Is The Red Pill a medicine or a poison?
Readership: All
Theme: Problems with The Red Pill / The Challenge of Transcending the Abyss
Reader’s Note: This post is related to a subtopic covered earlier in this series.
Length: 1,900 words
Reading Time: 10 minutes + one 10 minute video
The Red Pill Promulgates Avoidant Attachment Behaviors
To briefly review Attachment Styles, healthy relationships are characterized by a Secure Attachment Style. Unhealthy relationships are characterized by three main types of dysfunctional Attachment Styles (Anxious, Avoidant, and Disorganized / Fearful, collectively called Insecure Attachment Styles). Insecure Attachments are characterized by difficulties in cultivating and maintaining trust and a lack of a secure base. Read more.
The following video captures a noteworthy conversation about Attachment Styles between Adam Lane Smith and Connor Beaton, the host of Man Talks.
Man Talks: 3 Hacks To REWIRE Your Attachment Style (2024/2/12) Length: 10:17
From 7:38 to 10:10, Adam Lane Smith says [edited for clarity and concision],
“As far as falling apart, the sad, sad terrible truth that I have seen, that I hate, is that a lot of Anxiously Attached men tend to connect with the opposite [type of woman (i.e. Avoidant or Disorganized Attachment)]. They tend to connect with Avoidantly Attached women or women with personality disorders, or they just fall apart in relationships, even with nice women. They ruin [these relationships] because they won’t open up about their needs and then they feel like a victim. Then they go online, and they type in “bad woman hurt me”. Right? Or they ask, you know, “What does it mean when a woman is manipulative?” “What does it mean when a woman is unkind to you?” “Why are women so mean?” And the only thing they’re really going to find online is fairly radicalized Red Pill circles of formerly anxiously attached men who have never met a securely attached woman, it seems. It appears that they were primarily hurt by women with personality disorders, and now they have codified “how to act around women with personality disorders” into “how to treat all women forever”, because [they falsely presume that] all women on earth have Borderline Personality Disorder. All women are waiting to shank you with a knife and laugh at you. All women will cheat on you if you have the slightest emotion. All women are just waiting to trade up at a moment’s notice, and they have no loyalty or kindness whatsoever. All women are sociopaths. That is the sad version of how men get out of an Anxious Attachment — they become Avoidantly Attached.
Most gurus in the Red Pill circles teach men how to switch to Avoidant Behaviors, how to use Avoidant Behaviors [… and] to then prey upon Anxiously Attached women who are insecure, hurt, and afraid, to pit them against each other, and then emotionally coerce them into all kinds of sexual shenanigans. It just turns these men into people they don’t want to be, which is why they’re [only] in it for a couple of years, and yeah, they usually have more sex, but then they start to really be disgusted by themselves and very unhappy because all they’re doing is going through one relationship after another and that’s not what they want either. So then they start looking for another answer.
So guys out there, if you’re Anxiously Attached, becoming [Avoidantly Attached] is not the answer. Becoming afraid of women is not the answer. Fear is not the answer. Manipulation is not the answer. The same thing goes for the women out there. If you’ve been hurt by an Avoidant man becoming manipulative and hurtful yourself is not the answer. Do not be afraid. What you’re looking for is to be Securely Attached.”
I believe Smith’s basic message is true, that a disproportionate number of men in the Red Pill community have Attachment Issues. I also agree that many Red Pill communities teach and train men to develop Avoidant Attachment behaviors. But I disagree with Smith’s frame. The problem is that he’s basically saying, in so many words, that The Red Pill Community is a sycophant of the Anxiously Attached, and that it is enabling, encouraging, and teaching men to destroy themselves and their relationships more efficiently.
I have a different opinion. If the context is well noted and a wider frame is adopted, then readers may have a better appreciation of what is happening to men who take The Red Pill.
In the remainder of this essay, I’ll fill in the blanks.
Why do Many Red Pilled Men have Attachment Issues?
I believe the reason why many men of our modern era are Anxiously Attached is because they didn’t receive the unconditional love that they needed from their mothers during their formative years. Instead, their feminist mothers set a debased example of parental marriage, thereby excluding them from the knowledge of God. Their mothers didn’t respect their fathers, they divorced their fathers, and perhaps did even worse things. As a result, these missing pieces and ‘Mommy Issues’ have sublimated into Attachment Disorders. This has long-term adverse consequences to the psyche and soul that may require an entire lifetime to recuperate from, if at all.
The sad irony is that many men are not aware that they are Anxiously Attached, and this kind of self-knowledge is challenging to apprehend.
