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Aug. 25, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:12:47
852 Abandoned Child (A Listener Conversation)

Left in prison...

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Hey! So, we won't use any names, I'll just call you Xena.
How's that? Very good.
Excellent. That way your identity will be perfectly masked, because everybody will think that you're a character.
That sounds like it. Or something like that.
Right. The tight corset.
Right, yeah, you got it.
I'm just going by your avatar here, so I'm sure it's the same deal.
Right, right. Thank you.
Thank you for taking the time to...
Oh, no problem. No problem at all.
No problem at all. So, you had a general topic that you wanted to talk about, which was the sort of work-related issues in your department.
Is that right? Or was there something else that was more of a yearning-burning?
I guess... So, I guess I think of that as being like the specific...
Like a manifestation of the more general issue that if you could help me see what I'm not seeing, that would be the greatest thing to get out of the conversation.
Sure, absolutely. There's this horrible thing, and I don't know if you've been listening to the conversations lately, but everybody feels retarded when they deal with the stuff.
You're a highly intelligent and highly able human being, but everybody's completely retarded when it comes to making these connections, me, you, everybody else.
So I appreciate the humility to put yourself in the dunderhead hat because it's just a necessary evil.
It's good to hear you.
It's comforting to hear you say that, I guess.
Sure. When I was going through therapy, I wrote, I don't know, Probably close to 250 or 300,000 words to figure out some things about my family, which maybe I could have been told in about three sentences.
But we're all trained to not know these things, right?
We're all trained to not make these connections.
So it's really hard to do it.
And then, of course, when you get them, you look back and you say, well, duh, but it's still almost impossible.
The cage is totally obvious from the outside, but inside it's that sort of...
What was that movie with Jim Carrey where he plays the guy who's stuck in a dome but doesn't know it?
It doesn't look like a cage from the inside.
It just looks like the world. But from the outside, it's like, wow, how did I ever live in that tiny little box?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I guess I have experienced frustration or impatience.
Impatience at feeling like I'm struggling with things that I wouldn't have to if I had the right outside perspective.
Sure, sure. Well, do you want to tell me a little bit about your history and your family and so on?
Yeah, I'd be happy to.
I've got some notes just so that I can help organize my thinking.
Sure. So I guess, in general, my parents divorced when I was like five and I grew up with my dad.
I guess the experience with him was very...
Unpleasant in hindsight, or I guess I've come to recognize how unpleasant it was.
I don't have very many vivid memories of my childhood, and I understand that now as being probably because I was dissociated so much of the time.
The things that I do remember are basically being dismissed or intense amounts of You know, impatience or directed at me, just like I'm a great imposition on him.
And it certainly wasn't ever acceptable for me to express my preferences or feelings.
Right. And I remember at various times, like when I was, I guess, in the early parts of high school, like I was writing fiction and things, and like the imagery I was using was imagery of being, I had a very profound sense of being immobilized.
Right. Like unable to move, unable to Express even what was going on.
Right, right.
And so I guess most of my issues come from interacting with my father.
My mom also wasn't emotionally there for me, really.
Yeah, they tend to come in pairs, so I can certainly understand that.
But because we were divorced, you know, I spent most of my time, you know, physically with my dad or around my dad.
So it wasn't a sort of shared custody arrangement?
I saw my mom, I guess, on the weekends.
And so I guess the situation from, like, my dad was very, you know, managed, my brother and I, by, you know, Rigid and structured, you know, don't do anything that I don't approve of sort of environment, whereas my mom was very...
And that was sort of the way he didn't deal with us and the way that my mom didn't deal with us was to basically let us do anything we wanted and not provide any structure, any boundaries, but in a negligent way, not in a... Yeah, so you kind of went from the Stalag 17, the gulet to the hippy-dippy wolf-child raising himself kind of thing.
Pretty disorienting, I can certainly understand.
Yeah, but I don't remember feeling...
I was not conscious of the disorientation at that time.
This is all in hindsight that I am able to see how disorienting it would have been or was.
It would be for anybody and was, I guess, for me.
I guess that's my family.
I never had a very close relationship with my dad, obviously.
When I went to college, I, for the first time, saw it Therapy because I was incredibly depressed.
I feel like I've always been struggling to figure my way out of this hole.
Because I remember thinking very consciously when I was in high school that I would look around and see people who were happy.
The first inclination was to be cynical and feel like they just didn't understand the real nature of the world.
But I remember very consciously thinking at one point that, or just asking the question, but if it's possible that in fact they are happy, shouldn't I explore what would be necessary to get to that point?
Right. Right.
In hindsight, when you think of these people, and I don't want to interrupt you, but I just want to get a context of it.
In hindsight, when you think of these people, do they still seem happy to you in hindsight?
That they had something that you wanted to get a hold of?
Or do you think that maybe there was sort of this ignorance, this bliss thing floating around?
You mean when I was in high school looking around and saying that these people were happy?
Yeah, looking back, feel that they were happy or not so much?
That's a good question. I can certainly see a lot of the people, like my direct friends at that time, were not really happy.
Right. But they were better at hiding their unhappiness than you were, right?
Yeah, that seems like a fair way to say it.
Okay, yeah, and I just wanted to check out what that was.
I guess they were more functional.
Than I was at that time.
Right, right. So I was very depressed in college, and I was studying engineering, and I didn't have a very focused...
I was not applying myself in a very focused way.
I guess I'm intelligent, so I was doing pretty well, but it was not because I was trying very hard.
After that, when I graduated, I started working with a small research group also at the university.
It was my first real, I guess, full-time job.
It was a good experience for me because I got to grow and actually apply my talents in a real way, in a real environment where I wasn't being graded or anything.
It was just, this needs to be done and I can do it.
Right. And I found a satisfaction in being capable and competent in that way.
Well, sure. I mean, having been raised to believe that you were existentially incompetent, it's nice to get some traction in a practical sense, right?
For sure. And I guess in that job, I felt that I wasn't growing anymore.
I felt that I wasn't advancing.
It was just a position.
