All Episodes
Previous Next
Sept. 28, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
56:11
873 Mystic Paralysis - A daughter battles parental superstition

A brave woman confronts rant FOO-lishness

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, how's it going? It's going pretty good.
Good, good. So we're glad to give you a different kind of homework tonight.
Yeah. Anything's a good break from art homework.
Can you hear me okay? I sure can.
How's my volume? It's good.
Okay, great, great. So, I was...
These parents.
These parents of yours.
So, if I understand it correctly, your mother is sort of psychically stalking Criss Angel.
Is that right?
And your father is, as you'd mentioned, is or was a part-time psychic.
Did I get that part-time?
Yeah, he is a psychic.
Or, quote-unquote, psychic.
Yeah. And is this like a full-time occupation for him or something he does on the side or what?
He does it on the side.
Normally he just does merchandising.
Merchandising. Okay, never mind.
It doesn't really matter. And your mom, other than lighting candles to magicians, what's her deal?
She's just kind of a weirdo, I guess.
She's into the psychic thing.
She loves astrology. That's probably why she married my dad, but she...
I don't know.
I don't know what to tell. And what's your relationship like with them?
With her, I... We probably used to talk a little bit more when I was little.
Nowadays, I really don't talk to either one of them that much, maybe a couple hours a week total, just because I'm always working.
But when we do talk, it's just kind of those conversations like, oh, how's school?
How's your boyfriend?
How have you been? It's never really amazingly personal or anything.
And... I don't know.
It just seems a little fake, I guess, at times.
And when was the last time that you can remember having a sort of rich or meaningful conversation with your parents?
Probably, I think maybe around senior year when I was going off to college.
And she just kind of...
We talked about her college and her experience with that.
She told me a few things about her past boyfriends and I guess that was as close as we've ever gotten.
Right, but as far as sort of meaningful or useful things that they might have to say to you about ways to be wise or ways of knowledge that are sort of meaningful and reproducible, I'm guessing, based on their philosophy, for want of a better word, that may not be quite as common an occurrence as it could be.
No, it's not.
If anything, we'll just be like, oh, well, you're an Aquarius, so that means this, or something like that.
It's never... I remember there was a professor of philosophy when I was in grad school, and on the picture of his, on the door of his office, he had a picture, which I think was a far side or something like that, some cartoon, and on it it said...
The science of astrology took a great leap forward today when everybody who was a Pisces was hit by a fish truck, which I thought was pretty funny.
So, on what do they base these beliefs?
I mean, I know that that's a tough question to ask people who are basically mystics, but...
Do you get the feeling that your father genuinely believes that he's psychic or does he do a sort of cold reading kind of thing which is half in reality and half in this is kind of a fun thing to do?
Does your mother genuinely believe in the mystical side of things that she pursues or what do you think their beliefs are about it themselves?
I used to think that my mom genuinely believed in it, but of course she started watching Criss Angel, and Criss Angel openly admitted that he doesn't buy it or anything like that, and she watched those episodes.
I guess I never really asked her what her thoughts were, but considering how she runs her normal daily life, she's always looking up her horoscope.
She takes it pretty seriously.
So I would assume that she believes it.
And now, of course, as she would well know, she's not an uneducated person, so as she would well know, there's not a shred of scientific evidence for any of this sort of superstition, right?
Yeah. And her sort of explanation for that is what?
I'm not sure she has one.
It's something she's kind of grown up with as a teen.
I know it was big in the 70s, so she's got a lot of astrology books and whatnot.
And how many mood rings exactly does she have?
She's probably got like five.
My mom was sort of similar in the 70s, so I think I know where that's coming from.
Now for you, when do you first remember...
Realizing that your parents might not have the most scientific approach to the truth when you were a kid.
Do you remember any moment or anything in particular or any incident or sequence of incidents that began to make this more clear?
How did that come about, your knowledge of their beliefs when you were a kid?
I remember in elementary school, probably around fifth grade, I was going to just a supermarket with my dad and they had like the lotto going on and so he said he was going to buy a lotto ticket and I was like, oh, so you're psychic, right?
You can, you know, you can guess the numbers and win.
Sorry, how old were you when this happened?
I was in the fifth grade, so like, I don't know.
You were 11, kind of. Yeah.
So you said, so dad, you're psychic and he said, Funny you should ask.
I knew you were going to. I didn't say it like that, but, you know, he's like, oh, you know, that's not how it works.
And, you know, you can't use your abilities for that kind of thing.
I was like, okay. I guess I wasn't really satisfied by that answer, but that's what I got.
But it must have come up before, at least at some level, right?
I mean, you're an intelligent woman.
I mean, you must have noticed something, or it must have come up even in passing before.
Maybe they were reading the horoscope to each other or something before you were 10 or 11.
I remember getting readings from when I was seven years old or so, and they just, they weren't that accurate, number one, and number two, they were making assumptions for people.
For years later in my life, like around my death time even, then I'd hear about that.
And it was just like, I didn't believe that you could make a prediction like that, I guess.
Sorry, can we back up for just a second?
