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The Pinocchio Syndrome As author of Kill The Crap™ In Dating: For Men, I’ve handled dating questions from both men and women in all English speaking countries across the world to date. The most amazing thing I find, is that it doesn’t matter if you’re from Ireland, Britain, Australia or America or where ever, we all have the same problems, the same anxieties and the same difficulties in dating. One of the biggest problems is what I call “The Pinocchio Syndrome” the puppet that dreams of being a real boy. We spend so much of our life trying to be what we’re “supposed” to be, yet secretly yearn to be who we really are. This complicated mix of emotions, the desire to be accepted, and the desire to express ourselves, conflicting with each other creates that general state of numbness many seem to be feeling lately. I think what makes the decision to be real so difficult, is the instant gratification you get when giving in and being fake. I remember dating a girl back in the day and thinking she was such a cool and fun person to chill with… then I ran off to become a super star, got homeless, made an album in between spurts of homelessness and used the album sales to get myself a nice place to stay, a car, and as much of an inconvenience as it is… a job. Today things are pretty awesome so I started contacting people from back in the day just to see where they were at, this girl being one of them. I tell ya, it was like talking to a completely different person, and not in a good way. She had this shallow tone in her voice, almost like while she was technically talking to me, she wasn’t really listening. So me being the kind of guy that I am, I talked to her about it. I said what I was honestly feeling, and you’d be surprised what response I got. She was honest in return. She said that she had grown tired of “battling” the popular people for acceptance and decided to just give in, it was easier. In the end she got what she wanted, she sits at the cool table and guys shower her with gifts in the hopes of getting a date with her… She’s also alone. She’s also very frustrated. She’s also got quite a bit of pent up rage and after a little further conversation, she’s not happy, she’s simply more comfortable. Yet, she does wish that she could meet someone. So… she got what she want… but she doesn’t want what she got. Huh? Another guy, total player (for the difference between a player and a pimp, see Kill The Crap In Dating: For Men) had a different women every other day in the week. Every time this guy had a little to drink he was bawling about how lonely he felt. Once I even went as far as to ask him if it was real or just drunken bawling. He admitted to me that “in part” it was true. That sometimes he wishes he mattered to people. He finds women tend to use him as a conduit for their own repressed sexual desire, and aren’t actually concerned about his satisfaction. He even hinted at a little sexual preference confusion. So granted on the surface he was getting what every guy dreamed of, he wasn’t actually getting what HE really wanted. Here we have two very different people, doing exactly the same thing. Fighting and fighting to get what they want, only to realize what they thought they wanted isn’t really what they want. Sound familiar? I’m sure it does. I want to stop for a second now before we move on to what to do about this. An interesting thing about Killing The Crap in people’s lives is how quickly people will turn on you, even though they’re the ones asking the questions. I’ve had people completely flip out simply because I honestly answered a question THEY asked. For the longest time I would disregard this and simply say “don’t ask what you don’t want answered slick.”. You see, I believe that deep down inside, you guys already know most of this stuff. My job has simply been to get you to admit/accept/realize it. I don’t disregard the rage people have shown me anymore, I’ve started to understand it. I want to make it clear, I’m not claiming to be perfect. I’m simply saying that I am on a path to becoming the real me, and if you would like to be to, I can show you how to do it in a way that’s right for you specifically. I’m not here to make clones of myself, and anyone that commits to Killing The Crap in their life, immediately sees that. Yet, still, it’s hard. It’s hard to hear that the reason why Suzy wears colored contacts is because she’s symbolically trying hide the window to her soul, trying to keep people out because she doesn’t want them to see the fragile little girl still waiting to grow up. Yet, when you ask Suzy why every one of her relationships ends in a catastrophe, what does Suzy say? “men are scum”. She lashes out in a fit of rage and calls the idea ridiculous, colored contacts are just her way of having a little fun with her look. The question remains though, why is Suzy having a complete meltdown if