Practical Female Psychology for the Practical Man - David Clare, Joseph South, Franco 2008

Female Self Esteem

Every day I fight a war against a mirror

I can’t take the person staring back at me

I’m a hazard to myself

don’t let me get me

I’m my own worst enemy

— Hazard to Myself by Pink

Female self-esteem is a poorly understood subject for most men. To properly understand this part of our book it is important to get acquainted with a concept known as “basic trust.” This concept was described first by Milton H. Erickson, and it means that every person has a more or less of a basic sense of trust, including the ability to depend on oneself as well as on others. Read this chapter carefully, because this concept will have a tremendous impact on the quality and outcome of your relationships with women. It is crucial to detect — very early on — the level of basic trust of any woman that you meet, in order for you to decide which direction to take with her.

In this book, we divide women into two groups in regards to their self-esteem:

• HSE: women with high self-esteem

• LSE: women with low self-esteem

Being able to detect a woman’s own notion of her self-esteem provides you with crucial information about how she feels about herself and how she views the world around her.

As a rule of thumb, the HSE woman has a high degree of basic trust. She will have a basic internal certainty that she is good, worthy and fit as a woman, and she will have a healthy confidence in her ability to depend on both herself and other people.

On the other hand, the LSE woman has a low degree of basic trust. She may view herself as worthless, bad, and/or not useful to herself or anyone else. Unfortunately, many LSE women believe that they deserve to be abused by men, and may in fact consciously or unconsciously goad men into abusive acts against them, which only serve to reinforce their self-image.

It is important to note that our division between HSE and LSE describes end-member behavior along a spectrum. Most women have both HSE and LSE characteristics, and can display either or both, depending on the context of interaction that they find themselves in.

Basic Trust

There is some determinism in this feature. Modern academic psychology has — at least in the media — overrated the potential that psycho-therapeutic techniques have to improve a person’s self-esteem. What happens in reality is that if you detect LSE in a woman, she may have that feature for a long, long time, and in many cases, forever.

It is important to make wise choices with your time and energy. While some people may label you as callous and uncaring for refusing to get into relationships with LSE women, it is the course of wisdom to realize that many unpleasant features of such relationships will be rather permanent, in spite of your best efforts to help such a woman or to show her understanding and compassion.

The Early Frame Announcement

Detecting a woman’s self-esteem is strictly linked with a concept we have coined as the Early Frame Announcement (EFA). As a rule, a woman will say or do something early on in a relationship, by which she will unwittingly reveal the degree of her self-esteem and also what she expects from her relationships with men. Therefore, it is important that you pay very close attention to what a woman does and says at the very beginning of any relationship. Never forget that detecting the level of her self-esteem is crucial for you to know where to go and where not to go in your dealings with her.

It is also very important to understand well the concept of frame when dealing with women, or any other type of human relationship for that matter. A frame is a psychological environment which defines interactions and contexts. For example:

• “Doctors are good people who help others” is one frame

• “Doctors are sadistic people who enjoy seeing blood” is a different frame.

Maybe doctors are both good and sadistic, or perhaps they are neither. The frames used when talking about such a topic are not to be confused with absolute truth on a matter; they only reveal details about someone’s subjective experience. Therefore, a frame is very often connected with one’s subjective experience. In fact, “basic trust” is also a frame which is highly subjective. People with high self-esteem might dwell on an idea that a terrorist may drop an atomic bomb on some town tomorrow or the next day. However, whether or not that happens in reality is another matter.

Relationship with Sexuality

If read correctly, the woman’s EFA will determine the course of her behavior in your relationship together, with mathematical precision. One of the most important features of an LSE woman is her inability to receive or appreciate good things. A woman with LSE may relate to her sexuality as something bad, dangerous, painful and/or sad. On the other hand, a woman with HSE will usually relate to her sexuality as something joyful, beautiful, interesting and/or positive.

Take for example an EFA delivered via a statement such as, “I don’t like to receive compliments.” Such a comment from a woman, given early on in your interaction with her, should cause LSE alarm bells to start ringing in your head. It is very important that you never lose sight of the fact that women are extremely serious about their EFAs. What this woman is quite clearly subcommunicating — very early on — is: “I feel that I do not deserve good things from you or from anyone else.”

