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May 1, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
54:16
740 Separating from Corruptopn is Cowardice? - A Rebuttal
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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. We are starting in the dark today.
Thank you so much.
I had a wonderful, wonderful donation today.
I really, really do appreciate that.
And I will try to surmount even the things that I have done before just for the sake of saying thank you to such wonderful donations.
So, a friend of mine on the boards sent...
The transcript of a podcast about the one where I talked about the gentleman who was suicidal based on his neglect from his family.
This was not a Obi-Wan McEwee 2B one, no video, because I did it when I was walking around, so this will make more sense if you go and listen to that.
And this was her response.
Typical family therapy methodology, to a certain degree, that you must be suicidal if you are neglected, is a little extreme from my views.
This takes away any sense of personal responsibility and puts the individual in a victim role rather than a survivor role.
It implies that once a victim, you must remain one, and the only way to become a survivor is to show them your ass, which was, I think, how I, in terms of leaving, not just mooning.
A family unit, like people in general, are resistant to change, she writes.
A family is like a wind chime.
If one chime moves out of balance, the rest of that wind chime moves to try and restore the balance to what it used to be, even if that balance is dysfunctional.
Family secrets and the telling of those secrets throws the wind chime into a tailspin.
It takes a good amount of strength to disrupt the wind chime's balance and to refuse to move back into place when the rest of the chime is trying to make you.
Eventually though, the rest of the wind chime does balance out and come to accept the new positioning.
Another typical family therapy methodology.
Permanent cut-offs are bad.
It's escaping and not dealing with the situation in a healthy manner.
Yes, you should not have to deal with people who make you feel bad and sometimes a temporary cut-off is needed to strengthen yourself so you can withstand the wind chime trying to get you to conform back into balance.
However, a permanent cutoff is escapism and dealing with the negative situation through avoidance.
Similar to what this article is saying, ignore that it is an issue and it will go away and you will be happy, which is not what I said, but it is still there like a malignant tumor that you are trying to forget about.
Alright, well we'll come back to that.
People who had withdrawn parents.
To the people who had parents who did not speak, who coldly disapproved, who withdrew, who punished with silence, who killed with the soft blankets of eternal indifference.
Mine weren't silent.
She says mine were very vocal.
My major complaint about family is just how mind-crushingly dull it is, how you just can't talk about anything, you can't have any questions, you can't talk about anything of depth, you can't express your emotions.
Arg! Stupid notebook touchpad deleted my paragraph.
Not all families are like this.
With my mother, I'm choosing not to engage her in her neurotic behavior and thought patterns, which for my family is the same as rocking the wind chime, just in a different manner.
It is a change from the norm and not the expected mode of response.
I am still forcing my boundaries, though.
On that I will not bend.
I'm not sure what that means. She can accept it or not.
Really, she has no choice but to accept.
If she chooses not to, she's choosing to have no part in my life.
I wouldn't view that as a cutoff in this case if she chose not to accept my boundaries.
I don't know what that means. It would be her choice not to accept my terms of the relationship.
I'd still be willing to have the relationship if she would respect my boundaries, hence I'm not doing the cutoff.
I'm not... I'm not sure what she said.
Okay, we'll come back to that.
With my ex, he did grow up in a family that did not deal with conflict.
If I blew up about something, he responded by cowering slash fear.
So I learned that I had to keep my feelings to myself, and instead of things getting worked out, things stagnated and the relationship eroded.
With... Person X, Bab, he's more passive-aggressive.
I call him on it, and we get into an argument, but instead of on us going, fuck this, I'm out of here, we're able to step back, deal with the root cause of the argument, work it out, and prevent the stagnation corrosion from having a chance to build.
Not all conflict is bad.
Sometimes conflict is a gateway to growth and resolution.
That which we do not accept, that which we do not deal with, we reproduce.
This is what concerns me with your cutoff, This is her talking to this gentleman.
You've now learned that life is much easier by just eliminating anything in your life that is difficult.
Be careful that this does not become a defense mechanism for dealing with everything.
If I cut off everything that caused me distress, I'd be divorced again.
Life is full of distress.
You have to learn how to deal with it and work through it in a healthy manner.
Hence why family therapists are so against permanent cutoffs.
Again, temp cutoffs can be used to strengthen yourself while you learn how to adapt.
They can also be a mechanism for systemic family change, forcing the family system to adapt and accept a new balance.
Also, like I said above, setting up rules for the relationship.
X, I'm not willing to listen to you talk about dad or call his new wife a slut.
I'll hang up. Or stating your boundaries and making the other person respect those rules.
And if they don't, refusing to have a relationship with them unless they do is not the same as showing them your ass.
