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Dec. 30, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:46:12
951 Lifting Bookcases - A Listener Couple Conversation
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Hello. Hi, how's it going?
Good. So, Lara's taking a break for just a second, and I will read the letter.
Fantastic. Okay.
Okay, Lara's back. So, the letter is, Hello, Steph.
I hope you're doing well. And how is your work on the real-time relationship book?
If you're still interested in interviewing couples, Laura and I would like to participate.
Both of us are simultaneously eager and terrified.
You have asked for couples with specific long-standing conflicts.
In our attempt to pick a specific topic to discuss, we have recognized that superficially we have had very little conspicuous conflict.
Instead, there is a pernicious subterranean quality to our injuries of the other, our responses to injury, and the way we have historically avoided making these injuries conscious or discussable.
Only in the recent weeks have I connected emotionally with my contribution To the perpetuation of Lara's suffering within our relationship.
As well, I've only recently felt courageous enough to admit my fear of discussing penetrating topics with her.
I feel shame from lacking the courage to act on the problems I've felt for a while and been able to recognize as a consequence of listening to FDR. And though it stings, I accept this shame as just.
I'm working now to act more consistently with my values than I have done historically.
Also, recently, as a result of our conversations, Laura has recognized her tendency to minimize the legitimacy of topics I raise as a response to the extreme anxiety she feels in response to questions that come close to the core of our relationship.
As well, we understand now that one of her defenses learned in childhood is to put up a show of contentment that belies any torment that's actually under the surface.
And we are beginning to recognize how complementary and sometimes discordant our respective dysfunctions are.
She feels like she must act like nothing is wrong to safeguard her place in the relationship to prevent abandonment.
I feel like I must work alone on the hard work of understanding topics that are vital to the health of our relationship to prevent my own despair.
I end up feeling resentment, and she feels terror of abandonment.
Sensing my resentment, she redoubles her efforts to show that nothing is wrong, and seeing her, I redouble my efforts to point out what is wrong, and both of us all the while are terrified of our worst-case scenarios.
At the core, I believe that I'm struggling with my sense of the world as suffocating, insurmountable, hopeless, and she is struggling with the sense of the world as cold, unnurturing, unsafe, and unpredictable or chaotic.
At times, I'm sure we project onto the other this worldview, and at worst times, perversely, I think we live up to the other's worst fears.
At the conclusion of one particularly emotional conversation, I observed that our perpetuating the patterns of abuse learned in childhood were the ultimate assault on our individual happiness by our family of origin.
They tried to crush us in our childhood, and once we slipped away, the patterns of abuse stick to us like spies in our relationship still working to keep us from one another.
I felt our true selves reaching toward one another and the false self gargoyles left by our families greedily pulling back on our arms.
As scary as the above may sound, we feel that our attraction to one another was not solely unconscious, but that there was a part that recognized the other as able to grow.
We're just having a hard time getting to each other recently.
We've begun the process of reflecting on the beginning years of our relationship to demythologize the courtship and to be clear where there was sickness and where there was genuine goodness.
As operating principles, we understand that people of like esteem are attracted to each other, healthy or not.
We understand that when we met, we were not healthy.
We claim that we have gotten much healthier as a consequence of practicing a rational philosophy within our relationship, though we understand that we are not as healthy as we could be.
We want nothing to interfere with the quality of our connection.
Not that we have answers that are done by any stretch of the imagination, but I think that our perspective exploring this process may be valuable to others who have the uncommitted relationships prior to practicing a rational philosophy focused on the primacy of the individual.
In particular, if you accept the principle that couples are often unconsciously attracted to one another, specifically because of their similarity to the family of origin, then this will be a very common occurrence and dilemma as rational philosophy is disseminated further and deeper into society.
Of course, we both feel that there's a measurement that we could gain personally from talking to you.
And then in a PS, I said that anticipating a conversation with you, my biggest fear is that you, Seth, will observe something unsurmountable, but keep it a secret because it would be too tedious to explain to someone who's fundamentally lost.
Right, so your concern is that I might not express something?
Okay, I just want to check what kind of rational empiricism we're coming from here.
Please, sorry, go ahead. That's the face.
Right, right, okay. It's not only non-empirical, it's anti-empirical.
But anyway, cool. And Lara's biggest fear is that you will uncover something that reveals her to me in a way that will condemn her and utterly prevent any possibility for personal redemption.
Right, right. I guess a little background on our relationship is that we met in the fall of 2003.
We married in November of 2005.
I found FDR shortly after, in January of 2006.
For the last three years, I've been in some combination of individual or group therapy.
While in graduate school, in the last six months, Laura has felt safe enough, I guess, to get more connected with her feelings, become depressed, and during the last month and a half to seek therapy of her own.
Sorry, I just want to make sure I understand that last part so far.
I've had no problem following, but you said she's felt safe enough to become depressed, which I can understand.
I just want to make sure that I got that right.
Yes, yes. Okay, so there was perhaps a latent or repressed impression that she kept a false front up.
Sorry, like she's not in the room.
That you felt like you may have kept a false front up, but you have felt secure enough to let that sadder side of you or that more depressed side of you out into the relationship.
Is that right? Yes.
Okay, got it. Now it makes perfect sense.
Go ahead. So she has been peripherally aware of FDR as a result of my listening at She's now listening to more of the podcasts.
And yeah, those mostly about women, relationships and child abuse.
Right. So yeah, that's all the latter.
Well, that's great. And look, I mean, I was certainly aware that Laura had a tendency to minimize agony because you and I worked together on the hotel stuff and you never raised your voice at me once.
And I know that I can be incredibly annoying to work with.
So that much I'm aware of, for sure.
So where no hands actually attempt to reach directly through the webcam to strangle my endless fussiness, I know that there's problems going on.
So I just wanted to put that forward as something that I was fairly aware of.
It's not subtle.
And thanks again, of course, for that.
So, look, I mean, I hugely respect the courage that it takes to do this, right?
I mean, right or wrong, as far as this conversation goes, and I'm sure it will be right, not wrong, it's very courageous for you guys to do what you're doing.
And, of course, it is counterintuitive because when, I mean, you guys obviously love each other enormously and And to put that love under the radiation, under the Microsoft, so to speak, to find out how it can be improved is very counterintuitive, right? So we have this normal desire to avoid anxiety or discomfort, and of course that is the root of much of the dysfunction in the world.
So I respect enormously the – for what it's worth, I respect enormously the sweaty, palmed nervousness that it takes to sort of do this.
So I mean I'm sensitive to that.
I'm aware of it.
Lord knows I've been through it more times than I'd care to count in my own relationship.
And so I know that it's horrible.
I know it feels like you're taking a baby and hurling it off a cliff hoping that the winds will catch it aloft.
And so from that standpoint, I'm fully sensitive to and fully aware of just what a scary thing it is to do.
But also I respect that you want – you guys are going to be married for 50, 60 years.
So you want to be on a journey that is sustainable and growable where you have a framework for helping to resolve some of the things that – the scar tissue, some of the things that are problematic, right?
Just because we have scar tissue and we've got pulled muscles doesn't mean that we don't want to be in the Olympics, right?
In fact, because we have those things and we learn how to better work with our bodies, we can be far better athletes.
I think that's sort of the metaphor that I would use, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I think that sounds right.
Yeah, we were wondering how you knew that we had sweaty palms.
Can you see us? I've been blowing up.
No, it is such a counter to it.
It's because you treasure each other and your marriage so much that you want to go through this, but at the same time, it's completely – I mean, I know.
I know that I come across – sometimes people are very surprised when I express fear or nervousness, like when I was talking about how we were hiding from my wife's parents, like a bunch of frightened rodents or something.
People are always like, I didn't know you experienced fear.
And it's like, God, don't project me into some kind of vulcanoid.
I can't claim courage if I don't have fear, right?
So I'm fully aware of how delicate and sensitive a situation this is.
I fully respect your desire to give it a shot and I fully respect and recognize that it is based on your enormous and laudable devotion to each other that you want to bypass some of the things or find a way to manage some of the things that you've inherited or have been inflicted upon you as kids.
So I just wanted to sort of make sure that you understood that I understood that, right?
Thank you very much for that.
That is a comforting question.
Yeah, and you'll be fine.
I mean, it's like, you'll be fine.
I know it looks like there's a dentist approaching you with a drill about the size of something that digs up oil from beneath the sea, saying, this might pinch a little, but it really won't be as bad as you think.
Yeah. So can you tell me a little bit about a conflict that you find repetitive in your relationship or a situation?
So I guess the first thing that comes to my mind is It's like the...
I can't think of specific things, but just the process of talking about some things is, like I was describing in the letter, where...
So, just...
I guess it... Full disclosure, what I didn't talk about specifically in the letter that I have recognized in the last few weeks is what I felt shame about, that I wasn't specific, is specifically the tendency to be managing my anxiety by using Laura to manage my anxiety,
basically. As I've become aware of that and been trying to not do that, So historically, I think the pattern has been largely as a result of me trying to use her to manage my own anxiety about something.
