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Oct. 24, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
46:17
474 Emotional Defenses (Part 1)

Exposing defenses one by one

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. I know, it's a sickening lack of motion so far this morning.
but I wanted to just read a few things before we started this morning because I'm finally getting to my Psychiatry 101 Defense Mechanisms podcast, and I wanted to go over a few of the basics.
This is stuff that I've sort of picked up and read a little bit from a professor online, but I'll sort of free-form most of it as I often do, but I thought it's worth starting with a definition that's a little bit more technical.
So the question is what are psychological defense mechanisms?
What are psychological defense mechanisms? They are psychological strategies used by individuals and by extension groups of individuals and even entire nations at times to cope with reality and to maintain his or her self-image intact.
I wouldn't say necessarily cope with reality, but those are obviously to do with external things, to manage external stimuli and to manage an internal self-image whether true or false.
A healthy person will use many different defenses throughout life.
I'm not sure about that either, certainly as children.
A defense mechanism becomes pathological when it is used persistently and leads to maladaptive behavior that will eventually threaten the physical and or mental health of the individual.
Having said that, there are psychological defenses that are, one, almost always pathological, when they prevent the individual from being able to cope with a real threat and obscure his or her ability to perceive reality, immature, used in childhood and adolescence, but mostly abandoned by adulthood since they lead to socially unacceptable behavior and or prevent the adult from optimal coping with reality.
3. Neurotic.
Common in everyone, but clearly not optimal for coping with reality, since they lead to problems in relationships, work, and problems in enjoying life.
And finally, mature defense mechanisms used by healthy adults.
They optimize one's ability to have normal relationships, enjoy work, and take pleasure in life.
So there are almost always pathological ones, immature ones, neurotic ones, and mature defense mechanisms.
I'm sure I'm going to have some challenges with this guy's definitions, but that's fine.
What I thought would be, these are sort of typical defense mechanisms, and I've got a list of them here, and I thought it would be worth having a chat with them, not just for those people who are going through food processes with their family, But, you know, for those of us who face conflicts in sort of everyday life and need ways to identify what's going on, right? Because we're all sort of raised to feel crazy whenever there's conflict, right?
People just say, you're wrong, you're crazy, you don't understand, you've missed something, and so on.
And... So I'd like to sort of start off with the most fundamental one, the most fundamental defense mechanism that occurs.
And if you begin to bring any honesty to your family, this is the one that you will encounter very likely the most.
It would be interesting for me to see gender disparities in defense mechanisms.
I never have heard or seen of such a study, but to me it would be quite fascinating.
I'm not going to theorize on that because, of course, I don't have nearly a wide enough sample set, but I think it would be interesting to get people's reactions to any gender disparities between typical defense mechanisms.
But the first one, the most powerful and the most common defense mechanism is denial.
Denial, as they say, not just a river in Egypt.
And denial is the very basic act of simply stating that something which you are accused of or some process which was supposed to have occurred simply did not occur.
And that is what happens when you go to your...
I'm talking about my own experiences here.
I'll try and get some examples from my own life about defenses.
And when I was trying to figure out which I'm sort of pulling my own paths to see which ones I should use or not.
Let's sort of figure out which ones we're going to use.
But denial would be...
An example of when I sat down with my mom and started talking about abuses in the past, that my mom said she simply didn't recall these things.
Now my mom's, of course, not unsophisticated in ways, and so for my mom, she didn't say, that never happened, you're crazy.
Because she knew that that wouldn't work, right?
So she said, well, I don't remember them, but if you remember them, that's all that's important, right?
Which, you know, it's pretty sophisticated in a lot of ways, right?
I don't remember them, but of course, I was mentally ill throughout good chunks of your childhood, so if you remember them, that's all that's important.
So then, she's like...
Well, bad cop has gone away, so good cop here is going to try and clean up some of the mangled remains of your stumps in order to be a nice person, right?
The same person, right? And who knows when bad cop's going to come back.
But denial, in all of its various forms, everything from, ah, that's bullshit, that never happened, you're making it up, you're crazy!
To, you know, a very sweet kind of denial, which was, wow, you know, certainly I can understand that that would hurt you.
It doesn't, I mean, I don't really remember it, but I'm certainly here for you if you did.
And then if it, I mean, obviously it would cause you pain and I want to help you and blah, blah, blah.
