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Dec. 6, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:13:33
931 Predatory Depression Part 1 (A listener conversation)

The root causes of a collapse...

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Oh, hi, it's Steph. Hi, Steph.
How's it going? It's going great.
It's going great. How are you? Nice to finally chat with you.
Yeah, I've been looking forward to this for a while.
What I wanted to talk to you about or get some advice about is I believe you're kind of aware of the situation with my father.
I'm having a really hard time trying to work out how to kind of confront him and engage him in a conversation about my past and things like that.
Right. Even just thinking about it now, I'm kind of shaking and everything like that.
Obviously, there's some kind of hurdle that I need to overcome there.
Now, I do remember some things, but why don't you give me a recap?
And just as a reminder, just don't use any names.
This may not go out as a podcast, and it's totally up to you.
So you get a chance to listen, edit, and if you don't want to release it, that's totally fine.
But just to make it easier, if you could just give sort of the brief, or as brief as you like, a history of where things stand with your dad or where they've come from.
Oh, sure. Well, the short story is that I have A crazy mother, and my dad basically left me to be raised by her while he worked away from home, so he wasn't really there.
I guess it wasn't until very recently that I realized this was a bad thing.
I always was kind of on his side, so to speak.
I thought, you know, well, if I could get out of here, I would too.
But I never until recently kind of realized that him leaving me there was actually a pretty bad thing.
Right, right.
Right. And your mother is traditional, like, bats in the belfry, doing cartwheels in God's eyebrow kind of nuts, right?
And also has a cruel streak, if I remember rightly.
Yeah, she's not religious or anything, but she's into all the kind of mystical, rubbish, complete...
I don't even know how to describe it.
She believes in everything from kind of spiritual healing to homeopathy to...
You know, she's complete subjectivist, just completely irrational, totally crazy, that type of person.
Right, but also does have a certain amount of cruelty, as people don't often understand this, right?
I mean, I think you and I do that.
Mysticism is a form of aggression insofar as it violates other people's ability to think even remotely clearly, and it puts forward things that are blatantly impossible, but then when you question them, there's an enormous amount of aggression that comes out of these people, right? Oh, definitely.
It's become very apparent over the last few months when I've even tried to talk to her.
If I ask questions, she says, you know, you're interrogating me and things like that.
I don't really think she had an influence On my thinking, religious parents often create religious children and they have to get over that.
I mean, I never kind of bought into any of the stuff that she was selling.
But nevertheless, yeah, it was quite strange growing up with her, I guess.
Right. There is a claustrophobic kind of intensity to these kinds of mystics as well, particularly women.
And there is a...
If she's anything like my mom, and I'm trying not to mix the two up, so just let me know where I go awry.
But I think that one of the reasons I became more adept at psychology than most is that I spent an enormous amount of time trying to figure out What the hell my mom was thinking and feeling because it never made much sense to me.
It was, you know, she'd get gripped by strange passions and then she'd dive into this and then she'd love this person and then she wouldn't like this person and her moods were just so incomprehensible to me that I think I spent a fair amount of time...
unravel all of that.
You never become a cartographer if you don't spend your whole life lost.
But if you do, at least your whole childhood, then you become pretty good at reading a map.
So does any of that sort of ring true?
Again, because your mom sounds a little bit like my mom, I want to know where the similarity differences are so that I don't conflate the two.
I definitely can identify with that, although I would say that instead of getting a psychological kind of understanding, I think it probably developed my logical skills or my rational thinking skills a lot more.
because just trying to come to grips with some of the stuff that she believes in, just being exposed to all that bullshit just over time built up my Kind of a logical skills and a lot of people describe me as, you know, quote, too logical and see things in black and white and things like that.
So I'm definitely further that way than the average person.
I think that's got something to do with her.
Right, right. So you may be one of the small percentage of people who get not more black and white but some shades out of this conversation at Free Domain Radio because most people come here kind of goopy and they get solidified.
But it may be that some of your edges needed to be sanded a little bit in terms of a rush to judgment and so on because you had to be so alert and defensive with your mother that that, of course, may carry over into, like, if you see a hint of irrationality in someone, it may be like... Definitely.
I think what I've learned about psychology at FDR has definitely kind of smoothed off the edges a bit.
It's given me some more kind of understanding into the cause of irrationality.
So yeah, I definitely think that's true.
Right, right. Okay, okay.
And your mother did not grow into this over time.
Was she like this? I mean, again, not to confuse the two, but my mother was always crazy, but was slightly less crazy when she was younger.
I think that's definitely true also, yeah.
When, I mean, when I kind of think about My really early childhood, I don't remember any of this kind of bad stuff.
I think it's definitely increased over time, and I mean, she was in a really kind of crappy marriage, so I think she kind of found some solace in kind of this ridiculous world that she lives in, and certainly even after the divorce, I think it kind of...
It kind of poured into the gap that was left in our life, so I think it definitely increased over time.
Now, I'm going to just pause you for a second.
I just wanted to ask you what you meant when you said she was in a crappy marriage, and I understand what crappy marriage means, so what I mean by that is that it sounds, the way that you phrased it sounds a little bit passive.
Whenever I hear people talk about their parents, I'm always alert to when they may be speaking their parents' story, their parents' mythology.
And she was not in a crappy marriage.
She chose a crappy marriage, right?
Yeah, that's totally right.
You're completely correct for pulling me up on that.
I've often corrected her in the same way, so I can't believe I actually said that.
One of the reasons that parents are so good at manipulating children, and in my more cynical moments, one of the reasons I think that most people have children, Is that children don't have any real understanding of their parents' lives before they, the children, came around, right?
Yeah. So whatever circumstances we see our parents in, it just seems like that's where they were born, that they had no choice in that any more than we did, right?
Yeah, sure. I understand that.