Well, and successfully too, right?
I'm sorry, your voice has dropped out.
Oh, sure, no problem. What I mean is that you weren't trying to use her, you were successfully using her to manage your own anxiety, because you wouldn't have done it if it wasn't working, right?
That's interesting. Well, I guess no.
I mean, I guess it wasn't working.
I'm quite stubborn. Right.
And I've started to feel more and more miserable.
I'm sorry. Let me just back up for a second.
What I mean is that at some point it was working.
At some point it was working.
I mean, and again, I'm sorry, I'm not usually annoying this early in the conversation, but don't worry, the webcam reach-through will occur soon.
But if you met and you say you got married, I think around two years after you met, you'd be married for a couple of years.
So it may not be working now, but at some point it must have been working, otherwise the habit couldn't have continued, if that makes sense.
Okay, that makes sense as an idea.
Okay, then I guess I'm trying to imagine a time when it was working.
And when I say working, I don't mean productive.
But I mean, in terms of it, it did actually help you to manage or control your own anxiety.
And this could be long before you got into this kind of conversation or something like that.
But I mean, we do what works, right?
In the moment. We do what's sustainable.
Well, yeah, I mean, we rarely do what's sustainable.
That's the problem, right? It's like nutrition, right?
If you don't know anything about nutrition, you just eat what tastes good, right?
And that's not very sustainable if you want to, like, not die so young or whatever, right?
But certainly it works in the moment, right?
Like sugar and fat works in the moment to satisfy cravings for hunger, just like a cigarette does if you're addicted to that.
But it's not sustainable.
And the reason that I sort of wanted to pause on that...
Because you guys are obviously close and so on, everything that you do is part of a system.
Everything that you do is part of an interaction.
So the one thing that you said earlier, Stephen, was that you felt ashamed of this tendency, right?
Right. To use Laura to manage your own feelings of anxiety or stress.
Yes. But you don't bring that to the relationship in isolation, if that makes sense.
Okay. And what I mean by that is that in any long-term relationship, there are no victims.
It's not possible. And I'll give you an example.
I'm metaphorful at the moment because I'm cranking away.
I wrote like 9,000 words in the RTR book yesterday.
So I'll just give you one of the metaphors that I worked with and you can let me know if it makes sense.
The first time that I stick my hand in an open flame, it is the fire that burns me, right?
But if I then put my hand voluntarily into the open flame again, it is not the fire that is burning me, it is me that is burning myself.
I understand. And so what I want to make sure that we start off with is with the premise that what you guys do is a system.
It's not like one person brings a dysfunction into the relationship and inflicts it on the other person, if that makes sense.
Because we have a tendency to swing from, I mean, those of us who've had challenging pasts, to say the least, we have a tendency to swing from...
Almost no responsibility, right, which is using other people to manage their emotions, like you caused me to feel this or whatever, right?
And again, I don't mean that aggressively.
It could be in other ways, but we have a tendency to swing from almost no responsibility to almost complete responsibility.
But the truth in a relationship is always in the middle, right?
That you have some ownership and Laura has some ownership in the interaction.
And the reason that I say that is if that is the case, right, that you're I mean, if you're both pulling on a rope the opposite way, and only one of you lets go, the other one's going to fall down, right? But if you both recognize that you're pulling on this rope at opposite ends very hard, then in order to remain stable, you both have to put down the rope, or you both have to stop pulling, if that makes sense.
I think so. Sorry, you said you think so, which is totally fine.
I just want to make sure that I understand what doesn't make sense.
Or if the thesis is completely inapplicable, we should know that too, right?
Oh, did I say I think so?
Yes, you did. Oh.
Haha. It definitely makes sense to me.
I mean, I agree. Laura, sorry to be annoying.
Could you just crank into the mic a little bit?
Oh, sorry. You're not quite as loud as my conscience.
Sorry, go ahead. Same voice, though.
I definitely agree that I've been an equal participant in all this, so what the analogy you used definitely makes sense to me.
I think recently I've heard Stephen talk a lot about how he feels shameful that he's using me to manage his anxiety, and it does sound like he's trying to take full responsibility for this one-sided dysfunction.
And it definitely, to me, I know why I let it happen is because it happened to me all my life.
Right, so anytime we break a pattern, it causes anxiety within us, right?
That's why habits are so hard to break, even negative ones.
And so, just so you understand this more to Stephen, I'm sure that Laura gets it because it's her experience, but when you use Laura to manage your own anxiety, she lets you do it because to not do that would cause her anxiety, right?
Because when she didn't do that as a child, she got attacked, right?
So she is allowing you to manage your anxiety by using her, and in so doing, she is using you to manage her anxiety, if that makes sense.
Yeah, I guess we've talked a little bit about how that does relate to her childhood.
Right. I mean, in the economics podcast, we talk about the whole science of economics is about looking for the hidden costs of a particular interaction, right?
So if you raise the minimum wage, everybody understands that those people who still have jobs end up with more money.
But the whole point of economics is to look at the people who then don't get jobs.
Because the minimum wage is up and so on.
And all of the net negatives that accrue that are not obvious.
And in the same way, psychology, particularly in relationships, is really focused on what are called the secondary gains.
And the secondary gains are the hidden benefits that accrue as a result of dysfunctional behavior.
Because if we don't have secondary gains, then we're completely insane, right, for doing what we're doing.
Because then we're doing something that gives us no benefit whatsoever, which would be not really possible, right?
I mean, unless you're insane or schizophrenic or something.
So the key thing is if you take on all the responsibility and say, well, I basically bought a steaming pile of foo crap and dumped it on our lovely marriage, right?
And poor Laura, you know, got buried under this through no fault of her own or whatever, right?
Then you're going to try to respond to that by changing your behavior.
But the reality is that Laura...
Again, with all the love in her heart and all the best intentions in the world, will have a tendency to try to move you back to your original position because otherwise it will cause anxiety in her, if that makes sense.
Yes, and I guess the reason I said I think is I'm still wrestling with where the boundary is between the part that I need to take personal responsibility for versus where the line is beyond which I don't actually have any control and where it would be inappropriate or actually manipulative for me to try to Yeah,
for sure. And I understand that that can be a gray area, but the way that I would suggest is that you take 100% responsibility for what you did and recognize that you were part of a system where Laura takes 100% responsibility for what she did, right? Okay.
I know that's almost too simple an answer.
There's this Mobius strip, you see, and...
But any interaction that is sustained is the result of two people participating, right?
And you want to...
It is disempowering to other people to take 101% responsibility in our interactions with them.
Yeah, I definitely understand the way you've been describing it, that it is diminishing to Lara to try to take, you know, more responsibility.
Yes, for sure. For sure.
And you want to take full responsibility for all of that.
But the guilt and the shame is also part of your anxiety management, right?
I think so. Yes.
Yes. But the researcher, I refuse to come to any conclusion that may or may not be held up against me in a court of my peers.
I'm going to put this down as a tentative advance into a gray area that shall never be...
I need some peer review.
I need... Anyway. So, look, I mean, and this is an important thing, right?
As far as you say you felt guilt and shame, you didn't want to put it in the email, you felt, like, really bad about what it is that you had done, right?
And that is another way of managing your anxiety, right?
So, when we attack ourselves, right, then we do that because the alternative is going to make us feel worse.
And we also attack ourselves because we're afraid of being attacked, right?
The alternative of not attacking myself is going to feel worse, where the alternative is...
Well, sorry, let me just talk about your childhood, which I know very little about, but I can sort of jump to some mad conclusions, which you can let me know if they're valid or not, but...
In your childhood, if you ever attempted to share responsibility with another person in your family, what happened?
Like if you said to maybe your mom or whatever, or your dad or your siblings, whoever, and you said, I take responsibility for this, I think it's important that you take responsibility for that.
What happened? Yeah, I don't think I ever had the ability to not take the responsibility.
I think that it was always me or always my fault.
But I guarantee you that you tried at some point, which may be too early for you to remember.
But children, and if you see children, and if you ever watch Super Nanny or some of the Dr.
Phil's or whatever, but you can see kids with this uncanny perceptivity at the age of two or three years old, where they're unbelievably sensitive to parental hypocrisy and so on.
It's not a place that most of us can remember.
I remember some of it, but not all of it.
I guarantee you that your starting position was a rational one of shared responsibility.
We start off healthy, right?
I mean, we have to be messed up pretty heavily to diminish that health for a period.
But I guarantee you that you started off by saying, yes, I did this, and your involvement, whatever language skills you had at the time, and your involvement, Mom, was this.
I believe that.
I don't have specific memories of that.
Well, sure, but I mean, if we have a big scar on our arm and we don't remember the injury, we still know that we were injured, right?
Absolutely. And if you have a fear of saying, I have 100% responsibility, and so, Mom, do you...
In fact, given that you're the parent, it probably is 199%, and I have 1%, because that's a hierarchical power-based relationship, so it's different.
There's no equality in that.
The 100 is for adults, not for children with their parents.
