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Dec. 7, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:02:56
933 Predatory Depression Part 3: Father - A Listener Conversation

Should he send this letter to his father?

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Time Text
Hey, how's it going? Hi, Steph.
How are ya? I'm okay.
I'm feeling a bit calmer now after I've kind of got all that stuff out onto paper.
Right, right. But you were having some migraine and other difficult things occurring, right?
Yeah. Right, right.
And if you don't mind spending a few minutes, I thought it would be worthwhile Just going over some reasons for that and also what might be occurring for you with this letter, right? The letter that you have written and you're thinking of sending to your dad, is that right?
Yeah. Okay. So, would you mind just digging up the letter and reading it?
And then we can talk a little bit about the sequence that may be occurring for you at this point.
All right. Okay.
Dad, I feel completely terrified writing this letter to you.
I'm not sure why this is.
Perhaps I fear your reaction, or perhaps that trying to communicate my feelings honestly is something new for me.
My purpose here is not to create conflict, but to convey what I'm feeling.
I need to get this off my chest and get some sort of closure before I can move on with my life.
I have, for a long time, been confused about our relationship.
Although I've not known this consciously.
This confusion has been causing me a great deal of pain.
I am really trying to come to grips with my childhood.
As you know, I have been going through a really terrible time for the past few years, and now that I have resolved my feelings towards Mum, I must do the same with you.
This feels a thousand times harder.
I feel incredibly angry at you.
I realise that this may come as a shock to you, as I have not openly expressed that before.
This is because I never realised it before.
I have put the blame for my childhood squarely on Mum in the past, but I've come to realise that you've played a part in it too.
I am angry at you for not being there when I was growing up, and for leaving me under the sole control of Mum, a woman that you realised the poisonous nature of, a woman that you actively avoided being around.
I feel like you sacrificed me to her.
You left me there all those years when you could not stand being there yourself.
I don't understand how you could leave a child in the full-time care of someone whose occasional presence caused you, a fully grown man, so much stress that it threatened your life, and how you resolved the speed with which you acted to get yourself out of this situation with the years of inaction on your part while I was growing up.
I feel betrayed.
It must have been obvious to you what could have caused my depression.
You had been stressed to the point where your mortality became an issue, That's my brother, has been drinking and using drugs since he was 13.
I don't remember you suggesting that it could have been my past that caused it once.
It seems like you held back that answer to avoid having to admit your part in it.
I have had a huge emotional dependence on you in the past, which is why it is so hard for me to be writing this.
I know that I have to break this for any chance to be able to move forward in my life.
Many of these feelings are new to me and I need time to deal with them, which is why I've decided not to see you when you come over for Christmas this month.
I also don't wish for you to assist me financially with my psychologist or anything else.
I need to be able to work through my issues without having my judgment clouded at all.
Asha. Right, right.
Okay. And tell me a little bit about the process of writing that letter and what was going on for you, how many drafts it took or anything like that.
That was just the first draft.
I kind of just sat there with a notebook open and I just tried to think about the conversations we'd had and I just kind of let it flow.
I don't even kind of consciously remember writing it.
It just all came out at once and that was it.
Then I typed it up and posted it.
Right. Okay. Okay.
And can you tell me a little bit about your history with migraines and what's been occurring since...
It sort of came about since you and I chatted last, right?
Yeah. That's the kind of positive healing that I like to bring to people is blinding skull pain.
Sorry about that, but go on.
Yeah. I used to have them...
It would have been when I was 11 and 12...
Around that time, it used to keep me out of school a lot.
Sometimes I'd only go one or two days in the wake because I'd be home with migraines.
I didn't understand at the time that it was anything stress-related or anything like that, but I do now, and I hadn't really experienced them for For years until I spoke to you the other day.
Right. And yeah, they just came back and I was feeling really very stressed about what my next step would be.
Right, right. And can you tell me a little bit about your thoughts about the stress and so on?
Like, in terms of what you say your next thoughts would be in that?
Um, just, I was just kind of worried about writing this letter and what it would mean and kind of getting it out and having to, I guess, confront him about this in some way. I guess, confront him about this in some way.
Right. I don't know, I guess I can't really say I've been avoiding it, but I've been dreading it.
Right. So, as we had talked about the last time, the peculiar anxiety and to some degree stress and paralysis, depression can occur when we have a have to combined with a can't, right?
I have to do this. I can't do it.
Or I feel so strongly that I don't want to do it that it might as well be.
I can't do it well, right?
And so on. Like, so, if somebody would say to me, you have to perform an appendectomy, right?
I would feel pretty stressed because...
However much I would want to do it, even if it were saving my wife, the life of my wife, I simply Couldn't do it, right?
Because I don't know how to... Right?
So that stress probably has something to do with the impossible situation, right?