Yeah, so for me, like, my parents split up when I was very, very young.
I don't remember my dad being around.
And so, of course, my mother, you know, talked very bitterly about my dad.
And when I was a kid, it was like, well, she had a bad marriage or a bad marriage happened to her.
Or, you know, the evil gods of mating paired her up with a bad guy and so on.
But as you get older, you realize, of course, that our parents actively pursued the lives that they claim were inflicted upon them.
Yep. Yeah, totally.
I definitely kind of...
I thought that way, especially about my dad, I think, more than my mum, I thought, you know, he's kind of trapped with this, you know, terrible woman and, you know, stuff like that, but I've realised recently that that's not really the case, you know, he, it was, you know, his decision to do it.
Sure. I mean, they could have married anyone.
They could have not married anyone at all.
Anything could have happened, but they chose each other, right?
And nobody had a gun to their heads, and nobody forced them, and so on.
But, of course, the way that people who are immature or...
Narcissistic or whatever. The way they deal with their mistakes is they say, the mistake happened to me.
Of course I had to turn to mysticism.
This is your mother's story, right?
I was in an unhappy marriage.
As opposed to, well, you chose to get in it, so why didn't you choose to get out?
But they just portray themselves as people without choice.
And the problem with that, and the reason I wanted to just pause here for a second, was that you said earlier that your...
Training or your habits were more towards abstract rationality rather than to psychology?
Definitely, yeah.
But it would seem to me that if your parents portrayed themselves to you as people who were victimized by life, then psychology would be a great enemy for them.
Yeah, that's true.
Definitely. So it's possible, it's possible, and I remember you saying this earlier on in our conversations, not live, but it's certainly possible that you have a perfectly strong ability and curiosity with regards to psychology, but that... That was a great enemy of your parents.
And again, my mother hated psychology with a passion.
I mean, she was just always virulent and vehement, you know, like, don't psychologize me, you know, this psychobabble.
And any time that you would attempt to ask about motives or ask about anything to do with responsibility that may not be conscious...
There was just an attack upon that.
I don't know if that was the same in your household, but you may have been, and I'm guessing you probably were, explicitly or implicitly actively discouraged from psychological thinking.
It definitely fits.
I can't specifically remember that from my childhood, but I can actually remember it recently.
I mean, a few months ago I was kind of talking to my mum about being in therapy and stuff, and She kind of said, well, you know, make sure that you're focusing on the present.
Make sure that you're, you know, you're not getting stuck in the past.
Don't worry about the past.
It's not going to help you and stuff like that.
So it was obviously a kind of a big defensive reaction, kind of hoping I wasn't going to uncover stuff about her, I guess.
Right. When she says it's not going to help you, what she really means is...
It's not going to help her, yeah.
Quite the opposite, right?
And of course, if you become...
If you become psychologically sophisticated, and you are, I mean, as you go through this conversation, as you become psychologically sophisticated, you are less susceptible to mysticism, right?
I mean, Christians are the least psychological people on the planet because once you understand projection and you understand transference and counter-transference and you understand the unconscious and you understand the power of all of the complexity of interactions that goes on, Then mysticism becomes less of an option, right? Because mysticism is the projection of your unconscious or your myth-making capacities as a human being into the world.
And so when you become psychologically aware, you begin to withdraw those projections of your craziness into the world.
You deal with it as a psychological thing and you no longer have a place called mysticism or spirituality or religion or patriotism or whatever.
To put all your craziness, you have to deal with it as your issue.
So for sure, your mother would be hostile to psychology because that would make her responsible for her life and would also cause her to question her mysticism, which would be highly destabilizing for her, right?
Oh, definitely, yeah.
I've kind of, I've definitely given up the relationship I have with her.
I mean, it's completely over.
There's not a shadow of a doubt in my mind about that, so that's not really a problem for me.
The issue I'm having at the moment is with my dad, which is kind of a whole different ballgame for me.
Right. And the reason I wanted to talk about your mom was just so that we can put, or at least so I can refresh myself, and to anyone who may end up listening to this, to refresh myself sort of about who your dad left you with.
And in every abusive family, there's always the one that got away.
And the one that got away is the silent partner.
Of the abuser. So, if you've got, you know, the stereotypical, raging, alcoholic, drunken, abusive, violent dad, then there's the long-suffering, martyring woman who, you know, does her best and blah blah blah blah blah, and she's the one who gets away.
Right, so recently we had conversations about this with a couple where the woman was talking about, oh, you know, my dad is this, but my mom is that, right?
And there's always one that gets away in terms of the blame or responsibility we place upon the terrible things that happen to us as children.
And, you know, a lot of what this conversation is about is focusing on the stuff that gets away, that we don't normally think of as having the same kind of moral content as other people we know are bad.
And it sounds like in your family, your dad is the one that got away in terms of judgment, right?
Oh, absolutely. Yeah.
It was even more than just getting away.
It was... Definitely kind of looked up to him even.
So it was more than just a neutral thing.
It was really quite skewed in that regard.
So he travelled a lot, is that right?
Yeah, he works in construction as a construction manager.
I live in Australia, obviously, and a lot of the construction stuff that goes on here is kind of outside the cities on purpose-built construction sites.
So People would kind of fly out and kind of live and work there and, you know, come back every couple of months or whatever.
So a lot of his work was that type of stuff.
So he was basically just gone for months at a time.
Wow. And how young were you when this started, or was that always the case?
From what I can remember, we kind of...
We moved around a lot.
I think I went through 14 different schools.
I think it was 14, 13, 14.
Wow, you got me beat.
Yeah. Up until, I guess...
Jeez.
We moved around a lot and he took kind of city-type jobs.
I guess the big change when he really started moving away would have been about 95, so I would have been about 10 years old.