So I guarantee you that when you did that, you got savagely attacked, because that's why you don't do it.
It's the natural and inevitable and rational thing to do.
So if you don't do it, it's because you were punished for doing it.
I'm feeling now that I understand what you mean by me taking the blame is another way of managing my anxiety.
Yeah, because you fear, well, what's your real fear if you say to Laura, it's 100-100?
What's the worst case scenario that results from there?
Some kind of attack, some kind of...
Some kind of...
Loss for me, some kind of...
You know that I guess the fear is that I'll be held responsible for It's negligent not to take all the responsibility and I'll be held responsible for failing to do what I should be doing, which is taking all the responsibility.
That's a wonderfully, wonderfully abstract way of putting it.
Again, I salute your research instinct.
If you could put that, if you have a webcam, could you put that on a whiteboard as a kind of equation just so we could get to the real emotional rest of it?
Oh dear. Laura, does he ever intellectualize?
Oh, your voice dropped out again.
Does he ever intellectualize, you know, just between us girls?
From time to time. He has been known to.
Okay, well, let's just take another swing at that with a fewer number of syllables.
And I do, you know, the syllables are really impressive.
That's great stuff. Seriously, I mean, that's wonderful.
But... If you attempt to share responsibility for your relationship with Laura, and when you attempted to take anything less than 200% of the problems that occurred in your family...
You were attacked, and I'm sure that you were attacked on quasi-moral grounds, right?
So the quasi-moral grounds are around, you know, like when people say to you, oh, just grow up, or something like that.
Then they're not saying you're evil, but they're saying you're psychologically dysfunctional in the extreme, or whatever, right?
So my brother would always say to me, oh, Steph, all you ever do is play the victim, right?
And that's not a moral attack, like he didn't say, Steph, you are Satan's armpit incarnate or something, but he was saying that my level of psychological dysfunction is so high that I am beyond pathetic, right?
Or he would say, like, when I got into philosophy and objectivism and so on, people, like my family, my father, my brother, my mother in particular, would say that this was a psychological defense for me, that I couldn't handle natural interactions with people, so I had to frame everything in abstract terms, and it was a psychological defense.
Nobody ever talked about the truth or falsehood of the propositions or the positions, but they simply reported it or framed it, if that makes sense, in psychological terms, and that's what I mean by sort of a quasi-moral attack.
And I'm guessing that in your childhood, when you would attempt to reasonably share responsibility for a dysfunctional interaction, you would be attacked on these quasi-moral grounds, right?
Because you just used terms like, you know, lack of responsibility or whatever.
Does that make sense? Do you remember what you were criticized for or what criticisms you fear that produce the shame if you attempt to reasonably share responsibility in a relationship?
I guess the things that I fear are...
I don't know how to say this without being abstract, but I didn't realize I was being abstract.
No problem. And the reason I say that is that there's a reason that Laura is listening to the Relationship Podcast, right?
It's not because she really enjoys the abstractions, but sorry, go on.
I don't know if this is too simple.
I mean, the fear is just a feeling bad.
Well, sure, a feeling bad, but there's a story, right?
We feel bad not because of facts, but because of stories, right?
Because of mythology. Because of the lies that are told to us about our motivations or the realities of our...
The quote realities of our interactions, right?
So when you attempted to share blame or share responsibility, let's say, with those around you when you were a child or a teenager or even into your 20s, what came back?
Like, what story came back about you?
Was it that you were trying to evade responsibility?
Was it that you needed to take more responsibility?
Was it that you shouldn't play the victim?
I mean, I'm just trying to sort of frame how this was put in moral terms that left you with the infection of the shame response.
I think it was that I should already know how to do everything that I ever needed to do.
I remember when I was in elementary school or something, ridiculously young, worried about how I was going to get into college and worried about being homeless because I wouldn't be capable of working to support myself.
Right. And this reminds me of other interactions that I've had with my dad, where he expected me to know how to do things without telling me.
Right, right.
And I guess from that, I took that...
I guess I accepted that role of needing to know...
Well, and sorry to interrupt you for just a second, and that's great.
I mean, now I'm sort of really getting a sense of the process, right?
So I had a boss once who would literally, if I was working on a report or something, I would give him the report, and he would scribble in the margins things that you could not read.
And he would underline them three times, and three exclamation marks.
Like, you'd have a paragraph, he'd circle the paragraph, and right next to it, he'd write, And he would expect you to fix it, right?
And this, of course, was a completely impossible situation, because if you go back and you ask for clarification, he'd just say, I already wrote this down, right?
And he'd say, but I can't read it!
It's like, it's really clear, just right here, do it!
And then you'd sort of be stuck in this, I have to fix this.
There's no way to know how to fix this.
And I actually suspected that he couldn't remember what he'd written.
So he was just making stuff up, right?
But that's the kind of situation...
The situation where you are expected to know something that you don't know is the...
It's one side of the story.
The real question, though, from an emotional level is...
If you didn't know it, what was said about you?
Oh, that I was, you know, totally incapable or incompetent, pathetic in some way.
Right. Like, if I wasn't able to do it, then I was, you know, annoying to my father.
I was not a burden in the sense that he was too weak to carry me, but a burden in the sense that I was so pathetic that I couldn't do this.
I couldn't sit in my own pants.
I should be old enough to time out to sit my own pants to take care of myself.
It's time for you to stop being a burden on me and to grow up and all this kind of stuff, right?
Yeah, yeah, I guess so. Well, sorry, when you say I guess so, I don't want to put any words into your mouth, so if that's not accurate, just let me know.
know I'm just I'm just rejecting I mean these are not things I've ever consciously said I'm I'm trying to figure out from...
But there was a kind of contempt for sure, right?
And a perception of ranking competence.
Now, of course, this is something that you, I guarantee you, you got to your very core the brutal and abusive hypocrisy of this position, right?
Because what parents do, particularly with intelligent and competent children whose integrity threatens them, They put the following paradox into place.
First they say, Stephen, you're functionally retarded.
That's sort of the first principle that they will put in place.
And the second is, but I am never going to lower my standards.
Do you see the evil paradox that's in there?
Yes, I am guaranteed to fail perpetually.
Well, sure, but the paradox that I'm talking about is if I genuinely believe that my child is functionally retarded, what should my reasonable response be?
To lower your expectations.
To be consistent with what he's capable of.
Right, right, right.
I don't enroll my kid with an IQ of 70 into a physics degree, right?
I don't Yell at him for not getting A's in advanced math courses, right?
I say, well, unfortunately my child is functionally retarded, so I will be happy if he learns to tie his shoes, right?
Yes. So your, quote, incompetence was entirely based on your competence and your desire for competence, which all children have, and your desire to please your parents, which all children have.
So it's in the way that I talk about on Truth that your desire for virtue was used to attack you, right?
Which is totally evil and corrupt, particularly against the child.
So, when you think of sharing responsibility, and as a child, of course, you had almost no responsibility for the quality of your interaction with your parents, obviously, because they were just such nasty pieces of work, but when you attempt to share responsibility with your parents or with others in your life, you are attacked for not taking responsibility, right?
In other words, when you attempt to share responsibility, those around you rejected their responsibility and then attacked you for attempting to reject your responsibility, which they were already doing.
Can you say that again?
Yeah, let me metaphorize it.
So, let's say that you and I combined borrow $5,000, right?
And then...
I say, dammit, you've got to be responsible with your debts and pay them back.
So pay back the $5,000.
Do you see the paradox that's in that?
Absolutely. Go ahead. It's cooperative, and you've just sort of changed the terms immediately by saying that It's all mine.
Well, it's a little worse than that, but keep going.
And this is not because you lack considerable intelligence, which you, of course, have to massive degrees, but this is a hard part for you to get because this is something that you were trained not to see, although it's completely evident after you see it.
But this is the null zone that people get into with regards to their families.
It's worse than just me changing the terms of the debt, right?
Is it you actively exploiting me?
What? Go ahead, say. Lars, try to explain.
Okay, big words. Remember, big words.
abstract concepts and use the Roman Empire if you can sorry could you lean in a bit oh my god It's that, you know, if we borrowed the $5,000 and then...
I say to you, well, you need to be more responsible with your money, and you need to pay this money back.
Like, I turn it on, we borrowed the money together, but now it's your problem, and you are wrong and bad if you don't pay the money back.
Right, and why, if I say you need to be responsible with your debts and attack you for your irresponsibility, why is that so heinously hypocritical?
Because you're saying, like...
There's a standard you're applying to me that you're not applying to yourself.
Well, it's worse than not applying to myself.
It's worse than not applying it to yourself.
Not applying to a standard to myself, it's just not having the standard around, right?
It's being aware of it and being able to completely deflect that onto someone else.
Well, in this $5,000 metaphor, I attack you for irresponsibility with regards to debts, and the attack is an expression of my irresponsibility with regards to debts.
Because I'm saying you should be responsible for your debts and you should pay my debt.
But I'm in that very expression.
I am saying I am not taking responsibility.
In fact, I'm rejecting responsibility for my debt.
