All Episodes
Previous Next
July 3, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:55
311 Mother (Part 1) (From a listener email)
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Well, good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
This is take three, believe it or not, of exactly the same podcast topic I did.
The first take on Monday evening with Christina, and we had some technical issues in the car, so I re-recorded it yesterday, and then for the first time in three 120-odd podcasts, I accidentally erased a podcast.
So now it is take three.
So this is an email that I received from a very courageous listener who has courageously, and with courage, and with some bravery, has agreed to let me read the email.
With a full DNA string identifying characteristics set.
And then we are going to have a look at issues with the mom, and then issues with the girlfriend, which is the next podcast, 312.
So this is actually, gosh, July the 6th, but it's supposed to be July the 2nd, so we're time-traveling, I guess.
So here's the email.
And of course the email is about his mom.
So he writes, Ever since I've moved to Chicago, she's been unhappy with our relationship.
I never call enough or my communication in general is bad, and it may be.
She says we had such a close, loving relationship until I moved away, and now we have no relationship.
She keeps asking me why.
I asserted myself a little and she asked if I hated her, which surprised me, and I asked why she said that.
No real answer. I asked her about her relationship with her family, which didn't get far.
She's an awful family, but she still thinks there's something inherently good in family because it's home and they know you better than anyone else.
I could have really argued here, but I didn't.
She called me her child, and I told her I didn't consider myself her child, that I am an adult.
And she said, why are you picking on one little word?
A while ago I told her I was considering going to therapy, and on another call she said something like, you know, if you do they'll blame everything on me being overbearing and our relationship would be over.
I wish I had asked her if she thinks she did such a good job raising me.
Why she felt threatened by some stranger.
She also mentioned last night that, with tears in her voice, that she just worries about me and will always and wants to just be sure that I'm doing okay, and if I don't show more interest she'll just be forced to put me out of her mind so that she doesn't have to worry all the time.
I think this came out because I didn't budge an inch.
I wasn't as assertive as I could be with questioning the morality family, but I also didn't back down.
It did make me feel good.
She used a lot of family words, too, like mother, son, family.
Never my name, I don't think.
After she saw I wasn't budging, the conversation moved to other things, and it ended on an upside.
I don't understand why it's all my fault, and why you don't communicate enough or care about us anymore is all my fault.
I probably would be friends with her if she didn't have all this false sense of entitlement and treated me like a person and not a son or child.
Both my parents have done cool things in their lives and have a lot of information that they taught me.
I don't get why she's forcing me to force her out of my life.
Now, there's a lot to be said about that email, and now that I'm saying it for the third time, I think I can be relatively succinct.
Believe it or not, the last one I did on this clocked in at 55 minutes, but that was when traffic was slow.
I'm going to take the hyperspace private road between my work and my home today, and so we should be able to do it in a little around 30 minutes or so.
Now, the first thing that comes to mind when I have a look at this email is that there is a complaint, as he correctly identifies, on the part of his mother about the quality of their relationship.
You had a close, loving relationship, and now that you've moved away, she is no longer happy, she's complaining, she's whining, she's pretty passive-aggressive in this email about the quality of the relationship, and there's no ownership.
On her part whatsoever about the quality of this relationship.
And so the first thing is a generic thing, not specific to his mom, and something that...
I mean, this is something that people, sort of moms, have a tough time understanding if dads aren't around or in the picture or close to the moms.
Which is that, as a friend of mine's father once said, parenting is like you're pulling the arrow back in the bow, and the whole point of parenting is to let go and let the arrow fly into the world, not to sort of convulsively hug it to your chest and ask it to report back on its every arc through the air.
That parenting is to launch children into the world.
And once that job is done, as Dr.
Phil once said about his own son, he said, well, I assume that he's out in the world there somewhere, still alive, because, of course, they don't hear from him because he's left home, gone to college.
And so, yeah, the whole point is, you know, and you get together from time to time.
Your primary role as a parent is kind of done, right?
The whole point is to mentor someone so that they're independent of you, not to hang on to them as a primary relationship for the rest of your life.
