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Jan. 3, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:47
583 Internet Dependence

A listener needs help with his dark side...

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Hi everybody, it's Steph.
I'm out for my little walk at lunch, and I promise not to do three podcasts a day.
I'm fully aware no sane human being can keep up with this production.
But, um, right away we have people drifting back.
I don't mean to sound horribly conservative, but let me explain to you the way that this looks to other people.
So I'm strolling along, and I have wrapped my Rio, oh sorry, my Zen Vision M, in a toque.
And why? Because it is so windy, in this neck of the woods, that if I do not wrap it in a toque, basically you will hear, it will be as if I am standing beneath a space shuttle attempting to Podcast.
And so the reason that I try to be a little bit surreptitious about this is not out of any massive guilt about podcasting.
I feel that I can go for a half hour walk at lunch without any particular issues.
But... It's really because I appear to be passionately having a conversation, or having a passionate conversation, with a toque and a piece of paper.
And perhaps there is some degree of self-actualization that would result in me having no embarrassment whatsoever about the appearance of being intimately involved with a hat, but I am not there yet.
So, if you can excuse me for the occasional lapses in assignments, I think my hat is alive.
So, anyway, I got to email.
This is just the tidy-up stuff.
This is the stuff I never get time to during the drives because we have the main topics barreling along, the exquisitely worked-out curriculum.
But this is stuff that I've been meaning to get to for some time and apologize.
It took me so long. Somebody wrote or posted or some damn thing said the following.
Hi, I was involved with a woman through internet conversation for a few years.
We met through an internet forum rating site.
I guess maybe that's a forum rating site?
I don't know what that is. And began speaking directly in IM's.
Instant messaging. Initially I regarded her with indifference and disrespect, but over the next few months I began to have strong feelings for her.
She mattered to me and became valuable.
However, I feel as though I never actually treated her as though she has a value.
She would occasionally insult herself, and I would agree, sometimes because I actually did agree, and other times because I simply disliked that behavior.
This evolved into me insulting her for absolutely no reason whatsoever other than my own boredom.
I would like to her just to get a reaction and disrespect her, simply to amuse myself.
I alternately told her that I was supremely happy with her presence in my life, and that I hated her, and wished we had never met.
We kept this up for a few years, until she met and fell in love with someone.
As a result, we do not talk any more, and I miss her greatly.
I want to have her back, but feel as though I would do more harm than good.
I have made attempts to contact her, but she has not responded, and I do not blame her.
What was so strange to me about the whole situation is that I've never behaved that way with any other person in my life.
It was only her. I hardly ever expressed any sort of emotion towards anyone, but with her I expressed every emotion.
Every feeling of anger or sadness or fear was hurled at her.
I feel as though I abused her, and I am sorry for that.
My question is, how can I apologize to her in any sort of meaningful way, and should I even bother apologizing at all?
It might be for the best, If I just let her go on with her life and forget about me.
Any replies would be helpful, and any thoughts on how I can change my behavior would be absolutely appreciated.
So, I'm sorry that this took a little while to get back to you on this, or at least pass my thoughts along.
The behavior, of course, that you, you know, with no prejudice and with the understanding that we've all done things that we don't feel proud of, The behavior that you exhibited towards this woman was absolutely wretched.
I mean, I'm sorry, I wish I could put it in a more couched phraseology, but I really don't think that I can.
Now, she, of course, has her issues as well.
Of that, that can be no question.
So, I wouldn't take the entire blame upon yourself, but psychologically, this is an example of what is sometimes called splitting.
Now, splitting is the process of not seeing the person for the full person, but to bounce off the idealization followed by anger.
Idealization followed by anger at disillusionment, right?
The higher you put someone on a pedestal, the more, when you find out their flaws and failings, they tend to crash down.
So, I think that it's a very interesting...
The phase that you went through, and there's a lot to be learned about it in terms of regaining some of the less humane aspects, sorry, in terms of regaining some of the more humane aspects of yourself, which I think we can safely say were not entirely present during this interaction with this woman.
Now, what I think is interesting is the two comments that you make.
One is that you say that You began insulting her out of boredom.
And also that you rarely express any feelings towards other people.
Also that you rarely feel feelings towards other people.
And so what I would say is this, and I think that this is something that you need to deal with very proactively, and I would suggest very quickly.
Your soul is in danger of rotting within your body.
Your capacity for happiness and joy is very much in danger of rotting away.
Now, this woman has nothing to do with it.
This woman was simply a way by which you could act out particular feelings, a way in which you could keep somebody at bay.
I think that's an important thing to understand.
You don't want to have anything to do with this woman at an emotional level, This was a way of acting out particular problems that you have within your life.
