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Dec. 14, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:01:36
939 Luke Skywalker, Bonding and Perfectionism (A listener conversation)

Why we fear mistakes so much...

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So, yeah, so you were saying that you had a conversation about perfectionism yesterday in the chat window, but you couldn't come to much of a consensus about its origin?
Oh, yeah, we went, I guess we didn't delve into its origin too much, but we were just talking about various experiences, and mine, from stories I'm told about my childhood, started at a really, really young age.
So I was wondering what your theories on how that would have developed.
Well, perhaps you can tell me a little bit, just before we start on that, you can tell me a little bit about what the definition of perfectionism that you were using, what that definition was.
I guess...
Maybe it's not perfectionism exactly, but it was kind of a fear of failure, a fear of not doing things correctly, that type of thing.
Like, when I was young especially, I wouldn't even attempt to do things if I wasn't sure that I could do them completely.
Right, right, okay.
And... What is your mother like in this regards?
I don't really think she has too much of that trait, to be honest.
I don't think she's really like that at all.
I mean, she doesn't do a hell of a lot, but I don't think that's the reason why.
Okay, and your father?
I mean, since he was a construction manager, I assume that he's got a certain amount of it's got to be right in him?
Actually, surprisingly not.
He grew up on a farm, so I think he was pretty much just, you know, thrown into the work at a young age, so he didn't really have the option of kind of procrastinating or putting things off or anything like that.
So, yeah, that's why I was kind of wondering Where it could have come from.
Sure, okay. And can you give me an example of when you were a kid, sort of early memories that you have with regards to perfectionism?
Well, the earliest ones aren't memories as such, but they're stories.
And they're kind of corroborated by the whole extended family, so I think they're quite true.
But as an example, When I was learning to walk, most kids would kind of stand up and fall over and stand up and take a few steps and fall over and things like that, but I wouldn't do that.
I would kind of sit and study people and kind of maybe stand up and then sit down and then maybe a few days later stand up and take a step and sit down and kind of do it incrementally, but I never kind of push myself to the point where There was kind of the chance that I wouldn't make it,
so I was probably kind of one of the only kids out there who didn't fall over while learning to walk, but obviously there are kind of some positive aspects to that, I guess, but there's huge negative ones as well.
Right, so you didn't fall over when you were learning to walk, right?
Yeah. Sorry, I'm just eliminating the head injury category.
Okay, go on. There's all sorts of stories like that from my childhood.
Even when I was an infant and I wanted to climb into a chair when, for instance, my brother would have tried to climb on it and fallen off and done that over and over, I would sit there and look at it and study it and think about it.
Then eventually just do it.
There are all sorts of similar things.
For instance, when I was young, I liked jigsaws.
And my parents bought me a jigsaw that was kind of well beyond my years, but I refused to I refuse to do it.
I refuse to even open the box.
And I would just look at the picture in the box, like, every day, and I'd do that for weeks.
And then, you know, just one day I'd just kind of open it up and stick it all together, like, pretty quickly.
But I'd never kind of try and, you know, risk failure, if that makes sense.
No, it makes total sense.
Can I ask you if you have, if when you were a kid or maybe even now, What is your emotional reaction to movies or stories wherein the kid is found to be special kind of out of nowhere?
You know, like the kid inherits money or the Harry Potter.
He's found to be a wizard.
Or in Star Wars, he's found to be the son of the most famous pilot.
The kid turns out to be special.
In a way, and this is a very common theme, right?
That out of nowhere, he is the one, right?
Like Neo in the Matrix or whatever, where other people kind of discover his talents and abilities that outstrip everything he's imagined for himself.
How do you feel about those kinds of stories?
I definitely kind of loved Star Wars as a kid.
And, you know, Luke Skywalker was my favorite character.
So perhaps...
There is something there, but I can't associate any particularly strong emotion towards those characters that I'm conscious of.
Yeah, because the thing about Luke Skywalker was that he was discovered, right?
As all of these stories tend to be that he was discovered, right?
Like the Alec Guinness, Obi-Wan Kenobi, came to him and took him out of his life and put him in starships.
And he then became the guy.
But he didn't work for it, if that makes sense, right?
Yeah.
And this is something that you see kind of over and over again.
It's true even in Lord of the Rings, right?
That this guy's just sitting there and, you know, Gandalf comes along and says, oh, by the way, right?
And then there's this... The world that revolves around somebody sort of accidentally and that's a very, very common...
And it's very popular with a lot of kids.
And I was just wondering about your...
Like, did you ever have thoughts or feelings that...
You could be special in a way that was different from other kids?
I don't remember anything like that.
I think I probably realized that I was different in some way, but I don't know if special would be the word I used to describe it.
What was the difference that you perceived?
I guess it just, it still even continues now compared to kind of the general population and just the way I kind of perceive the world and think about the world and things like that.
Everyone always seemed to kind of do it a bit differently to me and I guess I never felt that I particularly fit in to the people around me.
But is your difference, would you say, that it is superior to the general population?
I would say, in theory, it's superior, but in practice, possibly not.
Well, I mean, if we put aside the psychological difficulties that you've had, you, I assume, like whatever we do, particularly when we're kids, whatever we do, we must think is the right thing in some way, right?
