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Aug. 20, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
57:44
848 The Lure of Suicide

One of the bravest letters I have ever received...

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Good morning, my beautiful listeners.
I hope that you're doing well. Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends.
Thank you once more for joining in the most important conversation in the world today, and thank you again to the wonderful listeners who joined into the Sunday chat show yesterday.
And it was a really, really great show, and I really do appreciate everybody's honesty.
You know, when you have these kinds of conversations with people, it also helps you realize once more just how little truth there is possible in most relationships.
So thank you again for the caring, the sharing, and so on, and the polite laughter at my bad jokes.
That's actually the most important part for me.
My book, On Truth, The Tyranny Evolution.
Grab a hold of it.
This is actually going to be the one that's the most valuable.
It's the first edition. There's not even an ISBN number.
I found one typo I'm sure I fixed, and one other little typo.
So I'm going to fix those in September.
And so grab a hold of this copy now.
And for those who have a request for signed copies...
Gosh, I wish there was an easy way to do it.
I guess you could send me the book in a self-addressed stamped envelope, and I'd be happy to sign it and drop it back in the mailbox.
So that's one possibility.
But I don't want to end up being responsible for mailing stuff out.
That's not a particularly good use of my time.
So sorry about that.
But, of course, if you come to, we're going to have this chat in Miami in January of 2008.
Actually, not that far, five months away.
And Christina and I will be in Miami for our fifth wedding anniversary.
And I'd like to get together with anybody who'd like to drop by.
We have some presentations to go over.
And, of course, if you bring your book, actually, there'll be free copies of the book for everyone who attends.
And free copies of Revolutions.
You can get all of those signed if you like.
That's one way of doing it.
So, without further ado, let us continue with a very, very interesting story that somebody sent to us, to Christina and myself.
And sorry, I will get to the Ask a Therapist relatively soon.
And it's a story of a man's depression and his salvation, which I think is well worth listening to.
There's a lot of important stuff embedded in here.
So he writes, Dear Stefan and Christina, Thank you.
Your podcasts have literally been the catalyst of the most important moment of my life.
This is a gift that the limitations of the English language prevent me from truly describing the gratitude I have.
He wrote this the 12th of August.
I found your website only a few days ago and have listened to about 75 various podcasts, plus 20 or so Ask A Therapist podcasts.
The combination of philosophy and psychology is completely congruent with my current mental health issues.
As you can see, this is a good writer.
I'm looking forward to listening to the entire series of podcasts in the coming weeks, then browsing through the forum archives and eventually becoming an active member.
I'm certain that the community is what I have been looking for my whole life.
I also feel the obligation to give you part of my income in exchange for this enlightenment.
I wish that I could say that without sounding like a religion.
As soon as I'm able to, I certainly will.
Spreading this information is very important.
Sorry, that's a note, right?
I mean, I'm not out there buying big screen TVs with these donations, but I'm using it with some minor exceptions, but I'm using it to advertise and spread the word, right?
Just so you know where the funds are going.
So, he says, thank you.
I have written out a short history of myself in the last 18 months.
I'm not sure why, but I have the feeling that I want to share it with you.
I am a 22-year-old male who was in the eye of the storm of a long-running mental health crisis.
Around 18 months ago, I was in the best period of my life so far.
I had a great place to live, decent social life, a fantastic one-man web development business that provided me with a few thousand Australian dollars per week, with only around four half days per week of work, and complete flexibility in the hours and the times at which I worked.
This was supplemented with a second, quote, job, or more accurately, hobby, which was playing poker.
I had freedom in every sense of the word for the first time in my life, and I was able to indulge in some of the finer things in life that I enjoy.
Then it hit.
And by golly, I put in as a tangent, doesn't it always?
It is when we achieve security that we fall apart, right?
We only feel how tired we are if we've been lost in the ocean.
When we fall upon the wet sand, then we sleep.
He continues, Proper meals for myself,
cooking was one of my passions also, and often ignored phone calls.
I also only left the house when I needed something like food or other essential items.
The isolation did not bother me in the slightest, as I have always had a sense of contentment being alone with my thoughts.
I guess I must be good company.
Very quickly, my tiredness, lack of energy and slackness increased, as well as an unhealthy paranoia At first I was just, you know, ignoring phone calls, etc.
But after not too long I had unplugged my phone, cancelled my email accounts, stopped collecting my mail, and didn't leave my house but for a quick trip to a local deli once per week or so in the wee hours of the morning when no one else was around.
My paranoia had intensified and I had an uncontrollable sense of fear of anyone coming to see me at all.
I would get short of breath and an escalated heart rate every time I heard a car outside that may be coming down my driveway.
I had closed and locked all doors and windows and kept all of my lights turned off so there were no signs of me being home from the outside of the house.
My days consisted of trying to sleep, which was very difficult by this stage, and cowering in fear because of my social phobia type anxiety.
This continued for a number of weeks.
I'm not sure exactly how long, because there was no real sense of time for me.
Of course, I started to develop suicidal thoughts, and the few times I was able to sleep, which was down to about three times per week of four to six hours each, the only escape from my personal hell became permeated with nightmares.