When he started, I guess, as the marriage got worse and he wanted to escape, so that was probably the catalyst for him taking more site-type jobs, and he's kind of done that ever since.
But before that, he was mostly a 9-to-5 kind of dad?
Yeah. I don't know about 9 to 5, definitely he spent a lot of time at work, like he would be there kind of late into the evenings and stuff like that, so I guess he was still kind of avoiding the marriage, but on a part-time basis rather than a full-time basis, if you understand what I mean.
I sure do, I sure do.
So would you say that he was a workaholic?
Yes, definitely. Okay, so it's hard to obviously think back to these times in our life, but looking at it now with the eyes of an adult, can you roughly picture how many hours he was working a week?
I mean, was he working 12 hours a day on the weekdays and a day on the weekend, or how did it work?
When I was young, I can't really remember.
It was definitely kind of really long hours.
It wouldn't seem in the morning and he'd get home kind of late at night.
So I couldn't really put an hourly figure on that.
But he wasn't, sorry, he wasn't home for dinner, right?
I can remember sometimes he was, sometimes he wasn't, so I guess it kind of changed over time and stuff like that.
And what about the weekends?
Sorry, go ahead. I think it probably got worse over time, so maybe he was more around for dinner and stuff when I was younger and as I got older it would become less and less until eventually he was kind of not there at all and I'd only see him every three or four months or whatever.
And you're an only kid, is that right?
No, I have a younger brother too.
A younger brother, okay. And how much younger is he?
He's three and a half years younger, which would make him 19, I think, this year.
Okay, got it.
Okay, so then as you got older and starting around 10, your dad began to absent himself for months at a time from the house, and he would then send his money back to your mom, and did your mom work at all?
No, she didn't. And did she ever work, do you know?
Not really, not ever since they kind of got married.
They had me not long after, I think maybe a year or two after they got married.
Right. It was a point of contention, actually, with my dad.
My mom was kind of raising us as we were small children.
And then once we were getting older, my dad kind of said, you know, come on, pick up the slack, get a job, start working.
And then she decided to go to university to get a degree.
And she did women's studies.
Right. Be careful what you wish for, Daddy.
You just might get it right.
She spent eight years doing that.
Wow, so she's obviously quite intelligent, right?
No, she's not at all.
But eight years in university?
Did she get like a PhD or what?
No, that was for a bachelor's degree in women's studies, a three-year degree.
Oh, okay, sorry, I take back the whole bright thing.
Quite the opposite, yes.
And then, after that, she still didn't want to get a job, really, and that's probably when her hypochondria started kicking in.
Oh, dear. Yeah, that was kind of the next reason why she couldn't do it.
The similarities are just eerie.
It's like we got the same damn mother, you know, just one was printed in Germany and one was printed in...
Say, like, we shipped the specs over and boot up the same one over in Australia a couple of years later, but anyway...
So yeah, so she got hypochondria or became hypochondriacal and like chronic fatigue syndrome and Epstein-Barr and all this kind of nonsense or is something more tangible?
All sorts of stuff, like ridiculous stuff.
She was kind of, she could catch diseases just by hearing about them.
Right. If she heard somebody had sleep apnea, then she would develop sleep apnea.
She kind of has a real love-hate relationship with the medical profession because she would go to doctors, but she'd go to five, six, seven, ten doctors until she found one that would agree with her that she's got what she's got.
Right. So she'd kind of hate all the ones that, you know, said, no, you're fine.
I am vindicated!
Yeah, and then hang on to the ones that kind of confirmed what she had.
And did she have a love-hate relationship with her own father?
Was he in the picture at all? Yeah, definitely.
I don't think...
From how she speaks about him...
She didn't like him at all, really, growing up.
She definitely kind of took her mother's side in that regard.
She was kind of the poor, hard-working mother that had to put up with, you know, a bastard of a husband, you know, all that kind of stuff.
Right, right, right.
Okay, and so then, is your dad still with your mom?
No, they split, is that right?
Yeah, they're divorced. They've been divorced for a few years now.
And what was the precipitating factor in the divorce?
Well, actually, my dad went to see a doctor.
He was feeling really, really, really stressed out, high-stress job, and occasionally he could kind of feel it in his chest and things like that.
And so he went to the doctor and, you know, he got tests and his stress levels were off the roof and It was quite funny because he had to monitor it.
So when he went kind of back up on site to work, the doctors there would test him and he would be fine.
And they'd say, you know, what's going on?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with you.
But then when he'd come back down to the city, when he was dealing with my mother, his stress levels were kind of through the roof.
And the doctor said to him, basically, whatever's stressing him out, you're going to have to get rid of this.
Otherwise, you're going to be dead before the end of the year.
Wow. It was that serious, and then he kind of thought, shit, you know, maybe it's time to do something about this.
And that's kind of what precipitated it.
And that is astounding.
From the outside, right?
I mean, it may not feel that way from the inside.
It was completely, yeah, shocking.
But yeah, that was his kind of reaction to the marriage and everything.
Sorry, what's shocking for you in that?
Well, shocking...
I guess considering the job he's got is a very high-stress job and he handles it without a problem, but just...
No, that's not what I meant by shocking.
Okay, what did you mean?
Although I can certainly understand what you mean, but what I meant by shocking was...
Your ears aren't too sensitive, right?
You don't mind if I cuss a little, you'll survive, right?
You're an Australian, it's no problem, right?
There's nothing I can't say that you haven't heard, right?
Okay, what's shocking to me is that your father, who I'm guessing is not in his 90s, what is he, late 40s, early 50s, mid 50s?
Mid 50s, yeah.
Mid-50s. Okay. So that's a middle-aged man.
He's not old by any means yet, right?
Yeah. So this man has had measured doses of your mother.
And by measured, it means he's had months off at a time, right?
He's had measured and controlled doses of your mother, right?