I mean, this is true of everybody at all times.
Whatever you're doing, you must think it's the right thing to do.
So for you, you must have thought or felt that studying walking before jumping up and plummeting and falling and so on, that studying walking and getting it right was better than just throwing yourself into it.
Yeah, I probably did, yes.
Alright, and the kids who just take the, God help them, they take the jigsaw puzzle and they just pour it out on the carpet and start flinging pieces together.
This must have caused you some anxiety, right?
I guess so. I can't really remember it, but I guess it probably would have some type of frustration.
I guess I can remember not being able to understand why people acted in that tougher way.
I thought if you just kind of think about it for a few minutes, then you'd make it a whole lot easier on yourself.
So it was kind of not being able to understand it.
Well, I would say that it might be a little bit more, and I don't mean this in any negative way, it might be a little bit more judgmental than, I just don't understand it, because from your perspective, people or other children were doing things that weren't particularly bright, right? Yeah, that's definitely true.
They'd get the bike, they'd put it together, they'd ride down the street, it would fall apart because they never read the instructions and did it properly and then they'd be crying.
I'm using a silly example, but you felt that people were doing things that just...
We're pretty stupid. Yeah, stupid, right?
And again, I'm not trying to sort of say you were right or wrong.
I'm just looking at the emotional experience that you had, which was at the company that I... I ran.
I had an employee, this guy, who was kind of crotchety, right?
And one of my project managers said of him, she said, this guy, he's like a 65-year-old man trapped in the body of a 22-year-old.
And I think it was actually very true, and I sort of get that sense a little bit from you.
It's like, you know, damn kids, why don't you think before you act?
You know, get off my lawn, so to speak, right?
Yeah. Like a little bit old before your time, so to speak?
Yeah, I think that's definitely true.
And what is your experience of spontaneity or spontaneous behavior in yourself?
I don't really do many spontaneous things.
I don't particularly like surprises or anything like that.
I remember my mum threw a surprise 18th birthday party for me and I just...
I drank myself to oblivion, basically.
Wow. The surprise is that my mum thinks that I like surprises, right?
Yeah. Okay, okay.
I think I understand it.
And when you look at yourself in the future, and I know this can be a little bit hard because you're still beating back the black dogs of depression, but when you look at yourself in the future, do you...
And this is like, we can just speak openly about the rank fantasy element of life, but do you see yourself achieving some sort of remarkable or great thing in the future?
Ideally. I don't mean like you've got it in the works or anything, but...
In the past, I definitely felt like that, but currently, I don't really.
Currently, I'm kind of, at the moment, I'm just aiming for a happy life rather than a great life, whereas in the past, I think my ambitions in relation to how other people saw me, like a big career and all that kind of stuff, they would have been a lot higher than they are now.
Now, thank you. When you were looking at the jigsaw puzzle and so on, and clearly you didn't save any time by doing what you did, right?
Because if you're staring at the box cover for weeks, you could have been done, you know, weeks before, right?
So it's not like you saved any time.
You certainly did save yourself some frustration, right?
Yeah. But...
When you would contemplate that kind of stuff, of getting it right the first try, in a sense, right?
So what happens is, after studying the cover on the jigsaw puzzle for so long, you kind of open the box and you assemble it very rapidly, right?
Yeah. Now this is going to be an odd question, and I don't even know if it can be answered, but let's take a shot at it anyway.
Did you... When you were assembling that puzzle very quickly, obviously you felt some pleasure, right?
Yeah. Like, look how quickly I'm doing it, right?
Yeah. Now, was that something that you were hoping that someone else would also notice?
I don't know.
I can't remember that at all, but that's certainly possible.
Well, and this is, I'll spend just a minute or two more on this if this is okay.
Can you think of times when you did something that was different or unusual or more efficient or in a way that you didn't flounder about and so on?
Was that purely for your own satisfaction or were you hoping that somebody in your environment would notice and say, wow, that kid is really whatever, like that's really efficient or that's really smart or whatever?
I think it was probably mostly for my own satisfaction, although it is a hard question to answer, but I kind of didn't even, I don't think I even really considered other ways to do it.
Well, the way to figure this out is, did you ever do these things in the presence of other people or tell them about what you had done?
So, like when you got the jigsaw puzzle, did you hide it in your closet, stare at it at night and assemble it in secret and then put it back in the box without anybody knowing?
No, I don't think so.
I think because all that particular story is kind of relayed to me from my parents, so obviously they would have been there.
Okay, so other people were witnesses of your methodology, of your way of doing things.
Yeah, I guess so. And you obviously thought that what you were doing was better than what the other kids were doing.
Yeah. So, I'm not trying to lead you to the thesis, but you know, if this fits, it fits.
If it doesn't, no problem, right?
I mean, I remember when I was about 11, this is weird looking back at it, but it makes sense in context of the general theory, but I actually experimented with different ways of walking.
What I would do is I would sort of squat down, bend my knees a little and motor along or I would try a stiff-legged long gait and experimented with different ways of walking.
And what I was kind of hoping was that people would look at that and say, well, he walks kind of strangely but man, it really gets him around quickly or whatever.
Like I was really kind of desperate in a way for people to notice that I had different and positive abilities and so on.
