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Aug. 21, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:09:15
849 Ask A Philosopher 1

I try to answer some questions...

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Dennis is a menace with his anyone for tennis and beseeching me to come and keep the score.
And Maud says, oh lord, I'm so terribly bored and I really can't stand it anymore.
I'm going out to dinner with a gorgeous singer to a little place I found right down the street.
Her name is Patricia.
She calls herself Delisha and the reason isn't very hard to see.
She says, God made her a sinner just to keep those fat men thinner as they tumble down in heaps before her feet.
They hang around in groups like battle-weary troops.
You can often see them queue right down the street.
Oh, except for that final note, it was a near-perfect rendition.
If you ever get a chance to listen to that song, it's a great deal of fun called Patricia the Stripper by Christopher.
Nothing like Lady in Red.
Very ragtimey. Anyway, I hope you're doing well.
This is the Savage and Corrupt Redirect podcast.
I do totally apologize, our fine listeners.
Have sent in questions to ask a therapist.
But Christina is otherwise disposed.
She has gone to Spain with a guy named Raul for research purposes.
I'm not sure what that means.
But I'm sure that it is something that will be helpful in some manner.
Maybe she'll come back knowing how to make a nice paella.
But she's expanding her practice and so on, so she's not particularly available.
And so I didn't want this all to just fester.
So I'm afraid, ask a therapist, sadly.
Ask a philosopher.
So, we will have a look at some questions, which I will do my best to answer.
I'll try and put myself in Christina's mindset without doing that usual self-grabbing that happens whenever I think of this particular kind of thing.
So, let us start...
With a question, which I'm sure is no particular shocker.
We might as well use this guy's name because he's posted this also on the board.
Nate has come up with some issues or challenges.
The question. Provoking emotion, he writes.
When the Chicago thing got cancelled, oh, just for those who don't know, there was a possibility, and it was only put forward as attempted, a possibility that we might be able to have a free domain radio seminar in Chicago, which would be actually this coming weekend, and there are some people swarming to Chicago to talk philosophy, which I think is wonderful, and if there weren't savage amounts of taxation on the Canadian, I would fly down anyway, but even leaving from Buffalo for Christina and I would be close to 800 bucks, and it would be over 1,000 for us.
From Toronto, so sorry, just wouldn't be able to do it, because it'd be one day in Chicago.
But I sort of had a threshold of people I needed to get on board, 15 people, 200 bucks a head, and we only got to 10, and so I had to not...
It was never sort of proposed and then cancelled.
It was a possibility that might go ahead if we had a sufficient number of people.
So, he writes, when the Chicago thing got cancelled, I tried to cancel my trip and found the Continental would not...
Refund my money. I lost about 949 to a trip I'd otherwise not bother taking, at least not during August.
I have other places I'd rather spend my money.
As a result, I felt not only angry, but completely enraged.
When I tried talking to my fiancé, she showed a lot of sympathy and understanding, but for some reason that wasn't enough for me.
I knew from the point that I began to feel angry that I would have to deal with it somehow.
For some reason, I had and still have this overwhelming urge to take it out on anyone and everyone I know, including her.
I suppose what I'm trying to do is provoke it in everyone else so that I don't have to feel that as much, or so that I feel my anger is justified or something.
Why? Why am I doing that?
I tried meditation to deal with this, but I'm still very enraged at this point, and I really want to tell everyone about the injustice from Continental Airlines.
I've always loved to fly, but it seems that the state has taken that away from me by propping up bad airline companies and adding to their costs with their needless and violently coercive and oppressive war on terror.
I don't want to fly because not only is it unreasonably expensive, but I'd rather not deal with the state pigs in security.
I doubt that that has anything or perhaps anything to do with it, though.
I just want to express my anger in the most violent of ways.
But that would be a bad thing, and I'd pay for it later.
I want everyone to be angry with me, but it seems that in order to...
Sorry, angry with me, I guess, at Continental.
But it seems that in order to do so, I have to take it out on them or bitch about it long enough until someone gets angry.
$949 is a lot of money to lose.
I could have bought something else with that, saved that money, or even donated some of it to FDR. Why is it that I always get screwed up like this when it comes to money?
I only booked when I did because it was getting more and more expensive with each day that passed.
Once you had confirmed that the symposium was on or off, it would be too late and too expensive to go.
So I figured, hell, I'll just cancel if it's not.
Yet in the fine print somewhere on the vague website, I'm sure, it says I can't get any refunds for the plane tickets.
I suppose I was screwed no matter what.
It was an impossible situation.
Either I would have missed out on meeting everyone or I would have lost...
$949. I'm extremely angry, and I don't know what to do with that anger at all.
Well, first of all, I am of course sorry that you lost the money based on a trip that had something to do with Free Domain Radio, for sure.
But we've been in this conversation long enough that I'm sure I can be somewhat blunt with you, my pal, so I hope that you won't mind too much.
First of all, you were gambling.
Because let's say that the last-minute flight would have cost $1,500, and you wanted to get the flight for $949.
Now, if you waited until you knew whether the Chicago trip was confirmed or not confirmed...
Then it would have cost you $1,500.
So you were trying to save, I guess, $551 or something like that.
Whatever it would be. Maybe it's $1,000.
Who knows? You were trying to save $550 by spending $949.
So this is a form of gambling.
There's nothing wrong with it. We make these kinds of cost-benefit analyses all the time in life.
But there are things that you can do to lower the odds of your gambling costs.
I mean, if I go to a Las Vegas casino and I start betting on Baccarat, which I know nothing about, the odds of me doing anything intelligent, or if I start playing 21 while having no idea what a pack of cards is, then I'm not going to do very well, right?
So knowing the parameters of what you're gambling is essential.
So you say that this is sort of an impossible situation.
I'm not sure that it is an impossible situation, right?
Because you could, of course, not go.
You could have gone last minute, and that would have been another kind of gamble.
Sort of last minute cancellation tickets and so on.
You can often get those very cheap a day or two before the actual date.
You could have taken a day off work and driven.
I mean, I don't know how far away you live, but even if it's a 12-hour drive or a 16-hour drive, you could have done that.
There's other things. There's ways that you could have bypassed this particular thing.
Or you could have just said, no, I'm not going to go.
Now, as far as managing the risk goes, and the reason that I'm pointing this out is not because I don't think you can assess these risks intelligently.
I'm absolutely positive that you can, but this is just a possible way of understanding or explaining the situation, the resulting rage.
First of all, whether you're a frequent flyer or not, if you're a frequent flyer, then you should know that refunds are not simple when it comes to airline tickets.
There's a reason that the price is reduced when they sell them to you ahead of time.
Because if they could just give you a refund, then no one would ever book tickets later.
Just think about it logically.
If booking three weeks in advance and then you could cancel up to a day before the flight leaves, nobody would ever book late.
They just book ahead of time whether they knew they wanted to go or not.
But airlines need to penalize those who go later because it's harder for them to plan for flights if they don't have advance notice of fuel and baggage handling and all that kind of stuff.
So an airline, if you were running the airline, you wouldn't offer refunds.
