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July 27, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:48:37

1115 Sunday Call In Show July 27 2008

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	Well, good afternoon, everybody.
	It's Steph. It is Sunday, the 27th of July, 2...
	Thank you very much to the two new subscribers who were kind enough to sign up for the $20 a month All You Can Eat FDR Brain Buffet.
	I really do appreciate that and I look forward to more people donating.
	I did a fantastic podcast that I'm not going to have a series that I'm finishing on The Childhood as the Foundation for the State, which is full of an enormous amount of grim material, for which I apologize, but of course doctors should not be afraid to look at abscesses, and that is sort of where we are.
	But I guess we'll start with a little bit of, I don't know, a little bit of humor.
	I don't know if you guys were at all interested in this, but...
	I have Google Alerts that are set up to a variety of things to do with my name, a free domain radio, and so on, just so I can get a sense of the pulse of the old blogosphere.
	And this is a guy, I think this was Alan was his board name.
	That's what I've heard. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but...
	He's got a whole bunch of posts about me.
	I haven't read the other ones, but I thought this one was just quite delightful.
	I've actually had a debate with this fellow, which was perfectly civilized, but he was upset because people didn't like his board posting, so he left saying he was never to return, and then he came back and started sniping again, and I asked him why he was back, if he said he wasn't coming back and didn't deal with it openly, and then anyway, so...
	So he said, this is from alrinus.blogspot.com, A-L-R-E-N-O-U-S, the entry for, what is it, July 26th.
	Sniping Molyneux again.
	So Stefan Molyneux has banned me.
	He's also plagiarized me in the past.
	This video, shortly after 11 minutes and 50 seconds, an infinite regression of causality is not freedom.
	This is the free will video.
	He says, this idea is directly out of my essay experiment, free will, determinism, cage max versus infinity.
	You can compare the post-dates.
	My influence is unmistakable, both because he uses nearly my exact words and because he almost never comes up with ideas this sophisticated on his own.
	You can test this by comparing his arguments in those three videos on free will to my arguments in my upcoming essay on the subject.
	And that is a...
	That is wonderful. He says, hilarious, in the middle of plagiarizing me, he says, if you've read that article of mine on his blog's blog, my blog's blog address.
	I'm also fairly sure he outrageously stole the idea that stochastic phenomena are not freedom.
	But, um... You know what?
	I think it's obviously wonderful.
	I could be accused of many things.
	I am critical of my own presentation style as much as probably, if not more so than anybody else, that I can be tangential, that I can go from that which is provable to that which is not provable without necessarily indicating the transition as clearly as I should.
	Sometimes I could be accused of maximum verbosity, as the old Zork series had it.
	But the one thing I don't think that I have a particular issue with is coming up with ideas and I don't actually have a lot of problems.
	I don't have a lot of incentive to troll the internet to look for ideas because my list of podcast topics to come is actually...
	It's way too long.
	I mean, I'm no shortage of things to do with that.
	But I think it is completely wonderful that...
	I mean, in a just intellectually delightful and psychologically delightful kind of way, when somebody says...
	You can compare his arguments in those three videos on free will, determinism kills love, to my arguments in my upcoming essay on the subject.
	And I think that's wonderful, because if he accuses me of plagiarism, and then he says that ideas that are already in my videos on free will...
	Are correlated to his upcoming essay on the subject.
	Pretty much if you say that there's a bunch of ideas that someone has that is the same as something you haven't published yet, it's not actually that person who normally would be criticized to plagiarism.
	Anyway, I just thought it was the kind of stuff I get in my inbox.
	I just thought this was kind of funny.
	I don't know if you are interested in this kind of stuff, but that's the stuff that is floating around.
	Some of the stuff that's floating around with FDR. And of course, I don't know when his...
	When his post was put out, the one that he's talking about.
	But certainly the free will staff bubbled up very early in the free domain radio debate.
	So it is just kind of funny that this stuff just comes up.
	Anyway, I just wanted to point that out.
	This is the silliness that is out there on the internet.
	And unfortunately, this is the quality of debate that goes on.
	Not just on the internet, but unfortunately in a wide variety of places.
	I thought you'd find that a little bit amusing.
	And so that's it.
	All I really have for the introduction.
	I'm doing this Grimm series on the history of the world as the history of childhood.
	And this fellow who posted the article that I read is interestingly enough, and I wasn't aware of this when I first looked at this, this Lloyd DeMauze from psychohistory.com.
	He actually has published some articles from Alice Miller, which are also very good.
	I'm quite a fan of Alice Miller's analysis of childhood and its effects on political action and political thinking.
	So that to me adds some more credibility because Alice Miller is quite well respected.
	So the fact that they have a relationship sort of helps me because, of course, I can't go to all of these guys' hundreds of primary sources to check everything.
	But I hope that that will help at least with some of the criticisms of non-credibility of this stuff that I'm working on.
	which is pretty controversial and very unpleasant as well.
	Anyway, I am more than happy to spend the entire time to talk about issues or questions that anybody else might have.
	So if you have a question, issue, comment, problem, I am more than happy to hear.
	Everything's fine with the baby, just in case anyone's asked.
	Monday we go for a detailed ultrasound.
	Which goes through all the baby's organs.
	And unfortunately, no tail.
	I was kind of hoping for that, because that would cause the baby to totally own online video games.
	But so far, no luck.
	I don't know if we can grow them at this point, but I'll ask them when we have the ultrasound on Monday.
	So, okay. If you'd like to speak up, I am all with the antennae.
	Steph? Yes.
	Hey, I just had a small question about a lot of the board postings on Ethical nihilism, especially the one with the meaning of sex.
	I had...
	I guess people were applying that kind of ethical nihilism to casual sex.
	I was just kind of, after going over it, I was just kind of wondering, do you think you'd ever go over the ramifications of the effects of having two nihilistic parents or the...
	I guess morality of having nihilistic principles in a kind of almost family environment because I would see that that would be like completely catastrophic to a kid growing up because there's no foundation of principles for the family to aspire to nor is there anything for the kid themselves to hold on to as far as trying to make any discernment of anything in the world.
	So I was just I'm wondering if you'd ever go into that or what your views or thoughts were on that.
	Well, the first thing that I'm interested in is your characterization of that as a small question.
	Um, I was hoping that it would be a small question, but, uh, no, I, it is a, it is a rather big question, but, uh.
	And I'm just curious, why would you have characterized that as a small question?
	Sex, parents, ethics, nihilism, I mean, good God, what are we not dealing with there, right?
	Yeah, no, I tend to do that.
	I don't know. I don't know.
	It's something that keeps bothering me, because we keep having these conversations on the boards about nihilism, and it seems like you bring up a very valid argument to going against it, but at the same time, it's just reworded those who oppose it into rewording it, and... Rewarding their previous argument and ignoring the actual logical fallacy that they're making.
	And I guess it's just been kind of driving me crazy, and I'm looking for a little more information or a little better material on how to approach it.
	Sure. Well, but nihilism is not a philosophy.
	Nihilism is technically the Latin term is an acronym.
	It's... EMF. It's an evasive mindfuck.
	It's what nihilism is.
	So it's not a philosophy at all.
	It is a virus.
	It is something which attacks consistency and truth while attempting to use consistency and truth.