Smith’s most important contribution to the sphere is raising awareness about this phenomenon. But his approach is a little off-kilter because he’s putting pressure on the wrong vain.
Red Pill Rehabilitation
The Red Pill gives men the knowledge, the tools, and the kick in the pants they need to jerk them out of autopilot mode and set them on a trajectory towards redemption.
Taking the Red Pill is how many men escape the birdcage, but learning to fly is another matter.
The inconvenient reality is that most men do not have the wherewithal nor the incentive to stop being Anxiously Attached until their compass is reoriented by experiencing the worst in an Insecurely Attached relationship with a woman. This is exactly why I said Identifying Attachment Style is the New Game (2023/10/12). But many men never get to the place of realizing this about themselves because they don’t even have the opportunity to have a relationship with any woman. And for those few guys who do, then their experiences with women eventually bring them around to the Red Pill — IF they’re lucky.
Sure, guys like Adam Lane Smith can tell men, “Don’t be Anxiously or Avoidantly Attached. Instead, you must be Securely Attached.” That’s right, but it fails as good advice. That’s like telling men, “Don’t be poor. Don’t live off of welfare. Instead, you must be an independently wealthy business owner.” Those who understand the gravity of the situation and know what would be required to make that transition will chuckle at the naïveté behind the blithe crassitude. There’s a vast chasm between knowing the way and traveling it, actually lacing up your boots, and slogging through the sludge of self-awareness. It would be a mockery to tell these men, “Playing in the dirt will do nothing to establish your business”, even though it may be true.
It would be nice if men could heed Smith’s message, skip the Insecure Attachment stuff, and go directly to zen. But there’s clinical work to be done in binding up the brokenhearted (Psalm 147:3) and getting them to trust and walk in faith.
Going through a phase of Avoidant Attachment may very well be the halfway house for them to become Securely Attached. I wrote about this process of transformation in The Red Pill and Blue Pill as Paradigms of Sanctification and Defilement (2020/11/15). Moreover, working through these issues, as messy and reactionary as it may seem, is part and parcel of Transcending the Abyss.
Boundaries
I have to add a ditty about some things we learned in our study of Boundaries, because 3 Laws of Human Nature are directly related to Red Pill Rehabilitation.
1. The Law of Sowing and Reaping — Actions have consequences (but they are not always clear and immediate). Failure to recognize this results in confusion.
6. The Law of Evaluation — Suffering is a part of life. What feels good in the moment is often harmful, and that which is painful in the experience may actually help us in the long run. Therefore, it is important to assess which type of suffering we are embracing, and come to terms with its value and purpose.
7. The Law of Proactivity — Get control of your life, or else your life will control you. Master your sin, or else your sin will master you.
In assessing the meaning and value of taking The Red Pill and the apparent effects it may have, it helps to evaluate the actions and consequences, the cause and effect, and how men are empowered, whether it be for better or for worse.
Remember the anecdote about a boy who said he ‘enjoyed’ eating the candy that made his teeth rot, and he was ‘hurt’ by the dentist who repaired his teeth? In the case of Red Pill Rehab, men are ‘hurt’ by parental divorce, feminist indoctrination, and the comfy trappings of a gynocentric culture, and they are ‘enjoying’ breaking free from that, often going to shameful excesses in their bittersweet joy of liberation.
As bad as some men’s behaviors might be, it would be wrong to think of The Red Pill as the primary cause of the messiness rather than recognizing it to be a shocking reveal of a long-festering pestilence. It would be wrong to see The Red Pill as the primary source of bad behaviors rather than recognizing it as a medicinal agent for rectifying damages already done. It would be wrong to put the finger on men’s sins rather than on what they need for healing and redemption. This Hypocrisy was the sin of the Pharisees who demanded a ‘clean’ presentation and therefore would not allow the puss to drain and the sh!t to be wiped out of men’s lives (Matthew 23:13-15,23-28).
Conclusions
Smith’s assessment contains some inherent criticism that characterizes The Red Pill culture as a petri dish instead of a penisillin culture. But upon further examination, Smith’s take is not so much a criticism of the Red Pill as it is against those men who are sick and tired of Feminitis, Gynorrhea, Hyperagentrophy, and Oneitis, and must therefore be admitted to the Manosphere Central Hospital and take the Red Pill medicine.