So this is a quote from my article.
If you recognize the grim and bloody danger you're in, the danger of absolute annihilation...
Which culminated in your suicidality.
If you understand the danger that you are in, the predators who raised you, the people who dragged you from the womb and dumped you in a coffin, then it would if I were you, show them no soft enderbelly, but rather just my ass as I left.
No one, this is all caps, no one has a perfect childhood.
No one. Parents are openly critical.
Parents are aloof and unresponsive.
Parents are human. Depends on your definition of human, but as an adult you have to acknowledge and accept what you thought growing up.
That your parents were all-knowing and wise is not true.
Your parents are just human, prone to mistakes, their own unresolved issues, and traumas from their own childhood, prone to stress at work, living in a society that forces us to do too much, live too many different roles, forced to choose between making dinner, fast food again, or carving out some hard-to-find quality time.
Acknowledging that your parents are flawed is easy.
Accepting that they are flawed and that they did the best they could based on their family history, society, and their own personal mental issues is more difficult.
The article implies that you have no personal choice in how you react.
You do. They can try and beat you down and, quote, murder you.
This article is very victim-focused.
You're a victim and have no free will.
Once a victim, always a victim.
You can choose to remain a victim and be beaten down and become suicidal, or you can rebel, risk upsetting the wind chime, and refuse to let them kill your spirit.
It's not as easy to upset the wind chime as it is to just accept and ignore and hope the problem goes away if you do.
Nothing gets resolved by ignoring.
It stagnates and grows until it becomes a smelly, stinky growth that affects not just yourself, but everyone around you.
I agree that showing them your ass as you leave is an effective method of upsetting the wind chime.
Sometimes a series of temp cut-offs is needed to get the others to see that you will not tolerate X, Y, Z. If after that they do not respect you and your boundaries, the only question then...
And you can answer this honestly.
Did you really try to force a family to accept a new balance based on you shifting the wind chime?
Or are you merely reproducing their own behavior in a slightly different manner?
Their indifference equals your cutoff.
That which we do not accept, that which we don't deal with, we reproduce.
Well, first of all, thank you so much for taking the time to write a very detailed and very sophisticated Both in terms of thinking and, of course, in writing.
A very sophisticated response to an article that I wrote.
And, of course, the article is taken in isolation from my general theories of what is technically called defooing, foo standing for family of origin, and if you can't have a productive and positive relationship with your parents, then you just don't see them, right?
That this is your siblings and, you know, everyone else in your family of origin.
You can just choose not to see them if they are Not people who make you happy if they're bad.
You know, bad people.
You can just choose not to see them.
That's sort of the idea behind it.
Now, of course, you wouldn't know this because you haven't listened to the podcast or seen the videos, but basically I say that you must try to connect with your family before you leave them.
And this, of course, was targeted towards a long-time listener who'd know that, and you can't go over every stretch and stitch of methodology in one podcast or videocast.
But this was really sort of directed at one guy who'd been a long-time listener.
And you can't sort of start, you know, with Volume 5 if someone's collected and then sort of criticized without knowing the history, and that's fine.
I mean, how would you know? You just got a transcript.
So, but there's a lot of really, really interesting stuff in here that is what I consider to be part of a methodology of thinking in the modern world that really is quite remarkable and really, really embedded and naturally, of course, comes from Christianity.
Not that I'm saying this woman is a Christian.
I don't know. Maybe she is.
But certainly the ideas themselves come from Christianity in its sort of fundamentals, which we'll talk about a little bit later.
So let's take this fine letter in sequence.
And that you must be suicidal if you were neglected is a little extreme for my views.
Well, that's not an argument, so I can't really respond to that.
The gentleman that I was talking about was, in fact, suicidal.
So I'm working empirically.
I mean, whether it's too extreme for her views or not doesn't really matter.
This takes away any sense of personal responsibility and puts the individual in a victim role rather than a survivor role.
Once a victim, you must remain one, and the only way to become a survivor is to show them your ass.
And so what this woman is talking about, if I understand it correctly, and please obviously feel free to correct me if I've made a mistake, what she's saying is that if you're abused by your parents and you stop seeing them, You try to work it out and it doesn't work out, so then you stop seeing them.
If you were abused by your parents and you stop seeing them, then you are remaining a victim.
Then you are remaining a victim.
I mean, I just don't understand why, fundamentally don't understand why parents get a different moral category or family gets a different moral category from everyone else.
It's a mere description of a biological relationship.
It means nothing. It means nothing.
Certainly, we would not say that a woman who is being physically abused in her marriage should stay with her abuser and attempt to do some damn thing with the wind chimes.