This is not a legislated thing.
This is just a common sense thing.
By common sense, I don't mean that you're not smart enough to figure it out.
I'll get to that a little bit later.
But if you were running Continental, the airline, you would not offer refunds either.
Because whether a plane is going to fly or not is very essential.
You have to figure out how many people are going to be on it.
Flights get cancelled all the time if there aren't enough people on the flight.
And people get bumped, right?
So you have to know ahead of time whether the flight is...
You can't sort of say, okay, well, maybe people will book three days before.
And you can't tell that.
And if a plane flies and loses a lot of money, especially given the price of gas these days, that's pretty catastrophic for an airline.
So they can't offer refunds.
They just can't. It's like if you rent a car, you don't get to cancel two days beforehand because they've already not rented it to everyone else, right?
So they're not going to let you do that.
Oh, the same thing is true if you book conferences or whatever, right?
Anyway, so that's sort of one thing.
So you could have managed the risk with the simple expedient of not booking through the web, which I assume you did, or something like that, but simply phoning Continental and saying, here's my situation.
I want to get to Chicago for this particular weekend in August, but I don't know for sure whether I'm going or not.
What's the best way for me to do that?
I mean, that's a simple phone call, and the person at the other end will absolutely step you through everything.
Because you talk about stuff being buried in the fine print, but you didn't choose to phone someone and talk to them about the situation and have them step you through.
You didn't ask for help.
You just sort of plowed ahead and did it, knowing that you were gambling, knowing that there was a risk.
I don't remember getting an email from you, though, asking what the odds were.
Of the trip going on or not, right?
If you Skyped me or IM'd me or emailed me or posted a question on the board and maybe I missed it, but if I did, then of course you could just contact me directly.
I'm not hard to get a hold of saying, you know, how many people have signed up, what are the odds, and so on, right?
And then I would have obviously said, well, make sure you get a refundable ticket because, right, whatever, whatever, right?
Now, I'm not sure if you phoned Continental and said, look, I've just made a mistake.
What can we do about it?
Because it's possible that, and sometimes there's a small fee for this, maybe not that small, like $150, where they convert your ticket into a voucher that you can use for any other trip that you want.
Now, it doesn't get you a whole $950 back, but it at least gets about $800 of it back, which is certainly better than where you are.
I'm not sure if you talked about it with your fiancé before making this decision.
But this is the kind of thing that you should talk about with your fiancé before making this decision.
She's your fiancé. She's going to be your wife.
So you don't want to make a $1,000 decision about booking tickets without talking with her first.
It's very, very important in a relationship that you start to lean on each other.
And what I mean by that is use your wife's brain for everything except philosophy because that will work out beautifully for you.
Trust me. Women are genius this way, right?
So you sit down with your fiancé and you say, well, I want to spend this $950.
I don't know if this thing's going to go on.
The first thing she's going to say, because women are just geniuses at this, is, well, is the ticket refundable?
The other thing, too, is you can buy cancellation insurance.
And maybe you decided not to buy that or whatever, right?
But again, these are all decisions that you made that put the $950 at risk.
And these are all things that are easy to bypass, right?
Does it take a lot of time to get somebody on the telephone rather than work through a web?
No, not really. It doesn't really take any more time to do that.
So, I have no doubt whatsoever that you are absolutely a million times more intelligent than anybody would need to be to figure this kind of stuff out, right?
So the question is, what is going on?
Why would you make this choice to put this money at risk and then end up feeling screwed, right?
Now, this is leaning on conversations that we've had over the last year, year and a half, but you have a predilection for feeling screwed.
Frankly, I mean, you have a story called, Nate gets screwed in life, right?
So it's the government, or it's the various drug laws, or it's the pigs at security, and you get screwed.
And this has happened a number of different times, in work, in your family, and so on.
So you have a core belief called, I'm going to get screwed.
The world is a hostile, exploitive, dangerous, destructive place, and no matter what I try, I'm going to get fucked.
Right? So, what happens is, because you have...
Again, this is my theory, right?
So, I don't know what Christina would say, but this is sort of my theory, and take it for what it's worth.
You have a core belief called, the world screws me.
And normally, of course, if you have a core belief, and you're conscious of it, right?
If you have a core belief called, I get screwed...
And you're conscious of it.
What you say is, okay, if I accept or believe that I get screwed, then I'm going to be triple, quadruple, quintuple careful about interactions that I do that I could be at risk for, right?
Particularly things like $1,000 worth of airline tickets.
You're going to say, well, the airline industry is going to screw me, so I better read the fine print.
I better call them up. I better get stuff in writing.
I better figure it out, right?
If you were conscious of this belief, then you would recognize that belief, right?
And you would say, okay, I'm going to be really careful.
Like if you had a core belief which says, I'm going to die of diabetes, right?
Then you'd say, okay, well, I better not.
Eat sweets, right? And then that would defeat the core belief, right?
So you need to sort of raise this titanic of this core belief, right?
And to recognize that, you know, based on your history and so on, you have this core belief that you're going to get screwed.
And of course, prior to your current, I mean, it happened in your relationships as well.
So because you have this core belief that you're going to get screwed, but it's unconscious, what happens is that you act in ways to confirm that core belief, right?
If you believe that the world is dangerous and is going to screw you, not being careful.
Indicates that the actions that you take are taken to reinforce this core belief that you're going to get screwed.
So you act carelessly, you don't phone people up, you don't check the fine print, you don't hedge your bets, you don't take cancellation insurance, you don't call me to find out what the likelihood is of the symposium going through.
So you basically set yourself up to get screwed.
Because that's your core belief about how the world is going to treat you.
As far as curing or healing, the first thing you have to do is understand that you are drawn to this kind of masochistic behavior.
This doesn't mean you're a masochist or anything like that.
You're just drawn towards this, the confirmation of this.
It gives you a kind of dark satisfaction to get screwed because it confirms that core belief that you are a good and helpless person, that the dark forces of the universe are going to trip and stumble and poke in the eye and make everything go wrong at every opportunity.
So the first thing you need to do is you need to examine where in your life this core belief called, I'm a victim who gets screwed, is showing up.
And I have all the sympathy in the world for how this belief came around, right?
Because, I mean, knowing a little bit, well, not more than a little bit about your family history.
I mean, you were. You were totally screwed and bludgeoned and beaten up and messed up and controlled and exploited and brutalized and abused and all this.
So you totally were, right?
But this, of course, is around breaking, right?
This is about making a new future, free of the tyranny of the past.
And so what you want to do is absorb the lessons of the past, accept the lessons of the past, and understand that you have this core belief called I'm helpless and I'm going to get screwed, so that you can begin to change your behavior, so that this stops happening to you.
So what you're addicted to is being exploited.
So in a sense, you're exploiting yourself in order to maintain this core belief that was inflicted upon you as a child.
So I think it's absolutely essential that you start looking at this as self-victimization in the present.
Because, of course, if it's not self-victimization, this is the paradox of psychology, right?