Because you just freaked the shit out of me.
And I just want to make sure I understand what you were just saying there.
So your parents, when you were seven, took you to psychics who predicted when you would die?
Yes. One in particular, yeah.
One did.
And what did they say?
Or he, I guess. What did he say?
Actually, it was a woman, but she said I'd make it to my late 70s, to be honest.
She didn't say the late 70s, right?
No, my late 70s.
A nice little decade joke there.
So there was a sort of death, I guess a time of death, right, that was put forward to you.
So we're at seven.
Was there anything that happened before you were seven that would indicate this sort of belief system?
Well, I grew up with my dad using tarot cards and candles.
We'd always have other psychics in the house.
I was always kind of exposed to what they did.
There was always books around.
I guess they never really pushed it on me, per se, until I was around seven.
That's very noble of them. And so, did they explain to you, did they sort of sit down and say, this is what we believe, or was it just sort of in the air, so to speak, like the bad incense or something?
No, they never said, you know, this is what we believe.
It was just kind of a daily routine kind of thing, kind of like, I guess, people praying or something.
It was just something that I grew up considering normal.
Well, yes, I would imagine that you did consider it not unusual within your household, but how did this stuff make you feel emotionally, right?
So when you're seven years old and your parents say, we're going to take you to a tarot card reader or something like that, how did that make you feel emotionally?
I guess at first I was just interested.
I didn't really know that much about it.
I just kind of grew up Just observing things.
So I just wanted to see what they would say or what would happen if anything would ring kind of true to me.
But... I don't know.
I wasn't too sure.
I guess I was just curious.
They never really gave me an actual, you know, concrete...
idea of what it all was or anything.
But when you were saying that the person, the woman who gave you the readings was not particularly accurate, is that right?
Yeah. And were you able to say, well, no, she wasn't particularly accurate?
I didn't say it, no.
I just smiled and nodded and, you know, walked off afterwards.
But it was just kind of a thought I had.
Yes, but that's interesting.
Sorry to interrupt, but that's interesting, right?
That You were not allowed to be skeptical.
Yeah. And so already you had a sort of communication that had been transmitted in some form that skepticism was not allowed, right? Or it was wrong.
So did they frame skepticism as negativity or, you know, you're busting my vibe or whatever they say?
I know my dad did, for sure.
He's always... I'll be watching, like, a skeptic show or something and he'll just be like, ugh, and kind of walk off.
He's not interested in it, so...
Right, so you weren't allowed to...
I mean, there is a kind of thinking for yourself that it sounds like you're quite prone to or quite adept at.
I would guess innately, or you may have developed it or whatever, right?
But this was definitely an unwelcome guest in your family, right?
This sort of thinking for yourself.
And I know that my experience with people on the sort of mystical side of things is that they have a...
You know, a supposed embrace of love for everything in the universe, but the moment you start questioning anything, they get pretty angry.
Yeah, yeah, it's true.
Yeah, they just want you to smile and know that it's right and just kind of merge your life with those thoughts, I guess.
And then if you question it, then, oh, what do you know, you're a kid?
That kind of thing, you get back, so...
Right, right. So, I'm guessing, I'm not trying to put words into your mouth, but I'm guessing that at some point, this began to become irritating.
Yeah, it did.
It did. Which I tried to give it a chance.
I did some research on it a little bit.
I tried reading some books of it and probably around high school-ish is when I totally just decided it was wrong.
All of it was. And it wasn't going to help me to believe in it at all.
But I never really talked to my parents about that ever.
I just kind of Well, I mean, this is, I mean, A, congratulations, that's an amazing leap, and you should be enormously proud.
You obviously have several thousand racehorses between your ears, and that's a good thing to have.
But this must, logically, there must be some conclusions I have some questions that I'd like to pursue, but the agenda is yours if you wanted to talk about anything in particular.
I'm up for your questions, actually.
Okay, I'm not going to speak them.
What I'm going to do, can you make that little, you know, that little hand puppet that people make with the thumb and the forefinger?
I'm going to speak through that just using my brain.
No, I'm just kidding. Okay.
I like it when it has lipstick on.
Do you have lipstick?
So, no, I won't do that or freak you out with any more bizarre mental images.
So, you said something that was sort of interesting, well, you said a lot of things that are interesting, but the one thing that sort of sticks out in my mind is you said that it was wrong, and by that, what I think you meant around the psychic stuff was that it was false, right?
So, it was not true in any way, shape, or form, sort of scientifically, objectively, logically, philosophically, and so on, right?
Right. It's just incorrect.
Right. Okay.
It's incorrect.
So it's a false belief system, right?
Mm-hmm. Now, if you were a friend of mine and you genuinely believed that a steady diet of cheesecakes would make you thin, right, then you would have an incorrect idea, right? Right. Right.
And so, if I knew that your goal was to lose weight, and I also knew that cheesecakes weren't exactly the stepping stones to a slender figure, then I would say to you, it's not the case.
I know you think that cheesecakes will make you thin, but it's not true, right?
