David DeAngelo - Double Your Dating - How To Change Yourself | Page 4

for her number.
In step 3, if we connect the signal to the wrong memories, we get
the wrong meaning. In this case, we usually have an inappropriate
and often emotional reaction. For instance, if a woman doesn’t return
your phone call, you might get upset and feel bad about yourself
because you don’t realize how common it is.
In step 4, when deciding what to do about it, if we have an
incorrect idea of what’s happening because of some of the problems
described, we might act in a way that ruins our chances of success.
For example, if you take it personally that she didn’t call and
assume she isn’t interested, you’ll never call again—when the fact is
that there could be other reasons for a woman to not to have returned
your phone call. If you’d just wait and call a bit later, you might learn
that she’s just been busy with a project at work. Just don’t call up and
say “I called you, why didn’t you call me back?”–that might forever
ruin your chances.

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„2004 All Rights Reserved. – Change Yourself - By David DeAngelo
Steps 1-3 are almost always subconscious, and even steps 4 and 5
are only sometimes conscious. You really have to focus on both the
environment you perceive and on your internal states in order to catch
misleading or faulty subconscious processing. Faulty associations are
the root of narrow perspectives, prejudice, mismatching disorder, etc.,
and they’re powerful because they happen subconsciously.
The Alluring Victim Syndrome
As we discussed earlier, negative mental states often are used to
generate attention, which can cause a person to be trapped with the
victim syndrome. This syndrome implies feeling that external forces
are causing negative things in your life and makes you view life as a
passive experience that happens to you rather than an active one in
which you wield power. There’s a lot of reasons this attitude is so
appealing:
1. It’s an easy response to dealing with defeat. Saying you’re not
to blame is easier than accepting responsibility for what goes
wrong in your life. At least in your mind, it shifts the negative
off you and onto someone or something else.
2. When you’re the victim, you don’t have to put any effort into
changing things. It wasn’t your fault, so why should you try to
change it?
3. It gets sympathy and negative attention, which is better than no
attention at all.
4. Those who come to live their whole lives as victims can become
experts at manipulating others through guilt and emotion.
Some learn to use sob stories to take advantage of good-
natured people who will provide material and emotional help for
the victim, while placing the blame on others and using the
ensuing guilt to get whatever they want.
5. It allows the use of irrational thinking that’s based on
emotion—the way things should be are based on the premise
that life should be fair—which is easier than logical reasoning,
which leads to sometimes painful conclusions.
6. Finally, the victim syndrome can be a deeply ingrained pattern
that is learned from parents, siblings or friends. Learned
victimization is often a person’s total perspective, so everything
is interpreted to fit within the paradigm of injustice and

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„2004 All Rights Reserved. – Change Yourself - By David DeAngelo
negativity. Even good things become twisted into
negatives—hidden motives are found, unlikely risks or side-
effects are weighed very importantly, etc., because the ‘victim’
is so used to seeing everything negatively they can’t believe
something good is happening to them.
In the end, being a victim means your life will never improve
because you have given up. By blaming what’s wrong on external
forces,you’re giving them all the power and leaving yourself with no
way to change your situation for the better. The first step in moving
past a negative experience is accepting your share of the
responsibility, by learning from it and accepting it as an unfortunate
risk that you ran because the alternative, positive outcome was worth
it.
4. Adopting a More Successful Attitude
Probably one of the first changes you need to make is to perceive
experiences more positively. This simple change in perspective is an
absolutely crucial element of the successful mindset.
Especially when it’s a negative experience , find a positive
connection to make, e.g. rather than “Who is to blame?”, ask the
positive question “How can I make it better?”
A negative outlook expects problems and failure, so that’s what
you’ll see first when you examine the possibilities. A positive outlook
expects benefits or solutions and finds them just as easily. Being
positive brings success, and we can make ourselves more positive with
the right effort.
Making Mental Feedback Loops Positive
Emotions are deeply rooted in your subconscious, so to deal with
changing them we need to explore the connections between your
conscious and subconscious.
Your conscious and your unconscious minds are wrapped in a
powerful feedback loop. The unconscious guides the conscious and if
you do it actively, the conscious can also guide the unconscious.
When an unproductive or negative unconscious drive exerts its
influence, you can either let it control you