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Feb. 27, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
51:55
662 Teenage Depression Part 2 Losing Love
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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. So sorry about the audio quality this morning.
I just had nothing but technical issues and I had to get to work.
So I ended up thinking I was broadcasting into a microphone, my USB microphone, but that also wasn't being picked up and neither was my good mic.
So I ended up just basically yelling at the computer and at its internal mic, which doesn't, of course, work very well, as we remember from the first cut of...
Podcast 13, Proof is Proof and Deities, which I had to re-record because I did it using this very same microphone, and it was a rather poor showing all around.
So, this is part two of this morning.
I was going to re-record this morning, but I did set a little bit of work on noise reduction, and it seemed to be relatively okay, so let's go on.
This is the post that provoked the podcast this morning, and let me know what you think.
I did ask if I could podcast on this, and the gentlemen kindly agreed to allow me to.
I just listened to podcast 657 and I want to get this out there while it's on the top of my head.
These are just some of the feelings I'm experiencing at the moment.
My grandfather died when I was three or four.
I was very close to him and so I took it really hard.
It is difficult to describe all the ways in which this event and my failure to deal with it changed my life.
But one thing that happened was that I developed what my old therapist called, quote, abandonment issues.
I realized years later, after much counseling and introspection, that I had interpreted this event to mean that I was, quote, unworthy, quote, undeserving, quote, worthless, etc.
Flash forward about 10 years, I'm 13, and having just begun to read LaVey and Nietzsche, I accept that I'm an atheist and that in a way I've always been, but I've just finally been able to admit it.
The problem? A devout, albeit liberal, religious family.
It was at this time that I descended into a deep, dark depression that would consume the rest of my teenage years.
In a way, I never really got to be a teenager.
Among many other problems, I would be committed to a hospital for the mentally ill twice during this roughly eight-year period, spending a few weeks each visit.
I'm not going to go into all the other problems I experienced with this.
I'm lucky to say that I didn't do anything violent or truly criminal, but rest assured it was about as close to hell as I can imagine.
Every day, for years and years and years.
It is important to note for purposes to be discussed later that my rage was almost entirely turned against myself.
I was also on an extremely heavy regimen of medicine for most of these years.
Some of the stuff I remember taking is lithium, Celexa, Stelazine, Wellbutrin, and many more.
My medicine always made me feel tired, and there were years where I slept up to 12 hours a day.
My medicine also made me sick from time to time, made me gain weight, which probably wasn't too good for my self-esteem either, and diminished my sex drive, which is kind of strange for a boy that age.
Stuff was so bad for a while that my last therapist, the best one, I argued with my last doctor, the best one too, as to whether what I really had might be borderline personality disorder.
My doctor insisted that it was just severe bipolar, and as far as I can tell, he must have been right since it seems that borderline lasts a lifetime and nothing even close to what I used to be.
I spiraled down into a kind of nihilism for a long time, though luckily I didn't have it in me to do anything violent or morally reprehensible.
While the nihilistic period was brutal, I tend to wonder now whether it might have been necessary a purging of sorts.
In any event, here I am now, 24, a senior in university, held my current job for more than two years, no abusive or destructive relationships, in the conventional sense, not the FDR one, as outwardly stable as anyone else, I know, and involved in what I believe to be the greatest conversation the world has ever had.
Why did I go through all this?
Those were the effects. What were the causes?
I don't know for sure, or at the very least I haven't yet admitted them to myself.
Now, for as long as I can remember, I've been interested in moral issues.
That isn't to say I acted morally, just to say that I've always had this passion to uncover right and wrong and to be curious about those issues.
So when, as a child, I was told that it was, quote, right and, quote, good to believe in and obey, quote, God, I took this very seriously, more so than my peers, or so it would seem, since some of them would go to their mandatory Christian functions, even though I knew for a fact they had doubts.
And some of them, who I knew had doubts, had no problem swearing or giving oaths about their belief in and subjugation to God and His will.
Yet as I grew older, I became less and less able to justify theism or any of the orders of God.
Now I had to make a choice.
If I just went along with the whole thing, my integrity would be compromised.
I would be lying to myself, turning against the very core of what makes me, me.
But if I did not go along, I might face devastating consequences.
For one thing, withdrawal of so-called love from my parents and family, impossible alienation from my so-called friends.
Not such a great choice.
I ended up getting a mixed plate of both.
Hooray! In addition, it's important to remember that I had been taught to believe that one must believe in God and obey His rules in order to be a good and righteous person.
Yet I had also been taught that to be honest and honest to oneself, to have integrity and courage, that these too were necessary to be good and righteous, etc.
