Hey
@Will_V These words resonate with me strongly. Probably you described one of my issues well. Would you mind to guide me on how to understand/become aware of this phenomenon in real life? Also, is this reasearched and conceptualized in psychological literature, it would be great to jump into theory of it too.
This probably needs a long post to properly describe, but here's the way I see it as simply as I can.
First let me quote myself:
That's very true, although I think it goes deeper than that - there are men who literally don't know who they are, whose momentary experience of themselves is almost completely false. They have lived a life for someone or something else and covered up their own authentic reactions to it in dogma or protective lies.
These men instantly leave a woman cold, regardless of what else about them might be attractive, since a woman predicts a man's ability to understand and validate her by his ability to do so with his own weaknesses - and these men often harbor a concealed violence toward the parts of themselves they despise.
The inability of a man to understand
who he is, to be fundamentally disassociated from his own intrinsic desires and motivations, is always a result of him trading off his identity in return for security. The reason why this trade exists is because his identity, from which his desires and motivations come, was somehow projected to put him in opposition to something that he felt would annihilate him, whether by physical force, or by creating unbearable guilt, or something else that he could not possibly face. So he denied it and buried it.
There are two problems with this: first, the subconscious cannot be lied to. It is not the same as the conscious mind, it makes its own separate observations and deductions from the same data that the conscious mind has access to. It has its directives, as I understand it, in a combination of general learning adaptation and built-in instincts, which nature endowed him with for a specific purpose: to succeed in the game of life. But the pursuit of success is not compatible with an inability to face conflict and risk, and so these mechanisms become frustrated, and certain of them - particularly aggression - which have been prepared to help the individual overcome opposition, cannot easily distinguish between obstacles that come from within or without. So the subconscious (which again is fully aware, though not conscious) identifies the individual themselves as the obstacle to their own success. This creates violent internal conflict, which the conscious mind, again seeking security, attempts to bury and hide even from itself. But in doing so, the individual becomes even more isolated from his basal identity - he harbors hidden forces that plot against himself without his knowledge.
The second problem is that the mind is not designed to operate in conflict. Contrary to what many people seem to believe believe, it is not possible to continually think one way and act another. Whatever actions a person takes - voluntary or involuntary - in turn modify his identity to accommodate doing them again in future. Thus by taking an action, the person internalizes not only the motivation to do so again, but also, the
identity of the type of person who would naturally do them in the first place diffuses through him. He becomes what he does. However, because a healthy mind cannot hold multiple identities, conflicting identities become entangled and attempt to repress and overwhelm eachother, rendering him disfunctional at worst, and unstable at best.
Now what makes this particularly objectionable for women is not just the possibility that he might take some action that negatively affects her wellbeing. It is also because women are designed to open up psychologically and adapt her identity and behaviour to a man. That means that in some sense who he is becomes who she is - or at least she operates proportionally to who he is. So if the man is messed up psychologically, she is opening herself to become the same - his fragmented identity is like a contagious disease that is passed to her though her psychological intimacy with him. And that is something women in their vulnerability are careful to avoid, and they are naturally much better at detecting such things than men are.
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This is one of the main reasons why I have a problem with MGTOW and all that sort of red pill stuff. Just because a man decides that he wants to avoid risk doesn't mean that nature will allow him to retain his identity or even libido thereafter. The internal world of the human mind is a collection of mechanisms that do not belong to his conscious mind, that are continually measuring and judging the reality that he experiences against what nature prepared him for. The worst thing that a man can do is find himself in opposition to them, because while he might be able to escape the judgement of a court, there are others that he will never escape.
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I can't point you to an individual source for my points of view, I've read a lot of psychology, psychoanalysis and neuroscience but most of them are very afraid to make the kind of direct practical connections between things that someone might find useful, and so they either allude vaguely to something or confine themselves to abstract technical observations.
I recommend all of Carl Jung's work and David Eagleman's work as they've been very good for understanding the mind in two different languages. But they can also be pretty abstract. Jordan Peterson (who is mainly based on Carl Jung) is good though his concepts are a little too self-absorbed for my liking.
The work of bringing together one's own mind into unity is a long process that there is unfortunately no manual for (though psychoanalysis came closest). You just have to work on yourself slowly, remaining calm and non-judgemental, teasing out each thread of internal conflict and accepting whatever you find and whatever you have to do to put it in its proper place. You must become your own teacher, being able to observe all your own problems without too much emotion, but with genuine self-love, knowing the extents and limits of your current capabilities, and growing them with discipline and habit.
