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Aug. 9, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
37:27
364 The Joy of Anger Part 2
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Alright, to continue, we have to have a look at that moment between the impulse that comes out of our histories and the desire to act it out in the present, the desire to divert it in the present to some unjust and often nefarious end, certainly unjust.
And when we have, just to take this example that I was working with a little earlier, If we take this example of somebody who was raised by a narcissist, Who feels, and not unjustly,
I mean it's perfectly valid and just, to feel that when somebody said to you, anytime you had any thoughts or opinions or ideas or feelings of your own, that was not convenient to the narcissistic desire for complete conformity, along with the desire for complete conformity, and I'm not phrasing this too well, so let me try it again.
The narcissistic desire for conformity from those around you is not just because you don't want people to disagree with you.
It's much more fundamental than that.
The reason that the narcissist opposes the fundamental desires and thoughts and feelings of everyone around himself or herself is because the narcissist operates on the basic assumption that identity equals death.
And so, anytime anybody tries to establish any kind of identity around a narcissist, the narcissist is usually...
The difference between passive aggression and aggression is power.
The difference between passive aggression and aggression is power.
In other words, fear of consequences.
It's not like fundamentally it's a totally different situation.
It's just that your parents, like when you're very young, your parents are openly aggressive towards you.
Bad. And then, when you get older...
Your parents become passive-aggressive towards you.
And that passive-aggressive can include countervailing tendencies within the personality, like they become nice and so on.
But the only difference, of course, is not growth or wisdom or knowledge or philosophy or ethics.
The difference is the shift in power.
So, when you have been raised by...
And I know, I'm going way out on limbs here, and I could be totally shot down.
I told you this was the opinion-based podcast.
I think there's this one and one other.
Just kidding. Lots of them.
But when you have been raised by a narcissist, and any time you show any kind of difference of opinion, or any kind of independent thought, you are viciously, in one way or another, emotionally or physically, you're viciously attacked for it, Then you have a significant problem when you face somebody who is honestly absolute.
Honestly absolute in your life.
And of course, this is one of the reasons that narcissism remains such a popular lifestyle alternative, I guess you could say.
Because what it does is, through trauma, it mines the harbor against any ships of truth that might want to dock, I guess you could say.
To take that Colbert metaphor, was it steering the ship of news through the channel of truth or something like that?
But when you have been raised by a narcissist, you then become hostile towards absolutes.
And that is how you remain trapped in the narcissistic world.
Because in the narcissist, you have to conform to opinions in a brutal, brutal manner.
That's the reality of the narcissistic world.
You have to conform to their opinions, and you are brutalized until you do so.
And it's ever-escalating, and there's no possibility of an alternative.
In 30 years of arguing with my mother, I never got her to concede one point the entire time.
In 30 years of arguing with my brother, I never got him to concede one point one time.
And that just shows you that when you have, as a basic principle, not a reference to...
Reality or logic, but a reference to your own particular preferences in the moment, then you really are, it's like wrestling with fog.
It's like, as I said before, it's like trying to nail jello to a wall.
You think we can't do it. And it's important to understand sort of when this is the case and when it's not the case.
Because when you start arguing with the fog people, and I'm not sort of talking about anyone on the board here, when you start arguing with the fog people, then you start to feel like deranged and crazy and you get nowhere and so on.
And you feel like you're going around in circles and every definition is constantly changing.
And that's because people are defining the truth, so to speak, as the whim of the moment.
So you have to make sure that you avoid, obviously, those kinds of interactions because they're very unhealthy for you and they're not going to do a whole lot for you to hang on to the delicate fabric of logic and empiricism, especially in this world that we live in right now, which is quite the opposite and it's a well-armed opposite as well.
So the important thing is that when you're raised by a narcissist, when you see any kind of judgment In another human being, about another human being, or any kind of statement around absolutism, your knee-jerk reaction, and I will put the emphasis on the first syllable just to be nice,
but your knee-jerk reaction, as is mine, is to say that this person is wrong and weirdly unhealthily wrong for believing what they believe.
That's just an inevitable reaction based on the scar tissue of your history and my history and just about everyone else's out there.
None of us were raised by the kind of rational beings that we're hoping to put our hand in to create.
And so when you have this kind of history...