So in fact, I found myself in a spot where I was entirely incapable of being a good or righteous person no matter what I did and despite my desire to be so.
There is a kind of torture in that.
I felt alone for so many years.
I still do in so many ways.
I was so isolated.
I was turned against myself, against reason, against curiosity.
I felt crazy, and interestingly enough, that manifested itself a couple of years later in my depression.
My family never physically abused me or anything, but I still remember the mantra my mother used to use against me all the time.
She often said it when I questioned her or any authority figure, and especially when I questioned theism or religion.
Her little, quote, joke was that I should be returned to the hardware store because I am a faulty product.
I know it might sound pathetic, but even as I type this, those memories bring tears to my eyes.
Those kinds of statements were commonplace in my family against me, that is, not against anyone else.
As for my father, whenever I expressed any serious intellectual curiosity, he would roll his eyes and start interjecting with meaningless topics.
Boy, the weather is nice today.
I hope it stays this way. Don't you?
Etc. He still does that to me today, even though he expects me to adopt his philosophical premises.
There are, of course, plenty of other instances of being treated this way.
I developed a fascination at this time with the American Civil War, or the war between the states, not because...
I'm from a martial family.
I'm not. No, rather I had a profound sympathy for slaves and a fascination with their plight.
My peers idolized people like movie stars and sports players, which is strange enough.
But my hero was the radical, violent abolitionist John Brown.
I look back on this now, and as I'm typing this, I still wonder whether my obsession with the issue of slavery had some other significance for me related to my family structure.
So I'm just sitting here and thinking about this now.
I'm letting the thoughts flow and not editing anything because I'm worried that if I don't get this down now, then I won't.
I apologize for all the rambling.
If you're still reading this, you must either be bored or maybe you can relate to this.
The main thesis I'm working with here is that I'm beginning to think that in combination with unresolved issues from my grandfather's death, my fall into theism in combination with my familial relations and my training slash, quote, education was one of the main causes of my depression.
I can see that now because I can see the rage that I turned against myself.
I was used as a weapon against myself.
My desire for virtue, for reason, and for social acceptance was used against me.
I think I can see how that happened now, and I can see how everyone was there.
Everyone that supposedly loved me was in on this, either as a perpetrator or as another victim.
Yet, in one way or another, they were there, and they were cheering on my destruction.
I don't want to get so melodramatic, but if you have ever been in a deep depression for nearly a decade, then you might understand why the word destruction is appropriate.
I don't want to rant on and on about all the things I missed out on in nearly ten years' time, and all the pain I suffered and all the joy I could have had if I'd had real childhood.
I don't want to rant on and on about my regrets.
But do you know what I do want?
I really want someone to tell me it was wrong.
I really need someone to tell me that what was done to me was wrong.
Because until today, everyone has called it right.
Everyone I know has rejoiced in it.
So maybe I'm looking for a sign of life.
Are you out there? Can you hear me?
True self? False self?
I don't know, but there it is.
And there it is indeed.
Thank you so, so, so much for a searingly honest and revealing and passionate and amazing, in my view, post.
That is a real generosity that I think we should not take for granted and we should not I mean, we should honor.
I think that's just wonderful what you have done.
And yes, my God, were you ever brutalized.
My God, were you ever brutalized.
I mean, it was beyond wrong.
This curse of smallness that we talked about this morning is just abysmal.
It's brutal, it's abysmal, it's catastrophic.
And people who hide out in these tiny little holes of how's the weather and isn't this nice and isn't that nice, I write about this in the...
In my novel, The God of Atheists, and I'll actually give you a free copy if you'd like, if you would like to, because this post is definitely worth it, and I think you'll enjoy it, wherein this wife talks about going, Joanne talks about going to her dad's, and what it's like, and what happens for her, and just how empty and nothingness it all is.
So I would suggest that you have a go at that book.
I certainly would be happy to give you a copy.
You've earned it with a post like this, and of course, if it does anything to help Clarify the 10 years that you went through, then it's well worth it to me.
So let's have a talk about this history, this very, very powerful and I think far more universal than we would like to believe kind of history.
Here we have, and please, please, please go and read the drama of the gifted child, and in particular, look at the stuff that goes on about Heinrich Hein and his parents' exasperation at his depth and his talents and his abilities.
Look, you were reading Nietzsche and other great thinkers at...
The age of 12 or 13, you had depth, you had passion, you had wisdom in you, even then, or especially then.
So the first thing that I would talk about, if I look at this from the outside, and there's no reason why you'd be able to see any of this, like trying to analyze your own dreams.
