How Domineering Mothers & Weak Fathers Make Beta Males

How domineering mothers & weak fathers make beta males who learn to be alpha.

In this video coaching newsletter I discuss an email from a viewer who realizes how much his domineering mother and beta male father caused him to act weak and make poor choices. He’s starting to recognize the wisdom in loving your family, but choosing your peers. He’s also noticed how his friends have the same family dynamic that creates roadblocks to reaching your full potential.

My comments are in bold italics like this below in the body of his email.

So this particular email is from a viewer. And he’s been following my work for a bit. He’s 35 and he kind of come to the realization, obviously, like I did when I was younger, because I had a domineering mother and my dad was very passive and kind of beta and let my mom kind of run things, that how it affected him in a negative way. His mother also, like when he was dating somebody, that was the best relationship he’d ever had. She was constantly trashing her and, and talking trash about her, even though because he kept a clear head, he’s vetting her properly. And the time of day were together. He didn’t really see any downside, any bad behavior, but because he listened to his mother eventually kind of sabotaged it and they broke up. And he’s kind of noticed just her mom’s attitude, like towards things he wanted to do. And what he’s kind of starting to realize is that when we’re growing up, it’s like our parents put all of their fears, their doubts, their insecurities, their model of the world, their business philosophy, their life philosophy into their children. And if your parents have a model of the world that doesn’t really serve them, that has convinced them that they’re less than they really are, well, they’re going to teach that to their kids. Just like if you’re trying to build a successful business and you’re surrounded by people, friends, family, maybe that tried starting a business one time and it failed. Well, if you start getting business advice from them, they’re typically going to give you their model that’s based on failure. And so if they didn’t succeed, they’re certainly going to have a really hard time encouraging you to succeed or having a positive word. And one of the things I learned many years ago from Tony Robbins, which I thought was so brilliant, it’s simple, but it’s brilliant. He said, “love your family, but choose your peers.” Because this guy’s also kind of noticed that a lot of his friends are the same way. They had domineering mothers, and how it’s negatively impact them and their ability to reach their full potential. Me personally, my spiritual beliefs, the way I look at things, I believe we choose our parents that we know we’re getting ourselves into. And so the way I would approach something like this is that you can’t fix anything unless you become aware of what the issue is, and then you accept it, and then you can change it and recognize that you know what? Despite the fact your parents are screwed up, they were doing the best they could with where they were at, and ultimately, they were trying to protect you, even if they’re imprinting their limited view or their limited way of thinking onto you. And that’s part of as you grow up, is to grow beyond that and to overcome that. So you can fix that in your bloodline, so to speak. So your kids, the people, the kids in your family, you can help them get beyond that.

Viewer Email:

Hi Corey,

I hope this message finds you well. I have sort of a unique topic for you to cover.

Everybody seems to think their case is unique, but I’ve talked about this over the last 20 years off and on. And you know, it’s why it’s good to read Mastering Yourself as well about aligning your life with your true calling, reaching your full potential. Because really getting anywhere from where you are to where you want to be is you got to have the right mindset. You’ve got to have an empowering mindset. When things go sideways, you’ve got to have an optimistic view about, “OK well, what’s good about this? What can I learn from this failure? What can I do differently?” Like Henry Ford said, “Failure really is just the opportunity to begin.” Again, but more intelligently, because obviously when you fail, you learn what doesn’t work. And the more you learn what doesn’t work and you start to kind of see things that kind of work and do work eventually, as you keep changing your approach, eventually you kind of figure it out. But if you have a limiting belief and a limited view of what you’re capable of, you’ll talk yourself out of it and you’ll paint yourself into a mental corner, so to speak.