	And this is also obvious when you think about it for a moment.
	So if somebody says nihilism is the statement that there is no such thing as morality, which, of course, falls right into The problem of UPB, right?
	Which is that if you say that there is no such thing as morality, then you're saying that there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior.
	And if you say there is no such thing as morality, then you are claiming a universal truth that everybody should adhere to that there is no such thing as preferable behavior.
	But if there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, you cannot make the statement that there is no such thing as morality that people should believe your statement is a universal truth.
	So, there is no possibility that nihilism is anything other than the scar tissue of child abuse.
	The way that nihilism arises, in my view, psychologically, is you have overbearing parents who use morality, who use ethics, and almost always this is religious ethics, To cow, brutalize, and grind down the child's will to oppose or question the parents.
	And so what happens is morality, and I put significant quotes around that word, is used within the family structure to bully, control, and humiliate the children.
	And so what happens is the children grow up with this resentful scar tissue against the question of ethics.
	Whenever the topic of ethics comes up, The children, who are now becoming intellectually sophisticated adults, get angry and resentful.
	And what they attempt to do is to dismantle the idea of ethics in the same way that you and I would attempt to get a lion out of the house or to pick apart a ticking bomb so that it wouldn't go off.
	So what has happened is that this is before an intellectual or moral defu from abusive parents, and I'm talking about intellectually sophisticated and abusive parents, intelligent abusive parents who use ethics, as I talk about in On Truth, to control the child, to use the child's desire for virtue to turn the child into the service of corruption.
	And so this is before the intellectual defu and so the parents still own the term morality and the anger towards the parents and the resistance towards the parents is sublimated which means the energy is moved into another arena which is then ethics becomes a substitute for the parents and all the resentment and hostility that the child feels towards the parents is poured into ethics because that was the primary control mechanism that the parents used to bully the child.
	So nihilism is a symptom of child abuse.
	It has nothing to do with a philosophy because any philosophy which contradicts itself in the utterance is obviously...
	I have the respect for people who profess nihilism.
	I have the respect for them to assume that they're not retarded.
	That they're not so stupid.
	That they will say there's no such thing as truth.
	There's no such thing as virtue.
	Everything is a choice. And that it is out of my respect for these people that I go into their childhoods because there's no possibility that somebody can say that and not just go, wait a minute, I just contradicted myself.
	And even if they can't see it the moment it's pointed out, it's so perfectly obvious.
	That anybody who's got any brains at all, if I were to judge these people at face value, I would say that they were completely retarded.
	And I don't believe that.
	I have a lot of respect for people's intelligence.
	I say that everybody's a genius and everybody's a philosopher.
	And therefore, when people say completely retarded things, it's got to be because of psychological challenges or psychological problems or a psychological history that they've had.
	Because the only other alternative is that they're idiots.
	And I don't believe that.
	I have too much respect for people.
	Particularly people as intelligent enough as, you know, calling themselves nihilists and reading books on nihilism and so on.
	So given that people aren't stupid, they must be damaged.
	There's no other explanation that could occur for people saying such ridiculous things with a straight face and then evading this contradiction.
	And so they put people in an impossible situation and they spend their lives attacking virtue and truth.
	thinking that this is somehow opposing their parents, when of course it's not.
	It's being completely enslaved by their parents because their parents still own the definition of virtue.
	So that would be my quick take on it.
	Does that help at all?
	Yeah, yeah.
	I guess my thing is that I've always been dwelling around in the abstract and I guess not as much taking the conversation to things that are more to do with the family.
	But I just wanted to bring it up because I've just been very aggravated in trying to make...
	Good arguments and actually get past, you know, circular arguing because it just seems like I'll put one argument forth and then they'll put another one back and we'll go right back to where we started, not making any progress at all.
	So I guess just a change of tactics and trying to be more patient with that.
	Okay, I'm going to start talking again, but this time I'm going to pretend that you're listening to me.
	And why am I saying that?
	Because I obviously missed something.
	Missed something? Because you're talking about bringing intellectual arguments to these people, right?
	Oh, right, right, right.
	And intellectual arguments isn't going to work because they're not into intellectualizing.
	They're dealing with past family histories, which has nothing to do with intellectualizing.
	Yeah, I mean this falls into the basic category of why does philosophy fail?
	Why does free market economics fail?
	Why does libertarianism, why does it all fail?
	Is it because the arguments are so complicated?
	No, of course not. Violence is bad.
	It's pretty simple, right? The government uses violence.
	Violence is pretty simple.
	It fails because of psychological causes.
	It fails because of childhood traumas.
	It does not fail because the arguments are so esoteric and hard to understand.
	So if you bring an intellectual argument to an nihilist, you're just wasting your time.
	And so you're worse than wasting your time.
	You're actually reinforcing his defenses against his childhood trauma.
	Because you're saying, well, the issue is one of abstract intellectualism.
	But his abstract intellectualism is a defense.
	There is almost no more entrenched and powerful defense than intellectualism.
	The idea to extract and analyze and not feel, and to use philosophy as a defense against the emotions, as a repression of the emotions, as a way of sublimating or diverting the emotions.
	So if you continue to – and this is – I mean if you continue to talk – and I haven't been following that thread at all because it's all just – to me, I haven't been following it.
	So the only thing that I've mentioned is – the only thing I can mention is what I saw is it just seemed to be a whole bunch of annoying intellectual baffle gab and nobody was talking about their history.
	Yeah. I mean, if somebody is...
	I was just thinking about this today, so I'll just drop this in there and we'll go back to it.
	If somebody is going to start talking about a challenging and difficult topic like sexuality, like violence, like virtue, we should at least assume that they have cleaned up their own personal history about it, right? Yes.
	So if somebody is going to talk about, let's say...
	Let's say sex. Somebody's going to talk about sex.
	I would at least assume that if you're going to put out public proclamations about sexuality, that you have dealt with your own sexual history and you have dealt with your own family's sexual history, which may be virtually nothing, right?
	It may be, you know, everything was fine and healthy and so on.
	But I would assume that if somebody's going to put out universal proclamations That they should at least have had the respect for the truth and for others.
	And a respect for the dignity of the truth.
	To make sure that they're not using truth to manage their own emotions.
	They're not using philosophy.
	They're not messing with people's heads.
	They're not putting forward stuff out of emotional tension, out of emotional avoidance.
	And that's why when people put out proclamations about sexuality or something, I will sometimes ask them, well...
	Can you tell me about your own family's sexual history?
	And the reason that I ask that is not because I'm automatically assuming that everybody's been sexually traumatized.
	I don't believe that at all.
	But somebody should be open about talking about this stuff because if you have theories about sex, you should at least be comfortable with your own sexual development.
	In one form or another. However it occurred.
	And it should not be a closed and tense book with people, right?
	If I have theories about violence, I should at least have examined my own temper, my own capacity for violence, the violence that I have experienced, to clear away the history to make sure that I can think clearly, right?
	So, that is...
	My particular approach.
	So if somebody starts talking about casual sex is good because there are no rules, well, it's important to say, well, tell me a little bit about...
	Your sexual history so that I understand where you're coming from so that I can differentiate whether you're just spouting a bunch of nonsense as an emotional defense for some trauma you've experienced or whether you have worked through all of this, you are starting without fogged or warped spectacles looking at this issue.