I'm good with other people, but I get stumped by mine for years sometimes.
Your grandfather died when you were three or four.
You were very close to him and you took it as really hard.
It's difficult to describe, blah, blah, blah.
And you said that your failure to deal with it changed your life.
Your failure to deal with the death of your grandfather.
That that changed your life?
Well, again, you know, brother, I would look much more closely at the people who surrounded you at that time before condemning yourself as having failures to process emotionally at the age of three or four.
Three or four! I mean, it's like you're saying to yourself, I didn't figure out the theory of relativity until I was, you know, eight or nine, and my failure to understand it at the age of two or three was really bad.
And I understand why you did this.
I mean, I think, at least, at least I have a theory.
You can tell me, of course, if it rings true for you.
Children have a wonderful way of making everything their fault, and that is inevitable and is natural, and it's actually healthy.
Because if you are in a prison and you get beaten when the guard is unhappy, your natural and biologically imperative impulse or desire is to please the guard.
To find ways to please the guard and to say, well, if I get beaten, fundamentally it's my mistake for not figuring out what the guard wanted.
Because the alternative, if you're a child, is to look at your primary caregiver as a brutal slave owner, and children can't survive that psychologically.
You just wouldn't want to live anymore.
You just wouldn't want to live.
And I bet you, if somebody had said to you, hey, you only get to live to the age of 18, but this is how it's going to look like, like before you were born, if you were floating above the world, And in the sort of John Rawls scenario, if you were floating above the world and some angel or devil showed you what your life was going to be up to the age of 18 or so, I think 20 years.
Actually, you said you got depressed at 22 or so.
And they said, then you're going to get hit by a bus.
This is your first 20 years and then you get hit by a bus.
Do you want it or not?
Well, I bet you that you would not want it.
I bet you that you would not want it.
I tell you for sure, I would not have wanted my life for the first 18 years.
I would have said, you know, I think I'll wait and float around here in the blissful non-existence and not so much worry about going down to get beaten up and screamed at and stuck in stupid schools and not allowed to have a voice and not allowed to have a personality.
Thanks! But I think I will forego the tastes of these pleasures.
So, when you are a child, you can't see over the hump into adulthood.
You can't see the freedom.
You can't conceive or process the freedom that comes after you if you sort of rationally disconnect from evil or, in this case, highly corrupting and infinitesimally tiny parents, psychologically constrictive, like a boa.
You can't see into the freedom of an adulthood when you're a child.
It's inconceivable to you.
And so, if you...
Look at your parents and you say, wow, these people are really nasty, bad, petty, weird, freaky, violent, whatever it is that they are, that's off the norm, and the norm as we talk about it here, not the norm in society, God help them.
If you look at your parents as a child and you say, well, I'm in hell slash prison slash a slave farm.
Psychologically, you would not survive that.
So you must internalize the problems, right?
So if you are rejected by your parents, you must as a child, you inevitably will, and there's no shame in it, and there's no alternative to it, you must say, I am rejected because I am bad.
I am rejected because I am bad.
There's something wrong with me and that's why I'm being rejected because then you can hang on to the illusion that if you change your behavior or you change anything about yourself, what you say, what you do, sometimes even what you think with God, right?
But you can say to yourself, if I change what I do, then I will not be rejected.
My parents have a criteria for acceptance and rejection that is good.
They're rejecting me. There must be something wrong with what it is that I'm doing.
There must be something wrong with me.
And therefore, if I change that, I will no longer be rejected and I will meet the standards that are out there that are good.
Because if the standards that are out there are bad, then you're just controlled by torturers for the next 20 years.
Well, for eternity. When a child looks up the ladder of...
Of childhood, when a toddler looks up the ladder of childhood, there's no top, there's no shelf, there's no mountain it leads to that you get to stretch out on.
It just goes on forever. You can't conceive of childhood ending when you're three, four, five years old.
It is eternity. It is infinity.
So, it is immortality, really.
So, children have to internalize the rejection of their parents.
They have to. Because otherwise it's an eternity in a cage of devils.
And children would just not get out of bed.
They'd kill themselves. I mean, there just would be no moving forward.
This is the kindness, in a sense, that nature puts in us in a situation of compulsion and slavery.
And the kindness is that it's our fault.
And if we just try this and try that and try the other...
You know, like we look upon the vault of our parents' hearts like sandpaper-fingered...
Pickpockets. And people who are safe crackers.
And we kneel before it for most of our youth and most of our teenage years.
And often well into our 20s and sometimes even into our 30s.
And for some people it's their whole damn wasted life.
We kneel before this vault.