We would say, look, if you're getting abused in your relationship, if there's physical violence in your relationship, then you should not be in that relationship.
If the woman says, I am leaving my abuser, we say that she is not being a victim.
And that if she continues to spend time with her abuser, then she is continuing to be a victim.
But families, everything gets backwards.
Everything goes in a different direction.
So people say, well, you were raised by your parents, and if they were abusive or negative or hostile or indifferent or whatever, right?
Because abuse...
In a parent-child relationship, neglect is abuse.
Neglect isn't an abuse in a marriage.
It's just not nice, right?
But neglect doesn't mean a damn thing as far as abuse goes in a marriage.
Because your husband or your wife is not dependent on you.
If you're a nurse and you have a patient who's in one of those full traction things and can't pee or eat and you neglect that patient and you have responsibility for that patient, then that is abusive because the patient is helpless and dependent upon you.
Children are helpless and dependent upon their parents.
If the parents neglect the children, it's abuse.
If I don't feed you, That's not abusive because you can go and get your own food.
But if you're my child and I don't feed you, then clearly that's abusive because you can't go and forage in the woods and get your own food.
You can't get a job. You can't leave.
You're a kid. You're totally dependent.
Now, it's well known in psychological circles and medical circles that children who do not receive affection do not thrive.
Even if they're physically taken care of.
If they do not receive physical affection, they do not thrive.
Physically, spiritually, psychologically, emotionally.
So it is as abusive to withhold affection from your child as it is to withhold food from your child.
Nutritious food, let's say.
So what I'm talking about, or what I talked about in this podcast, is not just my opinion.
It is based on science and a good deal of empirical testing.
They've got all of these kids in these Russian orphanages who have received food, but have not received physical affection, and they're just waste away.
They just waste away.
So, when you are in these sorts of situations, when I say that neglect leads to suicidality, it's because neglect is murderous.
Neglect of children from parents is a murderous impulse.
Because children are helpless and can't defend for themselves.
And of course there are different degrees and I understand all of that.
And I was talking about a guy whose parental neglect led him to be suicidal at the age of 15 or so.
Now there may be times in life And I believe that there are times in life when you're not a victim with regards to your parents.
But it's not when you're still dependent on them.
It's not when you've been raised by them.
It's not when you're in your early to mid-teens.
Then you're still a victim because your brain is still young.
You're still maturing physically and mentally.
You don't have access to all the information.
You don't have any real capacity for assertiveness because you can't leave.
So there may be situations where you're not a victim with regards to your parents.
But when you are 14...
Of course, the suicidality occurred at the age of 14 or 15, which meant it started a year or two earlier, so when you're 10 or 11 or 12, you're a total victim with regards to your parents.
You have no say in the matter.
You have no legal, economic, or any other form of legitimate or actionable independence from your parents.
What are you going to do? Run away?
Live on the streets? Please. They provide the food and shelter.
You are, to all intents and purposes, their legal slave.
Although even a slave could run away.
Or could choose to fight back and then run away.
Children don't have this option.
So there's a long sort of series of lectures here in the letter, which says that defooing, and I'm not seeing your family of origin, defooing is bad. which says that defooing, and I'm not seeing your family And why is it bad?
Why is it bad?
Why? Why is it bad?
Well, the standard answer, which I of course received when I was contemplating and undergoing my own defooing process, the standard answer is as follows.
Defooing is bad because you're just running away from the problem.
It's not healthy. You're not dealing with things.
You're not standing up for yourself.
You're not fighting for your rights.
You're just slithering away into the night like a cat burglar in a sudden searchlight.
So it's very unhealthy, because you're not fighting for what is yours, you're not doing something with a wind chime, so it's unhealthy in that regard.
And to me, that's a very interesting question, a very interesting sort of phenomenon.
And I'm not sure that I really understand the logic behind it.
If you're in an abusive relationship, Then you have the right to leave that abusive relationship.
I don't know why the hell it's so much more complicated than that.
If you're in a relationship which does not give you pleasure...
If you're in a relationship wherein you find the other person unpleasant, negative, difficult...
Where the negatives vastly outweigh the positives...
Yeah, of course. I mean, yes, tell them what you want, tell them what you need, and tell them what your preferences are, and so on.
But if it's a difficult relationship, why do you have to stay in it?
Why? Why?
This is not a comparable situation, but in a Dr.
Phil I watched a while back, There was a grandfather who had sexually molested his six-year-old granddaughter.
And the daughter of the grandfather basically said to her mom, why do you stay with him?
I mean, he's a sexual predator.
He's a child molester. And she said, well, I could just run away, but that would be the easy thing to do.
