This Mens' Dating Coach Really Pissed Me Off

Schedule a Free Consultation: 
https://calendly.com/justinavictoria/phone-consultation

Client Reviews: 
https://www.justinavictoria.com/post/client-testimonials

How to Pleasure a Woman Like an Expert ($17): 
https://square.link/u/ZXrSSFap

Get my Solution for Erectile Dysfunction & Performance Anxiety ($250): https://justinavictoriavip.my.canva.site/erectdt

Free Resources: 
https://www.justinavictoria.com/post/free-resources

Learn More About Me: 
www.JustinaVictoria.com

In this episode, Justina Victoria calls out toxic dating advice that blames men for attracting “low quality women.” She breaks down why this kind of messaging is not only harmful, but completely misses the point. Attraction isn’t about fault — it’s about familiarity, nervous system wiring, and the unconscious patterns formed in childhood. Justina dives into how trauma, invalidated needs, and a lack of attunement growing up shape our adult relationships, motivation, and self-worth. This episode is a deep reminder that healing doesn’t come from shame — it comes from understanding the why behind our patterns, and reclaiming our power through compassion and nervous system repair.

Topics Covered:
The problem with labeling people as “low quality”

Why attraction is based on familiarity, not fault

How childhood programming shapes adult relationships

The role of subconscious patterns in dating

Why “discipline issues” are often trauma responses

The nervous system’s impact on motivation and achievement

The importance of attunement and co-regulation in early life

Learn more about my work here: www.JustinaVictoria.com

Schedule a free consult: https://calendly.com/justinavictoria/phone-consultation

Transcript

 Welcome to the So Hard podcast. I'm Justina Victoria. I'm a psychosexual expert for men and couples, which means that I help men with various issues like erectile dysfunction, performance anxiety, relationship, and dating issues and trauma. And I help couples to resolve conflict and increase their communication and understand how to identify and communicate their needs so that they can have.

A blissful, phenomenal, fulfilling, amazing relationship. So today I'm going to complain. Uh, there is just so much garbage in this industry on Instagram that it blows my ma my mind on a daily basis. And I came across this men's dating coach who posted this post that. Like genuinely pissed me off. This is, this is the post.

It says, if you attract low quality women, it's your fault. I have so many issues with that first sentence alone. Like if you attract low quality women, first of all, I didn't know that we were categorizing people into quality. Like you're a low quality human being. Like, what does that even mean? I, I, I, to me it's like humans are humans.

Like we're not putting people on a scale, right? We're either attracting people who are healthy for us or we're not. I. Right. So when I'm working with a client who's single, and we're, you know, we're, we're working on dating, what we're looking at is, okay, have you had, what were your previous relationships like?

And let's say his previous relationships were just not very healthy, right? They, they, they, you know, maybe it was poor communication or he wasn't getting his needs met, or he was with, you know, women who didn't treat him well or. The other way around, maybe he was kind of, you know, it was hard for him to commit, or he cheated, or he was cheated on or whatever.

Right. Um, we're not going, wow, you, you were with low quality women. We're going, oh wow. Like, those seem like super unhealthy dynamics. Like none of those dynamics allow you to thrive. So let's figure out why are you doing that in the first place? Like, why are you moving towards that? Right. What we find familiar, we typically find attractive.

That's pretty much baseline for us as human familiarity and attraction are usually one in the same. So the second part of this first sentence, which is It's your fault, well. I'm not really sure. That makes sense. Because if you grow up in a family that speaks Chinese and you just speak Chinese, right? As an adult, you don't know how to speak any other language.

You just speak Chinese. Is it your fault that you speak Chinese? Like, I don't know that it's your fault. I just think like that's just how you were trained. That's the environment that you grew up in. Right? So if you, if you watched. Your parents have unhealthy dynamics in their relationship. You grow up into an adult who only knows that.