So as I talked to a fellow Ossie recently, that childhood is a disease that our parents are supposed to cure us off, sort of metaphorically.
And the problem is that when we hit puberty, if we're not prepared, then we basically have to become adults, but we don't know how.
But puberty is pushing us along nonetheless, right, to becoming an adult.
Right? But we have not been trained to have any preferences to negotiate any boundaries and so on.
And so we're basically becoming sort of child soldiers in the arena of adulthood and we don't know how to do it and we're not allowed to complain and we're not allowed to learn but the relentless march of physical maturity pushes us into that arena anyway.
So there's a real stress around puberty and that similar situation seems to be occurring for you now.
And I would like to look at some ways of relieving that pressure for you, because it's not necessary, though it is certainly understandable that it is occurring.
Alright, that'd be good.
So, tell me, this is a letter that you're thinking of sending, or planning on sending to your dad, right?
Yeah, I'm not 100% sure whether I'm going to send it to him.
I wrote it with that intention, but a couple of people have said, yeah, send it.
it just a couple of people said don't send it so I'm not quite sure at the moment well this is not to place this It's not a paradigm or this structure on you, but it could be the case, and you can mull it over and let me know what you think, either now or later.
It is a dangerous time, psychologically, when somebody first identifies abuse, clearly, and that's sort of what we were talking about in our last two conversations.
And when Ricky was up here for the barbecue, we talked in terms of his desire to get piercings and so on, tattoos, and he went out and got a whole bunch of piercings when he moved out from his parents' abusive household or the abusive household he was living in that his parents were in charge of.
And the reason that that phenomenon occurs is I think?
And when the motives and natures of those around us are first revealed to us in all of their unholy, evil glory, so to speak, it's highly disorienting and it is very stressful.
Now, one of the ways that people act, which is to reduce their stress, is to attempt to make the new knowledge unconscious again.
In other words, to attempt to go back to a state prior to a moral enlightenment, if that makes any sense.
Yeah, that makes sense.
Yes.
One of the things that will happen when, say, a woman leaves an abusive relationship is that she will sit home and feel a growing anxiety because she doesn't know what it feels like to exist without being abused.
One of the things she will be drawn to is to return to a state of abuse in order to go back to what is familiar.
Okay. And so one of the things that I wanted to ask you with regards to this is that it's sort of what are your thoughts about what could occur when your dad reads this letter, right? So if you sort of wriggle into your dad's skin, when he opens this letter and reads this, what is his response going to be?
I really, really don't know.
I've never had any type of communication with him like this before, so I don't know how he's going to respond.
Well, I'd just like to correct you, and I'm fairly confident, but you can tell me if this isn't the case.
I would like to correct you on that.
Because if you say, I don't know how my dad would respond to this, but for the more than two decades that I have known him, or even if we just count the ten years, that you have had the capacity to have any kind of conversation like that with him.
if you have never had that conversation with him, then it seems to me unlikely that you don't know how he would react.
Okay.
Is that too convoluted?
Did I put that in too convoluted?
That does make sense.
Perhaps I was trained to be like that from a young age, but I certainly, until recently, haven't had the desire to want a conversation like this, so I can't remember any past experience, if you know what I mean. But I do understand what you're saying, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, obviously, if you could have had this conversation at any time, and I don't necessarily mean just this conversation, but I guarantee you that you've never had a conversation like this with your dad.
Yeah, that's true.
Even about somebody else, and possibly, and actually quite probably, even about your brother.
Yeah, that's true. Right?
So, this conversation is off-limits as far as your dad goes, and he has made that very clear in one way or another.
And again, I'm not saying there's a big neon sign on his forehead or something, but he has made that very clear, right?
Yeah. So, you do know, down to the last detail, exactly how he's going to respond when he opens this letter.
Alright, perhaps I do, but I'm not really conscious of it.
Okay, no, and that's perfectly fine.
And again, it's just a theory, right?
But I mean, we can dig in and see if it makes any sense.
Okay, so, does your dad enjoy exercising power?
Um... I'm sure you'll tell me that I'm wrong, but I don't know.
Okay, that's fine. Look, I don't want to put you in the middle of the foggy planet and find your way to higher ground, so I'll just ask you a couple more questions.
Let me put it to you this way.
How does your dad react to vulnerability?
So if you were to sit down and read this letter to him and you burst into tears in the first paragraph, what would his emotional response be to your vulnerability and sensitivity?
I'm not...
I'm not sure.
I remember...
The only time I've really seen any type of emotion from him was when he came to visit my psychiatrist with me and I kind of saw tears in his eyes.
That's the only time I've ever seen anything like that from him.
It would probably be tears in his eyes and silence in combination, I guess.
Okay, well perhaps you can tell me a little bit more about the emotion that he showed when you were at the psychiatrist.
I didn't actually even notice it till when he was dropping me off at home again.
