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Oct. 28, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

02:12:24

894 Sunday Call In Show Oct 28 2007

Reactions to FDR books, late-life defooing, surviving a breakup, and how to get the most out of therapy...

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	Well, thank you everybody so much for joining.
	This is Stefan Molyneux.
	It is the 28th of October 2007.
	Thank you for a wonderfully kind donation this morning.
	Half a kidney and a firstborn.
	I take all forms of currency.
	This is more for the Saudi Arabian market.
	And thank you so much for those who've been...
	I'm snapping up the books.
	It's interesting because it seems to have very little correlation with when they're actually released, which is quite interesting.
	But that's good. I'm not going to complain.
	I have a short topic to start with, and then I'll turn it over to the fine listeners.
	Donations, of course, always welcome.
	I really do appreciate that.
	My books are available. If you can't afford the book, let me know.
	I will get it to you for free.
	If you like it, pay me when you can.
	This is Anarchy in Action, economically speaking.
	So this is a no-risk proposition for you to get a hold of any of my books.
	It's completely risk-free for you.
	What have you got to lose?
	If it turns out that they're mad, insane, deranged, and utterly wrong, Then you can jump out of this conversation and save yourself a lot of time and energy and MP3 battery life.
	So, it's a risk-free thing to get a hold of these books, and I strongly, strongly, strongly urge you to get a hold of, particularly on Truth, if you're looking at applying the philosophy to your personal life.
	And to the UPB book if you want a more theoretical understanding and for sheer mad, dare I say, funny entertainment value, The God of Atheists is the one to go for.
	So I'm just not going to ship you more than one for free, but pick one and you'll get it free.
	Pay me if and when you like.
	That's the deal here, and I hope that you will take me up on it.
	I wanted to start because there have been some comments, questions, issues on the board around people's reactions to books that you're giving to them.
	So people will buy a book on truth for someone and then will be surprised if the reaction is negative.
	And that I can understand.
	I absolutely want you to buy the books, but I don't want you to buy the books And give them to people who aren't ready for this part of the conversation.
	This is surgical, right?
	The spread of the conversation, this conversation, this philosophical conversation, the spread of this conversation is surgical.
	It is precise.
	It's going to require a very full, almost florid awareness of your friends and where they are on your part.
	I can't do it for you.
	That's your job to do.
	And it is important that you get the book to the right people with the right preparation.
	I don't fool around when I talk about the beginning of On Truth and for those Who don't recall the first paragraph or two of On Truth, I will repeat it for you here so that you remember that I don't write stuff for dramatic effect.
	I write stuff that I mean.
	And the first two paragraphs of On Truth run thusly.
	From a short-term, merely practical standpoint, you really do not want to read this book.
	This book will mess up your life as you know it.
	This book will change every single one of your relationships, most importantly a relationship with yourself.
	This book will change your life even if you never implement a single one of the proposals it contains.
	This book will change you even if you disagree with every single idea it puts forward.
	Even if you put it down right now, this book will have changed your life because now you know that you are afraid of change.
	This book is radioactive and painful.
	It is only incidentally The kind of radiation and pain that will cure you.
	I don't mean that dramatically.
	I don't mean that lightly.
	And it's important to you, if you want to be an emissary for this conversation, to be sensitive to the people that you're sending the book to.
	You ask them about their history, you ask them about what kind of books they like, and if they're really into Deepak Chopra, then this probably will not be the place where you want to send these books.
	You want to think of these books like hand grenades, let's use a nice masculine military metaphor.
	You want to think of these books like hand grenades.
	And you're going up against a whole infantry division that is hunkered down in those little pillboxes, you know, those concrete...
	They're like sort of concrete cylinders with little slits out with machine guns.
	You've got three hand grenades, let's say, or five hand grenades.
	You don't just sort of blindly lob them anywhere and hope that they go into one of those little things and clear the way for you to get through.
	These books are powerful.
	They are volatile.
	And they are confrontational in a way that is hard to remember since you've been part of this conversation for a while.
	So don't just lob them randomly.
	I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but it is important.
	I mean, if you lob one of these books wrong, you make the conversation tougher, right?
	If you lob one of these books wrong, you make the conversation tougher.
	Because the fewer people that we have out there eye-rolling the free-domain radio conversation, this philosophical conversation, the easier it's going to be for the conversation to spread.
	So aim these books.
	Aim these books.
	It's not like, oh, this guy read a self-help book.
	I'm going to send him this book and then see what he thinks.
	That is throwing the hand grenade blindfolded and, in fact, it's more likely to go off in your hand than to do any damage to anyone else.
	If you want to use the books to test a relationship, in other words, if unconsciously you believe that a relationship is not going to move forward in the bounds of a philosophical or meaningful conversation, intimate conversation, then you can just send them to a podcaster or two or just talk to them.
	I mean, the best way to drive off people who can't handle your true self is simply to be honest with them, right?
	And relentlessly, in the real-time relationship paradigm, just be relentlessly honest with them.
	And that's the way to do it, right?
	Don't drag me into it, so to speak.
	And don't put these books in because wherever you put these books, wherever you join people into this conversation, it's going to have a very strong effect on how quickly this conversation spreads.
	So, you know, given that you can't...
	I wouldn't mind, but I'm not assuming that everyone's going to throw a thousand books around their town or city in order to find the five people who can handle the conversation.
	I would say, have people earn the books.
	Don't inflict the books.
	Don't push the books on people.
	You can't change people just by giving them information, particularly explosive and confrontational information like this.
	And if you haven't listened to the podcast where I was talking about The brittle bones of those we play with.
	Listen to that. That's a recent podcast.
	And just be careful where you put this stuff.
	I mean, this is explosive stuff.
	This is unprecedented stuff.
	And this is stuff that is counter to a lot of the self-help movement that's out there.
	A lot of the self-help movement that's out there is around disconnecting emotion from action.
	And it does it through one of two ways.
	So the way that it disconnects emotion from action is it either says that you should reject your emotions, in other words, don't get angry, just rise above conflict and be there for people and just be their whipping boy if they need it and so on.
	And another way that the self-help movement Disconnects emotions from actions as it says, well, okay, you can feel your anger.
	You should write down a letter and then you should never send it and you should never confront and blah, blah, blah.
	But that's... And people will pay an enormous amount of money to have the uncomfortable fact that their emotions are actually propelling them to do something, to act, to help and save themselves.
	They will pay an enormous amount of money to have people say, That they don't have to, right?
	The natural stimulus is to be honest with people, right?
	And that's what the emotions that they're designed to do.
	So if you're angry with someone, you say, I'm angry with you.
	This doesn't mean that you're a bad person, but it does mean that I'm angry with you and we'll be honest with you about it.
	And that is our natural desire and our natural bent.
	That's very frightening to people, to actually be honest, because of our histories, because of the ways we were treated in family, church, school, and the way that we're treated by the state.
	The pseudo-consultation of the democratic process.
	So, what I would suggest is that...
	That you are honest with the people around you.
	You recognize that an enormous amount of what is called the self-help movement is around getting people to not feel, to not be honest with their emotions, or if they are, to never act on those emotions in a way that is productive and positive in terms of getting toxic people out of their lives.
	So just all I'm saying is this is a case Ready, aim, fire.
	When it comes to these books.
	And maybe even to the podcast of the conversation as a whole.
	Because every time that you miss, it's not good for the conversation.
	I think. This is my opinion.
	You certainly never know what you think.
	So you don't want to be like, ready, aim, aim, aim, aim, aim.
	You also don't want to be fire, aim later, right?
	You want to go through that sequence.
	Figure out who it is you want to share this stuff with.
	Validate that it's something that they can handle.
	Because it's also bad for you.
	Like if you send, as some people have, a copy of Untruth to someone, And that person comes back with a bunch of ad hominem nonsense, right?
	Like someone said, oh, that writer seems really angry.
	Like, that's not an argument.
	Or someone else said, well, it seems really elementary.
	And that also, of course, is not an argument.
	And the theory in On Truth is that when you criticize a mythology with logic, you will not get a logical response back what you will get.
	It's a mythological response.
	You will get the invention of storytelling that serves the emotional needs of the storyteller who he then, when he then mistakes this for logic.
	So just, I would really strongly suggest for your own happiness, Right?
	If you send ten copies of Untruth out and everybody comes back with like, it's stupid, the guy's angry, who is this guy, is some cult, blah, blah, blah.
	And I don't want these books and I don't want this conversation to make you feel bad.
	I want it to make you feel strong like Oxen.
	I want it to make you feel good.
	And that's not always easy, but there's things that you can do to avoid feeling bad and that would be one way.
	It's just to make sure that you have some idea and that you respect The ideas that we talk about in these books to the point where you will help somebody prepare.
	For an unprecedented and destabilizing introduction of philosophy to their lives.
	So that's just my suggestion.
	Obviously, be free to do whatever you like, but into the hands of people who are really going to relish and appreciate it in the way that you have and the way that other people have.
	But don't imagine that the book is going to do any work in your relationships.
	Don't imagine that any of my podcasts or any of my books or any of these calling shows or anything Don't imagine that this is going to do any of the work that you need to do in your relationships.
	As I say, always go and be honest with the people around you.
	And the last thing I'll say is make sure that you have credibility.
	If you're right in the middle of going through a defu process and you're destabilized and you're unhappy and you're tense and you're stressed and you're jumping every time the phone rings, that's not the time to say, hey, I'm part of this great conversation on the internet where I'm free.
	You know, if you... If you're an alcoholic and you come across a book that gets you to quit being an alcoholic, you don't hand that over while you're taking a drink, saying, oh, this book is going to whatever, right?
	Quit being an alcoholic and then tell people about this great book that helps you quit being an alcoholic because then they will be able to judge the effects based on your actions rather than words in a book, which always mean less.
	Then your actions, right?
	The best advertisement for Freedom in Radio, for philosophy, for this conversation is your life, not my books, not the podcast, not the board, not the conversations, not your thoughts about all of these things, not your moral arguments, not your logical arguments, not your emotional arguments.
	The only advertisement for philosophy that is going to have any credibility to the people in your life is your life.
	So, don't expect me or the books or anything else to do the heavy lifting for you.
	You have to inspire people in your life.
	To take a metaphor, if you're heavily overweight, the way to get people interested in a diet that you think is great is to lose the weight.
	Now, a lot of people, if you're around a whole bunch of people who are overweight like you, a lot of them won't want to know about this diet because they want to be overweight for whatever reasons.
	But a few of them will say, wow, I want that.
	I want that slender frame.
	I want that healthy body.
	And I'll do whatever it takes to get it.
	And I'm not going to make up excuses.
	And I'm not going to perform ad hominem attacks.
	And I'm not going to push something away because it threatens me.
	I'm going to work and embrace it and sweat.
	Those are the people that you want to get.
	And you're never going to get those people through words.
	You're only going to get those people through inspiring action.
	And kidnapping. But we'll get into that another time.
	Well, that's it for my intro.
	Thank you so much for your patience. Hey, not too bad.
	10 minutes? 15 minutes.
	I think we had one gentleman who wanted to talk about a challenging conversation that he'd had with his not-so-young father, if I remember rightly.
	Would you like to talk now?
	Yes. Hello. Hi.
	Yeah, I had my first quote-unquote defu conversation with my father this morning.
	Sorry to just let you speak at that interrupt, but for those who may be jumping into this conversation late, FOO is an acronym that's sometimes used in the mental health field for family of origin.
	The DFOO process is that in order to surrender your soul, money, and allegiance to the big chatty forehead, you know, I have to get rid of all the other relationships in your life, gather you into the nets of the cult.
	Wait, sorry. That's the back of the page.
	The front of the page is to have your conversations honestly and openly with your family.
	You try to be as real as you can with them and you wait to see what happens.
	And if you can't be real with them and if they reject who you are and everything that you value, then you have the option as a free and individual human being to not.
	Spend time with your family.
	So that's just an option that I put out there, which I encourage people to explore, not because I want to break up families, but because relationships should either be real or be gone.