But women, moms in particular, who have not...
Built the foundations for their old age in terms of getting a partner who's going to love them and be with them all the way through to the end.
Have a sort of claustrophobic need to hang on to their own children.
Because children is an unearned relationship for parents, right?
This is one of the things that makes that relationship so susceptible to corruption.
It's an unearned relationship.
You don't have to be a good person to be a mom or a dad.
You don't have to be a good person to have sex and have a baby.
It is a completely unearned relationship.
It's the ultimate union, right?
It's the union of two souls in both the sexual and the clothes-shop kind of sense.
So, you know, I didn't even have that joke in the last podcast, and that makes this whole number three on this topic absolutely and totally worthwhile.
For me, at least. Just kidding.
So, the fact that he's moved away and he's no longer as close to his mom is entirely to be expected and entirely healthy.
And she, of course, is taking it personally because she has personality traits that we'll get into just a little bit further.
And fundamentally, and I don't know if this is a male-female thing, I associate it a little bit more with women, but fundamentally, one of the issues that she's having...
Is that she believes that she is entitled to her son's time, energy, attention, money, whatever.
And if he doesn't provide it, then he is not paying a legitimate debt that she is owed.
And he's a bad person.
Now, I wish I could tell her this directly, but I doubt I ever will get a chance to.
But I'm going to say this as if she were here.
I'm going to say this.
Look, I hate to break it to you.
I really do, because I know it's going to come as a shock.
But your son owes you absolutely, completely, and totally nothing.
Your son owes you absolutely nothing.
You have no right to your son's time, energy, resources, attention, money, anything like that.
You have not one single solitary shred to a single solitary moment of that man's time, attention, resources, thoughts, calls, conversations.
You have a right to precisely squat And, conversely, of course, the son has a right to precisely squat over the mother's time.
And why? Because, my friends, relationships that have any value are voluntary.
This we know from the free market.
We're not happy with unions that are coerced by the state.
We are also not happy with family relations that are coerced through guilt and manipulation and so on.
So... This fine young man who has kindly agreed to let us examine and root around in his maternal relationship because we're all, to one degree or another, in exactly the same boat.
So I think this is going to be very helpful, which is why I asked him if I could do it and why I think it's worth a podcast on the topic.
Now, she tries, and you can sort of look at the tidal wave of the sort of sloshing back and forth of passive-aggressive tendencies, because she's unhappy with our relationship.
Now, if you're unhappy, his mom's unhappy with their relationship.
If you're unhappy...
With your relationship with anybody, it's absolutely not up to them to fix it.
Absolutely and completely and totally not up to them to fix it.
So picture the following scenario.
I stopped taking my clothes to a dry cleaner's.
Am I then to expect a call from my dry cleaner where he says something like this?
Well, I'm just not happy with our relationship these days.
You used to bring your dry cleaning to me all the time and now you just don't seem to care about me and my needs.
You just don't seem to care and you don't seem to want to bring your dry cleaning anymore.
And that really hurts me, and it makes me feel so sad, and I worry.
I mean, I'm not saying you have to bring me your dry cleaning.
All I want to know is, is your dry cleaning okay?
Is it okay? Is it safe?
Are you getting your dry cleaning done?
I'm worrying night and day.
I just want a phone call every day or two, or maybe even every three days, just to tell me, That your dry cleaning is being taken care of and so I don't have to worry about it.
And if you don't, you know, if you don't tell me what's going on with your dry cleaning and whether it's being taken care of and whether your colors are staying the same and whether or not your clothes are clean to your satisfaction, I don't know what I'm going to do.
I might just have to try and put you out of my mind and stop calling you.
Well, if I got a whole series of calls like that from my dry cleaners, frankly, it's called stalking.
And I would have a pretty strong talk with my local DRO, or go by in person and say, Dude, just because I brought you some dry cleaning for a while does not mean that you have a right to my time, energy, attention, or dry cleaning in the future.
And somebody, not me, of course, because I'm the victim and would be the victim in this situation, but somebody needs to say to my dry cleaner, look, if you want the guy to bring his dry cleaning to you, then maybe what you should do is offer him a free month of dry cleaning or cut your prices by 20% or phone him up and say, listen, did I do something?
