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Aug. 11, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
28:50
367 Unearthing Crimes Part 2 (audio track to a video podcast...)
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All right.
Now we're really pushing the envelope here as far as technology goes.
We are doing simultaneous video and audio.
Together as one, baby.
Just for you. Because we're all about technological advancement here at Free Domain Radio.
And the reason that we're doing this is because I'm just curious how far I can push this notebook before the battery actually starts weeping human blood.
That, I think, would be a step forward for me, because I don't think I've ever quite achieved that.
You will also...
It's like a frickin' tandoori oven in this car...
I parked upstairs.
I left the sunroof open.
This is the sacrifices that I take for this show.
I left the sunroof open.
And... This morning, because, you know, that's my high-tech lighting for the show.
And... Then I forgot to close the sunroof.
The... Shade?
Sunroof shade? The roof thing.
And so I parked upstairs and I ended up leaving the roof thing open, which means the car is now 8 million degrees.
And I am in the situation of having a car that is somewhat akin to a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle when I'm doing podcasting.
Because I can't run the air conditioner while I'm podcasting.
Because not only does it create a lot of roar, but also it tends to create circulating air that in fact blows on the microphone, which causes the podcast to blow in terms of sound quality.
So we are putting the whole thing together, babies.
We are multimedia.
Next, so you'll get to see some real forehead sweat going down in our drive today.
And next, what we're going to do is, because it's so hot in this car, we're actually going to get smell cams going so that you can enjoy the mid-afternoon work funk coming off me when I'm this hot in a car.
Actually, it's not that bad.
Christina's got me down with the deodorant and all that kind of stuff.
So it's not bad.
But it's a mingled scent, shall we say.
It's slightly jungle scent. So let's move on to excavation part two, the Indiana Jones of our history.
And, you know, I'm sorry, the last thing I'll say that's kind of funny about this podcast is that now I think this is the best angle.
The one that's staring right over the hump of the steering wheel is a bit jostly, I think.
And I'm still working out whether I'm going to put a piece of cloth underneath the webcam in case it's a little shaky.
But this is an interesting angle.
Because when I turn and so on, you get this weird tilting world effect behind my head.
Just like the changes that come out of listening to a heavy philosophical show like this one or any of the other quality ones that are out there.
You get that your world is spinning and spinning and spinning around until it finally comes to rest, interestingly enough, in the driveway of my house.
So... Let's move on to part two of our chat about unearthing histories and how you can use the kind of visualization techniques that I've been talking about over the last little while to begin to close off your history.
To begin to Integrate into your current life the actual facts of your history.
This comes out of some of the violence imagery that I was talking about earlier that is very helpful in terms of being able to activate the immune system of your own anger so that you can keep people who are corrupt or disruptive or negative or hostile or what have you at bay And of course, we talked about it this morning, and I'm sorry if you're listening to these straightened sequins.
Sometimes it's as much for me to get back into it as it is to remind you.
But this morning we talked about the guy with a belt situation.
Now that, of course, is a situation wherein somebody is punching you or hitting you or whatever with a belt.
Now, a good chunk of the abuse that I suffered as a child didn't have as much to do with physical violence.
I mean, a good chunk of it did.
But, of course, you don't need a lot of physical violence to be frightened as a child because the emotional fear of living with physical violence is pretty prodigious.
And so you don't need daily beatings.
I mean, you need beatings once every three or six months will do it.
In fact, you know... I'll be honest with you, one beating will do it.
One beating will do it.
Because that is such a line to be crossed in any kind of relationships, let alone the extraordinary power differential that is based in the familial relationships, in the parent-child relationships.
It really only takes one good beating for you to have a fundamentally different relationship with your parents.
Unless, and in the fantasy world of honest repercussions and integrity, unless...
This parent who hit you immediately goes into anger management and apologizes, goes into therapy, is so horrified by what they've done that they really make a huge effort to transition this kind of situation with you.
So that aspect of things is something that is not likely to happen.
I've never heard of it happening.
Maybe it does. But it's not a very common situation at all.
And statistically, let's just call it fairly irrelevant.
I think that's fine. So, the second question is not so much dealing with the physical violence.
I think we can sort of understand that dealing with the physical violence is okay, because you've got some real body memories to work with.