	So I'm sorry for that interruption, but just to frame it for people who are joining later.
	So maybe I should start with a little bit, a brief background of my relationship with my father.
	I think that's great, but I would urge you to remember that free domain radio means that there's no such thing as brief.
	Well, I'm 47 and my dad is 82 or 83.
	My relationship to him was never close and it certainly hasn't been that way in the last few decades of adulthood.
	My phone calls, visits basically amounted to talking about the weather, how's work, the basic reporting thing and it's just boring.
	My father, when I was young, basically just ordered me around, ordered us all around, was angry a lot.
	I'm the youngest of four kids, yelled, had real problems with my sister, went into bouts of extreme rage with her about her boyfriends, which he didn't like.
	And then my oldest brother, I had run-ins with him.
	I was the youngest, so it seemed like by the time I got to my turbulent teenage years, he was spent being, you know, explosive and angry.
	So I kind of didn't get that directly, but I got it indirectly from listening to all that rage.
	Yeah, but it could also be the case that...
	It wasn't that your father had been broken, but rather that you had been broken in seeing what had gone before you that you weren't as confrontational.
	Right, exactly. I think so, for sure.
	It was certainly not a healthy environment to be in, to be hearing that stuff.
	I shuddered.
	And also another big thing that happened is my dad had real problems with my mother and would, in the kitchen, I yell and yell and yell and yell at her, real angry exchanges.
	My mom would just kind of whine and act helpless.
	I was probably eight years old or between six and nine or ten or eleven.
	It went on for a period of years.
	Where they would go into these big fights with my dad doing all the yelling and my mom just kind of whining.
	I was upstairs and I could hear it, but what I felt compelled to do was to step out of my room and sit at the top of the stairs and listen to every single word of it.
	And I know for sure that that, and I've done some work on this, that that was extremely damaging for me.
	I guess I blamed myself or something, I don't know, but that was very hurtful to be in that environment.
	And it was kind of strange that I felt compelled to actually go up close and listen to it every time.
	Sorry to interrupt you once more.
	If you want to just continue, that's fine.
	I can save these questions for later, but I'll ask them and then you can tell me if you want to answer or continue.
	The first question I have is, could you give some examples of what you thought about the extreme rage that your father had towards your sister?
	And also, if you could tell me why you feel that it was damaging for you to listen to your parents' arguments.
	The first question, an example of extreme rage towards my sister.
	This is kind of a question I have for him because I don't know exactly what it was about.
	I can't remember exactly what it was about.
	The only thing I can really remember specifically is that he would Call her boyfriends these bad names like punk or something.
	He really hated the fact that my sister was going out with these guys.
	I can't remember specifically what he was angry about.
	All I just remember is that the door would be closed, he would be in her bedroom and he would be screaming at her.
	And I could hear the muffled rage.
	I couldn't hear the exact content.
	Although outside, when the doors were open, it would be more about that punk.
	Oh, it's that punk again or whatever.
	And your second question was what?
	Oh yeah, about the... Yeah, you said that you felt that it was extremely damaging for you to listen to these conversations, these arguments that your parents were having, and I'm just wondering what your reasoning is.
	I'm not saying you're wrong, I just want to understand what your reasoning is.
	Right. I've done some things, gone to some seminars where you kind of go into...
	Feeling your feelings and kind of go into your heart and express those feelings.
	I was led into these feelings of deep sadness inside of myself and would let it out.
	When I would feel that, the memory of sitting, it was almost as if I was transposed to sitting on top of those stairs again.
	Does that make any sense?
	It certainly does.
	Can you tell me what your siblings were doing when your parents were fighting like this?
	I don't remember.
	They did not join me at the top of the stairs.
	I don't remember.
	It wasn't like they were in the kitchen, too.
	It was kind of like they might have been in their rooms with the door closed or maybe not even around.
	I don't know. It happened so often that they had to be.
	Sorry to interrupt, but I just have two more questions because it seems to me that your motivation for doing that and your subsequent motivation for judging it are pretty important.
	Can you tell me first whether you were afraid that your father might attack your mother physically?
	No, I didn't have that fear.
	He never did. Did you feel that your mother might blow up and attack your father physically or did you feel that there might be an escalation of the emotional brutality of the conversation to the point where the family structure or the parental structure might be threatened fundamentally?
	I don't think so. None of that really resonates.
	I don't think there was fear.
	Maybe there was because it's kind of a violent thing to have a man yell like that.
	But I didn't fear that he was going to explode even more.
	That's not what I was concerned about.
	I guess I was just concerned that it was happening at all.
	And I can't really explain why I was drawn to it, to actually, you know, not kind of run away from it, even though I couldn't have anyway, because you could hear it everywhere in the house.
	I mean, I can certainly tell you, again, what do I know, right?
	I'm just some guy up here in Canada, but I can tell you what my gut tells me, and then you can tell me whether it resonates or not.
	You are drawn to the facts of the situation, right?
	So you have a situation wherein, even by the standards of the time, a fairly extraordinary degree of verbal abuse and destruction was occurring within your household, and you did not want to turn your face away from it, but you wanted to know it, to absorb it, to understand, if not the causes, at least the experience of what it was.
	Yeah, I think so.
	And can you tell me a little bit about, and we'll get back to your childhood in a sec, but can you tell me a little bit about your adult relationships compared to those of your siblings?
	My adult relationships compared to...
	An easy question for you there, nothing too complicated.
	Well, I'm the only one who hasn't been married.
	I haven't had a long-term relationship longer than, say, three years.
	I don't know if there's much drastically different.
	Well, you say that they have gotten married, right?
	But you have not. Right.
	And you do understand, right?
	So when you're sitting on those stairs, watching your parents tear each other apart, that you are inoculating yourself against marriage, right?
	For a very long time, I was completely resistant to marriage.
	Well, and that's one of the results, right?
	I mean, if you see somebody sticking their screwdriver into an electrical socket and burning the shit out of their hand, you're not going to be very likely to put your screwdriver into an electrical socket, right?
	Right, that's exactly how I felt, at least subconsciously.
	Right, so you were inoculating yourself against...
	Now, I don't know enough to know whether you were inoculating yourself against that kind of relationship or against a committed relationship.
	Like, for you, if your parents defined a committed relationship as mutual, savage, primeval abuse, then you were inoculating yourself against a...
	Let's say a permanent monogamous love relationship by saying, I have to see this so that I don't do this.
	If doing this was getting married, then you didn't get married for that reason.
	If doing this was, I can have a relationship that is long-term monogamous but does not involve this kind of abuse and in fact involves the opposite of mutual love and support and devotion and happiness.
	Then that would be a different kind of situation.
	But it seems to me that it was more likely that you said, this is what a long-term relationship is.
	This is what it will always degenerate into.
	I need to see this so that I can avoid this.
	I think that makes sense intellectually, but I don't think that doesn't really resonate.
	But I do have a theory that I'd like to run by you.
	Oh please, yeah, look, I'm sure it's more like my stuff.
	And this is based on, you know, experience.
	My issues with relationships have been when a relationship with a woman became Intimate towards, you know, expressing and feeling love when it got to that point.
	Like, for instance, I had a girlfriend say to me, you know, after we've been going out for a while, you know, how come you never say I love you to me?
	And that... Totally blew me away and that's maybe not a great example, but when I feel real love towards someone, it's painful.
	That's where I think happened to me by being in that environment, by being in the intimate environment of family where I needed A loving environment.
	What did I get? I got an environment of rage and hurt.
	So my experience has been, when it comes to feeling or expressing love to a woman, That feeling of love and wanting to express it really triggered these deep feelings of sadness.
	So when I had these feelings of love and these feelings of sadness were triggered from it, when this first occurred, I ran like hell.
	I broke up with a lot of girlfriends because I didn't want to feel that.
	It took a while for me to realize that, hey, This is something that's going on that I need to deal with.
	So that's my theory and that's what I think my childhood, that was the effects of my childhood.
	Does that make sense? It certainly does.
	Let me ask you this. Who owned the word love when you were a child?
	Nobody. The word love was never talked about in my family.
	The word love was never spoken in my family.
	I don't think I ever heard... Parents never said that they loved each other.
	They never said that they loved you.
	No, no, no, no. Well, what did they say?
	They loved me? Oh, they may have said it.
	Not in any meaningful way, you know.
	No, no, I'm aware of that.
	But the reason that I ask is, you know, if my mother never used the word flibber to gibbet, I would not be afraid of saying the word flibbity gibbet, right?
	Because I would have no particular emotional associations with that word.
	The reason that I asked who owned the word love is that the word love must have been used either consciously or unconsciously in some form In your family, for you to associate your family behavior with anything to do with love.
	Does that make sense? Like, if you avoid your family, which is what you staring at your parents fighting, is like, I want to avoid this in the future.
	If you then conflate that with the word love, then you will also want to avoid love, right?
	So love must have been bound up in your family consciousness, in your experience of your family.
	In some way, they owned the word love, and by avoiding them, you also ended up avoiding love.
	Does that make sense? Again, intellectually it does.
	I still don't know how to answer who owned love in my family.
	I can't make that. I'm struggling to make that connection, you know.
	And you could be right.
	I'm just sort of going on gut here, which doesn't mean anything other than sort of what my gut says.
	It doesn't mean anything to do with truth.
	But is your family, are they clannish?
	In other words, is it like, you know, my family right or wrong, family is everything, blah, blah, blah, that kind of stuff?
	Not really, not overtly.
	So, okay, help me understand then, if your family didn't express love, didn't express any kind of loyalty in particular, and did not seem to require as a virtue your attention, and you saw the fights...
	I'm just trying to put the puzzle together, right?
	So, if you saw these terrible fights and knew of this horrible abuse, then why are you approaching 50 still in contact with your parents?
	Like there's something that's missing there that doesn't quite connect for me.
	The only reason I can explain being in contact with my parents, I'm in the process of cutting off that contact, but obligation is the only thing I can come up with as far as that's concerned.
	So maybe that's a clannish part of clannishness.
	Well, but where does the obligation come from?
	Like, if your parents are, you know, I mean, they must be as bored by these conversations where you're talking about the weather as you are.
	And if that's what's gone on for years, I'm just sort of curious, what is at the root of why this relationship was considered to be necessary to continue?
	If there's no virtue in clannishness, if they don't own the term love, if you hated and feared your parents when you were a child, if they abused each other and you and your siblings, Where does the pressure to continue the relationship come from?
	Or the impetus, or the desire, or whatever it would be?
	I would have to put that in the past tense now, because I don't have that pressure.
	I don't feel that, I mean...
	Well, you're in the process, but certainly you have stayed in, pretty enmeshed in some ways with your family, long past your abusive childhood.
	So where does that come from, that impetus?
	Maybe that's clannishness, but it doesn't resonate.
	I don't really know what that means.
	There's no resonance there.
	You don't have to use my words, but you felt a desire to be in touch with your parents, right?
	Right. What was the story that said, it's bad if I don't, right?
	Right. I've given that a lot of thought in these last few months.
	Maybe I just didn't go past the obligation thing to see what else there would be, but I'm kind of at a loss right now as to what else it might be besides this obligation.
	What other story is going on there?
	Both my mom and dad didn't really care about me when I was a kid.
	They never asked me how I felt about school or anything like that.
	Instead of asking me, why did you quit the swim team?
	Instead, I got yelled at for quitting.
	Right. Sorry, what I'm guessing is that what occurred...
	I don't know if you've read Untruth, but this is somewhat in the book.
	Most of it, yeah. Yeah, well, what occurred is that your parents owned the definition of virtue.
	Your parents must have owned some positive definition.
	The only way that people can create multi-decade loyalty...
	In us, when they have abused us, is that they own the definition of the good.
	So, in some ways, it was defined for you as the good, as the moral, as the right, as the decent, as the responsible, as the good son, as the good child, as whatever.
	Your parents must have owned the virtuous, because there's no empirical reason why you'd want to have anything to do with these lunatics.
	Fear is probably what's behind all this because my dad used anger.
	I was afraid to...
	When I quit the swim team in high school, I hid from him.