This made me fear sleep even more than I feared being awake, and I was balancing precariously on a cliff with the enticing ocean of peace that suicide would provide, tempting me below.
The only thing preventing me from jumping was that my dad was going through an extremely tough time himself, and I knew me committing suicide would have been enough to break him.
This internal conflict raged for what seemed like eternity, but somehow my concern for my dad won out.
I built up the courage to plug my phone in, make a doctor's appointment, and drag myself to see him.
Thankfully, he was only about a block away from my house.
I told him my situation, and he prescribed me some antidepressant medication as well as sleeping pills.
The act of seeking help and leaving the house itself felt a bit like conquering Everest to me, and it propped me up a little bit.
I then sent an email to my father and tried to describe my situation.
The email was only about a paragraph, and I was uncertain of what the response would be, because we had never really talked about anything involving emotion before.
He is a stereotypical male, in that emotions weren't something that he expressed in any depth whatsoever.
And I was exactly the same.
Around the same time, I got noticed that the house I was renting was being put up for sale by the owners at the end of my lease, which was in a short amount of time, so I had to find a new place to live.
Having depleted my savings and having no income at all made this a very difficult task.
The situation we have in my city in regards to housing is also very extreme.
We are a resources-rich state and our economy had been expanding at an explosive rate on the back of China's growing hunger.
The development of new houses couldn't even come close to keeping up with the demand of the massive influx of people that we were experiencing, which resulted in rents going up over 100% in the previous two years or so, and a rental vacancy rate of under one-half of one percent.
With no job, my chances of finding somewhere to rent would be exaggerated if I described them as zero.
My only option was to ask my mother if I could rent one of the spare rooms in her house, to which we agreed.
I detested doing this, and it was an epic failure for me, because getting out of that house some years earlier was the best thing I had ever done.
Having no savings at all left anymore, I had to apply for welfare, which increased my self-loathing somewhat.
I guess this shake-up had been some kind of distraction from my headcase situation, but it took only about a week or two of being in the new house before I was practically back to where I had been.
The nightmares had started again and were getting worse than they were previously.
They were physically violent and always ended up with me being seriously harmed or on death's door when I awoke in a panic.
It was obvious that the medication was doing nothing for me, so I decided to see a psychiatrist and made a commitment to myself and to my dad that I would hold on for long enough to give treatment a chance of working.
Oh, he's a Canadian too.
This was about one year ago.
He started me on a stronger antidepressant, and I was going back regularly to have my medication and doses adjusted.
I went through a plethora of pills, none of which seemed to be working.
The result of the constant increase in medication over the months currently has me taking three antidepressants simultaneously to cover the various chemicals in the brain that could be causing a problem.
One of these was at the maximum prescribable dose, The other two were at doses even higher, which the doctor needed to obtain permission from the National Medical Authority before prescribing.
I was also on a mood-stabilizing agent and a thyroid supplement to try and kick me out of my depressed state.
The combination of all of these resulted in a decreased frequency of nightmares, which allowed me to get some type of sleep and practically eliminated the fear I had associated with falling asleep.
My waking time, however, was not improved, except by the fact that I was now able to sleep every night, even though the hours could only be counted on one hand.
I think he means the fingers on one hand.
The psychiatrist was frustrated by the fact that he hadn't been able to help me, and suggested the next step should be ECT. This is electroconvulsive therapy, which he had a lot of faith in, but always tried medication first because of the fear and public stigma associated to shock therapy.
I spoke about this with my dad, and he obviously had some concern, mainly because he did not know anything about it.
He took a few days off work, which was on the other side of the country, and flew over to accompany me for a visit with a psychiatrist.
An explanation of how a biological type depression works, as there was no precipitating event that led to the depression, was given to my dad, and he was filled in about the details of my treatment thus far, was taught about ECT in the modern day, and also about the various percentage chances of the different types of treatment working.
Which was something like 65% for medication and 80% for ECT. That did provide some hope.
The psychiatrist also gave him an insight into what depression is and what it is like to live with.
I think my dad realized that it was a lot more serious than he had assumed, and when he dropped me off at home, his eyes welled up with tears.
As I mentioned before, my dad is...
An old-school stereotypical male, and this was the most distressed I had ever seen him by orders of magnitude.
I felt tremendous guilt over this as it had added another weight around my dad's neck on top of the personal and work-related stresses he was going through.
We decided to give the newly maximized doses of medication six to eight weeks to kick in and then revisit the ECT issue if the medications alone weren't successful.
Times were still tough.
I had real anxiety problems with doing almost anything.
Going outside the house was very difficult.
Once, when I was out while shopping, I experienced a full-fledged panic attack, which was the first I'd had in public.
I was totally frozen and was disoriented by my surroundings, which was quite scary.
After a relative eternity, my body calmed down, enough for me to move and to get right out of there.
Since then, I have only gone out to a much smaller store for food, and always at times when there are not many people there.
This weekly ritual is something that I have become reasonably used to, although I still experienced an increased heart rate, shaking, sweating, etc.
when going there. I started having some nightmares again.
Fortunately, many of these were repeats of previous nightmares, and when I have a dream repeat itself, my conscious mind often kicks into gear and allows me to manipulate or end the experience by waking up.