	I mean, that's not too much to ask, is it?
	No. I mean, we expect a surgeon to scrub his hands before every surgery.
	Can we not expect people who put out public pronouncements about sexuality to at least have cleaned up their own sexual history and to have an understanding about it, right?
	Definitely. Definitely.
	So I would start talking with them about that.
	Okay. And if they're open and they say, well, this is interesting, this happened in my family and this happened and so on, and then they can talk about it openly and honestly, then you know that...
	They're not using sexual theories to manage or mask emotional trauma.
	If, on the other hand, they got all offended, what does that have to do with anything?
	Well, kind of then you get an answer, right?
	Right, right.
	Right. Hmm.
	It's kind of weird, you know, because if I put forward a theory about here's how people get diphtheria, And somebody says to me, well, have you ever known anyone who's had diphtheria?
	Can you tell me about your family history or whatever?
	And he's like, well, that's completely irrelevant.
	What does that have to do with anything?
	It's like, why is that an offensive question?
	True. Yeah, why get insecure about it if it's not that serious?
	Well, it's not insecure. It's aggressive, right?
	Well, yeah, yeah, yeah.
	You know, like, I mean, how many times, I don't know, for me at least, a bunch of times, you read about someone who's devoted his life to finding a cure for cancer.
	And you ask about his history, and you find out that his mom had a terrible lingering death when he was 12 from cancer, right?
	Right. And that doesn't mean that it's invalid to look for a cure for cancer.
	I think that's quite a beautiful thing to do out of such a terrible trauma, right?
	Yeah, but it gives a context for his actions, I guess.
	when people appear kind of foggy and kind of contradictory and you feel yourself falling into a swamp and you feel yourself getting irritated and confused, you shake your head and you say, okay, so clearly we're in some sort of unconscious psychological realm here because we're not making any progress.
	Everyone's getting annoyed and nobody knows what the hell anybody else is talking about and everything feels kind of like a maneuver.
	You know, like someone says something and then someone thinks about it and they craft a response and they put it out there and it's a chess piece, it's a...
	That's all indications of when you're involved in the psychological defense.
	Yeah. Yeah, I didn't notice it as well.
	I thought some of them might have been with some theories, but I didn't notice it as much and I think that this is definitely shedding some light on a lot of the conversations I've been having in those threads.
	That's definitely positive.
	Thank you. Yeah, I mean, just a last point is that I've always sort of thought about this in terms of cops and soldiers, right?
	We have guys out there on the streets who are willing to pull a trigger and blow someone away if necessary, right?
	Yeah. Somebody with that kind of awesome power should really be about the wisest human being around, right?
	Right. And so they should be People who come from stable, happy, loving homes who have gone through a process of self-knowledge and self-understanding to the point where they have the true moral and wise courage to use violence for virtuous ends, right? Self-defense for the case of others and so on, right?
	Yeah, yeah. But of course, it's always the exact opposite.
	That the people who get the guns are the most fucked up, screwed up, messed up, violent, nasty, sadistic, evil bastards on the planet, right?
	Yeah, yeah. And you go to a cop and ask him, did you ever experience violence as a child?
	Good luck, right? Yeah, really.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Definitely. I mean, even if it's small things you ask them, they can still be aggressive about just small things.
	I remember coming to the grocery store and just asking, like, was it closed or not?
	And I still got an aggressive answer from the cop, which was kind of weird.
	Oh, yeah, no, for sure.
	For sure. I mean, I knew a guy who used to treat cops psychologically.
	Oh, my God. Like, what an absolute cesspit of brutal and ugly family history and brutal and ugly current relationships they have.
	There was a cop on a super nanny.
	And the kid at the cop was a shoplifter.
	And he was screaming at his kids and shaking them.
	And I mean, oh, man, it's just brutal.
	These are the people that we give the guns to, right?
	Because nobody else wants. We'll take them, right?
	Exactly, exactly.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Definitely, definitely.
	This definitely gives me more to think about and to try to rethink my approach to those threads because I've definitely been hitting a wall, it felt like.
	This definitely shed some light on my tactics and the way that I was looking at it.
	Sorry, just to correct.
	It's not a wall exactly. If you hit a wall, you walk away, right?
	It's just kind of like quicksand, a fog, a slow Python-like strangulation, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, because you're still trying to work through the arguments through your head even after you get away from the thread.
	And it's like, I don't see how this could happen, but, you know.
	Right. And this is just a principle.
	I just have to sum the principle up so that everyone gets it.
	If somebody claims expertise in a particular area, they should have no problems talking about their own personal history with that area.
	Yeah, yeah. Right?
	I mean, if somebody says, I'm an expert on marriage, and somebody says, how is your marriage?
	Tell me about your marriage.
	They should not get offended at that question, right?
	Right, right.
	Definitely. If somebody says, I know exactly how to sing, it should not be enormously insulting for you to say to them, can you sing me something?
	Exactly. Because then there's something wrong.
	Yeah, so ask people personal questions, and that way you find out if they have worked through their own issues and come to wisdom.
	It's hard to get to wisdom, hard to get to the truth.
	We have to overcome a lot of confusion that comes from our culture and our families and our teachers and our priests and so on.
	We have to get through a lot of indoctrination to get to the truth.
	And if people think that they can get to the truth by leaping over their own personal histories, they're just leading mankind off a cliff.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Definitely. And the reason that I would suggest, because this is nothing new to you, right?
	Right. So the reason that I would suggest that you are trying to avoid other people's personal histories is why?
	Because I'm simultaneously trying to avoid the confrontation with mine.
	Huh. See? Everybody's a genius and everybody's a philosopher.
	Yeah, you're trying to avoid your own history coming up rather than somebody else's.
	That's why it's so important to clean up your own history.
	That way, when you bring up other people's histories and they say, well, what about you?
	You're like, okay, well, ask me whatever you like.
	I'm happy to talk about it.
	Exactly. Exactly. But yeah, that definitely makes sense.
	I still have a lot of issues I have to go over anyway.
	Definitely considering therapy as well.
	But yeah, that definitely makes sense.
	Okay, good. Well, I hope that it helps, and I guess we'll see how it goes with that.
	Definitely. I appreciate it.
	I really do. You're welcome.
	And don't forget to mute as we move on.
	Oh, yeah. I will. All right.
	Thanks, man. Talk to you soon. All right.
	Bye. All right.
	So we have an opening for another listener.
	Can I jump in here? Sure.
	Actually, what I have to say is something I've gone through.
	Over the past several weeks I've been examining myself and some of the trauma I've experienced in the past and why some things have hit me so hard.
	Recently, I've been grappling with some terrible feelings of loneliness, like feelings that if I were to drop off the face of the earth tomorrow, people wouldn't give a damn.
	I could disappear and leave absolutely no footprints, so to speak.
	And I've realized that that's one of the worst feelings I could possibly have.
	And I've been examining that and I've been examining what would be important to me if I had an intimate relationship with somebody like a girl or something.
	I'm realizing why my past heartbreaks have hurt me so hard and one of the things I've discovered about myself is that one of the things that I yearn for is the feeling that I'm irreplaceable to somebody.
	If I were to be gone from their life, that nobody else would be able to fill that void.
