- I’ve been thinking about my first relationship and why I took the end of it so badly some more. What was I really getting out of it that made it so hard when it was withdrawn? I covered the sense of purpose and heroism, but that wasn’t all.
Adoration and admiration. That’s it. She was not the most attractive girl. She wasn’t hideous, just kind of plain, and though I didn’t know it at the time, I am a very attractive man. Plus I was, compared to her and anyone she was hanging out with, a real bad boy.
She idolized me, and while I’ve had many women attracted to me since then, none have looked at me quite the same way she did. Hard to describe. She saw me as the badass rebel crossed with a white knight that I very badly wanted to see myself as.
What did this do? Feed my ego of course. Not an entirely bad thing, but it wasn’t self sustaining. Once she started to withdraw it, then left, I didn’t see myself that way anymore. I didn’t find anyone else who saw me that way, and couldn’t maintain the image in my own mind.
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- There is an argument going on in my head. One side thinks I can become what I want and have what I want. The other is insisting that my old way of viewing myself is and has always been right.
This has happened before with subs. This time it’s a bit different. I am barely aware of it. It seems to be happening much deeper. Much further below my surface thoughts. I am only aware of it at all because I am so used to being conscious of my thought patterns.
It’s not causing me any distress, it’s just there.
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- I’m really feeling the anger recon tonight. I’m glad my washout week is coming up.
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**8/23/22 STAGE 1 CYCLE 1 WEEK 4**
**WASHOUT WEEK # 1**
- The last couple of days have been very up and down. I go from feeling ok to anger, some depression, lots of stuff like that. Something is going on that’s bringing it to the surface, but I don’t want to go into detail about it.
This isn’t purposeless recon. It’s bringing out how I feel about certain things that I’ve buried. You know, “I don’t have a right to feel that way”, “Don’t be selfish”, ect.
Thing is, I’ve given myself permission to be selfish in some respects. I don’t have to be perfectly selfless. I can sometimes be unfair in my advantage and not feel bad about it. Some people might think I’m an asshole. I don’t give a fuck.
I might get into what is going on later. I don’t know.
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Duuudeee!
Is that khan st1 giving you this realization?
Damn! That is some goood shit
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The journal is for you really, nobody else. Don’t share if you don’t want to. I totally get the desire to keep some of that off a public forum. There are things I’ve left out of mine for sure.
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Partly that, partly circumstance. Yeah, I’m going through something that would normally have me keeping a lot of resentment bottled up while I shut up and did the “nice” thing. I’m at least thinking and talking about it differently.
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Very good
Good luck
I’d say mostly khan
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- I am getting a better look at my dark side on this. The thing is, as I am seeing it as more ok. I don’t mean I’d be ok with it if angry, resentful, and somewhat petty were my dominant traits. I do mean that I see it as ok that those things are a part of my makeup. I’m human. Humans get angry, resentful, and petty sometimes. Humans sometimes have emotional reactions to things that they didn’t predict.
The situation that is causing all of this is largely of my own making. Before, that would have caused me to try to suppress the reaction. Deny it even to myself. Not this time. I am looking at it, acknowledging that it is the way I feel, and acting on it in the most solid, mature way I’m able to.
It’s rough, but there is improvement in that.
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“ The path to paradise begins in hell.” Dante Alighieri. The Inferno
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I said that “I’ve been through dark nights of the soul and come back stronger before, I can do it again”. When I started this sucker. I was being glib. I shouldn’t have been.
This is not DR. Not even close.
DR was a rather gentle healing process. I was able to look at and analyze all of the things that made me what I am, at least the negative stuff without much distress or pain. It was an incredible program and did me an amazing amount of good.
This is not that. It’s the difference between a computer guided laser scalpel and a fucking hand grenade. Between a new age healing retreat and SEAL training.
It’s also exactly what I need.
The main differences are that where DR focused on the past, this is more centered on what is happening right now and who I am.
Also what I want, am I strong enough to pay the price to get it, and can I face the negative aspects of my personality and not get rid of them, (trying to would just drive them underground) but accept and master them.
The other difference is on this one I FEEL it. There is nothing between me and the truths I have to face like there was on DR.
It is acting in perfect concert with events in my life to throw me into a maelstrom of Anger, pain, confusion, and jealousy.
Now I have to find my way out of it without doing my life or anyone around me any damage.
I’ve always thought myself mentally tough, at least I said so. Now it’s time to prove it. -
I had the opportunity to end the circumstances that are making things so tough on me. Problem is that it would involve permanently giving up on one of the goals that I listed at the beginning of this journal. I declined to do so. I’m still not sure if that was the strong or weak, right or wrong decision.
