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July 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
32:57
312 Girlfriend (Part 2) (From a listener email)

The cause and effect from mother to girlfriend

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Time Text
Good evening, Ed. Steph, hope you're doing well.
It's some damn time.
What? 9.45, July the 3rd, 2006.
And I just saw a film with a friend.
I'm not sure it's really worthy of a review, but it was a very enjoyable film, The Devil Wears Prada, where my friend was actually a fashion consultant on the movie.
No, I'm just kidding.
Boy, that would be a great, great joke if you actually knew my friend.
But anyway, so we'll continue on with this gentleman's email.
We did his mother, and now we're going to do his girlfriend.
And that's an interesting way of putting it.
But what we'll do is we'll say...
Okay, so he wrote an email and said, I'm sorry that I wasn't being very conversive over the phone,
and now I just feel restless and upset over it due to my extreme insecurities at all times, which only tends to get worse and ever better.
I can't tell if I'm crazy or spot-on anymore.
Lately I haven't been feeling that great at all, and I'm starting to question if there's anything good about me in general.
I'm not trying to give you a sad pity story, I mean that.
I just want to know if things are okay between us.
I feel like I always have bad timing when I call you, like you're busy doing something, sleeping or whatnot.
I don't mean that as a blame statement towards you.
I meant that as a blame towards me.
So that's why I haven't called you, because I don't want to bother you.
For all I know, you didn't want to talk to me anyway.
I guess if you did, you might have called me.
Now, I just assume that you're probably bored of me because I am boring and always being a Debbie Downer, and just not bringing enough fun to the table.
I miss seeing you, but I don't know if you feel the same way, whatever the case may be.
Don't feel like you have to spare my feelings, because I would like to think that we can be honest with each other.
I'm probably being a big shithead right now, so please don't get mad at me.
I just assume that everyone will get sick of me at some point.
I just need to give it some time.
Fuck, I'm totally sick of me." Sorry it is long, but I figured the original would have been better than a summary.
I feel, know, that this is passive aggression, but I don't know why or how to respond because I also feel that it's genuine.
What I want to tell her is that she has many issues that are interfering with my relationship with her, and she refuses to deal with them.
I've been very supportive, but I don't have the energy to deal with serious and sometimes scary psychological problems anymore.
I think that it is a fair thing to tell her, but I'm just not sure.
My mum called late last night and upset at our relationship.
I wasn't as firm as I could be, but I was definitely assertive.
I'm still processing it, but I do know I'm pretty pissed at some of the things she said.
Sorry to send you my personal issues.
I hope you don't mind. I really respected your observations about my girlfriend and mother in the past.
Yours... Guy.
Guy not being his name.
Now, I certainly appreciate the private email, and what better way to respect the private email than to broadcast it to the thousands of listeners, nay, the general tidal wave of populations that we're dealing with.
And so...
This is sort of what Christine and I were going to co-podcast, but she's feeling a little nappy, and there's just no better way for her, as for many people, to get to sleep than to listen to me do a podcast.
So, 99, and...
Here are my thoughts of the thoughts that we had about this email.
Very, very interesting email.
And you can really see the pattern, I think, in both of these particular things.
Now, it is, of course, a Freudian imperative that our relationship with our mother defines our relationship with our girlfriends or wives.
And I think that's true if we do not intervene, right?
I mean, the past is the future without intervention, and the intervention is key, right?
I mean, we don't have a choice unless we have knowledge, and we don't have knowledge without self-honesty, and it can be a very painful thing to do that or to be in that situation.
But without that, we have absolutely no control over altering our future and making it different from our past.
So, if you want tomorrow to be different from yesterday, then you have to understand today.
And that means understanding yesterday.
Okay, let's stop doing the time machine flip around and just start to get to the issues.
Now, this is, of course, quite surprising when you think about a love relationship, which we can assume that this is.
When you think about the fact that this couple has not spoken in weeks, this is quite unusual, and something that is really a little bit hard to understand.
To go a couple of weeks without talking to your lover is, I mean, unless they're Actually in a coma, or have disobeyed you in any way, is rather hard to understand.
And so I would say that that would certainly be an indication that something awry is going on.
Now, I think he's right in figuring out that this is a passive-aggressive situation, because the woman says to him, I don't mean to blame you.
Well, actually, she blames him, and then she says, but I don't mean to blame you.
And of course, it's classic passive-aggressive stuff.
You always seem too busy for me when I call, but I don't mean this to be a blame towards you or any kind of negative statement towards you.