I was usually totally conscious in my regular dreams when I used to have them, but I have very recently learned that apparently that is not normal.
One of the factors that made nightmares so scary...
Apart, obviously, from the content was the fact that I was unconscious and thus had no ability to know that it was just a dream and no ability to manipulate the situation or wake up.
Although that is apparently the normal dream state, I still find that hard to believe.
What do you think? For me, it is unusual and quite distressing.
I've only had, just sort of by the by, I've only had that particular situation where I was able to have some control over dreams and have extraordinarily vivid dreams.
Astoundingly vivid dreams when I was going through an extremity of psychological distress.
So I think that it is the result of an extremity of distress.
One night, not so long ago, was the most terrifying experience of my life.
Instead of having just a single nightmare, I had a series of them.
I can distinctly remember at least six individual ones.
They were all back to back, and the experience seemed to last for hours upon hours.
As in my previous nightmares, they were extremely violent and ended with me being either hurt very badly or almost dying.
There were two nightmares that had different characteristics to the ones I'd had in the past.
One involved me dishing out the violence instead of receiving it, and I was brutally stabbing someone.
I'm hazy on the specifics now, but I remember there was some need for me to do it, and instead of having the pain manifesting itself as physical pain in the dream world, it was psychological pain.
Basically, it was what would go through my mind if for some reason I had to stab someone in real life.
That torment of having to make the decisions was an all-new type of experience.
And something that haunts me to this day from that dream is the pressure I felt against the knife when I was stabbing this person.
I had to push really hard and quite brutally to have the knife pierce his body deeply.
Anytime I think of this force I had to use to stab this person, I get shivers up my spine and my hairs stand on end.
The final dream I had ended slightly differently than usual also.
At its conclusion, I was badly beaten up and bleeding and going through my mind in the dream...
I was thinking about the unrelenting torment I had been through which seemed like hours and I just wished I would die so the pain would end.
Slowly I was drifting away in agony but feeling the freedom on death approaching.
After some time I peacefully took my last breath and I drowned in an overwhelming feeling of peace and relief.
It was beautiful. I was positively floating The only thing I can compare it to is that post-orgasmic headspace that is fleeting, where nothing else exists and you are filled with absolute peace.
This felt like a million of those happening all at once.
That was one of those experiences that seemed to last both a lifetime and only a fraction of a second.
I woke up. Instantly I became aware that it was just a dream.
And that I wasn't dead, I was actually alive.
That instant was the most harrowing and terrifying experience of my life.
It is like absolutely nothing else that I have been through.
I can't seem to find the words to express that feeling.
I could not take it all.
I could not take it at all.
It consumed me completely.
I wanted to get up, pick up a knife, and drive it into my heart.
I tried to move, but I was totally and utterly paralyzed.
I couldn't draw breath, and I couldn't feel my heart beating.
If my body responded to my commands, I would not be typing this today.
Eventually I was able to draw breath, although it felt like I had a huge weight on my chest.
I was curled up in a semi-conscious state, trying to breathe, shaking quite violently and lying in a pool of hot sweat, which I later discovered was so voluminous that it had actually soaked into my pillow and mattress, that we're both looking as if I had poured buckets of water over them.
I passed out again, and thankfully it ended there.
The next day, after I'd pulled myself together as best I could, my mind turned again to the subject of suicide.
I think my mind had taken such a battering that it was only partially working.
I was completely devoid of emotion.
I worked out a suicide plan based entirely on logic and wrote it down.
What I had gone through was not something I feel I could have gone through again.
The entire time through my depression I would be thinking, trying to figure out what the hell was wrong with me?
I got absolutely nowhere and after all these months I figured it was totally impossible.
I decided that I would give the remaining treatment options I had available, a chance to work.
Three courses of ECT and six months of therapy.
I decided then that if I had not had substantial improvement when these two paths had been walked, it would be time to end it.
I created a list of things I would have to do in the last month to get my affairs in order.
And I wrote letters, as in suicide notes, to a number of people, sealed them and stored them away, knowing that when the time came I would be fully prepared.
I felt emotionless through the entire process.
I knew that I could not get through a lifetime of this and that there was no real purpose to life left for me.
I could not even conceive of having children anymore.
Passing on genes that may contain a trace of a predisposition to this illness to another person would be utterly cruel.
There was no way I would subject anyone else to even the possibility of a similar experience.
A few months ago, a relative great uncle became aware of my situation.
I have always thought of him as the best human being I know.
His compassion, generosity, love and empathy make the general population seem like savages in comparison.
His job involves him jet-setting around Australia, Asia and the Middle East so often that he probably spends more time in planes than pilots.
Despite this and him living about an hour's drive away, he has come up to see me most weeks, the only exceptions being when he is out of the country.
This was difficult for me.
There was a lot of anxiety surrounding it, but over time, I became a bit more comfortable around him, and it has given me someone to talk to a bit about my situation.
About a month ago...
Sorry...
About a month ago he suggested I visit a psychologist.
This was a bit off-putting to me as my ignorance allowed me to believe that psychology, you know, talking about stuff and all that, was a load of equine excrement, to put it politely.