Any statement of judgment, any statement of absolutism is going to create fundamentally...
Well, let's work through the layers, right?
Tears, terror, rage, right?
So, when you start dealing with your past, and this may be a little bit more true for women than for men, the first thing that you start to deal with or the first thing that you experience...
Is tears, right?
So you feel a kind of depression, a kind of sadness, a kind of emptiness, a kind of vague anxiety, moral horror, and so on.
And so you get the sort of sadness, the tears.
Once you work through that level, then you start to deal with the terror, right?
So you're working backwards through history here.
And once you have to fight the over-intellectualization, you have to fight the paranoia of anyone who's trying to give you some information that they've worked through themselves, like me or a therapist or someone else.
And then, after you work through, then you're going to start to experience the terror.
And you might have panic attacks, but your heart's going to pound for no reason.
You're going to go through this experience of terror.
And then once you keep working through that, and keep confronting that, and keep absorbing that, and keep accepting that, why then, you end up in a situation where you start to feel the rage.
And the rage is acutely uncomfortable.
And in my experience, I went through this.
I have a very, very strong memory of going through this.
When I was, oh gosh, let's work it out now.
I was 33 or 34.
I had broken with my family.
And I was going through this process of insomnia and wild, incredibly elaborate dreams that seemed more vivid than my waking life.
I was going through a real psychological upheaval because I was really fundamentally changing my whole approach to living my values.
So my values were no longer something to be stuck in my head, to be jammed in my head like an iron pipe or like that crayon that goes up Homer Simpson's nose.
That's where my values are, in my sinuses!
I really tried to live my values, like for real, no kidding.
And that was an enormously difficult thing for me to do.
And I went through the most enormous upheaval.
Anyway, I've written a whole book, a journal about this as I was going through therapy at the time.
Just a wild, wild process.
It's like hanging on to the horse that's going insane.
Of course, it's trying to climb you out of the fire, but it's a very, very complicated and powerful situation to go through, which is why...
I say that it's very tough to take a little step down the road of living your values, living rational values, because it really does turn into a slippery slope and then a bobsled run and then it feels like a free fall very, very quickly.
And When I had gone through the pain phase and then I'd gone through the terror phase, then I went through a phase of extreme anger.
Now, I didn't act any of this out.
I mean, I didn't sort of go drinking.
I didn't go yell at people.
I didn't pick bar fights. But I did find that I just had the most incredibly violent images going on in my mind.
And maybe you'll have this phase too.
Maybe it was just more particular to me, but I think it's a little more universal than that.
But I had the most incredibly violent images.
1999 to 2000 was a pretty wild year because I went and spent almost two weeks in Morocco on a tour.
A friend of mine and I went over there and we had a driver and we went around and it was a lot of fun.
And then I went and spent three weeks in China for business, and so basically I went straight from Islam to communism, and it was really quite a trip.
And also two countries where I couldn't read any of the signs, right?
I mean, it's Arabic and Cantonese, or Mandarin is quite a...
not exactly intuitive, right?
You can't even pretend to read it and figure something out.
So... I remember being in the...
I was having very poor sleep and very vivid dreams whenever I did sleep.
Dreams that left me sort of more exhausted than when I was not sleeping.
And, of course, the frustration that goes along with insomnia.
Like, you have to play this weird game with yourself.
Like, I'm not getting stressed about not falling asleep.
I'm not getting stressed about not falling asleep.
And knowing that you have a rise, a wake-up time that's fixed.
And, you know, the everyday minute that you're not asleep, blah, blah, blah.
Like, it's just a bad scene all around.
So... I went through this phase where I remember sort of half-napping, half-not-napping in the back of this car that was being driven through Morocco, with the desert wheeling around me, the incredibly blue sky of Morocco, having these unbelievably violent images.
And, of course, I'd learned enough about my own emotional nature to not fight these images or judge these images, not to act them out, of course, in any way, shape, or form, But, boy, I was taking a baseball bat to my family.
I was just going through these incredibly violent...
And they were initially very disturbing.
And then, of course, what are you going to do, right?
This is what your unconscious is cooking up.
And in hindsight, it was a very important phase to go through.
So I'll put that out there as a possibility.
If you're going through this process and these violent images start to arise in you, don't panic.
Don't panic.