Kind of like when guys look at women and the women are attracted to them, but deep down they don’t believe they deserve it. And so they’ll literally talk the woman out of dating, sleeping with them, having a relationship without really realizing how they look at the world and how they view things and the meanings that they give it influence where they end up in life. And so like when I’m doing phone sessions with guys and they start talking and they’re explaining the situation, their model of the world comes out and how they view themselves. And if they are saying something or viewing themselves or they have a belief in the discussion that is limiting, I’ll point that out to them. “Look how you’re talking about yourself. Look what you just said about yourself.” Because again, if you don’t think you’re possible and you believe that, and it’s kind of running around subconsciously and you presuppose things aren’t going to work out for you, you’re always going to be kind of doing things that are literally taking you away. You’re literally moving away from the things that you want in life.

So it’s important to recognize that and understand how your belief system affects what you do or what you fail to do to move your life forward.

I have sort of a unique topic for you to cover. And it’s about how listening to my parents too much, stunted my growth as a man.

Well, when you’re little, you think your parents know everything, and as you get older, you start to realize they actually don’t.

I’m a 35 year old man, and I unfortunately never realized until the past year or so, how listening to your parents’ advice (specifically my mother’s) could be so toxic and damaging to your entire livelihood.

Well again, how could your parents know any different? I mean, they’re going to teach you their model of the world, how they get through life. And oftentimes it’s not very empowering. And you have to recognize that. So you can, because once you recognize that, then you can look for a better strategy. And that’s really what self-help is all about, learning to manage the conversation that happens between your ears. Because you either motivate yourself to move forward, or you motivate yourself to make excuses and not take action.

I can confidently say that around the age of 50, my father became a total beta male which caused my mom to wear the pants in the family.

And she’ll move into her masculine and resent it. And usually they stop wearing makeup, they gain weight, they cut all their hair off. They kind of butch the hair basically, and bitch and complain and dad’s like, “I just don’t want to piss your mother off.” So he becomes a pleaser. He won’t stand up for himself. Mom’s not going to respect him. She’s going to condescend to him. And if you’ve got daughters, then the daughters learn that that’s how women are supposed to talk to men. And then you try to date those women. They don’t respect their father. They’re not going to respect you. So it’s important to date women that love, respect and admire their fathers. And when women have soft beta male fathers, they typically don’t. If they learn not to respect men, then they’re typically not going to respect you. Even when you try to set boundaries, they’ll try to walk all over you because they learn that that’s what you can do, because they watched their mother do it to their father their entire lives.

I believe this was due to my grandpa passing, my father hadn’t been the same since. As a result, my mother became “the warden” in the family, it’s fair to say she calls the majority of the shots. I want to give you some examples of how their opinions and advice (specifically my mother’s) had inflicted damage upon my decision making, as well as my life.

I want to say again, you’ve got to remember, because as I got older, I got in my 30s and started, that’s when I kind of realized that, “You know what? Mom and dad, as fucked up as things were, were just doing the best that they could with where they were at.” Again, when you believe you choose your own parents, it’s like, I chose this. I chose to get into it so I could have the experience of getting out of it. It’s the way I looked at it. So I looked at it as a gift. And when you look at it that way, then you really can look at your parents with love and compassion and not be triggered or butt-hurt or upset or helps you get over your mommy and your daddy issues. Basically, you stop blaming them for your problems or where you’re at. Because at the end of the day, they gave you a start, but it’s up to you to overcome it. And every parent deep down wants their kids to do better, to be happier, more successful, have more money, have more love in their life, just have more of what they didn’t or couldn’t experience themselves.

I want to start off by saying, I’m actually level 1 spectrum, so I’ve struggled with women and friendships up until the past 10 years or so, in which I discovered your work. I’m not necessarily a Chad Thundercock, but I do pull some hotties from time to time. Flashback to 2024. I land myself my first long term relationship which lasted for a little under 2 years. It was with a woman who I had known for the past 4 years from work. She was going thru a divorce, we connected, and the rest was history.