When she has had no primary authority over him at all, when he's had the freedom to leave the marriage at any time, and he's only had her for some months a year, right?
Yep. And look what that minor exposure relative to you and your brother, that minor exposure...
To your mother in a non-hierarchical, in a non-hegemonic, in a non-power-structure relationship did to him.
Yeah. And I bet you, dollars to fucking donuts, I bet you that nobody in your family said, Oh my God, what has this done to the children?
That's definitely true.
Although, there's definitely something else at work that might have obscured that.
Not try to make excuses, but my mother is definitely kind of the propaganda machine of the family.
My extended family, I only have it on my mother's side.
I don't have it on my father's side, so there was always kind of a partisan support for her.
I don't think they particularly got any objective information about how my dad was doing.
In regards to any of this kind of stuff.
Sorry, I got a little bit lost there, which either means I'm confused or you're being defensive.
Doesn't matter which, we'll figure it out.
And when I say you're being defensive, I don't mean consciously or anything, but I'm not sure what your extended family would have to do with this.
Like, this shocking bit that I'm sort of talking about, I'm not sure.
Like, the person I'm talking about is your dad.
Yep. Right, who would look down and say, well, if I spend six more months around your mom, I'm going to be dead because she is so unbelievably stressful to live with.
Yeah. And I've had much less exposure to her than you have, right?
Yep. And she has no power over me in the way that she has power over you, so it must have been much worse for you than for me, and I'm almost dead.
Yeah, I understand where you're coming from.
Let me analogize it one more way, just to be completely redundant, right?
Let me analogize it one more way.
So your dad finds out that he has radiation poisoning because it turns out that there's a big nuclear reactor underneath your house, right?
But he was gone for months from that house, but you were living there permanently.
And children are more susceptible to radiation poisoning than adults are, right?
Smaller bodies, developing bodies, hormones, and so on.
And so your dad would then get this diagnosis and say, well, your doctors would say, look, my God, man, there's something radioactive in your house that's going to kill you.
I mean, as a father, the first thing that I would think about is, my God, how are my children?
Right?
So I'd say they grew up not knowing any of this.
And I'd seen the effect the radiation poisoning is happening on me.
And no one thought to ask how this person...
Yeah.
I mean, that's what I mean by that is shocking.
I mean, if you read that story, right, that the dad nearly died from radiation poisoning and nobody ever got the kids tested or even asked them how they felt – Wouldn't you be kind of shocked?
Yeah, definitely. That's the kind of shock that, of course, you're trained not...
To feel, right?
And it's easier to feel from the outside, right?
It's not my family, right?
You'd be shocked about things in my family that would be like, oh yeah, that's the way it is, right?
But that's sort of why we all need each other, right?
To remind us to be shocked, right?
To remind us to be appalled by these things and not to take them for granted, right?
Yeah. So when I sort of say that, when I say that it's shocking that...
The stress that nearly killed your dad, that not one person in the family ever asked you and your brother how you had dealt with it or how you were doing with it.
Does that strike an emotional chord with you at all, or is it just an interesting perspective?
When I was talking about extended family before, that kind of flew on from when you said family even now.
To me, there was kind of no...
Kind of third-party family that wasn't kind of behind my mother's propaganda, if you know what I mean.
So there wasn't kind of family members that were neutral in a situation that would have even heard the story.
The only person that would have really been aware of it is my dad himself.
There wouldn't have been other family members that would have been aware of it.
Right, okay, okay.
And that was a little bit confusing to me, and I totally understand why you thought family like extended family, but we're sort of talking about your dad.
Now, when you were struck down by the psychological equivalent of what struck your dad down in terms of his heart problems...
It takes a lot of work for your dad, or we'll just talk about your dad, other family members included, but I understand, as you say, they're all propaganda robots run by your mom, but it would take a lot of work to not associate these two things, right? Yeah, I guess so.
You guess so? Well, I wasn't...
When I really kind of fell into my depression, I wasn't living with my mum at that stage.
I was actually living with my dad at that stage.
But sorry to interrupt.
I mean, your dad was also away from your mum for months at a time, right?
When he also had his heart problems.
Yep. Okay, yeah.
So, I mean, the damage is done, right?
By the time you've been around this kind of toxic personality...
For years or decades, right?
I mean, the damage is done, right?
So, a couple of years ago, your dad faced a kind of physical death, right?
And the blame was placed, or the proximate cause, the responsibility for that was placed entirely at the feet of your mom, right?
Yeah. And then, when you faced a kind of spiritual death, more recently...
Nobody made this connection, right?
Yep, that's true. I mean, do you see that that would be kind of hard to miss?
Yeah, I guess so. So, there's not a lot of innocent people here, other than you and your brother, right?
And his kids, right? Yep.
When I sort of mention it now as an obvious...
Correlating factor or similarity of dysfunction.
That knowledge, does it make you feel anything or is it mostly just a sort of intellectual connection?
I guess I definitely get the intellectual connection and the emotional one.
It's kind of there. I guess I'm resisting it in some way.
Well, sure. I mean, you're trained to, right?
Yeah. I mean, you're not supposed to make this connection.
This is heretical, right?
This is blasphemy, in a way.
Yeah. So, you said that there was a feeling there that you feel that you're resisting, but what is the feeling?
I don't know. Maybe I'm trying to kind of hold on to the...
Kind of the ideology of my dad, like what I thought he was, this is probably the root cause of why I haven't been able to confront him because although I completely see it on the intellectual level, there's something that's stopped me from kind of absorbing it emotionally to kind of have that certainty to go forward with it.
Sure, sure. I understand.
And that was a very, very good way of not telling me what your feeling is.
Okay. Well done.
I mean, that was really good. I was almost like, yeah, that's okay.
Wait a minute. That's something cool.
I'm not sure. Maybe fear?
I'm afraid of what will happen if I bring this up.