It's all your unconscious.
Well, I'll talk about that in a sec, sort of what's going on.
But I had these images, and of course, I sort of tried to, and it worked relatively well, inhabit these images, not judge them, get behind them, and really get in there with the bad.
And yes, it was very odd and disturbing, because I'm by no means a violent person by nature.
And so going through this particular phase of dealing with these very violent images, which went on for weeks, and it was very hard to do, not because it's so hard to get angry at people who brutalized you for 20 years or 15 years, but more because it was very counter to my view of myself as, you know...
Not exactly hippy-dippy kumbaya, but a non-violent person.
And of course, I am an extraordinarily non-violent person insofar.
I've never hit anyone, never been in a fistfight, and I almost never raise my voice.
Except on the podcast, interestingly enough.
So I guess it's just the microphone and my sunglasses that make me angry.
Anyway, so I went through these very, very violent images and found it to be incredibly helpful.
Now, but very difficult to go through.
Now, what happened was, it was during this phase that I went through these violent images, and afterwards, of course, a real peace, a great peace, descended upon me or arose within me.
And in hindsight, sort of looking back on it, I can sort of see the value of what my unconscious was doing, right?
This is why it's important not...
Although I succumb to the temptation, I sort of still hold this as a value.
It's important not to get snippy and witchy with people or bitchy with people.
But it's really important to introspect, to meditate, to get to your own base feelings and work them through...
So that you can have some self-protection.
Once you have self-protection and you're not susceptible to crazy or aggressive people, or less susceptible, then you can actually kind of relax in your life and have a much better time, and of course the quality of the people that you will be drawn to and who will be drawn to you will improve fairly considerably, or in my case, with Christina, absolutely enormously.
And I wouldn't say that that's entirely coincidental.
But the reason that you have to sort of work backwards through time to go through this tears, terror, rage phase, or maybe this is a different layer of cake for your particular eating enjoyment, but this is what it was for me, is because you're kind of going backwards and unraveling all of the knots that were placed within you when you were growing up.
So what happened was, of course, you went the opposite way when you were a kid.
So, as a kid, you got provoked by your parents or your siblings or you were unprotected and provoked in some manner.
And so you got really angry.
And, of course, you didn't just wake up and get really angry.
Children aren't angry by nature because we know it takes a lot of intervention to make children sort of chronically angry.
And what happened is that you were provoked and you were goaded and something, right?
Your desires were provoked and then you were humiliated or rejected for them or something was going on.
And... In my case, it was silly little things, but a whole conjunction of them.
Like, whenever my family went out, I was a short kid and a pretty scrawny kid.
I filled out fairly well as a teenager, but I started working out.
But I was a pretty scrawny kid and short legs.
And my brother's taller than I am.
And, of course, my mother's fairly tall.
And so they'd all be, you know, jetting along when we'd be walking out there.
And I'd be getting tired as the youngest and about two and a half years younger than my brother.
So I'd be getting tired and they just would never wait.
They would just keep walking ahead.
So I'd be stuck in this situation.
And, of course, this is entirely cruel on the part of parents, right?
So you're stuck in this situation.
You're tired and you're hungry and whatever, right?
So you want to catch up, but you're tired.
and so you don't want to catch up.
You also don't want to catch up because it feels humiliating, like they've got to set the pace and you've got to just try and catch up.
But also, so you don't want to catch up, but at the same time, if you don't catch up, you're going to get lost, and God knows what's going to happen then, and then you're going to get in real trouble, right?
So these are the wonderful options that you have at hand, right?
You can get lost and get yelled at and maybe never find your way back to your family, because when you're four or five, this is a possibility.
Or you can keep plugging on despite being tired or exhausted and also feel humiliated.
Little things like that.
I mean, this is one of the minor examples.
There was a lot more sort of violent stuff going on.
But this is just sort of a minor example of the endless kind of crap that goes on.
Or you get...
You've been promised an ice cream all day and then...
You get an ice cream finally, and you often have to pester, right?
I remember wanting to see the film Bugsy Malone.
My mother promised us to go, and then she just nagged and bitched about it for, you know, an hour or two.
We just, you know, strap yourself in.
We've got to get to this film. We've just got to navigate all of this bitchiness and negativity and...