And I'm attacking you for not taking responsibility for your debt when I'm demanding that you take responsibility for my debt as well, which is thus rejecting responsibility for my debt.
I am in the very action...
doing the exact opposite, morally, of what I am criticizing you for.
It's weird that I don't feel the outrage at that.
Like, that's what I was trying to get at with saying that there was a standard applied to you that didn't apply Sorry, that applied to me.
That didn't apply to you. Well, but the reason you don't feel the outrage is obviously it's not weird, right?
You're trained not to feel the outrage, right?
But the reason that you don't feel the outrage is you're still not...
You're defining it as an absence of standards.
I know this sounds all very abstract, but it will be really, really helpful, I promise.
You're still defining it as an absence of standards, but it's not an absence of standards.
If I punch you saying it's wrong to punch people...
It's not an absence of standard.
It is a violation.
It is the opposite of a standard.
Okay, right. So by enacting it, you have implicitly said, this is the standard I have.
I'm saying that violence is both virtuous and evil at the same time.
An absence of standard is to say violence is morally neutral.
But if I punch you saying I'm doing this for your own good, I'm saying violence is virtuous for me, I'm saying violence is evil for you.
It's the use of a standard to attack a standard.
It's the use of positive morality to inflict negative trauma and obedience on another human being based on his desire to be virtuous.
It's stone-freaking-evil.
So when your dad says to you, dammit Stephen, you need to take responsibility, he is actively rejecting responsibility on his own part.
Yes. Laura, do you feel any outrage about this?
Oh yeah. I mean, do you realize what a complete, excuse my French, mindfuckery it is?
Absolutely. And do you see the harm that it does to a child?
Yes. And what a complete and total abuse it is of overwhelming parental power and authority to inflict moral lessons on a child that the infliction totally violates.
It is a direct assault on a child's capacity to exist.
It's exactly like yelling at a child to go both north and south at the same time while saying that it's evil to provide contradictory instructions. .
I feel like mentioning the trip we had in Oregon the last time we were with your dad.
Stephen was mostly raised by his father and we had invited His dad to come and visit us while we stayed summer before last in Oregon, and he came out.
And I had never much been around them interacting while we were trapped together for three days.
And during that time, I mean, we literally were trapped in a car, in a hotel room.
It was one of the most horrible experiences of my entire life.
And that was only three days when you were an adult, right?
Imagine what it was like for Stephen for two decades as a child, right?
Exactly, exactly. And yeah, I never had been able to understand where, because Stephen couldn't express to me what had happened during his childhood, because he didn't have the words to do it.
it.
I couldn't understand what the problem was because his father seemed charming to me up until this visit.
Sorry.
Yes.
Uh-huh.
But this man, you know, I watched my husband who is, you know, a strong, intelligent person just disintegrate.
I mean, he completely vanished and turned into this...
I mean, he didn't speak, you know, head down.
He disappeared from me. I was just not able to reach him or talk to him at all, just being in the presence of his father.
And I actually saw his father having the same...
I could see it happening to me.
Like, I started to feel that way.
I started to question everything before I said it.
I started to feel like I was doing something wrong.
I mean, there's some very evil undercurrent.
It's very strange.
And that was when I... I pulled Stephen aside finally and told him.
I said, you know, this is really scaring me.
We need to, you know, get together.
And, you know, and we ended up just holding on to each other for the last day and a half of the trip just to get through it.
And then shortly thereafter, Stephen cut off contact with his father.
Right. And that, of course, created the security that allowed you to deal with this stuff, right?
Yes. Yes.
Sorry, Stephen, you were going to say?
Oh, I was just going to reiterate how extraordinarily creepy that weekend was for me too.
And I guarantee you that your father was doing this non-stop.
Oh yes. This is not a habit that occurs like you swat a fly when you see it or whatever.
This is a way of being which is to consistently put other people into morally impossible situations to continually provoke them with rank hypocrisy and then to attack them if they criticize you at all.
Yeah. It is a perpetual assault upon your being, your very existence, your capacity to exist.
Yeah, it's like the most undermining and like hellish death dying feeling that and it was weird because like I hadn't interacted with him for like you know a while and then at visit and like I could I felt so vividly all the things that I hadn't I knew that that's how I must have felt my entire childhood after interacting with him that weekend.
And you know why that weekend occurred, right?
why you did that?
Why it occurred?
Why it occurred?
I mean, at some point I needed to actually make that connection.
I needed to feel that No, you can't make that connection.
Sorry to be annoying again.
You can't make that correction because you're trained not to.
Oh, I think I know what you're going to say.
Ooh, ooh, go on! I love it when this happens.
I brought him into our relationship so that Lara could see how he treated Lara and then be outraged by that.
That's very close, but I'd go one step further.
Okay. I would suggest, and you can let me know if this resonates, I would suggest not that you brought him into your relationship with Laura so that you could see...
I have to say, I think I'm the one who was curious about the relationship.
Sure. him into our world.
Stephen had very sporadic contact with his father before I came into the picture, just like the mandatory Thanksgiving visit sort of thing, and I think I very much encouraged him to come to visit us and sensed Stephen's discomfort with it, but wanted to...
I was curious as to what was going on there, and I don't know.
I mean, certainly maybe you allowed me to invite him because you also wanted to see.
Well, sorry, the reason that I would suggest, I think you're right, but the reason that I would suggest this is the evidence, if Stephen's theory that he invited his dad in to see how his dad treated you, Laura, what he would have done on that trip is be much more active and curious, and you would have felt his presence, right, not his absence.
Right. Right?
Look, if I say I'm going to go and study some pygmy tribe in the Amazon, and I go there, then I'm going to be alert, I'm going to be taking notes, I'm not going to be spaced out, right?
Right. So, it's not that he wanted to see how his dad was going to treat you, because that wasn't the problem with his dad.
The problem with his dad was how...
Like, Stephen, your problem with your dad was how he treated you, and no one had witnessed that, right?
Right. Yes, yes.
No one had given you the feedback to say, wow, that's evil.
I was desperate for a witness.
Right, and so what happened, Laura, was that in proximity to Stephen and his dad, Stephen displayed his childhood, not to his dad, because he knew, he already had displayed his childhood to his dad and knew what the result of that was.
He said to you very clearly, the subtitles are, this was my past.
Yes. And I need a witness, as we all do, right?
I'm sorry, your voice dropped out.
Sorry. And I need a witness, says Stephen, because we all do, right?
Yes. And so you did the amazingly wise and wonderful thing of being the witness, of saying, this is creepy as all get out, right?
Oh, yeah. I nearly got sucked into it myself, and that's what...
I just was thrown into action.
It was completely horrific.
Yeah, you see him going under, and you jump in to save him, right?
And yourself, right?
I mean, that's just a way of understanding what was occurring during that trip.
Because it's really important to understand what occurs in these kinds of trips, right?
So that you can understand why you end up being in the presence of an abuser again, right?
And I know this just from my own therapy, right?
The moment, and it took like a year and a half, the moment that my therapist finally got my brother.
Because she thought, oh, you're provoking your brother and this and that.
She didn't really understand.
She thought it was just some competitive dick measuring guy thing or something like that, right?
But once she finally got what my brother was like, after I brought enough evidence, I felt just such an enormous relief that somebody understood.
Because everybody in my life was like, oh, yeah, your brother's a little flaky butt, you know, whatever, whatever, right?
They didn't get what it was like.
And we need somebody to get, right?
Because the problem is that we're isolated, right?
All abuse is fundamentally the result of isolation.
And so we feel incredibly isolated and the problems that are created in isolation cannot be solved in isolation.
We need a witness. We need a witness to free ourselves from that.
We need somebody to have seen what happened so that we can get it, right?
Right. And so I would suggest that that interaction that you had that was...
Because Stephen very clearly communicated to you what his childhood was like in a way that was not necessary as an adult, right?
Right. Right.
Because as an adult, you could have said at any time, listen, you freak of nature, get the hell out of our car and take a plane back and, like, go, you know, we're going to get some holy water and sprinkle the back seat.
Seriously, evil, right?
So, like, Stephen was, and I don't mean this in any disrespectful way, was imitating his childhood so that someone could see it, right?
Mm-hmm. Yeah, right.
I think so. I definitely saw that.
And after somebody saw it and talked to him about it, he was able to defoo, right?
Yes. I mean, that's a lot of what I'm doing in the podcast, is serving as a witness to people.
I can't be there, I'm just some guy in Canada, but I serve as a witness from an ethical standpoint, right?
So that they can see it, see that somebody sees it, and escape, right?
Mm-hmm. And the reason that we're talking about this is that we understand what a system all of this is, right?
And you guys do an enormous amount, a huge amount of good, right, for each other in this way, in witnessing what occurs for you both in your childhood.
Now, I guess the next question that I would have is, has there been a reciprocal experience where you, Stephen, have witnessed you, Laura's history in some way?
Absolutely. I was thinking that as we were talking about this.
Yeah, I have absolutely seen the way that she interacts with her parents.
I've seen the little girl that she turns into around her father.