I remember that I would, when I was, I guess, about 9 or 10, I would, oh, maybe even 11 or 12, I would go to a public pool and...
I was a pretty big diver.
I do a lot of dives. But what I would also do is I would swim like two lengths underwater.
And one of the things that would drive me along, believe it or not, is that I thought that maybe in the public pool there was some billionaire who was setting up an underwater city and needed somebody who was really good at swimming underwater.
It's like this Dr.
Evil character or Bond villain or maybe a good guy would notice me and say, wow, can that kid ever swim underwater?
So I'm going to put him in charge of my underwater city or something like that.
I mean it wasn't a conscious like it's about to happen but I remember thinking that would be cool if it did, right?
Yeah. So it wasn't that I was a...
A terrific show-off or whatever, but I certainly did develop a lot of my abilities in the hopes that other people would notice and recognize a distinct value in me.
My experience of my childhood, I think it was...
Kind of the opposite.
I think mine was more fear-based than anything.
Because talking about public pools, when I was about two years old, my mum would take me to the public pool pretty much every day.
And for the first six months, I kind of wouldn't even go past being ankle-deep in the water.
Just because, I don't know, lack of control or lack of whatever.
Oh, so you perceived that as a lack within you?
Yeah, a fear, I guess.
I guess it was fear-based.
I can't remember being afraid, but that's kind of what it seems like it would be.
Just a lot of trepidation and I would take a long time to come to, I guess, understand everything in my head before I'd physically attempt to do it.
Right, right. I would suggest, I mean, I will suggest an alternate thesis, because the one thing that you talk about in, like, because I thought, I mean, for some time I thought...
That I was either, you know, just a big show-off or I was just, you know, insecure and wanted attention because that's, of course, the story that was always told to me, you know, like you just want attention and so on, right?
And like that's a terrible thing for a child to want is some attention.
My God, all you want is some food.
But I'm going to put forward a thesis that I developed sort of with regards to myself that gave me some understanding and some comfort, because understanding usually does.
But this is not to say that our experience is identical, but it's something that has enough similarities that it may be of use to you.
So you can take it for a spin and see what you think.
So when a baby is born, the baby is hungry.
For unconditional love.
This is what is called the mother-child or the parent-child bond.
And the parent-child bond is an exquisite amount of empathy.
We'll just talk about the mom. This is a traditional way of doing it.
That the child needs eye contact.
The child needs physical affection.
The child needs security.
The child needs empathy, right?
Because babies can't express what they want.
They can only express happiness and discomfort.
Pretty much that's what they can do, right?
And so it is a real challenge and it involves a dissolution of ego boundaries on the part of the mother to truly bond with and understand the infant.
And if the mother, because she is depressed or because she has a very weak ego or is some way debilitated or is suffering from postpartum depression, which is far more common than is ever talked about.
right? We don't have any memory of it.
I know for sure my own mother did.
She was in hospital. I actually hospitalized for depression for months after I was born, which was probably one of the things that saved me because I was given to a nanny who was very, very affectionate and actually ended up naming her first child after me many years later.
She was very young when she took...
but she was very affectionate and cuddly.
One of the big differences between my brother and myself was that my mother and mother had him in those sort of first crucial months and badly, of course, and I had a very warm and friendly I don't remember her at all, of course, and she's now very old, but I certainly do.
Now, this is the reports that she was very affectionate, and I do know that we must have bonded, because Stefan is not a very Irish name, but she named her own son after me many years later.
So, when we have a mother who is not able to...
It's called mirroring as well, right?
So, if you're happy...
And your mother then reflects back your happiness to you.
And she...
Are you still there? Yeah, I think Greg just brought...
Okay.
When you're happy and you express happiness to your mother and...
Your mother then reflects the happiness back to you, and she takes delight in your happiness.
That's called mirroring, and that's a very positive thing, right?
Like, you always feel uncomfortable when you're the only person laughing in the movie theater when there's a comedy on, right?
And in fact, we feel much more happy when other people are laughing as well.
That's sort of a well-known phenomenon.
So, let me just throw it back in.
So, this experience that we have of being mirrored by our mother, of having our own emotional moods reflected back, and also there is a...
A pretty well-understood phenomenon with babies as well, that if they get stressed because they're feeling, you know, gas or discomfort or whatever, have a rash or whatever, then if they themselves become stressed or the baby becomes stressed and you're crying or red-faced or,
you know, whatever, and the mother gets stressed, Then the baby, at some point, becomes less liable to express upset, right?
Because if you...
Express upset as a baby and then your mother gets panicky and tense and freaks out and then gets more upset and, you know, what's the matter with you and throws you in the crib and then very quickly you don't, right?
But if your mother expresses concern and is patient, and not perfectly so, nobody has to be perfect for there to be a bond, but if your mother expresses patience and concern and tries different things and sings to you and blah, blah, blah, right?
Then you learn to soothe yourself, right?
That it's not the end of the world.
If you get upset, you can get upset, you can express that.
The affection towards you as a baby remains constant, that you are still, even though you are unhappy or frustrated or in pain or crying, that your mother's affection remains, not perfect, but, you know, it's a strong bond, right?
And when you experience that as a child, if you experience the strong bond, then you feel valued and Just for who you are, right?
