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July 10, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
35:24
324 Conflict Resolution Part 2 - History (Part 3 continues on podcast 341...)
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Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph. It is 8.33 on the 11th of July, 2006.
And what a beautiful morning it is up here in Canada.
Just glorious. It was all washed clean by the rain last night.
And it's just looking lovely up here.
And I hope you're doing well.
I'm having a light sleep at the moment because I am working on a really difficult problem and trying to find a good way to communicate it.
The problem is roughly...
Why is it that emotional violence tends to escalate?
I try not to take anything for granted.
I'm sure you're aware of this kind of methodology of mine, but I'm sort of curious why emotional violence or why violence tends to escalate.
And I'm not talking about the economic drivers.
I'm talking about the psychological drivers.
So, for Hitler, right?
Why did Hitler want to wage war on the world?
And then why, when he had achieved every single conceivable ambition that a homeless, penniless, kicked out of a painter's school bum could have achieved, right, to become Chancellor of Germany, one of the most...
Advanced and educated countries in Europe at the time.
Why can they never stop there?
I mean, that's a fascinating question for me.
Why is it that when this penniless guy gets his first real job in politics, why does he's like, wow, great, you know, I get to rant around making speeches, this is a pretty sweet life.
And so I'm going to stop here.
He has to be a sort of causal troublemaker at the periphery of things.
And then he goes higher and higher and higher.
Why does it always have to grow until this orgiastic self-destruction of the world?
Why is it that they continue?
Like, why, when Stalin has all of the control and all the loyalty of Russia, why the purchase when Mao has all of these things?
Why the Cultural Revolution?
Why is it always an expansion of violence?
I'm working on that problem. It's very tough.
For me, anyway. It could be just because I have a block, but it's very tough to work out.
I have an idea as to why it happens, but I don't have a good way of communicating it yet.
So, plug it away on that one.
So, when that is occurring for me, I tend to have interrupted sleep.
When I'm working on a difficult problem just because my unconscious...
And I'm a little more tired during the day because my unconscious is plugging away on solving the problem with, you know, hopefully a little guidance from the me that I know.
But it's a lot of activity and it is a very difficult thing to both sleep and relax at the same time as you're grinding your way through this problem.
It's been about... A week or two, I think.
It's certainly over a week. About ten days that I've been working on this.
And nothing yet.
So this is just...
It's a teaser.
You know, like that guy in the movie, In a Town, where...
You know, that guy in the movies who's got that deep voice.
The guy who does the movie previews.
That's this. It's a preview of when I eventually solve this problem.
What we might be talking about.
I think it's a very important thing to understand, though.
Now, when it comes...
To resolving conflicts in romantic relationships or in relationships, I guess I'd say, as a whole.
The other thing that I'd like to talk about today is awareness of the past, awareness of your own past.
Now, there's been a fairly good debate, a very good debate on whether or not you need to deal with the past on free domain radio boards, whether or not you need to deal with the past or whether you can simply sort of reprogram yourself in the present because the past is gone.
It didn't happen.
The only place that it lives is inside your mind.
So if you change your mind, can you erase, not erase the past, but can you not have to go back and deal with the past?
But can you simply change your mind about the present and the future?
I've not found that to be the case, although I certainly think that that's a worthwhile thing to remember.
And it is, of course, all occurring in the present, but...
I have found the past to be too unmovable to simply will it away or to simply change my mind about what happened because when you've got a lot of unprocessed emotional stuff, which occurs when you have trauma, you have unprocessed emotions.
Trauma, by its very definition, is an inability to process emotionally what is occurring to you.
Because if you can process it, then you're just sad.
Or you're angry.
It's where you have fight or flight that you can do neither.
So where your fight or flight mechanism is provoked and you can do neither, that's where you end up with trauma.
That's where you end up with splitting.
And so this is why it's particularly true in childhood where provocation is fairly constant for most people.
And fight or flight is impossible because you can't fight your parents and you can't leave the home.
So this is where emotional paralysis and depression and rage and all of this sort of stuff that messes you up in the present, that's where it all comes from.
And I don't think that you can go back and pretend that you didn't spend 15 odd years or 20 years in a fight or flight but can't fight or fly situation because that kind of hardwires itself into your head.