So you work together, you get to know each other. She’s taking she’s in a marriage, and at some point the marriage starts to come apart. She starts probably opening it up to them, telling them what’s going on. He’s just listening. Obviously he’s studying my work by then. She clearly liked him, and the more he listened, the more her attraction grew. And at some point, they started hanging out and having fun and hooking up.

To be fair, she had quite a few red flags. She was only 40 years old and was going thru her third divorce, which put her 100k in debt due to a child custody battle. The first couple of encounters she had with my family were OK. However, at some point I let it slip to my parents that she was actually going through her third divorce, and this is where things took a turn mentally for the worse for me.

I mean anybody, it’s like, she was 40 years old on her third divorce and was like, “Well, she doesn’t make good choices.” Or I mean, you look at Donald Trump, you can say, “Well, he’s married three times.” Well, it took him three times to get it right. And at the end of the day, Donald Trump wasn’t the one getting dumped. Unlike Aaron Rodgers. I mean, when you listen to him tell a story recently about how Danica Patrick was depressed and she basically stopped sleeping with him, he got back together trying to work it out. She still didn’t want to sleep with him. And, uh, what’s her name? The actress Shailene Woodley or whatever, he proposes to her. And she basically says, “Well, before we get married, I want to go fuck this guy, some other dude.” He’s like, “What?” So he’s proposing to a woman that wasn’t all in and he couldn’t tell. And so she stopped sleeping with him. And then he’s like, well, we got back together to try to work things out. And they still didn’t hook up. And she basically said, I don’t want to be with you anymore. So she left him.

So at the end of the day, if a woman’s always chasing you, she’s not getting rid of you. And Donald Trump was on a date with another woman, when he met Melania and he had a reputation for being a Playboy, she didn’t care. Big difference between Trump and Aaron Rodgers and how their women view them.

My parents sat me down with a very serious conversation, and told me to be very careful with her.

Which quite frankly, is good advice because they care about you. They are like, man, a woman’s 40, 3 divorces, kids, the whole nine yards. Like, do you really want that? And again, this was like 35. That’s when he’s having his first relationship. But hey, he was a late bloomer. I didn’t really master this stuff till I was in my early 30s anyways.

And that she was just using me, and that she’ll ruin my life if I get her pregnant. (Keep in mind I’m 35 with no family outside my parents, as if having a kid of my own will totally be the end of me!)

Well, you want to make sure you have kids with a good woman who’s easygoing, easy to get along with makes your dick hard. Not your life. Communicates good loves and respects your father. Obviously somebody is 40 going through a third divorce. I mean, if you want to have kids, how are you going to have kids with her? Especially because her window is really closing fast. So you got maybe five years, 2 or 3.

As someone who’s level 1 spectrum and a former momma’s boy, the conversation they had with me gave me acute paranoia and anxiety to a point where I was taking home used condoms and making sure to shower with her after sex to verify she wasn’t up to any trouble. I had dated her for one and a half years without any problems prior to this. The conversation my parents had with me, basically caused me to not trust her at all, and it really affected the dynamics and the vibes of our relationship.

Remember, no one will ever do or say anything to you that isn’t a direct reflection of how they feel about themselves in a moment. So again, your parents also gonna project their fears, their doubts, their insecurities. But the reality is, dude, you being 35, you should be dating women that are 10 or 15 years younger, especially if you want to have a family. That’s just, I mean, it takes guys longer to get their act together. Women, younger women love older men. They got their stuff together. So you’re just getting started. But a woman that’s 40 has only got a few years left to have kids.

I was questioning my own sanity, and had basically gone mad! One evening, when I had too much to drink with her, we got into an argument and I told her she’s “just using me”, which caused her to cry a lot.

Yeah, it’s not a nice thing to say.

And it strained our relationship and it wasn’t the same since. A few months later we ended. This was the only woman in my life that I can confidently say, had truly loved me deeply. She would show up to my work to surprise me, buy me 500 dollar watches that I never asked for etc. We’re on decent terms and I still hear from her occasionally, but I’m not writing you to talk about her specifically, it’s to talk about how stupid my parents are, and how stupid I am for letting them inject their idiocy into me.