Right. Now, if I could then prove that to you, and you genuinely wanted to lose weight, right?
Right. Then you would be grateful, right?
Yeah. So,
the fact that you have not brought any of this up with your parents would seem to me to indicate something that I'm sure is not too controversial, but I just sort of wanted to approach it in a way that was a bit more, we could get to a sort of faster conclusion.
So, by not bringing up your, not disbelief in this phenomenon, but your knowledge that it's false with your parents, I think that you have implicitly understood that they know that it's false.
Yeah, or at least I think so.
Well, and I'm always annoying in this area, as in I am in many areas, but this one in particular, which is that we can never claim to not know things about our parents.
Just because we grew up, they were our world, they were our gods.
I mean, you'll never know anybody as well as you know your parents, right?
Because you studied them and you've seen them from decades and so on, right?
Yeah. So, if you are not talking to...
So, if you say, well, gee, all I want to do is lose weight, so I ordered another 12 cheesecakes for my lunch tomorrow, right?
If the moment that I said the cheesecakes will actually make you gain weight, if I never let you finish that sentence, but I got angry at you and claimed to be offended or insulted by your lack of respect for my desire to eat cheesecake, it would be pretty clear, wouldn't it, that I didn't actually want to lose weight?
Yeah, I guess so.
Maybe you're not ready for it anyway.
Well, it's my stated goal is to lose weight, right?
So if my stated goal is to lose weight, it's hard for me to say that I'm not ready for it, is that?
Right, right. So your parents' stated goal is the truth and knowledge and wisdom and all this, right?
Mm-hmm. And you and the entire rational planet, of which it's you and me and I think 12 other people, know that this stuff is pure nonsense, right?
So then the question becomes, their stated goal...
Is to speak the truth, right?
They didn't say to you, your dad didn't say to you, I'm not really psychic, but there's a whole bunch of suckers out there who will pay me to cold-read them and pretend that I am, right?
He genuinely, as you say, he genuinely believes, right?
Yeah. Right, so he genuinely believes that he is pursuing the truth, and then when he comes across opposing not just opinions, but facts, then...
He gets angry, right?
Oh, yeah.
But that means that he knows that it's false.
Because if I get angry when somebody tells me that cheesecakes actually make me gain weight, it's because I know that they actually make me gain weight, right?
I'm just, I'm rejecting the knowledge that I already have.
I'm attacking a truth which is already within me that's being provoked or evoked by somebody outside of me.
I'm sorry that's kind of badly worded but I think you get the idea.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah, it does. It's a while back now, there was a woman who claimed to be something called a Theosophist, which I thought was a kind of spider, and I guess intellectually it is, but Theosophy is some sort of study of past lives, right?
And I said, well, that all sounds rather nonsensical.
What is the proof, right?
And she said, oh, there's the scientific proof, there's this, there's that, there's the other, right?
And that's really fascinating, right?
The moment that somebody says there's proof or it's true, then they're claiming the validity that comes with empirical proof and rationality and so on.
But, of course, what they're claiming to be true never is that, right?
So this woman said, oh, there's this proof, there's that proof.
And I said, well, you know, send me the links and I'll check them out.
I mean, of course, I knew it was all nonsense, but she used the word science and empirical and observational and so on.
And so she actually knew what the criteria for proof was, and she was using it to put forward a whole pack of nonsense, right?
So that's when you know people aren't innocent, right?
I mean, and I hate to sort of put this so baldly, but, well, it's a physical condition.
So when people say that they have proof and that they know the truth and this and that and the other, then they're saying, well, yes, there are objective standards of truth, and I'm going to use the validity of those objective standards.
In order to back up what it is that I'm saying.
So I know that there's such a thing as the truth.
I know it's objective. But then the moment somebody actually brings some real objective truth or verification or science to the situation, they immediately rebel against it and get sort of hostile.
Which means that they know what the criteria for truth is and they also know that what they believe does not meet that criteria, if that makes sense.
So, they've made money at this, right?
Oh, yeah. It's their living, right?
Or it's your dad's living, for sure, and your mom's sort of quasi-living, if that's right.
Yeah, my mom definitely utilizes my dad's abilities, and she goes to psychic fairs where my dad works and stuff.
Did you say she uses his abilities?
Well, she'll ask him, you know, questions, of course.
You know, what should I do about this?
And he'll bring out his tarot cards sometimes.
Wait, sorry, I just have to re-evaluate all of this.
Are you saying that if you claim to be psychic, you can tell your wife what to do?
Hang on, I've got to just write this down.
This might change the whole conversation.
Right now! No, I'm just kidding. Now I believe I'm a true believer.
If there's that kind of power in it, I'm all over it.
So... I would assume, since you believe that the truth is valuable and objective, and of course which I would agree with, that telling people falsehoods is not good for them, right?
Right. So, I mean, if I were a doctor and I were telling people incorrect cures for things or giving them things which actually made their illness worse, right?
So some guy comes to me with a toothache and I give him morphine.
All that means, of course, is that he doesn't feel the pain, but his toothache keeps getting worse, right?