Well, of course, it's really not a very loving thing, if you care for someone, to not be available for them when they call, or to say, I'm sorry, I'm busy sleeping, and so I don't want to talk to you.
That's not a very loving thing to do.
So when she says, and of course she's putting the blame onto him, Quite clearly when she's saying that, I don't mean to blame you, but the reason that I haven't called you is because you never seem to want to talk to me.
That's very much shifting the blame onto him and not taking responsibility.
I'll give you a different kind of example.
If she said, I didn't call you because every time I call you, you are a jerk to me, right?
I didn't call you because I've been really angry at you, right?
That would be a sort of more direct statement.
Of course, not calling is not a direct statement to begin with.
It's very oblique, right? You sort of have to sort of figure out what's going on, read between the lines.
So this is the kind of personality.
So something has gone wrong.
Something is upsetting her.
And so she doesn't call.
And then when he emails her to say, is everything alright?
Now, who does that sound like, sweetie?
Because we just did this in the last podcast.
Could you help me out? It reminds me of someone.
Mommy! Yes, of course, right?
This is what's happening.
So, if you look at these two parallels in these relationships, you have one situation where the son is not calling the mother, and then the mother is calling and saying, and isn't calling him on it, isn't saying, look, help me understand why you're not calling me.
Something's not right.
Something has gone awry between us, and I, you know, whatever it is, just talk to me about it.
Whatever it is, just let me know.
I would really, really appreciate that.
And if there's anything that I've done, oh heavens, just tell me.
I would be more than happy to listen and to try and make it right as best I can.
Or if I can't make it wrong, grovel in the dirt and apologize until I'm blue in the face.
There's ways to get people to call you if they're pissed off at you.
There's ways to get people to communicate with you if they're angry at you.
And so here we have a situation with the mother where the son is not calling.
Now he's not calling her and saying, listen mom, I don't want to talk to you for a while.
He's just not calling.
And the mother is then getting worried and asking him, are you okay?
And putting the onus on him about the relationship as a whole.
Now here we have a situation where the girlfriend isn't calling, or they're not calling each other, so then he sends her a one-line email, something like, are you okay?
And that is not an honest statement, in my opinion, on the part of the man.
If my girlfriend did not call me for a couple of weeks, I don't think I would call her and say, ooh, is everything okay?
Because that's not actually what I'm feeling.
What I'm feeling is that things are not okay.
Things are absolutely not okay.
And, of course, if she was in some kind of dire and desperate situation and chose not to call me, then things are definitely not okay.
And if she's not in any kind of dire and desperate situation and she's still choosing not to call me, then things are really definitely not okay.
So here you have two sort of parallel situations where somebody's not in contact with someone else and that someone else is then sending a message sort of saying, are you okay?
Is everything okay? I'm worried.
Is everything fine? All this kind of stuff.
And that's not a very honest interaction.
And it really does parallel the two, right?
You can sort of see how habits of interaction are replicated over the generations here.
Now, the two conversations that this man is having with his mother and with his girlfriend, and these are not accidental conversations.
There's nothing creepy about it.
There's nothing weird about it.
It's just learned patterns of behavior that replicate themselves across the generations.
What is happening is that the girlfriend is saying, well, you don't seem to want to talk to me, and that's the problem.
And the mother was saying, sorry, what was the mother saying?
I can't quite remember.
Was it similar?
You don't seem to want to talk to me, and that's the problem.
You don't want to seem to want to talk to me, and that's the problem.
Do you think that's coincidence? I never know with these things.
What do you think? See, this is where it's good to have a professional in the car rather than a rank-mouth-breathing, ranting amateur.
So we will turn to the expert who will tell us whether or not this is a coincidence.
Sweetie? Not a coincidence.
Not a coincidence, ladies and gentlemen.
We have it from the expert.
Is there anything you'd like to add to that?
Okay, well I guess I'll just keep going then, because Christina has been dazzled by an enormous and possibly ludicrous amount of Jimmy Choo's Chanel and Prada, and is actually quite incoherent for some time, and seems to have lost a good deal of her frontal lobes in the dazzling whites of Anne Hathaway's smile, the dazzling white hair of Meryl Streep's hair, and the dazzling pate of...
Stanley Tucci's forehead.
So there's lots of dazzling going on.
And I was only disappointed in the film in that the lingerie scene was too short for me.
But that's something we can talk about in another time.
But, of course, here we do have these two situations where this gentleman has these two women in his life who are complaining that he does not want to talk to them and implying that it's his fault, but only one of them, only the girlfriend, is but only one of them, only the girlfriend, is actually saying that it's not his fault.