	That I fill a part of their life that nobody else can.
	And I don't know if anybody else has ever reached this conclusion before, but It's just been something that I've been examining about myself, and I'm not sure whether that's the result of trauma in my past or what, but it's something interesting.
	I was wondering if you had any thoughts on that.
	Well, I do have a thought, which is that you went from, at the beginning you were saying it's the most painful thing, and then at the end you were saying it was interesting.
	Well, what I'm saying is that it's interesting that that's the root cause of some of the pain I've felt in the past.
	At one point, when a girl broke my heart, at the time I didn't realize why it hit me so hard.
	And now, looking back, I realize that what hit me the worst was the fact that I got the feeling that I was replaceable to her.
	That after she was done with me, that she could just go on and forget about me, and I was nothing more to her than maybe a bit of a memory.
	And... You know, it hurts to think that I matter that little as a person.
	You see what I'm saying?
	Sorry, you're saying there's a lot of stuff to talk about in what you're saying, but let me just ask.
	So you're saying that if a girl that you date doesn't think that you are worth a lot, then you're not worth a lot.
	It's not that necessarily.
	I'm trying to think about how to explain.
	I apologize.
	I'm very discombobulated mentally.
	It's hard for me to articulate my thoughts in verbal words.
	Do you want me to give you more prompts?
	Would that help? That might help.
	That might help, actually.
	So, why are you talking to me about your girlfriends?
	Because you've been in this conversation for a while, right?
	Well, you mean like what conversation?
	Like the whole... The FDR thing, right?
	Yeah, I've been part of FDR since, oh, about January when Rich introduced me to it.
	Okay, so...
	Sorry to interrupt, but...
	So, you're talking to me about your adult girlfriend relationships, right?
	Well, one in particular.
	Sorry, but it doesn't matter which one in particular.
	Why is that not something we can work with?
	What do you mean? Why can't we just talk about that?
	Well, no. Why is that not the cause of your problem?
	It might be the cause of my problem.
	It's not the cause of your problem.
	Okay. Let's dig further.
	Let's see where you're going with this.
	Well, you know where I'm going with this.
	You're about to burrow a bit deeper into my past and help me examine the fact that my family probably never really gave me that feeling, right?
	Well, you see, you're putting the onus on me, like you're saying that I'm doing this, but this is exactly...
	No, no, I'm saying actually you'd probably be right if you were to say that.
	Well, you're right, because you knew that's exactly what I would do when you brought up your girlfriends, right?
	I mean, deep down, did you know that I was going to talk about your family?
	Is there ever any instance where I haven't done that that you've ever heard from me?
	Come on, you knew what was coming, right?
	No, I knew what was coming.
	People say to me, well, Steph, you do X, right?
	But you bring this question to me, right?
	You give me this stuff about my girlfriends, and you know exactly what's going to happen, right?
	And then you say, okay, Steph, well, if you want to go there, I guess we can, right?
	It's like, no, no, I don't want to go there.
	Well, no, and it's more of a matter of I want to go there, and I'd like to examine what actually happened there.
	To really create this dependency on others' evaluation of me as a person in order for me to have a feeling of self-worth.
	Well, it's a lack of love, right?
	Well, yeah. A lack of childhood love.
	A lack of love in your childhood.
	Yeah, I mean, it's like, I know that that's probably at least partially because of it.
	You know, that's partially the cause of it.
	The fact that, you know, as a child, I wasn't, you know, I didn't get that feeling a whole lot.
	Like, I didn't get the feeling.
	In fact, that's one of the sort of subconscious gripes I always had was that I could sit at the dinner table, and I could try to say something, and my parents would say, no, be quiet, and then other people would jaw for half an hour about nothingness, and then I'd try to give my input, and nobody would listen, you know?
	Or my brother would come in and tell me, oh, you know, listen to this that I've got to tell you, and then as soon as I tried to start saying, well, here's what's interesting about my day, he'd say, oh, that's not important, walk out.
	Are you saying that your brother had more attention from your parents than you did?
	My brothers, my sister, you know, my parents had more attention for each other than they did me, you know, and in fact, most everybody in my family had more attention for themselves than they did me.
	Okay, so if I understand it right, your thesis is that, or your emotional memory is that your parents had the capacity to show interest in children, they just didn't show interest in you.
	Yes. Now, if that's the case, and I'm not going to disagree with you, I have my suspicions, but let's go with your thesis.
	If that is the case, then your brother should have grown up and your sister should have grown up to be happy and loving and well-related people with great personal relationships and so on.
	My sister's married and seems to be doing well with that, but she's actually suffered a lot of trauma too and a lot of emotional scarring and damage and everything.
	She's only now starting to Not be as messed up as she has been.
	My brother, older brother, still lives at home and is really more of a man-child than anything.
	Really has no seeming desire to go anywhere with his life.
	My little brother is just so messed up that I think he may actually be somewhat psychotic.
	Absolutely obnoxious little brat and very, very odd individual.
	You can't really connect to him on much of anything at all.
	If you were to try to talk to him about anything, it's just like he's in a mental place that nobody else can really go, per se.
	Sorry, we'll keep going with your family as a whole, but it's interesting and I think sad that you go from, you know, your youngest brother experienced a lot of trauma, it's really distant and it's a little psychotic, and it is an obnoxious little brat.
	Well, yeah, but what I'm trying to say is that I'm not blaming him for it.
	Wait, wait, come on.
	Obnoxious little brat is not a neutral term, right?
	It's not a neutral term, it's a negative term, I understand that, but the main thing of it is that part of it is I think he's just been so brainwashed and mentally beat up by my parents and possibly the rest of my family, possibly even including me, because I probably should have been more supportive of him at times.
	You mean more supportive than calling him an obnoxious little brat in a public forum?
	No, no, don't laugh. Don't laugh.
	It's not funny, right? No, I know it's not funny.
	I don't know.
	It's just that...
	I mean, there's a lot of agony in this topic for your family, right?
	Yeah, there is. And the sad part is that when I was growing up, I actually thought that my family was, quote-unquote, a normal, happy family.
	And looking back, I realized that it's probably a very dysfunctional one.
	You say probably a very dysfunctional one.
	What part would give you doubt about that?
	Well, I'm speaking in relative terms.
	I know that most families these days are dysfunctional, period.
	It might not be as dysfunctional as other ones, but I know that it's very dysfunctional.
	Each person has a lot of emotional baggage and a lot of trauma that they deal with.
	My little brother, being basically on the end of the whole thing, has probably absorbed the most and has probably been the most damaged out of all of us.
	Because being on the end, it's like he gets hit with the leftovers of what everybody else experiences.
	Right.
	And all the powerlessness that the children experience because of the lack of positive bond with the parents, the powerlessness that that creates in siblings often will get – people will try to level up by putting down the youngest, right?
	Yeah, and I'm not going to deny, I've actually been guilty of that from time to time.
	And I've said some things to him about him that I'm not proud of, including the most recent thing, calling him obnoxious little brat, that was probably harsh.
	In fact, that was harsh.
	Unnecessarily harsh, but...
	Sorry, is there a way that it could be necessarily harsh?
	No, I suppose not.