It wasn't a career. Right, right.
At that point in time, I was getting...
I guess I was 24 or 25.
I was becoming more anxious about being...
The one who is directing my destiny.
And so I... So I applied to graduate school.
I started pursuing...
I think I started dating. I met...
Who is my wife.
Okay. It's alright.
I'll take that out.
And... I felt very...
Good at that time because I was, you know, taking very concrete steps and recognizing that I was growing and that it was in my power to do these things, you know, to realize that I wanted to grow and to apply to graduate school and to actually get accepted and,
you know, go. And, you know, my experience with women, you know, Prior to meeting my wife was very bad, disheartening.
One of the early conversations that we had was that I'm not done growing, I'm not done changing, that this is part of the deal for us getting involved is that this will be a dynamic.
This will be a relationship that will grow.
Right. No, that's obviously a very nice way of saying don't hold me to anything I'm saying now.
No, that's good. I'm just kidding.
You can write all this down. It's not going to matter because it's going to change tomorrow.
I'm a kaleidoscope. I'm a cloud.
I'm rolling, baby. I'm a moving target.
Right? No, I mean, I know what you mean.
I've just spoken some fun.
That's sort of what came to mind. That's very funny.
Way of looking at it.
I had never thought of it that way.
Yeah, don't play this joke.
It'll be under you. So I guess we moved together to where I'm going to school now,
to graduate school, and this was a big change for me that I was ready for, and I guess it was a very big change for her that maybe she wasn't expecting as much because we moved basically across country from where we were I guess once I got to graduate school,
it really pressed me on the issue of my self-worth that I hadn't pressed in my previous environment.
I guess it was pretty comfortable in the group I was working in previously.
In graduate school, it was My experience of the first few years was, wow, I'm in this really excellent environment and there's amazing people.
And what the hell am I doing here?
How the hell did I get in? Right.
They're going to find me out.
They're going to know I don't belong.
You feel like you're in the chorus line and then you're at the end like Danny DeVito doing, how can they not see this?
Right, right. Yeah, I guess I was very afraid that I would stick out.
Even today, I guess a theme that I can see back then is that I've spent a lot of time trying to hide, trying to keep any vulnerable part of me well under wraps and well protected.
And the consequence of that in my first few years of graduate school was me not understanding things but not feeling comfortable or capable of asking the professors for clarification because I was afraid that would out me as being stupid or being incapable or incompetent.
Right, right.
No, I gave a technical presentation once at a conference and somebody said, Don't you have a master's in history?
And I said, yeah, don't you feel stupid for studying something technical?
I had much more fun.
No, I do know what you mean, and I'm going to, a little later on, after we deal with some of the earlier stuff, I'm going to take a mild quibble at your interpretation of graduate school and self-esteem, but we can get back to that in a little bit.
So, if there's more that you want to add now, that's totally fine, but I didn't want to come up to the sort of contemporary issues that you have.
In your job without going a little bit back and plowing some of the sort of frozen tundra earth of the earlier stuff.
Is that reasonable? Yeah, I mean, that's pretty much everything.
Okay. Because, like, I haven't finished my graduate school degree.
Like, I've just sort of temporarily changed roles to be, like, a full-time staff member, which brought us to, I guess, the information I posted on the board the other day.
Right.
So why did your parents divorce?
Um, so I, I've, I've spoken with my mom to, to ask about this.
And, um, what she told me is that, you know, basically the marriage between, you know, she and my father was pretty awful, um, to begin with.
And like when, when she was pregnant with me, apparently, um, this became the focal point of everything that was wrong with their relationship.
Like, You bastard, what did you do?
Right! I'm just kidding.
Why do you feel so bad now?
You broke up this happy home by having the temerity to cling to the uteral wall.
Now, when you say bad from the beginning, do you mean bad from when they were dating?
I don't know that. I guess what I mean by bad is my mom self-reported that You know, by the point that she was pregnant with me, she was having bad feelings about the relationship.
Like, I guess, from her perspective there were warning signs.
Right. And it is always amazing to me how little we know about our families.
It's like this huge, you know, like it's easier to get stuff out of Washington than it is out of our own parents, you know, because at least we've got some legal loopholes to get sort of the Freedom of Information Act.
But getting stuff from our parents, it's like pulling teeth from like a skull with no teeth.
So, it's really, really tough.
So, I mean, that's, you know, if you wanted a couple of things that would be interesting to chat about with your mom, just say, okay, so you meet my dad at a party or whatever, and like, what happens then?
Like, how on earth did you people end up getting married?
You know, help to sort of understand the decision-making that occurred.
Throughout this process, like what was it that, I mean, with my own parents, they were both so completely mental that you could have put them in an airplane hangar with 10,000 other people at opposite ends, and they would have been like, you know, they would have found each other, you know, like, it's like a gravity well of insanity that draws these people together.
I don't know if your parents are that bad, but...
Trying to get a sense of how it is that they came together, right?
Because everybody talks about the end of a relationship with a good degree of emotional vividity, I guess you could say.
But it's the stuff that happens that leads up to that.
Because once you're at the end of a marriage and the relationship's over, everybody feels like a victim, right?
So you kind of have to go back before that to before they started victimizing each other and themselves and it all got sort of hysterical and And soap opera-ish and so on.
And what was the stuff that, I mean, that's usually good stuff to sort of figure out.
Because once you realize that, I mean, your parents made 10,000 bad decisions to end up getting divorced, that can be really helpful to just get the flow of how it ended up.
Because you just see the end and you experience the end as a five-year-old, which of course is very traumatic.
But as an adult, you can look back and see the fault lines and the decisions that were made to go down that road.
Okay. Part of some additional information I know is that just my mom's psychology at the time she was very I guess submissive.
She did not have a strong character or identity herself and I guess was attracted to my father who I guess was compatible with someone who did not have, who he could just impose, you know, whatever.
Right. You know how they say, like, opposites attract?
But these are the same people who say that fascism and communism are opposites, right?
So, of course, the reality is that neither of your parents had reasonable relationship to rules and discipline.