Well, I'm going to just, I'm sorry to ask you what you feel and then interrupt you right away, but the challenge when something like this has remained obscured for us is that when a truth is revealed in a family that has a lot of secrets, the first feelings that we often get, in fact almost always get, is not our own feelings, but the feelings of the person that the secret would hurt the most.
That knowledge of the secret, right?
Okay, so perhaps it's his fear.
Yeah, you are not afraid of the truth.
Right, you yourself are not afraid of the truth because you haven't abused a child, right?
Yep. So you have nothing to fear from the truth, just logically, right?
yep but your dad on the other hand has a lot to fear from the truth yeah Yep, okay. Right?
Like, if you and your dad are digging in the backyard for fun and exercise, but he's actually buried a body in the backyard, you're just going to be whistling while you work, right?
But he's going to be sweating buckets.
Yep. Right, so when we start digging around in the backyards of our own history to find where the bodies are really buried...
We feel, obviously, there's a certain amount of trepidation because it's change and it's new, but we don't feel fear in that way.
Because we've not committed crimes.
Okay. Does that make sense?
Yeah, that makes perfect sense.
So, the reason that you probably feel some fear and the resistance to it is because your dad...
Knows that he has done great wrong to his children.
He knows that.
I'm not saying he wakes up every morning and sings it to himself, but he knows that.
And he is very afraid, obviously, of you knowing that.
Because when you know it, he has to face it.
And he spent his life not only not facing it, but creating that capacity for crime, right?
Because he married a mother voluntarily, had children with her and so on.
And then left them with her.
So, the emotion that you feel, obviously there's some fear and so on, but I'm not sure that I would describe that fear...
It's your emotion. Okay.
Is there anything else that you feel in the light of this revelation about how a toxicity that almost killed a grown adult a toxicity that virulent that nobody ever asked you how you were doing even when it struck you down I'm not sure.
Really, what I really am kind of experiencing is kind of fear and anxiety.
I can't really feel anything that would possibly kind of be my own genuine emotions rather than his.
Yeah, no, I understand. I understand.
Let's try taking it from this and, you know, tell me if anything just feels weird or wrong, that's no problem, we'll stop, but Let's look at it from this angle.
I'm not going to use the dingo got my baby thing, but let's talk about...
If you read...
Just imagine, it's a reading in the newspaper, and you read about a dad that was...
With his little kids, he was taking them for a walk in the woods, and...
They were some sort of cougar.
I don't know if you've got cougars in them.
A bunch of dingoes. Okay, let's go with dingoes, right?
So a bunch of dingoes come across.
Sorry? You couldn't resist.
Couldn't resist. I'm sorry.
I tried. You know, the gravity well of Australian stereotypes just sucked me right in.
I'm sorry. So you read the newspaper article about a father who has little children, a bunch of dingoes, racing after them.
And what he does to slow the dingoes down is he puts his children, he throws his children down, and they can barely walk, right?
But he throws his children down so that he can get to safety.
Yep. And how would you feel if you read that story?
Angry. I think so.
Yeah. And why?
Because it's a pretty disgusting thing to do.
Pretty much. Pretty much.
Pretty much. And how would you feel if it was only one dingo?
Still pretty angry.
Well, more, right? Yeah.
How would you feel if it was only one dingo and the man had a gun?
Yeah, okay, I see where you're going.
Yep, definitely. And how would you feel if the man, not only there was only one dingo and the man had a gun, but the man had brought his children out to where he knew the dingo was?
Alright, yeah, there's definitely a different kind of perspective on it for me, yeah.
So what is your thoughts on that story, on that reality?
Well, I completely understand it, and now I feel like I should feel angry, but I still don't really have that emotion that I can kind of consciously feel.
I guess the fear and the anxiety have kind of overridden that.
Oh, no, I understand that.
Of course. Everybody has this belief in psychological questioning or work that we all have some big emotional boo-ha-ha, whatever, and then we're fine.
But that's not how it works, right?
Yeah. But let's look at it another way, right?
So let's imagine that you have children, right?
Yep. And you...
You drop them off at your parents' place because you want to go see the game.
You drop them off at your mom's place because you want to go and have some drinks.
Yep. Is that a wise thing to be doing with your children?
Definitely not. That definitely wouldn't happen.
Well, what if you did do it?
And you were driving away, and your children were crying out your name and didn't want you to leave, and your mom was cranking up the old crazy at them.
I feel terrible, I guess, too guilty.
It's hard for me to imagine myself doing something like that, but yeah, I guess it would be a lot of guilt and stuff like that.
Now, can you imagine what sort of person you would be if that seemed like a really, really good idea?
Yeah, a sociopath, basically.
Yeah, like if you did not feel guilt, if you did not feel remorse, but you felt that leaving innocent, helpless children with a lunatic...
That you couldn't stand and that you needed to get away from because you got chest pains because she was so horrible that giving her children to play with while you went off and did your thing, that you would have no problem with that.
You would not feel guilt.
You would not feel shame.
You would not lie awake.
You would not wake up at 2 a.m.
and think, oh, my God, what have I done?
Yeah, okay. I'm starting to understand it, I think.
Yeah, that is pretty terrible.
That is pretty terrible.
And there's two things that are terrible.
I mean, there's more than two, but just emotionally, right?
And this is why it's confusing.
There are two things that are terrible.
One is that you get what a terrible thing that would be to do to children, right?
At least with a dingo, it's a quick death, right?
But it's a terrible thing to leave children in the care of a monstrous and toxic woman like your mother.
That's terrible in and of itself when you imagine how you would feel if you did that.
What's even more terrible is trying to comprehend the personality, for want of a better word, of the person who does that for years without remorse.
And the moment, you see, there is the third worst thing here, because, you know, we might as well go for a hat trick, right?