And I'm sorry to interrupt. I just want to back up for just a second.
you said the way that she interacts with her parents.
Yes.
Now, just to, and again, sorry to be annoying, and you know me, Mr. Fruitsch, Freaky Detail, right? Okay, it's okay.
But if I saw someone in a wheelchair being beaten up by Mike Tyson, I'm not sure that I would express it as how the guy in the wheelchair is interacting with Mike Tyson.
That's a really good point.
And the reason that I'm pointing on this is I think that one of the challenges that you have is that I think that Laura has been able to witness your childhood in a way that it's harder for you to witness Laura's.
Okay, yeah.
And I'm just getting that from the way that you framed how her childhood was, that she was interacting with her parents.
And that seems to me that you're giving her a lot more responsibility...
Because, Laura, when you were on the vacation with Stephen's creepy, freaky dad, you didn't actually notice him interacting with his dad, right?
He wasn't interacting with the planet, right?
He wasn't. Yeah, he was gone.
He no longer existed.
And what is your...
Sorry, Laura, when you're with your parents, do you perceive yourself as interacting with them or as hiding and shielding and diverting and...
I really...
I guess I think of it as a little bit of both.
I tend to try to take on a lot of responsibility also, but I... Definitely on these last few visits when I've been thinking more about how messed up the relationship is and have tried to come to terms with a lot of my early childhood...
I definitely have felt that I'm not in the relationship.
It's not something like they don't see me as a part of it.
Right. So I definitely am recognizing that, in fact, I'm not actually interacting with them, that I am only being subjected to that environment.
Right. Sorry, just to back up for a second, you said just a second ago that you took on a lot of responsibility with your parents?
Perhaps you could tell me a little bit more about that.
Isn't it nice when the laser swings somewhere else, Stephen?
Wait, someone else is trying to get away.
Move the spotlight over there. Well, my parents divorced when I was around seven.
Then I moved in with my dad, and I actually did take on the mothering.
You know, I did the cooking and the cleaning and stuff from the time I was about eight for my dad.
So I guess it's hard to explain.
I mean, he always treated me like a friend, not a daughter.
Actually, I think that's more like a maid, but go on.
Like, I don't ask my friends to cook and clean for me.
Yeah. Yeah.
Like a house elf, a family servant?
Yes. No, seriously.
I mean, I'm sorry to, again, pause you on this, right?
But this is probably why Stephen's having a harder time being your witness, right?
Is that you have infectious mythologies from your parents, right?
I bet you your dad perceives that he treated you more like a friend than a daughter and that that was kind of maybe cool hip parenting or what?
Right, that's how it was, you know, presented.
Yeah, but that's not true. Right.
I don't ask my friends to cook and clean for me.
That's treating somebody like a slave.
Especially a child who has no possible option of saying no to anything that a parent says, right?
Well, plus I needed to eat.
Yeah, plus you needed to eat. So this is highly exploitive, right?
This is not friendship. Right.
Because you have a mythology that...
told you about your relationship, right?
And he admits, yes, I wasn't an authoritarian parent.
I was more like a hip high school, hippie guidance counselor, buddy guy, right?
Right.
But that's not true.
And that absolutely was not your experience of your I guarantee you there's simply no way that you can experience that kind of servitude, especially starting at such a young age.
And I bet you there was exploitation going on before then, particularly in the dissolution of your parents' marriage, when I bet you were grappled obsessively.
But I guarantee you that you did not experience this relationship as a friend.
No, I guess not.
No, seriously, just imagine this, right?
Just imagine some friend of yours calling up and saying, listen, it's time for you to cook me dinner.
Right. Yeah.
And you're not allowed to eat until I eat.
Would you say, hey, that's an interesting friendship?
Sounds good. No, I wouldn't.
Right, you'd say, what the hell are you talking about?
Right? Right. Clearly got the wrong phone number.
Yeah. Yeah.
So, Stephen, when you sort of look at Laura's childhood, is this level of not only exploitation, but propaganda, right?
That not only was she exploited, right?
And turned into a house slave, and her childhood robbed from her, in this sense.
Not only was she...
She was exploited in this way materially, but she was also exploited in terms of self-justification, which is the worst exploitation of all.
Not only was she told that you have to cook and clean and you don't eat and live in a clean place if you don't, but she was also told that this was friendly.
It's absolutely sickening.
The frustration and rage and I feel stifled because I get so angry at the situation, and when I try to communicate that, I'm pushing, I think, too much.
Well, sorry to interrupt you, but the purpose of examining Laura's childhood is not for you to get angry.
And in fact, the angrier you get, the less you're serving as a witness.
The less I'm a witness? Yeah.
I mean, the witness is the one who sits there, absorbs the situation, and says, how did that make you feel?
Right? Okay, that's definitely a big problem.
Yeah, if you get really angry, right, then Laura ends up having to manage your anger, right?
Sorry to interrupt. When he gets angry, Laura, isn't your response to say, it wasn't that bad?
Yeah, those are... That's a quote.
I guarantee you it's a quote, right?
So you end up having to manage his anger and diminish your own pain.
Right, and I feel bad for having shared any of it with him.
It took me so long to ever tell him about a lot of my childhood because I... He does...
I don't want to upset him and then jeopardize the...
The harmony or...
I don't know. I know that it will have a bad reception.
Right. So what happens is you feel something to do with pain, to do with your childhood.
And then you say this to Stephen and he cranks up, right?
Like, I don't know, some boxer on PCP or something, right?
And then you have to talk him down and that's very painful for you.
And again, Stephen, I'm not saying you're doing anything mean with the best of intentions, but Laura's experience would definitely be...
That she then feels doubly violated, because not only was her own childhood a mess, but now when she talks about it with you, she has to end up managing your feelings, which was exactly what her childhood was about, right?
Yeah, and I've witnessed that happen, and that freaks me out even more.
And then I end up in the situation where, you know, goddammit, I can't say anything.
I don't know how to be a passive or silent witness to something this fucking awful.
Sure you do. No!
No, seriously, we just talked about this, right?
Because with your dad, you were silent, right?
I'm sorry, your voice, you're saying just now?
Yeah, with your dad, when you were on that trip, you were silent, right?
But in that case, Lara was the witness.
Yeah, but she wasn't taking on your emotions, right?
She wasn't attempting to feel for you. .
Right. She wasn't attempting to, in a sense, reject your feelings by exaggerating them in herself.
That is what I'm doing to Laura.
Well, Laura, you don't feel hurt when this occurs, right?
You don't feel good when this occurs, right?
And you don't doubt that he has the best of intentions, right?
No, I know. That he's trying to do this goddamn white knight thing that all men seem to be programmed to do, right?
Female in distress. I must ride in and defend her, right?
Exactly. I must express her outrage.
I must protect her. And we all have this goddamn white horse that rides us off a fucking cliff every time, right?
And then all the women are like, you know, it's great that you're riding at a dragon, but why do you have to trample me to get there?
Yeah, that's it. Stop protecting me, right?
Just listen! Yeah.
Is that fair to say?
It is, it's absolutely...
Yeah, because when you rush in to try and defend her and to express outrage and this and that, you're not listening, right?
And you're making it about your feelings and your outrage rather than about her experience, right?
Yeah, that makes sense. And again, with the best, you know, with the best of, I know you guys love each other to death, with the best of intentions, you genuinely feel that leeches is how you cure this.
So is this another example of me managing my anxiety about the things that she's telling me by basically, you know, becoming hyper-emotional rather than listening?
Yeah. Well, for sure, we know that the alternative to you expressing extreme outrage at Laura's exploitive childhood, we know that the alternative feels worse, because you're not doing it, right?
If the alternative felt better, you'd do it, right?
I guess the fear is that...
This is definitely the fear. I don't know if this is true or not, but the fear is that I'll listen calmly and that nothing will change.
I'll witness and then, because it's so normalized for Lara, that there will be no connection that, okay, these things happened, but they're totally normal.
There's nothing weird about what I've just told you.
And what happens if there is no connection and nothing changes?
What is the disaster scenario that results from that?
I mean, I'm not saying that's true, but if it were true, what would happen?
Well, then, that's like a fundamental limit to our relationship.
Like, there's no shared reality there.
There's... It's terrifying to me.
Because why? If there's no shared reality, if you're living on the same planet, different worlds, and so on, what results from that?
For me, torment for the rest of my life.
In a bad way? Sorry, just kidding.
But what happens to your relationship?
I guess my fear is that it stagnates, because...
Like, there's nothing that I can do.
Well, sure you can. You can leave her.
Or she can leave. Again, I'm not saying it's nothing to do with anything that would happen.
We're just exploring the worst-case scenario, right?
Obviously, you don't have to get trapped in a horrifying, desperate, different-planet marriage, right?
Which is not what I'm saying you have.
I'm just looking at the disaster scenario.
Right, right, right. And I'm exploring that feeling, and I guess that doesn't feel like...
Right. So, because you don't have any...
I mean, the reason why...
Because whenever we do stuff that's dysfunctional or whatever, right?