The mother seems to be implying that it is fully his fault.
So, the real question is, and we can talk about the motivations of the women if we want, and depending on how traffic goes, we may end up doing that, and depending on how the battery on the computer goes, but the most important question that I have is, Dude, what are these women doing in your life to begin with?
I hate to sound harsh, but that's sort of the major question that I have.
The girlfriend in particular, obviously, obviously, obviously, is somebody with a bottomless, needy hole, somebody who does not love herself, somebody who does not act in an honest and open and firm manner with the people in her life.
Somebody who you can go weeks without talking and who then calls you up or sends you an email, an email even, an email.
An email is by far the worst, most horrendous, most dangerous, most destructive mechanism that can occur within relationships.
But I guess it could be said that emails have been kindly responsible for getting rid of more bad relationships than any other single factor.
And so I think that is a good thing.
And the reason for that is that emails sit there and burn their way into your retina.
They can be forwarded to people.
You can't pull them back.
And emails, my brother used to do this before emails.
He used to leave me notes, and my mother as well.
And that's just an evil way to communicate.
If you have something to say to someone, and it's important enough that it's not just, hey, are we meeting at 7 o'clock or 7.30, I can't remember, if it's not just a confirmatory note, if you have something that you really need to say to somebody, for God's sake, don't put it in an email.
That is the worst thing in the world, because it's very much also, it's a kind of narcissistic, one-sided communication.
Because you can't get interrupted.
The other person can't send anything back.
It always tends to escalate.
There's no capacity for back and forth.
You can't read the other person's voice or body language.
You're just throwing stuff out there that can't be responded to directly.
And this is why emails are difficult.
This is also why board conversations I do work, and other people on the boards work too, to make sure that they stay civil and positive, because it is a very dangerous form of communication.
There's no personal risk.
You can't read any body language, voice language.
So the fact that this email, which is a real, you know, there are fundamental issues with me and in this relationship, it's a really important thing not to send it by email, but this person is sending it by email.
And I bet you if the mother was better at email, she'd probably be doing it too, in which case we'd have two inboxes to deal with.
But the real question is, is this a relationship that's at all remotely possible?
That's sort of the first question.
And the second question is to go a little further and say, well, what is this person doing in your life to begin with?
Well, the woman says that she is sick of herself, that she doesn't like herself.
Now, my particular take on that is that She doesn't like herself because of what she writes in the email.
This is not a massive...
I mean, it is and it isn't.
A massive and deep-seated psychological issue.
It is, but it's triggered in this form of communication that she's taking, which is email.
And because she's doing all this passive-aggressive stuff in the email, like saying, well, I didn't call you because you don't ever seem to want to talk to me, and so on.
Because she can't resist that addiction of communicating in that kind of passive-aggressive way...
She becomes sick of herself in the course of the email.
In the course of the email.
And so my particular approach on this is to say, dude, if you care about this woman, if you don't care about this woman at all, then just blow her off, right?
I mean, let's just say you've had two dates, and you're one date, and she sends you something like this.
Just say, hey, you know, I'm busy with my right hand right now, and I'm not sure I can get involved in another relationship.
And if I do want to get involved in another relationship, then I'll use my My left hand and maybe a squirrel.
I don't know. I don't normally laugh at my own jokes, but Christina was almost nodding off.
Did you enjoy that one, CD? Are you proud about what I'm sending out over the internet?
Have you ever been more bursting with pride at this particular moment?
Can you see why I'm not on FM? Is that becoming relatively clear?
Anyway, so, where was I? Something to do with nuts?
I think it was.
I'm sorry. I shouldn't be laughing.
This is a relationship we're talking about.
But anyway. So if this was just something that wasn't getting going, then it wouldn't really make any sense to continue it.
You just blow the person off. It doesn't matter.
But assuming that this relationship is going on for a while, and I know sort of from first-hand knowledge that it has been going on for a while, then the really important question is, if you care about this woman, why are you still subjecting her to this way of behaving on her side?
On her side. Because this interaction is hurting her a lot more than it's hurting you.
Right? We can suffer harm and keep our souls.
We cannot do harm and keep our souls.
This is a very important thing.
It's far better to suffer harm than to do harm.
The people I know in my life who have suffered harm have emerged relatively unscathed.
The people who have done harm, I've not known a single one who's survived in terms of the true self.
Maybe it's possible. I just...
I mean, right now I'm sort of looking around me and seeing that...