We kneel before this bank vault, thinking there's the treasures of parental love and acceptance inside.
And all we have to do is find the right combination.
And they want us! They're waiting for us on the other side, and they're giving us instructions, and they're talking us through it.
And boy, if we can just get in there and get that big, syrupy, beautiful hug from the maternal and paternal units, things are just going to be absolutely beyond wonderful and perfect forever.
And so we kneel and we're constantly twiddling and listening and licking our fingers and trying again, listening for the tumblers, looking for the cracks, anything.
But, my friends, it's not true.
It's not true. We kneel before this vault of our parents' hearts and we're trying all these locks.
We kneel in front of a cliff wall.
It's a cliff face. There's no speak, friend, and enter.
There's no inside there.
There's nothing inside.
It's solid. Or, if you prefer, we're trying to pick the lock of a cloud.
But it feels more solid than that when you're a child.
So we pick these locks of our parents' hearts forever and ever and ever and ever.
And walking away from that is wrenching, is absolutely wrenching, because there's all of the accumulated stuff that's in there.
Because, of course, we know the truth.
We know the truth. We know the truth.
So, I'm going to put forward a theory about what happened to you, my friend, when you were three or four years old, that I hope will strike a chord and make some sense with you.
I'm really speaking to that aged perception of you.
You had a grandfather who you were deeply attached to.
I don't know if it was on your mother's or father's side.
I suspect on your mother's side, but you can let me know.
And this grandfather died, and you were heartbroken.
You were heartbroken.
And I'll tell you what you were heartbroken about.
You were heartbroken not that your grandfather died primarily, but you were heartbroken that your parents rejected your unhappiness.
I'm going to say that again. You were not so much heartbroken that your grandfather died, but it is rather more accurate and deeper, and I think a little wiser to say, that you were heartbroken because your parents rejected your sadness.
That you were not allowed to grieve.
That you were told, oh, he's with God now.
There's no need to cry. Don't cry.
He's gone to a better place.
He had a good life.
He loved you very much, but he had to go.
Don't cry. Don't be unhappy.
There's nothing to be unhappy about.
He's with God. Or some such nonsense that scrubbed you of your ability to feel.
Or scrubbed you of respect that you might have for the deep and powerful feelings that you had in terms of attachment to this grandfather, to your grandfather.
It is the fact that you're grieving, which was natural, and you were grieving for two things.
I mean, obviously you were grieving for your grandfather, but you were grieving for the fact also, which is related to what I was just saying, you were grieving for the fact that you were only...
Only connected to your grandfather.
And this reminds me of a story that I was having a look at of Greg's recently.
That you were only connected to your grandfather.
That you had a strong connection there.
Then he died and you were left alone in this cold land of icebergs that I talked about yesterday.
You did not fail.
To process your emotions for your grandfather.
You did not fail to process your emotions for your grandfather.
Please, please, you must have sympathy for yourself.
You must have respect for yourself, especially our original self, which is the child.
You must have respect for that.
You did not fail to process your emotions for your grandfather.
Have you seen a free child unable to express fear or pain or anger?
That is as natural as...
You know, the endless crap that comes out of a baby.
I mean, you can't stop that.
The free flow of emotion and the processing of emotions is specifically one of the great powers of a child.
And the thing that most frightens the adult, of course.
The soulless adult.
The child dwarfs the parent in the world that we live in.
The child dwarfs the parent.
The parent's soul is as a sunspot.
On the great and glorious heliocentric orb of the child's soul.
Childhood is depth.
We grow into shallowness.
We rise to smallness.
We grow into infinitesimalitude.
That's a kind of phrase.
So when you felt the upwelling and the grieving for your grandfather, I absolutely guarantee you, completely and totally guarantee you, that your parents scorned, mocked, poo-pooed, chided, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected, rejected your passion and your grief and your loss.
As dead souls themselves, they draped their zombie historical corpses all over your vital youth.
They crushed and killed.
They can't feel.
They recognize feeling as an enemy.
And the deep grief that you felt at your grandfather's death completely disappeared.
And totally overwhelmed them, overwhelmed their false self, who can find nothing better to talk about than God and rain.
At least one exists.
Your deep grief, your soul, your soulful grief, overran their petty, tiny, empty defenses like a tsunami over a sandcastle.
Your depth of feeling was an implicit criticism of your parents, which is true for the children's passions as a whole.
This is why passion is so often too much.
It's defined as too much.
And your parents wanted desperately to kill your capacity to feel.
Did they grieve deeply and powerfully for the loss of one of their fathers?
Of course they didn't. Of course they didn't.
