain relatively better image is with my office collegues.

(Maybe they don't talk about it in front of me and I don't have very long interaction with them)

Now until sometime before I was living in delulu and yeah I used to tell girls my flatmates etc are assholes not real friends ... I am not very close to them etc.

So they would not be bothered about their comment, if any they make.

I did not to answer I come as a high value.

But as my mind shifted from increasing notches to getting a high value mate.

Now I feel if I don't lay a girl on first date or lock her soon, I will lose her.


This makes me despo and needy infront of her why because need to lay her is coming not from desire but insecurity.


I feel secution tactics, push pull etc. are very effective for laying girls.

But now I am feeling inadequate and less deserving of a high value mate.

Again ending up pasty is not the only reason though.

I am not very ambitious person materially saying, I am ambitious in seeking pleasure etc.

But yeah basically I dont have habits that a good long term mate should have.

And since I want pick up girls for becoming girlfriend now.

I end up auto rejecting myself sometime.

Lastly issue of wealth and family background comes.

I am not very rich myself and my family is in a way say low middle class. (Marginally fucked up, deadbeat dad basically)

So yeah why parents of wealthy girl will give their daughter hand to me?

To sum up what is going in my head is I can get her in bed but am I really deserving of her?

Why I am asking this?

1. Affecting my seduction
2. Creating question if I cant have my end goal is it worth it?

Lastly, its not I am not trying to fix my underlying issues I am.

Like this year I started prioritizing other areas as well apart from girls.

But still I feel I will never achive it, because of my base nature and I will always be fakiing and break down in stress.

Because I am not someone who he pretends to be in the first meet.

Like I am very anxity prone and low in efforts and achiveing but when I am seducing I try to project myself as very chill person with idgaf attitude and who is very busy and ambitious who gets done a lot and lives a life of advenutre.

There's a lot going on in this post, but let's start from a simple concept.

I think what you are saying is that you don't have a strong identity. You don't have a sense of self that is consistent through all the situations of your life.

And I can see that this is true, because of one thing: your insecurities are based on the reactions of other people. You are afraid that she will judge you. You are afraid that she will leave you. You are afraid that they will see you as weak, and pick on you. You are not really afraid however of your own judgement of yourself - because you have no real perception or view of yourself.

In some ways, it's good to feel the pressure of the world telling you what it is about you that's not up to scratch, and respond to it. But there are some things that are difficult to change about ourselves, or which take a long time to change, and it's always possible that life can spring a sudden, crushing setback on you to add to the burden of your negative self-image. So it's risky to expose your emotions too much to the influence of the outside world.

That's why I believe it's necessary for a man to be able to separate his mind from the influence of his circumstances, to learn how to keep it within his own domain of control at all times, to learn to manage its impulses and control his emotions, and then to be able to camp inside his own mind in a state of rest regardless of his physical state or exterior circumstances. The first result of this is that all his capabilities, such as they are - whether they are great or small - are always within his own control to deploy at his own discretion, he is not just scrambling around in mindless reaction to things around him. And secondly, it gives him a sense of his own identity that resides completely within his own mind, that almost nothing can touch or change, that he can then turn outward to reinforce his actions. And, in social and sexual interactions, the primary source of a man's power and effect is the psychological.

It's difficult for someone to withdraw their sense of identity and their emotions from the world around them, and to some extent this is rational - it feels like a kind of self-blinding (though this is a lie that comes from our emotions - the emotions are being blinded, not reality itself), and that you will end up not being able to act when there's something you really need to do. So in proportion to how much you take control of your own state of mind, you must increase your self-awareness and your awareness of the mechanisms of the world around you - only your awareness of them, not your emotional response to them - and practice being strategic, intelligent, and calmly resolute in the way that you meet and interact with those mechanisms. This will give you a sense of trust in your capability to not only control your self-image, but meet the challenges of the world as well.

The second caveat is that you must, over time, learn to accept all the reality about yourself and discard all your illusions. Because to the extent that a man places his conscious, rational mind over his emotions, illusions become his greatest enemy, because they will make him do things that do not conform to reality. Illusions are only necessary because of fear, and fear is the root of all emotional weaknesses.