it isn’t true? If I say 2+2=5 a person would either just laugh and say it’s 4 and not argue the point, or if it were like a math teacher or something, they might try to teach you why it’s 4, but at most they would simply feel bad for you. A complete emotional melt down really wouldn’t follow. I’ve said some things that have caused people to write me a three page email telling me why I’m wrong, followed by asking everyone of their friends to help them lash out at me. In other words, these people are expelling quite a bit of effort to convince someone they’ve never met, someone they could easily just not reply to. But it’s not about convincing me… it’s about convincing themselves. I’ve heard it many times “you don’t know me”. See, the rage becomes less about whether what I’m saying is true, and more about how I could possibly know that about someone. It’s an issue of trust, not an issue of fact. If they’re going to listen, they have to know that I am real. To those people that would lash out, have an emotional break down and rally the help of friends in an effort to keep the fabric of their world intact, all I can say, is I’m not real. I’m not 100% real. I would love to say that I’m exactly who I am and can’t nobody tell me different. Unfortunately it’s just not true. The truth is I’m still on that journey. What I can say is that my life has afforded me some situations that have forced me to adapt, to understand and to empathize with others. You see, for me growing up was less about learning and becoming an integral part of society and more about surviving and not going crazy in the process. I was tossed around a lot as a child in the foster care system, basically from birth because my mother is Bi Polar and does a lot wacko things. Unfortunately, while I suppose child protection is meant to help, it didn’t. Many of these foster homes were full of some of the most demented and twisted people you can think of. Child molesters, abusers, drunks, thieves. The type of people that would beat you for sheer entertainment. I spent year 1-16 of my life being a chameleon. Any time I stood up for myself, I became a target. After a while I became very submissive, very angry. I promised myself one thing though, from a very young age, they wouldn’t take my innocence. I would change, I would play the bitch as long as I had to, but they would never take the real me. So I hid myself, deep down inside where the bruises couldn’t touch. I crawled into the darkest corner I could find, and I waited. Believe it or not, Kill The Crap In Dating: For Men was ALMOST a book on seduction. How to make people do whatever you want. I had gotten so good at changing. Whenever I could muster up the strength to actually do it, I could basically be, do, and have whatever I wanted. It felt powerful to take back, it felt powerful to not cower in fear. It felt good… for a while. See, giving in and being fake so you can quickly get whatever you want always feels like the right choice… at first. As time went on though, I yearned for that “me” I had locked away. When I went to find him, I couldn’t remember where he was. It was like trying to find the damn keys when you’re late for work. After a while you just grab the spare. I tried to be me and couldn’t remember what that was. So I walked around looking for a personality. Looking for the “me” I wanted to be. Yet, every time I found a new persona, it just wasn’t right. It didn’t work, it always ended badly, the more I tried to make things better the worse it got. And I… would sit at home, cry in a pillow and ask “what’s wrong with me?”. I would wonder why no one loved me and bla bla bla. That’s not the crazy part though. As I grew up I started to see a lot of myself in other people. What was strange, is not all of them had a life like mine. Some kids had what seemed like great lives, yet they too had locked away someone inside and hid them so deep they couldn’t find themselves when they looked, and so they searched for a persona to call their own. In a strange way being tossed from home to home was almost a blessing in hindsight. I’ve lived the dirt poor life. I’ve lived the rich life, I’ve lived the middle class life. I’ve lived white collar, I’ve lived blue collar. Trust me, the world feels lonely, but it’s really not. If anything, it’s the pain and suffering we go through separately that binds us together. I’m not saying everyone on the planet earth is fake and lost searching for hope, lol. I’m simply saying there seems to be a general vibe in society today. One of frustration, a lack of importance, an emptiness, and most importantly a yearning for something better, something real. We want something real. All of us, I know this because I’ve seen this time and time again. We don’t really want fake colored contacts, or a million different hair colors, we don’t want fake tits or moronic calf implants, we don’t want to have to resort to fake things. It’s when