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I did figure out that the reason I wanted to go for that particular goal is simply ego. I want that to validate my ego.
You would think that that would make me give it up, but I’m not going that route at the moment.
Ego has gotten a bad rap. After all, we all have one. It’s a natural part of the human condition. I think that the urge to stroke one’s ego is probably healthy. But it is like many other things where a good thing can become very bad if you let the urge control you rather than controlling it.
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I love reading your journal posts, man. Makes me think of things I’d never otherwise think about.
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Thanks. Just out of curiosity, what did I make you think about?
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The ego thing mainly. I’ve often thought New Agey people throw that word around too much, but didn’t really get why so much. Why it bugged me I mean. But you hit the nail on the head. Ego isn’t something to be squelched. It’s a tool for us.
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I don’t know if this universally applies to everyone, but I’m glad that I didn’t include Sanguine or anything to blunt the uncomfortable effects of Khan Stage one. I have the distinct impression that I need to be all the way in it and go all the way through it in order to get the full benefits. Real growth comes through challenge and stress. It’s a feature not a bug.
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New people. DO NOT USE THIS AS YOUR FIRST SUB.
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- I’m feeling better tonight. It is partly I think that the recon that apparently hits on washout weeks is abating a bit. And partly because I’ve been having good productive talks that are making me more comfortable with the situation that was bothering me.
I’m still not completely back to normal, and by no means comfortable with it, but there is progress.
I think True Sell had a hand in some of how I handled it.
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Cycle one is in the books. This has been an interesting one so far.
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The storm has passed. I felt nice and solid and stable all day today. That was damn brutal while it was happening though. I don’t think that I could have gotten through this a couple of years ago. There are two differences in how I handled it. First, I viewed it as a challenge. I kind of looked forward to facing the pain and stress just to prove how mentally tough I was.
Second, I am now aware on a visceral level that emotional states aren’t permanent. That lets me “ride the wave” until it gets better. -
I’ve switched Spartan out for Inner Circle for this cycle. One of the things getting in my way in life is a kind of lack of connection to others. This should get some people into my life who can be of help in getting me to my goals.
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**8/29/22 STAGE 1 CYCLE 2 WEEK 1**
- That washout period was just brutal, but I’m feeling a lot better now.
This thing pulled some of my deepest self doubts out of the depths of my subconscious and rubbed my nose in them until I acknowledged them and really look at them. Some of them subsided when I talked about them to the wife.
I had my confidence shaken by something that I knew was a possibility, but didn’t think would upset me at all. That brought a bunch of nightmare scenarios to mind which really illustrated some of the ways in which I am still insecure.
I can see now how those particular insecurities have been getting in my way. Blocking me from acting in a lot of the ways that I want to, and making me screw things up with nervousness or when I did try to take action, be so hesitant and half assed about it that success was unlikely.
I may tell the actual story tomorrow. Still not sure about it.
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- So, what has been happening this last week or so that along with Khan St1 threw me for such a loop?
The short version is that my wife is having better luck on the open relationship thing than I am. I didn’t think that this would bother me just thinking about it in the abstract, but when it became real, it bothered me a lot for a while.
That happened to coincide with the end of my first cycle of St 1, and caused a pretty much perfect storm on me.
Now the long version.
Since the beginning of our relationship a little under twenty years ago, I have insisted on an open relationship. “I don’t DO monogamy”. It’s true. I don’t. Not if I have an opportunity not to.
As much as I thought I was in love with girlfriend #1 I took every girl who made an offer up on it. (Put a pin in that, I’ll be back to it)
She wanted me to, but in order to stay with me she grudgingly agreed to it. Mind you, she was engaged to another guy when we started fooling around, so this was coming from a place of insecurity more than being a real moral stance.
We settled on a rule which I don’t remember if it was spoken or unspoken. That was don’t ask don’t tell. I also had the understanding that I was the only one who had any interest in other partners.
There were a few others throughout the years. Mostly these happened at events where there was very little chance of ever seeing the girl again. One night stands. I had one female friend who I hooked up with a few times.
I could have done more than that. I didn’t initiate meetings with her very much, and I passed up on quite a few offers from female coworkers and random other girls.
One reason was I was very careful not to get involved with anyone who would be likely to cause a problem that would either damage my life, or come to the wife’s attention and cause her pain.
The other was that I was a depressed, insecure, mess.