	I couldn't tell him.
	I knew what his response was going to be.
	You're a quitter. Yeah, anger.
	But not anger.
	Sorry to interrupt. I really want to help you break this part out, because as you say, it's tough to find stuff to resonate in this.
	The anger... What was it?
	Like my mother. When I was a kid, I took a computer science class that was like five years ahead of myself, and she got a lot of mileage out of that.
	So she told all her friends, oh, my son is in advanced computer science, and he's only 12, and it's for 18-year-olds or whatever, right?
	And I found it to be incredibly dull because it was around disc readwrites and five and a quarter inch floppies and I wanted to program games.
	It had nothing to do with anything.
	So I just dropped out.
	And I hid it from her for months.
	But it wasn't because my mom was going to say, oh, you're a quitter, you're lazy, you're never going to amount to anything, you hunk of...
	You know, protoplasmic nonsense, right?
	It wasn't because of that.
	It was because she was going to get angry because she was now going to have to tell her friends if they asked that I didn't complete the course because she wasn't going to be able to lie or whatever, right?
	So she would get angry at me because she felt humiliated, but she didn't make it into a moral tirade about me.
	Like, she would never say, oh, you're just lazy and never amount to anything.
	But she couldn't because I'd had a job since I was 11, right?
	So she couldn't say it.
	But with your dad, the way he framed it was in moral terms.
	And not just like, you know, it would be nicer if or whatever, right?
	You are a bad person if you quit the swimsuit, right?
	So there was a morality there.
	This defines you as lazy, as a quitter, as a do-nothing, as a whatever-whatever, right?
	Right. Sorry to interrupt, but there is a moral obligation there then, which is that your father defines what is moral.
	Right. Because, you know, the logical response, I mean, not that any of us would have the balls to say this when we're teenagers maybe, but the logical response is, well, Dad, you're screaming at me at the moment.
	So do you think it's worse to quit the swim team or worse to scream abuse at your child?
	Like on the moral scale of things, quitting a team that you're not that interested in, where does that fit on your moral scale versus screaming at helpless children or bullying your helpless wife?
	Right, because he obviously would not be able to, but that would just cause a massive escalation and probably would result in physical violence at some point, if you kept it up, right?
	But as far as the moral standing goes, screaming abuse at a kid for quitting a swim team, which of course is a perfect right for any child to do, is nowhere on the moral scale relative to Sorry, quitting a swim team is nowhere on the moral scale relative to screaming at a child, right? Terrifying a child. Using your petty bullying as a father to browbeat a child and a sort of child woman who was your mother, right?
	Right. So his ownership of morality was completely abusive, right?
	He used morality because he knew that would make you feel the worst, right?
	Right. Right.
	And he didn't, I don't know if he necessarily said, you need to be this way to be good.
	He just, I think it was implied, you know.
	Well, what did he have said, or what did he say when he found out you'd quit the swim team?
	I don't remember the exact words, but it was bad to do that.
	It was, yeah, basically, I was a quitter, and you shouldn't be a quitter.
	You shouldn't quit. Right, and you asked him, well, maybe you should quit your rage.
	There are some things you should quit.
	You should quit abusing children.
	You should quit having proto-sexual jealousy scream-fest with your younger daughter.
	You should quit screaming at your helpless wife while your child is watching from the upper stairs.
	There are some things in which it is goddamn good to be a quitter, right?
	Right.
	So he owned the ethics.
	Right.
	And what you're doing now is you're trying to reclaim the ethics.
	And through that, you will reclaim the love.
	Right?
	The capacity to love.
	Because if for you, avoiding rage is the best that you can hope for, right?
	Obviously you don't love your parents, and obviously they never loved you, because you don't abuse people that you love.
	The moment you abuse them, it's clear that you don't love them, and you're just using them for ego gratification, right?
	So, given that...
	If a sort of, quote, loyalty and self-erasure on the basis of fear is your definition of a relationship that is worth your time, then any relationship which threatens that paradigm for you is going to be negative.
	I would suggest that it's not that you're afraid of loving women that you back away from this, but you're afraid of what loving women will mean about your relationship with your parents.
	Huh. I'll have to mull that one over.
	It's a very concentrated nugget I would have to kind of...
	Well, I mean, just to break it down a little more, I'm sure you could do it too, right?
	But just in case we can get anything productive out of shaking the old sand on the riverbed, if you had a woman who was, you know, gentle, kind, virtuous, sweet, wonderful, you know, curious, mature, and so on, what do you think she would say about your parents?
	Yeah, they're pretty awful.
	Would she put the word pretty in there?
	No, she would say, if she was the kind of woman that I deeply respected and loved, yeah, I would certainly hope she would say they were freaking evil.
	And then what would she say?
	What the hell are you doing answering the phone and whatever?
	Yeah, you know this script.
	It is tattooed in your very bones, right?
	Now, you're young enough that you can pull it off, right?
	You're not calling me when you're 70, right?
	So you're young enough that you can pull it off and you can have the life that you want.
	You're not too old to be a dad.
	You're not too old to... You can do it.
	You can do it. But you know exactly the script that would come out of a healthy woman's mouth when she saw you calling up your abusive parents.
	This is where my defu question comes in.
	I have no problems at all with my mom.
	I've already gotten into expressing my anger with her, not necessarily directly.
	I have no problem with just saying, Mom, don't call me anymore.
	But I haven't, you know, because I've already had my yell fests with her recently.
	But with my dad...
	You posted some of those on the board, so comment.
	Yeah, right. But my dad, it's different, you know.
	It's like, you know, I've been thinking this over for the last...
	I'm thinking over how I'm going to do this with my dad for the last couple of months.
	And, you know, there's a large part of me just...
	It doesn't feel like it.
	When I went and called to call him this morning, it wasn't really fear that I had to get through to actually make the call.
	It was more kind of like, I just don't care.
	I just don't, you know, I don't care to get in with my father that, you know, which is what I basically told him was, you know, all we talk about is, you know, with the weather and how's work, you know, and it's like, I know all I need to know about my dad.
	I don't need to extract anything out of him real time in order for me to just end the relationship.
	The hard part for me is just kind of out of the blue when he's 83 to just say, Dad, you know, fuck you.
	You suck. I fucking hate you.
	And I don't ever want to fucking talk to you again.
	And just, you know, that's really what I want to do.
	But, you know, and that's what I'm afraid to do, I guess.
	Maybe that's where the fears come in.
	I can say that to my mom, no problem, but for some reason, it seems like it's just being unfair to just spring that on my dad when he's 83.
	I don't know, but...
	Because it seems that there's a sort of false dichotomy here, which is always a sign of defenses, right?
	And the false dichotomy...
	I think I can tell you what you're going to say.
	It's like, what's worse, you know, my guilt or what he did?
	Isn't that what you're going to say?
	No, no, but that certainly was an excellent guess.
	That would be a good thing to say as well, but no, it's a good guess.
	But what I'm going to say is it seems to me that there's a false dichotomy here.
	And the false dichotomy is I either...
	surrender my history and my soul to my father in these draining, empty-headed, avoid-the-past conversations, or I scream abuse at him.
	Okay, go on.
	Well, there's not just two choices, right?
	This conversation, it's always about freedom.
	So you're free to define this process however you want it.
	And that would include screaming at him too, right?
	Or are you suggesting it's not healthy?
	I wouldn't say so. I wouldn't say that the way out of an abusive past is to be abusive to your dad.
	Right. Now, I'm not saying that it wouldn't be understandable, right?
	That's kind of what I wanted to say, I guess, when I was a kid, you know...
	No, that's not what you wanted to say when you were a kid.
	No, I guarantee you.
	What you wanted to say when you were a kid is, Dad, stop.
	You're frightening me. Right.
	Right. There's no need to do this.
	I'm a good kid. There's no need to scream.
	There's no need to terrorize us.
	There's no need to bully us.
	I want to love you as a son should love his father.
	I want to respect you as a son should respect his father.
	You do not need to act like a raging pitiful two-year-old.
	In a grown man's body.
	This is not the way to do things.
	This is not the way to get people to love you.
	This is not the way to get people to respect you.
	you should stop using us because it is terrifying us.
	Right.
	The rage is your dad's response to vulnerability.
	And your dad's response to vulnerability is, I'm in a situation that I cannot control, and because I cannot control it, I'm going to get angry.
	I have expectations about the world that are false and unrealistic.
	My children will be perfect, my wife will be perfect, nothing will ever go wrong.
	The moment that those expectations are violated, I get to pound the table, rage, and scream.
	Right. Which essentially is your father being stuck at the age of two or three years old because of his own parenting and whatever, whatever, right?
	Right. So, for you to rage against your father would seem to me more of a continuance of the pattern.
	Right. And also, of course, fundamentally, you would lose.
	Right. Because he would say, my children are bad.
	That's why he was abusive.
	My children are bad and they deserve this and I have to scream at them because they don't listen and blah, blah, blah.
	So if you then become abusive, then however justly you may feel, if you then become abusive to your father, it kind of indicates his whole philosophy, right?
	Yep. So, the options that I would put forward just as possibilities would be something like this.
	You don't have to talk to him again.
	You don't have to say a damn thing to him ever again.
	You don't have to pick up the phone.
	You don't have to go over.
	You don't have to answer any emails.
	You can change your number. You can even move if you have to.
	You can change your email.
	You can do whatever you want.
	You don't have to because getting mad at him about things that happened 40 years ago is still going to be blocking you from the future that you need to get to.
	The future where you can have a sustainable love relationship.
	So maybe you can have kids if you want or whatever it is that you want out of life.
	The less time you spend focusing on how to blow up about the past, the more you can spend paving your way to the future that you want, right?
	And none of us is getting any younger and we should get to that future as quickly as possible.
	This resonates with my gut feeling of...
	Sorry, go ahead. This resonates with my gut feeling of I just don't feel like talking to my dad.
	I don't feel like saying anything to my father.
	I just don't feel like it.
	It's what we call closure, right?
	Yeah. You're just like, I've got my own life to get on.
	This stuff happened 30, 40 years ago and it was a tragedy and it left me with scars and I've had to do a lot of rehab and it sucks.
	But at some point, I've got to just put that behind me.
	And I'm not saying, I don't know if you're ready or what, but at some point I've got to put that behind me and I've got to grab my own life and make my own choices, not dependent upon the brutality of the past, but to create some beauty in my future, even out of fashioning it from the ruins of my past.
	I can use those ruins to create beautiful things.
	You know, I've already basically defood to large degree, I think.
	Every year I've gone, paid for a plane ticket and flown over there and spent four or five boring days visiting them and the rest of my family.
	You know, and this year I just bought a plane ticket to, you know, a nice tropical getaway and I'm going to have a good time for the first time, you know, during Christmas.
	And so what it's been like is, okay, now I've defood, now I've got to somehow tell them.
	I guess there was this obligation that I needed to somehow inform them or justify to them that I don't want them in my lives anymore.
	Well, and if you've made the decision to defu or in a sense it's a decision that gets made for us by trying to talk to our parents and seeing how we feel.
	I've done all that. I don't think I need to I don't need to get into it with my dad.
	It's like 47 years of not knowing who the hell my father is other than a raging person who suddenly became kind of nice after we became adults.
	Well, after he lost his power.
	Exactly. That's what I'm saying.
	I don't need any more justification to get rid of my parents.
	I need no more whatsoever.
	I have all the information I need.
	So then the goal, if you don't mind me saying so, is to make this transition as trouble-free for you as possible.
	And to hell with their effort, right?
	They weren't that concerned. To hell with them.
	Period....feelings when you were a kid, and so you don't need to be concerned with their feelings now that they're old.
	I don't need to prove to them that they didn't love me and all this.
	No, and certainly begging from recognition from people who've abused you is a hole with no bottom that you will never be seen by the light of man again if you go down that hole.
	And you know that, right? That's why you're not going down that hole.
	You will never see any validation from people who abused you when you were a child.
	It's completely impossible because that would require for them to have empathy.
	And if they didn't have empathy for you when you were a child, they sure as hell are never going to have it for you when you're an adult.