But you get the ice cream and then, you know, something happens to the ice cream.
Why? Because you want the ice cream and your desires have to be opposed, right?
Because you're in a narcissistic environment.
And so, you know, maybe your brother jogs your arm and then says, oh, what a shame.
Or, you know, when the ice cream top falls off and you, you know, and then you're very upset, right?
You're upset and you're crying and you want another ice cream or you at least want people to have sympathy for the fact that your ice cream has sort of dropped down into the dirt.
And your brother who jogged your arm is now not refusing to share his ice cream because you've got to learn to be careful, right?
It's just maddening, maddening stuff, right?
And this is the continual process for a lot of people, for far too many people, when they're children.
This is just sort of what happens on a daily basis.
There's these constant provocations and humiliations and so on.
And so at some point, you're just going to get really angry.
Now, the interesting question is, well, what happens when you're a kid and you are constantly provoked and you get really angry?
Well, you're not allowed to get angry.
In fact, you're completely blocked through anger.
Anger is a form of intimacy.
If you're with someone and you're angry with them, and I don't mean abusive and I don't mean raging, but you're genuinely angry at something they did, It is a mark of intimacy to be able to express that anger and have the other person accept that you're angry, not obey you because you're angry, not conform to you because you're angry, but just accept that you are angry, and to have that free play of emotion back and forth in a relationship indicates a very secure bond.
It indicates a very secure bond.
So, Christina can get angry at me.
I can get angry at Christina.
We've never called each other even the mildest name in the book, and we don't blame the other person like conscious motivation for evil is your designation.
But if we're angry, then we say, you know, I'm angry at something that you just did.
Let's figure it out. And it's not the end of the world and we talk about it and it's usually a great thing and it usually makes our relationship even better.
In fact, it always makes our relationship even better.
So the capacity to allow yourself to...
I mean, only the true self can have relationships, right?
The false self can't take any criticism and is innately hostile to anger or any kind of legitimate anger.
Rage is not so uncomfortable with because that's false self manipulation, not true self anger.
But you're not allowed to get angry, and so what happens if your anger is bottled up and thwarted, then it becomes rage.
Because then you feel not only angry, but also humiliated, controlled, and manipulated, and of course the real rage comes about when this is all presented as something for your own good.
This is also fairly inevitable in these kinds of familial situations.
So, you know, my brother jogs my arm, and the ice cream falls to the ground.
I cry. My brother mocks me for not being careful, even though it was he who made me drop it.
And my mother gets angry that there's any kind of problem.
She doesn't want to find out what happened.
Because the just thing to be would be to say to my brother, I mean to me, right?
If I was a parent in this situation, I hope I won't be, but let's just say I am.
A parent in this situation.
Then you get to the bottom of it.
Did you jog his arm?
No, no, no, right? And then you buy the kid another ice cream.
And if you can't, if you don't have the money to buy a kid another ice cream, you at least sit down and talk about what happened and work out the feelings, right?
And that stuff is all perfectly just to the way to do it.
What I wanted was not another ice cream, but recognition of an injustice that had been done to me so that I could relax and feel protected and not always at the mercy of my brother's endless teasing provocations and aggressions.
But of course none of that happened, right?
My brother mocked me and I got upset and I cried or I got angry and then my mother would get even more angry because she'd just like, can't you kids just get along or, you know, why is there always a problem every time we go out and that kind of stuff, right?
And so basically my brother operated in this total state of nature massive impunity situation because he knew that if I complained to my mother that we would both get punished, right?
So he would get the satisfaction of cruelty or sadism and then if I complained to my mother we would both get punished or punished.
I would actually sometimes get punished even more as being the one, because then he would put on all smiles and innocence, and I would be the one who was causing a problem which wouldn't exist if I didn't bring it up, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, we all know this kind of stuff.
If we've had these kinds of families, it's almost as inevitable as sunrise.
So, the issue that you need to work with is to get back in time through the dissociation that is involved with just sort of feeling empty or alienated or sad or depressed or whatever.
The first step is the alienation, which is composed of irritation, touchiness, dissociation, jumpiness, maybe a bit of social phobia.
This is the dissociation that results from not being allowed to have access to your feelings or for being punished for having access to your feelings.
And when you start to go through that, then you start to get sadness, or you might get terror first.
