Symptoms of Subconscious Inadequacy

The cuckold fetish is caused by pain around the concept of inadequacy, whether that be a fear, feeling, focus, belief, or association. This pain also affects many other areas of your life. None of this is conscious; it comes from our deep-rooted tendency to avoid, escape, release, or control bad feelings. Inadequacy causes the following side-effects:

Addictions.

If you don’t feel good enough, the natural urge is to escape from these feelings; to find a way to cope or temporarily feel better. This is the primary basis for all addictions. Some people use alcohol for this – alcohol gives you confidence, makes you happier, more creative, more fun, more sociable, and offers many other temporary benefits. For someone that doesn’t feel good enough, you really want those benefits. When you begin to experience them, you start to dislike the idea of living without those benefits. Then you start to hate being sober, because being drunk feels better. It comes from a sense of inadequacy.

Drugs can do the same – offer benefits to temporarily alter yourself into a better state, or in some cases, simply a different state is enough. Not just recreational drugs, but nootropics and steroids too.

Food is probably the most common addiction. When you feel inadequate, there’s really nothing stopping you from eating as much as you want. You have no appearance to uphold, no reputation to live up to, low standards of what you should be and an inaccurate perception of what you can be. You can eat just because it tastes good, with nothing holding you back. If food makes you feel good, you can easily resort to eating just to feel good.

Porn is also an easy way to do this. Sexual pleasure can provide good feelings. It becomes an escape from self-awareness when self-awareness is unpleasant. Emotions can be addictive too like anger or excitement, and the things that create those emotions such as gambling.

Aside from the mood-altering addictions, we can also get addicted to escaping. Things like video games, TV, films, books, and the internet can all distract us from how we feel about ourselves.

Righteousness

Religion, or the lack of it, can be a common manifestation of this. The disciples of any religious system can say ‘we are good, and the others – those not like us, the sinners – they are bad’. To be on the ‘right’ side feels good, especially to someone with a sense of inadequacy. Interestingly this can also happen with atheism, when atheism becomes a sanctuary for righteousness, or any ‘us vs them’ mentality. When you suffer from a sense of inadequacy, it feels good to believe that you’re right about something. It’s soothing to know that, no matter how inadequate you are, at least you’re right. Even politics can become an outlet for this. The republicans and the democrats see each other as pigs! By firmly taking a stance on a topic – whether it be politics, religion, or anything else – and then surrounding yourself with evidence that your stance is the correct stance, you can live in a bubble of comforting reassurance that you’re not all bad.

It feels good to be right. I used to be a ‘righteous science nerd’ – someone who only cared about facts and being right about everything. I would frequently ignore the feelings of others and looked down on people with uninformed opinions. This gave me a way to feel good about myself. I didn’t care about how other people felt, I didn’t respect their values or beliefs, if they were wrong I would tell them, because I needed to feel right; I so desperately needed approval from myself

Often I retreated to my bubble of righteousness to get angry in my head. I would have endless imaginary debates where I always won. This mindless daydreaming is a symptom of subconscious inadequacy. Your daydreams will tell you a lot about the contents of your subconscious!

Neediness and Validation

Righteousness is really about needing validation. When we have a sense of inadequacy, we desperately need to be liked. It can often become so much that we disconnect from social situations as a way to protect ourselves from the fear of not being liked. Introversion can be our soothing saviour in some cases.

As a result, we become needy. We need attention. We need respect. We need validation. We may end up pursing different methods of reaching that: by needing to seem funny, or nice, or thoughtful, or intelligent, or unique, or successful, or pleasant, or just perfect. These are all attempts to get validation. We learn that by being funny/nice/clever etc, people will like us. 

The desire to be a famous musician/writer/actor/comedian becomes larger when you don’t feel good enough just as you are. You need more external validation to feel good. You daydream of fame and fortune, of people validating your achievements, of being admired, respected, and liked – because you don’t like yourself. Your subconscious perceives validation as a greater need than it is.

Next time you’re lost in a daydream, take note of what you’re imagining. That’s a window to your deepest desires set in your subconscious. Take a look at the different way to create imaginary validation.