Well, what the fuck is wrong with doing the easy thing?
What the hell is this bizarre Quaker slash Calvin slash satanic emphasis on you've got to beat your head against a wall to be a good human being?
Why not take the easy path?
I mean, when you want to drive across town, do you start digging?
I'm going to dig me a tunnel to get across town.
Dig me a tunnel big enough for my Volvo.
Why? Because I don't want to do the easy thing.
If you want to go to Europe and you live in America, do you swim?
Do you put together a little raft?
Do you try to hang glide?
Do you catch a porpoise?
No. Take a plane.
Or a cruise ship. We do the easy thing all the time.
Because to not do it is kind of retarded.
I mean, life has its own innate difficulties, right?
We get old, we get sick, we die.
Life has its own innate difficulties, thank you very much.
I don't know that we need to add to them and that that makes us somehow a good human being or whatever, right?
If you're in a relationship with your parents as an adult and they're abusive towards you or negative or just boring, why is it your job?
To provide them with perpetual companionship until the end of your days or the end of their days.
Why is it your job?
Why? I've never heard an answer to that that makes any kind of sense.
And the answer that this woman gives, which is a perfectly commonplace and common answer...
Which is that if you don't deal with your parents, then you're being a coward and you're running away.
But what's wrong with running away?
What's wrong with running away?
And the funny thing is, and this is the interesting thing, right?
Is that the metaphor is inappropriate.
If you don't see your family, you're not running away.
You're not. You're just not running towards anymore.
Running away in a cowardly fashion is the way that it is generally framed or perceived or communicated as.
And that's just not true at all, not even metaphorically.
You're just not running towards them anymore.
If you say, well, I choose not to seek out abuse anymore.
I choose not to expose myself voluntarily and seek out abuse anymore.
Doesn't that sound kind of healthy?
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong.
Doesn't that sound kind of healthy?
And sure, I know that there are people who, you know, I don't see my family because they It's the Hatfields and McCoy. Oh, I'm just mad at them.
them.
So I'm just storming off and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
But that's like saying there's no difference.
Thanks.
Between somebody who abuses someone else by storming off, which is to be an abuser.
If you're in a relationship with someone and you just storm off because you're angry and you want to punish them, that's kind of abusive.
It's not quite the same as neglect, as I was talking about earlier.
This is with the desire to hurt someone.
If, as an adult, you storm out of a relationship with another adult, like your wife doesn't cook you the meal that she wants and you throw your glass against the wall and you go screaming out of the house, that's kind of abusive, right?
That's manipulative and punishing.
That's kind of sadism, right?
And this is the wild, inversal of values that I see in this kind of communication, which is depressingly common in this field.
If I am an abuser and I attempt to control and manipulate other people by storming around and running out and threatening never to see them again, and I'm sort of just a crazy bad person in this way, that is exactly the same as not wanting to be abused.
Abusing others is exactly the same as not wanting to be abused.
Do you see what a Absolutely bottomless kaleidoscopic fog this idea sits in.
And there's a good reason why this idea is there.
There's a good reason why this idea is there.
And we'll get into that shortly.
To reject masochism is exactly the same as being a sadist.
Storming off and screaming and yelling and rejecting people coldly to hurt them, that's being sadistic.
That is exactly the same as not seeking out Abuse.
Rejecting masochism is exactly the same as sadism.
Now, it could be said that masochism is the flip side of sadism, and I certainly wouldn't be the first or the last to say it, but rejecting masochism is the polar opposite of sadism.
And this is a very obvious line here.
This is totally obvious.
To not seek out being abused by people, or being bored, or just whatever, right?
To not seek out, to not go over, to not bring presents to, to not spend Christmas with, to not go over for birthdays, to not send cards, to not pick up the phone, is not action.
It's not running away.
You're not running towards people.
You're an abuser. You're not embracing your abuser.
You're not showing them your soft underbelly, drawing a big red bullseye, handing them a knife and saying, go to town.
You're just not exposing yourself to abuse.
Okay.
That's not even close to running away.
Not even close to running away.
It's about prevention.
My sister, not cure for what cannot be cured.
It's the difference between running away from a lion that is attacking you versus not going to Africa to begin with.
Quite a difference.
If I'm just sitting here, not going to Africa, and not being mauled by a lion, and someone says, you're not just sitting there, you're running away from lions because you're cowardly!
Like, I'm not running, I'm not doing anything.
I'm just not going to Africa, rubbing myself up and down with marinade, and then going and poking sharp sticks into the side of hungry lions!
Because I'm not masochistic.
But I'm not running away.
I'm not doing anything. Just sitting here.