That would be a pretty bad thing to do, right?
Yeah. If you can imagine if your father were a doctor and he was doing this, right?
If he was taking money from people to give them destructive, quote, cures, what would your response be?
Like, what do you think you would do in that situation?
Um... I'm pretty sure I'd probably approach him about it as scary as that would be.
That would be taking it really far, I think, to be a doctor.
Not that what he does is any better or anything, I guess.
Just let me know if you're feeling uncomfortable, because I can't tell from the laughter.
Just kidding. And I'm sorry to, and I'm not saying you have to do anything, of course, right?
I mean, I'm just some guy on the internet who's sharing some thoughts and ideas about sort of what you've posted, so none of this is anything about anything.
It's just sort of my thoughts and opinions and so on, so there's no pressure or anything like that.
I'm just sort of, I'm thinking out loud, and if there's use in it to you, that's great, and if not, then I guess your friend can buy you a drink.
But I would submit in some ways, I would submit in some pretty serious ways that to...
There are the crimes of the body, right?
There's the crimes of the body where you, I don't know, you stab someone or you give them a knockout pill in their drink and take their purse or something like that.
And those crimes are obviously pretty heinous and so on.
But you can kind of defend against those crimes, right?
But there are the softer crimes of the mind wherein people build up elaborate falsehoods and destroy people's or undermine people's capacity to think rationally.
And set themselves against the rationality in the world, which is really the only place where joy and intimacy and love and happiness can exist.
And I would say that in some ways, and this is not to sound too extremist, but it wouldn't be the first time, probably won't be the last, but I would say that the crimes of the mind that people commit, particularly against children, are the more egregious of the two.
In my sort of mind, and this is fairly well established, not just by me, but sort of psychological experiments, that the verbal abuse or the mental abuse that can occur is usually worse than the physical abuse that can occur.
Because the physical abuse is like tangible, right?
It's like, ow, you know, that hurt and you've got a bruise and whatever.
It's tangible and it heals and it's external.
But when you kind of get inside people's minds and you undo their relationship to reality and you undermine their capacity to think rationally, and in your father's case, he doesn't just...
I mean, he attacks it, he opposes it, right?
So if you do think rationally or bring up rational questions, he gets angry and upset, right?
Yeah, defensive.
So it's pretty...
To make your money out of harming people.
And I don't believe that it's an innocent pastime.
I don't think that psychic phenomenon and tarot cards and water divining and all this kind of crap.
I don't think it's innocuous.
I don't think it's harmless. I don't think it's fun.
Particularly, I mean, this is why it was so shocking that your parents would take you into this realm when you were seven years old and completely dependent upon them.
It harms people's relationship to reality very considerably, right?
And it turns them against truth and it sets them up against the evidence of their senses and against the evidence of their thinking.
And it makes them enemies of the truth, right?
It makes them oppose the truth, which is pretty essential, I think, to having a happy life, if that makes sense.
Mm-hmm.
Thank you.
So if your father were this doctor, and you did talk to him about it, and he refused to change his ways of providing bad cures for people and making them sicker, what would your response be?
I guess I'd tell other people.
Right, and if he was still not going to stop?
I don't really know what I could do.
I guess I'd just tell him how I felt, and if that didn't do anything, then there's not much point sticking around.
I guess he'd only end up hurting me too, so...
Well, sure. I mean, if somebody is pumping a gas into the house, right, you say, turn the gas off.
And if they won't turn the gas off, then you have to leave the house, right?
Because it's not going to help you breathe any more than they can.
And that was sort of the aspect that...
That I was sort of curious about, because you're kind of living this double life, right?
You're living this life like you're this hyper-intelligent, hyper-verbal woman who is skeptical and curious and philosophical and logical and scientific.
And then there's like hippie daughter clone number 12.
Who has to sort of, I don't know, dress up in diaphanous, long-flowing Blanche Dubois gowns to phone your parents psychically.
This is not that bad. Not yet, no.
Not yet. But, I mean, that's...
I shouldn't say alarming, because, I mean, it's sort of inevitable, right?
When you have crazy parents, you've got to act crazy half the time, right?
But... But what's that like?
I mean, do you have to sort of rearrange your mental furniture before you call your parents and say, well, I have to lower my standards, pretend I'm not irritated, not speak about this, that, and the other topic?
I mean, how do you make that transition?
I just kind of censor what I say, I guess.
I'm constantly formulating things to say that won't offend them or won't...
I don't know, I just try to talk on their level.
Exactly.
Look, here's a shiny ball.
Now, sorry, I'm sorry, go ahead, I don't want to interrupt you.
No, it's okay.
Continue.
I bet you that was going to be the answer to everything too.
Man, I shouldn't interrupt people.
Now, this split obviously is not healthy, right?
I mean, you don't have to be a psychological genius to figure out that living this kind of double life is not healthy.
And by that, I don't mean even primarily to do with your parents, right?
With all of this stuff, it's always about the future.
It's not about the past.
You can't go back and heal the past.
You can't go back and change the past.
You can't go back at seven and not go to the psychic and be told when you're going to die.