Well, it happens with all of us, dude. Again, your parents are going to imprint their limiting beliefs and their fears and their doubts onto you. It’s just they cannot not do that. Your job as a child is to grow beyond that, to recognize it and overcome it so it no longer affects you or your future descendants. And the fact she’s buying a $500 watches, I assume they’re both making good money. So she’s not like a poor chick that doesn’t make any money. So that’s nice. You’re dealing with a woman that can hold down a stable job. I mean, she’s 40 years old. She should be growing up. She’s got kids. Probably doesn’t have a choice. Maybe some of her ex’s are kind of deadbeats. And so she has to kind of pay more, which in most cases it’s not. It’s usually the guy’s the big breadwinner. But beautiful women make plenty of stupid choices and marry guys that lie and cheat on them, or that just can’t get their shit together.

Here’s a couple of other examples of my parents’ lunacy. When I wanted to move out and live by myself, what did my mother say? “don’t do it, you’ll be very lonely, big mistake.”

Well, you know why your mom says that? It’s like she doesn’t want you to leave. I remember when I told my mom at 21 I’m moving out, she just got a look of just immense sadness and kind of fear in her eyes, and she didn’t like the fact that I was going to move out. And obviously she told me, I talked to my dad about it and she was really upset. And he’s like, “Well, honey, kids leave the nest.” So your mom’s whole purpose was taking care of you, and now you’re like, moving out. You’re going to be on your own and you don’t really need her anymore. It’s like, so women struggle with like, “What do I do with my life now? My kids are gone.” Especially when they’ve been a stay at home mom, never worked or didn’t work very much.

I did it, yes, I’m lonely sometimes but I’m fine. Career choices that I spoke with about with my parents that I wanted to do? “don’t do it, it’s a shitty career, you won’t like it.”

Again, that’s your parents’ view. So it’s important to do something that’s exciting and compelling to you. Unless, of course, it’s a stupid idea. And people do sometimes get stupid ideas. But if your parents really went for something and were disappointed, they don’t want you to be disappointed. And so that’s why they’re going to teach you their life strategy, their career strategies.

I wanted to learn a trade, instead I went to college for a job that will likely be replaced by AI over the next few years. 

Well, you can always buy stock in the AI companies.

When I told my mom I’m trying to get my abs back? She says, “Why would you want abs? that’s not what life is about.”

Well, what does that tell you? Your mom’s not into physical fitness. So why are you talking to somebody looking for support, about taking care of your body and physical fitness when they have zero interest in it themselves, they’re going to basically try to get you to be like them. So remember that because the more you get fitter and in shape and they stay fatter, the more it bothers them. So if they convince you to be out of shape like them, then they feel better. So this is always happening, not just your family, it’s people you meet, people you know,

At this point I’m just waiting for her to say. “Why would you want to be or look like Brad Pitt or Leonardo DiCaprio?” imagine the amount of mental gymnastics you have to do to say stuff like that.

Well, if you settled a lot in your life again, that’s your model of the world and you’re going to teach that to your kids.

There are thousands of examples like this in all my life, where my parents are just holding me down, and holding me back, and yes, it is all my fault.

Well, at the end of the day, you listened. What did the Buddha say? “When somebody gives you a gift and you do not accept the gift, to whom does the gift belong?” So if they want to give you your limited view of the world or, “Hey, don’t do that, that’s stupid. Hey, you’re going to hate that career,” but you have a burning desire to do it. Well, you should go do it because even if you fail, at least you did it on your terms. Or as Frank Sinatra said, “I did it my way.”

I’m just writing to let you know, that young men need to be aware that their own mothers tend to give the world’s worst advice when it comes to being a man.