It's very painful to accept responsibility for what it is that we do to ourselves, but if we don't accept responsibility, right, if we say, oh, it's the government, it's the pig's insecurity, it's Continental Airlines, it's, you know, maybe Steph for, like, cancelling this symposium, if it's everyone else, you get a relief from self-recrimination, but unfortunately, you don't get to change your behavior, right?
Because it's everyone else.
I mean, if it rains out of a clear blue sky when we're at the beach, then there's nothing we could have done, right?
The forecast didn't say it or whatever, right?
Then there's nothing I can do to prevent that.
But the moment that you accept responsibility for the steps that you took to end up in this situation, which are very clear to everyone outside you, right?
Not because we're smarter, but just because we're not in the grip of this particular unconscious thing.
We're in the grip of other unconscious things that you can see much more clearly that we can't.
But this we can see. I mean, I'm sure everyone can see hearing this.
Like, what were you thinking? Kind of thing, right?
But of course, you weren't thinking.
You were setting yourself up so that you could reinforce this terrified and abused and frustrated and enraged situation that is all too familiar to you.
So you need to get that conscious.
You need to understand how you're doing it to yourself.
And there's ways of avoiding it.
And I know that feels like lifting a huge anvil underwater.
But it's absolutely essential you can do that so that you can avoid this kind of situation in the future.
So I hope that that helps. Let me know.
What you think, and we'll continue on with the next one.
Alright, on to the next one from a gentleman we shall call Bobette.
Dear Christina and Stefan, again, so sorry that it's just me.
As I certainly remember from when I was a bachelor, when it's just me, it's not nearly quite as much fun, no matter how much baby oil you have.
Dear Christine and Steph, my family is like a train wreck.
It has been completely out of control for several years and finally came off the rails completely last winter.
I have a hard time remembering my early childhood, probably due to, quote, dissociation.
I remember being resentful of my mother much of the time, but I'm not sure why exactly.
However, it was my father that was probably most damaging and the memories are more vivid.
He had...
And still has an outrageous temper and can fly into a rage over the most minor transgression.
Until I was self-supporting financially, he could be incredibly degrading.
His favorite question was, what the hell is wrong with you?
Which might be his response to a, quote, egregious error like spilling a few drops of juice onto the countertop while filling my glass.
My siblings and I would often wait in fear of him coming home because we never knew what would set him off.
Or what my mom would tell him about our behavior during the day.
I think that this has a lot to do with the prevailing sense of unworthiness that haunts me to this day.
What I resent more than the corporal punishment and fierce temper is the neglect.
My parents just didn't seem to take an active interest in their children's lives.
They would do perfunctory things like drive my sister to ballet or take me to piano, but encouragement beyond that was unheard of.
Although they might show up for school concerts and whatnot, my dad especially was reluctant to do so, and obviously was attending only out of a sense of duty rather than a genuine interest.
Whenever they did express an interest, it came across as hollow.
We had almost too much freedom, or rather lack of supervision, when we were children.
So long as we were home for dinner at 6.30pm sharp, we could go anywhere and do anything we pleased, more or less, which often meant trouble.
In elementary school, I was generally ostracized by my peers and simply had little interest in what my peers were doing.
In the early grades, I was the victim of violence, but soon learned to become, quote, invisible in the crowd.
I liked drawing, Beethoven, British mystery novels, and I had an obsessive interest in The Phantom of the Opera and Sherlock Holmes, my introduction to logic, for several years.
Part of the problem was that for the first 11 years of my life, our family moved 13 times, so I was forever, quote, the new kid and always felt like an outsider.
To what extent this was self-imposed, I'm not sure.
I'm not sure exactly whether the self-imposed is the moving, but I think felt like an outsider.
Okay, I think it's talking about himself.
Despite being the oldest of a large family, two younger brothers and two younger sisters, I have never felt comfortable around people until I got to know them well.
I think I could relate to the phantom because he too was an outsider, always looking on the real world and not participating.
Well, it could be the case, but I would imagine that your interest in the phantom was more to do with your father than to do with yourself.
When I hit puberty, things went from bad to worse.
At age 12, I started shoplifting.
Hey! That's about the same age I did as well.
I was quite good at it.
Probably stole a couple thousand dollars worth of retail without ever getting caught by the authorities.
At my worst, I broke into a law office and stole their VCRs.
The office was right next to the police station.
I remember I wasn't acting without thinking, but I was very explicitly challenging the conventional ethics like, stealing is wrong.
I would ask, why?
Why? I never got a convincing argument, and so I stole.
I was always hatching schemes to outsmart or con people, especially authority figures and institutions.
For instance, they sold milk and chocolate milk at our school by issuing tickets at the beginning of each month.
I bought the tickets one month, went to the local copy center, and made enough tickets for the entire school year.
Would, to build a treehouse, candy, clothing, CDs, bicycles, anything a twelve-year-old could want, I would steal and with little hesitation.
My parents eventually caught on and lectured me, and my younger brother to a lesser extent, but this only resulted in me being even more secretive.
In high school, and with my dad's assistance, I should add, I started making and selling pirated videotapes and software.
I started to take an interest in computers and wrote a little boot program that would install the key capture program and dump the keystroke log to the network drive.
I thereby had access to most teachers' accounts and helped myself to, quote, preview editions of the exams, which, needless to say, I stole.
The primary ethic I inherited from my dad was,"'Life is unfair, so cheat the system if you can!' Whether it was justified or not, I felt cheated by society, and theft and subterfuge were my means of revenge.
My grade A teacher particularly disliked me and used every opportunity she could to humiliate me.
I responded by stealing her keys from her desk and planned to come back later and steal whatever I could.
I smuggled the keys out of the classroom at recess.
When we returned to class, everyone was searched.
Our lockers were emptied out, and the prime suspects, including me, were interrogated several times.
I had the perfect alibi, though.
I swiped the keys as we were leaving the classroom and stuffed them into my pocket.
My best friend at the time was a highly religious kid, who the teachers trusted completely.
I spent the recess chatting with him on the outskirts of the schoolyard and was able to hide the keys behind a tree without him noticing.
So when they questioned him about me, he couldn't report anything suspicious.
Fortunately, this behavior ended shortly after I discovered computers.
Strangely, when I initially expressed interest in computers, my dad discouraged me and said that computers, innately, weren't for me.
I realized I was on a path to becoming a career criminal.
When I had this epiphany, my friend and I were trying to figure out how to set up a marijuana grill operation in an underground burrow we were planning to dig in a forested area next to a nearby abandoned auto shop where we could siphon electricity.
I realized how insane this was and put an end to my delinquent behavior at this point.
I gave away any stolen possessions I had.
I bought a computer with legitimately earned money.
I had a paper route from about age eight and up and focused my energies on that.
Shortly after, I discovered Ayn Rand and started to sincerely apply her ethics to my life, which definitely improved things.
However, I didn't take school too seriously and apart from being yelled at occasionally by my parents, wasn't encouraged to.
My dad attended university only briefly.
And perhaps unconsciously passed on the idea that higher education just wasn't for us.
So My dad, while I was on this nihilistic rampage, was obsessively dedicated to the stock market.