Such a lack of basic trust will have the tendency to escalate in a relationship. It may start with a frame of “I do not like compliments.” Later on in the relationship a woman like this will typically make statements like, “I do not feel comfortable with you. I feel you may become violent” or, “I think you are a pig when you want sex” or, “you do not understand my depression”, and so on.

An important feature of the LSE woman is to introduce the topic of sexuality early on in the relationship, while at the same time being dissociative in regards to it. “Dissociative” means that there is not a strong, conscious connection between her mind and her body. For example, she may say something on the very first meeting such as, “I like strong men who can make me scream,” but then refuse to have sex afterwards.

Another important, core feature of the LSE woman is a deep need for figuratively castrating men psychologically. In fact, their basic low level of self-esteem makes them see the world from a position of envy. On the other hand, an HSE woman views the world from a position of gratitude.

Let us now take a brief look at some of the internal belief systems of both HSE and LSE women.

Internal Beliefs of the HSE woman

• “I am good. I am worthy.”

• “I deserve all the good things that I can get.”

• “I am willing to give good things to other people and I know that I will still have enough for myself.”

• “Sexuality is a joyful thing.”

• “Men love me.”

• “I love men.”

Internal Beliefs of the LSE woman

• “I am bad. I am worthless.”

• “I do not deserve good things from others.”

• “I feel I cannot give anything positive to anyone, not even to myself.”

• “Sex is dirty, nasty, destructive.”

• “Men hate me.”

• “I hate/am afraid of men.”

How LSE and HSE Women Test Men Differently

Every woman has a basic need to test the potential and strength of a man early on in an interaction, as well as throughout the duration of any relationship with him. This holds true for interactions which the woman intends as short-term, and even more so if she has a longer-term relationship or marriage in mind.

As we’ve already discussed, you can detect whether a woman is LSE or HSE by her EFA. You can also detect whether she is LSE or HSE from the way she tests you, especially early on. By default, an HSE woman’s tests are designed to test your self-worth. An LSE woman’s tests are directed to test how destructive you can be. A woman tests you based on her view of the world. And her view of the world is determined by the level of her basic trust.

For example, when a woman says something like, “My last boyfriend was beating me all the time,” this is quite clearly an LSE type of test. On the other hand, if she says something like, “I just love guys who interrupt me when I talk”, with a hint of sarcasm, after you’ve made the mistake of interrupting her, that would be an HSE test.

Therefore, if the woman says, “My boyfriend was beating me all the time,” she is testing you to see if either a) You are going to take part in her misery and become her therapist (if you choose this route, we guarantee that you will not be enjoying a sexual relationship with this woman.); or b) whether you are going to beat her in the same way that her former boyfriend did, in which case, the sex could be really hot.

From the LSE woman’s point of view you have “value” for her only if you do one of the above two things. If you try to give her genuinely good things, she will simply not believe that this is possible. She will consider you to be either weak or a liar.

On the other hand, an HSE woman, by calling you on interrupting her, is testing for whether you are dependent on her judgment of you for your own self esteem. If you freak out or get defensive, you are done.

She is also testing you to see whether you are intelligent enough to understand that she values how she feels and what she says. You can keep interrupting her of course; but that’s not really the issue at hand. The core purpose of her test is in fact to detect whether your level of self-esteem is at her level or above. In this way she can decide whether or not you are a man that she can feel safe with.

Awareness of Her Own Sexuality

A woman’s awareness of her own sexuality is critically important. Imagine for a moment that a woman’s sexual, instinctual world is like the motor of a car, and her awareness of that instinctual world is like the steering wheel.

An LSE woman is usually in poor touch with her “motor”, such that she may be under the influence of very strong sexual instincts and/or poor sexual instincts, but in either case, her awareness (driving skills) of those instincts will be quite poor. It is similar to a situation where a person is driving a more-or-less powerful Ferrari, but the driver doesn’t have very much skill or experience with regards to driving that type of car.

On the other hand, you can recognize an HSE woman because of her skillful touch on the ’steering wheel’. She knows where she is going and what she is doing, whether her “motor” (sex drive) is very powerful or not.

The relationship of the LSE woman with her body is poor and for this reason she tends to be very dissociative. On the other hand, an HSE woman is not so dissociative. It should be noted, however, that dissociation is an element which is always present, to one degree or another, in all female sexuality.