You've got real physical fear, your neurostimulus response, your post-traumatic stress disorder responses, all of those kinds of things.
Once you get the right image and the right metaphor, and if you don't know any children that you like, Then you can always work with a, I don't know, a child star that you like or some child that you've ever remotely had any kind of affection for.
And if you've had affection for no children whatsoever, then I would go and see a therapist pretty quickly.
But I'm sure that isn't the case with our fine, fine listeners who are all striving with me to use our moral crampons.
To crampons? Crampons?
The little things that you dig into the walls to get up cliffs are moral crampons or crampons to go up the glass ethical wall of modern relativism to the summit of joyful and rational absolutism.
So, you know, that's the metaphor that's making me sweat, not the heat, because I think I may have worked it out just a little too much.
Ah, nice cold water.
So... Let's talk about how you are going to figure out your family if you had not so much physical abuse.
And a lot of us didn't have physical abuse other than some spanking incidents which were not exactly the same as the kind of stuff that I'm talking about.
Like getting hit with a belt is pretty considerably different than verbal abuse in that it's easier to deal with.
I don't think it has any particular effect on the personality that it's pretty bad all around to get any kind of abuse, which all arises from a lack of empathy and a lack of connection.
See, if you're in a family situation where somebody is abusing you and it's a sibling or a parent or whatever, you're in a situation where you are bounded in with someone.
You're sort of living with them in close proximity.
You're bounded in with someone.
And they have no empathy for you.
It's a very, very dangerous situation.
I mean, this really is the Stockholm Syndrome, as far as all of that goes.
It's a very dangerous situation to be in, and it doesn't really matter whether that comes out as physical violence or whether that comes out as teasing or emotional violence.
For instance, with my own family, My mother was the hitting one and the screaming and throwing one.
My brother was sort of the cold, calculated, teasing, cruelty, mental cruelty one.
Right? So, as I mentioned this sort of stuff before, that he would end up saying stuff like, you know, no means no.
Sorry, yes means no and no means yes.
Do you want me to hit you? Right?
And if you say no because that means you don't want to, then he says, bam!
See? No means yes.
How come you don't listen to me? And if you say yes, he said, oh, it was just for that moment.
Bam! You want me to hit you.
So there were these kinds of things as well.
And I'm just, you know, this all sounds very silly.
Maybe it's just for me. Maybe you went through the same kinds of things.
With my brother as well, this came up the other day because of some exercise that Christine and I were doing in a gym class.
I had a headache one day when I was about 12 or 13.
And my brother said, oh, I know how to fix that.
I just learned this from X, Y, and Z. And he said, you know, you sit on the edge of the bed and you put your knees, you put your elbows into your knees, spread your legs, put your legs apart, put your elbows into your knees, and then...
Put your hands against the side of your head, and then squeeze your knees in to compress.
This crushes your muscles in the side of your head, and then you relax them, and blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, you know, I'm like, you know, maybe because my learning curve isn't as high as it should have been, but...
I decided, okay, I'm going to do this.
I've got a headache. I want to get rid of it.
We didn't have any money for aspirin or anything, so let's try this solution.
And so I did that.
I sat down and put the elbows into my knees and then squeezed my head together.
And it didn't do anything good or bad in particular, but of course my brother started laughing at me.
And... In a sort of cruel and mocking kind of way.
And, of course, he just was fooling around with my head, right?
It's the trust-fucking that we've talked about before, that you're going to end up in these situations where people will, ha-ha, isn't it funny, get you to do things based on a trust relationship, which then don't work.
And I think that was the last time that I listened to him fundamentally at all.
And then what would happen is in the future, like at least once a month, there would be this sort of mocking situation wherein he would sit at the edge of his bed and say, if I had a problem or I was having a challenge or something, he'd say, oh, I know the solution.
And then he would pretend to crush his own head with his hands and laugh at me and so on.
It's this kind of stuff, right?
I mean, it's really stupid and frankly sick stuff that goes on often in sibling relationships.
And there were other things as well.
I mean, they all sound petty, but they're really not when you're a teenager.
Another time, I think I borrowed a sweater of his or something like that and got caught out in the rain, and he got really angry, like so angry that the sweater had gotten a little wet and that was going to stretch out or something like that.
And I can understand being sort of a little irritated or something like that, but sort of fundamentally I can't.