What does it say to somebody, and everybody wants to feel this as a good, wise, and deep, and God-fearing person, what does it say if I'm your father?
What does it say about me if you at the age of three miss my father when he dies more than I do who've known him for 30 years?
I've known my father for 30 years.
He dies and you grieve.
And you grieve.
Well, of course, you had your own grieving and you had all of the unacknowledged grieving of your mother and your father, whoever the child, the son or daughter was.
The sensitive, the tuning forks, the subsonic harmonic hearers that are sensitive souls, pick up and amplify all of the feelings around us.
We pick up and amplify all the feelings around us which remain unexpressed.
Nothing has a greater effect on the life of a child than the unlived life of the parent, the unfelt feelings, the unexpressed feelings of the parent.
So you felt your grief but you felt your parents' grief.
I'm just going to say it's your mom's father.
You felt your grief, you felt your mother's grief, but much more powerfully, and this is what overloaded your system, you felt these two things.
You felt your grief that your mother rejected your grief, and you felt your mother's grief that she could not grieve.
You felt your mother's horror that she could not grieve.
For the death of her father.
That you grieved, but she could not.
That you at the age of three had deeper and more powerful attachments and feelings to her father than she did after knowing him for 30 odd years.
The passing of your grandfather and children can understand death because they're new to birth.
Children can understand death.
I'm not saying take them down to the cemetery.
I mean, the morgue, yes, but not the cemetery.
But children understand death, of course.
Of course, there's this natural affinity between grandparents and children because they both represent birth and death.
They're both at the tail end of things.
In a sense, the child is at the tail end of non-existence and the grandfather is at the tail end of existence.
Gregory Peck used to say that he always used to get, before he died, he always used to get these movie scripts and it was always the same damn thing that he and his much-beloved grandson went on adventures together and he said it's always the same damn thing over and over again.
And this cliche, while a cliche, does have some truth in it, that there is affinity between those newly born and those on the verge of dying or close to death or old.
They have a perspective that in the middle of life, we empty ourselves out by forgetting the depth and power of our process, of our journey.
And we lose ourselves in little things.
We lose ourselves in little things.
And that phrase, I think, aptly describes what happened with your parents.
You lost yourself in little things.
You lost yourselves in the details.
Because your parents are a wall of rejection, a wall of angry rejection.
When your mother rolls your eyes and threatens you with non-existence that you're defective and you should be returned, of course it's going to make you cry, my brother.
Of course it's going to make you wail and gnash your teeth and sob and go into a fetal position and weep for years.
Of course to be threatened with being broken up like a bad robot.
To be brought back to a hardware store and disassembled because you are defective is beyond heartbreaking.
It's beyond heartbreaking, and it tells you everything that you need to know about your mother.
Christina's mother, when Christina was young, three or four years old, threatened to call the cops because she was doing something she shouldn't or whatever.
Who knows what the instigating situation was, but it doesn't matter.
We call the cops and get her taken away to jail.
And for Christina, that psychologically meant forever.
I'm forever going to be locked in a moldy old cell till the end of time.
I'm never even going to die. And Christina's mom even picked up the phone and pretended to dial.
When I tried to run away at the age of six and I packed up my cookies and I put everything in my pillowcase and some clothes, two o'clock in the morning, I'm just heading out into the street.
My mother just picked me up and beat me against the door.
I very clearly remember that's when I gave up.
That's when I realized I was going to have no negotiation, no purchase with my mother.
My brother, of course, was hiding in his room, could hear everything, but didn't come out.
Didn't come from me. Didn't say anything the next day.
And you tried every key combination that you could think of to open the vault of your parents' hearts.
To have them see you.
To have them see you.
When we are children, we are like ghosts when other people will not see us.
When other people reject us, it makes us evaporate into a sad history and a clingy willpower.
We vanish when they avert their eyes.
We grow in a mirror When we are children, it is almost impossible to hang on to a sense of identity when you are perpetually rejected.
And it makes us angry.
Because we get it.
Deep down, we get it.
We get it. We know exactly what's going on.
My spontaneous feeling, my spontaneous thoughts, my curiosity My interest in depth, my feelings of depth, my inner world, angers my parents.
Which means that I am greater than they are.
I am deeper and wiser and more powerful than my parents.
And yet they rule over me with pettiness and commandments.
It's a violation.
It's a violation.
It's a violation. To have a child and to reject that child is a violation!
It is buying a dog to burn a dog.
It is buying a dog to burn a dog.
It is sadistic and savage in a way that savages could barely understand.
To have a child and to reject a child is to buy a cat and cut a cat.