Truly, there are many diseased characters in the Red Pill community hospital, and this essay is not to excuse or justify their bad behaviors in any way. But it is not The Red Pill that caused them to become this way. The majority of Red Pillers probably would’ve never discovered The Red Pill had they not been burned alive by a vindictive woman. Taking The Red Pill is/was a medicinal and transitional stepping stone that led them out of a dysfunctional state of being. This is the reason why most men are only into The Red Pill for a few years and then grow out of it. Once they’re healed, they are discharged or released from the Red Pill hospital, and then they go on to do other, hopefully greater things in life.
The Red Pill does cater to men’s interests and indulges their desires much more than what would be considered normal and healthy — for a healthy individual. But in fact, much of this sycophantic pandering is fitting and somewhat necessary to establish trust, get them rejuvenated with the truths of masculinity, and get them back on their feet and running.
We don’t demand the same physical performance from guys in an orthopedic rehab as we do from men who are able-bodied and fit. Likewise, it is unreasonable to expect or demand moral or spiritual excellence from men recovering from the Blues.
Related
- Σ Frame: God’s Silence During Suffering (2009/12/14)
- Hungry Generation: The Forceful Advance of the Kingdom (2020/11/25)
- Σ Frame: Taking Headship by Force (2021/5/26)
- Σ Frame (Thedeti): On Red Pill Awareness (2021/7/23)
- Σ Frame: Attachment Style and Game (2023/10/13)
- Σ Frame: Hypocrisy in the Manosphere (2024/5/31)
ArchAngel
caterpillar345
Soup Sandwich
Lexet Blog
Novaseeker
Oscar
Red Pill Apostle
Jack
thedeti
Σ Frame 
Those essays feel like progress.
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I don’t know. I’ve actually become convinced that all women have a touch of borderline personality disorder (now usually called emotionally unstable personality disorder).
BPD/EUPD has been called “the woman brain on steroids” just as autism has been called “the male brain on steroids”. All Women Are Like That sometimes. All women are emotionally unstable sometimes. All women sh!t test sometimes. It’s just that some are much, much worse than others. And yes, if you’re raised around borderlines and most of the women in your family are borderlines, then you start to think it’s “normal”.
I’ve met some “normal” women with healthy attachment styles and boundaries and conflict resolution skills. They all have had emotional freakouts and meltdowns. They all sh!t test. They all get overly p!ssed off over nothing sometimes. They all lose their sh!t sometimes.
I’m convinced one of the things that allows women to become borderlines is no men around to keep women’s sh!t in check. No husbands or fathers there to tell their wives and daughters to get it under control and knock it off, or take it somewhere else. No men there to say, “You will not speak to me that way.” Or, there are men around, but they put up with her BPD because sex.
Men just really need to refuse to put up with this bad behavior from women.
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The post-SexRev, fully feminized society of the last 60 years has been the primary exacerbator of BPD/EUPD. Women throughout human history have always had this characteristic, but it was tightly controlled in times past. No more.
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This is bad daughter parenting on the father’s behalf, assuming he is around to parent.
Also, Paul said that women will be saved by child bearing. There is a reason for that.
Talk with any mom and ask her how her life outlook changed when she held her first child for the first time. Her child often marks the first time in her life when she is primarily responsible for the wellbeing of another human and she recognizes her child as being more important than she is.
Delaying children until around 30 means a woman has a decade as an adult to marinate in me first and make it a lifestyle. Behaviors are much harder to change later in life and the apparent rise in BPD seems like an unhealthy way of acting out when she doesn’t get her way.
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Re: Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) / Emotionally Unstable Personality Disorder (EUPD)
I wasn’t aware that BPD had been ‘renamed’. Whenever we see stuff ‘renamed’, it’s always done as an effort to remove stigmas attached to the old term. But the stigma is there for a reason, and that stigma always resurfaces despite changing the name.
My wife had some BPD displays when we first met, but I didn’t put 2 and 2 together until after we married, hence the post linked above.
Assuming that she really did have BPD, and just based on what I have observed in her, I believe your assessment is correct. During her formative years, her father was largely absent due to work, and she lived with 4 other women who played some horrific shame games amongst themselves.
After we married, I drew some boundaries and stated some expectations, and she slowly improved. I’ve written many posts about this. One thing that helped a lot is my amateur attempt at Cognitive Behavioral Therapy — basically making her aware of her behavior and getting her to think it through.
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The problem with guys like ALS and Conor is they tell men to “just be securely attached bro” with no training or advice on how to become securely attached. “Just be confident. Just take showers. Just go out there and do it. Just be more like me – a well adjusted man who found his soul mate at age 14 and has no real experience with other women and who never had any problems in his life.”