So that's the only thing that you can seek out. The only thing you'll find familiar, the only thing you'll find attractive, it's all you know. So is it your fault? I, I don't know that I buy that. We're programmed in certain ways, and our programs 99% of the time evade our consciousness, right? Our conscious mind makes up 5% of our brain function.

The other, other 95% is subconscious functioning. So no, I don't think it's somebody's fault if. They keep finding themselves in unhealthy dynamics or unhealthy relationships with unhealthy women. And I don't, I even don't really go like to go that far into even say unhealthy women. Like there's a whole group of women that are unhealthy.

Yeah. There's some women out there that are a bit toxic. Just like there's a bit toxic men out there. Right. Um, people who are just kind of fucked when it comes to relating to. To each other, but majority of people, right? You could be acting pretty toxic in one relationship because the partner you have is just pressing those childhood buttons over and over and you're struggling, but you can get into another relationship with somebody else who doesn't do that.

And that side of you doesn't come out right. So I, I always see it as like contextual. It's like, it's always about the environment that we're in, the person that we're relating to this idea that there's just low quality women out there and it's your fault for attracting them is nonsense. And it really does piss me off because there are men out there who are trying to develop themselves and it's like this is more programming about how you're just an idiot, you're a loser, you're not good enough, it's your fault.

And it's just like, this is not what we need to heal to make a change in our lives. So she goes on to say, you attract what you are. So you attract low quality women, it's your fault. You attract what you are, which means you're, I guess you're low quality and what you think you deserve. If you are a low quality man, you'll attract low quality women like it.

It's, it's, I actually am speechless, like I'm actually speechless. The idea that you're calling somebody low quality is just insane to me. So I wanna get into, you know, she kind of goes on here and says, you know, oh, these men, they want a perfect woman, gorgeous, loyal, who cooks, cleans, and raises their children.

It would be very few and far between the men that I speak to anyway who act that way. Most men are like, yeah, I just want somebody who mutually loves me. Who puts in as much as I put in, right? She says, yet these same men lack discipline, have no clear goals, show no ambition, skip the gym, and make no effort to improve their income.

So the reason why this pisses me off is because that if you're a guy who. Is struggling with discipline and going to the gym and holding down a job or increasing your income. That is a product of your environment as a child, how you grew up as a child. So when we go into survival mode, meaning that the body is pumping out stress hormones, our brain function is altered, and our ability to achieve.

Our ability to make money, our ability to have relationships, our ability to go to the gym, have a routine, all this stuff is compromised because your physiology, your biology has shifted into a completely different zone of functioning. Brain and body aren't like, Hmm, okay, let's think about like self-actualization and enlightenment and achievement, and how can I make more money?

The brain is going, we are in danger. We are in danger. So when you grow up in an environment where very simply, or we'll take abuse, we'll take neglect, we'll take all of that out of it. Okay. Overt. Childhood trauma, take it out and let's just look at, you grew up in an environment where your feelings and needs were invalidated.

Often, that's all we need. That's all we need as children to put us into the stress response because it means that, right as children, attunement is the number one need that we have. We need to know that our parents are attuned to our feelings and our needs. That is what signals safety to our brains and nervous system.

And when we don't have that, even for just a minute, two minutes. Where our parent isn't responding to us, isn't mirroring us, isn't validating us, isn't meeting our needs. The brain and nervous system go uhoh. I am in danger of death. Remember, as a child, you cannot meet your own needs. You are completely and solely rely, reliant upon your tribe to keep you alive.

So attunement, which means that somebody understands what you need. Somebody validates your needs and feelings, right? They keep you safe. That is signaling safety to our system. The second our parents go into the stress response, they lose the connection to what's called our social engagement system. So essentially all the nerves in our face go dead.

So whether we're in sympathetic, which is fight or flight, or uh, dorsal, which is. Depression. These are very simplified ways of looking at these states, but, um, we lose nerve, the, the function of our nerve endings in our face. So therefore, we cannot mirror somebody. We can't look at somebody and connect with them.