That belief, with the opinion I didn't really have anything to talk about, as there was no specific event that initiated my state, had me skeptical.
Over the next week I pondered the prospect a bit and decided to try it.
I was almost certain that I was not going to see any benefits, but by this stage I was willing to give absolutely anything a try.
During the first session I discovered that the therapist was quite intelligent in the way of thinking that I respect, namely logic and rationale, so it gave me some confidence in him.
He also had a master's and PhD in psychology and seemed to be proficient in a large variety of techniques.
If he weren't like that, I certainly would not have gone back.
The psychologist diagnosed me independently and then compared it with the diagnosis my psychiatrist had come up with.
Both doctors' diagnoses were identical, quote, major depressive disorder, biological in nature, with the probability of underlying issues.
Both doctors also independently came to the conclusion that it would be an exercise in futility to try and treat and underlying issues that may be exacerbating the condition.
Try and treat the underlying issues that may be exacerbating the condition because the severity of the day-to-day symptoms would prevent any type of progress or improvement unless those were significantly lessened first.
I guess they needed morphine for the pain before they could teach pain management, if that makes sense as an analogy.
The fact that a professional from each discipline, both of whom I had an intellectual respect for, came up with identical diagnoses and conclusions was extremely reassuring to me.
The therapist was also frank with me and said that he might be able to help me, he might not, and if it seemed no progress was being made, it would be wasting both of our times to continue.
This honesty also helped me trust him, as I had a preconceived notion of therapy as an endless process of weekly sessions of talking that had no definitive end.
That's not the case, by the way.
The therapist, as you understand, the therapist decided that trying to treat the symptoms of my anxiety would be a good place to start.
In an attempt to break the self-reinforcing cycle.
The first two sessions were focusing on breathing exercises and relaxation techniques, which did provide some relief when I was starting to get overwhelmed while at home.
It was a good first step. The next two sessions were based on hypnotherapy, again trying to work on the anxiety.
I was completely unable to let my conscious mind drift away while opening up my subconscious, just like my usual dream state, and thus this technique did nothing for me.
I've never tried it on hypnotherapy, I don't know.
We decided to try another direction.
I would set homework designed to find my boundaries, and then try to push them a bit more each week.
The tasks included things that will sound utterly pathetic to someone of good mental health.
There were things like taking a 15-minute walk in the evening a few times a week, going to a cafe for lunch, going to see a movie, etc.
I have been able to do some things so far, but others...
Four weeks of this takes us up to the beginning of this week.
Just for those who don't know this particular course of treatment, if you have panic attacks in social situations, the self-reinforcing cycle that he's talking about is, you know, if every time you leave your apartment you have a panic attack, then you associate, I mean, it becomes self-reinforcing, then you become afraid of leaving your apartment in anticipation of the panic attacks, right?
So you have to try and break that cycle, which is what the breathing exercise and so on is supposed to do.
Whenever my mind seems to be operating properly, he continues, I take the opportunity to engage it in something.
This serves two purposes.
It allows me to reach out and touch the pleasure of the past, and it also distracts my conscious mind from the depression.
The effect of depression on my mind when not in specific thoughts is terribly difficult for me to explain.
There is a constant dull pain, like you would experience from a really bad bruise, perhaps.
Something that is always there, always lingering, but taking on an intangible form in your mind.
Its constant presence has a huge effect over months and months.
If you pick up a brick, it will be quite comfortable holding it up at first, but over the course of an hour, the ache in your arm will have built up to be quite painful.
This kind of accumulation is what was happening mentally for me.
That's a great way of putting it.
Earlier this week, I had such a moment of clarity and so decided to have a look on the internet for some philosophy-related websites.
It wasn't exactly what I was looking for, but something that causes me great despair and has for a long time is the state of the world.
In particular, the education system that is taking in children.
And spitting out mindless zombies.
The media that seems to not want to lose any viewers and therefore caters to the least intelligent person in the country.
Irrational and stupid government policies and social movements, feminism in particular, and the population's inability to see what is plainly obvious to me.
And even worse, the fact that even if they could understand these problems, nobody seems to care.
Society is slowly consuming itself.
It seems... Like human evolution is not something that continually improves, but is instead parabolic in nature, and the peak has already been passed.
Any attempt over the years to discuss this with anyone has been absolutely fruitless.
I was starting to believe that perhaps there was something wrong with me.
It seemed more likely than the alternative, which is that there is something wrong with everyone else.
Yeah, I know that one. Free Domain Radio looked fairly interesting, judging by the list of topics.
So, I downloaded a podcast.
I believe the first one was about feminism.
Just a few minutes into it, I had a totally uncanny experience.
It was as if someone had taken my thoughts and articulated them back to me in the voice of Kelsey Grammer, as Dr.
Fraser Crane. I kid you not, I started downloading more and more podcasts on the topics that I myself have pondered, I was totally amazed.
The lines of thought were practically identical, although expanded in breadth and depth in some cases due to the obvious differences in experience.
Podcasts on issues that I had not before considered opened up all sorts of new doors for me, a truly enlightening experience.