I just want to check. I don't want to pressure you.
I just wanted to check. Did I do something to spoil your clothes?
Did they not get cleaned? Did something get ruined or shrink?
I just want to make sure that you didn't stop bringing me business because I did something wrong.
And if I then say, oh man, yes, did you ever do everything wrong?
You were the only dry cleaner in town.
I had to bring my stuff to you.
It always got wrecked. And half the time it was a mess and clothes were pressed with pleats when I didn't want pleats and they weren't pressed with pleats when I did want pleats and I just had to stagger through because you were the only dry cleaning in town so there's absolutely no chance that you're ever going to get my business now that I have options to go to another dry cleaner so thanks bud.
Well, that would be fine.
Now, if you said that and the guy said, oh, I'll give you free dry cleaning for a year or whatever, well, maybe you'd go back.
We're under new management. I'm going to change.
It was terrible and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Maybe. Of course, that would be up to you.
Now, I don't see why we expect our dry cleaners to provide value to us and not to simply nag us if we don't find that they provide value to us.
But we don't expect that from people who actually claim to love us.
I mean, it's bizarre when you really think about it that we expect more consideration for our needs from a freaking dry cleaner than we do from people who are in our lives and have been in our lives for decades and claim to love us to death.
Isn't that completely, utterly, and totally bizarre?
We expect more reciprocity from somebody who gets our coffee than we do from our own family in terms of value that it brings to us.
And we accept reciprocity Behavior that's stalky and depressing and claustrophobic and negative and manipulative and destructive from our family members and we would never accept that from somebody who came to install our cable or who wanted to sell us something on the street or who had a store.
Never in a million years. Now, the other thing that's very interesting, I think, is that this gentleman is thinking of going into therapy, which, given the mother that he had, God bless you, it's a terrible thing that you had to go through, I think, would make sense to me.
I think that would be a very wise thing to do, which we'll also dig into a little bit more on the next podcast.
And what does his mother say?
So he's saying, look, I need some therapy because I have some significant issues.
Does his mom say, oh my heavens?
I'm not going to pressure you.
It would really, really, I think, be helpful, and I'd like to help you in this.
The first thing I'm going to offer is, let me pay for your therapy.
I mean, I was your primary caregiver.
I was your primary coach.
I was the person who taught you how to live.
If you've got significant issues, I have a huge amount to do with that.
So, the first thing I'm going to say is, I'm really sorry.
The second thing I'm going to say is, let me pay for therapy.
And the third thing I'm going to say is, whatever you have to say to your therapist, just get it out.
If there's anything that I can do, if I can come to a session, if I can provide a written statement, if I can do anything to help.
And if you want to talk about it with me, I'm assuming you don't because you want to go to therapy and I can understand that.
If you do want to talk about it with me, you can lay it totally on the line and tell me everything that I've done that's hurt you because...
Obviously, I didn't do as great a job as I wanted, and I may have done a really bad job, and so if you want to talk to me about it, great.
If there's anything else I can do, at the very least, let me pay for therapy.
Of course, if you had a mom like that, you would need to go to therapy, but that would be one answer that your true self would recognize as, I think, a valid approach to trying to solve a problem.
But what does this gentleman's mom do?
She says, oh, well, he's just going to blame everything on me because I'm overbearing and our relationship will be over.
Well, that's not very helpful, is it?
Because it's all about her needs and what she prefers, and also, she knows exactly what any sensible therapist is going to say.
She knows exactly what any sensible therapist is going to say, which is, your relationship with your mom is destructive and claustrophobic, and yes, she's overbearing, she's manipulative, and you should not have anything to do with her.
She knows all of that, so what she's doing is she's mining the harbor to make it even harder for the therapist to get in.
So when the therapist says that, this guy is now going to hear his mom saying, oh, I knew that's what the therapist was going to say.
And they'll blame everything on me.
This is a very interesting use of the word blame, and a very predictable use of the word blame, of course.