Perfectly happy. And it is a very interesting thing when you think about how could somebody mistake just sitting there for running away?
Whose perspective Are we really seeing this interaction from?
Whose perspective are we really seeing this interaction from?
Because this woman's all about the boundaries, right?
Me, you, self, other boundaries.
Good! Good! We love the boundaries.
Boundaries are good. If I don't go and see my mom, I am not acting.
But my mom views this as me running away from her.
As me abandoning her.
As me leaving her.
Which is not true. I just don't go over it anymore.
I didn't live with my mom. I'm not leaving.
I'm moving out. If you have an ex-husband who hasn't lived with you, For years, and you call him intermittently and then he stops returning your phone calls, you say, he's leaving me!
He's leaving me!
No, he left you years ago.
It was a contact, an acquaintanceship or a friendship-based contact, which he's not continuing.
So it is not the perspective of the person who was rejecting the masochistic impulse to run over and be abused by people.
The person who is rejecting that masochistic impulse is not running away.
It's being inactive.
It's not acting in this matter.
If I get up and don't put my hand in a blender that's running, I'm not running away from the blender.
I just don't want my hand to get chewed up.
Stick a fork in an electrical socket.
Oh, you're running away from the electrical socket.
No, just sitting here, just not putting the fork in.
But to your parents, when you stop seeing them, what are they going to do?
what are they going to do?
This is the methodology which people don't dig into which is why they get confused about these issues.
If I abuse you and then you decide or you come to your senses and decide that life is too short to keep sticking your fork in a wall socket hoping to get used to the pain thinking well this is growth I am a wind chime.
Who must not alter?
Or must alter but let other people alter other wind chimes.
Such a gentle metaphor for such a brutal interaction as parental abuse.
Or neglect or hysteria or boredom.
So if I abuse you, and then you decide to stop seeing me, what am I going to do?
This is the fundamental paradox of this kind of ceased interaction.
I cannot win an argument with you if you decide to stop seeing me.
I cannot win an argument with you if you decide to stop seeing me.
If you decide to stop listening to the podcast, I cannot win an argument with you in any rational context.
And it is this huge hole at the heart of these interactions that people just get so incredibly confused about.
But it's so unbelievably simple.
I abuse you and you stop seeing me.
And then I get you on the phone.
What am I going to say?
What am I going to say? I didn't abuse you.
But that's not my decision.
That's your decision. It's not my decision whether or not I am abusive towards people.
It's their decision.
Am I going to say, "You're wrong?" Well, of course, the reason that people stop seeing each other, the reason that people defoo, is that they don't get listened to.
That they're eclipsed, right?
That they're not visible to the other person.
That the other person continually contradicts what they say, what they feel, what they think, and what they do.
So, if my abuse to you has been rejecting everything you say, and then you stop talking to me, I get you on the phone and I say, you're wrong!
Well, what am I doing? I'm rejecting what you say.
It's confirmation that you should not be talking to me.
It's confirmation that you should not be talking to me.
So either I get you on the phone and I say, I totally respect what you did or what you're doing.
I did abuse you. You're totally right to not see me.
Then I don't get to see you.
If I call you up on the phone and you answer, And I say, you're totally wrong.
You're just running away.
You should see me.
I didn't abuse you and you're incorrect.
Well, then you shouldn't see me.
Because I'm just rejecting everything that you say.
I'm just rejecting everything that you do.
Once you have decided not to see me, there is nothing that I can do to bring you back.
I mean, I guess I can...
Live a good life, right?
And I can hope that you see the light and maybe you find value at some point in the future.
Who knows? It doesn't really matter.
I was talking about this with Christina on the weekend, right?
So I had a dream about her parents coming over and us having to hide in the house.
Trying to figure out the fear.
The fear is that her parents are going to come over and just blast her into oblivion.
Not the fun oblivion with swords and pixels, but the not-so-fun oblivion of self-hatred.
Our parents have this power, of course.
The worse they are, the more power they have in this realm.
And I was saying, but if your parents come over, you can't lose.
You can't lose. You can't lose.
Because either they're going to come over and they're going to say, I was totally wrong, we did the wrong things, I've been to therapy, I understand, I'm not going to ask anything from you, but here's the situation, here's what I've learned, blah, blah, blah.
In which case, you haven't lost.
You may have a choice about whether you want to see them again, but you haven't lost.
Or they come over and say, you are a bad, ungrateful, mean, spiteful, horrible, blah, blah, blah, daughter from hell.
In which case, they've just confirmed why you don't see them.
You can't lose!
When you defoo. It's Pascal's wager.
you can't lose.