Our nervous systems are meant to connect with each other through what's called co-regulation. So when that doesn't happen, the child's nervous system starts to signal danger and threat to its ability to stay alive. So if you grew up in an environment very simply, right? Again, taking all overt neglect and abuse out of it, where you had parents who were just stressed, maybe stressed about money, maybe stressed about their relationship, maybe they had a, a illness, maybe they had, you know, they were taking care of an dying parent or something, right?

They're going to find it very difficult to attune to their child and that child is going to live. In the stress response. And if that child is living in the stress response while their brain and nervous system are developing, you are going to have issues with very, very basic skills as an adult.

And that's why I have a really serious fucking issue, excuse my language with posts like this. Low quality woman, low quality man, it's all your fault, all this nonsense. It's like what? Like somebody was just trained to be in the stress response as a child and they find it harder than somebody who's regulated to.

Make a higher income, to have a routine to go to the gym to do basic tasks. They find it difficult and they don't know why, and that's all they've ever known.

So the goal is to educate people, not blame people, not shame people, not tell people that they're low quality. But to help people understand that basic tasks are not easy for everybody and it's not neurodivergence and all this, oh my God, like I'm exhausted. I really am exhausted from all the labels and the this and the that, and this personality disorder, and that person's a narcissist.

And it's just like everyone's just dysregulated and that's normal. When you're in the stress response, your brain function is altered. So. Let's just talk about executive functioning as an example. Okay? So prefrontal cortex, where your forehead is. Logical thinking, critical thinking, adult functioning brain is the last area of the brain to develop, right?

Because as children, we, we're not adults. We don't need that brain until we become adults, right? So that takes time to develop, and we'll talk about how that gets impeded as well, but. That part of the brain is what creates routine and, and simplicity and basic tasks. And, um, you know, having, being organized, being planned out, focus, critical thinking, right?

Imagination, invention, et cetera. Right? So somebody who's quote neurodivergent, their brain function is altered, why is their brain function altered? Just for fun, just because of genetics or something? No. I can tell you from personal experience, I grew up with A DHD. I don't have that anymore. I don't have problems with focus.

I don't have problems with hyperactivity. I feel totally balanced on a day-to-day basis, but as a child, my God, bouncing off the walls. Bouncing off the walls and um, and that hyperactivity is an over-functioning of the fight or flight system that is not normal functioning. That is not, oops, I have weird genes.

That is a system that is not being signaled safety and it's not signaling safety. So the body's pumping out stress hormones and stress hormones and stress hormones ramping the system up. Causing hyperactivity, when in reality the body's going, I'm running from a lion, I'm running from a lion, I'm running from a lion.

What do I do with this energy? But there's no lion. I dunno what's going on, la, la, la, right? You can have a dorsal activation. And have tons of stress hormones pumping out of your body. But in this state, the body's playing dead, right? It's already ran. It's already fought. It's not working. Sympathetic is not getting you back to safety.

So we just have one last ditched effort. Let's play dead. So if you're a person who grew up more on that end of the spectrum, like I have a client who, his family used to call him ior growing up. And, um, he never knew why. He just felt that that was more of his demeanor. But he's one of the most like positive like sunniest, like he has such a shine about him that I find it very funny.

'cause now that he understands his nervous system and he is gotten more regulated and he, he understands what he needs to stay balanced, right? He's not living in that state anymore. So these are not personality traits. This is not a function of being a low quality human being. This is not the neurodivergence, like these are all symptoms of a dysregulated nervous system, a nervous system that went into survival and childhood and did not come out.

So I wanna talk to you a little bit about ACE scores. And this is something that you, I, I personally don't hear a lot of, um, on Instagram or on YouTube. It, it's, it's kind of rare that people bring this up, but it's actually so important. So ACEs are adverse childhood experiences. And the way they kind of teach it is very, very basic and very overt, right?