By chance, I had downloaded one of the Ask a Therapist podcasts, and I found it truly fascinating, as I really have no knowledge about psychology.
I proceeded to download the whole Ask a Therapist series.
And during the third one I was listening to, there was an issue that was extremely similar to something I had gone through as a child.
And the explanation for me was profound.
I had never even considered that issues from my past could have been messing with me so badly.
Sorry, let's find them...
Whenever something happened as a child that was not good, I simply rationalized it, considered it dealt with, and moved on.
That is, to some degree, the curse of intelligence.
He continues. Sorry, that was my comment.
All these things had built up inside of me, and the moment I heard the explanation for just one of those issues, it was like a key had been turned, and everything fell into place.
I think I learned more about myself in that moment of thought than I have in the sum of my entire life previous.
It was an intense experience.
I felt like I had been staring through my binoculars for years looking for answers, and Christina had come along and made just a tiny adjustment to the focus.
Suddenly the world that is my past was revealed.
Having found that there was at least one more person like me out in the world was amazing.
I've practically given up looking.
For the very first time in my life, I felt like I fit in somewhere.
Only a few hours later, when Christina gave me that tiny bit of insight that completely unlocked my past for me, I think it was the single most important moment of my life.
I used to wonder if I would ever get back to the life I had before this depression consumed me.
At that moment, I realized that the life I used to have was terrible, and that a much richer life was possible for me.
The more I listened, the more hopeful I became.
The relationship the two of you have is absolutely incredible.
Never have I seen two such brilliant people connect with each other on such a fundamental level.
I had perhaps the worst possible relationship role model as I was growing up between my parents.
I have observed relationships between others my own age.
That always seemed to be built upon a surface weaved of sex, convenience, money, and fear of loneliness.
I had no idea that something like what the two of you have was even possible.
Another amazing moment for me was when listening to the Good Wife podcast, Christina made comments about herself that were more honest than anything I've heard from anyone in my entire life.
It is amazing to have that kind of acceptance of yourself and a willingness to open yourself up.
To the world. Well, I agree, brother.
She is an amazing woman. Amazing, amazing woman.
Well, thank you, of course, for this wonderfully deep and rich letter.
Thank you for being so honest, and thank you, of course, for giving me the permission to read this out.
As a podcast, there is a lot in this communication And I'm going to just touch on it sort of very briefly to begin with, because I'm sure that most of it is self-evident to people who are here in this area of the podcast.
So, first and foremost, this is...
A reinforcement of something which I talk about quite consistently during this philosophical conversation, which is that this is not like learning Mandarin.
This is not like learning a foreign language.
Learning a foreign language, there's a moment that will occur when you're learning a foreign language, when you sort of learn to speak in that foreign language.
But that takes years of work.
I mean, I guess months if you're an innate polyglot, but it takes years of work for most of us.
But psychological enlightenment, awakening, authenticity, the breakthrough moment can occur within minutes.
This is why I say it's not like learning a foreign language.
It's digging up a treasure.
It's not learning how to make a treasure.
The treasure that is our self.
Right, so this gentleman talks about his moment that occurs within a few minutes of starting to listen to the content of this conversation.
And that is an amazing thing.
That our true self, like who we are deep down, is available to us in a moment's notice.
I mean, isn't it astounding how this true self aspect of our self retains its vibrancy?
And its immediateness and its contact with the world and can break through the defenses, the moment that it hears a true self voice on the other side of the wall of the false self.
Sorry if you're just listening to this and don't know what I'm talking about, you can go back and listen to some earlier podcasts.
On this, I think they're tagged under psychology.
But it's amazing just how accessible these aspects of our self are, right?
This authenticity is This guy starts listening to a podcast, and within a few minutes, and it probably happened relatively quickly after I got past the drivel and jokiness of the introductions, which is entirely designed to lull the false self.
Oh, I'm revealing my method.
Anyway, the tangents are the shiny things to distract the false self.
But he connects, right?
He connects. And he accidentally listens to an Oscar therapist and has an illumination.
That connects his past to his present within minutes, perhaps within seconds.
One comment, right? There's no single comment that will give you a full knowledge of German, right?
You can't listen to a show in German and learn German.
But you can listen to a show in In psychology and make the connection within a few minutes, that's an amazing capacity.
I think we all have it.
I think that this gentleman's obvious intelligence and language skills certainly help him to make it more quickly, but we all have this capacity.
Everyone we talk to is experiencing the same thing, which is why they fight us so hard.
So, that's sort of the one thing that I think is important to get out of this situation.
The other, of course, as I mentioned at the beginning, is that this gentleman obviously had parents who had a totally wretched marriage and were the worst possible role model for his sense of relatedness, right?
Of course, what he did was he projected this all onto the world, right?
His interstate, his parents' marriage, and so on.
Now, of course, the world is in the kind of mess that he talks about, but worrying about the world when you yourself are a mess is a way of distracting yourself from yourself, right?
And trying to sort of normalize your own messiness by looking at the world, or trying to achieve a false sense of superiority based on comparing yourself to a world, or, last but not least, blaming the world.
Before you're a mess-up-it-ness, right?
So, we have to fix ourselves, right?