I mean, those are both exactly the same thing, right?
It's just one's a bit more sugar and one's a bit more spice, I guess you could say.
And... So, denial is sort of the most fundamental thing that occurs.
And denial is...
I mean, the thing that's important to understand about denial, it's not a line in the sand, right?
It's not, I don't remember this.
This never happened.
Denial is not a statement.
I mean, when you don't have a strong habit for denial yourself, and you encounter someone with denial, what will happen is...
You will end up getting specific statements that are negative from them about things that you're proposing.
And this can happen at work as well.
I just had this thing at work where I sort of came in.
I didn't like the website too much, so I said, oh, well, who owns the website?
And I was told, you own the website, right?
So I started redesigning it.
And then it turned into a big sort of complicated thing where I wasn't allowed to redesign the whole website because everybody had to review it and it would take too long.
And the common thing that happens in business and in many realms of life is that, and this is particularly true for me because I'm very much one for charging ahead and getting things done, and I race ahead of many people.
And so what happens is that people end up In this state of denial, right?
So I mean, just by the by, this is sort of a minor example.
Denial is often manifested in this kind of way, right?
So I sort of, you own the website, so I'll go off to change the website.
And I showed it to the senior executive team twice, and they said, well, we'd like to change these icons and this and that, right?
So obviously I sort of keep going, right?
Sort of makes sense. And then when it comes, I'm like, oh, okay, well, let's really get it moving now.
Like we're ready to really roll.
Then what happens is everyone says, oh, it's going to take too long.
It's not a high list of our priorities.
We're going to have to review it and so on.
And nobody mentions that I was supposed to have ownership of the website and that they'd already seen two iterations and so on, right?
This is sort of the common way that denial works.
It's usually not an active...
It's usually not an active thing.
It's usually not, you're crazy.
Now, it becomes an active thing if you were to, as I didn't, for a variety of reasons we don't have to get into here, but mostly to do with the fact that when you confront people on denial, everything just gets worse, and I haven't decided a variety of things about my life just yet.
But denial is a continual process of erasing reality.
And it only becomes sort of active denial when you're confronted on it or when you confront someone on it.
So, you know, when you go to your mom and you say, you know, these bad things happened and I want to talk about it and I want someone to take ownership for what the hell happened when I was younger.
And your mom sort of says, you're crazy, or, you know, well, it never happened.
I can't recall it.
Maybe it did. I can't recall it.
But, you know, I'm here for you now.
All that kind of nonsense, right?
What happens is that it looks like a lion in the sand.
It looks like she's planted a flag or put up a barrier.
But that's not really what's occurring.
That's just looking at the white caps on the ocean waves and thinking that that's the entire ocean.
No, that's just a surface phenomenon.
What's occurring is a constant process of self-erasure.
Denial is self-erasure.
And through the erasure of the self comes erasure of others.
And that is something that is very, very important to understand, that denial is erasure of the self, which results in erasure of the others.
And you can see this at the micro level, in a sense, although I'm sort of starting to think that family is the macro level and the state is the micro level.
But you can see this in various phenomena in politics.
So, now, you know, the great...
It's so funny.
I mean, I don't want to sound, you know, prescient or anything, but I did a podcast on how the Iraq war was going to stop when they ran out of money, and now the U.S. is apparently secretly suing for peace with the insurgents and, you know, offering amnesty and all this kind of stuff, right?
Because what they want is...
They want a reduction in violence so that they can get out and not, you know, especially after talking about cutting and running.
It's so inevitable, right?
We'll get to projection a little later.
After being the heroic party of Stand the Course, right?
And everyone else is cut and run, right?
Now what they want to do is it's even worse than cut and run.
They want to bribe and run.
See, what they want is they want a reduction in the level of violence.
So they're going to bribe. I'm going to tell you exactly what's going to happen.
This is not brain surgery, right?
This is sort of a by-the-by.
Hey, let's talk a little bit about Iraq in a podcast on defenses.
But it's important. It's an example.
Yeah, let's go with that. Yeah, baby.
But... They're going to bribe the insurgents to lower the amount of violence, right?
And they're going to do this very explicitly, right?
They're going to say, we're going to pay you, you reduce the violence for three or four months, or maybe six months, and then we're going to be out of here and you can have the whole country.