That's creepy. But my concern is sort of the forward-looking thing, right?
So you're going to maybe get married someday, maybe you're going to have kids or whatever.
I mean, assume you want at least some sort of decent love relationship in your life.
It's a good thing, and that's what we get a great deal of satisfaction out of aiming for.
And my concern always is that the infections of the past infect the future, right?
That the viruses of the past turn and eat up the future.
And my concern, I guess, is I'm just trying to understand what is the disaster scenario that occurs for you if you say, hey, you know what?
I'm an adult now. I don't have to live a double life.
I don't have to hide what it is that I truly believe from my parents.
What is the scenario that unravels in your mind that keeps you from doing that?
I guess it's just that I don't know, but the only thing that I do know is that my dad gets angry, and that's enough to scare me away from actually doing that.
Well, but I mean, is that...
I mean, I know it's scary, but is that a good reason?
Is that the reason you're going to work with for the next 30 years, say, or is there another chance, another opportunity you'd like to take?
Um... Well, I do want to tell them, and that's why I was talking to you about it, but I guess it's just I'm worried about choosing the right time because I still rely on them both for things, and I'm still in the middle of college.
I still live at home.
I tried the dorm life thing that worked out even worse than my family did, so...
I don't know.
I don't feel like I could just leave.
And if I approach them like today about it, I'm not sure how much of a hell my family life would turn into.
Well, do you have a thought about what this would entail?
Right? I mean, so do you think that you're going to speak your mind?
And, I mean, I don't know, have you listened to any of the podcasts about the sort of real-time relationship idea that I talk about?
Right? Yeah.
Yeah. So, of course, you know, your dad's going to get angry and say, you know, this is just skeptical nonsense, this is right.
But then, of course, what you do is you don't talk about the psychic beliefs, right?
I mean, the psychic beliefs are a symptom.
They're not the cause of the estrangement, right?
Right. The cause of the estrangement is that your dad uses anger, right, and to get what he wants.
And I can fully understand why this would be a perfectly viable strategy when you were a child, because you were completely dependent and couldn't do anything about it.
But for now, the things are a little different, and I am fully sensitive to the financial situation, and you live there, and so on.
Which we can get to in a few minutes.
But you have the capacity now to do things that you couldn't do as a kid, right?
So if I'm talking to your dad and I say, well, you know, I really want to sort of sit down and go over this stuff because I really feel like I've been censoring myself, like I can't speak the truth to you guys because you're going to get mad and blah, blah, blah.
And then you start talking about what you really believe and your dad's going to get angry, right?
And then the real-time relationship thing says...
You can say, well, you know, now I feel really scared, right?
Because I feel like when I try to speak my mind about something that you get angry and I feel scared, right?
Because, I mean, obviously this is a long history of him getting angry and shutting you down, right?
Which is inevitable when it comes to mysticism, right?
This is why mysticism is so poisonous because it sunders people, it keeps them apart because it's all based on fantasy and fantasy is incredibly isolating.
And then your dad, of course, will try and drag it back to a discussion of the beliefs and the facts and the science and say, well, no, I mean, the problem is not that fundamentally the problem is not that I'm rational and you're Not so much with the rationality.
The problem is that you get angry when I speak my mind, right?
That we can't have a difference of opinion and work through it like reasonable adults, but you just use your temper.
And that scares me and I don't like that.
And the reason that you want to lay that principle down is not even primarily for your relationship with your father, but your relationship with your boyfriend, right?
Because if you have a strategy called give in to anger, Then what's going to happen is you're not only going to draw angry people or people who use anger to dominate into your life, but you're actually going to provoke those characteristics in people who may only have them to a smaller degree or whatever, right? So the reason that we have to do that horrible thousand-mile jump off the cliff with our parents is not to fix our relationship with our parents because...
That can't be done. That's a historical relationship and it can't be repaired in hindsight.
But it's to put that principle down in our life that says, if somebody scares me with their anger, then I'm going to tell them that they're scaring me with their anger.
Does this make any sense?
It's not about proving to them that they've been exploitive, people who've harmed other people's minds for money, which is pretty despicable in my view.
And it's not about whether psychic phenomenon is real or not.
It's about the fact that you don't feel you can speak your mind without people getting angry at you.
Right. Does that have any...
You don't have to speak about it if you don't want, of course, right?
But does that have any parallels?
Does that show up anywhere else in your life where people get mad and you kind of freeze?
I've had some friendships where we'll get into arguments and I... I either get really defensive or I just run away, but I don't stick around for very long no matter what if it gets to that level.
And by defensive, women often mean angry?
I'm just trying to understand what you mean when you say defensive.
A little bit angry, not like violent or anything, but I might say some irrational things for a second.
Sorry, just make a note here. Hasn't strangled anyone?
Okay, that's good to know. Just making a note of that, because I need to know how far I can push you.
No, I'm just kidding. It's mostly verbal.
Sure, sure, I understand.
Because you'd mentioned that in the dorm situation it didn't work out that well, and again, without any names, what sort of happened there?
