Valach

What is problematic seeking?

Almost everyone has trauma to some degree. I would not be surprised if all of us in this thread have it.

It feels like large chunk of people on this forum are just rage baiting at this point.

Forgoting trauma does not mean it does not impact you anymore. Most people are completely unaware of their trauma. By design.

A small child whos survival is completely dependant on their parents does not have any choice.

Trauma is not really about what happened to you (even if that is the initial trigger), trauma is about what happened inside of you because of what happened to you. If a child is being dismissed by its parents, it develops a belief "I am not not enough, I am not wanted, I can not depend on others" - that is the trauma.

How so?

Trauma is also inward experience, it hinders true self esteem.

I am not. Take it as you will.

Which is exactly what traumatized person would say. Don't you see that you are using woman to disconnect from the pain of your own trauma?

General trend is there, yes. Intimacy is a basic human needs and you can not be intimate (don't confuse that for sex) in some hookup scenario. Most people who won in life by being born to healthy parents and are able to connect to others safely simply pair up fairly quickly and tend to have healthy relationships that last. And so they are not out there sleeping with new people. I was hypersexual to a point as well, yes. I met a lot of woman and men in the circles who were the same. Looking back it was very obvious that most of us carried a lot of trauma. To give another example - one of the biggest signs of trauma is substance abuse. How many people who are highly promiscous that you've met don't drink. Alcohol is super prelevant in hookup culture. For a reason.

Always pleasure to read stuff from you

The thing with trauma is that you can develop a coping mechanism to your trauma that will lead to you actually being able to attract people a lot (to a degree I had that too - a lot of my charisma was performance), but it does not help you with having healthy relationships with people or with being content in general. It is performative and not genuine. So that is not something I would promote. Think about two people who have the same trauma and feel like they are not sufficient. One will cope with getting amazing career and hot girlfriend and whatnot. The other will cope by being resigned and playing video games and smoke weed. First one may appear more succesfull but deep down they both suffer the same.

I am still fairly early in the journey, I started just this year and as almost everyone I deal with a lot of self-sabbotage (read: doing jack shit and playing video games when I should be doing inner work). I would say TRE and IPF were the best when combined. I realized I carry a lot of tension in my body which makes it hard to do practices. TRE help me calm down and then the practices starting hitting more. As far as IPF -> I can't really comment on intimate relationships since I am not dating on purpose while doing this so did not have a close romantic partner yet. Things got first worse, way worse actually, because I suddenly became aware of all the patterns that used to run in the background. But from what I noticed I view other people in more positive light, it's like i am able to see the best in them even if we are not aligned. I am far more able to recieve validation (which I would often dismiss) and I crave it less. I am more open and vulnerable with people as well as authetic. I am less scared of people being dependent on me. Empathy increased quite a lot. Often times I have this feeling after meeting someone knew that I know them better than they know themselves. But I estimate I need another year probably to feel the full effect, let's see.

Learning from different teachers and modalities and drawing my own conclusions. Some of them are gonna be more popular (like Gabor Mate), some of them might be more controversial (like dr. Bercelli), some of them just unknown (like Daniel. P. Brown).

I see. Of course any meditative practice for building concentration or self-awareness or insight is great as an assistant for any healing - like vipassana meditation. Then TRE (trauma release exercise) worked very well for any bodily tension - it basically aims into triggering natural tremor response in our bodies that function to release tension from the body and nervous system. Then IPF (ideal parent figure protocol) for healing attachment trauma. It is basically about remapping narrative mind from the early childhood experiences. Basically you imagine ideal (different from real) parents behaving towards your 3-year old self in the best way possible and satisfying your core attachment needs - this then translates into how you relate to your self and other people as well. Then I did a bunch of IFS as well. Great tool, not sure how much it did for me as I was combining a lot of shit but it definitely made me more self connected.

Trauma's on of the biggest manifestation is within relationships and socialization.

Do you mean if healing modalities made me successfull or if I found modalities which effect made me progress in healing?

I do not believe that social skills are learned. That is what I meant. Social skills are given to any human being that went through life without major trauma and has a felt sense of somatic safety in their own body. Even things like empathy are given, always. The guys who are stunted and can't read woman (or any other people for that matter) are so because they experienced some trauma early on in their life and their coping mechanism was to shut down so they do not feel the pain. But at the cost of being unable to feel and read emotions of others. In pua terms -> You craving woman for the most part is a trauma response -> you feel like you are not good enough for them (read you dont think you have social skills) which is a trauma response -> you then go around bascially learning manipulation technique to soothe this inner wound with validation which is a trauma wound -> you succed, you are still traumatized person living in traumatized body but you have learnt to disassociate from the pain of your nervous system being wrecked by trauma by getting validation from people who are probably traumatized as well.

I don't really believe in the concept of social skills. But I understand your viewpoint.

That is what was mind boggling for me in the PUA journey, at least in the start. Everyone was talking to go out and talk to a lot of people to learn social skills so I do not feel social anxiety and I know how to talk to woman etc etc. But then I noticed a pattern. I would meet a woman, I would be nervous, not know what to say and all that. But eventually if she liked me and we would start talking, she would validate me (usually by sleeping with me) and then suddenly that unlocked me and I was able to be myself around her and suddenly I had the social skills and all that. Did I learn any social skills between our first date and say third date when we slept together? Not really. What was going on (and still is to a degree) is that my mind and body were conditioned to rejection due to traumatic childhood. So whenever I was in social situation, specially in romantic context might body would be bracing for rejection. Then when I would get validated and it would suddenly unfreeze me and I would be myself. Learning social skills was not needed. What was and is needed is to reshape your subconcious mind that it is not in this constant state of threat and locking your mind in.

Alcohol does not teach you social skills though. They are there, alcohol just unfreezes your nervous system so now you can talk. So the lack for people who can talk to woman drunk is in confidence, not in social skills.

Which is precisely what people need, the confidence to be authetic. You do not really need to learn what to say etc. You know that already, it is just supressed deep down.

Right. As I said the reason he is even able to do 100 approaches is that he gets either rejected or (more likely) self rejects himself out of interactions. I did not start game from the typical "zero experience", I was somewhat of a natural. So I never really went through the phase of mass approaching. But my typical daygame (which I did more) session would last for 2-3 hours where I would talk to about 10 woman max (if that). Simply because I would usually spend long time in interactions, have instadates and all that. So there is something going wrong here.

The spam approaching is good to do for one weekend - to just make this breakthrough to be able to approach at any given time. After that it makes more sense to focus on actually developing connection.