So, your dad didn't have any capacity to negotiate, which is why he was an iron-fisted totalitarian.
And your mom doesn't have any capacity to negotiate, which is why she's a loosey-goosey, diaphanous, enya dryad of permissiveness.
And so, they have that in common, so to speak.
I like that observation that both have no ability to negotiate, and that's different manifestations.
Right, and of course, this is one of the challenges that you're having at work.
It's centrally involved around negotiation, right?
So you have, as far as I can tell, and we'll go into this in a little more detail, but you don't have a template for negotiation where there are two people in the room who are thrashing out how both can get their needs met in a win-win and positive situation.
You don't have a particularly strong template for that.
In fact, you have a template for quite the opposite, right?
I mean that the only way to get along is to go along and you must either subjugate others or be subjugated.
It's eat or be eaten, kill or be killed and so on.
And so it's not a two people in the room both working out their needs.
That's not a template that you have as far as I can understand it.
That makes a lot of sense.
Thank you.
Right, right. Now, I'm getting a sort of vivid picture of your dad, and I'll just touch on a few things.
You can let me know where the accurate silhouette is or isn't.
Was your dad somebody who was impatient with things that you did of your own accord?
Or was he somebody, and I'm guessing this is more of the situation, was he somebody who would, say, try to teach you how to play tennis and then get really irritated?
Like, he would initiate instruction situations and then become irritable?
So, tennis sounds like something that's fun.
He would...
It should be. Like, so...
So would he say, I want to teach you tennis, or would you say, I want to learn tennis?
There would never be something as fun as tennis.
There would be, I want to teach you how to do these things to help me work on this other thing that you don't have any interest in.
I'm sorry. Oh, oh dear.
Okay, okay. No, no problem.
I got that. So would it be like hold this nail while I hit it with a hammer?
He used to live in the northeast and he moved down to the south where I grew up because he was very interested in farming.
So he had a little garden.
I guess it was a rather large garden.
So there's a lot of maintenance to do with that and a lot of labor to do with that.
We had a large wooded area in the back and we would have to cut and collect wood in the winters so that we could have...
We didn't have central heat and air, we just had a wood stove.
Oh, I see. So your childhood was a little sort of along the lines of medieval surf or plantation slave or something like that?
Like, you're out there with the garden gnomes trying to do some amazing Negro spirituals to get through the day.
But it's a lot of work.
I mean, I've spent a little bit of time around that kind of life, and it is like it's dawn till dusk, right?
It was worse because, like...
He was an adult, and he has a lot of energy, and we were like little kids.
Anyway, your original question was, what was it?
Well, so he initiated, like what I'm trying to figure out, and I have a sort of theory, so just tell me what the facts are.
We'll see if the theory works. Sure.
I mean, when you talk about impatient parents, right, there are generally two classifications to paint with a broad brush.
The first kind of impatient parent is the parent who does not initiate activities with the child.
And anything the child wants to do is annoying.
You know, it's like, I want to go to the beach.
Oh, just stop, you know, relax, you know, go read something, do something, here's a video, I'm not, you know, whatever, right?
The child initiates something and the parent is impatient.
So anything the child wants, the parent finds annoying.
And that's sort of one category.
And that's more narcissistic, like the parent just finds any needs that conflict with the parent's needs annoying.
But the second is a little bit more sadistic, insofar as the parent will initiate activities with the child.
And then we'll apply this heavy Louisville slugger kind of club called excellence or pride in your work or don't get anything wrong or whatever.
And so the child doesn't want to do the activities, right?
And so that's sort of the one problem that begins.
And then as the child begins to do the activities...
The parent begins to fence the child psychologically into a smaller and smaller matchbox of do it this way, do it that way.
No, that's wrong. Do it the other way.
I told you this way. How come you don't listen?
So the child doesn't want to do these things in the first place and then gets kind of boxed into these tiny little things which ends up with the paralyzed feeling that I think you described earlier.
So, the first thing that you described seems to fit very well.
I would do things on my own.
I would go to the shop and build things and just play around.
But that was never anything that he was ever interested in or curious about.
Right, so he wasn't irritated that you would go and build a model airplane or something like that.
Right, but if I at any point wanted to involve him, that was the imposition, that was the unforgivable imposition on his time, on his, you know, whatever.
Right, okay. So that's one aspect of the first part, but it sounds like with the second part that he initiated a lot of things that he wanted you to do.
Yeah, yeah. And then you would be stuck sort of in his world doing his things, trying to figure out how to please him, right?
Because your primary reference, like if I have a kid and I tell that kid to build a fence, the primary reference in a rational parenting scheme, I mean, you sit down with the kid, I mean, assuming he's, I don't know, like 14 or whatever, a teenager, a young man.
You sit down, you say, here's the kind of, you know, thing, here's the kind of, would you mind doing it?
You sort of sit down and negotiate that, find out some way that it's a win-win.
And then you say, here's the kind of, Here's the kind of fence that I want.
What do you think? I've never built a fence before.
Here are some resources. Would you mind taking this on?
And then you're available as a resource.
And what happens is the young man, your kid, wants to build a good fence.
And his primary reference is, is it a good fence?
Whereas if I'm hovering around that kid and criticizing and saying, what are you doing?
You're piling that stick in too deep, or this is the wrong kind of paint, or you should be going with the grain, not against the grain, like nag, nag, nag.
What happens is the child's primary reference then becomes, in terms of quality, Is my dad criticizing me?
Rather than, is what I'm doing quality?
Yes, absolutely. Does that make sense?
Yeah, that can fit multiple things that I can barely remember.
There were a lot of tasks or chores that...
We would get involved in and we were told to do them.
I can remember feeling an impossible situation where I can't ask for instruction, but neither can I get it wrong.
If I get it wrong or ask for instruction, then I'll be yelled at.
Right. And that kind of setup can go all the way through, of course, our professional eye.
So you get half-scrawled notes from someone saying, do X, Y, and Z with 15 exclamation marks at the end or something.
And you're like, I don't know.