	I mean... When you're harsh with somebody, you know, unless there's some kind of a justification for being harsh with them, like let's say you're talking to a murderer or something, you're being harsh with them and calling them a sick, twisted creep or something, then maybe that's necessarily harsh.
	But when it's somebody who's, you know, suffered as much trauma as my family members have, then that is actually unnecessary.
	Right. And cruel.
	Yes. Yes, cruel.
	Okay. So what is the situation with you and your family?
	Not talking to them, really.
	If my dad calls or my mom calls, I might pick up the phone and have a two-second conversation with them.
	But other than that, I mean, and I talk with my sister from time to time and visit her when she just had her baby and everything because pretty much she and I are the only ones who have actually somewhat kind of escaped my family and cut them off in the way we have, although she's starting to fall back in with them and everything, so...
	But she and I are the only members of the family that actually live outside the household now.
	Mainly for her, that's because she's married.
	For me, it's because I did my own best effort at a defu back at the end of March and the beginning of April, back around Easter.
	In fact, it was the day before Easter.
	That I defude and I stayed over at my sister's house the next day and went and picked up all of my stuff and left.
	And I haven't been back at their house yet again and, you know, I've spoken with them maybe two or three times since.
	Now, do you want to...
	Sorry, go ahead. I was just going to say, I know I'm not totally innocent and vindicated in the whole family situation.
	I mean, I have my own crimes that I've committed in the course, you know, and I'm not going to evade and say, well, I was, you know, I was a victim too and I had an excuse and all that because there, you know, there really isn't. Now, the word crimes is a pretty serious word.
	What do you mean?
	Just being harsh verbally myself, possibly exposing my little brother to verbal abuse, passing on somewhat of the same treatment that I got from my older brother to him.
	When I've gotten into fights with my elder brother, saying some nasty things to him and stuff like that.
	It's just been a very verbally and sometimes physically violent history that's defined my family.
	Sorry, when you say physically violent, what do you mean?
	Sometimes the disagreements between my older brother and I have gotten into physical verbal...
	Yeah, fisticuffs.
	Yeah, I apologize for that, but it's actually gotten into fisticuffs, fight, punch, grab each other and throw each other into walls and stuff.
	And between my father and I, it's gotten physical several times where...
	He's slapped me and grabbed me and threw me and a month before I actually did food, during one fight actually pinning me to my bed by my throat.
	It has gotten physical and it's gotten physical between my father and my mother and it's gotten physical between my father and my little brother.
	Between my mother and my siblings and I. It's not like it happened all the time, but it happened from time to time.
	Each time it happened, it was traumatic enough that each time I just really did not want to deal with the whole family situation anymore.
	Now, what is it like for you?
	And I'm obviously desperately sorry that this kind of ugliness and brutality went on in your household.
	It is completely monstrous.
	And your parents obviously did not do even the basics when it comes to parenting in any kind of reasonable manner.
	But tell me, what is it like for you when you talk about this stuff?
	You mean like, what do I feel inside?
	Yeah. Yeah. It's like you have a ball of chains hanging inside yourself, like about where your heart is.
	When I talk about this, it's like maybe grabbing it and shaking it somewhat and maybe trying to take a hacksaw to the chain that keeps it tethered to the rest of you.
	Sorry to interrupt. I'm not one to disparage a good metaphor, and I think that is a good metaphor, but that has nothing to do with feelings.
	Well, the idea is that I feel, when I go back and think about it, I feel possibly anger.
	I'm sorry, I don't want to know what you possibly feel.
	Okay. I don't want to know a theoretical.
	I don't want to know a ball of chains, but your heart is.
	I want to know. And if you feel nothing, I'm not looking.
	There's no right answer. When you're telling me these terrible things that occurred within your family, violence between siblings, violence between parents, verbal abuse, I mean, this is just satanic, right?
	When you're talking about this stuff with me, What do you feel?
	And again, you don't have to feel.
	I'm just curious what your experience is of talking about these things.
	Because we went a long way, right?
	Because originally you were like, well, I guess we could go back into my past if you think it might be relevant.
	And then you're like, well, I was ignored and I was beaten and there was violence in the family and I've had punch-outs with my dad and beat-ups with my brother.
	Do you see what I mean?
	So we've gone a long way in just a few minutes and I just want to know what your emotional experience is.
	If any, of talking about this stuff in more detail.
	Well, for some reason, and I'm not exactly sure why, but for some reason for the past several years, I've always been a somewhat emotionally numb person.
	And it's been very hard for me to feel extremely powerful emotions of any kind.
	Oh, sorry. Now, you said you've been somewhat emotionally numb.
	Does that mean that there have been times where you're not emotionally numb?
	Yes, there have been.
	What are those times?
	The aforementioned girl, when I was actually with her, happiness, very, very great happiness.
	When I recently did my play that I was in, which was part of YAD Food, was because...
	The disagreement with my parents over my involvement in this theatrical production, which was very important to me when we did that.
	And when we pulled off the production and made a success, extreme happiness again.
	When I got dumped by the girl, extreme emotional pain.
	Just raw pain that made me physically ill.
	I'm totally depressed and sad and just maybe want to crawl into a hole and die.
	When I fought with my parents, when I've actually been fighting with them, extreme anger.
	And I think part of why I end up being so emotionally numb half the time is because I've gotten so used to when I have dealt with my parents, I learned early on that the best way to deal with them was not to explode, not to express my anger with them when they were doing me wrong or whatever.
	And to just...
	Sorry, that's my phone.
	Sorry. When I've dealt with my parents in the past, I've learned that the best approach in order to avoid being beat up or verbally abused was if they had a problem, just to let them chew me out for 10 minutes and try to keep everything down and try to numb myself to what they were saying and then afterwards just go off and seethe or whatever.
	And I think part of that has made it more difficult for me to express myself when I am feeling anger or when I am feeling sad or when I am feeling happiness.
	It's like what I feel inside hits a barrier to the outside.
	Sorry, I appreciate that.
	And just so I understand what you mean.
	Is it that you felt strongly when you were talking about your family history, but you didn't express it, or you didn't feel strongly while you were talking about it?
	I think it's...
	I did feel angered towards my parents when I was thinking about what they were doing and describing what they were doing.
	When I described my siblings' characters and what they are today and what they've ended up as, I felt sadness about that because I know that what they are today is at least partially due to my parents' treatment of them.
	Think about, you know, again, when I think about what my parents have done to me, then I feel that anger again.
	When I think about what I've done, you know, what part I've played and what things I've said, I feel guilt.
	And I feel that I let myself partially become what they were.
	And, you know, over the years, the act of outwardly numbing myself, outwardly bodily numbing my, you know, expressions and everything have made it, have kind of bled inside and sort of wounded my capacity to really feel those emotions, you know, for real, you know.
	Right. And how long have you understood this about yourself?
	I think I've understood it about myself on some level since high school.
	And how old are you now, roughly?
	20. But I've understood it better more recently.
	And especially now that I've been examining myself and examining why do I feel like this or why do I react like this to that.
	You know, it's like, now I, and now especially speaking with you, this is, you know, and speaking with you is always like, you know, shining a flashlight into an engine.
	You see things there that you never even really knew existed.
	You know, and half of what I'm expressing to you right now is stuff that I've never iterated to anybody, including myself, before.