Right? We would also prefer that you keep the violence to a minimum for a month or two after we're gone.
But, you know, obviously we can't control that.
We're going to withdraw our troops out of Iraq and leave them nearby, right?
So then it'll look like, you know, well, we sort of left the country to fend for itself, and it seemed to be doing okay, and then we withdrew, and bam!
Then, oh, but how could we have predicted blah, blah, blah, right?
So it won't look like... It'll look like, wow, look, we've achieved our stabilization efforts.
And now, Iraq can stand on its own two feet, so we can withdraw with honor and so on, and then it'll all fall apart.
But they'll have a story, right?
I mean, that's all people who have defenses want, if they want a credible story to shut people up.
And the credible story will be...
That, look, the insurgent attacks went down.
We were effective. We stabilized the country.
We withdrew to a safe distance and let it run itself, and it still seemed to be okay.
We couldn't stay there forever, and then we withdrew, and then the Iraqis blew it, right?
The Iraqis themselves, you know, we spent $10 billion and trained a quarter million Iraqi soldiers and military after disbanding the army and debathifying the entire country, right?
And after that amount of investment, you know, at some point the country has to try and stand on its own two feet, and we did everything we could, and we did all the right things, and we did this and we did that, and then, you know, but at some point, you know, you have to sort of let, there's this metaphor, I'm listening to the audiobook State of Denial by Bob Woodward, which, unfortunately, it's the abridged one, and it's a pretty random grab bag of, you know, disparate impressions from people in power.
But one of the things that is kind of funny to me about it, Is that, don't worry, traffic is unbelievably slow this morning, even on the private roads.
And why? There's a spot of rain in the sky.
Everybody's got to dodge the raindrops.
So, they talk in these amazingly windy metaphors, right?
So, Rumsfeld is all, you know, well, Iraq, you know, it's like a kid.
You're trying to teach it to ride a bike.
I'm not doing a very good rum spell, but I just want you to make sure I'm not saying these things.
And so you make someone ride a bike, and at some point you've got to take off the training wheels, and you've got to take their feet from the seat, and you've got to just let them fall, and then they're going to learn.
And if you don't do that, you end up with a 40-year-old who can't ride a bike.
To me, that's kind of funny, right?
I mean, I'm not sure if they're talking about the deaths of hundreds of civilians every day, but it's very nice that they have this paternalistic teaching a child to ride a bike kind of thing, and that there's a few cuts and scrapes.
And what the hell's wrong with a 40-year-old who can't ride a bike?
Right? It's just kind of funny.
But this is the level that they work at, these sort of Dr.
Seuss Rhyming couplets of nuggets of wisdom with no connection to reality.
It's a language world.
They live in an ecosystem of words.
They don't live in reality.
This is partly what defense mechanisms are all about.
There's another one I can't quite remember.
It's like... Control, contain, right?
The words are similar.
I can't remember the exact phrase. But Condoleezza Rice was, after putting off being interrogated by the, lobbed some easy questions by the Senate about Iraq, she finally agreed to testify.
And so she's like, oh, what am I going to say?
What am I going to say? So then she starts to put a whole speech together and there's some book written in 99 by some guy that's about, you know, contain and control.
The fundamental process of the military operation is to contain and control or something like that, you know, like a...
And, you know, someone said, well, that's not really a positive enough metaphor, contain and control.
So, you know, we're going to add the word build, right?
So it's contain, control, and build, right?
So Condoleezza Rice sits down in front of the Senate or the Congressman or whoever, and she says, you know, the fundamentals...
I'm not even going to try and do Condoleezza Rice.
I can't do my stink eye with these sunglasses on.
But Condoleezza Rice, she sits down, she's like...
The fundamental purpose of our military operations in Iraq must be to contain, control, and to build.
And that's just the mantra.
She goes back to it. It's like, well, how about all these people being killed?
It's like, yes, that's part of the container control phase, and we're also starting the build phase so that we can build Iraq.
And she goes into these long things about how it's important to rebuild Iraq.
They need schools, they need sewers, and all these kinds of things.
And who's going to disagree with any of that?
It's like, no, they don't. In their own hats, right?
But it's just language, right?
I mean, there's no connection with anything that's going on in the real world.
It's like, if I add the word build to my speech, I mean, this is This is the level at which politicians think, right?