It's because the alternative we consider worse, right?
Like, why does a guy cut off his own arm?
Because it's trapped in a bear trap and he's starving to death or something, right?
I mean, we don't sort of wake up and say, hmm, that arm looks a little funny today.
Let me get a hacksaw, right?
But when we're in situations of emergency, we will do these things, right?
Right. So for you, the fear that if you don't express outrage, Laura will continue to find this normalized, which puts you in a state of extreme emotional agony and danger, which may lead to the dissolution of your marriage, or you have children and Laura raises them this way because this to her is perfectly normal and healthy, in which case you get to see the woman you love abuse and exploit the children that you love, which puts you again in a situation of agony which might lead to divorce.
I mean, there's a huge amount of catastrophizing that goes on here, right?
Which doesn't give you any freedom.
I don't get to pick which book I want to read next if someone's wrestling me off a cliff, right?
I'm going to deal with the immediate massive danger, right?
And because of the extremity of the downside, you have no options.
You can't risk not reacting strongly, right?
Yeah. Right.
So, the only way you can will yourself to not react in an extreme way to extreme thoughts, right?
That's like saying, I'd like to train myself to be in combat and feel no fear, right?
That's never going to happen, right?
Unless you become completely psychotic, which probably is not anybody's idea of a good solution, right?
So, the only way to make our reactions to stimuli less strong is to make our thoughts about that stimuli less extreme, right?
Yeah. That makes sense.
So, this is around trust, right?
And you guys have a lot of trust, and again, we're just sort of tying up some loose ends here.
But... You just saw that I talked to Laura in a non-catastrophic way about her childhood and she got something, right?
What did you get, Laura?
You listened to me and didn't get angry.
Well, Steph was listening.
Yeah, I was talking to Laura about her history and she was giving me the nice tidy little mythology about her dad being her buddy, right?
Which, you know, I understand.
Look, we all have the propaganda.
We're all raised as, you know, flag-suiting Soviet proletariat children.
I mean, I understand all of that, right?
But she gave me the story, right?
And she said, I took a lot of responsibility, right?
All of which is just mythology that serves her parents' narcissistic needs, not her own actual experience, right?
Yes. And I didn't express outrage.
I just, I mean, I asked, you know, I'm sorry, what does this mean?
You took responsibility? You know what I mean?
And, Laura, that was somewhat helpful for you, right?
Yes. Yeah, I mean, I hadn't thought of it that way before.
Well, you had. You've just been talked out of it, right?
Certainly, you didn't probably react with joy when you had to cook yet another meal and clean yet another bathroom, right?
Right. And, of course, as an adult, you would not accept that as friendly behavior from a friend, right?
all of this before, what had happened is you just had a mythology inflicted on you for the sake of appeasing your parents' guilt, right?
And that mythology is inflicted because you don't already believe that.
We don't put mythology around gravity because everybody already believes in gravity.
We only put mythology around stuff that people don't believe in, like the state and God and so on, right?
Yes.
Now, I'm not saying that this relatively brief conversation that I had with Laura is going to magically transform her entire experience of her childhood, but at least here's a small example of how you can ask somebody questions with the purpose of getting them to understand something.
So the thesis that if you don't express outrage...
Laura is not going to understand her childhood is proven, and I say this researcher to researcher, is proven false in two contexts, right?
The first is that when you do it, Laura does not understand about her childhood, right?
But instead, her childhood is recreated because she ends up having to manage your feelings rather than express her own, right?
So, on the positive thesis that if I express outrage she will understand something about her childhood is proven wrong in the positive, right?
Because it doesn't work. In fact, it does the opposite of working.
Because when we recreate someone's childhood rather than allow them to explore it, then we are actually, they are re-experiencing rather than understanding, which is the opposite, right?
Private conference. Yeah, that makes sense.
And on the other side, again, not saying it's anything earth-shaking, but in a brief demonstration that I gave of asking someone questions and picking up on everything that they say.
I mean, I listen like I'm concentrating on watching a tightrope or walking across a tightrope because I know that the first thing that people introduce me to something with is a mythology, almost always.
And this is true for me as well, right?
I constantly do this myself.
But when someone is talking about their childhood, what they will always tell you first is they will dutifully recite their parents' mythology, right?
I suppose so.
I mean, we're all programmed to do that.
There's no shame in it.
I mean, it would be crazy to do anything else because otherwise we would have been attacked, right?
Children can't handle that because we have nowhere to go, right?
So we just have to become obedient little propaganda robots, right?
And so, Stephen, when you first started talking, you talked about you need to take responsibility, you need to do all this, that.
I mean, it's all your dad's mythology, right?
And when you started off even earlier, you said, well, I need to, and you'll hear this when you listen to the conversation, but you started off earlier saying that you feel shame, you feel guilt, you feel this, you feel that, right?
And that's all your dad's mythology, right?
Yeah. And same thing with Laura.
She said, well, you know, I take a lot of responsibility with my parents and so on, but that's, you know, I taught you responsibility by being incompetent is not good parenting, right?
Yeah. I taught you how to cook by exploiting you, right?
I mean, that's not good parenting in any way, right?
Yeah. No, it's not.
I mean, you don't teach a child's responsibility by stealing his things, right?
No. So, yeah.
But parents will always try to redefine their exploitation as virtue, right?
Yes. And so, if you listen to somebody talk about their mythology...
And you just ask them about the inconsistencies.
I mean, mythology is dead easy once you get the hang of it, right?
It's impossible with ourselves, right?
We're like vampires. We look in the mirror.
We can't see anything, right?
I mean, it's just the way it works.
But that's why we need each other so much, right?
Because what is gravity to us is revealed as pure mythology to somebody else, right?
What is unquestioned absolute physics for us is revealed as, you know, made-up elvish languages to other people very easily, right?
That's why we need each other, right?
Mm-hmm. So as I'm trying to imagine doing this myself, I'm feeling a lot of the...
I guess the feelings that I was describing before where there's that, you know, disaster scenario where...
I guess all of my anxieties come up and you said that one of the ways of...
You know, challenging the behavior is to try to figure out how, you know, to challenge the extreme ideas.
How do I do that?
Oh, sure. Well, the first thing you do is recognize that they're false.
I mean, unfortunately, that's the thing you have to start with, right?
So, I mean, if you're terrified of going to hell, the first thing you recognize is that hell doesn't exist, right?
There's no God, right? And that doesn't immediately remove all of the emotional scar tissue, but at least points you in the right direction, right?
So, Laura is, I guarantee you, and I say this with all due humility with the fact that I've known her.00001% of the time that you have, but I can absolutely guarantee you that Laura can completely and totally process this effectively.
I'm sorry, your voice just dropped out.
Sure. I guarantee you that your wife, that Laura, can perfectly process this without any problems whatsoever.
Doesn't mean it's always going to be smooth and it's always going to be easy, but she has the capacity to process her childhood effectively.
Right? Because we just saw her do that, right?
To whatever small degree we want to say, although I think it was actually a fairly big realization, but we've just seen her do that, right?
Did that feel like a big realization?
Yeah. Okay, then there's something about the way that you're doing it, that stuff, that I don't even understand.
Right. Well, Laura, why don't you explain that?
Um, let me see.
Well, Steph just listened to one thing I said about me feeling like I take a lot of responsibility with my parents.
This is before we even get into, like, what actually happened during the last visit.
But you just said that you feel, um, very angry when you see us interact.
Right? And...
Because I say I take a lot of responsibility for my relationship with my parents.
Honestly, I'll have to listen to it again before I'm able to, but I definitely felt something huge sort of shift, like caught a glimpse of something that I wasn't aware of.
But that the reason that I would feel responsible as a child As I'm supposed to be a child in the relationship is that I was forced into being responsible.
Right. And to come to that on my own is huge.
Well, on my own by the help of some questions.
Right. And let me just sort of put it in a way that hopefully will make some more sense.
And if you came home and Laura was pinned under a bookcase, right?
Not injured catastrophically, right?
Just unfortunately you tried to, I don't know, take off all my books at the same time.
So Laura's pinned under a bookcase.
What are you going to do? I'm going to run right over and lift the bookcase off.
No, I think that by your principles what you're going to do is jump up and down and say how angry you are at the bookcase.
And you know you would say that you had set the bookcase up incorrectly and you would be angry at yourself.
I can't believe I did this.
The bookcase is so bad and I should have followed the instructions and I'm such a bad person and I feel so guilty.
And you're like, could you maybe just look at the bookcase?
And I'm like, honey, please, I'm stuck under the bookcase.
And the bookcase is mythology, right?
The bookcase is just lies that our parents told us.
So when Laura says, I took a lot of responsibility as an eight-year-old, right?
We know that responsibility is a positive term, right?
Nobody ever says, I took responsibility and fundamentally means I'm evil, right?
Responsibility is a positive term in the same way that the word interaction is a positive term because it implies the two equals, right?