Oh, that's a long story, actually.
I ended up having two roommates.
My first one I knew in middle school for a little while, and I thought it'd be cool to get to know her better, because she ended up going to the same school as me.
I thought that was pretty cool, but it turned out that she was pretty clinically delusional.
There was some One of the things that sticks out in my mind the most is that when we moved into the dorm room, I guess she thought that someone was coming into our room and going through her stuff, so she started piling up things and making stacks, and then she'd take a picture with her cell phone, and then we'd go out and come back, and she'd compare the picture on her cell phone to the stacks, and she'd be like, see, someone was in here, and it's like, well, I love you too, but...
So I couldn't take much more of that.
She'd wake me up at 3 in the morning to drive her to the hospital for pretty much no reason.
And she was always having anxiety attacks.
I'd come in the room and she was crying.
So I had enough of that.
You'd known this person since middle school, you said?
Well, I knew her a little bit in middle school, which she seemed normal then.
But I didn't know her, know her.
Sorry, and I'm just going to pause for a moment here.
Because you used the word normal with regards to your superstitious parents as well.
What do you mean by that?
What do I mean? What I mean is that earlier on, very early in this conversation, when I was asking you about the earliest times that you realized that your parents were superstitious, crazy, mystic heads, that you said, well, it just seemed normal to me, right? Right.
And here you just said, well, this girl seemed normal.
And I'm just sort of trying to...
Highlights these two uses of the word normal.
Not to try and trap you or catch you or anything like that, but just because if it's normal, if this kind of mysticism is normal for you, the great danger is the future.
It's not the past. The past is not.
But the danger is that you have a word called normal that embraces some pretty not normal...
And there may be average and you go to these psychic fairs and there's thousands of people there and so on, but they're all freaks, to use a technical term from...
No, they are. But I mean, this is not normal.
And by normal, what I mean is to have a healthy relationship to reality, not to society, not to the other people at the psychic fair or all the other weird psychics who come over, but to have a healthy relationship with reality.
And I guarantee you that the girl that you even knew tangentially in middle school had all the characteristics that later showed up when you had her as a roommate and that there was nothing particularly shocking or surprising here.
And also that you were unable to set boundaries with this girl because of your experience with your family.
Because the one thing that seems to be the true in your family is that you're not allowed to have your own opinions, right?
You kind of have to smile, as you say, and nod and pretend to go along, right?
Mm-hmm.
So you don't have a lot of experience, and of course, there's nothing to feel bad at.
It's just you were never taught.
Like, I was never taught Mandarin, so I can't speak Mandarin, right?
But if I'm in China, I've got to learn the language, right?
So you were never taught, like, I don't like this.
This is not acceptable to me.
This is not preferable to me.
This is not acceptable behavior.
This is not going to happen, right?
I mean, this is not like...
Like, if somebody wakes you up at 3 o'clock in the morning and says, who's a hypochondriac, and says, drive me to the hospital...
You don't immediately get up the next morning and say, I can't live with you, I'm going to get another...
Do you know what I mean? There's a part of you that's going to get sucked into this as long as you're in contact with your parents because then you're saying, these crazy people have value to me and I can't set up boundaries with them because I can't set up boundaries with my parents and so I've never been taught how to do it.
I can't do it and so you're forever going to be trapped in this underworld of people who are going to be forever crashing through any kind of reasonable personal boundaries.
I didn't think about that at all.
Wow. Well, and you're trained not to, right?
As I always say, I don't know if you've listened to any of these conversations, but I always say that there's a point where everybody feels retarded.
Is this this point for you?
Yeah. Okay, good, good.
No, because if we don't get there, then it hasn't been a successful conversation.
So unless I can actually make people feel retarded.
And look, I spent two years in therapy three hours a week feeling retarded about 80% of the time, so I understand that there's nothing wrong.
You're just trained not to see this stuff, right?
Yeah. You're trained not to have your opinions and have them mean anything to people, right?
I mean, parents should be soliciting their children's opinions in the same way that they don't feed them ball bearings and marshmallows and cheesecake.
Parents should be soliciting their children's opinions so the children learn that their opinions mean something and have an effect on the people around them.
Not so you just dominate or dictate or my way or the highway, but Parents need to solicit their children's opinions, but of course your opinions were fundamentally dangerous to your parents' false self, right?
To their fragile egos, their mysticism.
So your opinions were a threat to people.
Your boundaries were a threat to people.
Because mysticism is the ultimate, I don't have boundaries even between me and...
It's a totally ego-less situation.
It's highly fragile and highly volatile, which is why there's such virulence and temper on the far side of this hippy-dippy, one-with-everyone thing.
It's like, I'm one with everyone until they cross me, and then I'm going to screw them royally.
And so, in this situation, you're not taught how completely bizarre it is for somebody to be taking photographs and then comparing them and saying, ha, you know, someone has moved stuff or whatever.
You don't have at the moment the ego strength, and there's no reason why you would, but it's something you need to work on, again, with a therapist or counselor.
The ego strength to say...