Now you can, in my view, you can alter that, but you have to first go and process all of the emotions that you couldn't process when you were a child.
And we sort of go into the why about that, at least from my perspective, another time.
But this question of whether you deal with your past or whether you just change your mind about the present, certainly changing your mind about the present is an essential step.
You have to denormalize your actions in the present.
You're yelling at your girlfriend or your husband.
You have to at some point say, this is wrong.
This is bad. This is not the way.
It's outrageous and inappropriate, as Dr.
Phil would say. You have to denormalize it.
You have to say that this is not the way to behave.
And there's a great bit in a play that I was in once, Chekhov's The Seagull.
Where there's a very volatile young artist who's screaming at a woman and an elderly doctor says, no, no, no, no, no, not the way.
And I just thought that was a great way of putting it, sort of simple, you know, but not the way, not the way to happiness, not the way to peace of mind, not the way to serenity, not the way to joy, not the way to love.
And so the first thing that I would say that is important for conflict resolution is an awareness of the past and the effect that the past has had on you so that you can differentiate between the past And the present.
The one thing that's very interesting about the unconscious is its independent sense of time.
As we get older, we always want to say, well, I'm too old to deal with my childhood.
I'm past that now.
It feels vaguely humiliating to go back.
It feels like you're going the wrong direction in life to go back into your past and try and figure things out.
It feels like it's a turnabout.
It's a U-turn back into history.
When you should be plowing up the mountain of the future and so on.
But the unconscious is not sensitive.
Particularly to time.
You can have incredibly vivid dreams about things that happened when you're two or three years old.
But see, the unconscious is the all-processor.
The unconscious holds everything in balance.
So when I say, or when somebody has also said on the show this Sunday...
It's not because I don't remember people's names.
You're all undifferentiated voices out there.
I'm just not sure if people want it to be repeated.
So that's sort of why I just say somebody.
But somebody on the call on Sunday...
said that they were examining their feelings when the call display came up on the telephone.
Do I feel happy or do I feel not so happy when the call display is mom calling, that kind of thing, dad calling, brother calling, sister calling, friend calling.
Do I feel good or do I feel not so good?
And if you think about that all processing of the unconscious, that's why you have to have awe and respect for the unconscious, the greatest force of nature that we have any kind of access to in any kind of direct way.
And if you look at everything that is being processed by the unconscious, absolutely astounding.
I mean, everybody sits on top of a genius.
Everybody is sitting on top of a genius in their unconscious.
I don't care how bright you are intellectually, your unconscious is a genius.
That's sort of my opinion.
And a lot of my sort of things of value that I have to say, a lot of it's unconscious.
But... Anyway, so this gentleman was saying, well, I see the call display.
Do I feel good or do I feel bad?
Well, he then experiences literally instantaneously.
Just think about everything that's happening.
Instantaneously, he feels a negative emotion.
I only mean negative in terms of experience.
They're all positive because they're trying to help you.
But a negative emotion...
In terms of, oh, it's my mother, I don't want to pick up the phone.
That's an incredible amount of process.
This guy was in his early 30s, if I remember rightly.
And so he had a 30-odd year relationship with his mother.
And look at what's happening, right?
The phone rings, and he looks at the call display, probably hoping it's not his mother.
And then he sees that it is his mother, and instantaneously, like almost without any break, he feels the feeling that...
And feelings have direct neuro...
Neurological manifestations, right?
You get hormones. Feelings are tweaks in the system.
It's why they can be so addictive to the false self when it manipulates them.
But feelings do change your physiology.
When you get angry, certain things happen.
When you feel love, you get endorphins.
When you fear, you get adrenaline.
Things actually happen in your body.
And so you just glance at a cold display.
Let's say you just were coming out of a sleep and you weren't dreading it with your mom.
You weren't thinking about it or expecting it.
But you just experienced that you sort of got out of bed.
Oh, who's calling? Where am I? Am I a toaster?
Am I a human being? Reboot, reboot.
And then you see the call display and it's like, oh.
There's a very funny bit in a film called Moonlighting by Norman Jewison where the woman wakes up her mother from asleep and the mother says, who's dead?
She lives in terror, right?