He had a fairly high-level job at a major bank.
He was a lender for huge multi-million dollar real estate projects.
But his real passion was the stock market and he quit his job to become a full-time day trader.
This lasted for two or three years, and by the end he just broke even.
He had no choice but to return to the workforce.
For a few years money was tight.
I believe my parents even briefly received welfare.
He finally got a job, but with his age, a recession, and a lack of formal qualifications, it meant a considerable step down in both pay and prestige.
He was working for guys much younger than himself for whom he had little respect.
The first time I tasted any real success was when in grade 12 I landed a co-op position in a large IT company that happened to have an office nearby.
I was writing code that they found useful and I had a great time doing it.
It was then I realized I wanted to make my career in the field.
I found a job at a local internet service provider and became the administrator after a short time.
In my final year of high school, I received a job offer from the company where I held the co-op position.
Overnight, I was making more money than my father and enjoying the work.
I invested everything I had into this job and did really well.
Meanwhile, my dad had a heart attack and narrowly survived.
Also, his time was running out at work.
He tried applying elsewhere and had little luck.
Inevitably, they let him go, and after spending a year or so looking for work, he gave up entirely.
My mother recovered from her nervous breakdown and started growing a successful bookkeeping business, She also went to college in the evening and got a formal certification for bookkeeping.
It seemed that as my dad was sliding down, my mom was finally making some progress in her life.
She now pays all the bills for the household.
Since losing his job, he has substituted his obsession with the stock market with some bizarre new age mystical stuff.
I don't know much about it, and I don't want to, except that it seems to boil down to an absolutely subjective view of reality.
My younger brother worked briefly with me, but he didn't survive a round of downsizing.
He certainly had the potential, but didn't put the same investment into the job that I did.
I was disappointed to see this because I had worked with him many times before while growing up, and he previously had a strong work ethic.
I also recommended him for the job, so my reputation was on the line, to an extent.
He quickly acquired thousands of dollars of debt and started smoking pot, something he had never done before.
He followed my dad into the same occult nonsense and was convinced that you could literally will reality to your liking, much like the spoon scene in the Matrix movie.
Or the secret, I guess.
His behavior became increasingly strange and reckless.
He inexplicably dumped a pretty sweet girlfriend whom he had chased after for years.
His first, as far as I know.
He trashed the car he bought and earned umpteen speeding tickets.
My youngest brother was a passenger while the older brother was speeding down the highway at 200 km per hour where he pulled the emergency brake to deliberately spin out.
After what was left of his car had been repoed by the bank, he stole my mom's car and crashed it, costing her thousands of dollars.
It wasn't covered by insurance since he was a member of the family.
Eventually my parents brought him into the hospital against his will and he was diagnosed with schizophrenia.
I was never quite sure if it truly was schizophrenia or the result of smoking huge quantities of marijuana, but in any case, at his worst, he was speaking gibberish and evidently delusional.
Well, marijuana has been figured as increasing the potential of psychotic episodes, but speaking gibberish and so on is not, as far as I know, is not the result of smoking marijuana.
Regardless of the cause, I lost a brother, and that was one of my closest childhood friends.
He hasn't been the same since, and I've hardly spoken to him for the past five years.
I have two sisters, as I mentioned before.
The youngest is remarkably sane, despite growing up in this crazy environment.
She just graduated a paralegal program and has a full-time job in a law office.
She plans to go to law school after working for a few years.
My other sister, on the other hand, the oldest of the two, is and always has been unstable.
She was even more destructive during her teenage years than I was, only she directed it mostly inwards.
She drank a lot and slept around from a young age.
When she was 13, she started seeing a married man in his 30s.
My mom asked me to intercept their communication on the internet, and I did so providing a log of their disturbing conversations that became the basis of a sexual interference case against the bastard.
It was shortly after this that my mom, who had returned to work...
Oops, sorry.
Who had returned to work as a teller, quit her job, and had some sort of nervous breakdown, which I believe is an outmoded term in psychology, but that's how my parents described it.
Towards the end of high school, my sister started to pull herself together and, to everyone's surprise, made it through a three-year graphics arts program.
However, since graduating two or three years ago, she has not held a regular job, and she still seems to have a new boyfriend every couple of weeks.
Up until recently, she was still living with my parents, but was kicked out after attempting to have my father charged with assault.
My dad was issued a, quote, caution, but was not charged.
Exactly what happened is unknown.
My sister is living with her boyfriend du jour somewhere in X-City.
My youngest brother is much like how Steph described a dissociated child in one of his podcasts.
Quote, My mom said to me recently that he just couldn't be raised with the same hands-off approach that the rest of us had.
No shit, I thought.
Last winter, I had to leave my car at my parents' house because I didn't have a parking space for a couple of weeks.
I thought I could trust my parents with that, but apparently not.
My dad drove the car without my permission to somewhere in the States to rendezvous with some woman he'd been having an affair with, which up until that point had been purely, quote, platonic.
He disappeared for a few days without telling anyone, and we were close to calling the police.
My poor sister, the sane one who was trapped there until she finished school, was in tears.
My mom apparently wasn't surprised and mentioned that it wasn't the first time.
My mom apparently wasn't surprised and mentioned that it wasn't the first time.
Sorry, my dad was unapologetic when he returned and said they should have an open, quote, open marriage.
I believe the woman he met is involved in the same occult crap and open relationships as one of its tenets.
My mom resolved to separate and said they were going to sell the house, an idea which I supported.
Oh right, so he abuses the kids for decades and he's fine to have as a husband, but then he goes and has an affair and suddenly he's no longer worthy having around.
Oh my god.
Sorry, let me continue without editing or without commenting.
My mom resolved to separate. We said they were going to sell the house on India, which I supported.
They still haven't, some seven months later.
I'm not sure where things stand now, since I haven't spoken to them much this year.
What a splendid Christmas that was!
The notion of my dad having an affair seems out of character, since he was somewhat repressed when it came to sex.
It wasn't until I was in my twenties that he acknowledged to me that he found a woman physically attractive.
I think we were watching a movie with Charlize Theron at the time.
When we were growing up, he ridiculed me and my brother if there was any talk about us having girlfriends.
I've only had two relationships and neither was terribly successful.
I carry a deep sense of guilt or unworthiness that I haven't been able to shake, and that women can no doubt see a mile away and stay clear.
The more attracted I am to a girl, the more anxious I become.
When I was working, I was a classic workaholic.
I literally devoted every waking hour to work and ignored that part of my life.
I've taken a similar approach here at the university, despite being surrounded by young, eligible women.
I think the bullying I received at home, as well as at school, when I was younger, has resulted in an inability to handle conflict well and a general distrust of people.
I tend to respond to aggression by submitting in the short term and getting my revenge later.
That's the theft stuff, which is also the shoplifting.
I tend to respond if I can get the revenge later and feel it's warranted.
I really despise this in me and want to change.
I also think my dad's unending criticisms have a lot to do with my pathological perfectionism.
I can't stand making a mistake, and so I often become paralyzed, leaving things incomplete.