For me, it was tears, terror, rage, but you go through and you get the tears, and then you go through and you get the terror, and then you get the rage, right?
And then from below that, you get anger, which is the healthy aspect of rage, right?
So I guess it's a four-step process, but it's only three of them are scar tissue.
what's at the bottom in terms of anger is a very healthy thing.
And we'll talk about hatred a little bit later today.
But when you go through those layers, you're going backwards through time because the way that it is built the other way is you get angry at something and then you're manipulated or scorned or humiliated or punished for being angry, which gives you the rage.
And then when you realize that the rage gets you in even more trouble, then it gets suppressed to sadness.
And then when the sadness or the tears are also something you get mocked or punished for, then you're done with your emotional repertoire or your emotional authenticity.
And then what happens is you just don't feel anymore, right?
It's too painful to feel, right?
Anything that you feel, other than the approved emotions of respect for parents, which aren't really emotions, but just conformity, scar tissue and stuff, anything that you feel genuinely is going to cause you a lot of pain.
And so who wants that, right?
You don't get the satisfaction of expressing your feelings, so you get the negative feelings, and then you get punishment for having the sort of quote negative feelings, or the feelings that become negative because you're punished.
And so you end up with this total lose-lose situation, right?
So you can't express your feelings, or you can, but you just get further punished for them.
Your feelings, your identity, your natural self, your instincts, and consequently your rationality, right?
You can't be rational without feelings, in my humble opinion, and we'll talk about that perhaps more another time.
But simply, and I've mentioned this before, but just very briefly, it's because you can't reason everything through, right?
You have to sort of have emotions which provide you good judgments about what happens, what's happening in your environment.
You can't reason everything through, and so you can't fundamentally be rational, particularly in interpersonal relationships.
You can't be rational if you don't have your feelings, right?
So this is why narcissism destroys not only your capacity for emotion...
Being exposed to narcissism, your capacity for emotions, but also your capacity for rationality and relationships.
So this is why we all focus on the state rather than our relationships.
And so if you don't deal with this legitimate anger, rage that you have towards your parents or your authority figures or whoever manipulated and controlled you into being against yourself, if you try and manage the anxiety,
the tears, terror, rage that is provoked by any statement, Of certainty or absolutism or judgments towards other people, then what you're doing is you are going to end up attacking people for virtue in order to defend people who had vice or who acted out of vice.
So, with your parents, they acted in a negative and hostile and problematic manner.
And they opposed any kind of fundamental rationality or self-protection or self-feeling or passion or anything like that.
They opposed all of that. And they opposed that through a kind of brutal, narcissistic, irrational, subjective absolutism, based on personality, not process.
And so that was an unjust and wretched and horrible thing to do to you.
It's about the worst thing that a parent can do to a child, other than, you know, I guess, rape or something like that.
And that was just wretched, horrible, and awful.
It's worth dealing with that so that you can get that sort of off your chest.
Because if you don't, then you're going to continue to have an avoidance mechanism around any issues to do with certainty.
That's a very dangerous thing to have in your life.
You don't want to have an avoidance mechanism or a defense mechanism within your personality that attacks rational certainty and rational judgment.
Because that really is having a cancer, right?
Cancer swells or cancer reproduces and attacks healthy cells, and so you don't want that.
You do want a defense mechanism, right?
So this is what I'm talking about in terms of the value of anger and hatred, which we'll get to, I guess, a little bit later.
You do want to have a defense mechanism, which is anger.
You do not want to have a cancerous defense mechanism which attacks virtue.
That's not going to do you any good at all.
In fact, that's going to make your life problematic and difficult.
So, to get back to where we started, when you see a post or you feel the urge to post something like, well, I guess I'm a little different from you because I don't have to have agreement with everyone about every single aspect of reality in order to consider them my friend, Then you're actually attacking or undermining somebody who's trying to work through challenging judgments regarding another human being, and you're basically calling them narcissistic and claustrophobic and destructive and anti-identity and so on.
And you may be right, of course.
You may be right. But you wouldn't want to jump to that conclusion.
You wouldn't want to jump to that conclusion.
That is an injustice.
And what you're doing, fundamentally, is you are protecting your parents, who were not virtuous, by attacking a potential ally who probably is virtuous.