This leads us to the next symptom of subconscious inadequacy:

Compulsive Improvement

When you feel inadequate, you feel like you can control that by improving. It often leads people to pursue an area of self-improvement, whether that be through working on your body, intelligence, personality, or pursing a better career (as above), or earning more money, or working on some aspect of self-improvement. These all create the sense that if we can just have that one thing, people will like us and respect us and we’ll finally be good enough.

Money is something that might make you feel like people will respect you, or admire you, or otherwise think you’re good enough. Careers can similarly do the same, by working hard, getting promoted, and achieving a high-up position or by pursuing a creative career like writing or music, we feel like that will make us good enough. It gives you a sense of hope.

I became quite obsessed with lifting weights and exercise. When you feel inadequate, it feels good to be on the path towards being better. After 5 years of training I eventually realised I still felt like I needed to get more muscle; it never ends because it’s driven by the subconscious. I then had a brief phase of learning how to ‘pick up’ girls – in fact the desire to get approval from women is even greater. Often, we can have many female friends and get on very well with women, sometimes even more than men. The desire to do so comes from a need to feel good enough.

My other method of improvement was knowledge. I based my self-worth on my intelligence and felt compelled to read, study, and pursue academic success. I was a straight A student and made sure to attend a good university, not for my future but to feel good enough. Obsessively accumulating knowledge is a way to hide and control feelings of inadequacy.

Some people get addicted to self-help books. Of course, improvement is a great thing – but it’s not good when it’s a coping mechanism for a deeper problem. In that situation it’s a flawed attempt to be happy and feel good enough; something which does not happen by improving.

The Glass Ceiling

This compulsive self-improvement is often contrasted by a cognitive glass ceiling – something which prevents you from ever being truly successful. You’ll have big dreams but not be reaching them. You’ll get in the way of your own success, and find ways of self-sabotaging because success draws too much potential for criticism. When you don’t feel good enough, you fear that you’re not truly worthy of success.

Typically, this subconscious sense of inadequacy makes you adept at looking just good enough. Good enough for other people to accept you, but not too good to invite unwanted attention and scrutiny. Mediocre. Big potential but not actually reaching it. You might be able to control your addictions – or at least hide them, you might have learned how to get over your neediness, you have probably found a way to look like you’re good enough, but that’s all. You can’t be truly successful and happy if you don’t feel good enough – it’s a glass ceiling holding you back.

Underachieving

This, obviously, leads to underachieving. For some, they give up before they even try. If they accepted the sense of inadequacy early on in life, typically starting from puberty, they end up living a degenerating life of spiralling downwards. They give up on getting good grades in school because they don’t feel worthy. They were never socially confident so they became less social and internalized that concept as if it were their place in life. They don’t aim for a good job or challenge themselves because they assume they’ll fail. They don’t make an effort in life because they feel like it’s not worth it. They don’t achieve good things because they don’t feel like that’s who they are.

Your sexual desires

Cuckolding is a way to find pleasure in feelings of inadequacy.

It’s not the only way to eroticize inadequacy; there are many. Inadequacy is eroticized in situations which either create a situation of inadequacy (in the submissive role), or the opposite – create a sense of superiority (in the dominant role). These situations are validating to someone with deep-seated inadequacy.

I made this website to help you overcome all of these things and heal them. By healing your subconscious inadequacy your fetish stops being arousing too – but that hardly matters when considering the greater affects that this has on your life. Although my website is aimed at people with this fetish, it’s really only like that to give you motivation to discover the deepest aspects of your psychology, and why you are the way you are. Most importantly, by understanding that there is a common cause for all of these things, you then have the motivation to turn your attention towards fixing it, changing not just your fetish but your life. I hope this has helped you. Don’t forget to check out my online course for more information.

Further reading:

Can Fetishes Even Be Changed?

Can Porn Cause A Cuckold Fetish?

False Fetish Theories (rant)

NoFap

The Link Between Cuckolding And Interracial

Porn Addiction

How To Change Any Fetish

Symptoms of Subconscious Inadequacy

What’s Wrong With Having A Fetish?

Why Is A Taboo A Turn-on?