Physician, heal thyself first, right?
Before we go out and try to heal others.
So, worrying about the world when you yourself are a mess is a distraction and will not help you.
And will not help the world, of course.
So, that is not a very unusual kind of defense.
The problem with strong language skills and with high intelligence is the capacity to rationalize is very strong.
Because you can come up with good theories and subtle self-deceptions and you can ensnare yourself through language in a way that's just not nearly as possible to people who are less sophisticated, less linguistic, more primitive in a way.
So, language is a strength and a weakness at the same time.
So, anyway, just sort of be careful about that, right?
And of course, it's those people who have those kinds of language skills who are the most needed at this particular phase in this conversation and in philosophy.
But of course, it's those who are taught to rationalize early on, right?
By friends, family, educators, and so on.
So, they are effectively...
Most often effectively inoculated from the kind of change that is needed in the world.
Now, as I mentioned, the fact that this man had a psychological collapse after he had achieved a state of security, certainly to my mind, is congruent with my experience and the experience of other people that I've talked to who've gone through this kind of thing.
It's not scientific, but...
It's something I think that's worth sort of noting, that after I had made some real money and no longer needed to work, at least in the moment, for a living, I had the same situation.
After I had achieved security and made enough money that I could spend the next couple of years writing, which is what I did, and now I need the money again.
Remember that for donations!
After that situation, I went through the same thing.
Couldn't sleep. Went through the most amazing dreams.
I ended up spending a year and a half or almost two years in therapy, three hours a week.
And spent another 10 to 15 hours a week keeping a journal and having conversations and so on, right?
So it became like the job and a half.
And someday I can publish that journal.
Someday. But when we achieve security, this is when we fall apart.
Because we can safely do it, right?
It's when the adrenaline leaves our system and we no longer exist in a state of either crisis or achievement, high achievement.
So that's not highly unlikely.
This is, of course, why a lot of people do keep themselves in a state of stress because they know what happens if they don't, unconsciously.
They know the disasters that await them on the other side of that stress or the alleviation of that stress.
It's why people get so heavily into debt.
It's why they have difficult relationships.
It's why they fight with their kids. It's why they have unhappy jobs.
They keep themselves in a perpetual state of stress so they never end up falling apart.
The army is based on this, right?
Keep you in stress one way or another, as are a lot of even private sector organizations.
So, I think that's important to understand, that when we achieve security, it comes at a great change that comes from it, but the process is not the most gentle.
Another aspect that I'd like to sort of mention here is...
Is, look, I mean, I'm not accredited, as you know, right?
I mean, I've taken some psych courses, I've gone to therapy, I've applied these principles to my own life, so I have experiential and some theoretical, actually a good deal of theoretical understanding of them, but I'm no brain chemist, I'm no doctor, I'm no psychiatrist, I ain't no doctor with degree.
So, you know, you can take this with all of the caveats in the world, and there's, of course, when it comes to medical issues, you talk to a doctor and so on, but...
Having said that, I will say this, that this poor young man was enmeshed in the health industry for, it sounds like, a year to 18 months before, by chance, a podcast on the internet managed to awaken him to the connection of the childhood to the present world.
Really, that's quite horrifying when you think about it.
That he went to see a doctor, the doctor sent him to a psychiatrist, then he went to a psychologist, he talked with his family, he read books, he went to the internet, he did this, he did that, he did the other, right?
And through this entire process of professional, familial, and self-guided help, aid, No one made that connection for him.
And it wasn't that hard to make.
It wasn't that hard to make.
I mean, this guy, he was so ready to make that connection.
What are we talking about?
We're talking about a moment in a podcast.
He makes that connection. So having a debate on the board where psychiatrists generally prescribe.
They don't do therapy. Well, this is exactly what I'm talking about.
Right here we have a psychiatrist who prescribes pills.
And the pills don't do a damn bit of good.
And this guy is suicidal.
Well, he's damn close to taking his own life.
Taking this enormous gift that he has for language, for intelligence, for empathy, for understanding, for introspection.
Taking this incredible gift with him into the sleepy land of the dirt nap.
The eternal dirt nap.
And they're just pumping him full of drugs.
Nobody's talking to him. Nobody's helping him make the connection between his history and his present.
Anybody could understand him.
Of course, how long did it take to understand that he had had a really bad family situation growing up?
That he'd had the worst possible, as he puts it, the worst possible template.
Anybody who asks him where he's living knows that he's living with his mother who is not living from his father, so there was a divorce in his childhood.
All of these kinds of things are not hard.
This is not a complicated diagnosis to say that there are things in your past that are having an effect on your happiness in the present.
And, of course, we know that if you had the worst possible template for relationships...
Boy, how to put this delicately.
There's no way to do it. When you have really a bad divorce or a bad marriage, then what you're being taught about is not how to relate to others badly.
You're being taught about how to relate to yourself badly.
Relating to others poorly always results from us relating to ourselves badly.
And when I say relating to others poorly, I don't mean getting mad at them, right?
But I mean maintaining the happiness in your relationships, whether that's getting rid of people or embracing people or whatever.