	So the thing is to make the transition as easy as possible, and the way that I sort of have found it to be useful, and you can certainly take advice from others on the board who've gone through the same thing, is you say, you write a letter to your parents and just say, I'm taking some time off from the family for personal reasons.
	I will contact you when I'm ready to be back in touch again.
	So that would be to the siblings and everyone, too, because siblings would want to kind of angle in, too, probably.
	Well, it's your life, right?
	And you're more than half done with your life, so it all depends on how much time you want to waste on this stupid family structure that you accidentally got born into, right?
	Yeah. So I would say send it to everyone.
	Just say, look, for personal reasons, I'm taking some time off from this family.
	Just say, I'll be ready. If and when I'm ready to go, just say, when I'm ready to get back in touch, I will be.
	What that will do is it will buy you 6 to 12 months.
	Easy. Because people will sit there and say, you know, fine, whatever, right?
	But it won't ruffle their defenses.
	Whereas if you send emails or get into conversations with people saying, you know, you fucking assholes, you did this, that, and the other, what you're doing is you're closing the door before you get out, right?
	Because they're going to get all defensive, they're going to get angry, you're going to waste another six months feeling bad and getting upset and feeling rejected.
	You want to get out of the pool and they don't even want to notice the level of the water going down.
	And then by the time they catch up with what you've done, you're gone.
	Then they're just looking at an empty parking spot.
	Instead of keying your car, they're like, where did he go?
	We don't know.
	And then they will try and contact you likely.
	And, oh, your dad's sick or your mom's sick or they're dying and there'll be all this nonsense.
	The moment they have something that can hurt you, that can bully you, I mean, they'll do it.
	But by then, you'll have 6 to 12 months of building a new life.
	And you'll have the strength to just look at that for what it is.
	And it'll be hard, but that would be my suggestion.
	Whatever it is, you pick the lock at midnight and you slither out.
	You don't sort of kick the door in and say, you assholes, and set fire to the house, because they'll just come and chase after you.
	Yeah. Yep, makes sense.
	That was helpful. Thank you.
	You're very welcome. And listen, keep us posted about how it goes.
	I know that it's a bit of a Houdini move, but there's incredible stuff on the other side of it.
	And obviously you have a big heart and a big capacity for love, and you should really engage that in gear and go out and find somebody to love.
	Thanks a lot. I appreciate your time.
	I love you. Yes, absolutely.
	And without your parents in the picture, you will find that your heart will grow exponentially.
	Excellent. Thanks so much, I appreciate that.
	Is there someone else who has a question or comment that I'd like to bring up now?
	Yeah. Yeah?
	I'm still having a very difficult time with all this.
	All this conversation or what's going on with the Divine Miss R? Well, she's mostly out of the picture, in and out, getting her stuff.
	But there have been a few eruptions every now and then.
	The last one where she sits...
	That was a mess.
	She basically asks me what's wrong and then warns me not to criticize her and then turns right around and criticizes me.
	Just more of the same, but then I actually left right then.
	I was like, look, just get your stuff.
	I'm getting out of here.
	Right, so there's still a lot of...
	There's some hostility and some barbs flowing back and forth, right?
	Right, and... And what I'm trying to get through is not just that.
	That's the least of it all.
	It's just... I'm just really depressed.
	No, I understand that.
	Now, listen. If she were to come back into the room, burst into tears, and say, I want to join the FDR cult.
	Steph was totally right. You're totally right.
	I'm going to fix myself up and so on.
	Let's get back on track.
	How would you feel? Forget the stuff about me.
	You know what I mean? How would you feel if she did that?
	I would have a tough time believing that.
	Yeah, but I'm not talking about your belief.
	What would your heart do? How would you feel in your gut?
	I don't know.
	I think you do.
	It's okay if you're upset.
	I mean, these are feelings, right?
	They're not going to kill you. They're here to help, right?
	So how would you feel if she came back and threw herself on your mercy and said, I'm going to change and I'm going to make it better and let's go ahead?
	I would...
	That would be hard.
	I don't know. That would be really hard.
	But how would you feel? Doubtful?
	Yes, but it wouldn't be hard if you only felt doubtful.
	I'm doubtful about the existence of a god.
	That doesn't mean that a priest has any leverage when he comes in and asks me to come to church.
	So there's got to be more than doubt in that.
	Manipulated?
	I did.
	That's not a feeling. I would...
	Hopeful?
	Right. Right.
	Right. Right.
	You would feel hopeful.
	You would feel hopeful. You would feel like there's a possibility.
	I can tell you, having gone through a breakup similar to yours, where the woman and I were going to get married and then not so much, There's a time frame.
	Wait, Christina has to leave the room now.
	Just kidding. There's a time frame wherein you are both desperately hoping that someone can avert a crash that has already occurred.
	If that makes any sense.
	The reason that you get so mad at each other is because you both have some kind of hope that this thing can somehow still be averted, this breakup, or that someone's going to break down, or that the false self, she's hoping that you're going to break down, and you're hoping that she's going to break down, and that someone's going to give and rescue this thing from where it's heading.
	Does that ring true at all?
	That sounds like the case.
	Right, so when she comes in, a part of you, and there's nothing wrong with this, this is natural, but there's a part of you that's like, what's her mood like?
	Has she talked to anyone who's talked some sense into her?
	Has she read a book that has talked some sense into her?
	Has she listened to some magic podcast out there on the internet, maybe one of Steps, which has illuminated her and opened her eyes and, you know, Has she found the truth that I know to be true?
	And there is some of that whenever you guys talk and interact.
	Isn't that on your side? Definitely.
	Right. I mean, constantly, actually.
	And that's what makes these breakups so radically agonizing.
	It's that it is a continual breakup.
	And then when you don't talk for a little bit, you hope against hope that she's going to see something that is going to turn her around.
	And she, of course, is hoping against hope that you're going to see something that in her mind is going to turn you around.
	Right, right, exactly.
	And the agony that you're feeling is this perpetual rejection that is occurring because you are unable to accept what has happened, which is a huge thing that has happened, and I don't mean to minimize it, but you're not able to accept what happened because you keep turning to the short-term drug of hope in order to get through every minute, but that makes every next minute even worse, if that makes any sense.
	Right, and not only that, everywhere...
	Everywhere I turn in this house, where there's still things of hers left, it just makes it worse.
	How so? Well, I just see things of hers that just remind me of certain times or something.
	like certain good things that happened, and all the stuff which, you know, was genuinely positive, which was one of the reasons around you guys looking to take the step of marriage.
	Yeah.
	Yeah, there was a lot of good things, and those are the things that keep popping out and enshrouding everything else.
	When you say shrouding everything else, what do you mean?
	Well, there was a lot of good and a lot of bad things.
	And then I forget about the bad when I see these little things lying around the house, just reminding me of these times.
	Right. Now, can you just feel your forehead?
	Just with your sort of index finger?
	Do you feel a warm spot there?
	No. Okay, well you should, because what I've done is I've sighted a laser on your forehead, and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to pull the trigger.
	So I'm sorry about this.
	This is going to be unpleasant, but it will help.
	Alright. The question is, how is it possible to have good times with somebody who is the person we know?
	I don't know. Let me ask you this another way.
	Were the good times because her personality was different or your personality was different that you guys switched from being who you were to being the opposite of who you were, right?
	So you were having good times and your Nate won, right?
	And then you have bad times and your anti-Nate nine million or something, right?
	Like you're the opposite and the same thing with her.
	Um, no, she was really, really sweet.
	Well, sure, I understand that.
	I understand that completely.
	What were the circumstances around which she was sweet?
	Um, well, we were...
	We were out having a good time, or we would go places like New Orleans or Schlitterbahn or...
	Well, even Chicago was really fun.
	Yes, but why was Chicago fun?
	And I've heard those tapes, right?
	So, you know why Chicago was fun, right?
	I do? Yes, you do.
	Why was it fun?
	Well, how much fun was it when you and her and I chatted on the phone?
	Um, after that?
	Not fun at all.
	Right, I would say that by any stretch of the imagination that would be the complete opposite of fun for just about everyone involved, right?
	Right. Right, so the difference was it was fun in Chicago and it wasn't fun when you and her and I were talking on the phone for that hour and a half, right?
	Right.
	What was the difference?
	Um...
	It...
	We were talking about...
	About her?
	Well, we were talking about her in both situations.
	She was talking about herself in Chicago, and we were certainly talking about her during that conversation.
	I can't figure this one out.
	Well, I know. And don't feel dumb, right?
	This is the null zone that everyone gets to where they're not allowed to think these things, right?
	Greg, are you on the line?
	All right, he's just getting his mic.
	And the reason is that I don't want to, you know, you can listen to me or whatever you already have, but it'll be easy for other people who were in Chicago to tell you.
	Okay, I'm on.
	So, you know the answer to this one, right, Greg?
	And it's not because you and I are so smart, it's just because we weren't in the relationship, right?
	Well, sure, right. We can see other people's problems a lot easier than we can see our own, right?
	Right. And of course, no one's listened to the conversation that the three of us, not Greg, had.
	So that's not an issue.
	But you were in Chicago and I weren't, and Nate is saying that it was fun in Chicago, but it wasn't fun when I had the conversation with Nate's ex-fiancee afterwards.
	So what's the difference? Well, the difference...
	In a nutshell, the rest of us were too scared to call you guys on any of it.
	Sure. Sure.
	So the difference, Nate, is that when you were having fun, you weren't being honest.
	You were self-erasing.
	Oh. Yeah, that's right.
	You didn't... Nobody said anything.
	Right. So when your ex-fiance called me up with you and asked me a whole bunch of questions, then I gave honest answers and she got really upset and ran out of the room and this and that.
	And I wasn't being abusive.
	In fact, I was being quite sympathetic.
	But the difference was that just because I wasn't sitting there and it was easier for me from up here, But the difference was that you guys weren't pointing out inconsistencies.
	She was running roughshod over the conversation in Chicago, whereas when she asked me questions about certain things, I gave her honest answers.
	And when she said, well, why is it that people had some critical things to say about me when I was in Chicago?
	I said, well, it's because of these 12 reasons, right?
	And each one got worse and worse in terms of more and more unpleasant.
	They weren't any of them abusive and they were all supported by evidence and I certainly didn't put them forward in any hostile manner but I was answering a question but not being run around by her discomfort with the answers, right?
	Right, exactly. So when you're having fun with people It obviously can be because everything's going great and everyone's self-expressed, right?
	Everyone's fully self-expressed.
	And they're able to be open and to be honest and to say, oh, actually, this didn't quite fit for me or whatever, right?
	That can be one way in which everyone's having fun.
	The other way in which everyone can be having fun is when somebody who has some problems It's doing all the talking and other people aren't calling them on it because they're scared.
	And just speaking from that experience, I'm not sure I would define that as fun.
	No, it's not. It's fun for one person because they get to ride over the whole conversation and so on, but it's not fun, right?
	And so the question is, can we be honest and have fun with people?
	Can we be fully expressed When something doesn't feel right, can we say, this doesn't feel right?
	It doesn't mean it's not right.
	It just means it doesn't feel right. Let's talk about that.
	Can we be honest about the criticisms that we have of each other?
	Or are we all made of explosive glass right at the moment that we touch it?
	Things go up. One of the promo blurbs to come out of that weekend was, quote-unquote, I was in pain.
	That was for you? That was from somebody else there.
	Well, yeah, look, I mean, and it was, at least from what I heard, it was a relatively non-functional conversation, to put it sort of as nicely as I can, right?
	But that's the important thing, right?
	So everyone can have fun on vacation.
	And there's a honeymoon period in all relationships where everyone's getting along and nobody brings up any issues.
	Why? Because there aren't any yet.
	There aren't any significant disagreements.
	There aren't problems with the families, with the respective in-laws.
	There aren't challenges to do with money.
	There aren't challenges to do with planning.
	There aren't challenges to do with sex.
	There aren't challenges to do with...
	There aren't challenges to do with planning the next vacation.