This started before I found subliminals. And even after I found them they weren’t strong enough to really get through the crap going on in my head and make as much of a difference as I wanted them to. I still had enough social anxiety, awkwardness, ect that while I could randomly attract women, i wasn’t able to actively pursue anything and being the one to initiate was simply beyond my reach. Often when something did fall into my lap, I just wouldn’t take advantage of the opportunity due to nervousness.
Add to all that that I had an extremely high stress job, the personality changes that the MS were causing (didn’t know that at the time) the wife, and my extremely frustrating obsessive job search, and I wasn’t in any kind of place to be getting much.
I did make progress with my general confidence, social skills, and a lot of things during that time period. From about 2008 to about 2018 or so. It was glacially slow though, so I didn’t really notice.
After that though, that other company stepped up its game and came out with some real next generation subliminals. We were having financial difficulties, so from then till recently I couldn’t explore what they would do for my sex life. The results were miraculous on the financial side though, so I saw that subliminals had a lot more potential than I thought they did even after ten years of regular use.
The financial problems didn’t go away until early this year, but I was always able to find a way through. Some of the strokes of luck were downright uncanny.
I switched to Subclub I think sometime in 18, and I kept seeing great results. Their subs seemed to be better at making changes in my personality and the way I thought and felt about myself and the world.
That was the first time I saw a glimmer of hope for genuinely changing myself into some semblance of the man I’ve always wanted to be.
Unfortunately, that was also around the time that it became clear that the wife wasn’t going to be able to hold down a job anymore due to her MS.
The next two years were dedicated to keeping a roof over our heads while we waited for the government to decide to give her disability.
We had another series of amazing manifestations which allowed us to make it through without any major losses.
Part of that was that my employer was chronically short staffed and I was able to spend most of that time working six twelve hour shifts a week and make up for the loss of her income.
That was great in some ways.
Since I work nights at a job where I spend most of my time sitting alone in a metal box, I had plenty of time to run subs, think, and generally work on myself. Oh, and journal, which has been really helpful in figuring things out and working through them.
That was not so great in some other ways. Namely that I had almost no social contact with anyone other than my wife, kid, and roommate. I work security at a large facility, and there have been zero women on the night crew in all the years I’ve been here. Not on our crew. The most contact I get is as I check the ids of other types of employees as they come in. That isn’t much.
The thing I just realized about that is that while the changes in my outward personality might be perfect to garner me scores of women, I would have no way of knowing that since I’m not exposed to many.
Things really got better at the beginning of this year. I ended a year long DR run which had helped me to come to terms with a shitload of the stuff from my past that had been getting in my way all of my life.
Once I stopped that run, the my relationship with the wife improved markedly. This was partly because her new care team got her on new meds, and partly because I felt a hell of a lot better about myself and was better able to deal with everything.
We were getting along better, she wasn’t criticizing or trying to boss me around. The most notable thing was that our sex life improved. A LOT. We went from going months between to three to seven times a week. It got a lot better each time too. I must really be executing the sex mastery script in Emperor because it went from me being unable to tell if she was getting off to her having what I understand to be a very rare and undeniable physical reaction multiple times every time and being a quivering mass of jello when I’m done.
At some point late last year or early this year, some guy who works somewhere she goes regularly blatantly hit on her.
She told me about it and asked if it was ok if she took him up on it. She also said that she was now ok with me doing what I wanted to and not hiding it.
I thought this was a good deal for me (it probably is) because I was feeling pretty confident after DR and was able to look back and see how many opportunities I’d had come out of the blue throughout the years.
It didn’t work out. He weirded out on her. And that hit her in the self esteem a bit. The door was open though and she was interested. I made her a Seductress/Libertine custom which works very well and things kept improving.
We decided to explore partner swapping and other things on the wilder side since it turns out that we’d both been kind of repressing our sexual sides for years and we signed up for a website that deals in those kind of things.
There was a problem. One I should have foreseen. Online dating being what it is, we got a shitload of interest from single males wanting to play with her. One of which she found interesting enough to meet with.
This is perfectly in line with what we agreed to. I want the ability to have someone on the side myself. As I mentioned, I’ve done it.
That’s about the time I went into my first washout on St. 1.
My mind got unpleasant. The recon that started expressing itself on my washout just amplified what I could probably have dealt with smoothly. I started to feel jealous, and a number of very bad scenarios played out in my head.
It wasn’t just the normal kind of jealousy that most guys would feel in that type of situation. I was jealous of her as much as anything else. Bad scenario number one was that she would have an ongoing relationship with this dude while I kept trying and failing to find something for myself. I wouldn’t like that much. Matter of fact I’d hate the fuck out of it.
Another was that she’d lose interest in having sex with me.
There were a few others.