It's not blame, you see, really, in the way that she's using it, if it's accurate.
So, if I punch you in the face, and then you press charges and I say, I knew you were going to blame me!
I knew you were going to blame me for punching you in the face!
It's like, well, but you did, right?
I mean, so if this gentleman has problems with women, and we'll talk about that next podcast because, again, it's a bearing of his soul.
If this gentleman has problems with his girlfriends around sort of manipulation and passive aggression and so on, then, yeah, I think it would be fairly safe to assign responsibility to the mom here.
And I know that the great temptation is for everyone to say, well, my mom did the best she could.
She came from a bad background herself.
She this, she that's the other. Well, I got to tell you, that's really not the case.
And I'll tell you why. If anybody were to ask your mom at any time in her adult life, tell me, Should you be a good person so that people love you, or should you bully them into wanting to spend time with you?
Would it be better if people wanted to spend time with you voluntarily, or should you bully people into spending time with you?
I bet you a million dollars that she would say, oh no, people should be with you because they love you.
Not because you're bullying them, right?
So she knows exactly the kind of parent she could have been.
She knows exactly the kind of woman that she could have been.
And she simply decided not to.
See, people have no choice when they have no standards that are different from the behavior that they are putting into place.
So, if someone comes up to me, I'm beating my kids, and someone comes up to me and says, is it better to beat your kids or to teach them through non-violent means?
And I say, no, it's absolutely universal and totally always better to beat your kids.
And if you ask me that question again, I'll pop you one.
Now, this is somebody who really doesn't have a choice because their highest values are in direct alignment with their actual behavior.
Now, if you go up to somebody beating their kids, and you say, is it better to beat your kids, or is it better to not beat your kids, if you can get the same effect through sort of behavior modification, and they say, well, it'd be better not to beat your kids.
Well, then, they have a value which says, I want to do this, but they end up doing the beating of the kids thing, and therefore they're totally responsible, because they have a value that contradicts it, and they're choosing not to figure out how to exercise that value, how to put that value into place and not beat their children.
Similarly, if your mother does all this claustrophobic, negative, passive-aggressive, manipulative, controlling, asphyxiating routine on you when you're on the phone with her, the question is, does she do it in company?
So, let's just say that you and your mom and a bunch of your mom's friends are over.
Is she going to have the same kind of conversation?
And you say, oh, I'm thinking of going into therapy.
I bet you should say, oh, that's very interesting, dear.
You should tell me more about it, or something like that.
Or she'd say, oh, we should talk about this later.
But she's not going to sit there and say, ah, the first thing they're going to do is blame me and our relationship is ended.
I bet you she's not going to do that.
And why? Because this is just for you.
This behavior is just for you.
If there is a chance of outside eyes seeing it, right, the whole question is, do you behave in the same way whether somebody is looking on who has authority over you or not?
So if you believe in beating on your kids and it's the best thing that you can do for them, then do you beat on your kids when there's a police officer around?
Do you beat on your kids when there's friends around?
Do you beat on your kids in front of their teacher?
Well, no. People always do it secretively, which means that they have values which contradict their actual behavior.
And so, this is how you know people are guilty.
I mean, when Rumsfeld is up there and people say, do you torture prisoners?
He says, no, we don't torture prisoners.
That's the absolute worst thing in the world.
We would never torture a prisoner.
When he knows damn well they are torturing prisoners, well, he's guilty, right?
But if he openly said, hell yeah, we torture them, here are the videotapes.
We got them right here.
We're not hiding a damn thing.
There's nothing to hide. This is the best thing ever.
I mean, if I'm buying a pen and somebody says, Oh yeah?
Well, what if I watch you buy a pen?
Well, fine. Okay. Watch me buy a pen.
Well, what if I publish videos of you buying a pen?
Okay. If you feel that's going to get your rocks off, go for it.
Well, that's an example of behavior that has integrity.
I don't care who watches me buy a pen.
But if you're doing something that's not going to see the light of day with those who have power over you, of which your children are not in that number, then, yeah, your mom's totally responsible for it.