And then they're away on vacation, right?
And then you're like, oh, I don't know.
They're not reachable. I don't know exactly what they want.
They say it's urgent. And this is, of course, I mean, it's a kind of subtle professional sadism and perhaps not so subtle in the form of your father.
Okay, so you weren't involved in anything that you can remember that was pleasurable, but you were just kind of trudging from task to task with this dread of disapproval and hostility and impatience, like some sort of young, pale, even Denisovich kind of character, or someone out of a Dostoevsky novel.
And that, of course, as far as I understand it, is a pretty unbroken pattern for most of your childhood.
That sounds fair. Now, did you ever talk about this with your mom?
Like, when your mom said, how did you spend your week?
And you're like, oh, we hoed the back 40, we put up a new shed, we delivered a cow, you know, whatever, I would exaggerate.
But did she ever say, well, that seems like a rather harsh and workaholic kind of childhood?
Yeah, I don't know if I'm...
This didn't occur day in and day out, as far as all these chores.
It wouldn't be like every day, but there was probably something, maybe each week.
Well, when there weren't chores, for instance, would your father help you with your homework?
No. Okay, so his definition of excellence didn't have a whole lot to do with school, right?
Yeah, I really don't even know what it would mean to ask what his definition of excellence was.
Well, you do, but you just don't have access to it consciously.
If we don't know our parents after knowing them for 20 or 30 years and no knowledge of anyone is possible, you absolutely have your father's definition of excellence tattooed into your very bones.
It's just not available to you at a conceptual level yet.
Right? If someone were to sort of, you know, put you up against the wall and say, tell me your father's definition of excellence, it would absolutely come tumbling out, right?
Because you lived under this rule for, you know, dozens of, well, 15, 20 years or whatever, right?
Okay. So, I mean, that's probably a good place to pause then, if this is not as clear to you.
Well, no, I mean, he was very, I guess, perfectionistic.
I mean, he... His definition of excellence, I guess, would be knowing how to do things on your own without having to ask.
And would those things include, say, being a good parent?
Probably, yeah. I'm sure that he thought that he was doing a good job.
So he feels that he was an excellent parent?
Yeah, he would probably say that he did the best he could and, you know, I guess he did.
But that's not excellence, right?
But that's... Doing the best you could.
I mean, for instance, when you were a child, were you ever allowed to say, well, look, I just did the best I could?
Right? Of course not, right?
Of course not. Right?
So, I don't know if you ordered a copy of On Truth yet?
I have. Okay, good, good.
Well, this will give a little away here, but of course, this is an essential question, right?
Because you were kind of lashed with all of these standards, right?
And your father didn't say, I would prefer it for my own subjective, as my own subjective preference, like I prefer ice cream to chocolate.
I would prefer it if you do it this way, right?
He said, it is better to do it this way, and saying something like, well, I just did the best I could, is not an excuse, right?
Sure, for sure. So, when it comes to excellence, right, this question of excellence or perfectionism, I mean, the first thing to be excellent at is virtue, right?
The first thing to be excellent at is benevolence and kindness, particularly towards your own children, right?
That is what is called excellence in the real world, right?
I mean, that's not just me. That's all the way back to Aristotle and before, right?
That wisdom and virtue in the Socratic sense or the Aristotelian sense is what is defined as excellence in any objective kind of way, right?
Not whether you build a fence right or, you know, whatever chores it was or whatever it is that you were doing.
So, the one thing is like you have this concept of excellence that is rational and you apply it to specific situations.
The other is that you're a bad-tempered son of a bitch and you create this criteria called excellence so you can use it as a club to beat up on your kids.
Okay, yes. I certainly understand that there is either an objective standard of excellence or a subjective standard that would be whatever he makes up versus...
Versus like what you're saying, something more objective that is independent of that, that is tied more to virtue.
Right, right. I'm sure you get all of that, so you can send the book back.
No, I'm just kidding. But with your father, his definition of excellence, as you said, was knowing how to do things without being told.
Is that right? Yeah, that's what I said.
But of course, he didn't invent all these things on his own, right?
Somebody told him.
Like he didn't invent the English language.
He didn't invent the concepts of farming.
He didn't invent a stove.
He was told how to do these things by others, right?
So I'm sorry to be annoying and nitpicky about this, but this is probably a pretty core issue, right, in terms of seeing things more clearly.
I'm sure.
I mean, even for somebody as hypervoluminous as myself, right?
The amount that we actually invent is completely tiny compared to everything that's already out there that we just inherit, right?
I think, yeah, I understand.
So when he says to do things well without being told, what does that really mean?
For him, I mean, in his world, right?
Yeah, get it right so that I don't have to deal with you.
Oh, okay. So what he means is that if I tell you once, you should know how to do it.
Yeah. And if you don't know how to do it after I've told you once...
Then there's something wrong with me.
Yeah, you're broken and I get to now be impatient with you and, you know...
You know, insulting or dismissive.
Right, right. Right, okay.
So, and look, I mean, even the best of us or whatever kid can, my wife used to call me up at work sometimes saying something's wrong with the computer.
It's not doing X, Y, and Z, and I couldn't figure out what she was doing.
We all go down that road from time to time, right?
The question is, do you catch yourself and grovel and apologize and buy a tennis bracelet on the way home or something like that?
So this idea is that if you don't get it right the first time, then you are, what, stupid?
Yeah, I'm stupid and wasting his time.
Right, but you see, if you're stupid, then the criticisms should stop, right?
Like, if you're genuinely retarded...
Then the criticisms should stop.
Like, I mean, if my, let's say, I don't know, I have a kid who's got an IQ of 80 or something, right?
And he really wants to, yeah, I think he really should be a pilot.
And he goes and tries to become a pilot, but, you know, he can't really read and he doesn't do the basic math and so on, right?
So clearly he can't be a pilot because he's not intelligent enough, right?
I'm not sure that every day for the rest of his life I'm going to wake up and say, you're an idiot because you couldn't be a pilot.
Because if I'm limited in some particular manner, then it no longer makes sense for it to be a perpetual criticism, if that makes sense.