	Yes, no, I certainly get that, for sure.
	And that's partially why, you know, I seem to stumble sometimes when I'm talking to you, like right now today, because this isn't stuff that's pre-formulated, pre-fabricated in my head.
	This is stuff that's dawning on me as I'm saying it out loud.
	Got it, got it. Now, can you tell me why your girlfriend, what was your girlfriend's primary complaint when she broke up with you?
	Well, first thing she said was that her parents didn't want her dealing with me.
	Second thing she said was that she found another guy.
	Third thing she said was that she wasn't really that serious about me to begin with and then just let herself be sort of guilted into saying that she loved me and all that and then just You know, then just decide to end it or whatever.
	You know, out of feelings of guilt and everything.
	More recently, in fact, just last night, I found out that what she was really doing was deliberately fucking with my mind and deliberately saying all these things and initially saying that she loved me and everything just to see me burn and that it wasn't the first time that she had ever done anything like that.
	You mean so your perception is that she actually was sadistically torturing you emotionally and mentally?
	Yes, and I actually found that out because somebody else I was talking about her, too, spoke up and said, hey, you know, I spoke with this person a year ago, and what happened between myself and her happened a year and a half ago, and this other person said, and this is what she said she's done.
	So your perception would be that she is recreating some family history to do with power and abuse?
	Is that right? She might be.
	People don't just wake up and decide to become sadists, right?
	No, no. When I initially knew this girl, she told me.
	You know, that her parents were very controlling and everything.
	Never let her do this or never let her do that.
	Didn't even let her go on a date to the prom.
	And sorry, where were you in the relationship when you found this out?
	Did she tell you this fairly early?
	No, she told me that much later on in the relationship.
	In fact, near its end.
	And when you look back upon how long were you going out with the girl?
	Three months. When you look back earlier on in the relationship, what were the signs that she had these traits?
	Well, the fact that she said things like, you know, I love you and everything very early on in the relationship.
	That's one, right?
	Yeah. That was a big red flag.
	The fact that she was very evasive about letting me...
	I didn't know about her and concentrated more on what I was about than her.
	The fact that...
	Sorry, did you meet her family?
	Because you said that her family didn't want to deal with you?
	It's a very complicated story, one that very few people know the actual circumstances about.
	I'm trying to describe this without actually going into the specifics of the circumstances of our relationship.
	Okay, but there were indications that this was not a...
	Yeah, her parents...
	There was some risk, right? Yeah, her parents didn't really approve of her dating somebody who wasn't more of their ethnic background because she was Greek and Italian and I'm basically an American, Irish, Spanish, German, you know, whatever.
	And the fact that they wanted somebody who was older than her and established and successful and everything.
	And that's what she told me anyway.
	Right, okay. It's just like, you know, she's, and like I said, this is all based, from what I understand now, this is all basically a fabrication, you know, excuses, but there may be a grain of truth to it.
	And what did, sorry, I just don't want to get too much into, what did you love about her?
	The fact that she seemed intelligent.
	Oh, come on. Wait, wait, wait.
	No, no, no.
	You can't start off by saying the fact that she seemed intelligent because then you're both saying that you love her and you're insulting her at the same time.
	Okay, okay. Alright, let's start off with the obvious.
	Obviously, she was beautiful.
	You can't love that. You can't love that.
	So, what else? I mean, that's lust, right?
	That's lust. That's physical attraction.
	That's lust. That's physical attraction.
	But that was the physical factor, and I was getting that out of the way first.
	Right. Her intelligence, because she obviously did possess probably about the same amount of intelligence that I do, and I like that in a person.
	The fact that she was very poetic, loved reading, loved writing the same way that I do, had a great sense of humor, could joke about things the same way that I could.
	I mean, she just had, she and I seemed to have a lot in common.
	And, you know, at the time, I was very lonely and didn't seem like I could find anybody who possessed the same qualities that she did, of course, since then I've proven myself wrong.
	But, at the time, it seemed like she was unique, one and only, you know, basically the only person in the world that seemed to possess these qualities besides me.
	You know, possessive in the quantity that she did.
	And, of course, part of it was the fact that, as far as I knew at the time, I was the only person that mattered that way to her.
	Okay. Now, obviously you know that since all relationships are voluntary, there's kind of a free market of relationships that is going on?
	Yes. So, you said that you had a hard time keeping this girl's interest, is that right?
	Like she became less interested?
	Apparently, well...
	At the end of the whole thing, yeah.
	What happened was, at the end of the whole thing, she was saying stuff like, I found another guy, and all you were was just a boyfriend, and, you know, basically...
	It was a fling for her, right? Basically, yeah.
	And after all the things that she said beforehand, you know, I love you, you know, you're incredible, you know, you're one of a kind, you're the only guy who really makes me happy and all that and stuff.
	After all that...
	After all the things she said, and it took me a month to really trust that, you know, to really trust that she was telling the truth.
	Okay, now, you're 20.
	I'm sorry, you're 20. Let me just interrupt for a sec.
	So you're 20. This is with all due respect to your age.
	This is ridiculous to occur in a month.
	Yes, I realize that now.
	And here's the thing. It's actually the very first relationship I actually got into.
	I was totally new at the idea of relationships.
	Oh no, I understand that.
	This is just to watch your back in the future.
	If somebody says, you're one of a kind, I'm devoted to you, I love you, in a couple of weeks, run.
	Yeah. And in fact, that was kind of a red flag that kind of bugged me at the time, but at the time I was too naive and too trusting.
	No, you weren't. No, no, no, no.
	You weren't any of that sort of stuff.
	Sorry. And when did this occur?
	Two years ago. Two years ago was when the beginning of the thing occurred.
	A year, more closer to a year and a half ago was when it all ended.
	Oh, my apologies.
	My apologies. Okay. I'm sorry.
	I thought this occurred while you were in this conversation.
	But okay. So tell me then, why should she have stayed interested in you?
	I can't think of any reason why she should have.
	Wait, what?
	What do you mean you can't think of any reason?
	You know what I mean?
	I'm not saying there's nothing...
	If she wasn't interested in me, then she wasn't interested in me.
	No, but what quality...
	And forget about the past.
	Let's say you meet a girl tomorrow.
	What is it about you that is going to keep her interest and her affections and her devotion?
	If I were to joke, I'd say my roguish charm and devilish good looks, but the fact that I am generally very respectful towards a girl, I would respect her.
	I'm sorry, I have not seen one indication that you are respectful towards women.
	Okay. I'm sorry to be blunt, but just from what you're saying, you've constantly put down this girl that you claim to love once, right?
	Yeah, well, that's only because I don't love her anymore, and now I know what she really was.
	Okay, but you've talked about getting into fistfights with your mother.
	You've talked about two girls that you've broken up with that you've got your heart broken by.
	I'm just saying, going on the evidence, the next thing that would come out of your mouth would not be, I'm very respectful towards women.
	Okay. Alright.
	Maybe you are. I'm just...
	It doesn't fit.
	But anyway, please call me. I think you misunderstand what I said about my mother.
	My mother... I've never hit my mother.
	Okay? I've never... Well, but you don't respect your mother, right?
	Not as much as, you know, as I do...
	Was she not a core part of a family with violence and abuse that seems to have destroyed three out of four children?