I just kind of noticed his eyes were welled up in tears, but he didn't really say anything as such.
I think he probably That's when he realized kind of the gravity of the situation as the psychiatrist was explaining it to him.
But yeah, he didn't express anything verbally.
I just kind of saw the tears in his eyes and he was fairly anxious to kind of get out of there, I guess.
To get out of the car?
To drive off again, to not let me see his tears and stuff like that.
Okay, now that last bit is a story, right?
That the reason that he wanted to leave the situation is because he didn't want you to see his tears, right?
Yep. You don't, I mean, we don't have any confirmation of that as yet.
Yeah, that's fair enough.
So... Clearly, he understood the gravity of your depression and you have been going through a spinal cracking kind of depression for the last couple of years combined with certain aspects of social phobia and so on.
And when he understood how unhappy you were, do you think that in an ideal universe, if someone is sad, we should want to get away from them as quickly as possible?
No. So, what could have been happening, given that that is perhaps the worst possible thing that he could have done?
Maybe avoidance on his part, in terms of any guilt he was feeling?
It certainly could be.
Now, he certainly was feeling sad and overwhelmed, right?
We can assume that the tears were genuine and he didn't put eye drops in and pretend that these are genuine and real.
There is a genuine and real emotion, but the sadness that he felt, he clearly associated with being in proximity with you, right?
In other words, you were the cause of his sadness, right?
Yeah, alright. Yeah, that makes sense.
Again, I'm not trying to make any...
I'm just going empirically, right?
Because if I'm standing over and cutting a whole bunch of onions and my eyes well up with tears, then clearly, if I want to stop crying, I have to take a step away from the onions.
The onions are causing me to cry, right?
Yep. So, if we look at that moment...
We can clearly see, or somewhat clearly see, that in a situation where his actions, in very fundamental ways, had caused your depression, he perceived it that your actions were making him sad.
Yeah, alright. Yeah, that makes sense.
Right, this is very similar to me punching a child in the face and then saying, you son of a bitch, you hurt my knuckles.
Yeah, I never thought of it like that before.
but...
Yeah.
But what he clearly communicated to you was that your unhappiness was making him unhappy and that the solution was for him to leave you.
Yeah, I guess he was.
Now, can you tell me what parallels that has at a larger level about his parenting as a whole?
Well, I guess it's the same as when he left my brother and I with my mum.
He perhaps could have avoided us or avoided emotional conversations with us for the same reasons.
Is that what you were trying to get at?
Well, to some degree, in the...
I just want to get the placement.
Was it in the car after or actually in the psychiatrist's office?
It was in the car afterwards, right?
Yeah, I didn't notice until I kind of turned to him to say goodbye.
That's when I noticed it.
And that's when you got the impression that he kind of wanted to get out of there pretty quickly, right?
Yeah. Right.
So, when we look at his parenting patterns, which is that he began to leave for extended periods of time, if I remember rightly, you were about 10 or 11 years old?
I think so, yes.
And it was shortly thereafter that you began to develop the migraines, right?
Yes. Right.
So we have a habit or a pattern that when your father sees that you are unhappy, the solution that he perceives is valid is for him to leave the situation.
Okay.
So do you think he will do something similar if I ascend in this letter?
Well, let's just pause for a second, and I'm sorry if you've already gotten this point, but I just want to make sure that I'm crystal clear, at least in the way that I view it, and whether that makes sense or not to you, of course, up to you.
So he saw, as a child, and particularly when you were entering into puberty, that you were very unhappy.
Yeah. And his solution was to go and work in another city or another town or out in the boondocks, right?
Yeah. So here we have a very strong pattern that when your father feels that you are sad, he abandons you.
Yeah. And that gives you what message?
That he doesn't care, I guess.
Well, he cares.
He cares because you're making him unhappy and so he leaves, right?
Yeah, or that he's a bit of an inconvenience to him then, I guess.
Well, more than a bit, right?
I mean, if he's got to leave his home and his wife and go and work in the middle of nowhere for months, that's quite an inconvenience, right?
Yeah. And how do you perceive, and you got this pattern unconsciously, completely, because you got these migraines, right?
So, how do you feel about...
Your father's judgment of your unhappiness, or rather, what was the inevitable conclusion that any child would come to if he was abandoned whenever he was unhappy?
That I wasn't loved, I guess.
Well, not being loved is not painful.
There are a billion people in China who don't care about me one way or the other, right?
So, it's not quite that.
I think that...
If I abandon a child for whatever period of time, that is an extraordinarily aggressive action to take, right?
Yeah. I mean, abandoning a child is punishing a child.
Yeah. Right?
So, what we can say is that your experience of your father...
And his judgment of your unhappiness or your misery under the black heel of your mother was that if I am sad, I am punished.
