How to become more dominant and less controlling

I earlier talked about the difference between dominant and controlling behavior, and how people often misinterpret certain behaviors as "dominant" when in fact they come from a position of insecurity, or an attempt to desperately control things.

A person who is in control, knows he is in control. He doesn't need to nitpick, or micromanage. He doesn't react negatively to criticisms, or show anger easily. He doesn't show extreme emotions very easily, instead being somewhat cheery and light-hearted. Insecure people, on the other hand, need to constantly assert their authority and jockey for status. They respond very negatively to criticism, and are generally irritable. Extreme emotions are easy to read on them. At the core, these guys don't have their shit together.

Let's take a look at four insecure, or controlling behaviors that are fairly common:

• The need to constantly be in control of a conversation, talking over others.
• Visibly negative responses to any criticism whatsoever.
• The need to say "me too" all the time about things, instead of not giving a shit.
• The development of possessive oneitises.
  

The need to constantly be in control of a conversation, talking over others.
The first item is a common, and has a remarkable tendency to correlate with guys who lack dating success. Most of these guys are completely oblivious to what they are doing, but it's very off-putting. If people seem to respond strangely to you in social situations, check to see if you're letting them talk. Most people don't want to become friends with somebody who constantly needs to have the floor to himself. If you feel this doesn't describe you, then check to see if you do it in one-on-one conversations. You might be surprised at what you find.

How to solve this? Simply slow down and let the other person speak, but don't slow down so much that people think you're bored or uninterested. It takes some tweaking but eventually you'll get the hang of it.

If you have the opposite problem, and don't know when to speak, well, don't just sit there like a wallflower, interject every now and then. It's best to survey the conversation and see what you can talk about, if anything. I know I've been in many conversations where I know little about the topic at hand, and it can be difficult, so this is easier said than done. In fact I'm still not 100% sure of how to deal with it. It's a topic for a future post.

Visibly negative responses to any criticism whatsoever.
The second item is a common feature not only among men suffering from dating difficulties, but a good number of men today. The hallmark of a secure man is one who does not respond negatively to criticism. If the criticism is legitimate, he takes it to heart. OK, maybe his ego is bruised a bit, but he doesn't take it personally. If the criticism is completely illegitimate, he can just rebuff it and explain why. Becoming a put-together person involves habitually being able to take cannonballs and brush them off as if they were feathers. It requires learning, but it can be done. If people who are trying to mess with you can see that you're not visibly affected, they lose interest in messing with you. Often, they themselves are being controlling (dominant people wouldn't care) and are trying to control an even more desperately controlling person. Don't oblige them. Show them that you're not a good target.

The need to say "me too" all the time about things, instead of not giving a shit.
The third item, or me-tooism, is a hallmark of attempting to desperately contain a situation. Say your clothing, or vehicle, or whatever is not up to snuff compared to others. What do you do? Well, you can react negatively and become a socially avoidant recluse. Or you can just not give a shit, and rebuff any attacks or snide provocations. As I said before, the people doing this stuff to you are people who suffer from controlling issues themselves. If you don't oblige them, you're doing a huge service to not only yourself, but any others who may end up in their wake. You truly have to not give a shit about what others think in order for this to work. Can you do it, 100% of the way? Probably not. But you have to build an "outer armor" or alligator skin that at least gives the appearance that you're not being affected by these attempts to insult you.

The development of possessive oneitises.
The fourth item ties into dating. "Oneitis" is a term for limerence, or a nearly jihad-like fanaticism over some (usually unattainable) girl. I'm not 100% sure about the trajectory of this psychological phenomenon, but I believe that once you start obsessing over a girl, it's already too late, and you ruined your chance to be attractive to her. You've created this object in your mind that you fantasize over, like a fetish of sorts, and it makes you increasingly unable to realistically relate to the actual real girl on the ground.

I think this ties in with the need to become firm enough inside to not develop such incredibly deep feelings for a girl. If you think about it, a oneitis is a controlling obsession, where you deathly fear not being able to have the girl in your dreams. It's happened countless times and led to suicides and worse.

So what's the general way to break controlling behavior and become more dominant, in control, and relaxed? I think the key is to not focus on one particular problem so much. If you have issues with being easily manipulated by others into feeling fearful, or angry, or embarrassed, or whatever, I think it is best to distract yourself with something else. Same with turning a girl into a fetish or desperately trying to keep up with other people.