Right. So whenever people talk about their childhood and use positive language in any way, shape, or form, when we know that their childhood was dysfunctional, in the same way that, Stephen, you used the term responsibility, when somebody says about They're imprisonment in some sort of gulag and they say, well, it taught me self-discipline and helped me lose weight.
I mean, the first thing that we're going to say is, yes, but I'm not sure that you can focus on the positives when we have a coercive situation, right?
I mean, you can, but not to the exclusion of the coercive situation, right?
There may be unintended positive things that come out of a negative and hostile and difficult and coercive situation, but that doesn't justify the coercive situation, right?
So, when somebody says something, when Laura says something positive about her childhood, you know that she's just pinned under a bookcase, right?
And so what you do is, you don't freak out, right?
Don't blame yourself, don't get mad at the bookcase, right?
Don't worry that if you lift it up, her body is going to be crushed into a puddle, right?
You just, oh man, that's a bummer, let me help you up with that.
Because the purpose is to get the bookcase off her, right?
Yeah. So when she says, and we all do this, right?
And we all do this, right?
And you've heard enough listener conversations to know that everybody does this.
Just we're programmed as these propaganda robots to serve the narcissistic needs of our exploitive parents.
Unfortunately, that's the world that we live in, right?
It's the reality that we have to deal with.
And so when we start repeating this propaganda, right, about our parents, then we simply have to say, ooh, bookcase fell on you again.
Let me lift it off of you. So how do I remain calm during that?
Like, there's clearly some huge issues that I've got that...
Sorry to interrupt.
You feel stress, as we all do, in the moral examination of those in authority.
We're all taught to feel enormous stress when we morally examine people in authority.
In other words, when we take their moral principles, which they inflicted upon us, and we turn them back upon those in authority, we feel enormous stress.
That's why authority exists, because we're not allowed to question it.
Because the moment we're allowed to question it, it evaporates, right?
Yeah, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Right, so you just have to recognize that in your own family, and you don't have to go that far back, just think of that trip, three and a half days in hell or whatever, right?
that you were not allowed to question your father's destructive habits, right?
And, Laurie, you felt the same thing, too, because you didn't bring it up with his dad either, right?
Thank you.
No, yeah. You know that's a seething volcano, and the moment that you bring that up, that there's going to be just the ugliest scene, right, this side of Hades.
Absolutely. Right, so we all have this commandment carved in our very bone marrow, right?
Thou shalt not expose the moral hypocrisy of your masters.
Right? So we all feel stress.
When we question in a Socratic way, and this is part of the Untruth book, we all feel stress when we question in a Socratic manner those who rule us according to, not violence, but false morality,
right? So if you recognize that you yourself, Stephen, feel stress when questioning the moral absolutes of those in power, Then you can just recognize that, right? And then you say, well, I'm stressed about lifting the bookcase off Laura because I have a bad back, so I need to be careful about lifting because I don't want to join her, right?
We both end up on the floor, right?
I have to lift with my legs.
You know, I'm just stretching the metaphor too far, but I think you understand, right?
Just say, look, and this is part of the real-time relationship, right?
So you don't act out your anger, right?
I mean, you can't control whether you feel angry or not.
Neither should you try. But if Laura is saying something about her childhood and you feel angry, what do you say?
Um... So, based on what you're telling me, I know this isn't going to be helpful for you, but...
I know this doesn't help you with the situation you're describing, but I'm noticing that I feel really, really, really, really angry.
Right. Because if you're not honest about it, you act it out.
So if you say, this is totally blowing away your experience, but I'm feeling angry.
Now, again, we said at the beginning, this is a system, right?
So you feel angry because Laura does not.
So she is contributing, again, not consciously, but she is contributing to your experience of anger.
It's not just you suddenly going crazy, you frothy, rabid guy, right?
So all of the anger that Laura can't feel, and I know that she can't feel it because she just described her dad's story as if it were true, like the buddy thing, right?
So there's a lot of anger that's been swamped by propaganda, which is the point of propaganda, right?
To turn exploitation into a kind of crazy virtue, right?
So without a doubt, Laura has a lot of anger about her childhood that she can't feel.
But if you feel it, then she gets to manage your feelings, which in reality is her managing her own feelings, and thus she doesn't have to...
Deal with those feelings, right?
Because obviously we're trained not to deal with our anger towards our parents, right?
To those in power. It allows me to protect that story.
Sorry? In being able to just then manage Stephen's anger, it allows me to protect the story of my childhood.
Yeah, for sure. Because then he gets to overreact, you get to manage him, and nobody ever talks about mythology.
Right.
It's a redirect, right?
So, you know, to put a gross metaphor together, she kind of has her hand up your ass and it's moving your mouth, so to speak, right?
Not that I'm suggesting you would try that, but that's the reality of what's going on, right?
It's that you are taking over her unconscious anger, right?
Because she's not expressing it, but it's clearly a provocative situation, right?
But if you express all her anger and then she has to manage you and then she's recreating her childhood rather than examining it objectively, right?
Thank you.
So you just have to resist that temptation.
And it is a temptation. And I guarantee you, with all the best intentions, and given that she is a wonderful woman, this will still happen.
If you don't respond to her provocation, she will likely escalate her provocation.
She will tell you more things that are terrible without any emotion.
Right? Yeah, that has happened.
I guarantee you that happens, for sure.
We're not so mysterious.
We're complex, but we're not that mysterious.
Because she needs you to get really angry.
Because if you don't get really angry, she's going to feel it.
And then she's going to be pushed right into the anxiety of questioning those who had power over her from a moral standpoint.
Because we're trained not to be angry at our parents.
Otherwise, anger is the opposite of exploitation.
If we can get angry, we can't be exploited.
Because we get boundaries.
We push back. We say no.
So our anger is surgically removed and replaced with obedient slave mythology, right?
I mean... So, she feels anxiety.
If she gets angry, she's going to feel anxiety because that's going to propel her in a direction that's really the opposite of what feels good, which is confronting our parents, either in our minds or in reality, right?
And she doesn't want to do that.
I mean, who would? Like, stick your hand in an electrical socket, right?
It's no fun, right? Unless it's just going to restart your heart.
Mixed metaphors like crazy, but...
Right, so she would rather you get angry so she can manage your anger so she doesn't have to feel anger so she doesn't have to do...
What she'll have to do if she actually gets angry.
Yeah, this is an irony because...
Yeah, and that's what I mean when I say it's a system.
So I don't want you to sit there and say, well, I am now re-traumatizing Laura by acting out all her anger and I'm the bad...
It's a system, right?
You guys are participating in this and you are a wonderful couple and you do amazing stuff and you should be very proud of what you're doing, right?
I'm just pointing out that it is a system and we're programmed to endless propaganda robots to cover up the crimes of our parents and we will do a lot to prevent these crimes from coming to light.
Not because... We don't believe that they happen, these crimes, or whatever.
But simply because we're trained not to, great anxiety will accrue to us if we actually get angry.
Because with anger comes action, right?
So all I need to do is just be curious.
Just try to remain calm.
Yeah, so if she uses a word like responsibility, I mean, I'm a bit of a jujitsu at this, so I can jump straight in, but if she uses the word responsibility, just say, well, help me understand what you mean by responsibility, right?
Well, responsibility is X, Y, and Z, right?
And then you say, okay, well, is that a universal definition or is that just your family's crazy definition, right?
Because if it's a universal definition that cooking and cleaning for other people is being a responsible friend, right, then she should be out cooking and cleaning for people all over the place, right?
But if she's not, then clearly it's an inconsistent definition.
It's just that kind of stuff.
It's just a Socratic examination.
But the important thing is to understand what Laura means by the word responsibility, not jump to the anger of what you understand by it.
I mean, if you want to study photons, you have to figure out what photons are doing, not what you want photons to do, right?
There's a great line in not such a great movie.
Gosh, what was it? It was Meg Ryan and Sarah McLachlan's song, Angel.
Do you remember this movie?
I can't remember what it was called. He plays an angel.
I think it's a remake of an old Vim Vendors film with Nick Cage and Meg Ryan.
Yeah, I remember that.
Oh, it was called City of Angels.
City of Angels. Thank you so much.
Now, at one point, he says to her at the table, she's eating a peach, right?
And he says, what does a peach taste like?
And she says to him, you don't know what a peach tastes like?
And he says, I don't know what it tastes like to you.
To you, I remember that.
Right? And that's a very, very important and powerful moment, right?
In a pretty dull film, right?
But that moment, right?
Which is, you don't know what responsibility means to Laura.
That's true. And that's what you need to know.
That's intimacy, right?
What does a peach taste like to you?
Okay. I guess there's still some of my own narcissism that is like, you know, my understanding of the world is...
Somehow, you know, everyone's or should be.
Well, again, I would be hesitant about layering moral terms on yourself at the moment.
Because you don't know what's mythology and what's not yet.
And Lord knows I'm not saying that I do with my life all the time either.
But because you're just really starting to peel back the layers of this mythology, I'd be very careful about using moral terms or these quasi-moral psychological terms with yourself because you don't know, right?
This may not be narcissism for you.
It's really important to exist in a state of confusion.