I'm never living... Like, the moment somebody displays behavior like that, or is even within 10 miles of behavior like that, I am gone before...
Like, don't let the door hit you on the way out, kind of thing, right?
That's the kind of situation that the longer you're in touch with your parents, and particularly the longer that you live there, the harder that's going to be to undo.
Now, I mean, for the practical side, we'll get to in a second, but I just wanted to get your thoughts on what I've been saying there.
Um... Well...
I need just a second.
Okay, but just one second.
Now go! No, I'm kidding. Take your time.
It rings really true, actually.
I can think of a lot of times when that rings true.
It's mostly with friendships.
It's very, very hard for women, right?
Because, I mean, you all get the additional burden of having to be everybody's smiling slave, right?
So it's even harder for women.
But tell me a little bit more about what you mean in terms of your friends.
Let's see.
I guess none of my friends were really, you know, had...
They weren't exactly entirely respectful to me.
I've had a lot of manipulative friendships, which is probably my fault, again, pointing to this, because I just kind of don't draw the line.
I don't stop when I should.
So I'll get dragged into things like...
Having to take someone to the hospital because I stuck around for a while or...
Just like if we get in an argument and they say something that's, you know, really wrong but they say it with the right kind of tone, I can't say anything back.
And so I don't get to say what I wanted to so our friendship kind of gets ruined because...
Because I never told the truth at the right time.
That's a reoccurring thing, I guess.
It's all coming at me at once.
Absolutely, absolutely. And I'm going to throw something else in there because you are a robust lass who can handle a lot.
But the thing that I really got out of the last thing that you were saying, and you'll have a chance to listen to this, of course, but...
It's astounding, but not astounding, just how harsh you are on yourself.
So you say, well, it's my fault.
And you say, well, I didn't tell the truth.
And you say, well, I ruined the friendships and so on.
And that seems to me to be entirely not the case.
If there's one thing that I could pry off you at the moment, it would be the lack of sympathy that you have for the things that were inflicted upon you.
We're all born with egos and with strong preferences and the desire to have those preferences hold sway, not tyranny, but to have them.
You see 18-month or 24-month-old toddlers It's not called the terrible twos for nothing.
It's because they have a willpower and it's a strong willpower.
Again, it's not necessarily domineering or dictatorial, but we're all born with these desires and with these boundaries.
That's healthy. That's natural.
To use an extreme metaphor that is not totally appropriate to the state of your soul, if your parents Didn't feed you enough calcium and your bones were brittle, right?
You wouldn't say, well, I'm not going to try out for the ballet because I'm too cowardly, right?
Yeah. You'd say, well, I can't do the ballet because my parents starved me for the proper nutrients and my bones are a little brittle.
I've got to work to make them stronger until I can do that.
But you wouldn't say, I'm just chicken, right?
No. No. Right.
So, what I'm sort of trying to say is that there's two layers to understanding this.
Well, I guess three, right? The first one is to say, well, I wasn't taught how to have preferences mean anything.
Right? I'm supposed to just be there as an empty, smiling slave for anybody who needs me.
And, of course, the only people who will try to exploit you in that situation are bad people.
So, being that empty vessel only invites empty people to come along and fill it, so to speak.
So, there's that level, which is where you say, well, I just was never taught how to have opinions and have them mean something and have preferences and to have standards for reasonable and unreasonable behavior and so on.
That's the first level.
You say, well, I wasn't taught, so whatever, right?
But that's not the real truth.
The real truth is that you have these things naturally.
And you still have them.
It's called the truth self.
It can't be killed while we're alive.
And the reality is that your parents constantly attacked that in you.
And continue to constantly attack that in you.
So it's not that you weren't taught.
It's that you were trying to learn the whole time, and they were attacking you any time you got close to expressing that natural state of being, which is to have preferences and to have boundaries.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah. Yeah, it does.
So you have the capacity To speak your mind.
And we know that because you feel afraid of doing it.
If I was some great singer and every time I thought about trying out to sing on some whatever stage or opera, I'd get really nervous because I could do it.
Whereas I don't feel particularly bad or anxious if The nine-year-old lead for the nutcracker who's a girl comes up for the audition because I can't do that for 12 million different reasons.
So we only feel anxious when we have the capacity to do it and we want to do it.
Anxiety is desire.
It's the same thing.
It's just thwarted desire.
So the reason that you feel, and that's why I asked that at the beginning, right?
The reason that you feel anxious about speaking your mind with your dad is that you desperately want to, right?
Yeah. Now, can I leave you with one last thought?
Mm-hmm. This is the theme, and I'll get into why this is the theme next week, but your parents lie for a living in the mystical side of things, right?
They lie and they harm people for a living.
Psychologically, they'd be sort of akin to hit men, so to speak, because they come in and they detonate people's relationship with reality over and over.
When you speak the truth to your father about his exploitive mode of living, he feels anxious, because he knows the truth, and he gets angry at you, which you think is unfair, right?
Yeah. It's unreasonable.
It's not right. It's not the right behavior.
Now, what happens is your dad feels anxiety, right?
And then avoids that anxiety by lashing out at you, right?