Because if your parents change and I don't believe that they can undo the damage that they've done and I've had podcasts about that.
But if they change then you at least get the satisfaction of having your feelings validated you can make a decision or whatever, whatever, right?
But at least your feelings have been validated, your history has been confirmed, and that's nice, that's nice.
Or they come over and crap all over you, in which case it's like, oh yeah, right, that's why I don't see these jerks.
But you can't lose.
You're either validated or attacked.
Validated, good.
good now I know why I don't see you people so there's just this running away thing is not from the perspective of the person who's just sitting there reading a book not calling his mom That's not running away. It just looks like running away to bad people.
Because when the gig is up, right?
When the gig is up, when you give up on masochism, when you act out of self-respect to not let yourself be put down, not let yourself get into difficult or boring or whatever perpetual situations, when you finally start acting with some self-respect, parents know that the gig is up.
They know that the gig is up.
They know that you are no longer assigning them value because they are called your parents.
They are magical glowing gods of virtue because they rutted some decades ago.
Wouldn't it be easy?
Wouldn't need any moral philosophy then.
Just have sex without a condom and you're virtuous.
Not quite so.
So they don't have the hold over you.
Their tractor beam of imaginary virtue is gone.
So what are they going to do? What are they going to do?
Well, we kind of treated you badly for many years since you were a kid.
And now you're on to us.
Now you're on to us.
Now you don't want to see us.
What are we going to do? Are we going to suddenly become good parents?
Oh, fuck, that would be a complete disaster.
What a total nightmare.
That would be even worse than continuing to abuse you.
Or just be weird or freaky or negative or whatever.
Neurotic. Who cares?
If your parents are negative, or just use negative, whatever that is, right?
If your parents are negative towards you for 30 years and then you decide to stop seeing them, And then they suddenly become good parents.
Isn't that worse than anything?
Because that's them saying, oh yeah, we could have been good parents any time.
Any time. You just didn't threaten us enough.
Oh, we can be totally great parents.
We know exactly what to do.
We just, you know, we don't feel like it.
We weren't pressured. We weren't bullied enough.
And parents know that deep down.
They know that deep down.
If I've been beating my wife for 20 years and then she leaves me and I say, well, I'll never beat you again.
It's like, oh, so you have the capacity to not beat me?
You just chose to beat me?
That's even worse than just beating me because you're a psycho nutjob.
If somebody says, I will stop abusing you when you decide to stop seeing them, that is the worst insult of all.
Because then they're saying, oh yeah, I don't have to do it, I just prefer doing it.
It's a choice. If the husband who beats you for 20 years then says, come back so I can beat you some more.
At least he's being honest, and at least he's not saying he can stop beating you.
So... They either admit the abuse, in which case they're justifying why you...
Yeah, I've totally shit on you for 20 or 30 years.
And I can't change.
So yeah, you should not see me.
Or, oh yeah, I totally shit on you for 20 or 30 years, but hey, I can change.
I just didn't realize that shitting on you was something you didn't want.
How did I know? But then they're just claiming to be morally insane, right?
And of course parents do know because they don't do it in public.
They do know because if you ever try and turn the same tactics back on them, oh boy, they just don't like it at all.
So they know. They know.
So once the abuse is heaped up or the negative stuff is heaped up, there's nothing that parents can say or do to create value within the situation.
If they promised to change, it means they could have changed in the past.
They just chose not to until they were threatened.
Which means you have to keep threatening them or they're going to revert back to their own behavior.
And who wants a relationship where you have to keep threatening people in order to make them good?
I mean, that's just the government, right?
Who wants that shit? Life's too short.
If I keep clubbing the tiger, he might not bite me.
Yeah, that's a great fucking pet you got there.
What a relaxing environment that is, right?
How primed for love you will be.
So, the parents can't get you back because they have anything of value to offer.
Because the moment they say, oh, I have something of value to offer, your legitimate question is, well, if you can offer it to me, why have you not been offering it to me for 30 years?
Right? There's no answer other than, bye, right?
I mean, I think these things through.
These are just out of the top of my head.
So how is it that parents are going to create value?
How is it that they're going to make you want to see them when no sane human being in the world would want to see them?
Well, what they do is they say, yes, I'm difficult, but I'm necessary.
Yes, I'm difficult, but I'm necessary.
necessary.
If you don't spend time with me, I'm going to call you a coward, because it takes courage and bravery to spend time with me.
This is negative economics.
This is not the offering of a positive, but the inflicting of a negative.
Like you buy freedom from the government by paying them off in the form of taxation.
Thank you.
It's not the government saying, hey, I've got these great services.