She's a matriarch, and so if she's being woken up at night, it's only got to be because somebody's died, right?
But if you think you're stumbling out of bed, you go to the phone, you see it's your mom, and you feel immediately whatever you feel.
Maybe it's joy. Yay, mom's calling.
Let's have a chat. Or maybe it's like, oh, really?
Again? Do we have to go through this again?
I don't want to talk to her.
I just talked to her a week ago.
I don't have anything to say.
And the whole history of your relationship is processed by your unconscious, which provides you the feeling which is supposed to help you.
The feeling is supposed to help you.
This life isn't that complicated.
If you look at the phone and don't feel like picking it up, then don't pick it up.
Not to be overly media guy, but I've watched a couple of three and a half men recently, and in one of them he ends up with a girlfriend that he blew off, or a girl that he slept with and blew off.
And she says, why didn't you ever call me back?
And she's really angry at him, right?
And he's like, why would anyone want to have this conversation?
Although the character is pretty shallow and so on.
I mean, there is a simplicity to that, right?
Why didn't you ever call me back?
He's really mean. Why would anyone want to have this conversation?
Because he knows that this is how it's going to go, and this is somebody who is a little bit in charge of his unconscious.
And by the way, okay, I'm just going to surrender to the tangents because I am a little tired, and that's when the tangent monkeys run my brain.
Tangent monkeys run my brain.
Yes. We haven't had a good name for a band in a while, but I can see that one having potential.
But I watched a film, which Christina, of course, and I to some degree as well, we love wedding movies, because we just had such a great time at our wedding, and we always enjoy watching a wedding movie.
So I watched a movie called Best Man.
Not the one about the blacks, but the one about the whites.
The one that's set in England.
And, of course, I love watching films set in England because it really brings back some memories and reminds me why it's good to not, well, not be in England.
This film, if you ever want to see a fantastic depiction of the unconscious and the argument for morality, and I don't think that that's the intention, of course, of the filmmakers, but if you want to see a false argument for morality in play, look at the lead guy.
And if you want to see the unconscious in play, look at his flatmate.
It's not a fantastic film or anything like that, although there's some nice bits to it, and the guy who plays the smarmy guy is very good.
But if you just watch it for that, watch it for this false argument for morality and the unconscious, and you will see what happens, and maybe we'll do a film review of it later.
But I don't think it's a very well-known film.
It's not like Four Weddings and a Funeral.
But have a look at it.
It's a very, very interesting film.
You can see how these kinds of things pop up, right?
King Lear is the false self, and the fool is the true self.
When the psychosis takes over, the false self rules and the true self vanishes, as what happens to the fool in King Lear.
But it's well worth having a look at it.
Just have a peek.
All right. We're back to conflict resolution.
Down, monkeys! Down!
Ow, they bit me.
Anyway, so...
In the realm of conflict resolution, if somebody doesn't have access or knowledge of their past in any kind of direct way...
Then you are forever going to be the bad stand-in for the bad people.
Or the instinctive stand-in for the bad people.
The false self does not want the true self to deal with the feelings, right?
Because the false self is created in reaction to the feelings.
The false self is basically, I mean, I'm sure you're aware of this, but I'll mention it anyway.
The false self is almost always a false argument for morality, or it's its base preference over what actually happened.
As I mentioned the other day, the true self is the scientific method.
The false self is irrational preference with no evidence, right?
Just based on will. Angry willpower usually is the basis of the false self.
My parents are good, right?
This is the split that you have to have when your parents are mean to you.
You've got another 15 years to go, right?
And you're helpless. You can't sort of sit there and go, wow, I'm in hell for 15 years.
You'd probably kill yourself. But you split, right?
You say, okay, well, my parents are good and I'm bad, right?
At least you can manage your own feelings of badness.
There's something you can do about it, however futile.
You can pretend that you can take action to deal with the horror of your situation and...
So you say, well, okay, my parents are good and I'm bad, right?
So at least I can then be better by conforming and at least I can then conform without shame of degradation.
I can pretend that sometimes you get this false argument from morality, whatever your parents do is good and so on.
And I was tempted by this in boarding school where there was a lot of conformity going on, as you can imagine, in England.