	Well, yeah. I mean, but she's blindly supported my father and she has physically abused my brothers and verbally abused me.
	So I can't really respect somebody who has treated other people like that.
	Well, that's what I'm saying.
	So you're 20 years old.
	You don't respect your mother. In fact, she sounds like a distinctly loathsome human being.
	And there's just no way that you can switch around having had your heart broken twice and having a mother that you could not respect into suddenly respecting women.
	My heart's been broken once. Sorry?
	That was the other misconception.
	My heart's been broken once by one girl.
	Oh, I'm so sorry. I thought that was two.
	It's okay. It's okay.
	Alright, so let's say that you have an ambivalent relationship with trusting women.
	What else? Okay, um...
	My intelligence, at least by my own perception, I'm intelligent.
	I have a fairly good sense of humor, which is important.
	I'm sure you understand how important that can be in a relationship.
	I don't particularly because there are lots of people who don't have a good sense of humor and I would not say that they're any less worthy of being loved.
	Yeah, but what I'm saying is, like, with you and your wife, you know, I'm sure that you guys joke between each other a lot, don't you?
	Well, sure, but I would not say that people who, because a sense of humor is not something you earn.
	For most people, it's just born.
	I would not say that people who lack a sense of humor lose out when it comes to love.
	I think that people can love us passionately and deeply without having a natural or inbuilt sense of humor.
	Okay, okay. But sorry, I'm not trying to be hedgy, I'm just trying to sort of understand.
	No, no, I understand, I understand.
	So you're not intelligent and funny, and what else?
	The fact that I look for more in the relationship than sex.
	I suppose. What is that as a trait?
	You mean like you want to...
	Like you know how there's guys obviously just go around and like you were talking about with Ditto earlier about casual sex and everything where a guy will just look to get in a girl's pants and then drop her off next morning.
	I don't do that. Okay, so intelligent, funny, not as bad as a jerk, right?
	Yeah, I'm not a quote-unquote jerk when it comes to that.
	The fact that I'll listen to her and if she has any issues, she would be able to come to me and I'd try to help her out.
	I don't know.
	I'm really not sure what else about me would really be positively attractive to a girl.
	Okay, and I'll just end up, because we've spent a lot of time on this, but I'll just end up by saying something that I think is important.
	And this is with all due respect to your age and the fact that you're just coming out of a pretty brutal family fog and so on.
	What will keep a woman's interest is your emotional availability, right?
	True. And I can tell you that you are one of the least emotionally available people that I've talked to in this show at the moment.
	And this is because this is not a criticism.
	This is just an observation.
	It's because of your youth and because of your family history and so on.
	But you are not emotionally present in my experience or in my experience of you.
	You talk about things that are terribly traumatic as if you are relating a laundry list or a grocery list.
	You constantly fog and misdirect.
	And you'll hear this when you listen back to this conversation.
	You will put down this girl that you say you love quite consistently.
	but also without any real emotion.
	You have lots of theories about why you are the way you are, but they have not been applied by you in a way that actually requires you to change, right?
	So you say, well, I had to hide my emotions because of this and that, but you drone, right?
	You drone about these things that are intensely personal and difficult for you in a way that is very hard for anybody else to emotionally connect with because there's just no emotions there, right?
	Yeah, I mean...
	I mean, there are emotions, obviously.
	You're not a robot. There are emotions, but I don't think you have any access to them at all.
	And I think until you do have access to your emotions, you shouldn't go out with a girl, because what are you offering her?
	Nothing. You're intelligent and funny, you're not as bad as a jerk, and you can listen?
	I mean, that's not any...
	You're just going to hurt people, and you're going to get hurt yourself, because there's not going to be anything for someone else to connect with.
	And so this feeling that you have of isolation, which is where we started this, this feeling that you have of isolation, that people will drift away from you, that they will not stay attached to you, it's because you're not in a place as yet at the moment where you can actually share who you are as a human being.
	All you can do is report it from a seemingly interstellar distance, right?
	Yeah. Your heart is not open.
	Your heart is not lively. Your heart is not available to anyone else.
	And the question I have for you is, and if you don't have the answer I completely understand, but How?
	How do I get that?
	Because, honestly, and listening to myself, and I completely agree with you, I do sound emotionally dead.
	Well, no, I didn't say emotionally dead.
	I said emotionally unavailable.
	I don't want to go too far.
	What I'm saying is I was drawn in, and I was like, you know, I am describing stuff that's horrific and everything and has happened to me.
	Well, let me ask you this, right?
	Did you know that you weren't feeling while you were talking?
	I wasn't feeling much.
	It wasn't like burning inside of me or anything.
	Okay, did you notice that you weren't expressing any emotions when you were talking about this stuff?
	Yeah, and I was like, you know, why?
	But hold on, hold on.
	See, this is the RTR. This is the core part of what I try to do in terms of helping people build the bond, build the bridge to other people and to be open and vulnerable about who they are as a human being.
	So, if you are talking to someone about an emotional topic, and you don't feel an emotional connection, or you don't feel that you're expressing anything emotionally, stop.
	Right? Because you just keep droning on, right?
	Yeah. You don't stop.
	You're just like, pfft. Right?
	So then it becomes all about you.
	It's kind of selfish, right? Yeah.
	If you stop and you say, you know, this is weird.
	I'm talking about some really difficult stuff.
	And not expressing anything.
	I'm not feeling anything. Do you feel anything?
	No. Well, that's weird. I wonder why.
	You just keep going, right?
	Yeah. I... Okay, so...
	Let me riddle me this.
	I mean, because obviously this is an issue for me.
	I mean, this is not something that's positive.
	You know, this is not a positive aspect of me.
	How do I fix that?
	How do I go in there and take a wrench and, you know, what do I have to do?
	Because obviously this is...
	I mean, and I recognize that when I was talking to you, I was like, you know, as I'm saying this, I'm like, what the hell?
	I'm describing beatings, you know, verbal abuse, me being an asshole to my little brother, and I'm not feeling anything.
	Well, but what did I just say to you, right?
	Because you asked me how do I fix it, right?
	I gave you an answer and then you just asked me how to fix it again as if I hadn't said anything.
	So what did you hear? You said stop.
	Right. Be honest with people.
	And look, I'm not accusing you of dishonesty because I don't think it's conscious for you at all.
	But if you have a thought going on in your head like, this is weird, I'm not feeling anything...
	But you don't stop the conversation and say, this is weird.
	If you have a parallel thought that's going on that you're on autopilot in the conversation, just droning on and on and in your own head, like you're disconnected from what you're saying and in your own head you're evaluating it and saying, oh, there's no feeling here.
	But you just keep droning on and on.
	Well, of course you're not going to feel anything.
	But if you stop and you say, this is weird.
	I was just thinking, I'm not feeling anything about this.
	That is going to be a way that you can begin to connect with people, which is to just be honest about your inner dialogue about what you're saying.
	But will that fix what's actually going on inside myself that stops me from feeling these things?
	Well, I see, but this is what you want to do.
	What you want to do is you want to overleap The solution that I'm giving you, right?
	Well, yeah, but what I'm saying is you're saying that this is a solution for helping me deal with other people more effectively.
	What I'm wondering is, is this an actual issue that needs an actual solution?