So, that's a very interesting thing.
You can also see that as this gentleman becomes more assertive, his mother tends to back down more, right?
This is a very important thing, right?
So, your mom, well, this is the example of a bully, right?
This is what happens with a bully.
Now, if somebody gets aggressive with me, I don't tend to back down very much.
I might sideslip a little bit, but I really don't tend to back down very much.
And that's because I believe in what I'm doing, regardless of whether other people get shirty with me or not.
And so the question is when somebody backs down, when you become more assertive, then it really is an indication of particular bullying.
Now the other thing that she says, with tears in her voice, oh boy, we've all heard this sort of stuff from moms, right?
And maybe from dads too, but definitely from moms.
She just worries about me and always will worry about me.
Well, that's her issue, my friend.
That is absolutely her issue to deal with.
It's got absolutely nothing to do with you whatsoever.
I mean, if she was such a good mom, then why would she be worried about you all the time?
Right? I mean, she should have raised you to be self-sufficient and independent and able to think for yourself and take care of yourself and so on.
And if she didn't...
Then that's her issue, her problem.
She raised you badly, and the solution to her raising you badly is not for you to call her every day and say, Mom's still alive, haven't broken any bones, haven't opened any veins, only a few new tattoos, but basically we're still alive.
If she raised you badly, that's her issue to deal with.
It's got nothing to do with you whatsoever.
The famed parental worry is just complete nonsense.
Somebody says, oh, Steph, I'm so worried about you.
I can't imagine Christina calling me.
I haven't heard from you since 9 o'clock this morning.
Is everything okay? I'm so worried.
I'm like, well, what's that got to do with me?
I stub my toe.
That's my pain to deal with.
I don't phone other people, everyone around me, and say, I need you to come and rub my toe.
Rub my toe, it's painful.
And so if she's experiencing something negative, worry or whatever, then...
There's no external solution for that.
There's nothing you can do. That is, in fact, everything that you do to try and deal with her worry is just going to make her worry worse because it lets her avoid dealing with the real issues, which is guilt and the fear, the inevitable fear that you're going to figure this out and not want to have anything to do with her.
So, her worry has absolutely nothing to do with you at all.
It's not for you to manage.
Somebody phones me up and says, I'm really worried about you.
I'm like, well, thanks for telling me.
I don't really see what that has to do with me.
You're worried. That's your issue.
I just don't understand.
It's fine that you tell me, but I hope you don't expect me to do anything about it because I'm not going to.
And this thing too, this sort of vague threat is like, well, if you don't call me more, I'm going to just worry and worry and I'm going to go mad and I'm going to have to put you out of my mind.
Okay. Well, that would be one way of dealing with the worrying and at least your mom has control over that and it's not incumbent upon you to change your behavior to try and manage her emotions, which is never going to work anyway.
Now, he does start asking her a little bit about her own history and the morality of family.
She is using all of the mafia words, you know, mother, son, the family, and so on, and not the name.
And the basic thing is like, you don't communicate enough, says his mom.
You don't care about us anymore.
Now, the reason that that's manipulative, on many levels, one of the reasons that that's manipulative, is that if...
This gentleman did not care about his mother at all, then saying that he didn't care about his mother would cause no problems whatsoever.
No problems whatsoever.
Like, I genuinely don't care about some guy who works on a different floor of the office building.
I generally don't care about him.
So if he phones me up and he says, I just don't feel that you care about me, I'd be like, yeah, I don't.
Why would I? I mean, so the only reason that your mom is pulling this stuff out is because you do care about her and you don't want her to be hurt.
I understand the impulse and I applaud the sentiment, but boy oh boy, you've just got to stop that because it's really unhealthy.
And it's really self-destructive.
And if you don't stop it, you're going to continue to have the kind of problems we'll talk about in the next podcast vis-a-vis your girlfriend.
But if you genuinely don't care about someone, them saying, but you just don't care about me, it's like, well, no, I don't.
It's like somebody saying, well, you didn't go and see that movie.
It's like, no, I didn't. So she's assuming that you do care about her, and then she's manipulating you.