It's this incredibly childlike, sorry, insult to children.
It's this rapidly immature addiction to defendable words, defendable positions, right?
So, you know, Condoleezza Rice is like, not what is, she's not saying, well, what's going on in Iraq that I can report on?
That's sort of factual, right? Because, of course, you have this general's revolt where the generals are all saying...
There's just no way that this is going to work, right?
In search of attacks are getting worse, the number of deaths is increasing, and some of the reports of the numbers of Iraqi dead coming out are absolutely staggering, hundreds of thousands of people.
Not to mention the displaced, and nobody ever talks about the wounded, right?
Because the wounded, you know, there's an old thing that you would do if you were a spy or if you were an insurgent.
The better thing to do than to kill someone is to wound them significantly, right?
Because when you wound someone, you drain resources from your enemy for quite a long period of time.
Right, so, and other people, like if you kill someone, someone else just takes their place and it's the end and so on, but if you wound someone, then, you know, hospital beds and surgeons and you tie up a whole, nurses and all that, you tie up a whole bunch of other resources and they have to pay all these people and they have to pay that person's disability pension for the rest of existence and so on.
So when you wound someone, that's quite a much larger drain on the treasury of your enemy, which of course is what the insurgents are doing, and they're well-funded and well-paid to do so, and I bet you, relative to the other kinds of life that they have, I bet you being an insurgent, sorry, relative to the other kinds of lives that are available, I bet you being an insurgent is quite an exciting thing.
It's a boy's game of blow-up relative to the other crappy existences that they could have otherwise.
And they're all well paid for doing so, and you make an enormous amount of money as an insurgent because they're all paid by foreign governments and all paid by people who want to humiliate and embarrass the United States.
It's a fun shell game.
This is an economic war.
The soldiers are just one of the manifestations of it.
They're like the whitecaps on the waves.
But, sorry, it's a tangent from a tangent.
We are in a tangent whirlpool.
Let's go round and round.
So Condoleezza Rice doesn't sit there and say, well, what's actually happening in Iraq that I can talk to these people about?
She says, no. What words can I use?
What story can I tell?
What am I going to say to them?
That's the only important thing that occurs to her.
Not what is the truth, but...
What can I say? I mean, this isn't exactly as you'd expect, right?
I mean, these people, like, she's a...
I don't know, she's a...
They may as well be, you know, of Narnia, right?
I mean, this might as well be on their business cards.
You know, it's like, I'm the president of Narnia, right?
I mean, this is the level of reality that they're living in.
They're living, you know, they've gone through the wardrobe, right?
Into this death cult of Narnia.
And... I just think that it's kind of important to look at this denial of what is occurring.
And denial takes, of course, very many forms.
Redirection, skepticism, anger, dissociation.
And what is another common one as well, which is why I say denial is not an act but a continuum, is that even if you do get through somebody's defenses, then I mean, which for me has always been the case of relentless friendliness, which has always been my impassionate virtue.
It's been the only thing that I've ever found, and it's sort of worked with some listeners.
But if you do get through the defenses, right, then what will happen is the defenses will simply reconstellate, and you will be right back where you started, right?
So you'll maybe have one meaningful conversation where there's any kind of truth that is...
That is as stated, and then right away, the next time you talk, you're back to talking about, you know, boys and haircuts, or whatever, you know.
Boys and haircuts is always what I did some research, believe it or not, on a girl's slumber party for a novel I wrote, and boys and haircuts seem to be an important...
But you go back to talking about the weather and maybe politics or whatever, but nothing to do with this.
There's no reference back to what was spoken about before, right?
And so there's a number of people who are going through this defooing process.
Defooing is ditching or ceasing to have relations or seeking to pretend you do have relations with your family of origin.
And what's happening is that email is the new evil tool of the foo, right?
So when you're going through a foo-endectomy, a number of people are getting these emails with sort of nothing in the subject line.
Sorry, nothing in the body of the email, but in the subject line is just, we love you, Orr.
How are you? You know, this is all just ridiculous, right?
And I wrote about this on the board, so I'm not going to sort of go into it here because...
Really, there must be at least some common throughput to what it is that I'm talking about this morning.
So, there's sort of a level one mechanism, denial.
A refusal to accept external reality because it is too threatening.
And so there are examples of denial being adaptive.
