A podcast-style interview between Josh Trent and Adam Lane Smith exploring attachment issues, how early childhood wounds shape adult capacity to give and receive love, cultural narratives (including ‘red pill’) that make worthiness conditional, and the transformative power of experiencing real love. The conversation links attachment patterns to generational trauma, transactional intimacy (sex as approval), and suggests connection to something larger (spirituality) can mitigate ‘us vs. them’ thinking.
Chapters
There's something you posted, I think a few weeks ago. It says a damaged man is incapable of love because he does not believe love will be freely given, only earned through works. Second part, really fascinating. He seeks false intimacy in lust and mistakes sex for acceptance. These men seek insecure women who believe themselves unlovable and who use sex to earn approval. I think the wounding that you're starting to unravel there, and I want you to unravel it a little bit more, is that when a man is damaged because of his upbringing, and by the way, it could even be generational, his grandparents, great great grandparents. When a man appears wounded to a woman, he's going to, I guess energetically or loa, attract a type of woman that may actually fit his broken piece just like that. And this narrative right here where a man will not ever be worthy of love. You have to be worthy, you have to provide, you have to do all these things and then you're worthy of love. It's a broken fallacy, it's just not true at all. But yet I believed it for many decades in my life before I found Kerry, Michelle and I became a father. Love does not keep score. Love is not this frickin scoreboard on the playing field where it's like, you did these five things for me, so now I'll give you sex. That's not how it works. But can you unravel that a little bit more and maybe also juxtapose that with the red pill itself. That's the core narrative from Tate and all these people where a man is only worthy if he provides. I think I even saw Chris Rock say the only people that are worthy of love love are women, animals and children. And I thought to myself, huh, that is a very interesting yet harmful take. So what do you make of all of this?
It's, it's, it is crushingly sad. So here, here's what I'm going to show you is the research indicates that about 50% of American adults now have an attachment issue, right? Attachment is the way that we connect to other people to give and receive love. And we are, we learn this from minutes after birth, up until age 6, age 7, age 12. Our whole childhood is about learning are people going to love me? Do I live in an environment where people will support me? Do I live in a place where people will love and care for each other? Or is it a fight for resources and survival and no one will help me and is it my fault? Am I unlovable? Or are other people broken and the brain starts trying to filter all this information from six months old, right? Do you pick the baby up really quick in the crib? Do you yell at the baby? Does mom have postpartum depression so she doesn't actually talk and laugh and smile to the baby and play with the baby and give the baby attention and give the baby information are worthy of love? I will pay attention to you just because you are here. You are special to me. I will always be here with you. Does mom do that? Or is mom distant? Is mom cold? Is mom on her phone all the time? Does mom not respond? Is mom crushingly depressed so she has no facial. A complete flat affect, what they call the flat affect problem. What is mom doing? What is dad doing? Is dad present? Is he gone? Does the child say, if I was a better child, dad would have stayed even though Dad's, you know, who knows what Dad's doing? Mom has alienated dad. But now the baby thinks dad left on his own because the baby wasn't good enough. All kinds of messages come from this. I work with people who are adopted at birth who have attachment issues and their brain is telling them something is wrong. These are not my family. The smell babies come out knowing their mother smell. And none of these people smell right to me. So I feel like I've been stolen from my family. There's all these pieces that weave together. But when you learn as a child that your mother only pays attention to you when you are interesting, that they only stop yelling at you when you are perfect, that you must get approval from other people by doing the right things, by pushing the right buttons, that you don't deserve love and no one will ever care for you if they know who you really are. So you have to play games to make other people like you. You develop this. This transactional relationship with the world where your worth is tied only to the dopamine that you give to other people and to the control that you have over the relationships. And that is where red pill comes from. Feminism. This belief that men are only worth what we can produce. That's where that comes in. That women, all women are gold diggers. Women only want to take from you. I had a gu today. Just tell me. I posted about the importance of. Of connection and love. And he posted it and said, all women are parasites. Right? That's that view of they just want to take from us. That's a harsh one. All women are parasites. It's as bad as all men are rapists. It's the other group will never care about me and the other group. Someone from the other group has hurt me, and I am scared, and I don't think I will ever be loved or accepted. So I will push back and take control in the only ways I know how and when. You don't know how to get love. If you don't know that love exists, you control instead. Or you spend your life earning approval from people you think have control.
It's almost like we are in humanity. We've been given a Ferrari, which is life. I mean, God creator gifted us life, right? And I'm not here to define what God is. Everyone can figure that out from our 600 shows. But I do say, and I wonder how you feel about this. People who have a connection to something outside of them are less likely to be in bondage about the war versus me and you and us versus them. Do you believe that's true in your own life? Do you see that play out with clients? Essentially? Acknowledgment and honoring the mystery of why we're actually here in the first place, and a deeper dive into just the mystery and the beauty of life can, in so many ways, be an antidote to the war itself.
I only know three things. I only know, really three things on this topic, and I will tell you those three things in order. Audience out there, you guys can fight over this, tell me if I'm right or wrong, but I only know three things. Number one is that if you have never experienced love, then it makes no sense when somebody else talks to you about love and you can't factor it in your calculations, and you will never, ever feel safe without love in your life. And if you've never felt it, your life is so much less than it could be and so much more fearful than it has to be. Number two, if and when you actually discover what love is and you experience it with one human being on this planet, and you experience legitimate, real love with one human, whether that's a friendship, a partner, anybody. It changes everything. Because the world has 10 new colors in it, the 10 new smells, 10 new realities. Everything opens up in a way that never existed before. And suddenly things start to make sense and there is suddenly joy and hope, and that is important. And number three, I have worked with a tremendous number of people from all kinds of different faiths and. And in the absence of any kind of love or warmth or goodness in their world, it is very hard for them to really, truly believe in any kind of a God who might love them or regard them as worthwhile. But once they feel love from another human, and it's modeled for them. Suddenly they have an image of God in some way that they can finally understand and grasp onto. And many of them take a second look at whatever their religious faith was before they lost it. It's love is everything. Everything. The importance of it cannot be understated. I even saw Andrew Tate recently. Somebody asked him, would you consider marriage? And he said, and he paused and he took a deep breath and he said, in my younger days, I would have said no, but I'm really starting to second guess that and think about this. And. And there's something important about love that I didn't understand before. I'm paraphrasing. But he. He really went in depth. It sounds like he experienced some kind of love from somebody. And it.
It.
It can even transform Andrew Tate. I think it can transform just about anybody.
Oh, you're. You're preaching to the ultimate choir. Whether it's spiritual, esoteric, or logical, we all have a choir that we listen to. Some people call it an echo chamber. It's where we give and receive information. Twitter, Instagram, all these places that are kind of harbored safe spaces where we delete people we don't like, and we have this manufactured connection through social media.
Check out some of the videos on this screen that are perfectly curated based on the you just saw. Make sure you follow me, and I'll see you in the next video.