Like, Christina has dropped MP3 players of mine and broken them.
And the idea that you... It's all an accident.
Nobody's trying to do any harm to you if you're in this sort of situation.
So if you love someone, it's to me fairly inconceivable that they're going to do something that's going to make you really angry.
I mean, that's just not compatible.
I don't think I've ever been really angry with Christina.
I've been frustrated when she's really stuck in Foo land.
As she, I'm sure, gets frustrated when I, say, get stuck in foo land.
But that's frustration with the fact that she's not being herself.
It's never frustration or anger towards things that she's actually doing sort of in a proactive way or choices that she's making that she's consciously choosing.
It's an unconscious choice that may lead her to do things which I would consider deleterious to our relationship or to her happiness.
But I never for a moment imagined that that's a conscious choice that she's making based on the values that she lives.
It's that she's got stuck in the past, or she's stuck in Fuland, or something like that.
So, from that standpoint, I would say that it's incomprehensible that I'm going to get angry at somebody that I love to any sort of fundamental degree.
Because if I'm angry at them, it's because I believe that they've made choices Consciously, based on their values, that have been directly harmful to me, and that they knew about that harm and decided to do it anyway, and it was conscious of choice and all this kind of stuff.
And of course, if they're that kind of person, why would I have them in my life to begin with?
It wouldn't make any sense, really, to me.
So you get people like that out of your life.
The people who remain in your life, you really can't get angry.
It's why it's important to get angry, so you can get angry, get the people out of your life, And then you can, with the people who remain in your life, you can trust them and you can love them and you can feel secure with them around and you can be yourself and you can laugh and you can have a great time with them and a deep and rich and sometimes sort of conflictual or,
let's make up more words, shall we, a fractious time with them as you're trying to work out disparities in your values and truths that are evident to one of you but not the other or maybe to neither of you.
So it's not like all sunshine and roses, but it's a deep and rich and meaningful relationship.
And you can't fundamentally get angry at people that you remain in your life that you claim to love because it would require a disparity of values or an opposition of values that love would simply preclude.
You can't love somebody who has opposite values.
You can hate them if they're acting on those values against your interests or, you know, Pretty much indifferent to them if they're off doing their own thing and being negative in terms of values, not in a way that is directly harming your self-interest.
So my mom lives, breathes, exists in the world, is 69 years old.
I haven't seen her since she was in her early 60s.
I'm sure that she's still living in the same filth and squalor in the rent-subsidized apartment.
She's still living on the welfare state payouts that are based on, I guess, her old age pension plus disability.
My brother is still refusing to deal with any of the health issues which arise from her living in this Howard Hughes-like squalor.
And... All of that is occurring, and my father sent me an email that I saw very briefly before the email the leader dealt with it.
But my brother is saying to my father, oh, you should come with us to Africa.
My kids are going to Spain.
We're having all these vacations.
We're having this great time.
You should come. I'd love to spend time with you.
And all of that.
And all of that stuff's going on, which is all well and good and, you know.
Better him than me.
And so all of these people are still acting in the world, and they have the opposite values than I do, but because they're not interfering with my life, other than in a very generic, their status kind of way, which is true not just of my family, but just about everyone, except you, my dear friend.
So they're off there acting in the world, and doing all this funky stuff, and more power to them, but...
They're not directly interfering with any of my values, so...
So it doesn't really matter that much to me.
I would prefer it if they were different, but I've shot my bolt, so to speak, in that regard.
So that's not really going to be a possibility.
So I don't hate them so far as they're off doing their thing like everybody else, and it's only against my interest in a very abstract kind of way.
So I don't really hate them.
That's sort of my basic issue.
If they sort of bungeed into my life and made my life more difficult and more unpleasant and this and that or the other, then yeah, I would start to hate them again because I would have to push them back out emotionally and sort of reclaim my emotional and mental space.
But I don't wake up every day saying, ooh, my parents or my brother or whoever, I have such a huge problem with him or my mom or anything like that.
It's, you know, meh. If he calls, which he hasn't done in quite some time, and I doubt that he ever will again, then I'll deal with that.
I'm not going to actively hate him when he calls, but if he starts being persistent, then yes, I'm going to have to get angry or I'm going to end up getting angry so that I can push back that kind of intrusion into my mental, moral, emotional, physical and spiritual space.
