David DeAngelo - Double Your Dating - How To Change Yourself | Page 3

other similar ideas,
senses, memories, etc. that we also felt in those moments. The
stronger our current experience, the stronger the link becomes and
the deeper the association our minds connect to it.
Identification strips the individual specifics of an experience, so
that it is more easily connected to our existing thoughts by the
essentials. Identifying involves simplifying, so it becomes harder to
distinguish between these experiences since there are fewer traits in
your mind to differentiate.
However, when all the complexities that surround the experience
are missing, ‘over-generalizing’ can occur. Over-generalization
happens when ideas that don’t have a real cause-effect relationship on
each other become connected just because they share similar
characteristics.
Both ‘identification’ and ‘over-generalization’ came in very handy
a hundred thousand years ago. It usually meant the difference
between a long life or a quick death. If our ancestors didn’t quickly
‘identify’ that a lion was dangerous, they would likely get eaten. And if
they didn’t ‘generalize’ that a tiger and a cheetah (which look like
lions) were also probably dangerous, they would also be more likely to
be eaten.
However, these particular mechanisms have created some
challenges in the 21
st
century. Our fears, which were valid for
situations involving physical risk earlier in our evolution, now limit us
in instances where the risk tends to be mostly psychological.
To give an example, let’s say that you’re bald.
Let’s also say that today you approached a woman, and she said
that she didn’t date bald men. While you were feeling dejected and
depressed over the situation, you then saw a hair replacement ad that
portrayed bald men as lonely and unable to attract women.

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„2004 All Rights Reserved. – Change Yourself - By David DeAngelo
This kind of experience could lead a man to OVER-generalize and
begin to make himself believe that no woman would ever be interested
in him. Even worse, he would have a strong negative emotion attached
to the belief that would be triggered every time he thought about the
topic. Once this sequence happens, it can become very difficult to
escape this mental trap.
Every time you see an attractive woman, you’d feel the desire to
be with her. You’d then feel of the fear of being rejected like last time,
experience the accompanying emotions of depression, and
“remember” that attractive women don’t date bald men. All of a
sudden, these incredibly engineered and evolved survival mechanisms
became your personal prison.
Of course, this process doesn’t just happen to bald men who are
rejected by attractive women. It happens to other guys who are
short, poor, older, younger, too tall, too fat, too skinny, uneducated,
insecure, fearful in general, and just about every other type of person
you can imagine.
All it takes is one emotional experience for a normal person to
begin generalizing and thinking, “That’s just the way it is.”
Identification Entails the Wrong ‘Meaning’
Another powerful and dangerous element of identification is that
our brains try to make everything "mean" something. If a thought
didn’t have some connection to our existing belief structure, we’d have
no where to put it because there’d be nothing to which to connect it.
So our resourceful little brain cells go ahead and link everything to
something already in there.
You might not realize that you connected that awkward first school
dance, along with all of the pursuant emotional discomfort, to social
situations with women in general. Yet, any explicit ‘meet-women’
situation might cause you great anxiety because of a subconscious
belief that your failure in that first situation was the result of your
being no good with women rather than your not knowing how to
dance.
Here’s an outline of how humans gather, process, and respond to
information from the outside world:
1. We perceive events, communication, etc. through our senses,
which modify the different signals of the outside world (light,

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„2004 All Rights Reserved. – Change Yourself - By David DeAngelo
sound, etc., into the electrical signal of our brains.
2. Our mental filters pass along what we believe is true and what
we know how to perceive or understand, while discarding
everything else.
3. Our mind uses memory to associate the signal received with
signals experienced in the past. That’s when “meaning” occurs.
(At this step, we often have influential emotional associations
beyond the logical ones, which can psychologically blind us to
the reality that was originally behind the signal.)
4. The thought-signals that result in our brain from the outside-
signal either lead to action or more connected thoughts until a
new outside-perception arrives.
In this process, all kinds of things can go wrong and lead us off in
the wrong direction.
In step 1, we may miss the initial signal if it’s outside the limits of
our senses, e.g. sounds under 20 Hz or above 20 kHz. The ring of
your phone, for instance, could be too quiet.
In step 2, our mental filters might block or ignore something vital,
simply because we think it’s impossible or just don’t know it exists. For
instance, a woman might be using eye contact to show she’s
interested but since you don’t know anything about body language,
you don’t notice and never ask