Yeah. And then the same thing happened when you were in the car with him after the psychiatric consult.
Insofar as there was a moment, Ash, where you really needed your dad, right?
Yeah. I mean, he got it.
He saw and understood the misery that his child was suffering.
Yeah, I guess he did.
And his response was to punish you.
and to say, basically, you are a sickness that I must get away from.
As you say, he couldn't wait to get away quickly enough.
Yeah. Now here's the terrible and terrifying impossible situation.
My unhappiness drives people away, but when other people treat me as a mental sickness and punish me and abandon me for being unhappy, I get more unhappy.
The punishment creates the illness, creates the punishment, creates the illness in an ever-escalating manner until you gave out, right?
Yeah. So how is your dad going to react when he reads...
that you are sad and critical and angry?
He'll probably ignore it in some respects, punish me by ignoring it or trying to deflect it or something like that. punish me by ignoring it or trying to deflect it Okay, let's go down those possibilities, right?
Your dad receives a letter that says, I am terrified of you, my father, right?
Yeah. And do you think that your dad will say, tell me more, I want to understand what you're thinking and feeling?
No. No.
Guaranteed. You could place a billion dollars on it at a billion to one odds and you would absolutely never get that reaction from your father.
Yeah. Right?
Yeah.
And when you say, I am incredibly angry at you, what is his response going to be?
I'm sure he won't address the actual emotion in his head.
He may offer some kind of justification or something like that.
And what would that sound like?
Like I was doing what I thought was best or something along those lines.
Okay, got it.
Because if you're just sad and he drives away pretty much burning rubber on his way out, that's one thing.
Because you're being passive, and I don't mean that in a negative way, but...
If I come home and my wife is crying, and I immediately turn out and walk out the door, that would be a pretty startling thing to do if I claim to care about my wife.
But simply by being sad, she's not doing anything to me, right?
Yeah. So your dad processes you being sad as an attack upon him, which is why he wants to get away, like a burning building, right?
Yeah. So, your dad perceives that you're attacking him when you're not initiating any negative or critical action towards him, right?
Yep. And your dad is willing to humiliate you and abandon his child who is depressed to the point of being threatened by suicidality, right?
Yeah. Right, so his child...
is bleeding and choking by the side of the road and he doesn't even slow down to give his child aid.
He hits the gas.
Right?
Yeah.
And that's when you are in danger of dying.
Thank you.
And his action of wanting to get away from you the moment that he understands how dire your affliction is, was itself somewhat murderous.
Because you could not concoct a way to harm somebody who is depressed more.
Especially, even if you were a stranger.
let alone somebody who actually had some knowledge and held the keys to your cure.
So when you are merely sad, he is willing to act and very happy to act and without any indecision is willing he is willing to act and very happy to act and without any indecision is willing and happy to act in Thank you.
I mean, if my child ever becomes suicidally depressed, you can't pry me from that child's side until a corner is turned, right?
Yeah.
Whereas your dad couldn't wait to abandon you because you were making him feel uncomfortable.
Which was unbelievably destructive to you, right?
Thank you.
Yeah. Depressed people feel that they are rejected and they feel alone and they feel unloved and they feel that they can be...
that they are mentally ill, that they are sick, that they are never going to get better and they feel that life has become unbearable and may not be worth living, right?
Yeah. Now...
If that is the state of mind, if that is your state of mind, and I know that it was, when your dad treats you as a leper that he has to get away from, does that help or hinder your recovery?
That hurts it a lot.
It's catastrophic, Ash.
And that's when you weren't criticizing him in any way, shape, or form.
He was willing to pull the trigger on your mental health because he was feeling a little upset.
He perceived your sadness as detrimental to his self-interest and was willing to reject and abandon you in your most vulnerable moment for the sake of his own comfort.
So if that is his reaction, which is to perform actions which directly threaten your survival as a human being, when you're not even attacking him, what is his reaction going to be when you criticize him in a fundamental, soul-shaking way?
Just before you answer that, his abandoning you to your depression was exactly the same as him abandoning you to your mother.
Thank you.
His rejection of you, his punishment of you for making him feel bad because you were unhappy as a child, was exactly the same as his punishment of you for making him feel bad by being depressed.
And that was all passive.
You were just sad. What happens when you become angry and critical?
Jeez, I don't know how he'll react now.
Well, you do. And again, sorry to be annoying.
Sorry to be annoying, but you absolutely know how he's going to react.
Do you think that he would maybe go on the offensive a bit and be angry at May?
Thank you.
Well, correct me if you're wrong.
Sorry, correct me if I'm wrong and I couldn't, so just let me know what you think.
My understanding of your dad is that he's dangerous because he's much more sophisticated than your mom in terms of his defenses, right?
Yeah. I mean, your mom is like 12 pounds of crazy stuffed in a 2-pound bag, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Whereas your dad is, quote, concerned, right?