My first impulse was to get pretty dominant, perhaps domineering. I didn’t just say no and call the whole thing off, but I put a whole bunch of stipulations on it and said if they weren’t agreed to I’d call the whole thing off. (Mind you, I did say that the rules go both ways)
I was forceful and brooked no argument about it. She agreed to the terms. More like submitted to them. I could tell that she didn’t like it.
That was the Khan speaking or so I thought at the time. It was also insecurity speaking. Loudly.
While I definitely want the ability to dominate when the situation calls for it, that is no way to treat a partner. Especially over something that is largely of my own making.
I calmed down over the next few days, and was able to analyze why this was making me feel the way it did.
I figured out that what Khan was doing was using the situation (I had thought that the challenge manifestation thing wasn’t in there anymore, but this was just too perfectly timed) to force me to recognize and face some of the insecurities that I had been hiding from myself. These things survived DR, but since I ran it, I do have some insight into why they were there.
The possessive jealousy reaction, the nightmare of being stuck without a side partner, and my penchant for womanizing (at least wanting to) while in a relationship come from one source.
From the beginning of puberty until I was almost eighteen I never saw the slightest interest from a girl. Not that I recognized anyway. And while my adult brain may see that that isn’t that long of a time, it seemed like forever while I was living through it and I really didn’t have any concept that it would ever end end. The message that got cemented in my adolescent brain was “you can’t have it”. Not romantic love, not female affection, and sex is so far from possible that you might as well just forget the word.
I get into the reasons in-depth in my DR journal. In short I was a social outcast from kindergarten onward in a tiny school where there is zero upward social mobility.
My hormones kicked in so I wanted it of course. Badly. I saw other guys smothered in female adoration, and couples who seemed happily into each other.
I wanted any part of that more desperately than I can put into words, but the TRUTH cemented into my subconscious was that I’d never have any of it. Jealousy doesn’t begin to describe it. I HATED the guys who got the girls.
I stewed in that for what seemed like several eternities. It had a profound and deep impression on my subconscious.
Things got better when we moved to a new school my sophomore year. I saw a few signs of female interest, and I wasn’t buried below the totem pole with the low man standing on me anymore.
I had been improving myself before, but because of the social nature of where I was, it didn’t do me any good there. Without the external validation, I couldn’t see it until I found myself in a new environment.
I didn’t get anything that year, but the next I got my first girlfriend and we started rounding the bases.
It wasn’t that long before I lost my virginity.
A funny thing happened then. I had sex with the female friend who had set us up less than a week after that, and it wasn’t more than a couple of months later that I met some girl at an event, got her number, and hooked up with her. All of this was while I was still in that first relationship.
Here is why I did that. Of course I was a hormone soaked teenage boy, but there is more to it.
The TRUTH that I would never have any success with women had been very literally disproven. And yet, it had been hammered so far into my subconscious and solidified in there so strongly that that was impossible according to a large part of my under mind.
It must have been some kind of fluke. It must not have really happened.
Ok, prove it. Do it again. I bet you can’t. Another fluke. Ect. That “TRUTH” held on in there constantly demanding that I prove that I can get girls.
There was also fear that I would just wake up one day and have lost that ability completely and be back where “you can’t have it”.
That explains the possessive jealousy. I think deep down that if a woman shows any interest in another man, it proves that that ingrained truth was right and it was all just a fluke.
After I started figuring all that out, I was able to talk to the wife more calmly. We did a really good job talking it out even when both of us were getting frustrated. Which said a lot because we used to have vicious and bitter fights on a regular basis.
I explained myself and softened the way I came at things a bit without actually backing off of much. We still agree that if one of us is extremely uncomfortable with something the other is doing, they have a right to end it. There is more to that, but that is the gist of it. We just persistently worked through it.
I became a lot more comfortable with the situation. I’m still bouncing around on having faith that I can find what I want, but there is progress.
I realized that Khan is seriously destabilizing me, and the way I’m feeling about something today may not be the way I feel about it tomorrow, and I’m taking that into consideration.
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Now that my feelings insecurity and inferiority have been brought to the forefront and I’m being forced to deal with them, the question is how.
I have a couple of thoughts, but dealing with emotional crap has never been my strong suit. My go to move was always to suppress and deny “until it went away”.
You know how “they” say that that doesn’t work well and will find some way of biting me in the ass if I do it? They’re right. I’m fucking done with that. If I keep doing that it’ll eventually kill me. I’m not going out like that.
Just sitting here and analyzing why I feel like I do is extremely helpful, but it’s not enough. I have to actually do something to build up the confidence in the areas that it’s lacking.