And... So you just...
That's inevitable. You can't fight that.
I mean... It's as instinctive and automatic as puberty.
It's like trying to will puberty from not happening.
It's not going to happen. And...
So... If you, I'm sorry, or it will happen, but it'll be really bad for you, right?
I mean, you can sort of say, okay, well, I'm not going to pretend my parents are evil, but then you end up, or corrupt, or mean, or whatever.
But then you end up as a nihilist, which is even worse than being split, because you can heal.
You can heal a split because you have good and bad evaluations, but you can't heal nihilism really because it's all bad, right?
All non-meaning, all non-value.
So, you're really lost in a fog as a nihilist.
So, like for instance, somebody who has an eating disorder can stave off puberty by not eating, but that's worse, right?
Worse for you than just going through puberty.
In this case, you can stave off this split, but only by making everything bad.
The split is your unconscious's attempt to save your capacity to believe in virtue, your capacity to believe in the good.
Because if you say, well, my parents are bad, you can't say my parents are bad and I'm good as a child, because you're dependent on them, you've got to live there, blah, blah, blah.
You can either say...
My parents are good and I'm bad, or my parents are bad and I'm bad.
Then you end up as a nihilist and you will probably end up going to prison at some point in your life, but you can't avoid that.
There's no shame in that, right?
There's no shame in that at all.
There's no shame in getting beaten up by Mike Tyson, and there's no shame in splitting when you're a child if your parents aren't good to you.
So, from that...
I mean, since everyone just about statistically goes through that process, and we all have irrational conformity inflicted on us when we're children, I mean, you went to public school, or you lived in a country, or you had parents who weren't really wise and enlightened human beings, then you fall into this category.
So statistically, it's everyone, pretty much.
But... If you don't understand this about your past, that bad things happened to you and you couldn't process them and you need to process them, Then you have all of this anger, frustration, and pain sitting in your system, which you haven't processed and haven't released because you couldn't, right?
You couldn't get angry at your parents. You couldn't have a tantrum or whatever.
Or if you did have a tantrum, they would make it worse, either by getting angry themselves or doing that snarky kind of, okay, you're having a tantrum kind of thing, which is just even worse, right?
It's passive-aggressive. And so, if you have all of this anger in your system, and if you haven't processed it or don't acknowledge it, or don't...
If you can't direct it against this just and proper object, if somebody makes us angry, then we should get angry back at that person.
Or if somebody hurts us, then we should feel the sensitivity and the hurt and the anger back towards that person, right?
That's called justice. You know that old thing about the boss yells at the dad, the dad yells at the wife, the wife yells at the kid...
The kid yells at the younger kid, and the youngest kid kicks the cat, right?
I mean, this is sort of how...
I mean, this is all people, and this is all true, but this is all people who can't express their anger back at their proper object.
So if your boss yells at you, you yell back.
If you get fired, good, good, sue them.
So... From that standpoint, you really do have a lot of stuff bottled up.
And everyone who's young does have a lot of stuff bottled up in their system.
And it will stay bottled up in your system and it will stay warping and destroying your happiness until the day you die.
And Christina sees these patients who are in their 60s and their moms are in their 80s and they're having exactly the same fights as when they were 15 and 35.
It doesn't change.
The unconscious does not...
The false self doesn't relinquish, the unconscious doesn't change, and things barely age in the unconscious.
It's the ultimate museum of preservation.
And until you deal with the issues, you get stuck in this loop.
That's just sort of the way things work.
So if you're with someone who doesn't acknowledge their past, then you're always going to be the stand-in for whatever bad things happen to them.
So they're forever going to be dealing not with you.
It's sort of very fundamentally important.
You're forever going to be dealing with the people who actually hurt them, but with you with the stand-in and with no knowledge of the switch, right?
That's the false self, right?
And so you're not going to be able to deal with conflicts effectively in relationships.
If you don't both have a knowledge of each other's past.
Now, giving somebody knowledge of your past makes you vulnerable.
Because it leaves you open to the attack of...
You had a bad childhood and therefore when you get upset with me, you're not really upset with me.
You're upset with your mom, right?
So it's a dangerous thing.
And you better trust the person that you're giving this knowledge to.