That your mother takes pleasure in you just for who you are, that she looks forward, and especially when you become verbal and you start talking, that your mother takes pleasure in you and your existence as a young child, that she is delighted by the things that you say, and it doesn't mean that she's never crossed or never gets upset or whatever, right? But that fundamentally she really enjoys your existence in her life.
Like you are a net positive.
She looks forward to seeing you in the morning.
She's happy to hear what you're thinking.
She's very positive about you as a human being, right?
Because then what happens is you simply have a sense of value For existing, right?
You don't have to be you plus something else to get people's attention, to hold their attention, to feel that you bring a positive pleasure to other people's lives.
Now I'm guessing that wasn't so much your experience.
Yeah, I guess that's probably true.
I mean, did you feel that when you were a child that your mother took a positive pleasure in your existence just because you were there, not because you were doing a song and dance number?
I can't really remember how I felt at that kind of young age.
Well, we can talk a little bit older, right?
When you were sort of eight or nine and you would come home, was your mother sort of pleased and delighted to see you?
I can't really remember.
I don't think she probably was particularly.
Sorry, does that mean that you can't remember coming home?
I can't remember any emotion associated with it.
Can you remember whether your mother came to greet you with a big smile at the door?
No, she didn't do that.
I mean, just for example, not to mess up the generations or anything, but when Christina comes home, like I literally come running down the stairs to give her a big hug and I'm completely delighted to see her, right?
Yeah. And that's like, no matter, I mean, unless I'm on a call or whatever, right?
I mean, that's inevitably, right?
In the morning, I'm like, good morning, it's great to wake up with you and it's just a real joy and so on.
So, that is certainly possible, right?
I mean, it's possible within human relationships.
To be completely delighted when you see the person and to be just thrilled to have the chance to see them and to miss them when they're gone and so on.
So when you would come home from school, you put your key into the lock of your house or flat or whatever, and you walk in, what is the response from your mom, I guess, mostly, right?
Yeah, well, it's definitely nothing like that.
Perhaps... Indifference or even a bit of frustration would have been her response, I think.
Right, right. And sometimes this happens in relationships, right?
When the relationship is really decaying, like a romantic relationship, then your partner comes home and you feel a kind of dread when they come in because you're just not looking forward to seeing them, right?
And that can certainly happen and does happen much more often than it's generally spoken of between parent and child, right?
So the child comes home And the mom feels either indifference or perhaps even a mild resentment or perhaps even a not so mild resentment towards the child for coming home because it's like, oh, I was just sitting here reading my magazine perfectly content and now I've got to make a snack, I've got to play with him, maybe he's got homework and it just, it feels like a drag for the parent, right?
Yeah, I think that definitely applied to her, not necessarily even on a day-to-day basis, but on a kind of, ever since you were born, my life's gone downhill kind of basis, if you know what I mean.
Right, no, clearly you must have been an absolutely awful child.
I mean, all sympathy for that.
I mean, good heavens. I mean, good lord, every time I've interacted with you, it's just like, oh my god, they have to pull me back off the ledge.
But... So that was her story, right?
That you ruined my life kind of thing, right?
Oh, yeah. I was kind of accidental pregnancy and all that kind of stuff.
She often talks about, if only I didn't have kids, I would have been able to do this or I would have been able to do that and stuff like that.
So, yeah, I think that was definitely a theme for her.
And you do realize that this is the exact equivalent to a child of saying, I wish you were dead.
Yeah, I guess so. You guess so?
Like, it's not the case, or...?
No, I suppose it is.
Because you are king of I guess so, which I'm not sure means if you agree or not, which is fine if you don't agree, I'm just curious.
No, I'm just kind of processing it on the fly, that's all.
Look at you with your processing, it's like, but I can't put this puzzle together quickly enough, I need to stare at the box!
She didn't make that explicit until I was older, so...
Yeah, but you got it, right? Kids are very smart, right?
Yeah, I must have.
I don't remember consciously getting it, but I must have got it on some level, by the way, that she acted towards me when I was younger.
I mean, and I'll tell you, I'll give you an example.
Some people that I know, or marriage is going through a very tough period right now, And the husband told me that they've been married for over 20 years, and he said that in the first year of marriage, she got so angry at him about something or other that she said, God, I wish I'd never married you.
And he remembers that crystal clear more than 20 years later.
Yeah. Right?
And I remember my mother when I was, oh gosh...
Very young. I don't think I'd even gone to boarding school yet.
I think I was about five that my mother was an insomniac and she would sort of smoke and pace and so on at night and then one time and of course I was then an insomniac as well because even as a kid that age because I was not secure and did not feel safe and one night my mom just just screamed out like literally like raised the roof screaming you know I hate those I hate these fucking kids Right?
And I don't know if my brother was awake, but I certainly was.
And that's quite a significant event when you're a kid, right?
Particularly when you're like four or five years old.
So, and I remember that crystal clear, right?
Like 35, 36 years later, I remember that crystal clear as one of the very, very defining moments of my childhood, right?
Because this was prior to the physical violence, at least to my conscious memory of the physical violence, but that's a pretty strong thing to say.
I mean, there are certain things that...
You simply can't say in a relationship and have that relationship continue in any positive context whatsoever.