So, let's just say that that would not be a very productive and positive situation for me, but, you know, on average, overall, it's not something that I look at and say, wow, this is the greatest evil in the world, and boy, isn't this terrible, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
So, then the question becomes, if you've had a kind of history wherein the majority of the abuse that you are facing is...
Verbal in nature is sort of put-downy in nature, then you're going to have a more tricky time getting out of it because the cage that binds you is not a rejection of past violence and physical pain and the terror associated with it, but the kind of empty, howling wasteland of rage that accompanies inevitably a situation of verbal abuse.
Verbal abuse is insidious poison.
It is a really insidious poison that you have to try and work out of your system.
And it's tough because you don't have any physical marks.
And it's very easy to slip into a situation where you say, well, okay, I was put down, but I wasn't really beaten in the way that I know a lot of kids were.
I had enough to eat.
My parents came to my soccer games and this, that, and the other.
I wasn't really pounded down in the way that so many kids are.
Yeah, you know, I have some issues with the verbal stuff that happened, but it's, you know, not really the end of the world as far as that goes.
So, you know, it's hard to pick out the threads of what happened.
And I was going to, but haven't got around to, reading a post that's on the boards wherein a gentleman is talking about his Christian mother.
And his Christian mother is saying, hey, don't expect me to stop being a Christian just because of X, Y, and Z. You're an atheist or you're a rationalist or a stephobot or something.
But don't expect me to stop being a Christian and so on and so on.
Don't expect me to change. Well, I can't change.
Well, it was all in the past. Well, what can I do now about the issues that came up about things in the past?
Well, of course, that is a rather tricky situation to be in.
And what I would say about that is that you have to really, really, really fundamentally trust your gut on this.
And you kind of have to trust your gut.
I say this directly to you because it's so important.
You are going to have to directly trust your gut in a way that those of us who experienced violence, physical violence, don't have to trust our guts.
And you are going to have to live in the realm of, and please listen to this podcast if you haven't, you're going to have to live in the realm of, I am my own proof, to a degree that is very, very challenging, is very difficult, and is very hard to maintain.
It's not exactly the same as faith, because you really are trusting your gut.
And you can validate what's going on in the way it's very tough to validate.
Well, all that kind of stuff, you don't need any validation that you're bad because they're beating up on you, right?
But when it comes to verbal abuse, that's why I encourage people who've experienced this kind of verbal abuse with their parents or siblings to...
Reproduce the situation, right?
That's my big strong suggestion on the way to manage the kind of situation.
You want to reproduce a situation.
The way that you do that is that you end up going to talk to your parents and seeing what comes back in terms of the verbalizations, attitudes, and their responses, what you're doing.
That's why it's so important to go back in parents, especially if the realm that you faced has a verbal abuse rather than physical abuse.
See, now I'm doomed. I can't even edit that stuff because then you'll see the clip in the video and you'll assume I've been taken up and put back by the rapture deities.
So, from that standpoint, I think that it's so important to go back into talking with your family and to reproduce What happened to you when you were a child?
So that's why if someone wanted to go back in and talk to your mom or your dad or your siblings or your grandparents or whoever raised you who caused problems, and maybe all of them, but perhaps not all at once, you really do need to go in and talk to those people so that you can understand what occurred for you when you were a child when you tried to To establish your preferences, your personality, to exercise your willpower.
Not in a way that dominates other people, but in a way that is simply a contribution to the conversation within your family.
And so, what I did with my brother was, I went through a process, because my brother rarely hit me or beat up on me, there were a couple of times, but for the most part, it was all of this really tangled and convoluted teasing, teasing, teasing, endless, endless teasing, and mindfuckery, and skullduggery, and all this kind of stuff.
Just endlessly messing around with my sense of reality and logic, and up is down, and black is white, and You're entrapped in these impossible situations, which are always going to result in something deadly to your own particular interests, all that kind of stuff.
I remember chatting with a girl.
I was interested, probably around the age of 14.
I wanted to go out with this girl, and I saw her in a record store.
Look at the past that we're delving into now.
We were at a record store called Music World, actually.
I applied to work there a number of times because I wanted to work there.
It sure looked like it was more fun than waitering, and I used to love albums, and I think you got an employee discount.