We worry about children who torture animals and parents who reject their children To create the children who torture animals.
The children are merely in effect.
To have what is inevitably for you, my friend, a savage, unending, pitched battle between your soul and your parents' soullessness and anti-depth and anti-thought and anti-curiosity and anti-feeling, anti-meaning.
Anti-truth, anti-reality, anti-life.
An unconscious, eternal, pitched battle between truth and emptiness, between depth and nothingness, between richness and cancer.
My God, it's no wonder.
It's no wonder.
I can't believe it was only twice that you were institutionalized.
And I know that that's something that sticks with you, and I know that you're young.
You're 24 years old, and I know that you feel old, but that's young to me, because I'm really ancient.
40! 40, I tell you!
You can't even see up to 40 yet.
That's okay. I couldn't when I was your age either, but...
I know that you want to hang on to that.
I know and I can feel that.
You want to hang on to that as something that's important.
It's a totem or it's a clue or it's something that is important to you to say, I was institutionalized twice for a couple of weeks each time.
I used to, and I probably still have the urge even now, wanted to hang on to, my mother was institutionalized and I raised myself.
But that is something that as you go through this process, you're going to have to let go of.
You're going to have to let go of it, and there's no need for it.
If you know the truth about your history, if you know the truth about your parents, if you know and can have sympathy for the depth and power and pitched battle that you waged for 10 to 15 to 20 years, and no wonder you were exhausted, you fell in the field of battle for the progress of the human race, once you accept that...
The degree to which you were crushed, infantilized, brutalized, undermined, rejected, scorned, and threatened with non-existence.
That there was no bond that your children had a child to hurt a child.
And that there is no lower sin that can be inflicted.
No greater sin, no worse evil.
Because it is from that that all other evils, and by this of course I do not mean you...
It is from that that all other evil stem.
Dogs bite because they're tortured.
it.
Humans use violence because they were tortured as children.
Humans attack. Humans subjugate.
Humans brutalize. And it happened to your parents as well.
It happened to your parents as well.
If you're still in touch with your parents and you want to really understand what it was like for you when you were three, I can give you a very simple exercise.
I can give you a very simple, nearly infinitely difficult exercise that you can achieve in about 10 minutes.
And this is going to be very liberating for you.
I really, really would suggest that you do it.
I know it's going to make you feel sick and nauseous.
I really would suggest that you do it.
I think it's absolutely essential.
I couldn't recommend a stronger course of action, but of course, it's your soul, so you make the decision, but this is my suggestion.
I assume your parents are still alive.
If you wish to find a way to forgive yourself for not, quote, processing your grandfather's death when you were three or four years old, it's actually quite simple.
Now, with all of your additional knowledge inside freedom and wisdom that you have at 24, independent student in college and so on, I don't know if you're living at home or not.
If you are, even easier.
You have all of this additional independence.
You're no longer reliant on your parents.
You're emancipated by the law at the age of 18 or 21 or wherever the hell you are.
So all you have to do is one simple thing, and this, I absolutely guarantee you, will grant you freedom from this illusion that you did something wrong when you were young, or that anything other than your parents' failure caused your parents' failure and attack and assault, and attack and assault, that anything other than that caused your depression.
Do the following, if you would like.
Go over to your parents' house and make sure that they have uninterrupted time with you.
Don't do it over dinner. Do it after dinner.
Make sure you've just said, you know, I want to talk to you.
It's going to take a little bit of time.
Do you have time? Do you mind? I don't want to phone interrupt.
Whatever, right? Try and keep it as non-threatening as possible or they'll run away.
But you say, you know, when I was three or four years old, my gramps died, you know.
My gramps died. I was so unbelievably heartbroken.
I think it still affects me to this day.
That's it.
That's all I'm saying.
All you gotta say. Or, you know, whatever words work for you.
That's all you gotta say. See what comes back.
See what happens. See how well you can deal with the situation with all the knowledge and independence of your 24-year-old brain.
Your brain is almost mature, so lock this in before it finally gets fixed.
But that's all you've got to do.
Go and say, I was so heartbroken when my gramps died.
I think it still affects me to this day.
And I'd like to talk about it. What do you think?
How did you experience that time?
What went on for you? They will avoid.
They will avert. They will downplay.
They will pretend to listen. They will do anything rather than deal with their own emotional emptiness and the guilt of what they have done to you, to your brothers and sisters, if you have any.
If you want to feel this rejection from your parents, and you must feel this rejection from your parents, you must feel it because you won't be free otherwise.
You must feel this rejection from your parents consciously with the adults understanding and independence without being a slave to the next 15 years of being trapped with these cold icebergs.
You must feel parental rejection because you have to put the blame where it belongs.
And if it's not on your parents, then it's going to be on you.
And that's not fair. Why should you pay?
Why should you suffer? You didn't choose to be born.
You didn't choose your parents. They chose you.
They chose how they parented.
You had no resources.
They had all the freedom in the world.
They could have done anything. They could have gone to therapy themselves.
They could have at any time been horrified by what they were doing.
There are libraries with great self-help books that were around even 24 years ago, you know.
But they chose to avoid that, and you paid the price.
You paid the consequences. So you need to go back and experience parental rejection.
You need to. That's the only way to free yourself from the possibility of this depression recurring.
Look at Churchill. But this is why I say the way out of the cage is running towards the center.
The way free of your family is to attempt to be with your family.
When you're with empty people, intimacy is your exit strategy.
Thank you.
When you're with people who have depth and curiosity and meaning and feeling, intimacy is beautiful.
When you're with empty people who have children to hurt children, intimacy, well, you don't have to worry about defooing.
They'll kick you out. I mean, they'll probably provoke you into doing it, but that's really what happens.
Only connect. Only connect, said E.M. Forster.
Only connect.
And yes, absolutely, we should try to connect.
We should try and pick these goddamn locks until our fingers bleed.
Because then we can say, hey, you know what?
There's no lock. There's no door.
nothing behind this I'm not standing here wasting the rest of my life trying to pick this cliff so this pitched battle between your depth and their emptiness between your feeling and their vacuousness and their hatred of depth and feeling and their fear of depth and feeling is Well, of course this exhausted you.
You were constantly trying to will yourself into existence.
You're like a ghost straining for corporeality.
You are attempting to will yourself into existence by seeing any kind of reflection in the eyes of your parents, any kind of visibility in the eyes of your parents.
Anything, anything, even a scrap will do.
Children can live on atoms, it seems.
And your whole childhood you're saying, see me, see me, see me, see me.
I'm real, I'm real, I'm real, I'm real.
See me, see me. Listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen, listen.
And they're saying, oh yeah, we're listening, but we're not.
Oh yeah, we're listening, but we're not.
Oh, we see you, but you're not there.
Oh, we're listening, but we don't like you.
Oh, we love you, but we hate you.
Oh, you make us afraid, but we can't tell you that.
Oh, there's this constant battle.
Over what is actually happening, over any kind of reality, over the true pitched battle nature of the interaction.
Everything under the table, everybody smiling along the top, everybody under the table kicking each other with spikes on their shoes to the rawness and bloody nature of their own shins.
Of course that's exhausting, of course, of course you ended up where you ended up.
You know, throwing yourself against this cliff wall because that's really what it is.
There are times of pickpocketing and there are times of begging and there are times of lying and weeping and begging for any kind of shred of affection or visibility to others when we are children.
Of course you're going to be exhausted.
It is an absolutely strung-out, mad, manic, adrenal-pumping, depleting existence to be begging, begging for any kind of visibility for people who are blindfolded or staring right through you and saying, Oh, we see you.
No, it's fine. Yeah, absolutely.
I know that you want to talk about the weather.
I know you're reading some German guy with a big mustache, but the important thing is the weather.
And hey, what's on TV tonight?
And you're saying, God, God, God, let me speak.
Let me speak. I don't need people to agree with me.
I don't need people to agree with me.
I don't need people to conform.
I don't want to be told that I'm right.
I just want people, anyone, anyone, to listen.
To listen. And it doesn't have to be a lot.
I could go for weeks without it, but one hour every month.
One hour every month. I just need someone to listen so that I can relax.
It's very, very stressful when people are crowding around you all the time and don't see you.
It's like being a child being set down in the path of an endless streaming herd of stampeding bison.
A little tough to relax.
Bison, I don't know if they can see me or not, but they sure are storming across the plain, thundering and kicking up the grass and dirt.
And there are bodies around me, let me tell you.
A little tough to relax when people can't see you, because then when they can't see you when they don't connect with you emotionally, then what we get and totally understand from that as children, what we get and totally understand from that as children, It's that if people don't see us, if people don't connect with us, then they'll hurt us.
Because we don't exist to them.
They no more think that we're hurt than I think that when I cross a median, the little white stripe goes ow!
It doesn't have feelings.
It's just there. So when our parents don't empathize with us, it's really fucking scary.
It's terrifying.
Terrifying! And of course the parents don't say, oh, we love you.
Here's some food. I made you lunch.
But you can't see me.
You can feed me.
You can bandage me.
You can take me to the dentist.
You can get me a haircut.
But I'm just a big, fleshy prop.
I am a self-animated doll.
I do not exist emotionally.
To you. And that is beyond terrifying for a child.
Of course you were exhausted and depressed.
You had a pitched battle with very, very slippery and dangerous enemies.
And look, I mean, let's not kid ourselves.
You had it pretty fucking bad, my friend.
You had it pretty fucking bad.
In two significant ways, which infected each other.
One is that your parents sound...
Small beyond the norm, right?
Your parents sound small beyond the norm.
Actually, maybe they're not small beyond the norm.
My parents had different characteristics that way.
Maybe your parents aren't small beyond the norm.
They seem small. You know what?
Maybe I'm just thinking about casting it over with my friends.
You know what? I don't think your parents were small beyond the norm.
So, it is your fault.
It is your fault, my friend, because you were so deep.
What could you do? You ran over them like a steamroller.
I can't believe you did that to them.
How mean can you be? My God, man!
Didn't you have any empathy for them?
They were frightened! So, I mean, it's your depth and your size, right?
I mean, what were the odds that they had a child who was Indonesia, that they had a child of depth and passion, who could grieve for an entire family, Who could grieve for an entire family.
What an incredible strength and depth you had, my friend.
And have. But the union of your depth with their shallowness was an absolute battle.
Your parents viewed you, in my humble opinion, just working psychologically backwards from what you're telling me, I could be right, I could be wrong, just let me know.
Your parents viewed I believe, viewed you in the following manner.
We are floating nicely here on the surface.
Every now and then, this sea monster wraps its tentacles around us and wants to drag us down underwater and kill us and drown us.
And there's a magic spell which makes this monstrous tentacles detach themselves from us.
There is a magic spell.
And that magic spell is whatever words we can conjure up to laughingly humiliate the monster.
But the depth that you possess, the depth of feeling and passion, and of course your intellect, all of this was as a riptide underneath your parents.
That you were going to suck them down to the briny depths, chain them to Davy Jones' locker, and kill them dead.
Or to sort of switch the metaphor, they felt like one of those anglerfish, the little guys in the Mariana Trench down at the bottom, that if you bring them anywhere within miles of the surface, you bring them anywhere within miles of the surface, and they explode.
You bring it up to the surface, and it explodes because it's used to depth.
So, you were constantly trying to drag your shallow surface sunfish dwelling parents down into the depths, which they felt would kill them.
And who knows, right?
Probably would have caused them to cease functioning.
One of you guys was going to end up at a mental institution.
This disparity, one of you was going to end up at a mental institution, I absolutely guarantee it.
That was inevitable. If you had broken through their surface shallowness, then they would have gone nuts.
They would have had nervous breakdowns and they would have been unable to function.
So you're trying to drag them down to what they consider to be a briny, wet death.
And they are trying to pull you up to the surface and keep you at the surface.
You're like a whale, right?
You don't mind coming up to the surface to breathe.
None of us do, but... You don't want to live on the surface because it's kind of empty, right?
It's kind of shallow. And this strain, you trying to pull them down, them trying to haul you up for years and years and years and years and years.
It's like scanners. Your head's going to explode.
I mean, of course. One of you guys was going to end up in an institution.
And it was going to be you. I mean, I'm not kidding anyone here.
I mean, they had all the power and all the control.
It was never going to be them. It was never going to be them.
So, yeah, I mean, it was brutal.
It was brutal. Yeah, I think they had choices.
I think they had choices. I don't think they had to do what they did, but it doesn't really matter.
They did what they did. Their level of choice is going to remain forever lost to the history of the world that is unwritten and blown into nothingness because you will never get the truth from them about anything.
Their minds are fixed.
Their souls are gone.
They will not return.
They were gone long before you showed up.
I hope that you'll take my advice or suggestion and go and sit down with your parents and try and talk to them about something you're passionate about.
I would suggest starting off with your grandfather.
Ask lots of questions. Ask them how they felt.
Be really alert to what's happening.
Don't zone out. Don't fall into automatic patterns of habit and history and family.
Really be alert and be aware.
Tape it if you can. Use your slinky and slippery little Zen Vision M to tape the conversation so you can replay it later when you need to.
It is through that attempted connection that you will cut these moorings and loose yourself from this wreck of a family that is going to be the end of you if you don't free yourself, right?
Because... They are sinking into history like a wreck, like you are tied to the Titanic.
You must cut this cord, but you can't do it unless you try and connect with them and so free yourself from any blame that you felt about not processing emotions.
I hope that this helps.
I look forward to your donations.
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