It's got nothing to do with the woman.
I do think that you owe her something, but I would not...
We can talk about that later if you like.
But this would be sort of my rough formulation, and you can see if it makes any sense to you.
The first thing is that This is a mirror of a kind of relationship that you have had in your life, and I would guess with a parent or authority figure of some kind.
The indifference, the love-hate, the insults, the attachment followed by the hatred, the love and devotion and affection followed by the rejection.
This is the kind of game that people play when they can't feel.
And their feelings become very unstable.
So there's great attachment followed by great revulsion.
Affection coincides emotionally with fear of betrayal.
So the closer you get to someone, the more you fear that there's going to be betrayal.
The more you reject them and scorn them and so on.
It's a way of managing the feelings.
But, of course, this comes with an enormous loneliness, right?
This comes with an enormous and crippling interstellar sense of isolation, which drives you then back to try and connect with people, but the closer you get to someone, the more you fear that they're going to betray you, and so the more you attack them, and then you claim love, and then you recoil, and all of this arises from...
A fundamental lack of bonding that has occurred between you and your mother.
It could be some other, but let's just go with the most obvious and generally true explanation that this is what happens with your...
This is what happened with your mother or primary caregiver.
We'll just say mother. If it's someone else, you can substitute if you don't mind.
But... You never felt, when you were a child, you never felt secure in your bonding relationship with your mother.
And you always felt that your mother could turn on a dime, could change on a whim.
You never felt any stability in that relationship.
One of the great ways of controlling other people is to make them dependent upon us and then to act in a whimsical and contradictory kind of manner.
That is probably the most common way to control people.
Obviously, within the family situation, that is very much the case.
We also have this, of course, with the government, right?
Insofar as the government takes so many of our resources that we can't afford our own roads, we can't afford our own health care, we can't afford our own private defense or police systems or private courts.
So it takes all our resources and then creates a monopoly And so it forces us to be dependent upon the government for particular solutions, and then it behaves in a completely unpredictable and arbitrary manner.
This is how I say the government mirrors what occurs within the family.
Make somebody dependent on you behave in an arbitrary manner.
This is the root of teasing, of course, as well, right?
If you've ever had, you know, those stupid games which people play, siblings play, where you want something, and Some toy or somebody snatches your money or something and then they hold it above you and you jump up and down to try and get it back from them.
Or that sort of monkey in the middle thing where somebody grabs your hat and then they throw it around and you have to run around and try and catch it.
So now you're dependent upon these people to get your hat back and they behave in an arbitrary manner.
So... If people have a sadistic streak, this is how they control the agony of having been dealt with this in the past, is they try to turn it into a joke and become addicted to the highs and lows of affection and abuse.
And of course then what happens is, when somebody has abused you in this manner, has made you dependent upon them, and then is behaving in an arbitrary manner, if you get upset or frustrated or angry or tearful, then of course you can't take a joke I don't know if you're going to take it so seriously.
Chill! Relax! It's just a joke!
Relax! Then, of course, it becomes your issue that you have any of these sorts of problems at all.
So, this is a very fine and dense package of sadism that occurs.
And so, I can virtually guarantee you that within your own family situation.
You had a mother, a primary caregiver, who acted in a completely arbitrary manner And naturally, as a child, you were completely dependent upon her, because that's the nature of children.
It's the big weakness, or the inevitable weakness of being a child.
It's not really a weakness, it's just the inevitability of the power disparity between child and parent.
But your mother behaved in an arbitrary manner.
She would be affectionate, and then cold, and then she would fuss over you, and then she would withdraw.
And all of this would occur, and you would never know or be able to predict or manage your parents' behavior through any kind of actions of your own.
So what happens is your emotional apparatus shuts down.
Because our emotional apparatus is a sensitive thing, and if it can't achieve anything that we need in the realm of the family, it generally tends to shut down in the same way that a motor in danger of being burnt out should have a fuse or a...
An electrical system that can burn out should have a fuse that would cut out the power to avoid further damage to the apparatus.
So your emotional system tends to cut out in the same way that if you have an experiment where a chicken packs a button and gets a pellet of food and then packs another button and then gets An electric shock, of course, the chicken is only going to pack the bare pellet that gives it food.
It's going to avoid the other one. If you start randomly switching these, the chicken actually just becomes paralyzed.
Right? It doesn't know what it can do.
And this, of course, happens to our emotional apparatus when we're in a highly variable and unpredictable and punitive and hot and cold, running heaven and hell situation with our mothers.
So... What happens of course is that this kind of interaction has a sick kind of familiarity to it.
To you, and you are drawn to replicate this kind of behavior.
This is human interaction to you because you haven't differentiated the hell that you went through with your mother from a good human relationship.