LSE/HSE Male-Female Tests

You can also screen a woman for her LSE/HSE features by observing what arouses her in the course of a seduction. We call these LSE/HSE Male-Female Tests. These are simple tests you can run on a woman to detect the level of her self-esteem, early on.

The LSE Threshold Test

We would never advocate doing this if it would not be for your safety. For the sake of your safety is very important that you know early on whether a woman is LSE or not. Please do not try this at home with your long-term partner! This is a test to be run early on in a relationship, to lest for a woman’s level of self esteem, before you find yourself deep into a long-term relationship with her.

When you meet a woman, as an early test, you can say or do something that is slightly-lowering to her self-esteem. For example, this could be giving her an order in a slightly harsher way than normal, or by making fun of her and then escalating such teasing. By doing this, you will find the level which we refer to as her Self-Esteem (SE) Threshold.

The LSE Threshold is a reaction that a woman will present when you run this test on her. An HSE woman, for example, will react at a certain point with a statement like, “This is unacceptable! You don’t do this to me!” From this point, you can measure the degree of her self-esteem in a certain way. On the other hand, if you escalate with harsher treatment on a woman with bad LSE, you will be able to go much further without her defending herself in an effective manner. Some LSE women will be able to tolerate very harsh treatment without presenting the SE Threshold.

A woman will stop you once you reach her threshold. If the woman is HSE and you like her, then it should be obvious that you’ll want to end the test at this point. Simply acknowledge her objection and change the subject.

Eliciting Values about her Former Relationships

“Eliciting Values” means to find out about the particular abstract beliefs that a woman has, which in turn produce the feelings that are important to her in a relationship. You cannot do this in a direct way, otherwise you will give her the impression that you are too much of a nice guy and hence lower her attraction for you. For example, you would never, ever want to ask something direct like, “am I your type?”; rather, you have to elicit this information in an indirect way.

Indirect simply means that you are finding out about her values without her noticing that you are doing so. This can be done by using active listening skills. Having active listening skills means that you put aside your own values for the moment, and you relax and listen carefully to what she says about her past relationships. If she stops or changes subject you can kindly redirect her with phrases such as:

• “And?”

• “Oh that sounds interesting! I can’t believe it really happened…”

• “Amazing story! How did that happen?”

You absolutely must elicit a woman’s values in regards to one extremely-important thing, and that is, how she reacts to abuse.

Remember this: how a woman reacts to abuse is crucial information that will help you to determine where she is on the LSE/HSE spectrum. Therefore, when you find out the history of her former relationships, what you especially need to look for is, ’has she been psychologically and/or physically abused, in a repetitive fashion, by her former male partners?’ If she has been in that scenario very often, then you can be very sure that she is LSE. While there is absolutely no excuse for continuing to beat on another human being, adults also have the responsibility to immediately and permanently remove themselves from unacceptable situations.

Presenting Yourself as Free-Minded

This is a technique to have her open up to you, so that she tells you what you really want to know. It is also a good test for HSE/LSE.

There is a secret agreement amongst women; they talk in a completely free-minded way about everything amongst themselves. This free-minded conversation that women have comes across as subcommunication when translated into the male language. Women keep this facet of their conversations with other women a secret from men, and they sometimes do this consciously and sometimes unconsciously.

The key here is, when you first approach a woman, you should let her know in a subtle way that you are a free-minded individual. As an example, you could say something like:

• “I can’t believe how those guys made such a big deal about the mayor’s affair. They are all adults after all.”

• “I think it is so stupid when people make such a fuss about sexual minorities!”

• “I can understand that women who are frustrated in their marriage sometimes will end up seeking out a more adult, satisfying love.”

Sooner or later, sincere comments like this from you will invariably cause any woman to open up. She will start to tell you things she would never imagine discussing with her husband or boyfriend, but only with her girlfriends.

But be careful: don’t do this from the frame of the nice guy, who is trying to make up for his own lack of attractive qualities by presenting himself as the overly-sympathetic listener who has nothing better to do than agree with everything that comes out of the woman’s mouth. By doing that, you will ruin the sexual attraction. Your goal here is not to become another one of her girlfriends. Instead, be sure to put some tension and excitement into the conversation; disagree with her on occasion and tease her a bit at other times.