So if I were ever to say to my wife, I wish I'd never married you, she would pack up her bags and leave me and there would be no recovering from that, right?
Yeah. Because either it was true, like I genuinely wish I'd never married her, in which case the entire foundation of our marriage would be a lie, or it wasn't true but I was only saying it to hurt her, in which case I'd be sadistic in the extreme, and in either situation she would not stay married to me.
Yeah. Yeah.
Because you can't go from I wish you were dead to you're a great kid, right?
I mean, that would be insane, right?
Yeah. So, I think it's fairly safe to say that you had no bond with your mom.
Yeah. So, when your mother does not find value...
In who you are as an individual, when your mother does not take pleasure in who you are in your natural state, then how do you gain her affection?
Because you need some sort of positive reaction from your mother.
Because biologically, if we don't get any positive reaction from our parents, we're dead, right?
Yeah. They're not going to feed us, they're not going to shelter us, they're going to forget us by the side of the road or whatever.
We have to find some way to create value for our parents, despite the fact that they don't like us in our natural state.
Okay, so you think I was kind of trying to get attention by...
From the things I was doing kind of mentally or intellectually or perhaps avoiding the opposite by not failing.
Is that what you're kind of heading towards?
Yeah, I mean, you're basically saying to your mom, I'm special and I'm worthwhile and you should value me.
Now, I know that you're not going to value me for who I am naturally, but So maybe if I put on a show and maybe if I entertain you or maybe if I show that I have unique abilities or maybe if I show that I'm special or maybe if I show that I'm different or maybe if I whatever.
There's a million answers to this.
Well, quote answers, right?
But basically it's all about trying to woo our parents to take care of us when they have expressed an unwillingness and a hostility to that role.
Okay. So, for you, you did not want to give your mother, whose affections for you were not even non-existent, but rather negative.
She wasn't indifferent, right?
She said, I wish you weren't here.
I wish you were dead. Right?
So, for you, mistakes could be the end.
Okay, yeah.
That makes sense. If you made a mistake, then your mother would be, it would be the straw that breaks the camel's back, right, so to speak.
Be like, that's it.
You know, he's like, I already don't like him, I already don't want him in my life, and now that he's being difficult, that's it.
We're giving him up to orphanage.
Okay, yeah. That doesn't make a lot of sense.
Now that's one aspect of it, and the second aspect, which I can talk about much more quickly because we've got the foundation down, the second aspect is that when we have a weak bond with our parent, we cannot express what are called negative emotions.
We can't be difficult because they've already said that they don't like us, right?
So if in our natural state they don't like us, then clearly I can't be difficult at all, right?
Yeah. So I can't be frustrated.
I can't allow myself to be frustrated because when I'm frustrated, I get bad-tempered or I get difficult or I cry or I get angry or something, right?
And they already don't like me.
So if I'm difficult, I'm done.
They're going to just toss me out with the garbage, right?
Yeah. So it's not that you were avoiding error.
You were avoiding being abandoned, right?
And the kind of death that we all fear from that, or definitely the kind of negative experience that we feel from being abandoned or rejected by our parents, right?
So you couldn't have negative emotions, right?
Yeah, that does make a lot of sense, yeah.
So when you're looking at a box, right, of a jigsaw puzzle...
You know, deep down, that if you open it up and you start to make mistakes, which you inevitably would, right?
Then you're going to cry, you're going to get frustrated, you're going to whatever, right?
And your mother already doesn't like you.
And that could be it for her, in terms of any affection or any positive interaction.
So, you have to stare at it.
Until you can get it right.
And what that does is it serves two purposes.
The first is that it allows you to avoid the frustration of getting it wrong and therefore creating a negative experience for your mother who already doesn't like you.
And secondly, it allows you to show to your mother that you're special and that you are worthy of some sort of positive thought or feeling.
You woo your mother with your abilities, right?
And I swear to God, 95%, if not 99.9%, if not 150% of all the brilliance in the world is an after effect.
It is the nuclear shadow of our attempts to woo our parents, right?
So we all know the story, and it's a pretty typical story, of the guy who became a comedian because his mother was depressed, right?
Yeah. So he laughs and he makes her jokes and blah, blah, blah.
And it's not because he cares so much about his mother.
It's just a fundamental survival mechanism that I need to keep my mother going because she's the one who brings me food, right?
Yeah. And there's so much...
There's a sculptor, Henry Moore, who sculpts these distorted and overly chunky feminine figures...
And his mother was depressed, and she had aches and pains and fibromyalgia of every description, and so he would rub her feet and rub her back, and you can see from his sculptures that this is the perspective of a mother's body from a child's perspective, right?
And so a lot of what we do in terms of having scintillating abilities, so to speak, is because we have developed...
These performance or special qualities because we need to both avoid the anxiety of frustration and imperfection and we also are trying to provide value to our parents independent of just our natural and relaxed existence.
Yeah, okay, yeah.
That does make a lot of sense.
So, I guess the next question would be, how do you get over it?
Well, do you see how you're never satisfied?
God, I can't believe you. Of course she didn't like you.
It's always one more question.
Jeez, get her on the phone.
Let's get some sympathy for her. Well, there's no easy way out of this.
You have to mourn the loss.
You have to mourn the loss of having a childhood in a straight jacket, of being so incredibly hyper-controlled.