But the third worst thing is that the moment that your dad's health was threatened, what did he do?
He got out. He acted decisively, didn't he?
Yep, he hit the eject button.
So, he doesn't have much problem figuring out his own self-interest, does he?
No, not at all.
Right. So, it's fine to leave helpless and dependent children with your mother for years and years and years while he takes off, and not leave her and not get his children to a safer place and not protect them.
From this. But the moment that his health is threatened, BAM! He solves the problem right quick, doesn't he?
Yeah. Yeah.
So your interests, your health, your sanity, your security, your happiness...
Don't add up to anything for him.
But the moment that his health is threatened, he acts, boom, immediately.
This is fast. He didn't act twice as fast when he was diagnosed.
He didn't act to protect you.
In fact, he acted to endanger you.
And then we could say, well, maybe he's just got no sense of self-protection.
But the moment that his own interests are threatened, he acts right away.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, this is definitely a very new perspective for me to sit from.
I never even considered it in that type of way before.
And how is the knowledge coursing around your system?
What is it up to?
What is it doing? I guess the anger is starting to come up now.
Yeah, I feel like it's one of those situations where anyone listening to this is kind of shouting at the bloody MP3 player, you know?
It's so bloody obvious, so bloody obvious.
Have you had that experience when you listen to the other listener conversations?
Oh, absolutely. Isn't it funny?
Yeah, I feel that they're kind of doing it to me and it's taken me 48 minutes to kind of realize it.
There's nothing so humbling, right?
And look, I've been in this.
The chair that you're in, I was in for like three hours a week for two years, right?
So I know what it's like to sit there and stare like a drooling idiot into the blindingly obvious.
So I know. I mean, I think I can do it with people because I'm incredibly humble about it myself.
And this is not because you lack any intelligence.
You have a formidable intelligence.
But you're just trained not to see it, right?
You are not allowed to see this.
Yeah.
Well, I guess...
I guess it kind of makes it a lot easier for me to bring it up with him now.
Now that I can say it more objectively.
Right. And, um...
I am not even remotely going to do any kind of remote diagnosis because obviously you have people who are helping you with some of your social anxieties and so on.
But my guess about a way that would be fruitful for you to approach the social anxiety is I'm going to put forward a proposition here, which may startle you, or you may just laugh at us completely off the wall, which is fine. Just let me know if it works or not for you.
The reason that you're scared of the world is because you can't identify the real enemy.
So it's like, if there's a tiger somewhere in the airplane hangar, but we can't see a thing, we're going to be terrified, right?
The moment we can see it, we can relax a little, right?
Yep. So if you've had a guy who consistently sacrificed you without a moment's thought for his own immediate comfort, and then the moment his interests were threatened, he acted immediately, that person is not a friend to your happiness.
That person is not a friend to your self-interest.
I would say that person would be pretty damn close to a mortal enemy.
Alright, yep. Yeah, that makes sense.
But if you can't identify him as a mortal enemy, right, then in a sense, everyone becomes an enemy.
Yeah. Okay, so you think that if I resolve this, it may kind of ease the other problems that I've got?
Well, I think so.
I think that... One of the things that will be very helpful for you, I mean, obviously, if you could instinctually and with a good degree of self-trust, easily differentiate good people from bad people, then it seems to me that you would feel a little less anxious out in the world.
Yeah, sure. If you knew who to trust and who to avoid, and you felt that you could do that relatively easily, then it would be easier for you, right?
Yeah. Because right now, that's kind of like a paralysis, right?
Because if you have a story in your family, which of course you do, right, called Dad's a Great Guy, Dad loves his son, Dad, whatever, right?
Yeah. But if he is in fact an enemy to your happiness...
And if we put your mom in the crazy bag, then your dad goes into the cold and calculating bag, right?
Yep, okay.
Which is even worse.
The one that gets away is always the worst ones It's not the best one. It's the worst one.
It's the enabler that gets away.
So everything that you feel towards your mom is mild compared to what you really feel about your dad.
Okay, yeah, that does kind of bring truth to me.
He identified that she was toxic, right?
Your mom doesn't identify herself as toxic, right?
She's hard done by, the doctors don't care, and, you know, whatever.
The universe is somehow against her or whatever, right?
Your mom doesn't identify herself as toxic, right?
Yep. But your dad, very early on, identified your mom as toxic, right?
Yep. Your mom didn't think that she was a bad person.
Your dad thought your mom was a bad person.
Yeah. Your mom didn't force your dad out of the home so that she could be home to terrorize the children.
Your dad, knowing consciously, not even unconsciously, knowing consciously that she was an incredibly destructive person, left innocent, helpless, dependent children with her alone, right?
Someone he couldn't stand, he left his children with.
So, that's worse than just being a crazy, narcissistic mystic, right?
Yeah.
So, if the greatest enemy that you have is inside your circle of trust, the world is going to look completely terrifying.
Thank you.
Okay, yeah, that does make a lot of sense.
If you have a snarling jackal pressed up against your face, it's kind of hard to see the world.
Ryan?
Yeah.
Do you think I should raise this kind of stuff directly with my dad, or not?
That's an excellent question.
I would not want to be the one to give you that answer, which doesn't mean that an answer is not imminent, but tell me what it is that would be your ideal scenario for that.
How would that play out in a way that you would consider to be a successful outcome?
Well, I guess...
Putting all that forward to him, I would get some kind of response, and the response from him would help me get certainty of the situation one way or another.
Whereas, just kind of talking about it without confronting him, I can definitely understand it, but there's still that little bit of doubt.
However, wherever that comes from, the lack of certainty, that would make it harder for me to move on.
Right. I certainly understand that, and that's a very honest answer.
I hugely respect what you're saying.
Again, without getting into the whole remote diagnosis thing, and this is all subject to your mulling it over, right?