The do-harm camp is batting zero for $100, so I wouldn't necessarily put a lot of money on it.
Now, in this kind of way of communicating, she's doing a lot of harm to you because she's not being honest.
Now, you're not being honest either, but you're not being destructively dishonest.
Now, your dishonesty is not to set up a meeting with her.
I can assume you guys are in the same city.
If not, you could do this over the phone.
It would well be worth going to wherever she is if you're not in the same city.
Your dishonesty with her is not phoning her up and saying, look, let's meet and you get together and you have dinner and you say, this is obviously not working out, there are problems here, I don't particularly feel that I'm able.
To deal with them, I think that you have issues that require vats of medication and possibly a team from Zurich.
So this is more than I can handle.
However nicely you want to put it, maybe a small team from Zurich and maybe just puddles of medicine.
There's lots of ways to sort of make it nicer.
But sort of sit down and say, because you're absolutely done with the relationship.
I totally get that from the email.
As soon as you're saying, well, I think she's being passive-aggressive and I think she has really scary issues and I think and I think and I think.
No, you don't think.
You know. You know that you're done with this relationship and you need to find an honest way and a manful way and an honorable way of getting this person into therapy.
If you care about this, I mean, if you're totally done, then just walk away.
You're certainly not here to solve anybody else's issues.
The longer that you stay in a relationship with this woman, the more you are going to tempt all the devils in the world for her to act badly, and the more you're going to imperil her soul, because she's a complete addict of passive aggression.
I'm not sure about your side of things.
I don't think so, because based on your posts on the board, you can be more direct.
And you have a good sense of humor, which goes a long way.
In my book, anyway. Or a bad sense of humor.
Either way, you enjoy my jokes, and that's all that matters to me.
So... We were praising me, weren't we, sweetie?
What we were just talking about?
The relationship. Someone else?
Who? No, I'm just kidding.
So, if you're in this relationship with this woman, she is going to be unable to resist the temptation to do all of this passive-aggressive stuff, to twist your mind, to skirt around the issue of breaking up.
And look, she's totally done with the relationship, too.
It's just neither of you guys are putting this bleating horse out of its misery.
And you've just got to do that.
I mean, I know it's tough.
I know you feel like you're stepping into a canyon when you make that final decision.
And it may take a couple of times to make it work.
But absolutely, you can't be in a relationship like this and have it go well.
You simply can't. If you guys can't have the honesty to be direct and honest with each other, and I know it's scary, and I know it can be a really difficult situation.
I know that you don't feel safe in doing it because of this passive aggression, both on her side and your side.
That's fine. I totally understand that.
You still have to do it.
You still have to do it if you want to live with integrity.
You don't have to do it if you don't want to live with integrity.
But the woman doesn't love herself.
The woman is unable to avoid passive-aggressive manipulation, which means that the longer she's in a relationship with you, the worse she's going to mistreat you, which means the worse and more in peril her own soul is going to become.
And that's not what you want for anyone that you've ever cared about.
If you have someone who only beats up you in a relationship physically, you've got to break up with that person, A, obviously to protect yourself, but B, if you care even one shred about that human being, you need to make sure that they're not in a situation where they're beating someone up, because that's going to destroy their soul.
So, you really have to, you know, for the sake of all that's good and holy in the world, you really have to, you know, put a bullet in this dying beast and let this woman become more free, because she has a lot of work to do herself.
I mean, Lord knows we all do, and I would say that you might want to look in the mirror this way as well, but...
For sure, she needs to get into the hands of a competent therapist, without a doubt.
She absolutely, totally and completely and utterly needs to get into the hands of a competent therapist.
You can't help her.
You can't even say, hey, let's be friends.
Like, don't take the weasel way out, right?
You guys can't be friends. You can't downgrade a relationship from a 10 to a 3.
It just doesn't work that way.
It doesn't work with the sexual jealousy of when she starts dating or you start dating.
Don't even take that easy road out because then she'll be calling you up with problems and you won't want to hear about those and then she'll feel betrayed again.
So don't even do that.
Just say, hey, toots.
And use the word toots. I find this is really helpful.
I'm just kidding. If you want to get killed, then do that.
But, sorry, sugar.
Sugar is good. It's a good way of putting it as well.
But just say that, you know, hey, we had a great run, but dames, it's done.
But yeah, and suggest strongly that she needs to see a counselor because if she doesn't love herself, if she's sick of herself, if she acts in a manner that's this passive-aggressive, She's good to know, but you cannot love anybody more than you love yourself.