No. Doesn’t work. They don’t realize these men have learned anxiety or avoidance through decades of negative training and reinforcement. They don’t realize how injured and beaten down these men are. They don’t realize what the world has done to these men. They have no idea how to help these men.
For most men, getting to “secure” will involve being alone, probably for large portions of the rest of your life. Most men just don’t have what it takes to attract a woman and get her to stay with him for decades. They just don’t. This is in large part a function of the period of time in history we find ourselves living in. This is an unprecedented transitory period, uncharted territory, and no one really knows which way it will break.
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Many say that we have entered the End Times. If that’s true, then what we are witnessing and experiencing makes perfect sense.
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The flaw in Smith’s argument is that he believes there is a veritable ocean of securely attached women waiting for men to get their spit together and wife them up. The reality is that securely attached women today are as rare as hen’s teeth, and the ones that do exist tend to get snatched up early. He pretends that modern culture has only ruined men and not women, or at least not as many women, or at least not as bad. It’s simply not true.
His advice isn’t bad, per se, but it lacks a huge amount of context. It sounds good, and I’m sure for many men it has worked, but it’s ignoring the reality that even if you fix the attachment issues that men have, you haven’t solved the attraction issue, their mate choices will still be slim, and women’s behavior will still be a dumpster fire. Men need to get better for themselves and their immediate surroundings, but not to get a woman.
There was a YouTuber who posted a video a while back titled “Getting a Girlfriend Is Not An Achievable Goal”, meaning you can’t just make a task list to do certain things and end up with a girlfriend. It doesn’t work like that. People like Smith make it seem like fixing attachment issues will do that. It’s not true. You will feel better about yourself, and your personal relationships may get easier, but it’s not a “push button, get woman” scenario like they’re selling. If only they would be honest about that, but they can’t, because that would be addressing the elephant in the room and we can never do that.
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Found the video. HealthyGamerGG is the name.
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This reminds me of the Churchian position circa 2012: “There are legions on regiments on battalions of nice, pretty, available Christian women at our churches, and they’re all single and just waiting for nice kind good Christian men to marry them.”
Right. Most church women consist of…
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thedeti,
The small subset of church women who are the 2012 churchian ideal have already pumped out a couple kids by the time most of your list has ever seriously considered marriage.
These ladies are debt-free virgins without tattoos and I’ve seen them married between the ages of 20-24. They were a larger percentage of these truly wife minded girls 25 years ago, but they do still exist.
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The powers that be have decreed that men aren’t allowed to point out…
Oh well. Back to the society’s regularly scheduled dysfunction.
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What Sharkly calls “gynogroveling” has been deeply inculcated into men for the last 50-plus years, another aspect of feminism that is so all-pervasive as to be largely unnoticed. Thinking about it today, I, too, was afflicted with this attitude for much of my adult life. Not because it had been formally drilled into me by anyone of influence in my life, but because the society as a whole in which I lived practiced it, and I “went along to get along.” It took personal experiences and conscious effort on my part to break free of the habit, and that’s not something that comes naturally to most men. That’s why most “mainstream” advice to men misses the mark completely.
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Adam Lane Smith can help you, bro! Just one single session can get right to your issues! For the low, low, LOW price of just $840, you can be just like ALS, bro!
https://adamlanesmith.com/checkout/
Attachment Bootcamp video course is only $497!
https://adamlanesmith.com/attachment-courses/courses/
Five sessions with ALS includes the Single Session and the “Dating Mastery Package” for only $4,620!!
Or add the Marriage Rescue Package for only an additional $5,710! That’s only $10,330! Isn’t your marriage worth that? Shouldn’t you be paying Adam Lane Smith to learn things like how to set boundaries and how to say “no” to borderline personality disordered b!tches? Don’t you need to learn from Adam how to tell your wife you want to have sex with her?
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A good rule of thumb is that any “Red Pill Advice” with a $$$ tag on it is a grift.
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Here’s some free advice.
“Tell her ‘no’. She might break up with you. You might have to do without her. Good. You got off light. She’s someone else’s problem.”
“What you want and need is important. Start acting like it. Yes, she will probably break up with you. You might have to do without her. Good. You got off light. She’s now someone else’s problem.”
It’s really funny that before the manosphere, no one was really telling young men this.
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Pardon my ignorance, but is it even possible for people to change their attachment style?
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Attachment is a fancy way of saying nurture, except we’re dealing with negative nurturing. It’s a lot of work and also requires access to healthy people so you can see good examples live and in action, which is also hard because that’s in demand. Most people never overcome or just become sort of ok.
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Oscar,
Good question!