This is just sort of my thoughts about what I've heard now and over the past couple of months that we've interacted back and forth.
Yep. If your dad is the kind of man who can leave helpless and innocent children to the tender mercies of a monster like your mother, and feel that that is a good and productive course of action, then we know that he lacks any shred of empathy.
Right? Okay.
Now, we know that he doesn't lack any shred of empathy because he's mentally damaged in some way, because he certainly has empathy with his own health, right?
Yeah. So, when people in your life have no empathy for you and are more than willing to sacrifice your happiness and your peace of mind and your future and your soul...
For their own immediate gratification?
I think going to them for validation is spiritually suicidal.
If you go to a sociopath with a need that is elementally self-destructive, Because sociopaths will always manipulate and control you based on your need.
Okay. So, what would your suggestion be for me to kind of get that certainty?
Yeah.
Anyway, what do you care about?
This is just ideas, right?
But what I'm saying is that what you're saying is that I need something from my dad which will hurt him terribly, right?
Yeah.
Based on your history with your dad and the conversation that we're having now, do you think that your dad will take on enormous personal suffering for the sake of your preferences?
services.
Probably not.
Well, I'm perfectly happy to entertain the probably, but tell me where that has occurred before.
Even to a mild degree.
Alright, good point.
Yeah. I do understand that, you know, the probably is completely irrational and illogical, but it kind of still exists there.
Look, that's fine, that's fine.
This is like getting rid of God.
This is like a process, right?
I mean, this is getting rid of these illusions, or rather getting rid of these...
Narcissistic fantasies that serve bad people is...
It takes time, right?
So this is not a transition black and white.
And the question is, if you go to somebody who has never sacrificed his own happiness for the sake of your legitimate needs, and if we look at the history of your dad with your mom...
You know this, right?
And it's your history, right?
But I'm just saying that you need to look at that history very closely because what I'm trying to get you to start thinking about is self-protection.
Because if I had to identify one thing that you're lacking most, it would be a sense of self-protection.
Okay. Self-efficacy, self-confidence, which comes from the ability to tell good and bad people apart, to not surrender anything, to not surrender any power to bad people.
If you show needs to bad people, they'll mess you up.
Alright. So, with your dad, you need to think about, okay, so I need something from my dad that will be good for me, but unbelievably painful for him.
So this is part of elemental self-protection, right?
And it's absolutely tragic that you weren't taught this.
There's absolutely no reason that you would know this.
In fact, knowing it would be bizarre because of the family that you came from.
So there's no shame in having to do some of the 2 plus 2 is 4 because I had to learn it and I'm just trying to, you know, put it forward to other people as best I can.
But... You have to look at this with empathy to the other person and particularly empathy to their lack of empathy.
So you have to say, okay, I'm going to bring something up with my dad that is going to cause him enormous suffering and I'm going to ask him to put my needs ahead of his.
So, because the best predictor of future behavior is relevant past behavior, you can predict the outcome of that with mathematical certainty.
Okay, yep, I understand that.
So, what's the outcome?
So, the outcome is that I'd most likely be manipulated and probably not get what I was after in the first place.
Well, I would guess that it's not just a question that you would not get what you were after in the first place.
So it would perhaps...
I'd go backwards.
It would get worse. I would be infused with more kind of mythology about the situation.
The certainty that you seek would be further eroded, and perhaps catastrophically so, By your father.
Okay. That does make sense.
Right, and again, this is just, again, no reason you know this, and again, I'm sorry for putting you through such basics.
They're only basics because we're taught so badly, right?
I mean, if we're locked in wheelchairs for the first 20 years, it's hard to walk, right?
Yep. But what I'm trying to get you to understand, and I know that you have more than enough intellectual capacity to grasp, but it's just hard to pound it into our hearts, is It's that you have, you know, a flickering flame of a true self, of a soul, right? That you need to protect that from dangerous people because you have been raised to serve the needs of others.
You have been raised to not have needs of your own, right?
I know that's the case with your mom and it seems to me it would be logical for that to be the case with your dad.
So... You need to think about evaluating other people and recognizing that going from the axiom that people do not change is a very, very healthy place to start.
And because people don't change, and I know this is me trying to change the world, saying that people don't change, don't worry about that paradox right now, because you're changing, right?
But you're changing because you're in motion, and you're changing because you asked questions at the very beginning of when we began to converse, right?
So the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.
And the older that someone gets, the more certain that becomes.
And after they have harmed the innocent, they don't come back.
So what I'm saying is that...
When you have needs with regards to your father or people like your father, and your instincts will tell you this as you begin to get more in touch with them, as you peel away the mythology that keeps your instincts at bay or keeps them confused or dulled or distant, that if you go to your dad with a confrontation, you are fundamentally asking him, Dad, put my needs ahead of yours.
Why would he start now?
Okay, yeah, that does make a lot of sense.
And I also guarantee you that if he perceives that you are attempting to cause him pain in any way, shape, or form, how is he going to react?
Defensively, probably. And defense for him means what?
Attacking me, perhaps?
Well, you're the sun, you tell me.
Yeah, I guess that would be the situation or shifting of the blame or something like that, some type of manipulation.
For sure. Yeah. For sure.
For sure. Right, because your dad is obviously a very intelligent person.
I mean, hell, you're very intelligent and your mom, however slowly, did complete a degree, which is almost like a real degree.
Almost. That's a bit of an exaggeration, I think.
It's almost like a real degree in a modern-status university.
That's all I can give it.
But if I, from the outside, can put together a fair amount in, what, an hour or so, right?
Yeah. Your family is very smart, right?
So they'd have to be working pretty hard to keep this stuff at bay, right?
Your family is not in hot pursuit of the truth, right?
They're not saying, I'll pay any price, I'll bear any burden, I've just got to find out what the truth is, right?