About two years ago, I quit working and decided to make a go of university.
I owned a house and sold it at a nice profit, which is funding my education.
I have virtually every cent accounted for in a detailed budget.
I can keep going to school full-time for the next two years without having to worry about working, if everything goes according to plan.
Listening to FDR, especially the Ask a Therapist editions, have certainly hammered home the value of therapy.
I obviously have a lot to work through, but I'm not sure if I should use the money I have reserved for education for therapy or wait until I'm working again.
I really don't want to make a mess of my education the second time around.
I don't want to leave it incomplete, so I fear spending the money on anything else.
Prior to listening to these podcasts, I was highly skeptical of therapy and dismissed it as mostly a quack science.
I still have some reservations.
These core beliefs are so deeply ingrained, it's hard to imagine it being otherwise.
This summer, I have been feeling quite depressed, likely meeting the clinical definition, and haven't done nearly as well in school as I had during the first half of the program.
Maybe I do need to get these issues cleared first, if that's possible.
Since moving out a few years ago, I've hardly seen my family, only two to three times per year at most.
Taking it to the next step and defooing completely is something I've thought of often long before hearing the term.
Although FDR certainly alleviates much of the guilt I would have otherwise felt, I hear from them so rarely that in terms of my day-to-day living, it wouldn't make much difference if I were to officially defu.
I can't imagine my parents harassing me via email like so-and-so described during today's call and show.
They remain overwhelmingly disinterested in everything I do.
Nevertheless, and somewhat paradoxically, I feel trapped, like in being suffocated by my past.
After last winter, I no longer feel that they're fundamentally on my side, particularly my dad.
What exactly should I say to my dad after all this?
Simply goodbye or demand an apology?
It's sad thinking in terms of never seeing them again, but it's probably the right thing to do.
I don't feel the same degree of anger towards my mom as I do my dad, but she isn't innocent.
Thanks for reading this long, sad tale.
If you got this far, I didn't intend for it to be so long, but it just poured out once I started.
Well, thanks so much for sharing this obviously difficult and painful tale.
A strong sense that I get from processing what you've written is there's a certain lack of emotionality here, a certain disconnection from yourself and from what you have experienced that, of course, is manifesting itself.
You remember the fear and the frustration and so on when you were younger.
But there's not any particularly strong emotions that are occurring for you now.
It's not better or worse. It's just where you are.
But sometimes when people write this, there's some crying as they're writing it and so on.
So it's like you're sort of narrating a story rather than going through a particularly agonizing life history.
So that, of course, indicates a dissociation, which indicates or is probably one of the sources of your depression, right?
A lack of connection with your history and so on.
I'd also like to commend you enormously for pulling yourself out of this direction that you were heading in in terms of criminality.
criminality.
I mean, fantastic for you.
I mean, fantastic for you.
Not only did you manage to refrain from becoming a plague upon the innocent, right?
Not only did you manage to refrain from becoming a plague upon the innocent, right, because stealing from other people who've not done you wrong is merely recreating the abuse, which was, of course, what it was fundamentally about, right, a certain vengeance on society.
Because stealing from other people who've not done you wrong is merely recreating the abuse, which was, of course, what it was fundamentally about, right?
A certain vengeance on society.
You couldn't probably spend 18 bucks better than to buy a copy of my book and read it because this will really help you, I think, understand why it is that you went through this criminal period.
You couldn't probably spend 18 bucks better than to buy a copy of my book and read it, because this will really help you, I think, understand why it is that you went through this criminal period.
And I went through a criminal period at around the same age, and it really has to do with the hypocrisies of those who are ruling you, and the blindness of society, and the desire to strike out at entities, your parents and others, who claim that they care about children who claim that they care about children but do nothing to protect yourself.
So really, don't hesitate.
Go and buy a copy.
It's real cheap, and you can get through it in a day, and I think it would be enormously helpful.
I don't agree with your assessment that you have to choose between education and therapy, but I do think that it's important that You not complete your education and then go to therapy for two reasons.
One is that you're not going to do as well in school unless you start dealing with your issues because your depression and so on is going to affect your judgment, your thinking, your clarity, and it's going to affect your motivation, and so you're not going to be nearly as effective in school if you leave your depression untreated for the next couple of years.
So I don't think it's an all-or-nothing thing.
Depending on how all-consuming your therapy is going to be, and I suspect it's going to be quite a lot of work for you to reconnect.
It's going to be incredibly valuable and will help avert depression for the rest of your life.
But you're going to have to devote some resources to it.
The first thing that I would do is go and talk to a student union and ask if they have subsidized therapy sessions to start with.
That would be a good place to start.
If it turns out that you need to fund therapy yourself or there's some price or expense that you need to go through, then I would suggest, I mean, you have four months off in the summer to earn money for the next couple of years.
Don't take any summer courses.
Instead, earn money and pay for therapy through that.
If that's not possible, then I would absolutely go to school part-time and get a part-time job or just get a part-time job and continue to go to school full-time.
And you pay for therapy that way.
But the therapy is an essential part of what you're doing.
It also, of course, I mean, if you find it too all-consuming to continue your education with, there's no problem with taking the, what is it, eight months off if you take a school year off and continuing then after that and just getting the stuff dealt with.
This is more important than education.
Education about yourself is more important than education about a trade.
Because if you're educated about a trade, as you saw, your father had good experience as a high-level bank lender, which then completely cratered.
People say, well, I want to get educated, so I get a trade, and so on.
But if you don't deal with your emotional issues, your career will end up unraveling anyway, as you say, your dad.
It wasn't because he got old, and it wasn't because he took some time off to be a day trader.
It wasn't anything to do with that.
What happened was he became weird, and nobody wanted to hire him or continue to work with him.
So, you know, I would get out of the mythology that just things happened to your dad that killed his career.
No. No. Your dad is a bad guy, right?
He's a bully of children.
He's physically violent against children.
I mean, this is about as evil as you can get.
I would understand that because your dad didn't deal with his emotional issues, he ended up not having a career, right?
So it's much more important that you deal with your emotional issues rather than immediately try to further your career.
The other reason why it's important to do this now rather than later is because later you're going to graduate, right?
Now, if you graduate and then take a year off to do therapy, there's going to be a question like, what have you been doing for the last year when you go for a job interview, right?
So you're going to want to graduate and get a job relatively quickly after graduating.
That's going to give you a good deal of value.
And of course, after you graduate and get a job, then you're going to be consumed with your new career and you don't necessarily want to go into a destabilizing situation or temporarily destabilizing situation like therapy when you're in the midst of trying to start a new career because that's going to be disorienting for you at work and it's going to cause problems there as well.
And so I would get the therapy done simultaneous to your technical education and plan that it's going to be at least a year.
You know, like recognize what you're getting into.
It's going to be at least a year and probably a little longer because you do have a harrowing history, an absolutely horrible and harrowing history.
Get away from your family.
You know, this a couple of times a year thing doesn't count, doesn't wash, right?
The fact that you don't see them more than a couple of times a year doesn't matter.
Every time you see them, it's like pressing a radioactive nugget up against your chest, right?