	Everybody gets the honeymoon period in a relationship and lots of people make decisions in that honeymoon period that can't sustain moving past that honeymoon period, which is why it's not a good idea to get married too quickly unless you're desperate for a condo that you're And to be fair to Nate,
	we were being just as false by not bringing any of that up, by hiding behind the fear as they were in pretending it didn't exist.
	Nate brought his ex-fiance to Chicago for a reason and you guys let him down.
	Yeah. I mean, to be honest, right?
	That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
	Nate needed some visibility on something that he couldn't see himself because of his own history.
	So he brought her to Chicago for a reason.
	And she supplied that reason, I mean, in abundance, right?
	And you guys didn't step up, right?
	And that's okay. I mean, that happens, right?
	It's just important to know. But that's why it's more confusing for him now.
	Right. Yeah, I can see how...
	So, sorry, Nate, but just if you can tell me a time where you were able to disagree with this lady and feel comfortable.
	Um, at the beginning.
	About what? Um, well, just about anything, but like you say, it was the honeymoon period, and I think she was possibly just being agreeable.
	Well, but I'm guessing that you didn't disagree on anything fundamental that she then changed her behavior on, right?
	Right. It wouldn't be anything that she changed her behavior on.
	She would agree with things like, um, like a lot of your podcasts or, or, um, or, uh, what else?
	Just, um, some, the ideas that, you know, came out of some Ayn Rand stuff I had read and stuff like that.
	But she wouldn't actually change her life based on those values, right?
	No, obviously not.
	Right, and that's, I mean, you know, the important thing is self-protection in the future, right?
	That's a clue.
	I don't understand.
	Well, somebody agrees relatively quickly with ideas that they have not experienced before, and who then does not change their behavior relative to those ideas is doing a little something that Neville Chamberlain liked to call appeasement.
	Who's Neville Chamberlain?
	Oh, sorry. Geeky historical reference, the guy who surrendered most of Europe to Hitler in the hopes that Hitler wouldn't then continue.
	But if somebody just agrees with you and then doesn't change their behavior, what they're basically saying is your ideas are not important.
	Right, it's just...
	Yeah, like she would understand that the place she worked for was this Medicare, Medicaid type service that helped patients.
	She understood, or she seemed to understand that it was not charity.
	It was the opposite of charity.
	And even though, you know, it seems like it had good intentions, it really isn't good intentions at all.
	I mean, it isn't good at all.
	And she seemed to understand that, but she didn't change anything.
	Well, and that's, I mean, to some degree we can understand that we all have to make compromises professionally, but, you know, with regards to her family or her friends or whatever, right?
	If somebody just agrees with your ideas but doesn't change their behavior, they're just telling you to shut up.
	Or they're saying that it's meaningless, and this doesn't mean anything, and I'm just telling you that I agree with you so that you'll stop talking to me about it.
	Right, and then she would call me intolerant.
	And then if you bring it up again, they get exasperated, right?
	Right, right. And then she gets upset for me getting mad at her for being tolerant, which is...
	She was hung on this tolerance thing, which is why I wrote that whole spiel.
	Well, of course, which is fine, but tolerant people should be tolerant of intolerance too, right?
	Right. Logically, right?
	I mean, otherwise, being tolerant of tolerance is like being polite to everyone who's just polite, but the whole point of politeness is when people are rude, right?
	I mean, that's the whole point, right?
	But look, that's just something important to understand, because this is around self-protection in the future.
	Although it may not seem this way, at some point you will meet a fine lady who you will talk to about things that are important to you, and she should be curious, and then she should say, wow, this has implications for my life, and she'll have ideas that will have implications for your life, and then you will decide to implement good ideas from each other, and not just talk about them, and you won't feel...
	That you can't talk about them.
	You won't feel like you get, you know, 12 minutes of philosophy talk a day.
	And if you go to 1201, that's just too much.
	Like, enough. Right?
	You won't feel that. You'll feel that this is not a shallow cup that you fill easily.
	You will understand that this is a lake that, you know, the more you pour in, the deeper it gets.
	And that's all a good thing. So, that is just tough to look for in the future, whereas if you feel that somebody's saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, to your ideas, but don't really get it, and then when you bring it up again, they're like, no, we already talked about this, I got it, right?
	Then, of course, what they're basically telling you to do is to stop talking to them about this, because it's making them uncomfortable.
	But they're going to blame you for being persistent, or insistent, or dogmatic, or culty, or whatever, right?
	Right. Right, exactly.
	So, this Depressed, empty feeling I'm constantly feeling through all this is just a prolonged rejection.
	Well, you're prolonging the rejection by continuing to hope.
	The answer that comes that is around closure is when I say, if this lady were to come in and throw herself on the floor and beg and cry and scream to get back together with you, if you were to feel nothing but terror, Then that would be more closure, right? But if there's still desire, then you're continually re-inflicting a rejection on yourself.
	And I'm not saying that you could just snap your fingers and make all of that change, but the way to change is to recognize that the good times that you guys had after the honeymoon period were when you shut up and conformed.
	Exactly. And that's not a state to be nostalgic about.
	That's your childhood.
	Right, exactly. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
	And it won't make all the pain go away.
	You've got to still process through all the pain.
	But don't torture yourself with an illusory positive that was not there.
	I'm not saying you guys never had any fun.
	Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that everything was an illusion.
	I'm not going to call you crazy and say that you're just masochistic.
	I'm not saying that at all.
	What I'm saying though is that the fun in a relationship has to include productive differences of opinion and respect for each other.
	Even with all of my skills, I was not able to have a productive discussion with this woman where I disagreed with her.
	And that's just validation that very few people get from the outside in your situation.
	So... I'm not sure what...
	What I do now, I guess?
	Well, I mean, you just have to keep processing your feelings, but you have to negotiate with your feelings.
	You don't just let them run over you like a train, right?
	So if you feel really bad, and I understand that you feel bad and so on, but then you have to say, okay, well, why do I feel bad?
	Well, why am I tearing up when I look at that thing we got from the carnival ride and whatever, right?
	Well, you say, well, because that was so much fun and now all that fun is taken away and that fun could have been going on forever and blah, blah, then you're going to make yourself feel really bad, right?
	But you have to look at that and say, well, this is the same woman when X, Y, and Z happened.
	So why didn't it happen here?
	Because I wasn't questioning her.
	I wasn't having an opinion that was separate from hers.
	And so my choice was to either get into a fight or to be quiet and smile and be funny.
	And I don't like that choice.
	So that takes away some of the sugar from the past, which takes away some of the unhappiness in the present.
	That sounds about right.
	Yeah, I can probably do that now.
	Yeah, it's just about negotiating with your feelings.
	You don't repress them, but you also don't let them just run over you in terms of rank sentimentality, right?
	You examine your feelings and you engage in a conversation with them, and you make sure that you don't end up self-abusing yourself by being wildly positive about things that happened in the past, because then it's baffling as to how things turned out the way they did.
	Nate, this is an example of where cognitive therapy can be really helpful.
	When I talk about taking an opportunity to really look at the thoughts that are underneath the feelings and deciding whether those thoughts are rational or not, this is an opportunity to really do that.
	So if you look at, I don't know, what did you say?
	An item that you won at a carnival or whatever and you look at that and you think, oh my god, we had so much fun and it's going to be so sad and that she's no longer around, etc., etc.
	You then need to sort of stop and take a look at those thoughts and say, okay, but what else is happening here?
	That may be true, that the fun that you had on that particular day, and the fun that you may have had at other times in your relationship, but you can't separate that from the other aspects, like Steph was saying about the self-erasure.
	Use the cognitive therapy model where you challenge your thoughts, you challenge the underlying thoughts that cause the feelings, and if you can get a more rational reaction, then you're not going to have such an intense feeling.
	Yeah, I need to find another therapist again.
	It might be really helpful at this particular point to find a therapist to help you work through this, particularly since you're not going to be in a relationship.
	I would strongly, strongly, strongly advise that you really order.
	You're the only one I can order stuff.
	But I would strongly, Nate, advise you not to get involved in another relationship at this particular point.
	Just give yourself some time, a lot of time, to heal from this, to understand this, to process this, and to spend some time alone.
	Because by spending time alone, you'll also have an opportunity to process the feelings that go with that, so that you can emerge stronger.
	Yeah, I'm kind of terrified of being alone.
	No, I understand that, and of course that has a lot to do with your childhood and everything that's sort of gone on in your adulthood, but you don't want to, you know, sometimes we have to face the fear.
	You know, that which frightens us the most is the thing that we want the most sometimes, and I think you need to be able...
	I think that you need an opportunity to stand alone.
	You can't be in a relationship if you're not within yourself, and I know that's convoluted or a strange statement, but if you're not 100% you, and that goes for anybody, then you can't be in a relationship.
	Right. Right.
	A way of looking at it, Nate, that might be helpful is that if you can swim, then you can pick where you want to swim to.
	If you're in a lagoon and there are a bunch of islands around you, if you can swim, then you can figure out a rational goal of where it is you want to go, where it is you want to set up your tent or your shack or whatever.
	But if you can't swim, then you just have to grab at whatever is around that will let you float.
	And the problem has been that you have grabbed, partly because of your fear of being alone and so on, that you've grabbed at things pretty rapidly and without evaluation, without a sort of focused and patient evaluation.
	Whereas if you learn how to swim, then you can strike out and get to a destination that you want rather than just having to grab whatever's around to help manage your own anxiety because it just won't, I mean, as you can see, it doesn't work, right?
	Right, I'm kind of like a vampire.
	I feel so empty that I keep sucking the life out of people just to fill myself up and then I just end up empty again.
	Well, and of course you offer up as much blood as you take and everybody ends up, right, not doing too well.
	Right. Right, I'm...
	Yeah, I can see how this is worth it in the long run.
	It's just, it's not going to be easy.
	And it's not that easy.
	It's not, but you have to understand that the alternative to learning how to be alone and be happy, the alternative to that is this until you die.
	Over and over and over again.
	That's the only alternative.
	There's no... Third way, right?
	If you stay in the codependent state of mind, which was inflicted upon you by your bastards of parents and, you know, all rage towards them.
	But the only alternative to going through this process is more of this until you die.
	And that will scarcely make life worth living.
	Right. No, you're right.
	Totally right. All right.
	Well, keep us posted on how you're feeling and how you're doing.
	Stay in the conversation, of course.
	And I certainly, as Christina, find a good cognitive therapist who can help you at least process some of the feelings that you're having right now.
	And most therapists will be able to do this.
	You don't need somebody who's going to give you a multi-year situation.
	But, you know, a therapist who may be having some experience with codependency and social anxiety and so on is someone...
	Lots of people who can help you.
	They don't have to be, you know, they don't have to be Gustav Jung or Alice Miller to be able to help you with this, and I think that would be a very useful thing to do.
	Right. I think I've got another couple on the list to go see.
	One, I've got a lot of...
	Good recommendations for, so...
	I'm going to set that up next week.
	Absolutely well worth it. And, you know, you think you may spend a thousand bucks on therapy, but you know how expensive a failed relationship is all around, right?
	Yeah, very, very, very expensive.
	Right, right. But the only thing is it's a hell of a lot cheaper than a divorce and or alimony and or child support for the rest of your natural born life.
	So you still, I hate to say it, but, you know, financially, with therapy, you'll be getting off real easy.
	Right. Well, thank you, Steph.
	Oh, any time, man. Chin up.
	I know it sucks like a wetback, but you'll get through.
	And you'll look back and...
	Cursed the very day you started listening to my podcast.
	No, you'll look back and you will look at it as one of your proudest times to be able to get through this.
	All right. I think other people were in the queue.
	Is that right? Hello.
	Hello. I don't really know how to follow that.
	That was a really intense conversation with Nate.
	No, I'm just kidding.
	I just wanted to quickly say that I actually got angry with Nate on the board earlier this week.
	At the time, I thought I was being really expressive, saying how I felt and stuff.
	I actually think that I was not really taking into account that he's having a pretty tough time at the moment.
	He sent me a PM afterwards, and I just wanted to say I really appreciated that.