Because it's a dangerous thing.
It's a dangerous knowledge to give to someone.
It can really hurt you and make you less likely to give that knowledge to someone else, right?
There are these old myths about if you give someone your true name, then they have power over you.
And it's certainly true.
If you give someone your history and you tell them the things that trigger you and the things that make you unhappy, the things that make you angry, then you're giving them a lot of power over you because they can then use that to dismiss it any time you get angry.
Oh, you're just treating me like you would treat your mom.
Oh, why don't you just call up your mom and deal with her?
This is my brother and sister-in-law's approach to things.
If my brother gets angry at his wife, then she will simply say, oh, why don't you call up your mom and have it out with the real object of your anger?
Don't take it out on me. And so, basically, he can never get angry with her, so it's become a negative thing.
Now, his feelings were denied when he was growing up, and now his feelings are denied now.
Anyway, so... So if you don't have somebody around you who knows their past and who's willing to surrender to that knowledge, then you're going to have issues around conflict.
So I'll give you a tiny example of this.
Christine and I were going to the gym and then we went to go get a massage.
And we showered at the gym and then drove to get the massage.
And Christina said, oh, I know where the massage place is, so don't worry about it.
So I said fine.
Otherwise, I would have done the map quest thing and got the directions, which are usually 99% good or at least a hell of a lot better than me trying to figure it out myself.
So I would have done that.
But we get to this big mall, which is in a big round, and there's lots of stores, and some of it's inside, and some of it's outside.
There are all these disparate buildings scattered around.
So we get there, and we drive around, and the numbers are very confusing, and we have like five minutes to get to our massage.
And then... We drive around, we can't find it, and then we say, oh, maybe it's over there on the other side.
And so Christina says, oh, we've parked, and we walk.
We walk to see if we can find it, and then we sort of glance over to see the other side of the mall and say, the other side of the parking lot, say, well, maybe it's over there.
And I say, okay, well, let's drive over.
And she's like, no, no, no, let's walk.
And that seemed like a rather odd thing to me.
Like, we're running late, it's a long way, it's at least a five or ten minute walk.
And we're already late.
And we don't know that it's there for sure anyway.
So if we walk there, then we have to walk back to get the car like for sure, we're not going to make it.
And so I'm like, okay, but I noticed that things are a little bit odd.
But usually it's not the greatest thing to do it right there in the moment to talk about that.
So we walk over there, and sure enough, it's not there.
And then, so I say, okay, well, we have to phone them, and we didn't bring our cell phones, so we've got to find a store on us and use their phone, and the yellow pages, and so on.
Anyway, so... So as we find the place and as we drive in there, I say, you know, that was a bit odd there, you know, if you don't mind me saying so.
Nothing bad or anything, but it was just a little odd that you didn't want to drive over there.
And it sort of, it mildly irritated me because it was so clear to me that this was a bad decision.
Even if we knew exactly where it was, it was going to be a problematic decision.
And so I just sort of wondered what was going on for you, right?
And we went back and forth a little bit, and then I sort of said, well, what happened when you were a kid and you made a mistake, right?
The family relationships to mistakes is usually where you get quite a bit of insight and quite a bit of truth.
And she's like, oh, I mean, everybody would sort of come down on me and they'd make fun of me and they'd be sort of, you know, make mean comments and all this and that.
And the other thing that would happen is that they would get angry at her, right?
So the only defensive strategy you have is two things.
One, you can just blindly go on and sort of admit that, or not admit that there's any kind of error that's occurred.
The other thing you can do is sort of blame somebody else and say, I think, three things, right?
So you can pretend that no error occurred.
No, we're here, right? That's a little tougher when you're trying to find something.
The second thing you can do is you can blame, well, the woman gave me instructions, but those instructions are just bad.
And then you get angry and frustrated more than you really are, simply so you put off signals that nobody's going to mess with you.
Nobody's going to start blaming you because you're already angry and already impatient.
And so people put that kind of, to some degree it's an act, right?
Nobody sort of says, well, didn't you check or whatever, right?
And so that is occurring.
And, of course, the third thing that you can do in these kinds of situations...
This is an extreme example.
It wouldn't work here. But you can just sort of get depressed.