If you were abused, neglected, or you had a parent that WA was mentally ill or had a substance abuse or was imprisoned or went through divorce, et cetera, um, you are going to, that's going to have an impact on your brain and nervous system development. And it's a predictor of like, what's going to happen to you as an adult the higher your ACE score, right?

So let's say you have more than one of those things. The higher, more intense the impact is going to be on you as an adult. Right now there's also covert a neglect and abuse. Most people do not know that, and they do not know how to identify that. Very simply, that's just having parents who are stressed out, like we, we talked about at the beginning of this, this episode.

Um, parents who are just stressed signal a lack of safety to their child. If your parent doesn't feel safe, they cannot communicate safety to your nervous system through co-regulation. This is one of the reasons why, you know, our nervous systems regulate off of each other. This is one of the reasons why the baby's crying.

We pick the baby up and we place it on our chest. Our chest is where what's called our ventral vagus lives. That is the branch of our vagus nerve that signals safety and produces elevated emotion. When that is online, other nervous systems can feel it. So we take a baby, baby has no capacity at all to regulate its own nervous system.

So you could have been a baby who grew up in the era of the cried out method I was, and instead of the parent picking up the child when it's distressed and placing it on, its ventral vagal. To signal safety to the baby, so the baby could downregulate their stress response. They would allow their children to cry and cry, and cry, and cry, and cry, and cry for hours.

This is so destructive to a developing brain and nervous system. It's utterly destructive. Children do not have the capacity to downregulate their own stress response.

They rely solely on their caregivers for that. So these are things that are not talked about in, you know, ACE scores. These are the covert neglects and abuses that we received as children that we don't even know. They're invisible to us. Right. You may not even know if your parents used the cried out method.

You may not even realize that your parents were stressed all the time and not signaling safety to you, right? Your parents may have invalidated in your ne needs and feelings and made that seem so normal, and you were the one that was at abnormal. There's something wrong with you that you act this way and you feel this way, and you need these things.

There's something wrong with you and you are thinking, oh, it's me. I'm just weird.

That is covert neglect and abuse. So a lot of us don't even know that we were neglected and abused because a lot of us do have loving parents, like we do have parents who care about us. And, and this is what I explained to a lot of clients is, you know, you may have, I use this example, like you may have had parents who, let's say they grew up starving, they had no food.

Right. And they were like, I'm never gonna let my children experience that. But they never learned the skills of food, right? Where do you get food? How do you buy food? Where do you get the money for food? Right? And this is a really exaggerated example, but they never learned the skills of how to feed themselves, how to cook food, et cetera, right?

They don't know anything about food 'cause they were never exposed to it. But they know that it's bad that they don't have food and they don't want their children to go up like that. So. They don't have any of the skills. They know their children need to eat, so they feed their children cardboard. Well, the children are eating something and they're filling their bellies with something, but that cardboard doesn't meet the need 'cause it has no caloric value, right?

There's no energy for us to digest from cardboard. The nervous system is very black and white. You're either meeting the need or you're not. There's no in between. There's no like, well, mom tried. Mom did better than she had as a child. Nervous system is not concerned with that. It's very basic. Am I getting my needs met or not right?

Are my needs for physical touch and safety and food and shelter and water and sleep and oxygen and light and belonging and love? Are those being met or not? So.

There is so much that can be done invisibly to our brain and nervous system as they're developing, and this is why so many people today have these mystery illnesses and autoimmune diseases are on the rise, right? Because the body is fighting itself and this is a function of being in the stress response all the time.

Where does that? Fighting energy go. 'cause we're not running or fighting, like we're not doing that. Like most of the time we're doing that to a thought in our head. A stress in our mind and a a made up worry that we're envisioning about our future. Worst case scenario, we're running and fighting from a thought all the time.

You can't run, you can't fight, you can't freeze. You can't play dead to a thought or a feeling. And these neuroses are created by lack of safety when we're developing as children. So coming back to the ACE score, right? The more ACEs you have, the higher your score is gonna be, and the more prone you are going to be to, to things like.