It might be adaptive for a person who is dying to have some denial and so on, which, I mean, I'm not even going to try and guess about whether that's true or not.
Distortion is another sort of level one defense mechanism.
These are the ones that are almost always pathological.
So distortion is a gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs.
And this, of course, is...
I mean, the president doesn't sit there and say that...
There is no war occurring in Iraq and there never was.
What they do is they simply reshape reality.
So they say the insurgency is on its last legs.
We've almost won one last push.
And of course they do that because they want to keep leaving the treasury.
And of course now that they're starting to run out of money, Now they're reshaping external reality.
And of course, if you look at the way they say that they deal with Saddam Hussein as somebody who has weapons of mass destruction, that this is a principle, right?
That he must be dealt with because he's defying the UN and he's developing weapons of mass destruction and so on, right?
And what happens then is that Kim Jong-il of North Korea actually detonates a nuclear weapon and nobody does anything.
This sort of distortion is hilarious in a very fundamental way.
It's just hilarious. It's not, and just so you understand, it's not hilarious that anybody's dying.
I mean, that's something that I feel acrimonious about to the nth degree.
But it is hilarious to watch the ridiculous dance of pathetic sophistry and collusion among these citizens to pretend that this is not happening, right?
That this is all not about murder.
So the gross reshaping of external reality to meet internal needs I mean, the example there is, you know, the constantly twisting story about what's going on in Iraq.
I might as well just use Iraq for these as examples.
I mean, we've already done a bunch of family stuff beforehand, right?
So originally it was, you know, the game was set up that Iraq, you must disarm.
We know you have weapons of mass destruction.
You must disarm.
And so Iraq sends 20,000 pages of lists of its weapons to the UN, and lets the UN inspectors all over the place, and the rhetoric doesn't change, right?
So, of course, now you know you're dealing with a defense.
But the defense is not exactly the right term, because almost always it's an attack, right?
You're defending the self by attacking the other.
It's the false self which defends illusion by attacking the truth.
We'll use the term defense, but when I'm talking about it in a military context, I don't want you to get it confused with self-defense.
It really is about an attack of the other.
So this is a kind of trap, right?
It's a no-win situation that you get into with people who are pathological, like politicians, right?
So George Bush says to Hussein, you must disarm, right?
And Hussein says, but I don't have any weapons of mass destruction.
And Bush says, we know you do, you must disarm.
Now, of course, if... Saddam Hussein said, fine, here's my weapons of mass destruction, if he actually had them.
He'd turn them over and say, fine, I've disarmed.
And they'd say, well, you lied to us, so now we're going to invade you.
It's the how, you know, when did you stop beating your wife kind of quote debate.
And if he continues to deny that he has weapons of mass destruction, and lets UN weapons inspectors in to have a look around and so on, then they say, well, we know he's got them, and he's lying to us, so we're going to invade.
It's going through the formalities.
And so that sort of situation is funny, right?
It's complete distortion of reality.
And then when you get into the war, right, it's like, well, we're there to defend Americans from weapons of mass destruction.
And there is no weapons of mass destruction.
So then they say, well, we're there to...
I mean, there's a whole bunch of reasons, but we'll just go through the two major ones, right?
And then they say, well, we're there to rebuild Iraq, right?
And then no rebuilding of Iraq is occurring, right?
You're still getting only a couple of hours of electricity a day in Baghdad and so on, right?
Just as you'd expect from army engineers who aren't in the army because they're good engineers.
Good engineers work for defense contractors.
Anyway. So, then, we're here to bring democracy to the Iraqi people, right?
And then, clearly, there's no democracy available to the Iraqi people.
And then, well, we're going to help rebuild their economy.
Well, there's no rebuilding of the economy that's going on, right?
And of course, this is all just distortion of reality and just constantly reshaping with no reference to the past, like reshaping the story, right?
So that's something that's a fundamental defense.
And of course, basically, all of this sort of stuff, you know, the...
The talking heads, right?
They're all like the guy who's the lookout during the bank heist.
You know, that's all that's happening is the guy who's the lookout.
Anybody who comes close, he's saying, hey, nothing going on here, or, you know, it's all virtuous, it's all good, keep moving people, and so on.
That aspect of things is...
This sort of distortion where you just reshape whatever is going on in reality to create a cover story that is plausible for your hidden agenda.