When you do this, the final result is that you have an identity, a sense of who you are, that is not influenced by your circumstances, yet which can be brought to bear on any of your circumstances with great effect. Whether you are poor or rich, weak or strong, in a state of pain or pleasure, reflecting in the aftermath of a success or a defeat, that identity of yours will not change, it will not react, it will simply continue to exist and provide you with a foundation to support your self-image and future actions.

It's not easy to forge an identity like this, but essentially, to the extent of my experience, it comes from meditation, building a strong self-awareness, and practicing relaxation, emotional control, and calm, decisive action in all kinds of difficult situations. At every moment, in every situation, no matter how bad, a part of you must be able to say "I am still ME, regardless of everything, my emotions are not who I am, and I will act according to my will".

 

[empath]

There's a lot going on in this post, but let's start from a simple concept.

I think what you are saying is that you don't have a strong identity. You don't have a sense of self that is consistent through all the situations of your life.

And I can see that this is true, because of one thing: your insecurities are based on the reactions of other people. You are afraid that she will judge you. You are afraid that she will leave you. You are afraid that they will see you as weak, and pick on you. You are not really afraid however of your own judgement of yourself - because you have no real perception or view of yourself.

I won't say I don't have a sense of self.

I do have a sense of it but because of it I have to live a double life.

See before learning about seduction and girlschase.

These were my part, introverted bullied kid in school. Who used to love and being goofy. But I was irresponsible and careless and weak.

After learning about seduction, I began to transform myself.

Irreaponsible and careless became reckless / devil may care attitude.
Goofy in me I supressed.
Introverted became extrovered or I was always extrovered but just shy. In additon I wear a damenor of maturity too, not because I am but because its liked. To compensate for bullying I became verbally aggressive.

But these changes are not permanent. These are just clothes I wear.

My goofy with friends, shy and soft personality still remains at core and slowly slowly it seeps in.

I can't carry the act always, can't come with sharp replies.

So Image I create falls slowly or atleast it has fallen enough of times to let me know my armour don't have chinks but huge holes.

Now whenever I walk in this armour I know anyone can remove it easily which creates fear in me.

Why do I still wear this armour?

Because it gets the job done.

What I want that the armour/dress I am wearning is not a dress but real me my body.

If I was able to explain.

So basically I hate my identity.

Again I agree my identity is not very strong but whatever it is I don't like it much.

 

[Rakehell]

My goofy with friends, shy and soft personality still remains at core and slowly slowly it seeps in.

I can't carry the act always, can't come with sharp replies.

So Image I create falls slowly or atleast it has fallen enough of times to let me know my armour don't have chinks but huge holes.

Now whenever I walk in this armour I know anyone can remove it easily which creates fear in me.

Why do I still wear this armour?

Because it gets the job done.

What I want that the armour/dress I am wearning is not a dress but real me my body.

If I was able to explain.

So basically I hate my identity.

Again I agree my identity is not very strong but whatever it is I don't like it much

What you’re describing is the natural fluidness of your presentation when influenced by who you’re around.

In psychology this concept is called code-switching.

It’s a natural part of the journey of reinventing yourself. It shows you’re on the right track since you’re able to recognize when this is happening.

It helps to spend less time with people who view you in a way that isn’t congruent with who you want to be until you get more engrossed with the new you.

The girlschase articles on frame control touch on the concept loosely so i’d spend some time researching those.

But overall you’ll reach a point, if you keep at it, where you recognize that all of these things make up your identity and sometimes it’s simply out of your control. You aren’t one thing or another thing, they all make up different parts of you.

Some people will view you one way and others will view you another. You can influence it some but mostly it boils down to perception and their own psychologies.

 

[Will_V]

I won't say I don't have a sense of self.

I do have a sense of it but because of it I have to live a double life.

See before learning about seduction and girlschase.

These were my part, introverted bullied kid in school. Who used to love and being goofy. But I was irresponsible and careless and weak.

After learning about seduction, I began to transform myself.

Irreaponsible and careless became reckless / devil may care attitude.
Goofy in me I supressed.
Introverted became extrovered or I was always extrovered but just shy. In additon I wear a damenor of maturity too, not because I am but because its liked. To compensate for bullying I became verbally aggressive.

But these changes are not permanent. These are just clothes I wear.

I believe this is a common issue especially for guys. We grow up as children with a certain sense of who we are and how we should express ourselves, and then, especially as we become adults and realize that we are responsible for success and failure, and nobody is going to come and save us, this self comes into contact with the real world, and we realize that it is not effective for getting what we want.