And, quote, helpful, and was, quote, doing the best he could, right?
Yeah. So, this is my guess, right?
This is my guess. I don't know your dad from Adam, but this is my guess as to what is going to happen.
He's not going to punch you, right?
Yeah. He's not going to scream at you, right?
Yeah. He's not going to call you a fucking dickwad who doesn't know his ass from a hole in the ground, right?
Right. Right? He's more sophisticated than that.
There are some people who will do that.
But I don't think your dad is one of them.
No, definitely not.
Right. Okay. So I think I understand that so far.
So, this is my guess.
And if you don't mind, we can try a little roleplay here to see how right I might be.
Okay. Okay. So, you read this letter, and I play your dad, and I say, but Ash, I'm shocked.
Where is all this coming from?
I would probably have to tell him it was some crazy philosopher on the internet.
And how do you think that would go?
Not very well. So there's some guy out there.
Where is he? Canada?
Alaska? He broadcasts from his home.
He self-publishes his own books.
He tells people to criticize their families and to give money to him.
so this is the person that you're putting in front of your own flesh and blood and I've been there for you your whole life and I have tried to do everything that I can to help you and provide you and I pay for your therapy sessions and I'm here to listen whenever you want me and you're going off and the thanks that I get and the repayment that I get is you go off following some crazy bald ass guru in Canada I'm not sure that he'd be that aggressive actually, he's
Yeah, I think you're right. I don't think he would be.
I think what he would do, though, is he would focus on your interest in philosophy as just another sign of mental illness, right?
Possibly. He's actually...
I've spoken to him about going back to university and studying philosophy, and he's kind of encouraged that, so...
Well, sure. Sorry, what I meant was not your interest in university philosophy, because university philosophy would never have you writing this letter, right?
Yeah. Right?
So, what he would be concerned about is your interest in proactive personal philosophy, right?
Yeah. Right?
He'd say, this is just another thing that you're grasping at that you think is going to make you better, but it's not.
It's going to make you worse.
Your family is the ones that you should be coming to.
You should not be going to some crazy guy on the internet and listening to everything he says.
You've got to start thinking for yourself.
Or something. Again, I'm more aggressive than he would be, but it would be something like that, right?
Yeah, probably. So he would bring the full weight of culture and cultural imperatives and all of the natural and inevitable skepticism that would arise out of listening to somebody in this kind of medium.
And I'm pretty sure that you would walk out of there far less certain and positive about your future than when you went in, right?
Yeah. I think it might actually be likely that he would assume that I'm getting this from my psychologist.
I'm not sure if he would ask me where I'm getting it from.
Oh no, he would. Because this is new.
This would be a new ingredient.
This letter would be a new ingredient.
Yeah, that's true. Yeah, he would ask because, look, you've been bouncing around the mental health care system for a couple of years, right?
Yeah. And this is new.
Yeah, that's true.
Right, so he would know and he would absolutely try and get to the bottom of it.
And the reason that he would want to know where it was coming from is that he would want to be able to discredit the source and disorient you, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Right?
So if you said, well, I'm not going to talk about where this is coming from, he wouldn't let that go.
He'd say, well, is it because you're ashamed of where it's coming from?
I mean, is this the book? Is this like, and I, you know, let me listen to it.
I want to listen to it. I want to understand, right?
So that I can help you, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Yeah. But what would happen is it would begin to focus, he would move the focus, not on his actions in the past, but on your motivations for writing the letter and the source of those motivations and the validity of that source.
Yeah, that's quite likely.
Well, you know, there may be other things that he could do, but...
For sure, you're not going to feel heard.
You're not going to feel respected. And you're going to work out of there feeling a whole lot less sane than when you went in.
Yeah, that's true.
I think it's true. Again, I mean, this is something you would know obviously infinitely better than I would.
I'm just looking at the mental picture of a father who has just been told that his son is suicidally depressed, wanting to get away from him as quickly as possible, and what that says about someone's personality.
Now, it could be, of course, that we would all make that kind of foolish and overwhelmed mistake, but what would happen is we would be eaten up by guilt and remorse as we drove home, and then we'd turn around and drive back and take a month off work, and, you know, because our son was, Sick, yea unto death, right? Yeah.
But this has never been raised again as something your dad has any remorse about, right?
No. Right.
Which means that he does appreciate and understand your emotional life, right?
He's not psychotic, right?
He does have a sense of your emotional life, but your emotional life provokes anxiety in him, right?
In the same way that a dead body provokes anxiety in a murderer.
And, of course, if the murderer comes across his dead body, he also wants to hit the gas and get out, right?
Yeah. Yeah. So, the reason that I said on the board that this is a great letter for you, but I would strongly advise against sending it to your dad...