Okay, I'll take another example because I'm being a bit obtuse here.
If my son wants to be a basketball player but he's 5'2", then I can't criticize him for not being a basketball player.
Sure. Because he genuinely can't do it, right?
Right. So if you genuinely can't do it, like if you genuinely are too stupid to follow simple instructions, then your father should not criticize you for it.
I'm just talking logically, right?
Oh yeah, absolutely. I guess I follow the logic.
Maybe I'm still missing the emotional part of it.
Well, of course, the emotional part of it is that if your father wants you to think that you're stupid...
Then he's going to have to assume that you're not stupid.
If he wants to hurt you by calling you stupid, you know, if somebody calls me bald, I'm not that hurt, right?
Because, hey, I'm bald, right?
So, I mean, that's the deal.
I'm not going to be, if somebody says, you lie me, right, or whatever, right?
Well, yeah, I guess I have a British accent and so that sort of fits, right?
So if somebody says something about you that's kind of true, then it's not particularly insulting, right?
Okay, yeah. So if you genuinely were stupid, right, then getting impatient with you for being dumb when you're actually dumb would not make any sense, right?
Yes. So, you have to not be stupid, and you have to believe that being called stupid is degrading and insulting.
You have to not be stupid and for it to be an insult for being called stupid to have the desired effect of making you feel like crap.
Okay, so just to be sure that I'm understanding what you're saying...
No, no, I already told you once. Ha!
I'm just kidding. That's good.
No, this is horribly complicated, so take your time.
Sorry, I couldn't resist. So...
Right, so...
In the act of consistently insinuating that someone is stupid, it is the understanding that in fact they're not.
Sure, it relies on the fact that they're not.
Because the only reason you would keep doing that is in order to adapt or adjust their behavior from whatever it is they're doing that you don't like.
Sorry, the only reason that you would continue to call somebody stupid if they weren't was to adjust their behavior?
Is that what you said? That would be the only reason that he would keep treating me in that way, is to get me to behave some other way.
No. No, I'm sorry to be blunt, and I know that you're an incredibly intelligent fellow, and you're going to kick yourself afterwards, but that's okay.
That's part of the process. But that's not at all what he was doing.
I can absolutely, completely, and totally guarantee you that he was not calling you stupid because he wanted to adjust your behavior or wanted you to do something different.
Okay, so...
All right, good.
So... Well, we just have to look at the results, right?
We just have to look at the results.
If I do something for 20 years, right, and I keep getting the same result, can I really claim, and I never adjust my behavior, can I really claim that I was trying to achieve something different?
Can you be more specific?
I'm not sure what you mean. Sure, okay.
Maybe. Let's take your example, right?
So let's say that I'm your dad, right?
And for 20 years, I nag and criticize and berate and humiliate and intimidate and call you stupid and so on, right?
And the result of that for you, as you sort of mentioned early on in the conversation, is a feeling of paralysis, right?
Yes. Which is a perfectly logical response, but it is not a logical response to someone who wants to change your behavior.
Paralysis is the result of being given two contradictory instructions.
And being damned if you do, and being damned if you don't.
Right? So, it's like my brother would say, no means yes, and yes means no.
Do you want me to punch you? Right?
And what could I say?
Because if I said no, he'd say, well, no means yes, and he'd punch me.
And if I'd say, yes, I do want you to punch me, he'd say, oh, the game is over now, and then he'd punch me.
So no matter what happens, I get punched.
So I'm paralyzed. I can't say anything.
I understand now, I think, your objection to why...
So you couldn't possibly be doing this in order to adjust my behavior, because...
Like, I was trying my damnedest to do it.
Well, you ended up with no motivation and no...
I mean, your behavior was paralysis, which is the opposite of behavior, right?
And that was his goal, right?
His goal was to detonate your capacity to make rational choices.
Yes. That's quite different from wanting to affect your behavior.
I mean, an advertiser wants to affect your behavior, right?
Right. When I propose to my wife, I want to affect her behavior.
But that doesn't encompass the sadism of giving a child contradictory instructions or giving a child incomplete instructions and expecting a perfect job and getting angry if additional questions are asked.
I mean, that is entirely sadistic and designed to throttle and corrupt and attempt to destroy your capacity to make rational choices with the confidence of your rational mind.
Definitely. I guess through my therapy and so on, through the last probably eight months, I've recognized very vividly that as I began feeling much more comfortable with myself, the wall I was hitting was, okay, now I need to start acting in the world.
I need to start acting on my understanding of the world.
I guess this is also what you've been saying.
Well, sure, but your understanding has to be crystal clear or your action is going to be premature.
Yes. That's definitely what I'm worried about with regard to my work situation.
Right. So this feeling of damned if you do and damned if you don't was the result of psychological warfare, sadistic psychological warfare, inflicted on you by both your parents.
I mean, this was a tag team.
So in one, you have no capacity to make choices.
with any kind of confidence because everything you do is criticized that's on your dad's side on your mom's side you have no capacity to make choices and evaluate them because there are no rules right so in both situations you're either in a tiny prison or you're floating in an interstellar fog either way you have no clear contact with choice and cause and effect yeah that's a very succinct description
That's very nice. Now, your mother couldn't handle your father's, and I guess she couldn't handle his critical and demeaning and dictatorial personality, right?
Yes, in the conversations I've had with her, I guess...
I guess it was her describing things towards the end of her relationship, but what she was saying that she recognized on some level that she was dying like her...
Yeah, and I have no doubt that that's true, but I have a question which you can ask her for me, if you like, which I think would be very helpful, which is, Mom, if this guy was strangling your will to live as an adult, you were an adult, how the frick do you expect me, as a five-year-old child, to survive him?
Yes, that is a good question.
In the conversations I've had with her, I guess within the last year or so, I guess she Because she has also been going through some self-reflection,
I guess in the last few years also, she is at a place where she can actually reflect on that and recognize the horror of it and simultaneously not know.
To feel the horror of what occurred And to not know how she could have done it differently because she felt that she was going to die if...