It is to you just relationship.
So you're drawn because of the ghastly loneliness that you experience, which I have full sympathy for.
You're drawn to try and connect with people, but the moment that you try and really connect or actually succeed in connecting with someone, The sadistic impulses come out, and you have to play out what was done unto you, at least until such time as you go through the pain and integrate it and so on.
So, as far as your relationship to this woman goes, she obviously had the same thing with her father, right?
And this is the cross-generational stuff that gets played out, and the internet is...
It can be fairly dangerous in terms of playing out relationships.
IM has a certain anonymity and a certain acting outedness that, you know, people swear at me and IM that would probably not do so in real life, right?
Internet courage is a dangerous brew.
It's not really courage, of course.
So, as far as this woman goes, yes, of course you treated her very badly, no question.
And the guilt that you feel, I fully understand.
Now, the great challenge is how to make gold out of shit.
But it's possible, right?
So, if you treat somebody very badly...
And she was drawn to this, and she needed it in a ghastly kind of way as well, because she was undifferentiated in terms of her own history and what was going on with your relationship.
So, I think that...
You need to recognize that you treated her badly, but the degree to which you treated her badly was still a very small amount relative to how badly you were treated by your mother, father, whoever.
So the degree to which you feel guilt as your behavior, which I can certainly understand and makes good sense, I would say that you should feel anger towards those who abused you when you were younger and left you with this futzed out and too much, too little amperage kind of emotional apparatus.
So, I would strongly suggest the following.
I would not try to contact her.
I would not try to write her.
I would recognize that I had treated her badly.
I would recognize that the emotional disconnectedness that I feel towards myself is causing me to become over-attached and then sadistic in my relationships and that the boredom that I feel is very dangerous.
Boredom is the great danger of the soul because boredom results in explosive action.
There's a play by Chekhov called The Wood Demon where there's this great story where this guy says, you know, Jakob and I were sitting in a A tent in Siberia.
We were soldiers and we sat there and we sat there and we had nothing to do for weeks upon weeks upon weeks waiting for reinforcements.
I can't remember how the story goes. Something like this.
And we have nothing to read.
We have nothing to talk about.
We have nothing to do. And after about two months of this, Yakob simply stares across a little wooden table one day to me, grabs his sword and I grab my sword and we just start falling on each other with blows.
And that's not a bad way of expressing the danger that these kinds of situations of boredom can accrue to people.
So, I'd be very careful about this problem of boredom.
It is going to lead you to do some pretty heinous things.
And this is sort of like the way that you would run high voltage through somebody's chest in order to get them to wake up.
This is what the panic that occurs when you're disconnected from your emotions.
There's a great deal of panic.
There's a great spiraling hole of nothingness that can swallow you up and end up with you becoming incredibly destructive, either to yourself or to others.
So, I'd be very, very careful of this black hole, this blank hole within your heart, within your soul.
And I would work as hard as I could to try to reawaken this broken and damaged part of yourself.
So, I would absolutely not get in touch with this woman.
I would recognize that I had done her wrong.
There may be ways in which I can make amends in the future, but I certainly can't do it from the emotional position that I'm in right now.
I would leave her be. I will absolutely guarantee you that she's, unless she's gone through significant therapy, she's not going to be happy in her new relationship.
You guys should never ever date.
You should certainly not contact her again because you're going to be too tempted to be drawn into these old patterns.
And this would be very dangerous for you and for her, of course.
I would get myself into therapy as quickly as possible.
Do not let the sun go down tonight without phoning a therapist and making an appointment.
Phone a competent counselor because This aspect of your heart that has become cold and hurtful to others, and to yourself most particularly, can be healed.
You can change this kind of behavior.
You can find a more satisfying way of interacting with people.
But you need to recognize that the way that you were taught to live was incredibly negative, and the degree to which you were hurt when you were a child was extraordinarily deep and horrendous.
And, of course, I feel nothing but anger and contempt towards your parents.
But you have to recognize how badly you were treated.
And you have to work to heal it, and you have to make that call to get through to a counselor, to get through to a therapist, to start talking honestly about what hurts within you.
Because this null zone, this blank zone, is a very, very dangerous place to be.
And I don't think you want to hurt any more people.
You don't want to be hurt yourself.
You don't want to treat people this way.
You don't want to be treated. You don't want to live in this hell wherein you're either distant from people or close to them in a weird kind of way.
But feeling the urge to hurt them as well.
That's not the world that you want to live in, I think.
And you want to be a force for good in the world, right?
You want to be a force that's going to help people become happier and better people.
And you want to feel that your interactions with people leaves them positive, more optimistic, happier.
And you need to stop reacting to and acting out the abuse you suffered as a child.
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