It's not that complicated a hidden agenda in the Iraq war, as we've talked about before.
It's a massive transfer of money.
It costs hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars.
That money is certainly not going to the troops.
It is going to people involved in the war who are...
I mean, there's no greater moneymaker for evil organizations than a war, and everything else is just sort of a cover story.
I mean, it's all about the monies.
It's all about the pieces of paper with dead white guys on them.
Delusional projection.
Now, this one I can talk with a little bit more credibility about, and I can actually sort of use my own mom because she has this to a very large degree.
So, my mom, of course, a very violent woman, very aggressive woman, a hateful woman in sort of fundamental ways.
And as she grew older, I sort of have gone through the ideology of this once before...
Or maybe more than once.
But just to touch on it briefly, she acted out sexually inappropriate behavior towards me when my brother was sent to England for a couple of years to live and it was just her and I alone.
And then that all collapsed.
And I would say that it was probably somewhat heroic on her side to not prey on me in this manner.
But what happened was then she experienced a psychological collapse when I was, I don't know, 13 or so.
Maybe 14? 13.
I think it was around 13. And she was just unable to get out of bed.
And so I just thought I could go to school.
I'd bring her tea in the morning and...
Go to school, come back at lunch, and make her a little lunch, and leave it by her bed, and she wouldn't eat it.
And she just, like, a complete catastrophic kind of breakdown of the false self that was, right?
False self that had some connection with reality.
And from this phase, she emerged with this...
This went on for some time, and then she was institutionalized for some time, and my brother and I just sort of worked a number of jobs.
We took in roommates in sort of mid-teens and sort of survived from there and flourished relative to how things were before, so please don't feel like it was a bad thing.
It wasn't as good a thing as having a good family, but it was a heck of a lot better than having this crazy woman Around the place, throwing things and beating us up.
So that was by far a significant improvement from the age of, I don't know, 14 or 15 onwards to be more or less self-sufficient with some interruptions.
But my mom emerged from this sort of catatonia or this intense depression.
With this persecutory complex, right?
With this paranoia.
And she certainly did experience it before, right?
So when I was about 11, a vacuum cleaner went missing.
And some people had been in to fix our kitchen tiles and she thought they'd stolen it and then she demanded that I march right over to my friend's houses who'd been over and get her vacuum cleaner back.
I mean this was a whole mess that went on for quite a long time.
And of course I simply refused to do that, you know, because I wasn't going to go to my friend's place and say, why did you steal my mom's crappy old vacuum cleaner?
And so she definitely had this inability to, you know, it's a very weak ego that can't admit mistakes, right?
I mean, we all know people like this to one degree or another.
A very weak ego that can't admit mistakes.
And whenever potential criticism arises, must find an external scapegoat to blame, right?
So this arises out of an extraordinarily high degree of self-loathing that, of course, in my mom's case, She started off a victim, right?
I mean, she was born, as I mentioned before, in 1937 in Berlin.
Jewish heritage.
Not a good place to be.
Spent her war years being shunted around, hidden, sent to orphanages.
And you can imagine what was going on in those orphanages, particularly in wartime, was just the worst kind of predation that you can imagine.
So she started off a victim, all sympathies for her.
And then... She became a victimizer.
No sympathies for her. Complete responsibility.
I'm sorry. It's a sad thing in a way, but that's just a fact that people have to sort of have to, but, you know, they would be wise to accept, I guess you could say.
The self-loathing that my mom experienced was deep and powerful and justified.
She had done hateful things.
Hurt, bullied, beaten her children, screamed at them, frightened them, tyrannized them, and so on.
When a vacuum cleaner went missing, And if I remember rightly, and I can't remember this exactly, she'd lent it to a friend of hers but forgotten about it.
Like her friend came back with the vacuum cleaner.
And of course then there's no reference to the history.
Then the mistake is not, I lost my vacuum cleaner, but I persecuted my son for a vacuum cleaner going missing.
And then there's no reference to that, right?
So they just sit down and say, oh my god, how bad.
I'm so sorry. I don't know what happened there, right?
What can I do to make it up to you or anything like that?
You know, she's just tight-lipped.
Now she's angry at my being upset and angry, right?
I mean, it's all just too silly and ridiculous in hindsight for words.
Though, of course, at the time, you know, sheerly terrifying and enraging.