	I think you're going through some tough times, but best of luck, Nate.
	So, anyway.
	Sorry?
	That's very, very kind.
	Was there something else that you wanted to talk about?
	Yeah, I was going to talk about therapy.
	Excellent. I had an interesting discussion with Greg about my therapist.
	I am currently seeing a therapist I have been for since sort of mid-summer.
	This is the second one that I've tried and the first one I got referred to from my local doctor as Christina suggested.
	That wasn't very useful, the first one.
	It was basically a lot of this therapist saying to me, essentially sympathizing with me and saying, you know, that must have been really difficult for you.
	So we didn't really have a very good connection.
	But I got past, I then went to this second one, and I've had an amazing experience with it, really.
	Really intense.
	She is, she calls her, well her approach I think is called psychodynamic therapy and this is kind of odd for me because I'm very much a sort of empirical and science based person and I think this is much more at the, well less sciencey end of the therapy spectrum as far as I understand.
	It's a kind of It's what Freudianism kind of became as far as I understand.
	But it is something that I found incredibly useful because for me the whole purpose of doing this is about really understanding my subconscious better and getting more emotional certainty for myself about my feelings because I handle life on a rational basis Pretty well,
	I think, in terms of, you know, any objective measure of sort of being able to cope with the practicalities of life.
	That's all going really well.
	But the issues that I want to deal with are to do with my feelings and, you know, very much to do with my past.
	So before I talk about, before sort of telling you about my kind of concern I have with the therapy, I posted a bit about it on the board and I was a bit negative and it's partly because I was having a chat with Greg about it and I think after listening to the premium podcast today,
	I think I may have chosen to have a chat with Greg, about it because it might have been an opportunity for me to kind of let off steam about my concerns about my therapist and that may have been my, you know, my sort of thought in getting it started, but Greg...
	Sorry, just up until recently, Greg's shop of negativity was always open, so...
	Yeah, that's... And always...
	Customers, so...
	That may have been quite right, but please go on.
	That's why I wanted to say that it's not when he immediately said, oh, wow, how could she have done that?
	And oh, you know, because I think I probably, you know, probably asked him for a reason.
	So don't blame yourself, Greg, because it's not entirely you.
	But my concern about...
	Into the Prince of Darkness, and all I got was darkness.
	Sorry, go on. So, yeah, just before I say what my concern is, I mean, the way that this therapy has worked has been very much based around my dreams.
	And I have been having amazing dreams and just totally vivid dreams.
	And my subconscious has been offering these up, you know, pretty much before all these sessions.
	And actually, it's been really useful because it's been a great way to get Going on talking about things without over-intellectualizing them, which is my particular, probably my kind of defenses as well, similar to Greg's. But the dreams are, you know, are uncensored, and they're stuff that just comes up.
	So it's been really interesting, really useful.
	She's a very intelligent therapist.
	I had a lot of difficulty with her approach because she refuses to tell me pretty much anything about her qualifications, apart from the fact that I'm referred, she's referred through the doctor, so she's, you know, official and legit, if you like.
	But her approach is to say that that is my Conscious self asking for reassurance, and I'm going to have to learn to trust her on a subconscious level.
	And I sort of understand the argument, but it's a bit weird, because she kind of has quite elegantly dodged every question about her Sort of training and her qualifications and so forth and that makes me feel a bit weird.
	I think Greg mentioned that your girlfriend came with credentials though, right?
	She had a PhD in girlfriendy?
	Yeah, that's right.
	I remember you were saying I think to me at one point that until your girlfriend, and this is before you started dating her, gave you references and also pulled out her PhD and I'm a good girlfriend, you were never going to date her because there was just no way to trust her without those credentials.
	Is that right? Well, I made a written exam for that.
	Absolutely. Absolutely.
	I prefer the oral exam, but that's just me.
	Oh yeah, I really set that joke up.
	So, but yeah, I wanted to say that on the positive side, I think I've had a very positive therapy experience so far.
	And what kind of has upset me is that I brought an email along which I actually showed to Steph and to Greg which was one that was sent from my aunt and I found it to be a very bullying email about the fact that I don't see my parents and this is something that in combination with some of my dreams which many,
	many images of my childhood home and lots of things to do with my childhood come up in my dreams.
	And my therapist said to me, I think you need to re-evaluate your decision.
	She was talking about de-fooing.
	And I sort of said, why do you, how did you get that?
	Why do you think I need to re-evaluate the decision?
	And I didn't really I feel like I've got a very good response.
	It's quite difficult to remember the flow of conversation in therapy afterwards.
	It's often quite difficult to actually work out what on earth happened afterwards.
	There's just so much going on.
	But essentially she was saying that she thought it was interesting that I brought this other perspective from my aunt, and my aunt obviously has a very different perspective about me not seeing my parents.
	But she also said that in my dreams there are images of my childhood at home and going back to my childhood at home and these are not happy images.
	And somehow from this she came to this suggestion that I need to reevaluate by decision.
	And I really sort of felt uncomfortable with that because, you know, I feel very vulnerable.
	I'm going into this and I'm really trying to open up and I've certainly talked about a lot of difficult stuff that's happening to do with defooing.
	And she hasn't really given me a lot of active suggestions like that.
	So that one sort of stuck out a bit to me like a sore thumb because most of the other things she's talked about is interpreting what the significance of things are.
	And now I feel a bit confused because, you know, I feel like I've had a positive experience, but I also feel like maybe that, you know, deferring is such an explosive issue.
	And she is quite an old lady.
	It may be that she's had children.
	I have no idea because obviously I don't have any personal details.
	But it may be that, you know, that this is an issue that she herself is uncomfortable with because, you know, I don't understand how she gets the idea, and I have said, sort of directly to her, I just don't see how this is going to help me in my self-actualization, or just in my life generally, to see my parents' skin, you know, what am I going to get from that?
	And, you know, I feel, sort of, on the one hand I feel, I'm concerned that maybe she's got an agenda about this because of other issues that I don't understand because I don't know anything about her.
	On the other hand, I do know that I have a huge problem trusting authority figures and that this is a major issue for me in life anyway because of my particular experience growing up.
	So on the other hand, me not trusting her is It's part of the therapeutic process of me coming to terms with trust and so forth.
	So this is the situation that I'm in.
	Actually, it helped a lot writing about it on the board today because I'm basically going to go and talk to her again about this more directly next time.
	And tell her how I feel about it.
	But I thought it might be interesting to talk about just because I think the issue of defooing is pretty explosive.
	And this may be an experience that other people might have, you know, and, you know, it may be that this is entirely my issue, but it also might be that it's partly the therapist's issue.
	And I just wondered what you thought about that.
	Well, I would certainly trust your instincts on this but I would not allow this particular incident to sever, and I'm not saying this would be the case with you, I would not allow this particular incident to sever my relationship with my therapist.
	First of all, I'd like to tell you that I absolutely envy your dream state at the moment.
	When I was going through therapy and this whole carving the channel defu process alone, I never had and have never had in the years since the vivid dreams that I had during that process and I miss them.
	So I think that it's, you know, although the dreams can be very intense, relish them because I certainly have not been able to retain my capacity to have those dreams and they were a wonderful part of There was lots of stuff that sucked, but one of the oases were the amazing dreams that I had.
	So I envy that.
	That's a great phase to be going through, though it is a challenge.
	My experience was that...
	I mean, my therapist was a mystic who believed in yogic flying and had all sorts of fruit salad coming out of her armpits as far as her beliefs went.
	And the other thing that occurred with me was that in my...
	In my relationship with my friends and my therapist, just about everybody was comfortable with and could understand why I stopped seeing my mother.
	Almost nobody, almost nobody could understand or was sympathetic to why I stopped seeing my brother.
	And even my therapist for about a year I thought that I was engaged in some sort of hyper-masculine pissing match with my brother, and it wasn't until I hung tight and explored those options.
	It wasn't until I hung tough and explored those options that after a year, she got it.
	Now, did that mean that she was delaying my progress for a year?
	I don't think so. I think that when she got it, it was because I got it.
	Right? And there is a bit of push and pull when it comes to that.
	The other thing, of course, is that I accepted that she could be wrong on some things and still be on authority on other things, right?
	And she could even not know that she was wrong on certain things.
	And it's like, you know, I don't need my doctor to be a good rower, so to speak, right?
	Now, in this area, things are more sensitive and I don't mean to diminish what it is that you're saying about that.
	But I think that if you go through the process of actively mistrusting something that someone in authority is saying, but staying in the relationship, I think that could be very productive for you.
	Because no authority is ever perfect, right?
	I mean, no one is ever going to be able to tell you everything for sure, as you are never able to be perfect in your life.
	So accepting that she may have an agenda, but she's providing you with enough great stuff That even if you do end up reopening the question of defooing, you can explore that to the point where the next time somebody says, I think you should reopen that question, you can say, I don't think that I need to and I'm not going to, without any doubt or anxiety, if that makes sense?
	Yeah, yeah, no, that does make sense.
	And I did say to her, and it actually felt really good, because I said to her in the next session, Look, I really appreciate you trying to interpret that last dream for me, but it just didn't work for me, you know, what you were saying.
	I think we kind of had a bit of a red herring there because I just don't follow.
	And I think there was something else going on in the dream and so on and so forth.
	So I basically just disagreed with her without saying, you know, oh yeah, right, well you're fired then, forget it, you know.
	And... Right.
	You need to be...
	I mean, look, the most powerful thing that I did was change my therapist's opinion about my brother, so to speak.
	And I did that by bringing more information, by being willing to doubt myself.
	But by the time that you actually can convince your therapist, in a sense, of the justice of what you're doing, there's no doubt that will ever come into your mind about it again, if that makes any sense.
	Yeah, but I don't want to get stuck in a...
	You know, in being dependent on changing her mind about that...
	No, no, no. Sorry. Let me be a little bit more clear.
	I was absolutely unclear, so you didn't misinterpret anything.
	But what I mean is that if you are completely certain about your decision, then somebody saying you should reopen that decision won't cause you anxiety, even if they're in authority.
	Because what you're doing is you're saying, well, if she's wrong about this, what other agendas could she have?
	And maybe she's going to, like, from here on it's going to be a complete misdirection and so on.
	Does that make sense? Yeah.
	Right. But you have to trust yourself.
	If your therapist turns out to be wrong for you, you will know.
	And you will be able to navigate this simply by being honest about your doubts.
	Because what this is is an incredible opportunity to express your doubts about someone to that person.
	Yeah. Yeah. I think it's just that I just feel so like I've been attacked by people like my aunt.
	And so, you know, I kind of thought, well, at least, you know, this is going to be a person who's sort of above, you know, those kind of, So social norms that they're going to just tell me, oh, you need to do this because, you know, parents are parents, etc., etc.
	And I think I just felt vulnerable, basically.
	And it's like, oh, God, I'm not going to have to bloody...
	Defend myself against shaming from this person as well.
	And that's not fair on her because she hasn't shamed me.
	She's not afraid of being shamed.
	This is the opportunity that you have here, is that you need to be not afraid of being shamed.
	Let's say that you go in and she says, I went over to your aunt's place.
	I can't believe what a bad kid you are.
	You are the worst kid ever.
	You're long-suffering parents.
	You've totally betrayed them.
	You're a bad kid. Whatever, whatever.
	Let's just take a ridiculous example that she'd never do.
	But you need to not be afraid of that.
	I mean, we're always going to not, and nobody's ever going to like it or anything like that.
	But because shaming, of course, and I know this not just from your family, but from British culture as a whole, right?
	I mean, vulnerability is not front and center everybody's fun cup of tea in the British culture, right?
	There's a lot of savagery around vulnerability, particularly in the upper classes, right?
	So... So the shaming issue, right?
	If you're afraid of her shaming you, then you need to, in the therapeutic environment, expose yourself to the possibility of being shamed and work through those feelings.
	Because she's not your parents.
	She's your employee. You have all the power in this relationship.