It just takes you months to recover from even a single meeting with these kinds of poisonous individuals.
So you have to.
I mean, you have to.
What are you going to say to your dad?
Dad, you're a mystical nutjob who beat me when I was a kid.
I just don't have anything to do with him.
Just drift out.
Say you're going to take some time off in the family and you're going to explore therapy or whatever.
And then just never go back, right?
But don't sit down and have a conversation, right?
Unless you're absolutely dying to because there's nothing that your family can say to you that's going to have anything to do with being able to have a decent relationship in the present.
If you don't get that, sure, sit down with them and explain to them how you feel, but there's no way that your family is going to be able to be a part of your future.
I mean, that's absolutely impossible.
I understand that you're more angry at your dad than at your mom, but your mom is entirely embedded in this situation as well, so...
I'm going to email you your letter back in case you didn't keep a copy from the form mail at Free Domain Radio.
Bring this to your therapist.
It's a good family history to start with, and it will be a document that you can use to go over with your therapist to start out with.
I would say keep writing, keep jotting this stuff down, keep working with this kind of stuff, keep combing over memories.
Look for those connecting incidents that make you start to feel better.
Something, right? Because the lack of feeling that you have with regards to your history is going to be one of the primary barriers to reconnecting with who you are as a human being.
So thank you so much again for sharing this incredible story.
And just, you know, don't let the sun go down without going to talk to somebody at your student council or student representative, student union.
Get yourself in to talk to a therapist like right now and bring this with you and let us know how it goes.
Alright, so let us move on with number three.
And we'll call this gentleman Sid, though his name is in fact Nancy.
And he writes, Hi there, I was listening to some of the podcasts.
See already, that's a problem.
I'm not sure what some of the podcasts means.
Get moving, man. Get cracking!
There's more! And it made me start to think about how my relationship with my parents might affect how I act around other people.
Good for you. My dad has always been a very quiet man, and I respect and love him deeply, but I am a quiet person myself, and wish that I wasn't.
Sometimes I blame my dad for this, for not being a better role model.
There are traits which I value, such as keeping an open mind, genuinely listening to people rather than thinking of what to say next, modesty, etc., which I hope that I've inherited.
On the other hand, these traits can at times come across as weaknesses, e.g.
sitting on the fence. Lack of leadership skills and just plain old being boring.
I feel that I'm missing some key social skills which should have been taught to me.
I already know that it doesn't really matter who your parents are.
It's up to me to make the best out of myself.
We'll come back to that. Whilst loving my family, I also see their faults and see them in myself.
Really, I want to know if it's possible to change how I act while staying true to the attitudes that I've grown up with.
Now, you may say that I'm feeling this way because I feel social pressure to be a more gregarious person.
This is true. I do socialize quite a lot.
I have a lot of friends who I know respect and care about me.
The problems I face are more to do with everyday interactions with strangers.
It takes a long time for me to break down the barriers that turn an acquaintance into a friend, which probably explains why I feel so close to my two friends.
People move around a lot these days.
I can see myself moving from the city I'm in in a few years for work or something, and I can also see a lot of my friends doing the same.
We all then need to make new friends, but like I say, that's harder for me than for other people.
Life today requires that we are outgoing and friendly whilst not appearing to be a pushover.
This seems to me a very difficult balancing act, and I'm definitely on the pushover side of things.
I think that I tend to come across as either shy or brusque, depending on my mood.
I think that I've learned that there's no use acting that you're something that you're not, but I want to be different.
Is there any way for me to move on and change my behavior without changing who I am deep down?
Alright, well, let's back up just a little bit and have a look at the first person that you talk about, right?
Because I'm going to assume that, much like I suggest we can learn everything we need to know about everyone in the first couple of seconds of meeting them, I'm going to look at the beginning.
So you say, how my relationship with my parents might affect how I act around other people.
My dad has always been a very quiet man and I respect and love him deeply, but I am a quiet person myself and wish that I wasn't.
Sometimes you say I blame my dad for this, for not being a better role model.
There are traits which I value, such as keeping an open mind, genuinely listening to people rather than thinking of what to say next, modesty, etc., which I hope that I've inherited.
On the other hand, these traits at times can come across as weaknesses.
Sitting on the fence, lack of leadership skills, and just plain old being boring.
Missing some key social skills.
Alright, so the question is, why is your dad so quiet?
Why is your dad so quiet?
So let's look at the things that you praise about your father.
Keeping an open mind.
Well, if we look at somebody who has social anxieties, and I'm not going to try and diagnose your dad, but let's just look at this possibility.
If we think of somebody as having social anxieties, then what he's really afraid of is conflict.
We're really afraid of expressing an opinion.
What is it that keeps people quiet?
Well, often what keeps people quiet is a lack of ability to handle conflicts, a lack of ability to handle being disliked.
And so what you get is you get a lot of small talk, and you get a lot of nonsense and drivel and so on, right?
So, again, this is just a possibility.
You can sort of turn it around in your brain and see how it fits in the jigsaw puzzle of your existence.
So keeping an open mind, well, that could just be another way.
It could be a synonym for just not wanting to have any conflict, which is also known as being a coward.
And again, I'm not trying to pick on your dad.
I'm just sort of pointing out how you can look at these things, right?
Genuinely listening to people rather than thinking of what to say next, you say.
Well, if somebody is socially phobic, then they're going to develop habits called genuinely listening to people rather than thinking of what to say next because he's got nothing to say because he's afraid of provoking controversy, right?
So genuinely listening to people, modesty, etc.
But people who genuinely listen to you are not boring, right?
Because they're processing what you're saying.
They're really getting what you're saying.
They're grokking your oneness, baby.
And so really listening to what to say, modesty, keeping an open mind, and...
You say that these are virtues, but then you say, well, they also seem like sitting on the fence, a lack of leadership skills, and just plain old being boring.
Somebody who's socially phobic is not going to give you access to their true self, to their deepest thoughts and desires and fears and imaginings and so on.
And so people who are boring are hiding from you.
They're shielded. They're insecure.
They're phobic. They're not revealing to you who they really are for fear of being rejected, for fear of provoking conflict, for fear of humiliation, for fear of whatever, right?
And people who are really listening to you and really keeping an open mind And people who are really modest are not boring.
They're not boring. They're very, very exciting people to be around.
So the boring indicates people who are boring you are doing two things.
They are hiding from you and they are attempting to cause you to dissociate.
Because when people are around you and they're boring, that is a way in which dissociation or a lack of connection to your feelings gets transmitted.
Now, you say here, I already know that it doesn't really matter who your parents are.
It's up to me to make the best out of myself.
I'm not sure what to make of that.
It certainly matters enormously who your parents are in terms of the challenges that you face as an adult.
And I'd sort of like to put the possibility forward that love may not be what you think it is.
Keeping an open mind, genuinely listening, modesty, and so on, these are not virtues.
I believe that we can only love virtues, honesty, courage, integrity, right?
Things which we admire, like a shining statue, like a hero, like something that is noble, like something that is uplifting.
That we love, right?