No question of that.
But... This kind of phenomenon within my mom's history, or psychological history, was definitely a core part of her defense mechanisms.
Whenever anything occurred that might provoke criticism of her, she would simply rage at other people.
A delusional projection, right?
That she is capable and has achieved great crimes.
As my therapist said, she said, your mom has an unlived life of a murderer.
That she is a murderous kind of rage and it's only a miracle that she didn't go that far.
Which I think is probably true.
So because she has actually enacted great crimes, she now believes that all other people We'll enact great crimes because she won't own her own behavior, so she can only normalize it by projecting it onto others.
And thus she then gets to re-experience victimhood from herself, projected into the outside world, which also makes her a little bit more in touch in a sick kind of way with her own childhood.
So it's all quite complicated.
But what happened with my mother was that When she went through this terrifying depression, which lasted for quite some time, and about a year later, she was institutionalized for some time.
When she emerged from that, she had a new...
I'm trying to think how old she was at that point.
She wasn't that old. Maybe 45?
No, that can't be right.
Sorry, I'm just doing some math here.
This would be the early 80s, late 70s, early 80s.
So, 37 to 70, there'd be 40s.
No, she was in her early mid-40s.
Now, you've still got a long way to go, right?
I mean, she's still alive, and she's like 60.
She's almost 69. She's 69 now.
So, what is your false self going to do?
It's going to have to reconstellate itself.
Because now you're not able to work and your children don't really like you and they're leaving, right?
So your victims are leaving.
And I think this has probably actually come to think of it, this probably has a lot more to do with it than anything else.
So your victims are leaving, which doesn't give you the chance to act out your rage against helpless children.
And so what happens, right?
You have to act out your rage because you're, you know, evil, I guess you could say.
And so what are you going to do?
Well, my mom began to formulate, or it actually was a fairly rapid process, she began to formulate a complex wherein the doctors were trying to kill her, right?
So there was this German doctor, and the fact that he was German was probably not accidental.
And there was this German doctor who's now dead who, you know, injected her with all of these ailments and gave her all of these illnesses.
And she's, you know, it became part of a vast conspiracy and everyone was out to get her.
And so, like, she would sleep with a knife under her pillow.
And when, like, a car would backfire or there'd be a noise from the street, she would literally throw herself to the ground, sobbing in terror, thinking that somebody was trying to shoot her.
And when some graffiti was sprayed up on the wall opposite the apartment she lived in, she perceived that as a message from the insurance companies that she better back off and that if she didn't, they were going to kill her and so on, right?
And she then, of course, using legal aid, she began to persecute and, of course, she couldn't do it directly because she was becoming older and she's not exactly a big woman.
So she began to use the legal system to persecute people.
So she had this endless legal case that was going up against a variety of doctors who had had the misfortune to come in contact with her.
And this went on for quite many years, at least a decade.
I don't know if it's still going on, but of course I only knew her for about a decade after that.
And this is sort of a by-the-by.
It's just how strange these sorts of things can get.
I stayed with my mother after my undergrad because I just could not get a job.
This was during a terrible recession.
I could not get a job. I had no place to stay.
She was there for a few months and of course I spent a good deal of time.
I got various jobs like gardening and so on, weeding and so on.
My mother then at one point just decided to go to Ottawa.
She took a bus to Ottawa and she ended up living in a women's shelter there for about six or eight months or whatever.
I can't remember.
It was very nice for me.
I ended up just paying her rent and all that kind of stuff.
And this, I remember one day I was at home and I got a call from, there was a call, I picked it up and it's like, "We're looking for Christine and we're looking for your mother." And I'm like, "She's not here.
Why, can I take a message?" She's like, yeah, this is the court. It's her court date today.
She's supposed to be in court.
And she's not here.
And this sort of made sense why she had taken off to Ottawa, right?
that it began to be a little bit more comprehensible, that she'd taken off and left town because she knew, although she hadn't told me, that her court date was coming and she didn't want to go to court for fear that if she went to court that her case would be thrown out and she would no longer have that her court date was coming and she didn't want to go to court for fear that if she went to So this was a great negative for her.
And it really was at a fundamental level with self-preservation, right?
I mean, at this state in your life, the level of crimes that you have committed, the levels of abuse that you have perpetrated on others has become so prodigious that you either continue to persecute other people or you kill yourself, right?