	So if you have all the power in this relationship but you're afraid of being shamed, then you have a disproportionate response to the power system that's in place, which obviously is based on your childhood, where there was the opposite power structure in place.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	But still not connecting emotionally yet?
	No, it is.
	I'm just thinking How to do it, basically.
	As you're talking about it, I'm just thinking about what I'm going to do in the next session.
	Well, you've just got to be honest, right?
	Honest, honest, and say, you know, I'm terrified of what you said about my aunt's letter.
	I'm terrified because, obviously, if you were completely certain, like if my therapist said, I think you need to go and follow the Dalai Lama and learn how to do yogic flying, I'd say, well, that's interesting.
	That's not going to be on my plans for now, so if we could just get back to what I'm talking about now, but there wouldn't be any anxiety in it for me, right?
	Yeah. No, there is anxiety because I still feel the guilt and social pressure and So she's helping you, in a way.
	I mean, I'm not saying she's doing it consciously, I don't know, I don't want to speak about the therapist, but she's bringing up these feelings in you which are going to haunt you, and they haunt Christina and I still, right?
	I mean, there are still some people we have not told about Christina's defoe.
	So we get professionally mealy-mouthed, right?
	How are your parents? Oh, good.
	I mean, what can we say?
	They're fine. Still on the planet, still carbon-based.
	Everything's good, right? So they dropped by last week, which is...
	So, yes, there's, I mean...
	They call by often.
	That's right. They pound against the door with regularity, like bats against a window.
	So, yeah, I mean, look, that's not easy in any way, shape, or form.
	And as I mentioned in a podcast a couple of times, you know, telling Christina that my mom was this sociopath who'd been institutionalized, how about your dad?
	Oh, suicidal electroconvulsive therapy and also two institutionalizations.
	Let's get married! That's not fun.
	When you take a stand in your relationships, it reveals all the shortcomings in your other relationships.
	The people who were down on me for disconnecting from my brother, I let them make their case a number of times.
	I certainly let my therapist make her case a number of times.
	I worked through all of the insecurity and doubt that I had around it.
	And then when the decision came, the decision came.
	And that didn't mean that it was easy after that.
	The direction was easy.
	I had to turn around and go the other way.
	That didn't mean that I didn't have mountains to climb and crap like that, but at least I knew which direction to head in.
	But the thing with your therapist is, you know, again, just crank up the old real-time relationship engine and you say, I'm terrified of this.
	I feel such an exquisite amount of shame and guilt over defuing from my parents.
	My solution to that is not to reattach to my parents.
	My solution to that is to work through the feelings of guilt and shame in this.
	And I need to know what your opinion is about it, my therapist.
	Because if you also feel that I should feel guilt and shame for defoeing from my parents, then you're not going to be able to help me with this.
	I don't think, unless there's some other thing that I need to...
	I don't think that I should feel guilt and shame for disconnecting with my family, but I do.
	So I'm vulnerable. And you just have to go and be radioactively honest.
	In that relationship, because that's going to save you a lot of money.
	The reason we tell people to be honest in therapy is so they have more money for donations, because they have to spend less money on therapy.
	They don't spend all this time beating around the bush, so to speak.
	But seriously, just go and say, I'm terrified.
	This really opened up a whole chasm of shame and fear that I have about my defu process, and doubt, and so on.
	That's what you need to work through.
	She can work with that, right?
	But I don't think you can work with your old calculating eye figuring out whether or not she should stay your therapist, right?
	Right. Okay, well, that is fantastic.
	Thank you. That's what I wanted to talk about and that's really useful.
	I'm very glad. Do keep us posted on how it goes.
	Now, because you posted a dream on the board today, are you talking about these dreams with your therapist?
	I mean, I don't necessarily want to come crashing into a therapeutic relationship with my stuff because obviously she knows a lot more about what you're talking about than I do, but did you want me to have a look at that dream or what's your...
	I would love you to have a look at that dream.
	That was a really powerful dream for me.
	I will certainly be talking about it with my therapist.
	I don't think that that's necessarily a problem, but I mean, it's entirely up to you.
	I don't see her until next week, so...
	Okay, well, I'll give it a stab.
	Did you also post what happened before and so on?
	Any associations? Yes, yes.
	Okay, I'll get to it this week for sure.
	Certainly now the books are done. I have a little more time for this stuff.
	Well, we can do one more short topic if anybody is interested.
	Let me highly, highly, highly recommend a podcast that Christina and I and another listener did about two weeks ago.
	It's taken a while to edit out all of Christina's swear words, as you can imagine.
	So, I think it was.
	No, I think it was two weeks ago.
	But especially because she swears a lot in Greek.
	So that's hard to figure out.
	But it's a Silver Plus podcast called Leeches and Trout.
	It will make sense when you listen to it.
	And highly, highly recommended.
	As far as listener conversations go, I thought it was stellar.
	And of course, thanks so much to said generous listener and to Christina.
	But it's well worth a listen.
	I sent the email out if you haven't got it and you're a Silver Plus.
	Please let me know and I will send you the link.
	I can't put any more files on the board.
	I'm only allowed 100, so I have to upgrade my license.
	And please don't suggest that I switch the board software because I'm not importing everything into a new board package just for the sake of saving a little bit of license fee.
	So don't sweat that one, my brother.
	So if anybody has any other questions or comments or issues or problems, feel free to jump in there.
	Nobody wants to talk.
	Yeah, someone here said on a scale of 1 to 10, I give it 1,000.
	And some listener said it's chock full of everything that's bad about the listener.
	Plenty of entertainment for everyone.
	Oh, we've all been there.
	You know, we've all opened the kimono and some unholy stuff has slithered out, so it's fine.
	It's fine. Alright, so going once, going twice, any last questions or comments, please do send a couple of questions in to ask a therapist.
	I would really, we need one or two more questions to do a full show.
	It's been a tad scanty, which of course means that everybody's perfectly mentally healthy, which is great.
	Christina, unfortunately, has stopped accepting submissions from me, so that's not somewhere we can go.
	So, okay, going out, last one, last call for anybody who has questions or issues or problems.
	Otherwise, we close shop for the day.
	All right.
	I have one question.
	One-- That's two. Oh, well, this will be the second one, then.
	Okay. You dispel that fog, he's like a whip!
	Well, this is more for Christina, maybe, but what about therapists who...
	I haven't ever heard of Nathaniel Brandon or Alice Miller or anything like that.
	Don't be obstructive.
	You know, there are so many movements in psychology now.
	Nathaniel Brandon wrote his books in the 1980s.
	Alice Miller, her books have been transcribed from the 1980s and the 1990s, but there's so many new things out there these days.
	I don't know what they're teaching in graduate school in psychology.
	A lot of cognitive stuff.
	There's another movement called interpersonal psychotherapy.
	You'll probably, if you're in graduate school right now, do a stint on psychoanalysis, the Freudian stuff, just for the history of it.
	So I don't know.
	I mean, there's a lot of validity and a lot of value in those therapies.
	They have, as I mentioned in the IM chat, was it an IM chat?
	The Skype chat that I had with the listener a couple weeks ago that now I lost my own train of thought.
	Oh, well, sorry, it's gone.
	Anyway, there's a lot of...
	Oh, this is what it is. HMOs.
	HMOs want really quick and proven treatments.
	So if you're going in for treatment for depression, they want empirically validated treatments that they can pay 10 sessions.
	It takes 10 sessions of CBT to treat depression or 12 sessions of IPEDA to deal with anxiety or something like that.
	So I guess that's what the universities are teaching, but...
	So maybe newer therapists may not have had this exposure.
	I don't know. I can't speak to each individual therapist or to why some therapists would have read these books and others would not have.
	Okay, so...
	Well, you have to trust your gut.
	You have to trust your gut.
	I mean, Ayn Rand read Nathaniel Brandon, but we wouldn't want Ayn Rand to be our therapist, right?
	So, you have to trust your gut and your instincts, right?
	Because life gets a whole lot easier.
	I forgot to mention to Jake earlier that he said, I live my life very well rationally, but I also want to learn to understand my unconscious, as if his unconscious is not rational.
	Or the opposite of rationality.
	It's like, I live perfectly well with my rational conscious mind, but I want to integrate this crazy unconscious mind as well.
	But that's not true, of course.
	I mean, the rationality that we are conscious of is often just a pale reflection of the real rationality that is going on in the world of dreams and in the world of our impulses and creative faculties and so on.
	So, you are not going to guarantee that a therapist is going to be good for you because he's read Nathaniel Brandon and you are not going to guarantee, if one has not, that he or she is going to be bad for you, right?
	What you need is some real TLC, right?
	Because you have to ease your codependency on other people.
	So I would go with someone, if I were you, who was really sensitive and empathetic, right?
	Because that's a lot of what's been missing in your life.
	Self-empathy being among the greatest ones that you need to have that true affection for yourself.
	I don't know that Nathaniel Brandon would be the guy to talk to about that.
	I think that you just need to talk to therapists.
	I wouldn't ask them, have you read this book?
	Have you read that book? Just talk to them and see how you feel when you're talking to them.
	The person who makes you feel the best when you're talking to them is the person you should go and see.
	Even if they don't understand that emotions are Aren't these afflictions that come and need to be willed away with meditation and all that stuff?
	What if they start Well, you won't feel good if they say that, right?
	But you understand Nathaniel Brandon, but you can't change yourself, right?
	So the mere intellectual understanding is not going to be enough, right?
	Otherwise, we could all read five books and be perfectly healthy, right?
	That's not how it works. So you need somebody who is going to really empathize with you and get you to that place of self-empathy and self-sympathy, right?
	Because you and I both know that you're incredibly harsh on yourself, right?
	So you need somebody who's going to pull that demon off your throat, so to speak, right?
	And give you a chance to breathe and be relaxed and positive and happy about yourself and who you are and the choices that you make.
	That's not going to come from somebody reading a Nathaniel Brandon book or an Ayn Rand book or listening to 12 million podcasts or anything like that.
	That's going to come from you getting that emotional connection with someone.
	And the only way you're going to know that is through talking to them on the phone and how you feel and then how you feel after the first session.
	The important thing to philosophy is to free you from abstracts.
	The fundamental goal of philosophy is to free you from abstractions.
	So when you're going to learn a sport, you're learning ski jumping, you learn all the technique.
	You learn all the technique, where to point your skis and how fast to go down and how to angle your body and how to breathe.
	And you learn all of these things and they're overwhelming.
	But the entire point of mastery in a sport is to forget everything that you've learned and just act.
	And know that you'll be doing the right thing.
	That's the whole point of like you take all these piano lessons if you want to be a jazz musician so that you can go out and jam and really enjoy it and have a great time.
	And that of course is the point of philosophy is to free you from the rules because you will be the rules.
	You will have integrated the rules of productive living and you can just go out and have a blast Good point.
	Alright. Maybe I will just stick with this same therapist I've been going to because...
	She does have all those qualities you're talking about that she needs for me, I guess.
	The way to test her is to just be unbelievably honest with her.
	Hold nothing back. Nothing that you're ashamed of.
	Nothing that you talk about.
	Like, nothing that you do. Just don't hold anything back, and then you will find out how good she is, right?
	But that's the way to figure these sorts of things out.
	Just throw yourself in heart and soul and know that if she's not good, you'll know it and you'll survive.
	I see. Okay.
	Yeah, I'll give her a couple more rounds and see how that goes.
	Well, give her everything you've got for the next couple of rounds, right?
	Right, right. Give her all the material she can...
	You be her PhD thesis, right?
	You be her doctorate.
	You be her claim to fame.
	You be the book that she's going to write about, your pathologies that's going to make her famous, right?
	So just give her everything, every piece of material that you can on the planet, and then you can find out how good she is.
	But that would be my suggestion. Alright.
	That's also how you know this isn't a cult, right?
	Because cultists don't say, go form bonds with therapists, right?
	Right, right. Right.
	But they don't listen to that part.
	Right, right, right. Alright, well, thanks for the good question.
	Anything else? Alright.
	I'm going to jump in.
	This is something that came up in the chat window.