And being like one end, like I always say, two sides of the same coin, one end of the spectrum or the other, where it's like you can't hold a job at all. Like it is unbelievably difficult for you to just go to work or you're on the opposite end of the spectrum where you literally can't stop working. You have to be productive all the time.

You can't. You have to go, go, go. Do, do, do. Achieve, achieve, achieve. Um. That's very basic stuff, right? Not being able to take care of yourself. Not eating three meals a day, not drinking enough water. These are signs that we're really disconnected from our needs, like we're seriously disconnected from our survival needs, our vital needs.

The fact that we don't feel thirst. The fact that we don't feel hunger, or, again, opposite end of the spectrum. We eat and eat and eat and eat and binge can't stop eating.

Um, these are, these are results. And most people don't understand that. They just think like, oh, I'm just lazy. Oh, I'm a low quality human being. No, we just don't know 'cause we're not taught this. Each state of the nervous system when activated creates a different. Biological and physiological effect on the body.

It changes the brain function. S severely alters brain function. So when you're in sympathetic fight flight, you're going, there's certain areas of the brain that are gonna go into low power mode. There's other areas of the brain that's gonna take that blood and energy that was going to your adult logical thinking brain.

And it's gonna. It is gonna shunt it to the center of your brain where your emotion cent, your emotional center is, and your survival center is, and you're gonna do things and you're gonna say things that you didn't want to do, that you didn't mean to do. When you come back to regulated, to a regulated place, you're gonna go, oh my God, why did I do that?

Oh my God, why did I say that? I dunno what came over me. Why am I so impulsive? When you go into a dorsal activation and your body's playing dead well, yeah, your brain function's gonna slow down. Energy production, your cells is gonna slow down, and you're gonna have thoughts like, I'm such a failure. It's never gonna work.

I might as well give up. Sometimes you'll have thoughts like, I should kill myself. That's, believe it or not, that's normal thinking in a dorsal activation. You go really deep into dorsal. Yeah. That's where these symptoms of suicide and suicidal ideation come from. Dorsal activation.

Or you can be in functional freeze where both sympathetic and dorsal are online at the same time, and you just feel stuck. You can't make progress. There's no mode, like there's no momentum, like we feel like we're in quicksand frustration or lots and lots of people pleasing, being hyper-focused on someone or something else outside of ourselves.

So. As you can see, there's just so much around this, and that's why it pisses me off that somebody would create a post like this because this is not, our world is not black and white. It is not simple like this. It is not just you're a low quality person and it's your own fault for attracting low quality women, right?

It's like every human being is of equal value. There is no replacement. And I always tell clients this, when they're struggling with mattering or feeling that they have any inherent value, you are every human being is the most valuable thing that's ever existed because unlike something that we deem very rare and very valuable, like a diamond, there's trillions of diamonds.

Diamonds are not that rare or valuable.

But a single human being is the highest value thing that you can possibly ever encounter. There's only one. There's only one of you. And once you cease to exist, that is it. There is no copying it, recreating it, bringing it back. That's it. Every human is of the highest level of value and the most rare thing in the universe.

So to categorize people as high and low value is just, I think it's,

I just think it's gross. Um, and some people are gonna struggle because of the environment that they grew up in, and they're gonna struggle and they don't even know why they're struggling. You know, they don't even know why, because they don't, they don't even have overt neglect and abuse in their history, and they think their parents are their best friends and they had a great, happy childhood.

That was me. I thought I had a happy childhood.

So people need more compassion. They need to understand why basic things are difficult for them and easy for others, and that's my mission is to provide validation for people's needs and people's feelings

so they can. Get out of that internal prison that they've been in since they were children, and they can get regulated and they can get back to safety and they can get back to doing things or not even back. Just experience it for the first time. Like life can actually be easy. Life can be vibrant and fulfilling and easy and successful and enjoyable and effortless.

We have to turn that. Survival response off to, to make that happen. So is that's my rant today. I hope it was of some value to you, and I will see you in the next one.