Someone once told me that if you can't directly solve a problem, try to ignore it, and distract yourself with other things. Don't become overly focused on making your point in a conversation-- say the core points that you need to; you don't need to get absolutely everything across. In the end, most of the conversation will be forgotten anyway, and it's likely less significant than it appears at the time being. If you suffer from a oneitis, then distract yourself from her-- talk to other girls, ask out other girls, even if you massively screw up and fail. The experiences you get doing that will likely take your mind off her.

Distract, distract, distract, while paying attention to areas where you could improve-- and you'll probably desensitize yourself fairly quickly. It just takes time and will sting a bit. I hope this is better advice than the simplistic "just go out there and do it!" combined with pop-positivity that depresses people who see no way to start more than anything.

New video up

That's right, I finally recorded another video! More to come.

Pt. 2 of "Dominant vs. controlling behavior" is coming

I haven't forgotten about it. If you haven't yet read the first part, take a gander and ruminate. I'm going to talk about what causes a guy to have issues with controlling behavior and how to fix it, incorporating some recent revelations I've had about game.

Feminism and the fuel that it runs on

Feminism is all about freeing women from men and giving them as many choices as possible. Seemingly absent, however, is an analysis on how these choices affect men. For instance, take the example of the single feminist career woman who remains single and doesn't settle down until late in life, if ever. The gender ratio is very nearly 1:1; nature has made sure of it. This means that for every woman who is single and not in a relationship, one guy is forced to be alone, regardless of whether he wants to be alone or not. It may be a good guy, it may be a bad guy, but numerically, some guy has to eat the shit sandwich of not having a woman available to him if a woman refuses to date or decides to chase after a small number of high status men along with many other women at the expense of average men.

When feminism liberated women from the expectation that they should settle down with a guy when fairly young, it necessarily created involuntary celibate men. Of course, a large number of these men will find a woman later on in life, but that is only because the women are deciding to settle down. The choice has been completely ripped away from men. Many men are suffering as incels in their late teens and possibly during their entire 20s because of this, a time when they are arguably the most sensitive to adversity and need companionship the most. (As an aside, this could be partly to explain for the meteoric rise of suicide among young adult men post-feminism.)

Feminists, and sadly nearly all women, seem to fail to understand this. It's not fair to men that women get to satisfy their urges, while men are completely left alone with no choice at all. It's not even being left to fend for themselves in an unbalanced system; it's being completely shut off from the market.

And what's the response that women say to men suffering from this? "You'll find someone someday," "be patient," "look at the good sides in life," etc. They're basically expecting men to be ascetic monks with no companionship or sex needs for years, even decades, while women are allowed to freely do whatever they want. Whatever happened to the concept of ones freedom ending where the others begins?

Now how could women justify this? Well, they could just be plain clueless as to its harmfulness. And in a lot of cases, that's exactly what's going on, especially since this has been going on for several decades and has plenty of cheerleaders from both sexes. But the original women who came up with this had to have known what was going on- or did they? I feel they just had a hatred of men and wanted to gain a leg up on them at whatever cost, and didn't think through the consequences. Sadly, they had (and still have) so much support that the ill effects have been completely swept under the rug. Even many men who have themselves been screwed over and forced into celibacy cheer for the system, incapable of putting the pieces together.

And it's complicated by the fact that not all men are screwed over by it equally, or even at all. Indeed, it serves men on the top of the totem pole very well, by giving them sexual access to women who would have previously been less willing, as they were already partnered with a man. Men on top are in power, and willingly support this, so it keeps proliferating. These guys could generally care less about whether the average man has to go through long periods of celibacy before he gets anything, or that they're throwing tons of men under the bus with the decisions they make, so the problem remains unsolved.

Of course, the problem is, when you screw people over, they tend to be less willing to work for the system. Even many manginas who still buy in to the system, but have gotten screwed over by it, don't put as much into it. How, you ask? Don't they enthusiastically support it? Well, it doesn't need to be a conscious thing. Sure, they've been brainwashed into thinking this system is forward-thinking and progressive, but deep down they have been hurt by it on some level, so they lack the motivation that reasonably well-rewarded men have. These guys tend to get less hard-charging jobs, tend to not innovate as much, and tend to not earn as much as well-motivated men. They tend to channel their resultant rage into an endless variety of ridiculous causes, wasting time and energy. Ultimately, this slows societal progress down to the point where another saner society is allowed to grow and either makes it insignificant, forcibly subjects it or destroys it.

Feminists are basically eating the seed corn of society, and the behavior they espouse is ultimately the kiss of death if men don't wake up and resist it en masse.