Is that you're saying, as we talked about before, this is not a guy who has empathy for you, right?
This is a guy who is always willing to sacrifice your happiness and even your life because, I say, being rejected by your dad at a moment of great psychological distress when you're feeling suicidal is murderous, right?
I mean, it's an unbelievably awful thing for a parent to do.
But you are basically expressing vulnerability and anger at somebody who is unbelievably cruel to you.
Yeah. I mean, it's okay to get into the ring, into a bullfighting ring, if you're a matador, right?
Yeah. But you don't want to just go in there naked, right, in a wheelchair and wave a red flag at the bull, right?
Yeah. And I'm not saying I'm a matador, because with my own parents, I'm also the naked guy in a wheelchair.
It's always the case. Just with other people's parents, I can be a bit of a matador, but with my own, I'm as helpless as anybody, right?
But that's my concern.
And we had talked in our last conversations about little things that you could do if you felt the need to engage further with your dad.
There's little things that you could do.
Like, you could ask him, you know, how did you feel when you heard this diagnosis?
And just keep asking him, whatever.
Or you could just do little things, like I would prefer this or that.
But I think, I personally think that the healthiest thing to do right now is to, as you say, not see your dad over Christmas, because he obviously does exert an enormous amount of influence over you, as all our parents do to us.
But the way that you can achieve that is to simply say, I have some issues.
That I need to work on.
I'm going to take a break from the family so I can get my head straight and I'll be back in touch when I feel that I've gotten that well underway.
So there's no content.
There's no challenge to the sadist.
There's no challenge. There's no attack.
There's no criticism. There's no I'm so angry.
Because we don't want to provoke dangerous people in our life.
I mean, you are, I think, I mean, tell me whether this is true or not, but you are in a state of pretty significant recovery, right?
Yeah. I mean, I know the migraines suck and I really do have, I've never had a migraine, but Christina had one many years ago and they're just terrifying.
So, you know, with all due sympathy for that, but you are feeling somewhat better, right?
A lot better, yeah.
Right, right. So you're in a process of rebuilding, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
And when you're in a process of rebuilding, there's a lot of aches and pains, right?
So when you get out of the wheelchair, you go into physiotherapy, it hurts like hell.
And what people want to do to avoid that pain is they want to get back in the wheelchair, right?
So you've got to watch that you're going to have a tendency to want to re-invite abusive and destructive people into your life because that puts you back in the wheelchair so you stop hurting because of physiotherapy.
Okay. So, one of the things that may be occurring here, or one of the motivations that you might have had for, not just for writing, but for sending this letter is, if I can fight with my dad, then I can go back to that which was familiar.
And so, in a sense, you're inviting your dad and you're saying to your dad, Dad, this philosophy stuff, it's good, but man, it's painful.
It's disorienting. It's painful.
I've got these migraines. I feel like shit some days and so on.
So, if you can just blow in here like an evil, fiery wind and blow all this philosophy stuff away from me, then I can go back to the way I was, which at least was familiar.
Yeah. Because that's what he'd do, right?
He would discredit what you're up to.
And that would be a relief.
It is for all of us at certain times.
Like, can I just go and blend with the herd again and stop being this icebreaker of new human thought or whatever, right?
Yeah. So that's something you have to be alert to.
Okay. But enough of my talking.
Just what is it that you think about what it is that we've been talking about?
I think your kind of analysis of the situation where we drove off definitely got me one step closer to the kind of certainty I'm after.
But at the moment, as stupid as it sounds, I still feel like there's kind of that little tiny flame burning of irrational hope there.
I was hoping that if nothing else from sending the letter that I'd get I'd be able to extinguish that flame.
I feel like until I get rid of that last little bit of hope that it'll always be an issue, if you know what I mean.
How would you suggest I go about doing that?
Well, that's obviously a big question.
I don't think we'll be able to cover it all.
But one of the ways that I was able to achieve this to the degree that I've been able to, which I think is a fairly good degree, is through a sort of series or a process of visualizations, right? So I would sort of sit there and say, well, if I beat a child...
Who was one-fifth my size.
How would that affect me?
And, of course, I would be tortured and wracked with guilt.
And it would be unbearable for me, and I would have to find some way to make restitution, and real restitution, not just, like, get angry at the kid for making me feel unhappy because they're crying because I hit them, right?
I mean, but real restitution.
And, of course, I would go... I mean, as I sort of, when I did some corrupt things, or I didn't do them, but I was involved in a group that did them, and I was profiting from it in an indirect way, I simply stopped being able to sleep, and I had to re-evaluate my whole approach to living philosophy and so on.
So I try to put myself in the mindset of somebody to whom both beating a child and then getting angry that the child was unhappy, I try and put myself in the mindset of somebody like that.
And The reason that I tried to do that, and the reason that I strongly suggest that you do that, Ash, is that...