And that turns your defense mechanisms from something that protects you into something that's cancerous and attacks your capacity for happiness and trust and joy.
And by getting upset or angry or by diminishing or being scornful towards somebody who's trying to work through a genuine issue, then you are attacking them instead of getting angry at the real topics or the real just and legitimate source of anger for you, which is your parents, of course.
All injustice in the world arises from...
An unjust application of anger, or getting angry towards somebody in a way that is a diversion from the real object of your anger, a displacement, or whatever you want to call it.
This is the source of just about every injustice in the world, is this problem of getting angry at the wrong person.
And I would say that that's a very important thing to work on and to understand, that when you get angry, I mean, we're all angry, because we all, you know, we messed around quite a bit when we were kids, so we're all angry.
There's nothing wrong with that. It's perfectly healthy.
Anger, hatred, all of these sorts of things, all perfectly healthy.
All things that you absolutely need to have in your emotional repertoire to navigate through the world, which is full of some, you know, not-so-nice people.
So there's nothing wrong with those feelings at all, but we have to get to the source of who we're really angry at.
We have to get to the source of what really happened to us.
So we don't end up being unjust.
We don't end up being unjust and getting angry at the wrong people.
Because this is, again, what I was talking about yesterday.
If somebody's saying, well, I'm offended by what you say, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you're insulting me, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, of all the people to get angry at, am I really at the top of people's lists?
Of all the people to get angry at about being maybe narcissistic and over-controlling and judgmental and blah blah blah...
Is it really somebody on the board that you're going to get really angry at?
Well, yeah, I can understand that you would if you've had a long conversation with them and they've turned out to be this kind of person while claiming to be otherwise, and you've already dealt with everything to do with your parents, then sure, I can understand that maybe next on the list is somebody on the Freedomain radio board or somebody else in your life or whatever, right? But the fact of the matter, of course, is that this is not where your priorities need to be in terms of being angry at people.
You want to make sure you go through your chain of injustice in a rational kind of way.
Before you end up getting angry at people who have, you know, virtually nothing to do with you, right?
And people on the board, certainly relative to your parents or friends or family or whatever, have almost nothing to do with you at all.
And that's what I'm saying is the first clue that you may be working in an unjust situation.
So when you do feel irritated towards someone, and I say this as somebody who's going through all the same crap all the time too, but when you get angry at someone, or you feel irritated at someone, or you feel the urge to smack them down in some manner or another...
What I would suggest is just go through this as a mental exercise.
You know, just see if it's helpful.
What I would suggest is something like the following, to sort of...
I mean, you can make a physical list.
Maybe that would be useful, but I'm sure you can manage to do it, make a mental list as well.
But, you know, you could maybe put a list together and say, okay, so this person is...
I get the feeling that this person is...
Trying to do something that I consider to be hurtful.
In other words, I'm getting an impulse or I'm getting a feeling, irritation towards this person because this person appears to be overjudgmental and overcritical and overcontrolling and so on.
And so let me run through my own history.
You can do this in a couple of seconds, right?
Let me run through my own history and say, okay, have I ever experienced that before?
Have I ever been in a situation where somebody's been over-controlling and I'm not allowed to have my own opinion and any time I disagree with them, they reject me or this, that, or the other?
And you can then, I think, run through your repertoire, see if that's happened to you before.
Now, if it's never happened to you before, then welcome to the planet.
You must be from Mars. I hope that you don't mind the change in temperature and gravity and radiation.
But you have experienced this kind of stuff before, and if you've dealt with all that kind of stuff, like you've confronted your parents, and if they haven't changed, you've broken with them, and you've gone through some therapy, and you've done all the stuff to manage your history, then I would say that you can probably trust yourself that this person is kind of narcissistic, and it's okay to get angry at them.
It makes perfect sense. But if you haven't done all of those things, if you still have unresolved issues in your history or your past, or if you are just struck by the idea now that, hey, maybe this happened to me before in my history, Then you probably don't want to hit post.
You probably don't want to hit send on that email.
Because you certainly don't want to be reproducing a kind of problem that occurred for you in the past on somebody else.
You don't want to be re-inflicting something that was painful for you on somebody else, to somebody else.
So hold off on that.
What you then want to do is go through the process of dealing with this, that, or the other.