I don't know, does that make sense?
It totally makes sense, but when it comes to a divorce, either the divorce is because of petty inconsequential reasons.
He kept singing Great Big Sea in the shower and I hate that band, so I left.
In which case it's like, oh, so you broke up your family and half abandoned your children because of some petty little difference of opinion, right?
And nobody ever says that about their divorce, right?
What they say is that there was this big, terrible psychological situation that I could not survive in, right?
That's what everyone says, right?
And it's perfectly reasonable in a way, right?
We don't break up marriages over nothing or over a little.
But of course, the more objective your father's destructive behavior, like the more it wasn't just, you know, I say potato, you say potato, apples and oranges, difference of opinions.
The more objectively dangerous he was, the more justified your mom is in leaving him, right?
right for sure the less justified she is in leaving you with him yeah for sure the more she justifies her decision the more she condemns herself like her decision to leave the marriage the more she condemns herself for leaving you with your father Yeah, logically I absolutely see that.
And so if she's in a situation of reflecting, then if she couldn't take it as a grown adult with all the resources and independence and legal power that she had in that situation, if she couldn't take it, how were you supposed to take it?
People leave children behind in marriages with destructive people, like other people use newspapers to wad up a leaking hole in a ship.
They're not going to be able to take it.
Because by the time you got into the teenager...
Right? Your capacity to express preferences or feelings was virtually destroyed.
You were writing vivid fiction, expressing endless aspects of immobility and paralysis.
Yes. Yes.
Right? So, you became what your mom had to escape.
So, it's like, well, that's fucking great, woman.
You got it. What about me?
Right? Right? You got away.
It's like this prison is killing me, so I'm going to leave the prison and not take my children with me, but leave my children in the care of the prison guard.
Because the prison guard is so abusive and destructive, I feel like I'm going to die.
So I'm going to escape, but I'm going to leave my children behind as a peace offering to this brutal man.
Because I can't take it, but I'm going to leave my children behind so that it's easier for me to escape.
I'm being harsh here, and of course you can process this as you like, but that's something that is, I think, a very great unspoken in your family.
And yeah, just for full context, last November, I finally defued from my father.
So, he is not in my life at all.
I think that's fantastic.
I mean, obviously, that is completely and totally, in my humble opinion, that's completely and totally the right decision.
But I think that you need to be more honest because deep down, you know that your mom left you with this guy.
She's supposed to be a protector, and why is she supposed to be a protector?
Because she recognized how difficult this prison guard is, how destructive and abusive this prison guard is, right?
She was the one who was fully aware of that.
You were a kid. You were only instinctually or unconsciously aware, and you had no capacity to escape.
And unconsciously, you know she left you behind to appease your dad.
Actually, she's literally said that one of his statements or arguments or requests was to have us because we were the only thing that he had left.
Well, can you imagine this?
If your wife is kidnapped by a brutal gang, and you're both kidnapped by a brutal gang, let's say.
And you managed to escape.
Can you imagine escaping without bringing your wife with you or at least going back and getting her for good?
Of course not. Of course not.
Of course not. And this is different because she voluntarily went into this gang.
She wasn't kidnapped.
She chose your dad. She chose this gang.
She got out. She chose the mafia.
She got out. She left you behind.
That's horrible. Yeah, yeah.
I'm getting the horrifying feeling.
That is going to leave you with feelings of worthlessness.
I'm not even worth bringing with.
I'm not even worth rescuing.
My mom got out of prison and left me in a cell.
Wow. I'm getting a little teary.
Well, of course. I mean, but this is the core of the worthlessness that we experience.
We don't make this stuff up.
I mean, this is actually how we're treated.
Yeah, wow. And what is the feeling there for you?
I mean, it's just feelings.
They're here to help you, right? I mean, they're not your enemies.
What is the feeling that's in there for you when I talk in this manner?
A lot of sadness. A waste.
A waste in what sense?
Because it didn't have to be this way.
None of it has to be this way.
No, none of it does. And without a doubt, there is going to be in there, and we are more receptive, of course, to the tender feelings, particularly with regards to a mother, and there is sadness in there as well.
But as you keep rooting around at this incredibly productive prison that you were left, there's going to be anger as well.
Yeah, yeah. I was almost there.
Yeah, for sure.
For sure.
So, okay.
Is this where it comes full circle to the current situation?
or...
I think so, yeah. I mean, I don't want to cut off your emotional experience here, and if you want to talk any more about that, I'm totally happy to.
So would you like to talk any more about what you're feeling now or would you prefer to move on to the work stuff?
stuff.
I don't know.
I'm afraid I maybe cut it off too soon because I was maybe just scared.
I don't know.
Scared of their feelings?
Yeah. For sure, for sure.
I mean, there's ways that you can evoke these kinds of feelings and the way that you can evoke these kinds of feelings that can be very helpful is to put yourself in the opposite position, right?
So, instead of being the child who was abandoned, imagine if you had a child and your child was kidnapped in South America or something like that.
You had to leave that child behind and never come back.
I mean, I know your mom didn't totally abandon you, but this is not how you experienced it as a child.
So we have to use that metaphor of your childhood experience.
Imagine that you had a child, you know, a beautiful, shiny-faced, tousle-haired boy of five who was kidnapped by gorillas in South America, and then you just took a boat out of there.
And you would look back and see this kid going back into the jungle.
I mean, that's pretty horrible, right?
That would be an incredible thing to have to live within yourself.
It's absolutely...
I can't imagine how horrifying that would be.
Right. And here's the gap, right?
This is the chasm between yourself and your parents.
That image for you evokes such supernatural horror as it should.
Right? As it should.
The idea of abandoning your child to a brutal situation is a situation of such unbearable horror that you would do anything.
Or you'd turn into some sort of vigilante to get your kid back.
Yeah. You would.
You would do anything, right? You'd hire mercenaries, whatever it took to get your kid out of that dangerous and deathly situation.
You would do that, right?
But your parents won't.
This is a huge chasm.