Well, obviously, because especially most women that have been hurt by a weak man, they try. What they typically try to do is they’re pissed off at men. Well, I’m going to make my son so nice that he would never hurt a woman. He would never hurt a woman. In a way, I’ve been hurt by men in my life, my own father or her men that she’s been with or dated her husband or boyfriend. And unfortunately, what they do is they turn them into beta males that are too nice, too soft, too compliant. They go along to get along. They don’t stand up for themselves. They won’t put a woman in their place. They don’t want her to get upset. And then women are repulsed because they basically act like another chick. And there’s no sexual polarity. You get the, “Oh, there’s no chemistry, there’s no spark. You’re a great guy. But it’s not you. It’s me. I only think of you as a friend.”

When you see a 5 to 10-year-old kid in football, hockey or at the gym, 90% of the time it’s the father’s doing, not the mother’s.

Yeah, most of the time I would say that’s accurate because mom’s like, “Oh, I don’t want you to get hurt.”

In fact, I can confidently say that most mothers want their son’s to be total beta males.

It’s not that they’re trying to make them beta males. They want them to be nice so they don’t break girls hearts or treat them poorly, or make them feel uncomfortable, like the men in their lives who have failed them. But unfortunately, what it does, it does turn you into a beta male. That’s why I mean, you look at prison, 80% of the dudes that are in prison came from a single parent home raised by single moms. So when dad’s not around, what happens? The kids run wild and mom is too soft to stand up to the boys. She wants everybody to get along, and then they just run over her. And then kids join a gang or they end up in jail or worse, dead. Again. 80% of the dudes in prison were raised by single mothers. No dad was around.

They do not want their sons being Chad Thundercocks and sleeping with every woman in town.

They just don’t want their sons going around being a dick and breaking hearts. But again, they make guys too soft, too nice. We don’t want to be put in their place. They want to be dominated. Women want to be in a love story, and they need a man that’s strong enough to make the love story happen, romance them, sweep them off their feet, but also not take their shit and put them in their place when they get out of line.

I’ve even seen this with my friends’ moms, my own ex girlfriends and how they treat their kids as well. That’s a topic for another letter though.

When it comes to my parents, as the great late Obi Wan Kenobi said, “Who is the more foolish: the fool, or the fool who follows him?”

Bob 

That’s a good quote. So at the end of the day, I would say, “Bob, cut your mom and dad some fucking slack. They did the best they could with where they were at. “And if you kind of looked at it and kind of the spiritual light that I do, if you chose your parents, well you signed up for this journey. You knew what you were getting into. And obviously, if you’ve come across my work, you’re working in earnest to try to overcome those weaknesses, those fears, those doubts, those insecurities, so you can succeed in spite of the limiting beliefs and fears of your parents that they imprinted onto you. But I’ll tell you what, when you succeed, you’re doing really well. At some point they’ll say, “You know, I was wrong. You were right. Glad you didn’t listen to me. I’m so proud of you, I love you.” And that typically comes with age.

So again, cut your parents some slack. It was around your age, actually, like my early 30s when I kind of I realized that and it really helped my relationship with my dad. I just love my dad as he was. So it would be better. If you love them, doesn’t mean you have to spend all your time or you go to them for advice. But just understand if they’ve got a limited way of thinking and showing up in the world, it’s probably best not to ask them for advice on certain things, but it’s clear they love you and they care about you, and they’re trying to help you avoid getting hurt or getting your heart broken or being disappointed. But again, when your mom is the dominant essence in the family, it’s going to make you soft. It’s going to make you weak. And what’s the difference between a beta and alpha? The alpha is brave and courageous and goes after what he wants. The beta comes up with excuses, mentally paints himself into a corner. That girl would never go out with me. And so he doesn’t try. He doesn’t develop himself, doesn’t do the things he needs to do in order to reach his full potential. And every day we have a choice. As Edgar Casey said, “You have set before you each day, good and evil. Choose what ye shall serve.” That’s something to think about.

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