And you can't be in a relationship and be loved any more than the person loves herself or himself.
Absolutely, completely, totally impossible.
It's like asking gravity to send a rock to the moon.
You simply can't have it happen.
To love anybody else, you have to love and respect yourself first.
She's going to be useless within a relationship.
She might have another ten relationships before she figures this out.
God forbid she has children before she figures this out.
The likelihood is there as well, though, because this is a woman who's got some real issues.
But the question which I sort of want to ask at the very end, and I can't answer this, although I probably will, but the question at the very end is, dude!
What were the signs that you could have noticed at the beginning of this relationship that might have been, might have been, just the vaguest conceivable possible clue that this woman was not a towering Eiffel Tower of mental health?
This would be a fairly important question to ask yourself because you, my friend, have a tendency And you have a tendency to be drawn towards broken women.
I know this, because until I was about seven, I had the same tendency as well.
But I outgrew it when I was very young.
Surprisingly young, because I did a lot of self-therapy with myself, and a hand puppet worked out beautifully.
But we can get into that another time.
Was there a squirrel involved?
No, that was puberty.
No, she didn't know me then, and she probably will disavow knowing me now.
But the question is, why are you drawn towards these broken women?
Well, I can tell you why, if you don't mind, I think that you're drawn towards these broken women.
I would suspect it's because you have a mother, well, who's broken.
So, you're not facing the anger and the manipulation that you feel as a healthy male towards a claustrophobic mother.
You're not feeling the healthy anger and control and manipulation and sickly over-feminization of that relationship.
You're not feeling the anger towards your mother that is the only defense against passive aggression is assertiveness, right?
Aggression doesn't work.
Aggression will not help you because then the passive aggressive will get hurt and wounded and you'll feel guilty.
Aggression does not work.
Passive aggression, in return, while fun, does not work.
Because you both end up in this soupy fog of not knowing who the hell is talking about what.
But assertiveness does work.
Now, it doesn't work in terms of curing passive aggression, unless you're a long-time therapist and the person's committed to changing.
But it does help get these people out of your life, right?
And that's sort of the primary purpose.
So, I want you to think back to when you saw this goddess of instability strolling across the dance floor What were the indications that she wasn't the healthiest estrogenical prodigy on the planet?
And try and figure out why that was comforting to you.
And I would suggest, as a possibility, I don't know, right?
But I would suggest as a possibility that the reason that it was comforting for you was that it felt very familiar.
And you preferred that familiarity because you have not dealt with the issues around your mother.
Now, you cannot deal with the issues around your mother with your mother.
This is the joy of passive-aggressive people.
You cannot deal with the issues around your mother with your mother, number one.
Because your mother's not going to change.
It's going to have an answer for everything.
It's going to twist you, and you can't control your parents.
They will always have the upper hand.
Twenty years of a lopsided power relationship can't be snapped away.
So you cannot deal with these issues with your mother, number one.
Number two, you can deal with these issues for me, but it's going to cost...
Ooh, how much money would we like right now?
The cost of our mortgage.
What is the cost of our mortgage?
Not just this month, but for what remains.
Well, you know, just send me an IM. We'll figure it out.
But... House out of water?
You don't get any walls.
And you need boundaries!
Yes, that's the bonding is boundaries.
And bondage is restriction.
Hey, we're back to the squirrel.
Anyway, so you need to deal with this with a therapist.
I don't know if you're in counseling or not, but please, as somebody who has had a few tricky interactions with my mother, just once, 1978, February the 12th, one afternoon, I went into therapy, took it for a couple of years, absolutely fantastic, emerged with it, dated my therapist for a while.
No, I'm kidding. But emerged from it, much healthier, much more robust, and got a great relationship out of it.
Christina's the prize for graduating from therapy.
And so absolutely get involved in therapy if you can possibly find any way to do it.
If you can't, you know, reading and automatic writing and homework and so on is not a bad thing to do, but it's just not the same.
And I would certainly suggest that you try and get involved with a female therapist in a way that's productive because that will help you denormalize what happened with your mother, right?
When we grow up with parents, our natural tendency is, like a gravity well, is to normalize whatever they're doing.
And we might roll our eyes and we might say, oh, my mother's like this and my mother's like that.
But fundamentally, we don't get how screwed up our relationship with our parents are until we really delve into our true self.
Because our true self just stands there, mouth agape, horrified at what happened to us when we were children.
And we then have all this nonsense in society about, oh, your mother and your father, and no matter what, we're family in that sort of mafia kind of way.