She's manipulating your virtue, your capacity, your empathy, your sympathy for her.
She's manipulating it into making you And talk to her.
Or making you not want to talk to her because she knows you don't want to talk to her.
But rather than trying to up the value that she's providing to you so that you want to talk to her, she's just going to talk to you as if you don't care.
And the only reason that that's going to change your behavior is because you do care.
And she completely knows that.
These are not accidental things that come out of your mom's mouth, right?
She knows you care.
She knows that you are a kind person and that you're susceptible to this kind of manipulation.
So frankly, she slides the shiv in where the armor is the weakest, and she knows that completely and totally.
So saying that you don't care about her is a complete lie, and she knows it, but it's what she says to force you to knuckle under and to do what she wants, which is a whole lot easier for her than doing self-examination and figuring out why it is that you don't want to talk to her.
Now, the last major issue that we should talk about, I think, with regards to this email, is that he says, I probably would be friends with her if she didn't have all of this false sense of entitlement and treated me like a person rather than a son or a child and blah blah blah.
Well, I've just got to tell you, and I'm sure it's not too much of a shock deep down, you really don't have that option.
You really don't have the option...
To pick and choose the characteristics of those around you.
You really, really, really don't.
Your mom is a package deal.
You don't get to say, well, she's got cool bits about her, and if I could just get rid of the narcissistic, bullying, manipulative, destructive, controlling, overbearing, claustrophobic side of her, boy, we'd have a lot of fun.
Well, this is a package deal.
When somebody becomes corrupted, as your mom obviously is, and I would say irretrievably so, because she's obviously done this sort of stuff throughout your entire childhood, and therefore she's done quite a bit of harm to a child, and you can never survive doing harm to a child.
That's just not possible to survive, at least in nobody that I've ever known or talked to about this kind of stuff.
And so... If you think that you can get some good bits in your mom and get rid of all the bad bits, I would say that that's like saying that, oh, okay, I've got lung cancer, and if I could just breathe with the good parts of my lungs and just ignore the bad parts of my lungs, then everything's going to be fine.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no, you don't get that option.
If poison is mixed in with your soup and stirred around and blended in perfectly, you don't get a chance to sip the soup and say, well, I'm just going to drink the good parts of the soup and I'm not going to drink the poison.
People are packaged deals.
You don't get to pick and choose.
And look, there may be somebody out there who can help your mom.
There may be somebody out there who can help reach through to your mom's true self if there's any possibility of that occurring anymore, which I doubt.
There may be somebody out there who can help your mom, but friend, you are not that person.
Children can never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever help their parents as far as self-growth goes.
Absolutely and completely and totally impossible.
A rapist May be cured of the impulse to rape at some point.
Somebody might come along who can help save a rapist, but I'll tell you this, it's not someone he raped.
That victim will never be able to help that person deal with rape.
Because when a rape victim comes along, all of these defenses and justifications and bullying impulses get kicked up in the soul of the rapist, so the victim can never help him.
The victim can never help the abuser in any way, shape, or form, in any universe, past, present, or future, no comprende possibilite, no possibility whatsoever, that the victim will ever be able to help the abuser, because the presence of the victim provokes all of the worst habits of the abuser.
It's why we have therapists.
It's why families can't help each other.
It's why brothers can never help each other.
It's why families and parents and children and the whole damn mix of your close and extended family can never do a single solitary goddamn thing to help each other.
Friends, maybe.
Therapists? I think so, if you get a good therapist.
Family? Thank you for trying the impossible growth scenario.
Never try again.
It's completely impossible.
So, with that perhaps sort of squared away in a way that hopefully isn't too subjective-making, that hopefully can give you a sense of just how impossible it is for you to think that you can do anything to affect the behavior of your mom.
And she knows that. And she knows that.
And you know that deep down as well.
So you're concerned about asking her more about her family, about asking her whether she thought she did a good job raising you, because you're going to get the same bullshit back that parents always say.
I did the best that I could.
Did I make mistakes? Sure.
Am I perfect? No.
Did I do a good job?
