You attract what you lead with
And what you lead with is the opposite of what you are trying to hide.
I spent years terrified of being seen as a loser.
My subconscious way of avoiding that pain was to impress
So I attracted women who needed to be impressed.
But a woman who needs to be impressed never stops needing it.
And a man who needs to impress never feels like enough. We were both on a treadmill with no finish line.
So the criticism came. Constantly. And I took it as confirmation of the thing I was most afraid of.
That I wasn’t good enough as I was.
The whole thing was a closed loop. My insecurity built the exact relationship that would feed it.
The way out wasn’t impressing more and performing better, although that’s how I tried for a long time.
It was stopping the performance entirely. Coming back to who I actually am without the need for validation running underneath it.
That shift changes everything. The women I attracted were entirely different. And the dynamic was genuine and loving and caring.
You can’t out-achieve an identity wound.
You have to go in and deal with it directly.
That’s the work.