And we have to denormalize what happened to us as children, which means that we have to get in touch with our true self, and we have to, no matter what anybody says, no matter what society says, we've got to denormalize the corruption and manipulation that we experience as children.
And if we can do that...
Then we can start to build the kinds of relationships in our adult life that we can really only dream about now.
And of course, the relationship that I have now with the most wonderful woman in the world, sorry, maybe you can get the second, I have the first, is something that I kind of believed in when I was a kid.
Like when I was a kid, I was like, well, why would people fight?
Why would they not get along?
I mean, it's just easy. Just be nice to each other.
Be nice and be friendly and be cuddly and all that.
But it took me quite a long way of getting there.
And the fundamental thing that I had to do was completely and totally denormalize what happened to me as a kid.
And is there a good way of putting that?
I can't think of it other than denormalize.
Does that sort of make sense? I'm sorry, baby.
I didn't mean to wake you. I'm just kidding.
Denormalize? Is there another way?
Okay. So, yeah.
And denormalizing involves a lot of personal instability, right?
In the short run, right?
You get angry. You can't sleep.
You're pacing. I mean, because you're kind of working a kind of poison out of your system.
And the only way to do that is to say, hey, you know, I was really poisoned.
And... There's a certain amount of anger.
There's a certain amount of blame.
That recedes in time.
But fundamentally, you have to get angry at your mom.
You have to understand that this is a really shitty way to treat any human being, and particularly your child, who's vulnerable and helpless.
And no matter how old we get, we're always going to be over-controlled by our parents.
I mean, there's just no way to get around it.
You simply can't. I mean, I haven't seen my mom in seven years or so.
If I saw her down the street, walking down the street, I'd wet myself.
In fact, if I even see a woman who looks like...
Anyway, I won't get into all of that, but there's lots of laundry at our house.
Anyway, that's never going to change, but we really do need to denormalize it.
And then what we can do is we can begin to choose the kinds of relationships that we want rather than blindly photocopying our existing relationships.
And it may end up with you breaking with your mom.
I would consider that to be a high likelihood.
But so what?
I mean, that's fundamentally so what?
It's your life. It's your future.
Your mom's had her life.
She's made her choices.
She had her kids. She raised them the way that she saw fit or the way that served her narcissistic needs or whatever.
It's your life. It's your future that counts now.
It's your future that counts now.
And you need and you have the right to be able to design a future that is different than the one that you inherited, which you had no choice over.
No choice over who you were born unto.
And so, if you have this capacity, and I know that you do, to really examine your own heart, to recognize just how shitterly you were treated, and are being treated by the women in your life, and for the women, you could reverse the roles.
This isn't to bash the ladies, but...
If you understand how badly you're being treated, how not normal it is, even if everybody else is doing it, we know for a fact that human beings are capable of processing what is normal, even if everybody else is crazy.
And we know that because everybody in the Eastern Bloc was depressed all the time, even though everybody was supposed to be this happy communist.
We know what is normal in our heart of hearts.
We know what is corrupt and unpleasant and difficult and abusive in our heart of hearts.
So just get in touch with that old heart of hearts thing, which is great to do with a therapist and with other things that I've mentioned on the board, and dig up just how terrible it was to be treated the way that you were treated when you were a kid.
And don't make excuses. And don't cop out and say, well, they did cool things.
Well, they're different. They're a different generation.
They didn't know as much. They didn't know this.
Forget about all of that.
Get in touch with your true self.
Stop making excuses for people and then you won't have excuses for yourself and you will be able to design the kind of relationship that's going to bring you real joy.
Well, you don't go for weeks without talking to the person and then...
Email them one little email and get passive-aggressive bullshit coming back.
You will actually have a relationship that's glorious, that's happy, that makes you joyful, that makes you laugh, where you can't wait to talk to your partner and your partner can't wait for you to talk back to you.
It really is a true joy.
I wish that I could show people more about what it's like, but Christina won't let me turn the webcam on.
Because she's all square down with that kind of privacy thing.
Anyway, plus, you know...
Donations aren't too bad, so we don't need to go for that additional extra income.
But that's just my particular approach on how to look at these kinds of issues.
I hope that that's of some help, both to the gentleman who kindly wrote in and kindly allowed me to use his emails as fodder for helping other people.
I respect that, and I certainly appreciate that opportunity.
And come by Donate, do the FeedBurner thing, fill out your listener surveys, come by the board.
We have 157 members now, 56.
Which I'm very pleased about.
Thank you so much, and I will talk to you soon.
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