I had this too, it was the root of my social anxiety, which used to be very severe in my teenage years. Fortunately I was never really bullied, but making friends and social connections, and navigating social situations (especially where girls were involved), was extremely difficult because of the powerful negative emotions that I struggled to control.

I've spent a long time learning to understand and manage my mind and my emotions, and even now a lot of things that I can say that I understand intuitively, would be hard to explain. But one thing I can say is that we develop as children inside an environment in which there are pressures and influences, especially from our parents (or a lack thereof), and our personalities and expressions tend to develop along the lines of what gives us the most success in that environment.

The problem appears when the environment changes - as we grow from children without responsibility to succeed, to adults with a responsibility to succeed, some ingrained habits that are more or less now part of our personality and identity can cause problems. And the faster and more chaotically that that change takes place, the more at a loss we are for how to navigate it.

One of the main issues of this type is 'nice guy syndrome' where a guy learns through childhood that he gets most success when he appeases those around him and avoids confrontation, and then finds that it doesn't work in relationships. Another one is the 'clown', where a guy learns that his funny self is far more acceptable to and rewarded by others than his real self, and so he grows into an adult finding it very difficult to express himself with any seriousness or severity. There are many others.

Whatever the case may be, there is nothing that hits guys in this situation harder than the woman problem. Because you can be weak of will, dislikeable, lacking strong personality traits, or any number of unattractive things, and still find great success in a career field, if your intelligence can be put to work. But there is no way on earth you will find any real success with women unless you are a capable, skillful, and competitive social player, and you won't keep them unless you are also a capable leader and manager of the human mind.

Modern society has almost made it possible to succeed as a man on nothing but the raw utility you offer to society, but female sexual attraction is a powerful, primitive thread governing the practical outcome of male success that cannot be extricated from the system or reasonably controlled. This is why society tries so hard to regulate it, and mostly fails to have any effect.

So how to deal with this problem? How do we find success in all things, without losing our identity?

The first and by far the most important thing to understand, in my opinion, is that the concept of your own personality from which you derive the largest part of your identity is mostly an emotional concept and not a rational one. That is to say that your concept of yourself is not so much an objective view of yourself and the reality around you, but a collection of ingrained, habituated emotional expressions and impulses that, upon feeling and expressing them, make you feel that you are who you are.

What happens in many cases is that when expressing ourselves this way doesn't work to achieve our objectives, we may tactically adopt other 'personalities' of a complementary type (such as being aggressive and selfish if being nice doesn't work). The problem is that, while these may more or less work in different situations, both of these are not you, and they also contradict eachother. And the result is some level of internal conflict and existential anxiety. Many people adopt a suite of emotional armors that cover the main situations that govern their life, and deal with the conflict arising from their contradictory nature with stuff like drugs and alcohol - this is how you end up with the stereotypical guy who is weak around his wife and his boss, but all 'alpha' with the boys or when he's had a few to drink. I think what you're describing about how you feel around women vs how you feel with your friends is another example of this.

The only way to get closer to yourself, to understand who you really are, is to spend long periods of time exercising your self-awareness and turning your perception toward yourself in a state of calmness, of very low emotion. Only when we dispense with all the various emotional armors, both the ones we believe to be our innate self, and also the ones we tactically adopt, do we start to see the reality underneath, the reality that simply exists, of the person we actually are. And that, in my opinion, is the only solid foundation on which a person can conceptualize their own identity. As we grow in understanding of it, we can learn how to express it functionally in many different situations - while also realizing that there are times we will need to express very specific things that we may not be used to expressing, but that our identity will not change in doing so.

Something I believe very much is that people are not functionally very different at all. The majority of people (there are of course exceptions) have more or less the same capacity for aggression, for compassion, for love and hate, honesty and deception, goodwill and malice. What happens is that the rewards and punishments of the environment cause us to prop up one part of ourselves as our identity, and banish another part into the dark depths of the subconscious where we can forget it exists. But, as psychoanalysis has demonstrated, it is not possible to destroy elements of the personality, only to frustrate them. And the more that an element of personality is frustrated in its freedom of expression, the more it forces its way, in one form or another, into the unconscious spaces between our conscious expressions.