Would you like to buy them? And you say, yeah, that's great.
I'd love to. That's the offering of a positive.
But it's the infliction of a negative that creates value.
It's a Best Buy or some store.
They get your money by offering whatever it is that you want that you go to buy there.
That's positive economics. Negative economics is have sex with me or I'll kill you.
That's rape. That's negative economics.
It's not have sex with me because I'm a great guy and I can do this amazing thing with my ears.
It's have sex with me or I'm going to beat you up.
That's rape. That's negative economics.
So it's not spend time with me because I'm a great person.
It's if you don't spend time with me You're going to be really, really miserable.
And you're going to be a coward.
And you're going to be shallow.
And you're going to be running away.
Like a little pussy.
Well, that's negative economics.
And what does that do? It confirms that you should not spend any time with these people!
Jesus! Why is this so complicated?
I know emotionally it's complicated.
I know that emotionally it's very complicated.
It certainly was for me. But intellectually, people, this is not brain surgery.
But let's have a look at this in slightly more detail.
So your parents say, or whoever, right?
Someone says, well...
If it's difficult, it's good.
If it's difficult, it's necessary.
Well... First of all, it's not easy to defoo.
Anyone who thinks it is has never done it.
And secondly, if you grow through difficulties, then you are bestowing a great gift of growth on your parents by not seeing them.
Because it's difficult for them if you don't see them, right?
So difficulty is good, though.
They should not want you back because they should embrace the difficulty of not having you around as a great path for growth.
But I've never once heard one of these people, never once heard one of these people, if they find out that I don't see my mom, I've never once had them call up my mom and say, well, this is a great growth opportunity because this is really difficult.
This is really difficult to not have your son around.
What a great growth opportunity.
This is really the right thing to do.
Oh, no, they don't do that.
They don't do that. Why?
Because they're scared of my mom because she's a crazy bat.
And a nasty one at that.
No, what they do is they pick on the sanest person, right?
They pick on the most rational person.
Right? This woman is not phoning up this guy's mom.
He defood, right? The listener who posted this email.
His friend is not phoning up his mom and saying, what a great opportunity for growth this difficulty is.
I know it's difficult that your son is not seeing you, but we shouldn't always try and do what is easy in life.
We should do what is difficult, and that is to let him go.
No. Just do that.
Why? Why?
Why? Why?
Why? Why? Why? Why is this 100% ratio of picking on the children and a 0% ratio of picking on the parents?
I don't even have to answer, do I? Victimhood.
Being a survivor and not a victim.
Now, personal Exposure, not the kind I want because I'm driving, but personal exposure time is that my brother called me a victim, that I played the victim.
That I played the victim all the time and that I blamed everyone else for all of my problems and this and that.
So I have a certain amount of emotional sensitivity around this issue, but I still think that I can speak with some coherency to it and you can let me know if you think that's true or not.
Well, first of all, I think that we have to have some understanding of what a victim is.
What is a victim? Somebody who's helpless, right?
Somebody who's helpless in a situation.
And the children are victims.
Children who are abused are victims.
Total, complete, utter, absolute victims.
If a child who is abused is not considered a victim, then the word victim is meaningless.
then the word victim is meaningless.
So, I absolutely, to the death, will defend that I was a victim when I was a child.
Thank you.
With enormous sympathy, with enormous respect and pride for what I was able to achieve and how I was able to survive, I was a complete and total victim.
Because to imply even a shred of doubt To the contrary of that would be to turn me from victim to masochist.
And that I will not allow to be put as a remote, remote, remote label on myself as a child.
That I somehow got off on being abused.
If I was not a victim, then I was complicit.
If I was not a victim, then I was seeking it out.
And oh, let me tell you, brothers, I was not.
So 150 million percent victimhood, full status as a child.
To imply otherwise is to imply that the child is a masochist who picked his parents with full consciousness of their evil intent before he was born, all metaphysically completely mad.
So we are all 150 million percent victims when we are children.
Now, our brains stopped developing in our mid-twenties.
I think that we would be less victimized or less victimhood would not last into our 20s if there was not this kind of nonsense floating around in the intellectual atmosphere about how to be masochistic is to be wise and to run around pursuing people who abuse you and exposing yourself to that abuse is somehow being strong and great.
If this kind of crap wasn't around, then we wouldn't be victims as long as we are, because we'd actually have some mental hooks with which we could use to get out of being victims.
But unfortunately, everybody says you have to see your family all the time, except for maybe a little bit of time so that you can strengthen yourself up.
It's okay to have them not choke you if you're about to die, so that you can get a couple of breaths and then get back to having them choke you again, because that's wise and strong and good and noble and virtuous.