Yes. Did I do a perfect job?
No. Or you're going to get a, oh, I did such a bad job.
I was such a bad mother. Hold me.
Right? Whatever it's going to be, I guarantee you, it's going to be about her and not about you.
Because the real fact of the matter is, my friend, you have no relationship with your mom.
You have, at the moment, and you will never be able to change this, you have no relationship with your mom whatsoever.
You are serving her narcissistic insecurity by hovering around, but she has no idea who you are as an individual.
She has no idea what motivates you.
She has no idea what you love and what you hate and why.
She has no idea who your favorite authors are, what your favorite music is.
She has no idea about who you are as an individual, because she's a narcissist.
It's absolutely completely impossible that she would have any kind of idea.
Of who you would be as an individual, independent of her needs.
She sees you as someone who just can plug up her holes, pick her up when she falls down.
You're just some shadowy force in her life that she can turn to to manipulate and control so that she can feel a little bit better or a little less worse for a short amount of time.
You're just a drug. You're just a utility.
There's no independent existence for you in her mind whatsoever.
I completely guarantee that. So, the question is, of course, what to do.
We'll sort of end up with that.
There's more to say about this email, but I think you sort of get the idea.
And if this gentleman doesn't mind, I'll post it anonymously, and you can sort of read it over yourself, but there's a lot, I think, to understand.
Well, the question is what to do. Well, if I were in this gentleman's position, this is what I would do.
I'd sit down with my mom face-to-face, and I'd say, no, I would sit down with my mom face-to-face.
And I would say, as I have in my own life, I would say something like the following.
I've got to tell you, this is not working for me.
This relationship is not pleasurable for me.
I know because when your name comes up on the call display, I don't feel good.
I don't feel like, yay, I get to talk to my mom.
I feel like, should I take the call?
Should I not take the call?
I guess I might as well get it over with.
I don't feel good.
I don't feel good about that as any kind of relationship in my life.
And I can tell you where things are going to go.
If we continue down this road.
We'll stagger along for another little while.
A couple of months, a couple of years maybe.
But eventually it's going to be over.
And it's going to be over and it's going to be unrecoverable.
So, this is what I'm going to do.
You can do whatever you like, but this is what I'm going to do to try and save this situation.
Because I would prefer to have a relationship with you rather than not have a relationship with you, but I simply cannot have a relationship with you under the current way that you interact with me.
Let's just say the way that we interact, if you want to put it that way.
So this is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to take six months or more off from this relationship as a way of trying to take the pressure off while I deal with the issues so that I can come back sort of tanned, fit and relaxed and have a more positive and productive relationship with you in the future if that's possible.
But I'm, of course, only one variable in the equation, and I'm not even the major variable because you're the parent, right?
You always have the authority.
20 years of you being in charge, so you are much more of a variable in this equation than I am.
And I know you want to blame me, but just hang on while I finish this, and then you can tell me what you think.
I absolutely guarantee you that if you don't also go to therapy, we will never have a relationship.
Not because I'm a mean guy and so on, but just because I'm not here to serve you any more than you're here to serve me.
If I'm not getting pleasure out of a relationship, if I'm not enjoying it, then I'm not going to do it, because life is short.
And also because I want to have a happy relationship with a girlfriend, and I'm not going to get a chance to do that if I'm getting rubbed raw by dysfunctional relationships with you all the time, or dysfunctional interactions.
So, I can absolutely guarantee you that if you don't go to therapy, and you expect me to go off to therapy, and get everything fixed and come back, everything's going to be hunky-dory, then that's not going to work.
That's not going to work at all.
You are the major variable in this equation.
You're the mom. Sorry to tell you, but you're the boss.
And you have been the boss. And to some degree for the rest of my life you always will be the boss because you can't get rid of 20 years of first impressions.
So you absolutely need to go to therapy and you need to figure out a better way to deal with me.
I absolutely need to go to therapy so that I can figure out better ways to deal with myself and to some degree better ways to deal with you as well.
Now, I'm going to take the six months whether you like it or not, and it may be closer to a year.