Testing her Level of Self-Esteem

Once a woman is comfortable with you and convinced that you are a free-minded person, she will start to open up to you about everything; what she likes, her sexuality, her former relationships and so on. Once you know what you want to know, you can then test her by becoming a little bit nastier and wilder in your free-mindedness. In other words, become progressively more crude. If she is LSE, she will giggle and become even more attracted to you. This is because the LSE woman has very chaotic and non-defined borders of the Ego, and they easily let strangers into their sphere of personal intimacy.

On the other hand, an HSE woman will do something to try to stop you, because she will begin to feel some uneasiness. Caution: this does not mean that the HSE woman is not freeminded. Instead, this usually means that her self-esteem reacts to your attack on her core values by defending the borders of her intimacy.

The less a woman defends an attack against her personal, intimate boundaries, the more she is LSE. The more a woman defends against such an attack, the more she is HSE, with one important exception: the LSE LD women.

The Low Self-Esteem (LSE), Low Sex-Drive (LD) woman may seem to be defending the borders of her intimacy while you are becoming more crude in your speech, but she is usually doing this out of a fear of sexual intimacy. Such a woman lacks the capacity to really enjoy sex, and this is not due to a healthy level of self-esteem on her part. Therefore, it is important to know about and recognize this sub-group of women.

After you have performed this basic test of the woman’s free-mindedness, you then must determine whether there are elements of self-destructiveness in her.

The Tendency towards Self-Destructiveness

Once you gain experience with testing women for HSE/LSE, you will begin to notice that the HSE woman has a lot of mental space between the physical and the psychological part of her sexuality. In other words, she behaves like a person who is constantly testing your personality, and she will take the time to do so without rushing into any kind of sexual action with you. The HSE woman can do this because of her superior awareness of her own sexuality.

On the other hand, an LSE woman will seem to be in a big rush — once you elicit her sexuality with your seductive skills — in either one of two directions. In one direction, she may be in a hurry to deny her own sexuality, by making comments like “I am not that kind of a woman!” This is a distinctive trait of the LSE LD woman.

Alternatively, she may be in a relative hurry to grab your male sexual organ and to jump all over you. This is a distinctive trait of the LSE HD woman. The women of this sub-group may introduce sexual elements early on in your interaction, even before any overt approach coming from you.

HSE women may also have sex with you quite quickly, but you will notice that before an HSE woman does so, she will take the time to more carefully test your personality. Not testing your personality prior to having sex is almost invariably a sign of LSE.

Another important feature of the HSE woman is that she will always test you for safety. For a healthy women, she is concerned with three primary aspects of safety: physical, psychological, and social safety.

This will not be an easy one to detect; women with LSE can also test you for safety, but they will do so from a completely different perspective than HSE women. LSE women will test you for safety from a position of fear. LSE women who have deep damage to their self-esteem will also test you for abuse. It is very sad to say, but some LSE women will consider a man as a high-value prospect if he demonstrates the capability for abusing them.

On the other hand, when an HSE woman tests you for safety, what she is after is the feeling that she can safely be with you as an emotional and sexual human being. She is also concerned with her reputation in the community and among her friends and family. This is deeply programmed into a woman on the biological level. An HSE woman understands well about the chance for pregnancy and of the necessity of wisely choosing a suitable partner before she engages in the act of sex.

When an HSE woman tests you for safety, she will often seem to be acting in quite a selfish manner from your perspective as a man and that is certainly the case. However, the HSE woman’s selfishness will not have destructive elements within it. Rather, there will be always be an aspect of looking out for her own emotional, physical and social well being.

Practical Advice

Why, therefore, should you always test a woman for her level of self-esteem? Because amongst all of the discernible traits of her personality, her self-esteem is one factor that will definitively influence the course of your interaction with her. This holds true whether the interaction be will be short-term, long-term or even result in a marriage.

The issue of a woman’s self-esteem is extremely important. If you are looking for a healthy, long-term relationship, failing to recognize a woman’s level of self-esteem may mean years of problems for you, severe emotional pain, and even economic losses. The chances that a woman with LSE can change into an HSE woman, without years of therapy and a strong motivation on her part for change, are extremely, extremely low. Furthermore, the journey would be full of dangers for your own well being as a man. It is extremely important for you to learn to screen LSE women out of your life, and by doing so, make room in your life for HSE women.