It's almost like the difference between having a soul and not having a soul, if I can use a quasi-religious metaphor for a moment.
Right?
It's the difference between having empathy and not having empathy, right?
That you can experience, even in your imagination, the horror of leaving a child in that kind of situation.
But your parents did not experience that horror in any conscious way at all.
Now, of course, they do deep down experience that horror.
And your mother has probably spent most of her life avoiding that feeling in one form or another, finding some desperate way to not have it come up, right?
But it's there, right?
This is the seething lava that is at the core of your family, which is your mother knew how destructive your father was and left you and your brother behind.
Wow.
And I'm not telling you anything you don't know, right?
But that's part of the paralysis, which is a feeling of worthlessness.
Like, she didn't even turn back.
She didn't get mercenaries to come and get me out.
She didn't get the court system to give her sole custody.
She didn't do whatever it took to make me safe.
And she knew, she knew how desperately dangerous the situation was for her.
As an adult, she couldn't handle it.
But as a child, I was supposed to do it.
As an adult, she couldn't lift a car, but she put me under a car thinking I could.
And the time to work on this stuff now, and this is why it's so amazing what you're doing, right?
It's before you have kids. It's all going to come up when you have kids, right?
When you have kids, it's all going to come up.
And you've got to denormalize this incredibly sick situation of betrayal, of abandonment, of sadism, of abuse, psychological abuse.
I mean, of your own personal Abu Ghraib, which is worse than Abu Ghraib, because that happens to adults.
Because otherwise, if you don't get all of this in your gut and work through it, then it's going to happen again to your kids, but it's going to be worse for you than it is for your parents, because you will feel it.
Feel the horror of what's happening much more acutely because you're more sensitive and obviously more psychologically astute, right?
So you will feel the same, these same primitive primeval instincts to control and manipulate and bully and betray children in this manner.
But you will also feel how horrible that is in the moment but be unable to stop it, right?
And that's why it's so essential that you do this work now.
And that's why it's so great that you're having this conversation.
And just to be clear, when you say this work, do you mean specifically reflecting on the history of the situation and the horror of that situation, so that I can connect with those feelings, so that I can consciously recognize them?
Is that what you mean by the work?
Yeah, what I mean by the work is, I mean, you've got it almost exactly right, which is the fundamental thing to do with these kinds of terrible histories, and look, my heart breaks for you.
I mean, this was an unbelievably terrible history.
The reason that we need to feel this horror is so that we can fundamentally denormalize what happened to us.
That's why I kept picking at stuff like, well, he was trying to modify my behavior, he had this stuff to do with excellence, because all of that is normalizing the behavior.
And we do have this incredible desire at all times to normalize our parents' behavior, because that's how we survive at the time.
If you sit there at the age of five saying, oh great, so my dad's so toxic, my mom has to run away, she's left me behind, I'm totally abandoned, and I got another 15 years to go before I'm free, well, you just jump off a cliff, right?
The way that we survive is to normalize the situation.
But the way that we flourish after we survive is to completely reverse that process and denormalize the situation.
Because if you think that there's anything productive in what your dad did...
Then when you have kids, you're going to either do what your dad did or you're going to say, I'm going to do something that's unproductive.
Which, who wants to do that, right?
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah, I feel very lucky to be with my wife because we, I think, recognize that the things that we don't work through would be...
We feel, when I say recognize, we feel that the things that we haven't addressed would be replayed.
I feel lucky.
I think fantastic.
And you guys are incredible heroes.
I mean, and I absolutely mean that without a shadow of irony.
You're incredible heroes because who knows how long this goddamn mess has been cycling through your gene pool, right?
Could have been a thousand years. Could have been ten thousand years, right?
But it just takes one person to say, it stops now.
It stops here with this generation, with me.
This is where we get off this hellish train that goes round and round, this pit of fire.
And this is how the world is saved, right?
right?
I mean, this is how we become free as a species.
And so is it your sense that my not yet having made that connection is part of the cause for the intense feelings of anger and impatience that I feel like at my time?
Yeah, that's because you feel that there was something productive in what your dad did, which is what we were talking about.
And so, naturally, you want to do things that are productive.
And because you have defined what your dad did as having some productive value...
Then obviously your response is you're immediately downgrading yourself and humiliating and abandoning your own experience, which was that it was hell on earth, right?
And so when you say that there was anything productive in your dad's experience, then you are, you know, throwing yourself back into that cell and walking away and saying, well, he was right and you were wrong.
And also then when you face similar situations, we always follow our values, right?
Our values are the physics of our decisions.
You can't throw a rock in the air and not have it fall down.
And you can't define something as valuable or productive or good without reproducing that behavior.
That's how we are programmed, right, to use a geek metaphor.
And so that's why I kept chipping away at any time you defined anything that your dad did as positive or productive or useful and so on.
I had to keep chipping away at that because you need to get that this was just a sad, sad, broken, and vicious man who felt himself enormously inadequate and decided to bully children as a way of restoring his equilibrium, which is a very sad, pitiful, and disgusting, and vile thing to do.
And there's nothing productive There's nothing productive in that.
I don't care if Hitler did love animals, he was still an asshole.
Yeah, I think I'm, you know...
Getting the glimmer of the feeling that it's completely consistent to the degree that I don't identify those kinds of patterns as, in fact, destructive, that I would sort of play them out again in my work.
Well, it's worse than destructive.
Again, just to be annoyingly nitpicky, it's worse than destructive because you can be destructive without being sadistic.
But this was sadistic.
Okay. Did you get the sense from my post that there was sadism there?
No, sorry, I'm just talking about with your dad.
Right. Your dad's behavior was absolutely sadistic.
To say to a child, you must get it right, this complicated thing, I'm going to get angry at you if you ask me again, and I'm only going to tell you once.
Completely sadistic. Completely and totally sadistic.
I guess my concern was that I'm being sadistic in my work.
I did not get that sense.
I think that what's occurring at your work is a recreation of your father's behavior towards you and the resulting paralysis and rage that you would feel in that situation.