I mean, they're actively hiding it and hiding from it, right?
So, if that's where people are, if they're actively opposed to the truth, you know exactly what their reaction is going to be when you bring up the truth.
Okay, maybe this is just me not getting it again, but if I am aware of...
Of kind of the manipulation and stuff that can take place.
And I did confront my father.
Wouldn't I just be able to see it for what it is now that I'm aware of it?
And wouldn't that kind of give me the certainty that I'm after?
Yes. I mean, you are absolutely getting it, right?
I mean, I knew I called you smart for a reason.
You are absolutely getting it.
But the question is, when are you strong enough to do that?
And when I say strong enough, I just mean...
Because our parents are always gigantic to us, right?
Until the day... I mean, they can be like 90 pounds in a hospital bed at the age of 150.
They'll still be giants to us, right?
Just our first 20 years, right?
So... Your dad is...
Let's just say, sounds like it, could be, you know for sure, a master manipulator, right?
And he also has all the power of parental authority, and he also kept you, a highly intelligent man, away from the truth, in fact, in hot opposition to the truth in some ways, for going on 24 years, right?
Yep. So, he's got some power, right?
He is your Mike Tyson, right?
Yep. So, if you want to get in the ring, you've got to train, right?
Okay, yeah. So, I would say, you know, launch off tomorrow and say, I'm in, right?
And training can involve your dad, right?
Yeah. But what I would do is ask little questions and see how you feel about his response, right?
Okay. You know, ask him little questions about, you know, I don't remember much about this early part of my childhood, you know, what was I like, or, you know, things which can't really conceivably be considered offensive, right?
Yeah. Okay.
And just see how you feel about his response.
Have little needs, right?
Don't go on big whole hog and say, I need validation for my childhood and this and that, right?
Because that's a big honking need, right?
Yeah. If you want to find out if someone's a vampire, you don't offer them your neck, right?
Just give them a little bit of blood and see if they dive on it, right?
Say, ooh, look, I spilled a little red paint.
See if they jump all over it.
But you start with measured doses, right?
And the important thing is not how he reacts, but how you feel about him reacting.
Because I promise you that all of the instincts you need to be perfectly safe in this world are in you already.
And they will tell you based on how you feel.
Do I feel good? Do I feel valued?
Do I feel respected?
Do I feel that this person is...
Like, here's something, right?
Take him to a bar to watch a game and then interrupt him while he's watching the game.
And see what he does, right?
And whatever the equivalent is in your relationship, I don't know.
I'm just coming more with cliches, right?
Yep. When someone really claims to care about us, we should not be an interruption for them, right?
I mean, I don't mean never, right?
But for the most part, we should not be an interruption for them, right?
Okay, yep. And so you can do lots of things to gauge all of this.
Without throwing your neck back and saying, bite if you want it, right?
Yep.
And you can do that until you get some kind of certainty.
Okay, yeah, that does sound like a much more sensible way to go about it.
Right. I mean, you know, there's always this talk about boundaries, right?
And boundaries are like, you know, you meet these people and they tell you their whole life story in the first 10 seconds, right?
Well, those are people who aren't testing the waters, right?
Those are the same idiots who jump straight off a big hill into a water without checking whether there are rocks two feet below the surface, right?
It looks like lots of fun until there are rocks two feet below the surface.
Then it's a whole lot of mess, right?
And so this is another way that this is just part of testing the waters, right?
When you meet somebody new, you ask them questions and you monitor their responses.
How does this person make me feel?
Do I feel like they're interested in me or do I feel like when you're talking to someone...
At a party or whatever and they're looking around the room the whole time.
Well, I just don't spend that much time with people like that because they're obviously kind of narcissistic and just looking for someone better to talk to.
It's like, go find them. Don't let me get in your way.
It's just learning to get a sense of how we feel If I'm talking to somebody for 10 minutes and they don't ask me a single question about myself, I have no more time for them in this life or any other.
I don't mean you right now.
It's just being able to gauge.
Lots of people get involved in these big relationships.
A year in or a year and a half in, it's not working out.
It's like, man, you could have figured that out.
You saved yourself 18 months and tens of thousands of dollars right here.
Five minutes is all you need.
So it's just learning how to test the waters and see how you feel and that's how you will build up your confidence to go through the world with security and safety.
Okay. Well, thank you very much for that.
Yeah, that's definitely turned everything upside down for me.
Excellent. Well, that's what I try to do.
Yeah, I think I see it a lot more clearly now.
So, yeah, thank you.
I know that this was a bit of a conversation that you were concerned about.
How did it go for you?
I mean, was there anything that you would have liked to have done differently or for me to have done differently or how did it go for you?
No, it was good.
The reason I wanted to confront this issue was because I didn't want to confront it in a way.
I guess what I've learned over the last six months or whatever is the things that you don't want to deal with are the things that you really have to deal with.
Definitely, when I really kind of get the mythology and stuff challenged, although it feels a little disturbing, I also know that it's really kind of the most important thing I can do in the long term.
So, yeah, I think it was very good in that regard.
Okay, good.
And what was it like relative to your expectations?
Yeah, I didn't really know what to expect because I was quite confused about the whole issue, but you definitely helped clarify it for me somewhat, which is what I was hoping I don't know if that was what I was expecting because I couldn't really foresee how that would happen, but It definitely got what I was hoping for out of it.
I'm very, very glad. Well, obviously, keep us all posted.
I will compile this and send you a copy so that you can listen.
I personally think that you didn't mention any names and it's a big country.
It's a continent, in fact.
So if you were comfortable releasing this as a podcast, I would certainly be very happy about that.
But have a listen to it first and let me know what you think.
You can absolutely release it.
I have no problems with that.
That's very, very kind. I certainly do appreciate that.
And keep me posted, okay?
Okay. Thank you very much.
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