Message from a Reader: The Consistency Trap

Below is a message from a reader: Max describes how he got caught up in PUA, and how he managed to free himself from the negative influence. Please pay particular attention to what he calls the "consistency trap".


Hi there. My name’s Max, and I was into PUA for a few years. Even though I learned through experience that it was unnecessary, it was your site and PUAHate which convinced me that it was really ridiculous. Weirdly though, I found it hard to let go of it. It took me a while to figure out what the issue was. I eventually realized it was something I call the consistency trap.

Basically, you can encounter PUA because you were searching for “solutions” with girls, either because you wanted more or because you feel bad. I was in the second category: at that time, I had been heartbroken by a girl I really liked and didn’t like me back. I felt awful, and discovering the PUA thing was a revelation: if I could just master “social dynamics”, be alpha and a master PUA, I could probably fix that! And moreover, this could enable me to make sure that I would never suffer from that again.


So I did some PUA and saw results pretty fast. This led me to become pretty arrogant, but also quite lazy, which inevitably led me to drop some PUA nonsense, and then realize my results didn’t vary as long as I made a move. It was not long after that for me to find your website and PUAHate, and decide PUA was idiotic.

The thing was, I couldn’t really let go. Even though I would not do PUA, I would get stressed in social settings, and in my head, I had all these permanent fantasies about out-alphaing other dudes. I was constantly in my head. It took me a while to realize that I was stressed because there was one thing I had not rid myself of: basically, that there was a certain type of personality or behavior that was universally attractive, and that not being in this character (alpha, super social, always witty, etc) even for a second would mean permanent loss, which in my case echoed to the suffering I had felt when I got into PUA.

I call it the consistency trap because it comes from the fact that PUAs convince you that there is one way of being which you need to learn (generally a narcissistic sociopathic sex-crazed social retard), otherwise you will fail for sure, and if you don’t fail, it will be temporary because, ultimately, the foolproof way of not suffering with chicks is to become like the guru.

This fucked me up for a while: it led me to question my behaviors, thought patterns, “limiting beliefs”, view of the world, values and even reasoning abilities! I wento to hypnotherapy first to try to change myself to fit that mold because I thought that my upbringing had fucked me up since I was not up to the standard! I even blamed my parents for it. Fortunately, at some point, I figured out something was wrong and worked instead on breaking the link between the pain I had felt in the past and the PUA pseudo-logic.

That is some toxic stuff. Humans will try to avoid suffering by using anything that seems to remotely make sense if it just promises it might help. I discovered that the hard way, and I believe it is the most fucked up thing PUA teaches: that basically doing things your own way means you are doomed to fail.

Thanks a lot for the good stuff Aaron! And also AlekNovy.

Max, thank you very much for your message!