	And I just sort of was chatting away, and I mentioned, actually I haven't thought about it for a couple of months now, but I mentioned how, you know, I've pretty much deep food.
	You know, I haven't talked or spoken with either of my parents for a number of times, even though my mother tried to call me recently.
	But my father has some small children, about the age of 10 or 11, Now granted, they're a thousand miles south of me, so I'm not going to run into them.
	But there's small children in this house, and...
	My father is one of the, you know, physically, maybe not so much physically anymore, but certainly, you know, criticizing, crushing, emotionally horrible troll of a man, if you can even call him a man.
	The enthusiasm pressure that we talked about last week, right?
	Yes! Yes, certainly, you know, Him, both of my parents, but him, for sure, for a much longer duration.
	And he's in charge of three smaller children now, basically 20 years-ish younger than me, 15 to 18 years younger.
	And it's kind of like, you know, I guess it's almost the same thing, if you don't mind me saying, with your nieces, right?
	Just... You can't do anything, right?
	I mean... You can't.
	You can't do anything unless you witness any of her abuse and you're willing to go.
	Wait one second. The brains of the outfit has something to say.
	Okay. Here in Canada, you can do something.
	And if there's any suspicion of abuse or neglect, you can call Children's Aid Society.
	You can call anonymously. You can say, I have some questions.
	You can run the questions by the intake worker, who will tell you whether or not you have enough to file a report.
	And then when you do file the report, you have the right of remaining anonymous.
	You don't have to identify yourself.
	Similarly, if you were subject to abuse by this man, you know firsthand that he is an abusive individual.
	And so, you can say, he abused me when I was a child.
	He now has young children at home.
	I haven't seen him for a while, but I can suspect or I can imagine that these children are going to be under the same kind of torture that I experienced.
	And then, children's aid or children's services Would be able to make a decision about whether or not they should go in.
	And just because they go in, and this is the fear for a lot of people, oh, they're going to take the kids away, they're going to put them in foster homes, they're going to do this, they're going to do that.
	They're not going to do that.
	They're going to start with an investigation first and foremost, and they will determine what the consequences or what interventions need to occur.
	And it could be that they send your father and his wife to parenting classes and they put the family into therapy.
	And they put the kids into individual therapy.
	Or they have somebody who comes into the house who monitors them and offers them parenting advice on the spot.
	There are lots and lots and lots of interventions that can take place.
	But if you have concerns about these children, even though you haven't seen them and you have been directly assaulted, Assaulted by this man when you were a child, then you have grounds to suspect these kids are being abused.
	And if you want to do something, if you care about these kids or are concerned about their well-being, then it wouldn't hurt to pick up the phone and just make an anonymous phone call and ask some questions.
	I assume it works the same way in the States.
	Right. Well, I'm sorry.
	My turn? Okay.
	Here's the funny thing.
	They had let, about maybe a couple years ago now, to try to keep the names out of it, they had dropped off the nine-year-old child, the adopted son, off at the pool, and he was swimming around unsupervised, you know, direct supervision, that is.
	You know, there's lifeguards and everything, but Somebody called Child Service, Family Services, whatever you want to call it, on them then.
	And as far as I'm aware, nothing's happened out of that.
	Now granted, that was just the one incident, but maybe if they get another call, who knows what's going to happen.
	But at the same time, that's kind of like, I don't know.
	Well, you know what? I'm sorry, what?
	It is a big deal, and I can imagine that anybody who wants to place that phone call will feel anxious and scared and nervous.
	I do it in my professional role quite a bit, or I've done it quite a bit in my professional role, and it's not any easier.
	I can imagine what it would be like for someone who's calling to rat out a parent.
	No kidding. I just get the feeling like I'm going to, you know, who in the world would call, right?
	You know, because I've quote-unquote brought the state into it before.
	When I was in elementary school, you know, I think I told Steph about this a couple of podcasts ago.
	We had the Department of Youth and Family Services in Jersey come up and, you know, oh, it was all pleasant and You know, the piano was playing, no shouting or anything.
	So, of course, the home environment was, quote, you know, and that's all happened.
	But, you know, my father got angry at me for bringing the state into it.
	And, you know, who else is going to call, you know, these services?
	But, I mean, granted, I'm an adult now.
	So, you know, if he gets angry at me, as long as he's not, like, you know, threatening me with his fist or anything, then whatever, right?
	But still, just that fear is, like, very real.
	No, and I can appreciate that.
	And, you know, if this is something that you do struggle with, maybe it would help you too.
	And here I go with the go-see therapist.
	Go talk to someone about it who can help you through this process.
	I mean, getting to know you're doing this would be really helpful.
	It's not an easy thing to do.
	Like I said, I do it in my professional capacity and it's hard.
	Yeah, yeah. But if you're scared of your dad, like if you're scared of your parents, imagine what these kids are going through.
	Oh, you're right.
	You're right. Oh, man.
	It is real tough.
	I can't imagine.
	Well, I can. I can't imagine what it's like.
	I mean, as far as getting to a therapist...
	It's in the plans. It's in the works.
	Well, not in the works. I should say it's in the plans.
	The works will come later. But, alright.
	Yeah, I guess there's really no time to waste for calling the Department of Youth and Family Services, but I can just imagine, like, in a sense, it's almost like I know what's going to happen in terms of It'll be all smiles and rainbows, so to speak. You know, obviously, underlying tension and hostility.
	But you have no control over that.
	I know, I know. You have no control over what measures they're going to take against the incursion, so to speak.
	You have no control, you only have control over your own actions, right?
	Right. And of course, the possibility is that your parents are going to call you up and say, you know, you bastard, you called these people, right?
	Right. Oh, they can't call me up.
	Well, no, but they could guess, right?
	Who knows, right? Sure, sure.
	They could just be calling everyone, right?
	Oh, they don't have my number, but yeah, okay.
	But, I mean, it could get ugly and unpleasant, right?
	Yes, I know. But in which case, you simply say, well, I didn't call, but I'm telling you what, I'm going to call now and say that you're threatening people.
	Right? I mean, the state is not great, right?
	The state is not great.
	We know that. But nonetheless, if someone's coming into my house, I'm calling the cops.
	Right? So, I mean, it's the best we've got, you know, and it's not perfect, and the roads would be better in a DRO society, but still we have to drive our cars, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, look, you do have access to a legal system that, at its core, came out of Anglo-Saxon common law and is not state-invented and so on, and there's still a few shreds of possibilities left for decent restitution or help in the state system, so... You know, you're not helpless in this.
	It's not you versus your family anymore, right?
	There is a legal structure in place that...
	And I remember being completely shocked by this.
	I just... I remember I was a waiter at a restaurant, and there was a bar at the restaurant.
	I was about, I don't know, 17 or so?
	And this bartender, this guy was threatening the bartender, and he got sort of belligerent, right?
	And the bartender said, okay, so...
	If you touch me, I'll just call the cops and you'll get thrown in jail.
	And I just remember, even at the age of 70, I was stunned by that.
	I just remember thinking, like, well, that's kind of true, right?
	I mean, it's not a perfect system or anything, but it's kind of true.
	And, of course, because when I was a kid, it was never something I'd call the cops on my mom or whatever.
	It was something that never occurred to me.
	But we are in that society, and we do pay our taxes, and there is a possibility that something positive can come out of this situation.
	So I'm certainly glad that Christina knew more about that than I did.
	This wasn't really an option with my nieces, but if you feel that that's the case, then if the only thing that's holding you back is fear of your family, then you should do it, right?
	Because the kids are going to feel a lot more fear, a million times more fear than you are, right?
	Yeah, especially at this point, right?
	Even if nothing happens, what you're doing is you're putting a marker down.
	So you're putting a marker down.
	If somebody comes to interview the kids, then at least there's something there where somebody has said something funny is going on here.
	And that may be something that later on is going to be important for them, right?
	Yeah, yeah.
	If it doesn't scare him into at least treating him right, at least it might scare my father into not being quite so horrible.
	Who knows? Well, it could be or it may also be something where the kids get enough validation of how badly they've been treated that they think about your parents a little more clearly when they get older.
	Yeah. There's that, too.
	There's that, too. Right.
	Well, keep us posted about how it goes.
	I don't envy the decision, but it is these painful ways.
	Again, to hell with Ron Paul.
	This is how I think the world gets saved.
	We've got to build this wall brick by brick.
	So I don't envy these decisions, but the difficulty of these decisions is exactly why the world is not in as great a place as we need it to be, but we can certainly move it in that direction.
	Yeah, you know, it's funny. The thought first occurred to me well over a year and a half, two years ago.
	Well, probably first occurred to me when I first heard that he was adopting, for Christ's sake.
	But, you know, the first serious thought.
	But even then, back then, it was like, I can't do it, you know?
	It's just... But now it's like I've seen too much.
	I understand too much now to not even at least think about looking up the number, you know, at least that much, right?
	Right. I mean, I think Nietzsche was right when he said if you give a man a why, he can bear almost any how.
	If you give a man a why, he should do something.
	He can bear almost any way, any method to do it.
	Mm-hmm. And if you know why it is that you're doing it, then you will find a way to do it.
	You can bear almost any way of doing it if you know why.
	Yeah, I don't think I would have known why back then.
	No, quite true. Well, thank you.
	No problem at all. That was a great and brave decision.
	Do keep us posted on how it goes.
	All right. Well, thanks everyone so much for joining us.
	Unless there are any desperate last-minute questions about things that we have missed, we can close the show down now.
	Somebody else says, Nietzsche was also right when he said, I got the big old mustache.
	I think that's quite true, although I don't think he said it in a bad Texas accent.
	But he also said, I love this horse, now I'm going mad.
	So, thank you so much.
	Oh, last thing.
	We're going to start the Freedom Aid Radio Book Club and we'll be studying all Molyneux all the time, starting with my early grade textbooks.
	Sorry, my early grade writing books from about grade two or three onwards.
	I have some nice pictures. We'll be studying those.
	And then we'll be moving on to my report cards, and then doodles, and so on.
	But we are going to start, and we're going to start with Nietzsche's The Antichrist, which is a short and powerful book that is well worth your time to look over.
	He is a brilliant, brilliant psychologist, raving loony when it comes to philosophy, but as far as psychological insights go, you can't get much better.
	So I have converted his book to an audiobook, not by reading it, but I've got these super ultra-high-quality computer voices that I bought For reviewing my own work.
	So I've converted it.
	I'm going to post it in the Gold Plus section.
	So you'll get a chance to listen to it.
	Or you can pick up the free e-text.
	We'll link to it as well. So read it.
	Make notes. Come with your best thoughts and we'll have a nice conference call and talk about Nietzsche and the Antichrist, which is a fantastic book to read.
	And so we're going to start that.
	I guess maybe we'll chat a week Tuesday or sometime.
	We'll figure out sometime where we can all get together and have a chat about this.
	But I think it's great.
	I mean, I think that it's something that is a lot of fun.
	I was in one before.
	It can be a hell of a lot of fun and really illuminating.
	And of course, you know, the best thing to do is to just read great people as often as you can.
	So, if you are a Gold Plus member of FDR, which is people who've donated $100 or more, and be warned, I will be decaying people's memberships starting in a couple of months just because I'm mean.
	So, yeah, just look for that in the Gold Plus section.
	And give me your Skype handle, and we will have a week or so to read it, and then we will have a chat about the book.
	I hope that you will enjoy it, and of course we can always take suggestions for other books to go next.
	And that's it for this show.
	Pick up the new novel, The God of Atheists, available in hardcover, sorry, in hardcopy, and also as a PDF download, though I'm keeping the audiobook as a dangle for donators.
	So pick that up on Truth, the Tyrion, and Evolution.
	Still available, of course.
	Universally preferable behavior.
	Thank you for those who've given me such kind comments.
	I may never do better in my life, so get a hold of that book, I think.
	It will be well worth your while.
	As always, if you don't like the books, then I would give you your money back.
	If you can't afford them, just let me know, and I will ship them to you free if you like and pay me whenever.
	Thank you so much for listening on this fine Sunday.
	Have yourself a wonderful, wonderful week.

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