But I wanted to work there, but I was so crazy honest even back then that I would say in my job applications when it said, have you ever been arrested?
I'd say, yeah, you know, I was arrested.
A friend of mine stole a candy bar and I got caught up in it.
So I think that's one of the reasons why.
Not so much for me with the record store, but, you know, perhaps it's just as well.
Otherwise I might have pursued the whole band singing thing and you may never, probably would never have heard of me again.
Anyway. So I'm walking up to this girl, and I want to talk to her.
And of course, I'm 14. You know, I've got the self-esteem of a depressed termite.
And it's a very hard thing for me to do.
And of course, my brother comes up while I'm talking to this girl.
I don't think I'm doing an okay job.
He comes up and he says, Oh, Steph, wipe off the drool.
Why don't you? And of course, you know, you feel like the trap door is just opening up below you.
And man, it's just a, it's a feeling.
I think even he felt a little bit bad about that.
Because the mutually assured...
Well, but there was no mutually assured destruction because I could do that kind of stuff.
Not only... It wasn't just because I was so off-fire virtuous.
I just couldn't do it in a very fundamental kind of way.
I just couldn't figure out what to do.
I have the willpower. I was too frightened.
I couldn't think of it.
I could never retaliate kind of way that had any kind of effect or was any kind of...
I guess negative stimuli, feedback, any kind of way to vote my brother's desire to do these things.
And so it's important to go back and re-engage with your family so that you can figure this kind of stuff out in a way that really makes sense and is productive for you.
So that's a very important thing to work with.
And that's why when you go back and talk to your family, it's important to be vulnerable and have desires and to express preferences.
That's very, very important.
So that you really, at a very bottom gut basic level, you really do remember.
It's so important to really, really, really remember Remember your history.
Remember your past. And the best way to do that, of course, we have this magical, fantastic lab in which to do that.
And the way that we do that is by recreating the situation.
That's how we can achieve this magical world called recreation.
And so when we go in to talk with our families and we say, I want a preference, I have a difference, I have a change, I want something different than what is, I'm going to do X, Y, and Z, we get this amazing time machine.
We get to step back in time with all of the clarity and independence of being an adult.
We get to step back in time.
And to be a child again relative to our families.
That really is an amazing thing to experience.
It is like a time machine.
It's like going back into a bubble of your younger self, but with all of your adult awareness and understanding.
That's why it's so scary, because we really are going back to reproduce the past.
And the more scared you are, the more you should do it, right?
This isn't one of those things where you're scared.
As I talked about with Christina's dinner party metaphor with the guy at the conference, she didn't have control over those variables.
They were all under his control. But in this case, you do have control over the variables you're going in to get yourself free from a corrupt situation.
And so I would really, really suggest that you go back and reproduce this stuff if you can't in your own mind.
See, with the violence, you don't need to because, you know, you recognize that it's stone evil and really bad and that it's not.
And it's generally recognized as a terrible thing.
But if all your parents did was, you know, drag you to church and ignore your wishes and oppose your desires and never respect your thinking and all this, that, and the other, then you are in a situation that's much easier To reproduce.
You don't want to go back and provoke violence from your parents.
You don't need to, because you know the violence is bad.
But, when it comes to the verbal kinds of attacks within your family that can say, denigration or diminishment or putting you in impossibles, they do, to nullify your city, to reason, to enjoy the operation of your mom, then you really do want...
I'm at the lights, it's okay, we're safe.
You really do want to be in that situation where you can...
Go back, reproduce, re-feel that experience that occurred when you were a child, so that it's really clear to you what happened, felt about it, what occurred, and that way you can, I think, work to free yourself from this eerie kind of fog that occurs when you have history that is...
Subtle terms of the amount or the type of abuse that occurred for you.
So thank you so much for listening.
It's August the 11th, 3.30 in the afternoon.
Left work a little bit because, hey, I'm done pretty soon.
Thank you so much for listening as always.
I hope that you have yourself a great, great afternoon.
And I look forward to your donations.
I look forward to seeing you on the board.
Oh dear, oh dear, look at this.
No editing. Oh, just when he was about to make it out, he just never quite got round to it.
Let me just see. I'm gonna, yeah, piddle along.
Here, you can leave now if you want to.
Okay, let's see what we've got here.
I think I can at least stop one of these.
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