See, to have a child and to refrain or refuse to bond with that child or to refuse to express anything positive to that child in any consistent way about the pleasure of his existence for you is fundamentally a way of controlling a child.
Okay. Because when you give a strong bond to someone like Christina knows that there's no chance whatsoever that I'm ever going to leave her and that I adore her from here to eternity, so she can get mad at me.
She knows that the bond in our marriage is unbreakable.
Yeah. So she has freedom because of that.
She has that security.
Whereas if I was like, you know, I don't know if this marriage is going to work out.
I think I'd be a whole lot happier not being married.
Then assuming that she wants to stay married to me, and God knows she wouldn't, but if she did, then her freedom and spontaneity would be entirely inhibited.
Right?
Yeah.
She would spend her whole time calculating and scheming what was going to make me happy and to stay in the marriage.
Right?
Yeah.
So when you threaten somebody to break the bond, particularly with a child, when you say that the bond is fragile, the bond is non-existent, the bond is merely willed, the child's existence is a negative in your life, what you're doing is you're preventing that child from having free speech.
spontaneous and independent identity.
Because you have to spend your whole life sitting there going, well, I can't piss her off.
Well, I better make her happy.
Well, I better show that I'm valuable.
I better keep proving my value.
It's like the employee who constantly feels that he's on the verge of getting fired, right?
Yeah. You're panicking.
It's like, how can I please my boss?
How can I prove value? Because I'm never going to get another job.
I'm going to starve to death if I don't have this job.
Right? You just, you can't think.
Clearly, you can't think straight.
You can't have a relaxed and independent existence.
You can't have jokes.
You can't, you don't feel that you have value and people take pleasure in your, like it's just terrible, right?
And that's a horrible, horrible existence for a child to live through.
Yeah, okay. And that's desperately sad, right?
I mean, you could have had a childhood which was free and emotionally rich and spontaneous and where you could play with your mom and she took real delight in you and you spent two-thirds of your childhood laughing and only 5% of it crying.
But as opposed to basically feeling like you're clinging to a brick wall with your fingernails trying to constantly hang on as it shifts around, right?
Yeah. I guess even after I kind of moved out of home and got away from her, it still kind of continued for me.
I still had this very kind of all-or-nothing type mentality to things.
I guess it didn't naturally decrease over time.
No, it doesn't. Sorry, just interrupt.
Time heals nothing. Time heals nothing.
If you just stay off a sprained ankle for a couple of weeks, it's going to be fine.
That's not how emotional patterns are absolutely and permanently fixed within us without strenuous effort.
and time heals nothing, time changes nothing of its own accord.
Yeah.
I feel that it's kind of something that as life goes on and the problems get big and more complex, that it kind of creates a worse situation because as a child with a jigsaw, that is something that it kind of creates a worse situation because as a child with a jigsaw, that is something that is kind of solvable in the
I remember things like in the last year of high school if there was like a chemistry test or something and I wasn't fully Maybe I could have answered three quarters of the questions or something.
I wouldn't even kind of attempt one of them.
I kind of handed a blank sheet for...
I'm not sure.
I'm not sure exactly why, but it's kind of a...
You know, if I couldn't do it completely, then I wouldn't do it at all.
Well, sure. Sorry to interrupt.
Just so you understand that...
Criticism of an effort for you psychologically would equal, if the thesis is true, and it certainly seems to apply in your case, criticism of an attempted effort would equal annihilation.
Right? Because they already don't like you and wish you were dead.
So it's far better not to try than to try and fail, because if you try and fail, A, you're going to be upset, and B, you're going to give them even more ammunition as to why you shouldn't be loved and why you shouldn't be cared for and why they shouldn't bother with you.
Okay, and would I have kind of projected that not only kind of onto my parents but onto other people around me, like teachers and friends and stuff like that?
Oh, yeah. No, it would definitely have occurred that this would have become the world for you, right?
That the world is full of people who, if you put a foot wrong, you're doomed with them.
Like, they're going to just mess you up in some terrible kind of way, for sure.
And this is, of course, one of the reasons why your paralysis descended upon you, right?
As we talked about before, you had been raised to be a slave, and then you were, quote, set free simply by becoming an adult.
But you had all of the anxieties and habits of a slave, but now you were in a situation of voluntarism, and it doesn't work out very well unless you change your habits, and that takes quite a bit.
You know, like you join some horrible government union or get involved in some hyper-destructive relationship or some slowly indifferent decaying relationship where you can recreate the situations that you're familiar with or you have a collapse, right?
Now, a collapse, although it's horrible to go through, is by far the healthier choice, right?
Yeah. Even speaking of relationships, I never dated, I never had any relationships of that type at all, and I think that was, it feels like it was because of the same kind of, the same phenomenon in relating to all this,
so that's definitely, that's what I meant when I said kind of as I got older and things get more complex, it has like a much greater negative effect because You know, having kind of never dated or anything like that, that's kind of a big kind of negative in my life so far.
Sure, and just by the by, I mean, it's quite healthy that you've never dated because the tools that you were given, for want of a better word, would have gotten you into a very destructive relationship, right?
Because you don't have anything.
You were taught that you don't bring anything to the table, right?