Because you have this guy who's at the top of this project who is recognizing that people are not pulling their weight and is avoiding the topic, if I remember rightly.
And correct me if I've missed that sort of key pod.
I'm pretty sure that's the situation.
Right. So if you go to somebody and you say, I mean, you've got some options, which we'd sort of talked about, about going and saying, you know, I feel that there are some people who could be putting more stuff in, but I don't know how to best motivate them.
How do you do that? Or, you know, I'm just looking, maybe I'd sort of like to step up and take a bit more of a leadership, team leadership role in this thing.
I just, you know, having trouble finding ways to motivate people and so on.
And if the person says, well, that's interesting.
I have the same challenge. Here's what I've tried.
Here's what hasn't worked. What have you tried?
What has worked? What hasn't worked, right?
If you approach it like two people trying to unravel the problem, then fantastic.
You have a road forward and you have a new friend, right?
But if the person says, you know, hey, we don't need another team leader.
Everything's fine. Just do your work and just don't worry about it.
Don't fuss with other people and don't start putting your nose in other people's business and this and that and the other, right?
Well, then you have an answer, and the thing is that you have an answer that you won't want, and that's one of the reasons that we fall back into the past, is we see things in the present that we know, oh, all too well, right?
And we don't want to recognize it because that is going to have us make decisions that we don't want to make, right?
So if you do this, I mean, just to make a long story short, if you do this proactive stuff where you try to figure out, basically what you're trying to do is create a moral map Yes.
Are people good or bad?
Do they have integrity?
Are they willing to stand up for what is right?
Are they willing to confront people?
Because it is also sadistic to have low expectations of people.
It is also sadistic to let people get away with doing wrong.
It's sadistic to bully them if they do wrong and humiliate and abuse them, but it's also sadistic to let them get away with it, which is sort of your mom's side of things.
To sort of a, hey, there are no rules, there are no expectations, do whatever you want.
That's also cruel, right?
Because it doesn't help people.
I mean, it's like feeding people, feeding babies whatever they want, letting little kids eat five bags of candy.
I mean, it's just not responsible.
That totally fits with the way I had been looking at the situation, whereas my options were basically to be over-aggressive or to be submissive.
That's what I enjoyed about your response.
The question of just asking, how do you motivate people?
Because it keeps me in the conversation and it's a solicitation of cooperation, not Right, right.
But the reason I'm telling you this, just I don't want to, I'm obviously, you know infinitely more about the situation than I do, and these are just my thoughts, but they do have some experience behind them, so I mulled them over.
The reason that I'm telling you that it's wise to create a moral map is not because I think it can be fixed.
Right. Yeah, I'm kind of getting that feeling.
And you know this, right?
And the reason that you're paralyzed is it is like your childhood.
And the reason that it's like your childhood is not just because of you, but because of the people in authority.
You're recognizing something that is similar and the reason that the paralysis and the frustration and the anger and the fear and all of the reason that all these childhood things are coming up is not just because you have challenges in this area and this and that, right?
It's because... It is a similar situation, which means that you need to map it and you need to accept that you have an early warning radar system that is very sensitive, but that doesn't mean that it makes things up.
So you can see 10 times further than anyone else's radar, but it doesn't mean that you make up blips that aren't there.
Because you can use this to your advantage.
The amazing thing about having a really difficult childhood is it does give that amazing early warning radar to us, which allows us to steer clear of things which other people just sail, the rocks that other people just sail straight into.
Don't look at it as a problem that you need to solve.
Like, I'm in this situation. I need to find a way to solve the problem.
And if I can't find a way to solve the problem, it's because my childhood is one and I can't get things right and good things will never happen to me and all this and that, right?
What it means is that I know this situation really, really well.
And I know when I can't change it because I spent 20 years not being able to change it.
So I know. I may not know everything, but I sure as hell know this situation.
In that statement, it sounds like there's more of a self-trust aspect, whereas maybe right now I'm sort of doubting myself.
Like, what am I doing wrong? What is...
Right. You're saying that I'm creating these feelings unjustly, but I doubt that you are.
Ah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I like that. That the feelings are somehow mismatched with the situation when, in fact, probably they aren't.
Yes, absolutely. And the difference, of course, now, and there's a reason that you have never thought of leaving this position, right?
And that's because, of course, when you were a child, you couldn't.
Now you can, and that doesn't mean you should, but it means that you are free to leave, which means that you're free to take risks that you could never take as a child.
Yes, yes. It's amazing.
Well, I mean, again, kudos to you.
I mean, I know it's not a fun conversation to look forward to, but I try and put a little bit of sugar in the medicine.
Which conversation were you referring to?
Oh, just this conversation, the one that you and I are having.
Okay, okay. I agree with the quote that's on the back of Truth.
It is painful, but it is the pain that heals.
Yes. Yes, it is.
It is the pain that changes. I mean, when we feel the pain, we are really motivated to change our behavior and to challenge the thoughts, right?
So now that we're free, we don't have to repeat the same cycles, but that means we have to recognize it was really bad, which means we have to re-experience the pain.
I mean, sadly, physiotherapy hurts like hell, right?
his continued weakness.
Well, listen, I've given you about six million things to think about.
I think I'm starting that right now.
What I'm going to do is I'll snip out the two names that you mentioned.
I will give you the MP3 file to listen to, and you can let me know if there's anything else that you want to change.
But I do think that this is, I mean, it's an amazing conversation that you participated in here, I think, and thank you again.
But I think, I mean, I think it would be something that would help other people, but feel free to have a listen to it and let me know what you think.
Oh, yes. I mean, I went into this conversation with you with the expectation that this would be shared, absolutely.
Right, but really, have a listen and let me know what you think.
Of course. I always want to give people that option for sure.
Okay, no problem, I will.
Okay, well listen, I'll email you with the, or I'll put it in the Skype thing, it'll take me a little bit to snip the names out, and then just, I won't do anything until, I'll post you the link where you can get the file, then I won't do anything until I hear back from you.
Okay, thank you so much.
Alright, thanks Emil, man.
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