When we relate to others badly, counterproductively, in a way that makes us unhappy or escalates problems in relationships, when we enmesh, when we When we merge, when we go through fusion, when we go through escalation of anger, temper, dissatisfaction, when we experience manipulation, or when we manipulate others, the way that we treat others is just an effect of the way that we treat ourselves.
That's what's so funny and sad, but funny in a way, when people say, I can have a better relationship by fixing my partner.
No. No.
The first person that you have to relate well to is yourself.
The first person you have to start manipulating and listen to is yourself.
The first person that you have to have a peaceful and positive and happy and self-accepting relationship with is yourself.
We can't treat anyone better than we treat ourselves.
We can't. So, this guy sort of openly admits, and good for him, and says, my parents had the most possible template for relationships in the form of my parents, and that's true, but... The danger that occurred in this situation was the relationships that your parents taught you how to have with yourself, individually.
And that, of course, continues past the divorce, right?
Because it's still the same damn people.
So, no one ever made this basic connection.
This guy goes to see a psychiatrist, goes to see a psychologist.
Now, I'm not going to fault a psychologist, right?
Because, I mean, the psychologist is doing some...
ER work, right? Some emergency work with this guy saying, if he can't leave his place, we've got to start with breathing.
That's great. But really, was it so hard for his doctor, for his psychiatrist, for his psychologist, for anyone of the many people that he talked to, let alone his parents, was it so hard for someone to say, well, it's about your childhood, right?
And there are some clues here, right?
Even in this gentleman's email to Christina and myself, there are some clues here as to what's going on with his familial relationships.
One of them is where he says that my father was in tears when we left the psychiatrist's office after the psychiatrist told my father about the nature of my depression.
My father was in tears.
And I felt very, very sad for my father.
Oh, my brother, go listen to the August 19th call-in show about being exploited by others.
You're the one going through the goddamn depression.
What the hell are you doing feeling sorry for your father?
Right? Do you see how fucked up that is, frankly?
How fucked up and exploitive that is, that you have to manage your father's feelings when you were diagnosed with the catastrophic depression?
Do you see how greedy and exploitive your father was in that moment?
And I can only speak of that moment, though I guarantee you that it will be more common than in that moment.
Do you see that if you are diagnosed with cancer, you should be the one receiving comfort.
You should not feel the need to comfort others.
Your father, with his silent goddamn tears, is total bullshit.
When you go with someone and they receive a terrible diagnosis and you understand that diagnosis, you should be there to goddamn well comfort them.
Not stand there silently weeping and have them rush to comfort you.
You know, this is why your parents' marriage broke up and this is why you ended up in the situation that you were in, right?
When you are suicidal and...
The only thing that keeps you going is the fear that it will hurt your father.
This is another example of how your father has exploited you and expected you to be there to comfort him throughout the course of your relationship with him.
So you can sort of mull that over.
And again, these are just my ideas, right?
I'm not guaranteeing that these are right.
This is just what I take rationally from the evidence of what it is that you're providing.
I generally have the belief, and again, listen to the show.
I think it's 847 or something, 848.
It's the Sunday call-in show, August 19, 2007.
I don't think you need much information to understand the true nature of people.
I totally got your dad the moment that he received this terrible diagnosis and you felt you had to comfort him.
I totally got your dad...
When you said we've never talked about anything of import, right?
That it's bullshit, fucked up, nonsense, empty, small talk the whole damn time that you've been together.
Well, of course, this is how you're taught how to relate to yourself.
Right? Because your father is not teaching you how you should relate to your father.
He's not teaching you how he should relate to you, how anybody should relate to anybody else.
What he's teaching you is how you should relate to yourself.
So if when you talk about things with your dad, anytime you come up with anything emotional, he shuts down and withdraws, what he's saying is that anytime you feel anything emotional, you should shut down and withdraw.
Right? He's teaching you how to relate to yourself, not how to relate to him or others or whatever, right?
So, of course, you're going to end up without being able to piece together these clues.
It is, in fact, specifically to avoid the revelation of these clues that your father teaches you to treat yourself the way you do.
When people have exploited us throughout our childhood and have used us and abused us in order to manage their own feelings, to repress their own feelings, control and destroy their own feelings...
When people have done that to us, of course they don't want us to make connections about how our past exploitation has resulted in our present depression.
Once you get, what is going on with your family, your mother and your father throughout your life?
Once you get that, oh well, we don't have to get into that now.
But there's going to be quite a change.
And your parents don't want you to get that.
They don't want you to piece this together, which is why they've always taught you to reject your feelings.
And to focus on outward success.
And to your eternal credit, my brother, your soul couldn't take it.
Oh, my great uncle, he jetsets around the world.
He spends more time in the air than pilots.
So what? So does George Bush.
Doesn't mean anything. That's just outward success.
Nobody ever helps you make the connection, right?
You're floating adrift. Exploited.
Abused. Pillaged.
Used for other people to justify their own existence.
And you're unemployed, you have to go on welfare, you're catastrophically depressed, you're suicidal, and your mother charges you rent?
I mean, capital W, capital T, capital F, five question marks.
Your mother charges you rent?
When you're falling off a cliff?
I mean, if you were dying of cancer, would your mother charge you rent?