Oh, nothing I do is right.
Every time I try and do something, I get lost or I get confused.
You get depressed. And then people, of course, will rush in and, oh, it's okay.
So these are just ways of bypassing the conflict that arises when you're in the presence of people and you've made a mistake.
And what happens when you make a mistake?
It's sort of a fundamental thing in families and in any relationships, right?
It's sort of an important thing to look at.
If you make a mistake, if you're supposed to get you and your girlfriend, a boyfriend, a husband, a wife, To this location by this time and you get lost, what happens, right?
You're just like, wow, this is going to be a funny story.
You know, this stuff happens, right?
It just happens. Like, Christina called me yesterday and she'd made a mistake with her patients and I was just about to come home and I couldn't come home.
I had to come home early. I had to change my plans for something else.
You know, it happens, right?
It's the first time this has happened. She's been running this thing for over a year.
So, who cares, right?
It's just part of the natural things that happen in life.
You don't fight that kind of stuff. But...
And Christina went through all of these kinds of things.
So when we parked the car and started walking, she was saying there is no problem, right?
That was sort of her approach.
And then when I pointed out that it seemed like she's like, then she said, well, you know, they did kind of give me bad directions, but we'll...
Anyway, so we went through a couple of these things in a very minor kind of way.
And I was beginning to feel irritated because I felt a little bit manipulated.
And so I said, well, this was kind of odd.
This logical decision was odd.
And so the first thing that we do, and we'll talk about this more later, but the first thing that we do is we'll say, well, this thing was not logical.
This decision that was made was not logical.
If you're late trying to get somewhere and you don't know where it is, you don't abandon the car and start walking.
That's not a logical decision.
And so, that's the first thing, that something unusual has occurred, right?
Something that's indicative of a non-optimal decision, I guess you could say, has occurred, and that's sort of an important thing to understand, right?
Because if the person doesn't understand that something non-optimal has occurred, then the person is not going to be able to understand that they're making some sort of defensive decision.
And finally, in these kinds of situations, what you're most worried about is Usually your parents as well when you were a kid is the person being snappy when you finally do get to the massage, right?
So you do get to the massage and everybody's worried about the person behind the counter saying, oh, so, you know, we book you a time.
We're booked end to end.
Well, all I can say is we expect people to be on time here and you can get your massage, but we're deducting this time and we're going to have to charge you full price.
And being kind of mean, right?
I mean, oh, whatever, right? And of course, that didn't occur at all.
I mean, the service industry, that's not really the issue.
But everyone's afraid of that, right?
And so I was able to say to Christina, well, what happened when you were a kid and, you know, you made a mistake?
And so we had a look at all of the things that happened when she was a kid and made a mistake.
And then we were able to talk about what happened when she wanted to abandon the car and start walking to get to someplace we were late for her.
And that that was everything that was going on were habits that she'd learned to mask her mistakes, not because she was ashamed of them, but she was afraid of criticism and hostility.
And in her family, that could last like the day, right?
That could literally ruin the day.
You know, you're in those relationships and things are just getting going from bad to worse.
And you you've planned like a day at the zoo or something to have fun.
And things just start collapsing around you.
Things go from bad to worse.
And you start to get that slightly petulant frustration around, well, we were supposed to have this great day together, and now we're sitting miles apart in the car, not talking to each other, afraid to go to the zoo because we're not talking to each other.
Well, that's the kind of stuff that occurs when the past grabs you and you think it's the present.
When the past grabs you and you think it's the present, everything escalates.
Everything, everything, everything escalates.
Because the false self wants to pin it on the present so that it doesn't have to deal with the past, right?
The false self wants to pin it on the present.
And the true self wants to desperately not pin it on the present, but to deal with the past.
And so that level of conflict is one of the reasons why, generally, you will end up with constant escalation.
I'm still working on that whole thing, so we'll get to that at some point.
But this is a very important thing to understand.
If you can't talk honestly with someone about their past...
Like, if you can't say, well, your mom kind of did something like this, is this why you're upset?
From a curiosity standpoint, I mean, God, if you value your life, don't ever say, you're acting just like your mom, you witch, right?
I mean, that'll get you killed for sure, and I, for one, would not convict a killer, but...