So that's psychological health, right?
If they're about to kill you, take a break, and then strengthen up, and, you know, pull back just before you see the light.
You strengthen up, let them strengthen up, then let them get back to choking you, and that is the sin qua na of mental health.
I don't quite agree.
So, children are not masochists who get off on being abused.
They are victims. And they may provoke the abuse in order to get it out of the way.
They may provoke the abuse in order to continue a pattern that gives them some sense of comfort.
But even in that, they are complete victims.
Complete and total victims.
So as a child, I was a victim.
Yeah, as an adult, I guess I could call myself a survivor, but I don't think that's a very accurate term because I have done more than survive.
I have, in fact, flourished, my friends.
So I don't like to think of myself as a survivor.
Now, how is it that I stopped being a victim?
How is it that I stopped being a victim?
Well, I did exactly what this woman did.
I said, I don't accept this bad behavior around me.
I don't accept that people reject everything that I say.
I don't accept that they roll their eyes when I try to talk about what is important to me.
I don't accept that they put me down.
I don't accept that they ignore me.
I don't accept any of these things because it's not what I do to people, so I don't accept it from others.
And when people refused to change, I hung in there for a little while and then I just went, you know what?
This ain't a fucking set of wind chimes.
This is my life. This is my heart.
This is my soul. And it hurts.
And I'm not masochistic.
Right? And I don't have all the time in the world hoping that 10 years or 20 years or 30 years, somehow my parents or my brother are going to be good people.
And, right, I don't have the time and I'm not willing to take the risk.
There's no indication of that having changed and there's lots of damn good reasons as to why it is essential to understand that it never will change.
Somebody may be able to help the abuser, but not his victim.
Someone may be able to help the rapist, but not his victim.
That's sick. That's sick!
As a rape victim, to dedicate yourself to the mental health and comfort of the rapist is sick.
It is a continuation of the abuse.
It is not mental health, and I don't care how many therapists say the opposite.
If therapists are so wise, why is the world so fucked up?
If psychiatrists and psychologists who say, oh, you should never defoo permanently, that's not healthy.
If they're so amazingly wise, why is the world sick and getting sicker if they have the cure and they're so effective at it?
You know, the human race has been beating its head against this addiction to family for 100,000 goddamn years.
I think it's time we tried something just a little different.
Just a little. Just a little.
Just, you know, take that temporary, turn it into a permanent.
You know how I can temporarily stop beating my wife?
Maybe it's a good thing if I just permanently stop beating my wife.
You know, just go that extra little step.
Actually, it's quite a doozy, but...
You know, if you have to stop seeing people because they're abusing you, maybe the purpose of not seeing them is not to strengthen yourself up or to recover from the abuse so that you can get abused again.
The article implies you have no personal choice in how you react.
Well, of course, by definition, if you're reacting, it's not much of a personal choice.
I'm talking about not reacting, though, but rather initiating action.
Or rather, initiating inaction.
That's all defooing is.
You're initiating inaction.
That's all that defooing is.
You're initiating inaction.
It's exactly how the free market works.
And it's exactly how government and taxation does not work.
Initiating inaction.
Like a woman who doesn't want to sleep with someone, or anyone, just initiates inaction.
Just doesn't walk over and have sex with that person.
You're initiating inaction when you defu.
That's all you're doing. I don't want to go and buy something at Best Buy.
I don't have to do a damn thing.
So for sure, if you're just reacting, then you're a victim.
But in order to stop being a victim, you stop reacting.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Parents are not perfect.
Well, that's just a straw man argument.
I mean, that's just nonsense. Nobody's perfect.
And so to say, I mean, what she's trying to do is say, well, people who cut off their parents are intolerant.
So intolerance is bad.
Hostility is bad and so on.
But what if your parents displayed these attributes 10 times or 20 times or a million times to what you display?
Initiating an action is not attacking anyone.
It's just not... If I'm paying for someone to get drunk every night and then I decide not to pay for them to get drunk every night, I'm not doing anything to them.
I'm just no longer doing something for them.
That's not evil. Inaction is not evil.
And inaction, when the alternative that is suggested is a continuation of abuse of others, you can't win.
You cannot get people to change when you continue to reward them with your presence.
Why would they change? It's still working.
Whatever they're doing is still working.
If you're still going over and spending time with them, you can't initiate change with them and then continue to see them.
Because, obviously, what they're doing is working.
So I hope that this makes some sense.
It was a bit rambly, but I appreciate your patience.
This is a very, very important topic because there is a lot of nonsense out there about how no longer being masochistic is somehow being cowardly, and I think quite the opposite is true.
Thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it.
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