It really helps you stop mistaking the world for yourself, right?
And this is something we all do, right?
So we are all intelligent and sensitive people and we all have a conscience.
I mean, just about everybody who's in this conversation, right?
We all have a conscience.
We all don't want to hurt people.
We all would feel bad even if we inadvertently hurt someone and we would all be sensitive to that and try and make amends and restitutions.
And so what happens is, because that's who we are, it can be really hard to jump over that mental fence into the land of people who are not like us at all.
Right? Okay, yeah.
The imagery to understand is my child is being raised by a vile, destructive woman that I made a huge mistake in marrying.
Right? That's the stimuli.
And this is nothing made up.
This is all empirical, right?
That's the stimuli.
And the response is, so I'm going to leave them alone for months.
I'm going to move out, right?
Pretty much, intermittently.
Yeah. Yeah. Or my child has just been given a diagnosis of terminal depression and I can't wait to get away quickly enough.
And that doesn't bother me.
And it doesn't keep me awake at night.
I feel no remorse.
And I would defend that action Well, it was for you.
I didn't want you to become scared because I was crying.
I didn't want you to think that I thought it was really serious.
They would make that up and make it your fault.
Not only would they violate any tenet of rational love in the moment, but they would then blame you for criticizing them afterwards and say that you misinterpreted and you're paranoid, and they would further harm your mental health.
We would not take somebody in...
In movies, right, there's always this cheesy bit where the terrorist grabs the woman and uses her as a human shield, right?
And we always say, well, that's really cowardly, right?
Yeah.
Well, what if the terrorist grabbed his own child as a human shield?
I'm going to appease your mom by...
Leaving you with her and not fighting for custody and not getting divorced and not whatever, right?
I'm just going to appease your mom, right?
I'm going to appease your mom by throwing you to her, right?
It's the dingo thing, like the last time we chatted.
If you can put yourself in the mindset of someone to whom that is a really good idea, that is an amazing leap of imagination and that is incredibly liberating.
Because we are so sensitive to our own feelings, right?
I mean, I totally get that you're very sensitive, and that's got a kind of gay connotation, but I mean that in a good way, right?
That you are empathetic, right?
That you feel your own emotions very strongly.
So it's very, very hard...
It's a leap of conceptual imagination that's a real challenge, but it's very essential to get ourselves into the mindset of somebody who does not recognize our feelings at all.
It's very hard, right? Because we feel our own feelings so strongly, and we feel our own sensitivity so strongly.
But getting into the mindset of somebody who doesn't Recognize our feelings in a very fundamental way and is not troubled by that lack of recognition is really tough.
To empathize with a real, chilling, cold, interstellar lack of empathy is one of the greatest feats of moral imagination that we need to achieve.
But it is essential for self-protection.
Because you keep thinking that your dad is something like you, right?
Right? Yeah.
Yeah. I am a human being.
My father is a human being.
Therefore, my father would react to a crying child.
And if he didn't, it's because it just hasn't been explained to him in the right way.
Yeah, yeah. That's definitely what I've had floating around in my head the last few days.
Exactly. It makes total sense, right?
It makes total sense. Like, I don't speak Mandarin, but if somebody said a Mandarin sentence to me slowly and loudly enough, I would somehow gain the ability to speak Mandarin.
There is, and we're not, again, this is not just my opinion, this is science, right?
People who are sociopaths, and this is not to, I don't know your dad well enough, but you know this answer, right?
Their brains do not light up when other people suffer.
You and I feel that, right?
I mean, you and I probably, we watch someone getting an injection in a movie and her arms hurt, right?
That's what that sense of, right?
It's like, we see suffering and it's painful, right?
But the people who are able to do things that your dad did fall into the category of people who are just missing things, biochemically, physiologically, neurologically right it's like asking it's like well if I if I explain the rules of basketball well enough to this man with no arms he'll be able to play
you know there's that that Bible statement right By their actions shall ye know them, right?
And that's very true. Your dad has told you everything about who he is, his level of empathy, his level of sensitivity, his level of conscience, his level of remorse, his level of care and concern for you at his own expense.
And he has repeatedly, consistently, and without guilt made decisions that are horribly detrimental to your self-interest for the sake of his own immediate advantage, right?
So you've got to try, this is literally a life-saving thing to try, you've got to try to get into the head of somebody who does not see you for who you are, who does not connect to your emotions as they are.
Who is not at all sensitive to how you feel and views you only as a prop or a narcissistic convenience piece or showpiece or I'm a good dad.
Look, I went for lunch with my son and we had a great time and that makes me feel like I'm a better person and I can tell my friends.
But it doesn't have anything to do with you as an individual.
In fact, the moment that you as an individual shows up, you're going to get punished because you're an accessory, right?
Yeah. So learning to empathize with non-empathy is a really, really huge challenge, right?