So with the free will versus determinism thing, one of the reasons that I had to take a break was that in conversations with Christina, I realized, and this is not to say anything about the people on the other side of the debate, but more just about myself, that I realized that I was reacting to these people as if they were my brother, and this was not a good or healthy situation.
And I didn't want to talk about it with them directly then, because those who've listened to podcasts know that I have a certain opinion about my brother, which I would not, because it is a case of projection.
I would not want to say that the people on the board who are arguing for determinism are related to my brother, other than an association within my own mind, which has nothing to do with whether that's just association or not.
It just is an association.
So that's just something I need to work through and I'm doing that and all that.
So, you really do want to, when you are getting angry at someone, you want to make that list of who has dealt with you in this manner or in a manner that reminds you of this or in principles that you would attack this person on before.
Who's done all this to you before?
So, if you feel that somebody's being closed-minded and over-controlling or whatever, or if you feel like somebody's willfully misinterpreting all your arguments and mocking you and insulting you and not taking you seriously and blah, blah, blah...
Then you want to make that list.
You really, I promise you, you want to make that list.
You want to make that list and say, when has this occurred to me before?
Right? It's not a hard thing I'm asking you to do.
I'm not asking you to scale the Matterhorn here.
When has this occurred for me before?
And once you get that, then you can say, okay, what is the severity of what I'm facing now relative to the severity of what I was facing in the past?
So somebody put a post on the board that's really annoying me because of X, Y, and Z. Well, X, Y, and Z is what my parents did.
What is the severity of X, Y, and Z when my parents had 20 years of control over me versus this anonymous guy who's posting on a board?
Well, I've got to tell you, I don't think I'm going out on a limb on this one, that the post on the board is far less serious than what happened with your parents.
Infinitely, nearly infinitely, it's infinitesimal.
It is an atom compared to a storm cloud of provocation towards you.
And so, if you do feel provoked by somebody on a board or somebody wherever...
Look at your own history and say, okay, well, who provoked me before?
It was my parents. And so getting mad at the guy at the board is not very rational.
I'm not saying we don't have the impulse to do it.
Of course we do. It's not a very rational thing to do.
Because in terms of provocation, it's really not that big a deal.
So, I don't know, like if you've been in prison and you've been raped for 10 years and you've had pretty serious violations of your personal space and then somebody walks a little bit too close to you on the sidewalk, getting mad at somebody who walks a little too close to you on the sidewalk is understandable, but it's not rational. So you need to deal with the original stimuli to make sure that you're not unjustly abusing people in the here and now to avoid the original stimuli.
To avoid having to deal with your parents.
To avoid having to deal with your history.
To avoid having to deal with your original provocations.
So, when you feel upset at someone, make that list.
Figure out what the priority is.
If you're upset about somebody who appears judgmental and your parents are really judgmental, go talk to your parents.
Don't post on the board. Now, once you've worked all that out, then you can post on the board.
And of course, you can do whatever you want.
I'm just suggesting, I'm trying to appeal to your greed here, as Dr.
Phil says. I'm trying to get you to understand that if you do commit an injustice and you find out later that you were doing something unjust and you were getting mad at the wrong people and you were humiliating or abusing or...
If you're denigrating people for the wrong reason, you're going to feel terrible.
And it's really going to interfere with your personal relationships and your sense of trust in yourself and your sense of trust in others, right?
The more that you attack people unjustly, the more, fundamentally, you are going to be afraid of being attacked unjustly yourself.
So you're going to have to be prickly and defensive and you're going to have to take the first swing all the time and you're going to be punchy and you're going to be this and you're going to be that.
Don't make that world for yourself.
Don't make that world for yourself.
Live in a more peaceful world.
Live in a more trusting world. And that means dealing with the original provocations rather than acting them out against innocent strangers.
And I say this as much to remind myself as to remind everybody else, because we're all in the same kettle of fish together, struggling to move the species forward in a very challenging way.
Alright, time for my presentation.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I really, really appreciate it.
I'm sure that it's helpful.
I know that it is for me, and I hope that it is for you, and I will talk to you soon.
Oh, and thanks for the donations that came in this morning.
It really put a sparkle in my step, and I really, really appreciate that.
I can't tell you how much that means to me.
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