At a talk I gave yesterday for the LSS I briefly went into that I consider the basic phases of a man’s journey through game. Namely:

Beginner’s Hell —-> Adventure —-> Maturity

So in the beginning everything is new and exciting but you have all kinds of problems. The psychology of unplugging from the matrix is complex and difficult because you have such a strong ego investment in your AFC ways. Most guys get enough ego payoff from their existing (mostly unsuccessful) attitudes that they can reframe themselves away from making any changes. Rollo Tomassi is probably the best writer on this topic. It’s not until a guy hits rock bottom and his ego is completely crushed by life events (such as my divorce) that he faces up to the reality that the current way isn’t getting him the life he wants.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result

So during the beginner’s hell phase you can have a swirling cocktail of thoughts and emotions. Your ego is trying to trap you into giving up and falling back into comfortable AFC patterns, your social circle is trying to put you back into your cage, you get constant bad feedback from girls because by approaching you have removed your buffers against rejection and suddenly discover you’re far less talented that you’d tricked yourself to believe, you have existential doubt from being unable to distinguish between good and bad advice….. fuck me the pain period is tough.

If you make it through (most don’t) things begin to click and you start having adventures. This is a really fun stage. You start pulling off stunts you’d have never thought possible, like same day lays or banging your first stripper. For the first time your identity changes and your subconscious begins to accept you can be the guy who is good with women. The biggest risk in this stage is turning to the Dark Side. Like a fatty discovering his first pie, the frequent-but-irregular payout of external validation and hedonistic pleasure becomes addictive. It’s easy to let your life slide and become Mr SNL or Mr Daygame. If you have an addictive or compulsive personality, you’ll suddenly find your whole life dedicated to the hunt for pussy.

Hopefully, you’ll eventually progress to the stage of Maturity. Banging women is put back into perspective with everthing else in life. You start to realise that this newfound power you have can be used for both good and bad, that it can mess up your life as well as the mess up the girls. I can’t write too much about this stage because I’m still bumbling through it myself. I have my ideas, but that’s all they are.

A blog I’ve recently started reading gives lots of advice for guys looking to transition from Adventure to Maturity. I’ve just read his post on attachment theory which, though it’s basically a restatement of the A-level textbook, offers some good insight to self diagnose what risks you specific to your situation. I liked this quote:

“For instance, a man may be more or less secure, get married to an anxious type, bring her up to a more secure level, but when they run into money trouble she falls back to her anxious level, cheats on him and then divorces him for all of his money, sending him into a tailspin of avoidance. He goes on to ignore intimacy and pump-and-dump women for the next 10 years, afraid to become intimate with any of them.”

That would be me if I stayed in the Adventure stage (in spirit, not specific details, my wife wasn’t a cheater or divorce-thief). He also links to an online test of your attachment type. Take the test. The goal is to transform yourself into a low-anxiety / secure man. If you score as “dismissive avoidant” you’ll ruin a generation of women while feeling empty and unhappy. If you score “fearful avoidant” you’ll likely regress into solitude and not approaching. The “preoccupied” quadrant suggests you are likely to get repeated oneitis and no matter how successful you become at getting girls, they’ll always ruin you.

Here’s how I scored. Three years ago I’d have been strongly dismissive-avoidant.

* Another good blog is Roosh. He doesn’t conceptualise his journey into these stages but over the past 2 years you can see, in the subtext, his gradual transition from Adventure to Maturity