we want love, when we want acceptance, when we want friendship, attention, appreciation that we start looking for a way to get it. What bothers me so much, what causes me to write frustrated comedic rants in my blog section so often, is that these are things that can only be found inside. The one place so few of us look. The mind is an endless thing and it’s very easy to get lost in there, it’s very scary, because your mind can show you anything. It can show you how your daddy used to beat the crap out of your mommy. It can show you how your sister used to touch you in naughty places and then beat you up just to make sure you didn’t tell anyone. It’ll show you anything that really happened, yet can also confuse you with twisted memories sugared up to keep you from going crazy. So turning inside for help can also be frustrating and difficult. . What I found back in high school in my independent research class when I set out to define “The Human Instinct for Survival and it’s relationship with Self Esteem” is that the mind has no problem momentarily feeding you a farce in order to maintain mental stability. It however will always do what’s best for you in the long term. So in the beginning, it will block memories of abuse or neglect, but as you get older, it will start to leak them out, because as your life becomes more complex as it always happens with adulthood, your brain doesn’t have the resources to hide such things while still focusing on multi tasking and complicated problems. What I’m basically saying is you HAVE to face yourself. Whether bad things happened in your life, or maybe no-things happened. Maybe nobody ever mistreated you in an abusive sense but they never stepped in to guide you, leaving you a little under developed when it comes to interacting with the opposite sex. Still, regardless of why you don’t want to face the mirror, you still have to. You have to see your life, no matter how ashamed, how afraid or how bored you are by it, and you have to say, “This is my life to date, where will I take my life now that I know that?” It’s time for the Puppet, the shell, to become the real thing. I have come a long way in my life, a looooonnnnng way. However for a good portion of my life my journey was my curse. I don‘t think I‘m alone in that sense. I think there are a lot of you out there that would rather forget. Take a second though and imagine what would happen if you remembered. If you accepted. It‘s kind of like flying to the moon. It‘s not so much what you‘re going to find once you get there, a bunch of moon rocks, but it‘s what you would have to accomplish in order to get there. Technological leaps and bounds have come from venturing to a goal that was seemingly impossible. Yet once we got to the moon, we found a lot of the same stuff we found on earth. For some that may make the journey seem worthless, but the truth is in fact that it was the journey that mattered most, the experience of life. Sexy has been sexy since before I was born. You already know deep down inside most of what I‘m saying to you. They say there are no original ideas and I suppose in the big scheme they are right. At the end of the journey, you have the chance to discover what someone else might have already found elsewhere. But the journey, that‘s yours and yours alone, and what it takes for YOU, not Harry Johnson down the street, YOU, to become the real you, is what makes everything come together and feel purposeful. To me, the answer to the question “what is the meaning of life?” has a simple answer. It‘s to live. Live your life, experience life, let go of the things that make you stagnant, face the things that hold you back, put yourself into life, become a part of it, enjoy it, because it‘s all you‘ve got. The meaning of life… is to HAVE a life. There are so many people struggling with Pinocchio Syndrome. Put yourself on the path to find the real you, even if it takes daily adjustments bringing you closer and closer to who you really are deep down inside. Be the real you, and you will meet the people you REALLY want to meet. Hide, and… be a puppet. I will say the Pinocchio Syndrome isn’t ALL bad. When you feel that emptiness, that lack of purpose, that lack of belonging, a distant yearning for who you were before things got confusing, perhaps it’s time to take a look in the mirror and find who’s really standing there. If you are stuck in the Pinocchio Syndrome, then look at it not as an ailment, but as an indicator, you’re ready to accept the life that you’ve lived so that you can live the life you HAVE in a way that makes the real you happy. Now, if you're reading this and thinking that it makes sense but you need to know more. You can get the complete answers to your questions in my book Kill The Crap In Dating: For Men, get your copy here. Kill The Crap, Confused? Comments? Email me killthecrap@killthecrap.com |
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