People who sit on the fence, have no leadership skills, and are just plain all boring, well, that's not someone, right?
Keeping an open mind, genuinely listening, modesty, that's all passive, right?
It's all passive. And so I don't think that you can love that.
And I would sort of examine in your heart of hearts about whether or not you do love your father.
Because when you love someone, you love them without ambivalence.
I don't sort of look at my wife and say...
You know, I love these things about her, but they could also be interpreted as these negative things or whatever, right?
I mean, I just love her completely wholeheartedly.
There's no part of her that I don't adore.
And there's no ambiguity about that, right?
Where we have ambiguity, we have the truth plus false mythology.
So I think that I'm guessing that what your father has done has refamed his own social phobia as a virtue.
And you want to watch out for that.
Because that's not really going to help you to figure out who you are or how to better interact or more effectively interact with people.
And so you say life today requires that we're outgoing and friendly whilst not appearing to be a pushover.
There is, of course, a lot of mythology around this kind of issue that nice people are pushovers.
And this, of course, probably is inherited from your father as well, and perhaps your mother too, if she's around.
But... I know that I face this, Christina, my wife also faces this as well, right?
That we're very positive, outgoing, and friendly people, but we both have these cores of complete and total steel, which is that if people betray us or mess us up or undermine us or whatever, then we come out fighting, which doesn't mean abusing or anything, but...
You certainly don't want to get on the wrong side.
But it confuses people, right?
Because I'm sort of happy and positive and joking and so on.
And then some people mistake this for weakness or insecurity or sort of empty, hungry desire to please or whatever.
But those people, they're just looking to exploit me and so on, right?
Because someone should treat you the same whether you're secure or insecure, right?
Because that's a personal sense of integrity, right?
How is it that I'm going to treat people?
So if somebody comes up and, I don't know, wants to give me their kidney, then I'm going to say no, right?
So I'm going to try and treat people the same, whether they're secure or insecure.
And people who treat you differently because you're outgoing and friendly, so if you're outgoing and friendly and they then say, oh, that means you're a pushover, well, just don't have those people in your life.
And if that means that 99 people out of 100 are not going to end up in your life, well, that's philosophy, right?
I mean, there's not much we can do about that.
So if you're on the pushover side of things, then that's because you have interpreted or probably been taught by your father that your father's reticence and perhaps his social phobia comes across as a virtue, is a virtue, right? So then you end up with this destabilized relationship with other people, right?
That you're either... Pushing them over, as you say, you're either shy or brusque, or you're being pushed over, but that chance for a meeting of the minds of equality, of an exchange of ideas and emotions from a situation of equality, is not something that strikes you, I would guess, as particularly likely.
But none of this can be dealt with by trying to change your attitudes towards your friends or towards potential friends or acquaintances.
There is, as I've mentioned sort of in more recent podcasts, the fundamental thing that you were taught by your father was not how to relate to others but how to relate to yourself.
So if you have shyness, like if your dad is very shy or socially phobic but restates that to himself as a virtue, then what you've been taught is you don't have to change yourself.
You just have to call whoever you are virtuous.
Which is real magical thinking.
So you have to get rid of that idea, which is a very difficult and challenging idea to get rid of.
You have to really sort of judge your father according to more objective standards.
The fact that he has an open mind and seems to genuinely listen to people and seems modest, none of those are virtues.
Virtues is acting to really better the world, and not in a passive way, but in an active way.
So, I would really examine that a little bit more closely, and through that, you will be able to come up with a more effective way of dealing with others.
But first and foremost, you have to look at your father's illusions about himself, and then how those have been transmitted to you in terms of your illusions about how to make your way efficaciously and socially in the world.
Alright, number four, the last one for now.
Hi, Christina. Hi!
Sorry, um...
It's just me. My question is a pretty simple one.
I'd love to hear your thoughts, if only briefly.
And then there's an emoticon that I'm not even going to get into.
I tend to find that I am hypersensitive to guilt.
Have you donated? I'm just kidding.
Have you? If I cut someone off in traffic accidentally, even if they respond well to the misdemeanor, it is on my mind for the rest of the journey.
I just started a new job.
It's great. I work a shift alongside somebody my age, 20.
When I make mistakes, the kind of mistakes you'd expect to make in the first few weeks on a new job, leave something out of the fridge, telling a customer the wrong price for an item, tripping during the lap dance, making some small mistake on the till, I am consumed...
Sorry, one of those wasn't in there.
I am consumed by a terrible feeling.
Employees at this place can have whatever food they like, and one day I had a pie for lunch while I was not working.
The guy I worked with mentioned this to me, that if he isn't working at the time, he tends to like to pay for pastries and such.
This is pretty insignificant and it's just his preference, but I remember how consumed by a guilty feeling I was for some time afterwards.
While that could be because you're eating guilt pie, always, always, always check the labels.
A similar thing happened today when I took some out-of-date, fine-to-eat-not-to-sell chips from the office.
The boss was working at the time and mentioned to me, seeing a packet missing from the rack out front, that generally it's good for staff to take them from the office to save whoever is working from restocking out front.
I mentioned that I did, and somebody else currently working at the time quickly added that the missing packet had in fact been sold.
He said, sorry, my mistake, and I said, no problem.
Afterwards, though, I still had that same feeling, though to a lesser degree than other times.
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this.
I don't have this feeling within my family as far as I can recall.
Please keep this between us, or general, if you podcast on it.
Thanks so much. Well, thanks so much for writing about this.
This question of guilt is really, really quite interesting, and I'm very glad that you brought it up, because this is not uncommon for a lot of people to deal with these kinds of feelings.
So, the first thing that I would do to try and figure out, if I was sort of in your shoes, the first thing that I would do to try and figure this out is to sit down with a piece of paper in an hour or so and write down all of the situations and the feelings from the very first time that you can remember experiencing this feeling.
Write down everything that occurs that brings this feeling up in you.
Also write down the situations that ameliorate this feeling in you, right?
So, for instance, the thing you say where you took some out-of-date chips from the office and somebody thought that you took them from the front, but you took them from the back, right?
So the fact that you were able to say, no, I didn't do that, helped ameliorate, though not alleviate, immediately, the feelings of guilt.
From the very first time that you can remember feeling this feeling, just write down what happened.
Look for patterns. Look for things that make it worse, things that make it better.
Look for situations that may have been good.
And look for the instigators, right?
So if you have parents or siblings or teachers or a doctor, what was it that brought this feeling up in the first place for you?
That would be my sort of first order of business, to create a mental map of this feeling so that I could look at it in a more objective way, trying to link it to its causes and its effects.
Now, that's going to give you some sort of very interesting stuff to work with.
The next thing that I would do is to recognize that guilt is a healthy emotion.
Guilt is a very, very important and healthy emotion.
Guilt is one of the fundamental concepts, I guess you should say, is the fundamental compass in terms of helping us to navigate through life to act in a moral manner.
People who don't feel guilt are called sociopaths.
Guilt is good. An excess of guilt is bad.
A deficiency of guilt is bad.