Seriously? This is more dangerous than any cancer.
Anyway, it's just things that I'm not going to say that I have any problem understanding, but this is hard stuff for you to swallow.
swallow, I can perfectly and totally understand that.
I mean, really?
So, where people first jump to when you are going through this catastrophic problem, where people first jump to is not to understand your history, to not understand the premises that you learn, how your brain was programmed to deal with issues and problems and challenges.
That's not where anybody goes to to begin with.
Madness! But a very rational and productive madness.
I mean, it's like if you went to a doctor and you were 400 pounds heavy, and the doctor said, well, son, first thing we've got to do is open up your gut and staple your stomach.
Cut your stomach in half, right?
And nobody ever says, hey, what are you eating?
Hey, what's your body image?
Hey, how does food work for you psychologically?
If the first thing that is suggested, and in fact the only thing that is suggested, is physical alteration to your biochemistry or your flesh, if the first thing that is suggested is antidepressants, and look, I don't know, what the hell do I know about antidepressants, but I will say that antidepressants should never be used as the sole source.
I mean, unless it's a clearly biological phenomenon, like certain forms of, well, all forms of schizophrenia, which is biological.
And certain forms of manic depression.
I can't remember what it's called now, some other damn name.
But unless there's something specifically physical that's identifiable, then you start with the soul.
It's your soul that is sick.
It is your soul that is expiring in the face of exploitation and loneliness.
It is the fact that you don't have a rational and benevolent connection with reality, which cuts you off from others and from yourself.
The fact that you've been taught that emotions are to be crushed.
Well, the unconscious is Gandhi.
I talk about this in The God of Atheists, but the unconscious is Gandhi.
It will absolutely obey you, but it will get its vengeance.
So if you say to the unconscious, hey, thanks for all these emotional impulses, but I'm going to crush each and every one of them, the unconscious says, okay, no problem.
I'm just going to have to take away your will to live then, but you can absolutely completely crush the ecosystem of the unconscious.
You can reject and quash every instinctual feeling that you have.
You can turn off every damn light in the house, but guess what?
Then it becomes very, very dangerous.
So you were just taught to reject all of your impulses, to reject all of your feelings, to reject all of your emotions, to reject your deepest and most self-protective instincts.
But there's only ever one big switch.
It's on or it's off. You can't say, oh, well, I want to keep the happiness, but I want to get rid of the anger.
I want to keep the love, but I want to get rid of the self-hatred.
I want to keep the fear in certain situations, but I want to get rid of the insecurity in other situations.
It's just one big switch. It's one big switch.
On or off. On, you get the whole damn ecosystem of emotionality, which is almost always designed to help you.
Or, you switch it all off, in which case, guess what?
No fuel, no thruster.
How can we complain when we end up drifting deep into stellar space, far from all habitable planets?
The intellect is not the self.
The intellect is not the self.
Any more than pure emotionality is the self.
The self is an ecosystem. It is a complex ecosystem, just like the body.
There's no organ called the body.
The body is an ecosystem of organs, all relying upon each other, all working to help support the health of the whole.
And the mind is an ecosystem.
There is no such thing. There's no such organ as the mind.
There's the brain, which is analogous to the body, but the body is not an organ.
The body is an aggregation of organs, which are aggregations of cells.
The mind is an aggregation of different psychological energies and impulses.
We've got rationality. We've got instincts.
We've got emotions. We've got dreams.
And there's a whole ecosystem of states that goes on.
There's the conceptual reasoning.
There's the instinctual understanding.
All of these things. There's things which take us five years to learn.
There's things which, with the right information, is this person...
As noted, we can learn in an instant.
And it is everything together that makes us whole.
It is everything together that makes us whole.
You know, with the body, yeah, you can take out the appendix and still live, right?
You can get rid of self-loathing and still flourish, in fact, flourish even more.
But you can't just cut out the liver and live.
And you can't just cut out the instincts and be happy.
So you were taught to reject yourself.
You were taught to reject your instincts.
You were taught to reject your emotions.
you were taught to be there to serve the needs of others and that is horrible That is parasitical. That is vampiric.
And that is not something, parents, you know, we're not supposed to be there.
You might want to listen to the podcast, Your Children Do Not Love You.
I can't remember the number, you can search for it on the board.
I'm sorry, you can search for it on freedomainradio.com.
But, you know, your parents, you're not there to serve your parents as a kid.
All too often we're conscripted into this horrible duty, obligation, managing our parents, reinforcing their screwed up views of the world.
But you're not there to support your parents.
You're not. When you get the diagnosis, when your father hears the diagnosis, if you're crippling and life-threatening ailment, the fact that you feel sorry for your dad, anyway, I've already gone into that.
Listen, keep us posted. Keep us posted.
Keep exploring. Keep listening to the Ask a Therapist.
Read some Alice Miller books.
There are self-help workbooks that you can get into, self-esteem workbooks and so on.
Keep a journal. Write down your dreams.
Post your dreams on the board.
People will take a stab at helping you understand them, right?
Fight for your soul.
Fight for your future. And through doing so, fight to save the world.
Thank you so much for listening. I look forward to your donations.
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