love

How To Find And Keep True Love

With Valentine’s Day coming up I thought I’d review David DeAngelo’s program Love The Final Chapter, which could otherwise be titled How To Find And Keep True Love.

Love Is Real

David had a series of realizations as he evolved over time which for me boil down to worthiness. When you don’t feel worthy, you need a lot of tools and techniques to attract women. Learning these tools can help develop a sense of worthiness but ultimately they need to be dispensed with to create a truly loving relationship. (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How To Recover From A Narcissistic Mother

Narcissistic Mothers Turned Their Back On Our Feelings When We Were Upset

Growing up with a narcissistic mother can be a complete disaster for a growing child’s sense of self, self-confidence, and future adult relationships. Narcissists are like emotionally immature children walking around in an adult body, which makes them incredibly challenging to have as a parent. Even if your narcissistic mother does eventually grow up, her emotional unavailability and controlling nature when your infant brain and sense of self were developing can leave deep wounds in your adult psyche.

If you’re wondering whether you had a narcissistic mother, check out my previous article Ten Signs That You Had A Narcissistic Mother.

Here’s how to recover: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

How Your Emotions Work

Hi, I’m Graham. I had 18 years of formal education – that’s 12 years of primary and high school, and then another six years at university studying engineering – and during that time, I learnt a lot about how to think but very little about how to feel or how my emotions worked.

In fact, I can’t remember in that entire time a single class where I sat down and had a teacher teach me how my emotions work.

Now, possibly maybe in art classes or in music classes or maybe even in English they might’ve come close, but really nothing all that direct and concrete.

And that’s a shame because, fundamentally as humans, we’re all driven by our emotions. All our behavior is an attempt to either move towards pleasure or move away from pain.

So emotions are absolutely key to getting what we want in life. They’re also the key to a successful relationship, especially with women.

So in the rest of this article, I’m going to give you a quick introduction into how your emotions work.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Stop Seeking Validation From Your Family

Hey there, it’s Graham from The Confident Man Project again and today I want to talk at you about your family. Family issues have been pretty huge for me so I know a little bit about this and I want to share with you what I have learned, particularly about stopping seeking validation from your family. What tends to happen when we’re young is that our parents experience us as an infant, as a baby, as a child, an adolescent and then by the time we become an adult our parents’ view of us is often so fixed by their earlier experiences of us that they have a lot of trouble accepting who we now are as an adult being different to who we were as a child.

And this is the reason why a lot of the time when we hang around our families we tend to regress back into a child-like state where we behave and relate to our parents and our siblings in much the same way that we did when we were a kid.

That’s not necessarily what you want to do if your childhood experience wasn’t one where you felt reinforced and validated and loved and just nurtured and you had a really fun time all the time. So if you want to break away from some of the family stuff, it’s really important that you stop seeking validation from your family.

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Basic Emotions

HappinessMany of us guys lack a basic emotional literacy; we have physical sensations when we’re feeling something, but we often don’t know how to identify what we’re feeling, nor are we able to recognise emotions in other people. Being able to identify emotions is the basis of empathy, which is a core communication skill.

In short, most of us don’t understand how our emotions work. Simply learning to identify and express the following basic emotions will improve your relationships dramatically: (more…)

By Graham Stoney, ago

The Single Biggest Mistake Of My Life

I was telling a female friend of mine recently about a realisation I’d come to regarding the single biggest mistake of my life. The one that had caused me more pain and grief than anything else.

The biggest mistake I ever made was taking on a false belief. An idea, the consequences of which were enormous. It fundamentally changed how I behaved around other people, leading me to suppress and alter my whole concept of who I was. This one belief and it’s consequences led me to end up hating myself and thinking there was something wrong with me.

It’s an idea that I took on so early in my childhood that I can’t even remember when I decided to believe in it. Although I borrowed this idea from the people closest to me while growing up, it was still my choice to adopt it in my own life; something I now regret.

So what was the faulty idea behind the biggest mistake of my life?

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By Graham Stoney, ago

Do You Avoid Love For Fear Of Getting Hurt?

Everything we do is motivated by one of two things: seeking pleasure or avoiding pain. It’s not entirely black and white since sometimes it’s a mix of both, but usually one or the other is the dominant factor. Some of us tend to be more motivated by pleasure and others more motivated by pain.

Our actions are always motivated by how we expect to feel, and this basically comes down to pleasure versus pain. Yet the two go hand-in-hand: many of the most pleasurable experiences in life involve the risk of pain.

Another way of looking at this is love versus fear. We’re either acting out of love, or we’re acting out of fear. Perhaps it’s a combination of the two. Often we’re not even aware of the underlying motivation but if we look closely we can see that it’s usually one or the other.

Acting out of love means being vulnerable and since this exposes us to the risk of painful rejection we often don’t want to risk it. It seems easier and feels safer to be defensive and act out of fear. But when we do this we miss out on loving and being loved. Our willingness to risk being vulnerable determines how much love we get.… Continue reading…

By Graham Stoney, ago

How to Heal Emotional Pain

Traumatic or emotionally painful events in our past can leave us with emotionally charged memories that get triggered whenever we find ourselves in similar circumstances later in life. This will undermine your confidence in these situations, as the powerful emotions triggered quickly become overwhelming even though there’s no real threat present.

Crying heals the emotional pain of past trauma

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By Graham Stoney, ago