There's no sort of third door called self-healing at this point in your life.
The soul is certainly not an indestructible organ, I guess you could say.
And so this sort of persecutory delusion, this projection of that people are out to get me, is a fundamental defense where you ascribe Your own motives, which remain hidden to you through this very act of ascribing them to others, you ascribe them to others, and you then become defensive through attack.
So my mom believed that the medical institution, the doctors as a whole, the insurance companies, everybody and their dog, was out to get her.
And so, in order to defend herself, she began to mount all these taxpayer-paid-for lawsuits against, you know, fairly innocent doctors.
And one of them actually died quite early, and I wonder sometimes whether it's the stress of this.
Anyway, there's no way to know.
But yeah, so my mother, her own hatred of others, her own hatred of herself, It's a nightmare world when you get into this kind of personality structure.
And so you have this hatred for yourself, and then you act that out on your children, right?
So you think your children are bad all the time, and disobedient, and so on.
And I remember, and I hope this isn't too much of a trip down the memory lane of hell or something, but...
I remember one story that was recurring within my mom when we were younger was that we were staying with my aunt and uncle once, and my uncle asked my brother, I can't remember how, but I bet you he didn't scream it at him.
He said, you know, did you remember to put the cat back on the toothpaste tube?
And my brother went back up and checked, right?
And he wasn't screamed.
I don't remember, because I was very, very young.
But this kind of stuck in the mind of my mom for, oh, many, many, many years.
And it would come up, you know, like the defended people are broken records.
They're incredibly irritating, you know, that way.
And it's sort of very fundamental way. They're very irritating.
Because it's just over and over and over.
You get the same thing over and over and over again.
Because they're not alive, fundamentally, in their soul.
It's all scar tissue, right?
It's not androids of defenses, so to speak.
And so my mother would always say, oh yeah, well, when I ask you to do something, you just won't do it.
But when so-and-so asks you, you just flew up those stairs and did it right away.
And my mom felt that this was some sort of injustice or some sort of cruelty on my brother's part, when, of course, it was simply that nobody wants to be bullied.
And, of course, she couldn't ever see her own complicity or her own causing of this kind of stuff.
So she just had to blame my brother, right?
And she also launched a number of lawsuits against my father.
And, you know, the law is the bully's weapon, right?
I mean, you can see this in Prison Break as well.
The government uses the law to loose the dogs on its enemies, right?
I mean, it's got nothing to do with justice.
It's just a tool for destruction and oppression.
So, yeah, so there's a lot of self-hatred, which is then acted out against those within your control and within your power.
And then, when that doesn't work, and the fundamental thing that changes here is when the kids leave home, and that's why parents use all of these guilt and control mechanisms so that they can continue to act out this hatred and hostility towards others, which is actually towards the self.
And then, if the kids get out of your orbit, Then, and this is, I don't know, I won't even talk about that.
But when this gets out of your, when the kids sort of get out of your orbit, when they get out of your power, get out from under your heel, sorry, let me find another way of putting that.
I'm not sure why the first phrase wasn't good enough, but it just wasn't.
Then you have to persecute others, right?
And for a lot of times, for a lot of people, this goes into abstraction.
So for my mom, it becomes a persecutory, paranoid complex around people out to get her.
And of course, then she feels that it's purely preemptive.
And of course, this is highly, as you can tell, highly related to Iraq as well.
Then it becomes purely preemptive and purely self-defense to attack.
This is the great danger.
If George Bush did actually feel that Saddam Hussein was a threat to America, if he did genuinely believe this, then this would be exactly what we're talking about here.
This would be a projection of his own aggression.
Every single leader in the history of the world has always sorrowfully gone to war because there's no other alternative and diplomatic efforts have been exhausted, which of course is completely false.
And any basic rationality will show that, as you can see with the fact that he's managing to find some diplomatic alternatives with North Korea.
So it is entirely possible that defenses cause war.
And certainly you can look at this in the case of Hitler, where he feels that everyone's really aggressive and so on.
Everyone's out to get him. And he is the one who actually wants to go and kill everyone.
So we'll continue on with this chat about defenses this afternoon.
Thank you so much for listening. Got some very nice donations yesterday, today, and a new subscriber.
Welcome aboard. Thank you so much.
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