Right. So, acting to avoid anxiety at the expense of other people is not a good thing, right?
I mean, that's something which we would not generally say is ideal behavior, right?
Mm-hmm. The reality is that the worst thing that your parents have taught you is nothing to do with mysticism or even a lack of boundaries.
The worst thing that your parents have taught you is that you should use other people to manage your emotions.
So when you feel anxiety about speaking your mind, you don't do it, right?
So you change your actions to manage your anxiety.
Yeah.
Which is the worst lesson that you got from your parents.
Right? So, in a sense, you lash in.
And this is the typical, right?
And I don't mean to diminish this, right?
I know it's very, very powerful and important for you, and I respect that.
Right? But the typical pattern is that men lash out and women lash in, right?
So, your dad says...
You're a bad person for bringing this up because it makes me feel anxious, right?
Or it makes me feel upset or it makes me feel bad.
And you would rather he just be honest with you and say, what you're saying makes me feel really bad.
I wonder why that is, right?
That's the honest response, not lashing out.
But then when you feel anxiety or fear, you also change your behavior and you don't say what's on your mind.
And by changing your behavior to manage your anxiety, you're simply inviting that anxiety to repeat itself over and over again for the rest of your life.
It doesn't have to be that way.
But by not speaking the truth, you're using your parents.
You're avoiding the truth with them, right?
It's a subtle kind of manipulation on your part.
And the reason I say that is not because you're a bad person.
I mean, I think you're a fantastic person.
I think you're doing incredible and excellent and beautiful and wonderful work.
But when you have these friends around you who are similar to your parents, right?
Invasive and they don't listen and they just get bullying and manipulative and so on.
When you obey them, you're doing exactly the same thing.
You're manipulating them, too.
Because you bring them into your life to reinforce this principle that you never have a voice, and then you don't have a voice, which actually harms them.
To drive a hypochondriac to the hospital does not help the hypochondriac.
That's getting... The drunk a drink, right?
It's getting an alcoholic a drink.
It's getting a drug addict their next hit.
It's enabling, and you know that, right?
I'm telling you anything you don't know.
And that's as manipulative as what was done to you, but you have a choice now, right?
Because you know, and of course you have the strength of character to hear something like that, which of course is not easy to hear.
here i understand that and the reason that i say that is that you can gain control of this behavior and live a different kind of future than what you were programmed for i think she fell asleep i'm in deep thought Well, you don't have to process it all now.
Heaven knows that people say that they listen to these things a dozen times over and they still can't believe how much I talk.
But this is a lot to absorb, right?
And of course it is not even an hour, right?
But that's the part that I really wanted to talk to you about, right?
To give you some clear moral delineations about the nature of your family.
And you don't have to move out tomorrow, but the important thing is that you just start noticing how you feel when you're in the presence of your parents, right?
Because your gut will tell you everything that you need to know.
And that it's very, very important not to spend your life afraid of speaking your mind because people will get upset.
I know that it's very tempting, and in the short run, it feels like a really great thing, right?
It's like, oh, you know, I can avoid this, and everyone's happy, right?
Women kill with peacemaking, right?
I mean, they really do.
They keep the truth from a lot of people, and men do too, right?
We were just talking about you. But you can speak your mind, and you should speak your mind, and you should have the people in your life who respect what it is that you have to say, even when you make a mistake, and who will tell you the truth and welcome the truth, even if it's uncomfortable, right? Yeah.
That would be lovely, actually.
Sure. We don't want to spend our whole lives like frightened mice, right, hiding under the bushes, hoping that we're not going to get trodden on and hoping that we can just somehow slither our way across the field without, you know, somebody catching us and hurting us or whatever, right?
We don't want to live that way.
It's how we're all told to live.
And it's how we're all programmed to live.
But we don't actually have to do that.
You can be somebody who speaks her mind and is respected for it.
It's not easy to get there, but it's absolutely worth it.
That's helpful. What do you feel now?
Emotional. Good emotional or?
Yeah. Yeah, because I didn't really think about it at all, so that helps.
That's answered a lot of questions for me, so...
Okay, just try and stay with what you feel.
Listen to this a couple of times, and if you'd like, we can chat again before you chat with your dad or make any decisions.
You know, if you think it would be helpful, I'm more than happy to do that, because, I mean, you've really got an amazing brain, and you've got, obviously, an enormous amount of potential to live a really happy life, and...
I think it's important for me to talk to the next generation of moms before they become moms.
If that's your direction, I don't know.
Anyway, is there anything else that you wanted to say now, or do you want for me to stop talking?
No, I think I'm satisfied.
Very, very satisfied.
Okay, great. Thank you. If you could just hang around at your friend's place for a little bit, I'll compile this and send it, and then you can listen to it again.
I think this is useful enough stuff that I'd like to broadcast it as a podcast.
I'm going to take out the bit where you talked about your mom's occupation, but have a listen to it and let me know what you think, and just get back to me.
Okay, thank you. Thanks so much.
I really appreciate this. It's a great conversation.
▲
Export Selection