I don't know because I haven't started therapy yet, so I can't really tell how long it's going to take.
You need to go into therapy.
If you want to have a relationship with me, you need to go into therapy and you need to start dealing with these issues as well.
And if you do that, and I do that, and we reconnect in 6 to 12 months, then we might have a chance to have some kind of relationship if we both work hard at it.
And if we find that we enjoy it, that it's fun, that it's a good thing, that it's worth it, right?
That overall the net thing is positive.
Because right now I just feel like I'm going to a crappy job and not getting paid.
So, there's really nothing in it for me that's fun and enjoyable, and there's a couple of laughs here and there, but it doesn't add up to a font and a windstorm relative to the problems that I'm having, or the unhappiness that I'm facing in this relationship.
So, you need to go to therapy.
I am definitely going to go to therapy.
You don't have to go to therapy, although I'm going to go for sure, but if you don't, then the 6-12 month thing is never going to end, because I'm fully aware that if I go to therapy, And I'm trying to sort of deal with all of these issues, and you end up calling me and I get to feel frustrated and bullied and depressed and all this, that and the other, then I'm just going to get set back, right?
I'm going to get set back. It's like me trying to go into physical rehab and then hitting myself, my knee with a ball-peen hammer every time I come back from working it out.
It's just going to make it worse and worse and worse.
So I absolutely need the time.
You can take a couple of days to think about it, obviously.
And you can just email me.
I'm definitely going to take the time, which I need to take in order to get myself sorted out.
And you can send me an email with your decision and let me know if you're going to go into therapy and who your therapist is, just out of curiosity.
And then you can keep me emailed very short about progress that you're making and so on.
Just stuff about you, not stuff about us.
And that might be helpful.
But if you don't do that, I mean, if you don't give me a therapist's name and don't give me a progress, then I'm simply going to assume that you decided not to go to therapy and that I, as a son, am not worth you going to therapy.
And that tells me pretty much everything I need to know about how valuable I am to you in this relationship.
And so I had that conversation with people before I broke with them, and nobody took me up on my offer.
I went to therapy, and thank heavens that I did, because it led me to Christina and a beautiful, wonderful life that I have now.
But nobody took me up on the offer of going to therapy in a mutual fashion, not obviously to the same therapist, but any of that sort of stuff.
And of course my mom just freaked out and screamed at me, and my brother didn't.
He said, oh, I took some therapy when I was in my 20s, I'm done with it, I don't need it, blah, blah, blah.
And...
So the problem, of course, is that this probably will be the end, but what you do at least is buy yourself 6 to 12 months of breathing space, and you also do get to find out the degree to which people are willing to compromise with you in relationships, right? Are they willing to listen to you and say, yeah, okay, if this is what is going to save our relationship, I'm going to go into therapy.
Like if Christina came to me tomorrow and said, you need to go into therapy or I'm going to divorce you, I'd be like, sign me up.
I'm all over it. What can I do?
And so you need to find out to what degree your wishes are important to people in relationships.
And if they're not willing to go into therapy to save their relationship with you, that's all you need to know.
That you never were that important.
That you're simply a prop to their own misery.
That you're just a shadowy margo in a narcissistic playpen.
And you need to recognize the truth of that.
And the best way to recognize the truth of that, of course, is simply to say, if you do this, then we have a chance.
And if you don't go into therapy, we don't.
But that would be my approach.
And then just take that 6 to 12 months at a bare minimum and say, of course, that you will get back in touch with your mom when you feel ready to, assuming, of course, that she's in therapy and so on.
And from there, you have yourself some breathing room and you can sort of work on your girlfriend issues.
You can go to therapy without constantly getting re-provoked.
And that would be my suggestion about the best way to approach this.
And the reason that I'm saying all this, of course, is because you're not the only person in this situation.
So I hope that's helpful. Thank you again so much to the listener who very kindly donated his heart and soul for general overview and analysis, which is a brave thing to do.
A very brave thing to do.
And so thank you so much for listening.
I look forward to donations. Sign up for FeedBurner, blah, blah, blah.
You know the routine. Talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection