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March 19, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:46
691 DeFOO Part 2

When kids are involved...

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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. Steph here.
It's 10.57am on March the 19th, 2007.
And I'm going to talk because apparently I can't get enough of talking about my own personal life, though I think it will be of use to other people who are facing this challenge in the DFU scenario.
And DFU is... Foo is family of origin, and this is when you have a family that won't listen and won't be decent and treat you well.
What is it that you're supposed to do?
Well, of course, I say that life is short, and if you can't get people around you to treat you well, then don't bother being around them.
And this is the defooing process, which is a last resort, of course.
I mean, but... Is enabled by a philosophical approach to truth and the basic fact that there is no innate ethics in biology, there's no innate morality in your family, and they're just a bunch of people who happen to give birth to you, and there is no value in mere accidental biological histories, or as I call it, the ABC, the accidental biological cage, which we happen to be born in.
And if The people who are in our family are receptive and open and positive and do in fact love us in a way that is Measurable and not just in words.
In other words, we value the same things.
They listen to what you are interested in.
They treasure what you treasure, and so on.
Then you can have a wonderful relationship with them, and I think that's great.
I mean, people say, I'm anti-family.
I'm not. I'm anti-corruption.
I'm anti-vice. I'm anti-evil.
I'm anti-irrationality.
I'm not anti-family. The family doesn't exist.
It's just a biological label.
They're just people.
Just people. Now, that having been said, and I've talked about my own DFU experiences before, but there's an aspect of it that is something worth talking about.
Because if there are children involved, like if you have nieces or nephews or whatever, cousins, then you're going to be faced with a peculiar and really challenging set of circumstances.
And I can talk about my experience with those.
Not because you care that much about my experience with my family, but because I think it helps highlight the complexity that you get into.
I was not able to make a go of continuing a relationship with...
My niece is. But perhaps there's something I've missed and perhaps there's something that you've had more success in that you can tell me.
Or perhaps you're considering this, getting rid of or defooing, but trying to maintain a relationship with the children of the people you're defooing with.
And I can at least share with you the difficulties that I had so that you can be prepared for some of the complexities that are oh so joyfully heading your way.
So I defooed about, I guess with my mom, it was about...
Seven or eight years ago.
I haven't seen her. With my brother, it was about five years ago.
And I did try to maintain a relationship with my nieces, who I was around when they were born, and I was around when they were growing up, and I babysat them a lot, and thought they were a lot of fun, and enjoyed their company, and I think they enjoyed mine.
So I did try to keep a relationship going with my nieces, which was originally encouraged by my brother.
The challenge, of course, came along...
And my nieces were, at that point, in their early teens, tweens, I guess.
And we would go out and they would ask me questions, as children are wont to do, as is entirely appropriate for children to do, and which should be honoured with, I think, great seriousness.
In the reply, in the responding to children's questions.
Lying to children is not something that I am willing to take on in my conscience.
I am not willing to do that because it is so destructive to children to not tell them the truth about situations that you're involved in.
There is an appropriateness.
I mean, you're perfectly able to take the fifth, but where they can understand it and where it is appropriate, Then I think it's generally not good to plead the fifth or to lie, right?
So you can't when they're, you know, 12 and they say, where do babies come from?
If they even say that at 12 anymore, I think it's about 12 months these days.
Then you can't say, I'm not comfortable with answering that.
I mean, you have to give them the honest responses, which is stalks and the government.
But... You can't lie and you can't plead the fifth when they're able to process the information.
And that, I think, occurs at a relatively early age.
But, of course, that's a debatable point and it's dependent on the nature of the child and the communication skills of the parent and so on.
So what occurred about...
Actually, no. I stopped seeing my brother earlier then, about six or seven years ago.
But what happened about five years ago, or six years ago, when I was still in contact with my nieces, and I would take them out to dinner, or we'd go to see movies, or whatever.
I certainly remember seeing the first Lord of the Rings with my niece.
They would ask me questions.
So we'd go to the playground, and we'd boss around, and we'd play tag, or whatever.
And they would ask me questions.
So they'd say, how come you don't see your mom?
How come you don't see grandma?
Now that's a perfectly valid question to ask for a child.
And it is the child trying to get a mental and moral map of the world that they live in.
And that is very healthy for the child to do.
And the child, like everyone, deserves honesty where it's appropriately processable.
And in this case, it was appropriately processable.
I could not tell them, I will not tell you.
At least I felt that that was not the right response at the time.
I could not tell them that...
I will not tell you why I don't see my mom.
So I said, well...
My mom was violent, and she is still very abusive and unpleasant and difficult, and I felt that she had put in 15 years into raising me, sort of, more or less, in a vague, approximated kind of way.
And then I had put in 15 years taking care of her, and I felt that, at the bare minimum, we were done.
And there is a defoom window or door that opens up.
The revolving door, there's suddenly a gap in the brick wall revolving door of a corrupt family.
And it generally occurs around the same time that you have been around them as they had around you as parents, right?
So if they parented you for 20 years and then you stick around for 20 years, then there's something that occurs, at least for me and a couple of other people I've talked to, around that sort of double, the age of being a child, where there's a certain kind of we're squared, like we're done, we're sorted, and we can sort of move on.
And I think it's important to seize that opportunity if you don't enjoy spending time with your family or if you feel that you spend time with your family solely to please them or mostly to please them or they're needy or manipulative or destructive or abusive or just boring.
Boring is pretty important.
Boring is a pretty important situation.
To understand emotionally and certainly friends who are boring you would stop seeing and you probably don't go for lunch with your forensic accountant all too often unless you have business to discuss or whoever else is boring in your life.
So boring is important as well.
Boredom is rage spread. It's thin as I was talking about the other day.
So... So I said, well, you know, she was violent and I don't like her.
In fact, not only do I not love her, but I don't even like her.
In fact, I quite enormously dislike her and it's, you know, very close to hatred.
And I wasn't trying to alarm them, and I felt that as early teenagers, they were, at least one of them, was old enough to sort of understand.
I said, you know, it's like if you have a bully in the schoolyard, and every day they come and they punch you, and then they take your lunch money, you're not going to go and be that person's best friend, right?
They understood that. And I said, I did it for a long time, I did it for too long, and I don't feel that I want to do it anymore.
Which I thought was an honest and not overwhelming answer to the question, which they knew about, right?
I didn't tell them that I'm not seeing my mom.
So I didn't introduce the topic to them.
That was introduced to them, I would assume, by my brother or perhaps by my mother.
So I'm not sure that if they didn't have that information beforehand that I would have introduced it to them and said, Hey, you know, I don't see my mom because I hate her.
Like, I wouldn't do that. But they had been informed by other family members that this was the situation.
And what happened then was they asked me about it.
Now, since I didn't introduce the topic and I didn't want to lie to them and I didn't want to say I refused to answer that question, which I think is even more cruel to a child who's able to sort of intellectually or emotionally process at least the base facts of the situation.
So... What happened then was my brother got very angry, and I don't know what happened when my nieces went home and when they had conversations about it, but I'll tell you what I think might have happened, and you may run into this situation with your own family in the diffuse scenario.
They went home, and of course they're pondering this.
So children have time to ponder, and children have questions.
And it's almost, I mean, they're almost young women, or at least they were at this point.
So, they went home, and they talked to their father, my brother, and they said, so, was grandma, like, did she hit you?
Which is a perfectly reasonable question for a child.
Somebody tells them, Steph is not seeing his mom.
They ask Steph why. He says, because she was violent, because she's unpleasant and difficult now.
Well, this is a mental map of the family.
And of course, a moral map of the family is entirely and completely what is almost always kept from children.
Children can never see the moral map of the family.
They can't see the moral reality of the family.
Everybody comes up with sentiment and, oh yes, well she can be difficult, but she's your grandmother and we love her and she means well and blah blah blah.
I mean, children can never hear the base moral facts.
Of the family, that is really one of the basic propaganda issues with the family, that this was the great falsehoods of the family, that you simply can't get a central or even remotely accurate moral map of the family, and once you realize this enormous absence, then you can begin to get a sense of the state-like secrecy of the family, that there is nothing but buried secrets in this biology.
So they ask the question, And it's a reasonable question to ask.
Did Grandma hit you, Dad?
And I have no idea what my brother's answer was.
I'm sure, I'm quite sure that it was evasive.
Well, there were times it was very stressful raising her.
She did have a bad temper.
She could be unpleasant.
She could be difficult. But it's very hard to raise children when you're single.
And she was alone.
And it was not like now where there's even more support.
She didn't have family around her.
And, yeah, there were times when she would get very angry.
Which a child knows is just nonsense, right?
I mean, a child can hear nonsense sometimes even more clearly, in fact, often more clearly than an adult.
So then she says, naturally, yeah, but did she hit you?
And that's an important question to ask for a child, because that way they get to start to get a sense of the mental map and the moral map of the family.
What are people's values?
What do they just say, and what are they actually willing to really do?
What are just words, and what are...
Real values that actually come alive.
Well, I don't know what my brother answered to that, but this is the challenge that he would have in answering that question.
If he says, no, she never hit us, then he knows that the next time, and kids don't forget this stuff, he knows the next time that my nieces are with me, they're going to say, well, Dad says that she never hit you.
So what's the truth, right?
This is what Dad says, and this is what you say, and it doesn't square.
So he can't say that, really.
I mean, he can, but then he would have to, you know, prevent me from seeing his daughters sort of ever again.
Now, if he says, yes, she did hit us, then they're going to say, did she hit you a lot?
And if, again, my brother is going to say, no, she only hit us once, and I think it was accidental, right?
He slipped. No, he's going to have to say, yeah, she hit us a lot.
Then they're going to say, why do you see her?
Do you love your mother?
Because Steph doesn't love his mother.
Steph doesn't love granny.
Do you love your grandma?
I'm sorry, do you love your mother? Which again, perfectly reasonable question, perfectly sensible question for children to ask because they're trying to understand their family and what values are people living.
Children really, really need to know that So then, is my brother going to say, yes, I do love my mother?
And they're going to say, well, what do you love about her?
And what's he going to say?
There's no quality that is even remotely admirable about my mother, let alone a conflagration of qualities that would evoke love in any sane or rational human being.
In fact, if you were insane or irrational, you wouldn't be able to love anyway.
So my brother is going to feel enormously angry because he's being pushed into a corner.
He's being pushed into a corner where he is going to actually have to start to speak honestly about his history and about just the bare facts, not his emotional interpretation or his story, but just the bare facts, right?
It's that Joe Friday from Homicide question, just the facts.
Bro. So what is going to happen?
Well, he is going to have to say, well, you know, she's a fighter, she's...
Tough. Whatever, right?
He's not going to come up with anything that is remotely believable and he's going to feel exquisitely tortured and humiliated.
Because he's been lying to his children.
He's been faking things with his children.
Because he drags them to see my mom as well.
So what they're doing is they're actually asking him, what do you mean by love?
What do you mean by virtue?
How can you love somebody who abused you?
Not like demanding, but just genuinely curious.
Well, how can you?
You use the word love for us, like daddy, you love us, and we don't hit you, and we don't scream at you, and so on.
So help us understand how you use the same word for a sort of opposite behavior.
And it's all perfectly reasonable and perfectly sensible questions for children to ask.
And parents just hate those questions.
Because the hypocrisy of parenting is the great secret.
Again, not to pump the God of Atheists, but that's a lot of what the God of Atheists is about.
It's about the hypocrisy of authority figures.
That's why I don't have a politician in it, because the politician is just an effect of all the stuff that I talk about in the God of Atheists.
Available for donations of only $50.
$50 Canadian, even.
Canadian! So, my brother has this difficult conversation.
Another question that his daughters are going to ask is this.
Daddy... If Grandma is violent, why was she our babysitter?
Why did you let her babysit us?
Unsupervised. Well, she's changed.
Well, how has she changed? Well, of course, there's no answer to any of that.
There's no answer to any of that.
So, this big, ugly, Gordian, thorny knot of my brother's falsehoods about my mother, if I tell even two sentences of Totted up and glossed over facts about our family history, the morality of our family history, the family's ethical map.
If I say even two sentences, she beat us, I don't love her.
How long does it take to say that?
Not long. How does it help the children understand the moral history of the family which they're embedded in?
It does an enormous amount.
For parents who've been hypocritical and lied about their values, It is agony for children to hear those sentences.
That's why children never hear those sentences.
That's why you never get clear moral statements about the family, or even facts from which you could draw some sensible moral conclusions about your family.
It's just a massive put-up, cover-over, conch-job family communication.
You can talk about anything, but anything that's important.
So, my brother gets impaled To the white wall of truth with a couple of slender and glossed-over questions, or answers to questions.
So he's like a butterfly being pinned to the white wall of truth, hates it, hates it, loathes it, fears it, is enraged.
And, of course, who does he get angry at?
Right? This is always the question.
Who does he get angry at?
By the way, Niels, I can't believe you fell for it again.
Ah, these determinists.
Check out the board for an explanation of that.
But who does he get angry at?
Who created the difficult situation in our family?
Was it the person who beat her children and screamed at them and threw things at them and terrified them and manipulated them and bullied them and frightened them?
Was it that moral monster who created the problems within her family?
No. No.
No, that's not the person you should get angry at.
Was it our father who abandoned us to this criminally evil woman and never asked about anything to do with how we were doing?
Was it the father who found her too violent and aggressive to be married to, who then decided to leave his children with her and move to Africa?
Was it the father who contributed to, or in some sense caused, The moral problems within the family.
No, no, no.
See, we have lunch with Daddy too.
And we invite Daddy over to stay with us.
So it's not Daddy that you get angry at.
It's not Mommy you get angry at.
It's not the person who served you up to the abuser, and neither is it the abuser that you would get angry at.
Because they didn't really create the moral problems within the family.
They didn't create the scarred and brutalized histories.
No. It's not them.
Who is it that you get angry at?
And this is about much more than my family, and it's about much more than your family.
Who is it that people get angry at?
Is it the people who do evil things that everyone gets angry at?
No. No.
No, my friends, it is the people who point out that evil is occurring.
That is who everybody gets angry at.
And this is why I'm in people's face a little bit about this stuff.
And this is why I feel so impatient about the fact that the rational people are always the ones who get attacked.
It is not the evil people who are condemned.
Evil, the act, is not condemned.
Evil, the act, is shielded and protected and supported and enabled.
You have lunch with the evil actor.
The evil act is shielded.
The evil word is attacked.
The murderer is defended.
The word murder is attacked.
And of course these two things are entirely correlated.
If you do something as ignoble as defender and abuser of children, then your ignobility and your humiliation and your self-hatred will only rise to the foreground when somebody says, hey, she's a child abuser, and you go and spend time with her, and you have exposed your children to her.
The word abuse is attacked as morally evil.
The moral evil of abuse is defended and supported.
Nobody gets bad at the evildoers.
Nobody gets angry at the evildoers.
They only get angry at the truth tellers because they are so morally upright and courageous.
Because the philosophers aren't going to scream at them.
That's why they defend the evil people and attack the truth tellers who name evil for what it is.
So, with that knowledge safely tucked under your belt, it's not that hard to figure out who my brother got angry at.
Who did my brother get angry at?
Well, it's not that complicated a question and I'm sure that I can reveal the secret by telling you that my brother got angry at me.
So, in the hierarchy of values, the abuse that he and I both suffered as children This is so common that if this isn't your family,
you live in the future.
Ha! So this is just so common that it barely is worth mentioning, but because it is so common, it needs to be said over and over again so we get some moral clarity about it.
So, in your family, and I can almost guarantee you, and this is exactly what happened with the gentleman whose letter we wrote, or we read on Friday's Oscar Therapist, number 13, I think it was.
He is the one who's saying, some sick things happened in my family, and I need to feel that, and I need to...
that has consequences. Evil has consequences.
Being abused has consequences.
Because if it doesn't have consequences, you're just colluding.
You're just colluding. If people abused you when you were a child, and you go and spend Christmas with them, and you phone them, and you pick up their messages, and you respond to their emails, and you say you care about them when you're sick, if abuse has no consequences, if you act towards an abuser exactly as you would act towards a morally healthy individual...
Then you are a colluder in the abuse.
You are accepting it.
You are praising it.
You are rewarding it. And so it's going to happen again.
You're going to do it. You're going to do it.
Because how can you suddenly switch all your values?
You're going to do it. You may not do it in the same manner.
It may be verbal rather than physical.
It may be through eye-rolling.
It may be through contempt. It may be through emotional distance.
But you will do it.
Because you've defended it.
You've absolved it. You've rewarded it.
You're praising it. And what we praise is who we become.
What you value now is who you will be in ten years, or five years, or who you are already.
That's why we have to be very careful and very, very focused and very rigorous on what we say that we value and, most importantly, what we act as if we actually value.
You have to be very rigorous about that stuff.
If you reward abusers with time, attention, and love, if you reward the corrupt or the alienated or the boring or the whoever, People whose virtue and values are only in words and biology, which is to say that they do not exist at all, other than as camouflage.
If you reward these people, then you will become these people, in one form or another.
In one form or another.
So, my brother got angry at me and said, I don't want you to talk to my daughters about your relationship with your mom.
They have their own relationship with their mom, and you should not impose...
Your own values on them.
And it went on for much longer than that.
And it was not exactly that calm.
But I think you get the general idea.
And I said, well, if they ask me direct questions about their grandmother, what am I supposed to say?
And you say, well, just say, you have your own relationship with your grandma.
And it's not my place to tell you how you should feel about her.
And I said, but I'm not telling them how they should feel about their grandmother.
Simply, they're asking me, because somebody told them, not me, that I'm not seeing her, but somebody told them that this was the case, and they asked me why, which is a perfectly sensible question.
He said, well, you can say I just have my own issues with my mother, and they're really not...
Something that I would like to talk with you about.
And I said, well, that's true.
That is true. But they're not my issues.
Anybody who abuses children is not a good person.
Is not a good person. And he's like, well, but that's just an opinion.
That's, you know, she's changed. It's different now.
You've got to find the good in people.
You've got to rise above history.
You've got to do this. And I said, but I am rising above history.
This idea of taking the high road, which means ignoring your history, and for there to be no consequences for the evils in your history, for the people who committed those evils, that's not rising above history.
That's pretending that history didn't happen.
That's not taking the high road.
That's bludgeoning yourself into self-induced fantasy of non-existence.
Nothing happened. Nothing happened.
And the bad stuff that did happen is not anybody's fault.
Not anybody's fault. So, I said I don't agree that simply stating a fact, Mom beat us.
I didn't say us, I said beat me.
Simply stating a fact about her mother, which is significant in terms of why I see her or I don't see her.
Simply stating a fact about her mother, I don't see how that is refusing to rise above history.
I think pretending that that didn't happen is being trapped in history, because we weren't allowed to talk about it as kids.
And if we're not allowed to talk about it now, for whatever reason you make up, Then, that's definitely not rising above history.
That's just continuing the pattern of silence.
And he said, I just can't talk to you when you're like this.
Which is actually true. So, this is the challenge, I think, that people face with regards to children.
I'm just sort of giving you one example of the complications that occurred.
So, the end result of all of that, of course, is that I am allowed to have a relationship with my nieces only, only if I bring nothing of myself to that relationship.
I'm allowed to be around them, I'm just not allowed to be with them in any sort of real sense.
I'm allowed to take them to movies and take them to laser tag and take them to mini golf and take them to this and that and the other.
But we are to talk about nothing.
I am to be a chauffeur of empty gifts and emptier words.
So once I got that, that I was only going to be allowed to see my nieces if I could not bring anything of truth and value in my identity and my personality and anything real or anything that had happened in the past or anything that I value or don't value, if I was allowed to be with my nieces only on the condition that I was not allowed to be with them, then it was fairly clear to me that this wasn't going to work.
This wasn't going to be a situation that could be in any way, shape, or form productive.
And that I would rather not lie through a mission to my nieces.
Because, you know, the genie was out of the bottle.
They're not going to stop asking questions.
Why would they? They need to know.
They have a hunger to know. They even tried grilling my wife about grandma.
So the genie's out of the bottle.
When you make these decisions...
Based on morals, this is why I say everything is intertwined.
Everything is embedded. It is a domino.
It is the true domino theory.
Make one moral stand in your family and your whole family relationships will unravel because everybody then feels that they have to choose sides and then everyone gets angry, not at the fact that choices have to be made, but that somebody is saying choices have to be made.
And of course, I didn't say to anyone that choices have to be made.
I said, I am making choices about who I see.
And the implicit nature of that It's something that people can't abide.
Of course, they don't get angry at the people who are forcing those other people to make choices.
Nobody gets angry at my mom.
They only get angry at me.
Nobody will get angry at the fact that you were abused.
Nobody will get angry at the abuser.
They will only get angry at you for withdrawing your sanction from the abuser, for withdrawing your praise and your support and your hate.
Nothing happened. It's a great family we got here.
Ooh, couldn't be better. They will only get angry at that.
And seeing that in the face of the world is a really disgusting spectacle.
It is a truly disgusting spectacle.
You have to have a strong stomach to look at that and really see it, and that's why people avoid it.
So, what happens with you, with your relationships, with your nieces or nephews, the children or whoever?
This is what is going to occur with all of your family relationships.
I'm not saying it because it's a curse I wish upon anyone.
I wish it were different. I wish that my family were different, but I have no control over them.
I only have control over my values, what is true, and how I react to those values, whether I put them into my life or whether they're just a bunch of words that mean nothing.
So, what I would say is that it's just important to be prepared for this.
It's just important to be prepared for this.
And to be aware of it so that it doesn't blindside you in the way that it blindsided me and that it took me over a year to work this out and to actually act on it.
I'm sort of trying to give you a couple of missives from the front lines a little bit further up the ice saying, you know, here be dragons.
And I hope that this is of some use to you.
It is a very, very unpleasant and difficult and dangerous thing, this whole defooing thing.
It's a heck of a lot less dangerous than it is to stay around a corrupt family, because they know you better than anybody knows you, and that means that they have the power to hurt you more.
Everyone talks about the good stuff to do with family, and of course there is some wonderfully good stuff.
I have an amazing family with Christina, but...
And the family that can help you the most is the family that can hurt you the most.
They know exactly where your nerve endings are, and that's the real danger, and you have to protect yourself as far as that goes.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to donations.
It's been a little light lately, I think, due to March break, but if you could spare a few shekels, I would absolutely appreciate it.
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