Like people say to George Bush, well, you know, look at these pictures of the dead in Iraq, or the dead in Iran, thinking that if he only understood that 100,000 people or more were murdered, that he would feel the horror of the war that he started, right? Yeah.
But it's not happening.
It doesn't work. It does not happen.
There is no amount of logic.
You cannot talk somebody out of being a sociopath.
It's like trying to talk somebody into regrowing a limb.
They are missing something fundamental in their brains.
What you and I experience...
I'm guessing, and let me know if I'm wrong, but you probably experience guilty pangs even if you don't want to and even if they're not sensible.
Yeah. Right? You can't avoid the stimuli of a conscience, of guilt, of whatever, right?
Yeah. And there are times when you'd like to, right?
Yeah. Like if I could just be a little bit less damn sensitive, like if I didn't get a bruise when the wind changed, right, it would be a whole lot easier in my life, right?
Yeah. So you and I have to work hard to manage the stimuli that we get in terms of empathy and sensitivity and conscience and guilt and so on.
These things arise in us unbidden, right?
Yeah. But they don't occur to your dad at all.
Your dad's not managing his conscience, right?
He does not feel...
Guilt. He does not speak Mandarin.
He has no arms.
And a letter is not going to have him regrow the part of the human brain that develops around the age of four to seven called empathy any more than putting somebody in an English class who never learned how to speak any language at all during that critical language phase when they're children will not Make them regrow their capacity to have language.
That's a specific window, right?
People develop empathy during a specific window in brain development.
And you cannot recreate that window later on in life.
And I've used this metaphor before, but it's useful here too.
If you don't get the calcium, or you don't get the protein, your growth is stunted.
Having lots of protein and calcium later on doesn't make a difference.
Yeah. The brain is different.
You're not the same species.
I'm using that term loosely, but in terms of brain, it's very, very different.
His brain scan would be totally different than yours, and that is not something that a debate or a conversation can change.
Yeah, that's definitely...
It kind of clears it up.
It clears up, gets through that little flame of hope, I guess, thinking about it in that context.
And, you know, feel free to experiment, right?
And don't get me wrong, deep down, deep down, your dad lives in hell.
I mean, we can't escape reality fundamentally, but the problem is he does not experience it that way at all.
And because he does not experience that, there's no key, right?
People don't change unless they suffer, right?
They just don't, right?
And if you have no empathy and you have access to manipulative mythology...
Then you can avoid and bypass suffering, right?
It's like taking heroin perpetually with no hangover, right?
Because they don't experience the hangover either.
Plus they get a lot of social support for what they're doing because there are a lot of the crazy people out there with the same fantasies who will support them and reinforce what they're doing.
So to empathize with people who are fundamentally alien to our way of thinking is very hard.
But it's something that we really do need to achieve in order to escape attempting to do the impossible.
And then, of course, what happens is we fail repetitively, which makes us feel what?
Useless. I've got to go try again, right?
Maybe if I run at the wall in a different way, I can run through it.
And of course, there's no shortage of people, including those we are trying to create empathy in.
There's no shortage of people who will keep telling us that it's our fault, right?
Yeah. So, yeah, I won't repeat it again other than to say, just put yourself in the mindset and say, well, if my child was going through an unbelievable amount of suffering and I didn't care about it, what would I be like?
What kind of human being would I be like?
And I just, you know, if my child was begging and gasping and bleeding and I just said, well, this is making me feel kind of weird, so I'm going to leave.
And you just left your kid by the side of the road choking and bleeding and What kind of person would you be?
And putting yourself into that mindset is essential, right?
Because once you get what kind of person that is, the idea that you can change their mind through words becomes something that you just don't waste time on.
Yeah, that sounds extremely useful to the situation I'm in at the moment.
I'll definitely try to kind of get into his head in that way.
For sure, for sure.
Okay, was there anything else that...
How are you feeling? Was this helpful or useful?
Oh, this is extremely helpful.
Every time I speak to you, it's kind of a whole new layer peeling off the onion.
There's a whole new set of things that you kind of...
Oh, it's my pleasure.
Look, it really is my goal to be the best damn cult out here on the internet.
And so, you know, I think that as far as cult quality goes, we're definitely getting into the five stars.
And that, of course, I'm enormously pleased with.
And of course, we hope to pick up more Scientologists as Germany continues to ban it and so on.
But, uh... I'll do the usual here.
If you can have a listen, let me know.
But I think that particularly the last part about empathizing with those who lack empathy could be very helpful for others.
You can absolutely put it out.
It would be entirely selfish of me to stop you from doing that, considering how much I've got from the other listener conversation.
So go right ahead.
All right. Will do. Thanks so much.
And you're doing magnificently.
You have just such an enormous amount to be proud of.
Thank you. Okay, man.
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