So you want to have the right amount of guilt for the right things in the right times under the right circumstances which provoke a better course of action.
Guilt is sort of like the emotional side of physical pain, right?
So if you've got your hand stuck in a fire, you want your hand to give you physical pain, right?
So if you're having a heart attack, you want to feel that as a rather unpleasant sensation so that it will propel you to get to the emergency room, otherwise you're going to die.
So guilt is a very healthy emotion.
It's our conscience and its effect upon our life, right?
So when we do something that makes us feel guilty, and we're just going to assume this is an inner directive, right?
So we do something, it makes us feel guilty, then the way to healthily, I would suggest, work with that emotion is to say, okay, well, I did something guilty.
I did something that makes me feel guilty.
Is that a reasonable or just response to what I did?
Or am I just afraid of being attacked?
So this is a very interesting thing, and we'll talk about this in relation to your circumstances or situations in a moment.
When I was a kid, I was six years old, I was into boarding school, and we would play football.
And the football would occasionally go over the fence to the next, I guess, building, which was the sanatorium.
It's where they placed the kids who were bad under the guise of medical treatment.
And I would climb over, or other boys would climb over the fence to get the ball back.
Now this was wrong.
This was against school rules.
I can't remember. Iron Spice on the top or something.
Not really blunt ones.
You don't really hurt yourself. But it was against the rules.
So I would feel anxiety about going over the wall to get the ball.
But not because I felt that I was doing anything morally wrong, but just because I knew...
That it was against the rules.
Those two things are very, very important to differentiate within your own mind.
Because if you're going against your own conscience, then you should adjust your behavior.
And if you're going against rules, then maybe you should adjust your behavior or maybe you shouldn't, right?
But for sure, you should recognize that it's different from a moral situation, right?
So if you want to smoke marijuana, it's not immoral, but it's definitely against sort of the rules of society.
So you can decide to do it or not, recognizing the risks that you're taking, but you wouldn't put it down to a moral situation, right?
In terms of good and evil.
So, I think it's important to differentiate between things which we've done which make our conscience uneasy because we've done something that's wrong, in which case we should change our behavior, that our guilt should inform us that a change in behavior is necessary, versus we're afraid of being exposed and attacked because of some arbitrary damn rule, and then we feel guilty as a way of attacking ourselves, but we don't have the same motive to change our behavior.
In fact, that kind of guilt comes with resentment.
So, I resented.
If I was caught and I was caught and caned in boarding school for going over the sanatorium fence, I would feel resentment for the rule because it was just dumb.
Like, what do we have to do? Wait here for an hour for a teacher to wander by to get the ball?
The game was over and it was right sitting there through the bars.
We could see it, right? So, with the guilt of that or the fear of that, retaliation comes resentment, right?
So, you have to kind of figure these things out.
So you've kind of given us a fear-guilt-fear sandwich here.
And the first thing where you say, oh, I cut somebody off in traffic accidentally, it's on your mind for the rest of the journey.
But then you say, I took some pie when I wasn't working.
Now I worked in restaurants when I was a teenager.
And I was allowed to have a meal if I was working.
But if I was just dropping by to pick up a paycheck or just dropping by to say hello, then I didn't get a free meal.
So the fact that you took a piece of pie and didn't pay for it and had no problem with that until somebody pointed it out is interesting.
Because it means that This is a clue that helps us to understand that the guilt you feel is not around a moral transgression, but it is fear of being attacked, a fear of breaking, sort of quote, arbitrary rules and being punished.
And you have to look back in your past to figure out where that came from.
The challenge is you say, I don't have this feeling within my family as far as I can recall.
But I think it's very important to differentiate between those two.
I think that taking the pie was wrong.
It's no big deal, right?
But it's definitely not the right thing to do.
But it didn't bother you at all until somebody pointed out that they don't do it, and then you feel anxiety.
But it's because you fear being attacked, not because you have...
I would just say it's fear of retaliation.
It's fear of attack. It's not quite the same as guilt.
And so...
Guilt pushes us sort of out of equilibrium.
It pushes us out of a situation of contentment and happiness.
And that's good. That's what it should be doing.
It should take us out of a comfortable situation of happiness and contentment because it's saying, look, our behavior needs to change.
It's the negative biofeedback that helps us adjust our behavior and fine-tune our course in the goal towards virtue and happiness and love.
But what happens is your guilt is out of whack, right?
So it doesn't cause you to change your behavior, as far as I can tell, and then it feeds on itself and escalates, right?
So it's something that comes from outside of you.
It's something that was inflicted upon you from outside.
It's not an inner sort of directed thing.
And what you really are afraid of, if I understand the sort of emotionality that goes through you, is you're afraid of being attacked at a very fundamental character level.
You're a really bad person because you ate that pie, and you have no respect for other people's property.
There's going to be some escalation of attack on you based on you having done something that you could be conceivably attacked for.
And that, of course, has resulted...
In some self-esteem issues, right?
When people attack us at a very fundamental level, attack our character, our being, our virtue, our future, everything about us, when people do that, it's highly destructive to our self-esteem, particularly when we're children.
And it's destructive to our self-esteem not just for the obvious reasons that, oh, they're tearing you down from top to bottom, but it's destructive because...
We know exactly what's really going on, which is somebody is just abusing us to make them feel better.
So they're sadistic. Knowing that we're under the power, under the thumb of sadistic people is really, really ugly and unpleasant.
So it's less ugly and unpleasant to imagine that we're bad than to imagine that those who rule us are corrupt or evil.
So when you do something that's wrong, which we all do, when you do something that's wrong, then You have to sort of figure out what does this mean about my own self-esteem?
And I would feel this kind of fear at times, even recently, right?
When I was working at my last company, I would take some time during the day while I was having lunch or whatever, and I would look at Freedom Aid Radio.
Sometimes if I was bored or just waiting for a phone call or whatever, then I would do that, look on the board and answer some questions and so on.
And I felt in that situation, sometimes if somebody just sort of came into my office, I'd feel a sort of stab of anxiety, right?
And what I realized about that, sort of in hindsight, and a little bit more towards the end of my time at that company, was, yes, I was afraid of being attacked for, oh, you're working on your own thing, you're here being paid by us, and here you're working on some website of your own, blah, blah, blah, that I was just going to get attacked.
But fundamentally, what it also meant was that I didn't want to be in that situation to begin with.
I didn't want to work there to begin with.
There's some meta stuff that goes around this kind of guilt or shame or stabs of self-attacks or whatever.
That's just important to really, really process that to figure out what's going on deep down.
I hope that this helps.
Do let us know how it goes.
Thanks, of course, for writing in to Christina and myself.
Sorry that you just got me.
I'll talk to you soon. Donations more than welcome.
Remember, my book on truth, The Tyranny of Illusion.
Is available for $19.
And absolutely well worth it.
Worth 10 times the price, but I shan't be greedy.
And I hope that you will order it.
I look forward to donations. Remember, you can sign up for subscriptions.
It's a little bit closer to $20 now.
I guess it's about $18 rather than $16.
And I really, really, really appreciate that too.
I will see you on the boards.
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