Yeah. That you are just a net negative to be in somebody's life.
Well, how on earth can you have a loving relationship if you've been taught from day one that you're just not worth crap, right?
In fact, you're negative worth.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
Yeah, I do kind of see it looking back now as there's definitely kind of a silver lining to it.
But overall, it was...
I still kind of wish that I had the ability, even if it was the ability to have a bad relationship, if that makes sense.
Well, I understand that, but of course, a bad relationship can be a 20-year sentence, right?
So, if you get into a bad relationship and the woman gets pregnant and has the baby, that's 20 years, right?
and hundreds of thousands of dollars.
And then you would have, of course, forget about the money and the time, you would have been in a situation where your unprocessed childhood would have been inflicted on a new child, right?
Yeah.
Which would have meant that you would be lost to virtue forever.
Because once you harm a child, there's no coming back, right?
Yeah.
So I know that it feels tempting that you want to climb into the beer commercial and lay thee down with the bikini-clad goddess, but honestly it is an incredibly slippery and difficult and negative slope to go down where you can do an enormous amount of damage to yourself and others.
So the way that you can solve this in the relative short term, or at least start to, is you just need to grit your teeth and make mistakes.
Right? Yeah. You just need to grit your teeth.
I mean, you're a very careful and considered person, right?
Yeah. Yeah, well, you need to not be that.
You need to give yourself permission to have value and be wrong.
Okay. So just starting off with small things, do you mean?
Yeah. Yeah.
Like, just start off with small things, just say.
And because what happens is when you step outside this little box, right?
Because basically, first of all, you're definitely burned out, right?
Because when you spend your entire childhood trying to get across an endless chasm on a tightrope while people are shaking the rope, that's pretty exhausting, right?
Yeah. Yeah.
So, that's also part of the whole collapse thing, right?
Which is just, you get exhausted, right?
It's when you've been swimming through the storm-tossed seas, you don't feel that tired.
As soon as you hit the shore, you're just exhausted, right?
Yeah.
Which is why you collapsed after some financial and professional success.
So, at least, possibilities.
You know the answers, just possibilities.
But you need to give yourself permission to make mistakes, to be difficult, to be problematic, to be And what will happen is you will then feel a huge amount of anxiety when that occurs, right?
You will feel like you're stepping off a cliff.
You will feel like you're playing Russian roulette.
And then you can deal with that anxiety.
But as long as you keep avoiding that anxiety, you won't have the symptoms that will provoke self-analysis and change.
Yeah, I even kind of felt that today.
I felt, you know, with all the kind of conversations you've had with me over the last week, I felt I was kind of, you know, monopolizing your time and I was kind of anxious about that.
So, yeah, even today I've kind of felt that.
Well, and you said that, right, in the chat window.
You said, I don't want to monopolize your time.
Are you sure that you have the time?
Right. Yeah. Which is one of the reasons why I went down this path with you because that says an enormous amount about your management of me and your feeling that I'm doing this for some, I don't know, reason that's going to come back and bite you in the ass or I don't know exactly what, right?
First of all, I get great pleasure out of these conversations with you.
I think other people have gotten enormous value out of your honesty and openness and And this is certainly part and parcel of what it is that I'm trying to do, right?
Which is to awaken people to their histories and so create a different future for the world as best I can.
Yeah. So when you say to me, when I say, it's an interesting topic, we should talk about it.
It's a big topic, we should talk about it.
And you immediately say, I don't want to monopolize you.
I mean, clearly, right?
This is somebody who feels that they're not worthy of investment, right?
Yeah, yeah, that's definitely true.
And that obviously doesn't come from me, because I've never said to you, you're not worthy of my time, right?
Yeah. So clearly you're telling me that this is what you feel, and you're equally telling me, and Steph, it has nothing to do with you, right?
Yeah. So, it provokes anxiety when I say, let's have another talk, let's have number four, or whatever it is, right?
You say, well, you know, I mean, jeez, I don't know if I'm worth it, I don't want to, you know, you've got this book to write, I monopolize your time, right?
Yeah. Like, that's your decision, right?
Like, it's your decision whether I enjoy talking to you, right?
Yeah. Right, and so you're trying to manage the situation, and what you need to do is say, not, because what you felt was some anxiety, right?
Yeah. So this is the real-time relationship idea, and this is how you deal with it, as you say, it's death.
Well, what do you say? I'm feeling very anxious about this and I'm not sure why.
I guess I felt like maybe I was, you know, maybe it would have strained the relationship or been too needy or something like that is kind of how I was feeling about it.
Right, that's right.
That's Because you are incredibly adept at picking out a story, right?
Yeah. From other people.
And when they say X, Y, and Z, you say, no, no, that's just a story, right?
Somebody says, I feel betrayed.
You say, well, that's not a feeling.
That's a story, right? Yeah.
I just can't talk with myself very well.
None of us can. None of us can, so don't feel bad about that, right?
I mean, a surgeon cannot take out his own appendix, right?
That's natural. That's natural.
But when you feel the anxiety, then you say to somebody, I feel anxiety.
Yeah. And you can tell them your story.
I feel anxiety because I feel like, and this is not you, right?
This is just my feeling. I feel like, oh God, I'm monopolizing his time.