I’m really of two minds about how to do it. My first impulse is to just find a woman to have sex with. As quickly as possible. Just go out there, stop making excuses, and get one in the win column however I have to.
That doesn’t sound like the healthiest of options, at least how most people reckon these things. However, I’m not sure that they’re right about that in all cases. Yes, I’d be doing it to validate my own ego, but as I said, I don’t see that as always being a bad thing. Internal improvement is the most important part of anything, but unless you are purely going for alterations in how you think and feel about yourself, they have to be accompanied by external results at some point or it is just an exercise in self deception. Since I know that getting some results as soon as I can might well help the program achieve what I want it to faster and more efficiently. One of the goals here is to become the guy who can go out and make it happen when I choose rather than waiting around for something to fall into my lap. I can honestly say I’ve done pretty well based on just that, but I want more control over when it happens.
Since I want that, I’m going to have to get over the hump of being the one to approach, initiate, and guide the interaction where I want to go eventually. There is no better time than now.
The main negative if I can call it that is that I can’t be very selective about what kind of woman I start with. Now, that isn’t as bad for me as it would be for some guys. I’ve never been one of these guys who needs every partner I have to be a nine or a ten to be interested. I can be extremely attracted to average looking women, and have noticed that I can have as good a time or better with them.
I am slightly concerned that this strategy, just going out and getting one in the win column might be a continuation of the pattern I described above where I was perpetually trying to prove to myself that I could get girls through a mess of a subconscious that wouldn’t believe it no matter how many there were.
I think that that is only half right. I couldn’t believe it before, but that was before I really started to work on myself and now I’ve been through The Dragon’s fire and I have The Khan to back me up. I give it a better than even chance that now my subconscious will accept any success that I have as evidence that I can have further success any time I want to.
The other path I could follow is to not worry about it for a while, and take the time to really work on myself until it starts happening more organically. I’m guessing that’ll be stage three at the latest.
The advantage to that is that it takes the pressure off and I can just let stage one and maybe two do their thing without putting undue pressure on myself which might cause me additional problems executing them. That might especially be a problem if I am not getting results as fast I think that I should.
The problem with going that route is that it is sticking in my craw that the wife has a playmate and I don’t. I’ve been in open relationships before and didn’t have a problem with jealousy so long as I had a side partner (odd choice of words, but I’m trying not to be vulgar or sound degrading to anyone) at the same time my primary partner did, or at least was pretty sure that I could have casual sex with someone if I wanted to.
Right now, I feel like I can wait, but the last week had shown that Stage one is really destabilizing me and where I’m usually an emotional rock, I can’t say how I’m going to be thinking and feeling tomorrow let alone during the next washout.
I don’t have to make a decision tonight I will have to consider this. -
On the good side, my interactions with women, when I have them, have changed. A lot. I’m a lot more gregarious and I’m pretty sure charming. I got my hair cut the other day, and when the lady said “I’ll take COWolfe” I said “lucky you” and proceeded to spend the whole time bantering with not only the girl cutting my hair, but all the rest of them too. There was a different energy to it than I’ve ever felt before.
It actually surprised me. I don’t generally feel any different, and I wasn’t expecting to do any of that stuff, it was just like some internal switch flipped and it all just flowed out naturally.
Before I left she complimented me on the necklace I was wearing, asked me about it and said “VERY manly” with some real feeling in her voice. This might be easier than I thought. -
My fear about the wife losing interest in sex with me was unfounded. We still go at it almost every day, and if anything she continues to get even more responsive and into it. That is reassuring.
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If I go with plan A, I am sure that there are a plethora of women who would be happy to sleep with me. What I am going to have to figure out is where I can find a good number of women of the type most likely to be receptive. I don’t have time to spend hours in bars (I hate dance clubs) or spend a lot of time doing cold approaches (might do some good, but my life isn’t set up that way) during the day. I’m going to have to figure out how to do this efficiently.
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This seems like the crux of it.
[armchair quarterback]: I feel like the time you put into this part that you’ve stated above is probably going to lead to a breakthrough.
Also, to be fair, you have been running Khan Stage I. If we want to get technical about it, the fact that the situations you’ve describe above are what you’re dealing with as you run Khan Stage I is probably actually kind of impressive. From what I understand, Khan Stage I drains the lake and acquaints you with your personal lows, while also helping to improve them. So angst, insecurity, and desperation are basically going to happen. But your version of angst, insecurity, and desperation seems pretty self-aware, proactive, and kind of moving-along (rather than stagnant and stuck).
What’s the sub schedule going forward? (No suggestions from me, I’m just interested in what you’re doing. This is pretty far away from my territory.)
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