You want to sort of be curious about it and say, this reminds me of, or that time you talked about something that happened when you were a kid, this sort of reminds me of the same situation.
And if the person's honest enough to be introspective and say, yeah, well I guess maybe I am overreacting a little bit to the present, maybe it's something to do with something that happened in the past that I haven't figured out or haven't dealt with, And then that's great.
Then you're on your way to solving the problem.
And the problem is the past.
The problem is not the present.
Everybody argues about topics.
Nobody argues about principles.
So everyone gets mad about, you were supposed to take out the garbage.
It's nothing to get mad about.
Who cares? But it's all these principles that are deep down that really matter.
And so people end up wasting their lives arguing about topics when they should be arguing about principles and not really arguing.
They should be finding solutions for these things, in my humble opinion.
So from that standpoint, this is a very important thing.
If you're not with someone that you feel comfortable being vulnerable with around your past, you will never be able to solve most, if not all, of your conflicts with them because the past is always going to be interfering.
She's always or he's always going to be reacting to you as if you're the mother, the father, the authority figure, the The teacher, the mean camp counselor, whoever, right?
Whoever hurt them that they couldn't process, you're going to be that stand-in guy forever.
And if that continues, like if you do that for a certain amount of time, your relationship is completely, totally done.
You should just leave and work to heal on your own, get some therapy, and start to build a better relationship in a year or two.
With somebody else. Because once you've sort of planted that flag in the ground and you've said, no, it's not my past, you jerk, it's you.
Once you've done that more than maybe three times, then you really have set yourself up a position that you can't back down from.
I mean, you just can't. I mean, imagine if somebody's been nagging you for 10 years saying, you are irresponsible, right?
And then it turns out that you were never irresponsible.
It was just their father who was irresponsible.
And that anxiety is, you know, they can't get mad at their father because their false argument from morality says, oh, he's getting old or whatever, right?
Or Or he tried to do the best he could.
All the things that you, in a futile way, you try and argue with yourself about.
Well, if after 10 years of putting you through emotional hell and destroying your self-esteem and just being totally difficult and unpleasant and vicious and cruel, is she then going to say, hey, you know what?
It never was you. Holy!
Right? Because she's sowed the seeds of a lot of emotional abuse, or he has.
And so... She's now too terrified, right?
It's like after you've held someone hostage for more than five seconds, you've held someone hostage for five years, if they get a hold of the gun, you're toast, right?
So if you put down your gun, your belief and your probably not unjust belief is that you're going to get shot, right?
So once you've waved that gun around, you can't ever put it down, right?
That's the danger of violence, particularly in intimate relationships in an emotional sense, right?
So, A, don't do that to begin with, right?
If you get really angry or frustrated or irritated at someone, the first thing you do is you say, I'm irritated and I don't know why.
I'm not saying it's you and it probably isn't you because, I mean, all you did was X, but man, I'm just bugged and I don't know why.
And if that other person is just like, oh, deal with it.
You know, we're late. Then you might want to not be with that person, in my humble opinion.
But if that person stops the car and turns to you and says, Wow, well, tell me more.
I understand that's very upsetting.
Tell me what's going on for you.
And not worry about being late to some dinner party where if you go and you're freaked out and not together, you're not going to have a good time anyway.
And you can make your excuses for being late in a civilized way, but you get reconnected and you get things sorted out before you go out socially.
That's the person that you want, who's not afraid of being late for a dinner party relative to helping you with your feelings and relative to getting close to you.
You've got to be the number one priority for that person.
Number one priority for that person.
Not their job. Not social conformity.
Not their kids. Or your kids.
Or both of your kids. Not their parents.
You have got to be the number one priority for that person.
Exclusive of their responsibility to themselves.
And if that's not the case, then you need to be with somebody who is going to make you the number one priority.
Because that is where trust and loyalty and vulnerability and intimacy and joy comes from.
And you can be perfectly honest in those kinds of relationships.
And you can't in any other kind of relationships.
So... I hope this has been helpful.
Thank you so much. I woke to some juicy donations this morning.
I really, really can't tell you how much I appreciate that.
Look at all the extra tangents you've bought.
So, donations are always welcome.
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