Oh God, he feels obligated to me.
I'm being too needy. And this is not you.
This is just sort of what I'm feeling.
And obviously it doesn't have anything to do with you because you've never given me...
Any indication of that, and I wouldn't want to give you the disrespect of saying that you're going to do something entirely against your self-interest just because I'm needy, right?
So you just talk to somebody about how you feel, and that's how you deal with it, right?
Yeah. You don't let the story be the drug, right?
Yeah. I just have to kind of watch myself a bit, I guess.
Well... You had the stimulation, which is good, right?
I mean, you had the anxiety, which is very healthy, right?
And now you just have to be relentlessly honest about the anxiety.
And I don't always do this either.
It's not like I'm... It's a really hard thing to do because we're all trained to be evasive, right?
Yeah. But, yeah, you need to be honest with people and with yourself, right?
And say, well, I feel anxiety, and the solution is not to get the other person to reassure me or to change their behavior or to inflict my story, but simply to say to the person, I feel anxiety in this situation.
And there will be some people who criticize and reject you for that, and that's painful, but that's a hell of a lot healthier, you know, you just get those people out of your life, right?
Yeah, yeah.
And the last thing I'll say is that you say that That the difficulties lie ahead, you know, that as things get more complex and more difficult, I'm going to try and completely reverse that in your mind with just a very few short and simple statements.
I can absolutely, completely and totally guarantee you that all of the major difficulties in your life are far in the past.
Okay, yeah. When you were five, and you were facing another 15 years, almost 20 years until you got it, another 15 years, or 10 years if you want to say that, another decade in a rabidly destructive prison, you had some problems.
Yeah. You were completely under the control of an abusive, destructive, and subtly murderous mother.
You had no recourse to law.
You had no recourse to independence.
You couldn't go and get a nice manual job, get out in the sun, get some exercise, get some money, go home, right?
Yeah. You faced year after year of being ignored and rejected either by your mother, by your father or by your teachers.
You faced all of the bullying that went on within your family and within the school ground and you had no choice about where you spent your time.
You woke up, you were herded after school, you were forced to stay in school, you came home, you were forced to stay home.
I absolutely guarantee you, you will never ever face, even on your deathbed, you will never face the difficulties that you faced when you were a kid.
Yeah, that's certainly true.
But if you say the difficulties lie ahead, then you stay tense, right?
Yeah. But you are completely and totally over the absolute worst.
And the absolute worst in your future will be one-tenth of one percent of what went on when you were five.
Yeah. Like, you've got to kind of whew.
You've got to get a kind of whew out of it, right?
Like, wow, made it through, right?
Yeah, yeah. And the future is a golden meadow compared to the ice tomb of the past.
Because you have choices and independence now that you never had.
And 10 years to a child is like 100 years or more to an adult, right?
Yeah. So, if somebody said to you, I'm going to put you in prison for 100 years, you'd say, well, that's pretty bad, right?
And then if they said, well, okay, I'm not, you'd be hugely relieved, right?
Yeah. So you're out of your 100-year prison sentence.
You have freedom and independence.
You even have the freedom to be wrong in terms of being unhappy, which of course was generally not allowed in your family.
And there's no possible difficulty in the future that's going to match even...
It's not even on the same wavelength, not even on the same spectrum as what occurred in your past.
Yeah, that is true.
That is a bit comforting.
I hope so. I hope so, because you don't want to manufacture more difficulties than you have sort of naturally, right?
Yeah. I do kind of understand that.
I feel like I'm kind of...
At kind of the last hurdle, if you know what I mean.
Like, I've probably got kind of six or twelve months to go to kind of get things sorted, and then it'll be kind of smooth sailing.
Yeah. It took me about two years, and that generally seems to be...
I mean, I'd accumulated a few more errors than you had, so it may not be quite that long for you, but...
Yeah, there's light at the end of the tunnel.
And that, of course, was not the case when you were a kid.
You have freedom and independence now.
You can actually put...
I mean, the reason that we don't come to these conclusions as children is because we can't do anything about them and the knowledge would just torture us, right?
So we blind ourselves to it so we can make it through every day.
But that's totally different now.
You have the choice and opportunity to put into practice what you're learning.
Yeah. Well, thank you very much.
This was extremely helpful for me once again.
I'm very glad and thank you.
I mean, it's a great topic and I think that, you know, when people look at the bond that occurs, you know, I believe that the vast majority of parents do not have the kind of bond that gives their children real security and a feeling of value without performance.
And so we all end up being these false self-performing kind of people who end up both alternatively, you know, exhausted and enervated and so on.
And it's a... You know, to get out of that cycle is just hugely important.
I mean, we have to be valuable in a state of relaxation or it's not value at all.
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, well, I will give you a copy of this.
Have a listen. Again, I think that one of the reasons that I'm always happy to talk is that I think that what we talk about in these conversations is incredibly helpful to other people as well as I'm very happy that it's helpful to you.
Yeah, you can absolutely put it out as a podcast.
I don't need to think about that one too much.
So, yeah, go for it.
Okay, Bridget. Well, I really appreciate...
Oh, shoot. I shouldn't have said your name.
Just kidding. Okay, well, thanks a mil and have a good sleep, okay?
Yeah, thanks. Okay, bye.
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