This is a good thing, in the sense that, to rebuild a well rounded identity, we do not have to create ourselves anew, so much as we must learn to tease out, grow, and give a sort of supervised freedom to parts of ourselves which, until now, we have attempted to squash on behalf of our environment. We are already whole, but typically - in cases where we struggle with our identity - greatly unbalanced.

As we build a more and more solid identity, it's much easier to be our most effective self at all times, since our expression is now governed by a larger degree of rationality and a smaller degree of emotion, and all our various drives, or sides of our personality, are accounted for and ready. We can remain who we are, while deploying those parts of ourselves that are needed in any given situation, without them running amok and commandeering our sense of self.

It is not easy to do. I have spent at least 15 years getting to the point I am right now, patiently expanding my awareness of myself and learning in what ways I can successfully steer myself toward the person I want to be. Perhaps the most difficult part is learning to live with and optimize the parts of yourself that you don't particularly like, that you cannot easily change, and may never learn to change, without judging them too harshly.

But, as I believe Carl Jung said in so many words, the work we do on ourselves is by far the most important and meaningful work we will ever undertake. And the practical benefits it has had for my life (and the lives of people around me on whom I have some influence, since an understanding of others begins with an understanding of ourselves) certainly make it worthwhile.

 

[Atlas IV]

It is not easy to do. I have spent at least 15 years getting to the point I am right now, patiently expanding my awareness of myself and learning in what ways I can successfully steer myself toward the person I want to be. Perhaps the most difficult part is learning to live with and optimize the parts of yourself that you don't particularly like, that you cannot easily change, and may never learn to change, without judging them too harshly.

Genuine question, how did you get to the point that you are now, Will? What stuff did you read and absorb, and what was your mental process?

Your writings are some of the most insightful stuff on this forum, intellectual on a level that's at the very edge of my comprehension. I really have to engage my brain on all cylinders to follow along.

Surely this has come from a PhD in psychology or something similar, combined with a good deal of very intentional introspection?

 

[Will_V]

Genuine question, how did you get to the point that you are now, Will? What stuff did you read and absorb, and what was your mental process?

Your writings are some of the most insightful stuff on this forum, intellectual on a level that's at the very edge of my comprehension. I really have to engage my brain on all cylinders to follow along.

Surely this has come from a PhD in psychology or something similar, combined with a good deal of very intentional introspection?

Glad you enjoy what I write, and I hope that it's this side of comprehensible

I read a lot from as early as I can remember, all kinds of books, lots of scifi and nonfiction stuff. When I was learning to read my dad used to give us Scientific American magazines, back when they used to have a coupon attached inside, in the hope that in flipping through it looking for the coupon, we would end up reading the articles. I can't remember if it worked, but I know I ended up reading a lot of them later on.

Growing up I was always good with words, together with one of my brothers we wrote a fiction book (we both started and I finished, it was a mess but amounted to 300 something pages iirc). English was always my best subject in school, and I ended up doing a lot of freelance writing out of university. So I have some experience with it.

Specifically on psychology, I've read a lot of psychoanalytic books by Freud and Jung. I believe psychoanalysis was the last serious attempt to understand the mind in its own symbolic language (which I think is by far the more useful approach), rather than looking at it from a purely physiological point of view. Despite all the eccentricities and shortcomings of psychoanalysis, it's very sad to see nothing built upon it for so long.

I've also read a lot of neuroscience books, philosophy books, history books, historical fiction (which I like but good ones such as The Source by James Michener, or Shogun by James Clavell, are very rare).

What initially got me interested in Girls Chase were the fantastic articles that covered a lot of stuff I hadn't thought about, especially the ones that really go deep into a subject and associate it with a broader context. Needless to say it's very hard to find articles out there that are both intelligent and practical about seduction and female sexual psychology (and what it reflects about what constitutes a healthy male psychology). So I've always enjoyed reading them.

I would say that I've always been blessed with a very good intuition for reading and understanding people, though how much of that is learned knowledge and how much is innate I don't know.

More than anything, what has helped me is to spend a lot of time with my own mind. I am somewhat of a loner by nature, though I like very much to immerse myself in high energy social situations on a regular basis. But when I am alone is when my mind reveals to me the most about itself and its nature - I sort of submerge myself sometimes in my subconscious, trying to understand its symbolic language, the way that it creates the sea of notions and impulses and ephemeral associations that the conscious experience floats inside and sustains itself with.