It's really important to exist in a state of not knowing so that you can know.
But don't jump to conclusions about yourself.
Don't jump to conclusions about Laura.
Just explore. That's the beauty of marriage.
Because the moment you jump to conclusions, you stop looking.
And the moment you put a label and you say, well, this is my narcissistic thing or whatever.
But you don't know that.
Yet, you're just starting.
And again, I'm not saying starting philosophy or whatever, but as far as these particular spots, these null zones go within yourself, steadfastly resist putting labels on, because once you've got a label, you don't explore, right?
If you're driving home, once you're home, you stop driving, right?
But you don't know where home is at this point.
You don't know what the truth is.
And the moments that you come to a conclusion, which you will be irresistibly drawn to do, the moment you come to a conclusion, you shut off exploration and intimacy in those areas.
Does that make sense? Absolutely.
And you've got to watch each other's back with this because you'll both have a tendency to put labels on so you don't have to go there so you can avoid the anxiety.
But don't put labels on.
Just keep exploring.
I was just feeling surprised by how I think of myself as being pretty indeterminate.
For a guy who thinks of himself as being unsure about Everything.
There's probably a whole lot that I'm prematurely sure about.
For sure. For sure. And that's true of all of us.
Everyone under Sun and Moon is the same way.
We need to keep constantly dismantling our conclusion mechanisms, right?
And remain open to excellence.
That's science, right? RTR is the real-time relationship.
It's just science in relationships.
The same way that UPB is just science in ethics, right?
It's just science that says, when I don't know, I'm going to take the radical step of saying, I don't know, right?
And staying there until I have enough evidence and reason to genuinely know.
And is the genuinely knowing, I mean, is that the emotional certainty that you talk about?
Yes, and I guarantee you it cannot be encapsulated in a word like narcissism, right?
The knowing about your history and your own tendencies to control and your own dark side and so on is a highly complex ecosystem.
It cannot be encapsulated in a word like narcissism.
Now, your parents may have narcissistic traits.
They may even be narcissists, but who cares and who knows?
And it doesn't matter. The important thing is that for your own experience as a growing and exploring and questioning human being, there's no possible way that your own complex ecosystem, which is not exploitive, not destructive, not abusive, polysyllabic, In the extreme? No. But there's no way that your own experience can be encapsulated into something like, that's my narcissism, right?
Yeah, I see now how much of a shortcut that is to try to label it that way rather than to...
Explore. Go through the process of uncovering the emotional...
Right, if Christopher Columbus had sailed into the new world and said, that's America, and turned around and sailed back, he wouldn't have known anything about America, right?
All he'd have is a word, right?
That's good. That's very good.
Okay, okay, so there's...
So for me, it seems very, very important to recognize that that shortcut has been A way of, I guess, avoiding the anxiety that is otherwise produced when I enter that uncertain area.
So, like, because I'm just trying to imagine this, and I guess I'm recognizing that there is a great deal of anxiety when I can't give a name to what I'm experiencing.
Right, and that's not your anxiety fundamentally, that's your parents, right?
You like exploring.
I guarantee, because you listen to these endless podcasts, you like exploring.
You like playing around.
You like trying to figure out stuff, right?
Oh, God. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, that's why I do my research.
When you have a personality trait that is directly opposite to every other personality trait, it's scar tissue, which means that exploration, which serves you, does not serve other people.
And it's those other people's commandments against exploration and to labeling that you're following.
It's not your natural personality.
It's scar tissue that is inflicted upon you, right?
So, to take a very brief example, if I'm a counterfeiter and somebody comes around my neighborhood selling absolutely guaranteed counterfeit detection mechanisms, the store owners are going to feel happy or sad.
Happy! Right.
Am I going to feel happy or sad?
Oh, are you the counterfeiter?
Yeah. Yeah, you will feel a lot of anxiety.
Right. So, the people who will benefit from exploration are going to feel happy with philosophy, right?
Right. The people who will damn well not benefit from curiosity are hostile towards philosophy, right?
Yeah. So you enjoy philosophy, but the curiosity that philosophy and the sort of starting point of I don't know, which is the foundational aspect of philosophy, including science and all these other things, if you like that in general and in your life, but in one particular area around authority and ethics and so on, you suddenly short-circuit and go the exact opposite direction, right?
You just know that you're programmed to avoid that, not because it would be detrimental to you, but because it would be detrimental to those who exploit you.
Yeah, that makes sense.
It's weird. Yeah.
So it's just around, is curiosity and rationality a value?
Well, yeah, then it's a consistent and universal value.
Which means, and if you genuinely enjoy it, except in this particular spot, you just know that you're trained not to go there because it's detrimental to those who exploited you.
And so you don't let them run your agenda.
I mean, obviously it happens and we all try to fight that, but We say, okay, well, if I'm tempted to put labels on, that's just because I'm protecting the guilty by sacrificing the innocent, which is not what we want to do, right?
Absolutely. Well, I've given you guys a hell of a lot to process.
I was like, me, me, back the truck up, right?
Here's the dump. Was this helpful for you?
Was this useful? Was there anything that could have been more helpful or more useful in the conversation?
I found it incredibly helpful for me.
I really look forward to going back and listening.
I get a lot from re-listening to things.
I don't know anything that I can say that would have helped me more.
Yeah, I mean, I can't do a whole lot, like, over a non-face-to-face conversation sort of thing, I can't do a whole lot of, and how do you feel?
And I mean, because you guys can do that for each other, right?
And you know the history and so on, right?
So I can't do a lot of making people cry over the sky.
I'd like... Thank you for that.
But, no, I mean, it just doesn't really work because it's too silent.
I can't read body language.
And, of course, you guys can do this for each other infinitely better than I could even dream of, right, in terms of, like, getting to the actual emotions and feeling and so on.
So that's why I have to stick a little bit more with the theoretical stuff when we're talking.
But, anyway, I just sort of want to mention that.
But, Stephen, what's your response to that sort of question of, you know, how was it?
Was it useful? Could it be more useful?
Any feedback and so on? Yeah, I guess it's...
I guess it was good.
I still feel...
Arousing, maybe. I guess I still feel a lot of anxiety or uncertainty about just what to do.
I'm sorry, did you not think that that was the purpose?
No. Maybe I've misunderstood.
Maybe I've miscommunicated what the purpose of this is.
The purpose is for you to feel unsure of what to do.
Because if you're sure of what to do when you're wrong, then you're going to keep doing it, right?
So if you're driving south when you're supposed to be driving north and you're perfectly confident that you're going the right direction, you're going to keep driving south, right?
Yeah. So for me, the purpose is when I say that curiosity and a lack of knowledge is the point, and then you say, well, I'm not happy because I feel curiosity and a lack of knowledge.
We just may not have met up on the same place as far as the purpose of the conversation goes.
Laura, that makes more sense to you, doesn't it?
Yes, it does. Right.
But to Mr.
I-need-to-know-have-the-answers-and-control-things, it's not quite as comfortable, right?
Yeah. It's good.
It's really good. Because you want that from him.
You want him to not know what to do, so he'll keep asking you questions.
When he knows what to do in these situations, that's not so good for you, right?
Right. No. Because he's wrong.
No, he's right about 99.9% of things, but in this area, he couldn't be more wrong, and that's very frustrating for you, right?
So if he doesn't know what to do, isn't that a big step forward?
Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm glad that we cleared that up at the end, because if you hung up saying, geez, that was terrible, now I feel uncertain, I'm like, that's why I'm doing it.
Mission accomplished. Right, right.
No, like knocking off the props of certainty is the key, right?
Absolutely. Okay.
I know you don't like that, right?
I mean, I know you don't feel, but of course that makes sense, because if you liked it, we wouldn't have to make you uncertain, because you'd already be doing it.
Right, right. No, this is a brilliant addition.
So just be patient with him while he goes through the agony of not being certain.
I'm happy to. It's tough.
No, look, this is, you know, when you, and this is not to put you in the same category, Stephen, but when you have a conversation with a religious person, right, like an hour or two or whatever, right, they don't walk away from that as a converted and committed and certain atheist, right?
No. What happens?
There's going to be confusion and disorientation.
Confused and annoyed, right?
Yeah. Well, that's what I'm selling, baby.
Confusion and disorientation.
It is. Look, philosophy is confusing and annoying in the same way that physics can be, and there's a reason why Socrates drank Hemlock, right?
Because it's confusing and annoying for people, right?
And that's great, right?
We need to go through that phase of confusion and annoyance so that we can get to real certainty, which is the intimacy of knowing both ourselves and our partners in very real and non-assumptive ways, if that makes sense.
It does, yeah.
Yeah. Thank you, Steph.
You're very, very welcome, Melissa.
As one of my favorite couples, whatever I can do to help is great.
Thank you very much.
All right. Well, listen, I will compile this baby and fire it off to you.
Obviously, I think it's a good conversation for others to listen to, but you all have a listen and let me know what you think.
Yeah, no problem. We will.
All right. Thanks a lot, guys. I'll talk to you soon.
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