I guess the PUA community has demonstrated that some men can change from Insecure to Avoidant. I believe this is done by forming a more positive model of self and a more negative model of others, i.e. stop pedestalizing women. (See graph in the main essay.) I imagine that once one learns to change his/her models of self and others, it gets easier to adjust them some more to achieve a ‘normal’ Secure Attachment.
I did a brief search on your question.
This 30% statistic. My pastor once said he estimates about 30% of people have strongholds of distrust stemming from their childhood, what he called ‘Inner Child’ issues. This is essentially the same — Insecure Attachments are characterized by an inability to trust. Coincidence?
This article is also pretty good.
The Wave: How Do Attachment Styles Form and Change? (2023/11/7)
From reading a few articles, I gather that it is possible to change one’s Attachment Style, but it is difficult and it takes time — as in years. Some things that help are…
Personality Disorders make it more difficult to change an Insecure Attachment style.
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Yes, you can change your attachment style. I’m a walking example of it. I was pretty strong in avoidant with just a little bit of secure, with a lot of hard, difficult, and sometimes soul crushing work (both personal and with a therapist) I moved into the ‘secure’ attachment style. This took about 2 years at age 45.
Every relationship got better in my life but one, that was with my ex.
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Thedeti,
That’s quite a whopping price tag! I would be interested in hearing some first-hand testimonies from anyone who took his courses, whether they feel it was worth the $$$.
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A good analogy for TRP is cancer treatment. TRP is chemo for malignant female behavior. Just like a malignant growth, the longer a man tolerates such behavior in his relationship the more extensive and painful the treatment becomes and the longer the recovery is.
At some point the treatments need to stop and the man needs to move on with life in a more productive manner. While chemo kills cancer cells, it also kills healthy cells so the ideal treatment is just enough poison to kill the malignancy without killing the person. Too much RP content is not necessarily good for the health of a man’s soul because of the risk that he remains stuck in a jaded phase instead of moving on to a healthier state of a relationship with enforced personal boundaries.
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Sort of on topic:
An interesting perspective on why feminists are so prone to mental illness:
Lew Rockwell: Are Women Hardwired To Care for Men? (2024/6/19)
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Here’s the article that Lew Rockwell referenced. It’s really long, so I haven’t read it all, but here’s a quote that is exactly on topic for this post. Dr. Hannah Spier describes three archetypical female psychology patients.
That’s pretty much what Jack said.
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“Equality” is really at the end of the day an expression of envy rather than admiration. It’s the resentment of beauty of truth and of goodness. Which feels like “putting you down”.
The Hatred of Greatness of God ultimately. It’s the evil eye of envy that seeks to cut down the tall poppy rather than seeking to be like him but also regarding the dignity of your own strengths and weaknesses as being as important as his or hers.
In the Christian Kingdom it shouldn’t be undesirable to be lower rank. For the Higher rank needs the lower rank. And there is only so much social status to go around.
Not everyone is an eye or hand or even little toe( 1 Corinthians 12). But God made us complementary. For everyone needs the other. Thereby promoting unity in the Body by said interdependency in addition to the Holy Spirit. If everyone has every gift they can each more easily become atomized and break communion.
Let not the Lord despise the humble peasant or infantry that fulfills his purpose. Let not infantry despise the Commander for not being constantly in the thick of the fighting. For both Big Picture Vision and Strategy and on the ground conflict is required.
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That’s a good point. It’s important to note that the original concept of equality was that we are equally created in God’s image and therefore endowed with free will and moral agency.
None of that means we’re equally talented (see the Parable of the Talents), or gifted (the scripture you referenced), or called.
Equality got twisted from a Christian concept based on the beautiful doctrine of the Imago Dei to a Marxist concept based on ugly, naked envy.
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Also imo. We need to make sure those women are winning. He because they are truly for us. By any means necessary may they be blessed.
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@Oscar
Now we have to specify. That it is “Equality of Dignity”. Otherwise it’s always going to give the envious the capacity to run with it.
We have to be more specific.
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The part of Oscar’s comment in boldface should be boringly normal to hear in sermons because it strikes at one of the most powerful strongholds.
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How one man counselled another to handle misbehavior from his wife:
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Info,
A LOT of his post mirrors what RPA, Thedeti, and I have been saying since 2021.
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Yep. The men he is referencing and refuting. Like the “Fresh and Fit” host Myron Gaines and others who are algorithmically boosted spreading bad advice is conflated with the “Red Pill” and Joel doesn’t quite know what he is taking about. But glad that the Real Red Pill is also likewise mainstream
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