	Besides that, you know...
	Wait, okay, so hang on, hang on, hang on a sec.
	See, you've got to understand what you're doing here.
	I don't know what family defense this comes from.
	It doesn't really matter. You start off telling me about your girlfriend.
	We talk about your family.
	I ask you a whole bunch of questions because I try to find something that you feel anything about, right?
	I'm talking about your family.
	I'm talking about this girl. Anything that you have any kind of feeling about, right?
	Yeah. And the whole time you're talking to me saying, it's weird that I can't feel anything, but I'm just going to put my voice on autopilot and drone on about this stuff.
	And then I say, well, then you were having a parallel conversation that you weren't sharing with me.
	About how you weren't feeling anything, right?
	That you were shielding your true self from me because you were talking to yourself more authentically than you were talking to me, right?
	More honestly, right?
	Because you said to yourself, I don't feel anything.
	But you say to me, blah, blah, blah, blah, drone, drone, drone, right?
	Yeah. So I say, well, take that voice that is honestly evaluating what is occurring for you and bring it to the other person.
	Bring your true self, your true experience of yourself or of the conversation and bring it to the person you're talking to, right?
	And then you say to me, but how's that going to solve my lack of connection?
	Which indicates to me, you're not listening, right?
	It's just that what you were describing to me, like stop and be honest with other people, seems more like a fix for how I deal with other people than how I access what's going on inside myself.
	But you were accessing it, and why didn't you tell me?
	Because you think it's about connecting with other people.
	I'm saying it's about connecting with yourself.
	It's not about connecting.
	We connect with ourselves by being directly honest with other people.
	I suppose I'm looking at it as a bad thing that I actually don't feel much of anything about.
	Listen to me.
	You were avoiding your feelings and the way that you avoided your feelings was you didn't tell me that you didn't feel.
	I think I'm starting to get this here.
	It's trippy, right?
	It's a little trippy, so take your time, right?
	But it's important. So what I was really feeling the whole time was, Doug, snap out of it.
	You sound like a zombie. Come on.
	Wake up. You sound like you're sleepwalking here and you're describing these terrible things that happened to you.
	Like they happened to somebody 500 years ago.
	You'd probably have more sympathy to somebody that they happened to 500 years ago.
	Yeah, you're talking about this like it's history.
	And I'm talking about this like I'm talking to myself, which I was.
	You're talking about this like it's history instead of something that happened to you just two freaking years ago.
	Right. And what you were trying to do was you were trying to bore me into losing interest.
	Subconsciously? Yeah, yeah.
	I'm not saying you have an evil plan, right?
	I'm just saying that...
	What you were trying to do was you were trying to bore me into losing interest because it's very threatening for you to get to these emotions.
	So it's like my own defenses were kicking in and trying to stop me from actually saying these things.
	Look, it's the layers of defenses that you have.
	Your first move... Yeah.
	Yeah. And then,
	when we got through that evasion and we got through that fog, your third defense was, okay, I'll admit that they were brutal and dysfunctional, but I'm going to drone on about it in a way that is going to completely cause you to lose interest, to make me feel hopeless about connecting with you.
	So it's like you're stripping away each one of my defenses and then a new one pops up.
	It's like a... Wait, wait, wait.
	Now there's two more. The next defense is, yes, but how does this help me solve my problem?
	Like, I'm deliberate...
	Well, not deliberately, but subconsciously deliberately not understanding what you're saying.
	Right, and you're saying, well, but how is this going to solve all of my problems, right?
	That's trying to distract me from the core issue, which is that you weren't being honest with me about your experience, right?
	How is honesty with you and myself going to help me connect with other people and myself?
	Which is, obviously, you're far too intelligent to ask a question like that, right?
	I just got it.
	I just got it.
	Oh my god.
	Do you know how much I've just hit a revelation here?
	I've just realized...
	I hope so. I hope it's worth the 45 minutes, so feel free to...
	No, no, it's...
	Okay, so these past four months, I've been priding myself on how quote-unquote emotionally honest I've been with myself, but the truth is, I haven't.
	I've been shielding and I still have these defenses.
	I still have this fortress that's been built up around me, partially by myself, that's keeping me from really accessing What's down there in the core, you know, in my heart, or in my quote-unquote soul, you know, even though soul is more of a religious term, but this is...
	And all this time I've still been emotionally dishonest by not admitting to you from the get-go, I'm not really feeling this.
	And it's not emotional dishonesty.
	And it's not your fortress.
	I think what you're saying is fantastic, but you're taking way too much ownership for a guy who's 20.
	Now, a guy who's 35, I will sometimes rake over the coals for continuing to blame his parents, because it's like, dude, it's coming up for 20 years, right?
	But you're 20, which gets you almost completely off the hook in my book.
	What that means is that these are not defenses that are yours.
	These are defenses that were inflicted upon you.
	You were punished for not doing this and therefore you avoided it, right?
	You were punished for being honest.
	Now you have lots of tricks to avoid honesty, right?
	Yeah. But they're not your defenses.
	This is just stuff that was inflicted on you.
	It's like me saying, I chose to learn English because it's the universal language.
	It's like, no, I was just born in England, right?
	And now that I'm only, what, like three months removed from my parents, they crowbarred that shit into me, and I'm still trying to crowbar it out.
	Well, but you can't crowbar it out if you think it's partly yours.
	No, I mean, I'm going to continue to blame myself, and it's going to stop me from saying, okay, this is what my parents created.
	This is me. Yeah, think of it like this.
	If somebody fires a whole bunch of shrapnel into your leg, you want to pick out the shrapnel, but you don't want to pick out the bone, right?
	Yeah, but if I can't differentiate between the shrapnel and the bone...
	Then you don't know there's nothing you can do, right?
	Yeah. Okay.
	So you've got to get what the shrapnel is and whose hand pulled the trigger to give you these scars.
	You've got to dig the shrapnel out, but you've got to first accept that you did not wake up and say, I really want this family.
	Boy, of all the families I could have, this is the family that I want because, boy, I'm a sadist.
	I'm a fetal sadist.
	That's what I want. You were just born into this shitty situation with these violent and brutal people.
	You did everything. It's incredibly wonderful, brave, and amazing things to survive, and it's left you with some trauma, right?
	But you didn't choose the family.
	You didn't choose what the parents were doing.
	You didn't choose the violence.
	You just were trying to survive when you were dropped as a baby into a war zone, right?
	Exactly. But now that I'm removed from that war zone, now that I've basically medevaced myself out, I don't need that crap anymore.
	I don't need that fortress that was constructed around me.
	I don't need that dishonesty.
	I don't need the bullcrap, basically the lines of bullcrap that have been given to me and that I've learned to parrot myself.
	I don't need that anymore.
	Well, but let me just be a little bit more precise with you there, and I really appreciate your honesty here, of course.
	It's not that you don't need it.
	Think of it like this. You've spent 18 or 19 years with an incredibly loud noise in your ear, right?
	And then the bell or whatever it is, the tone, the alarm, it gets switched off.
	How long are your ears going to keep ringing?
	They're going to ring for a while.
	They're going to ring for a while. So, saying to yourself, getting mad at your ears and saying, why are you still ringing?
	There's no noise. Well...
	They need to keep ringing because the danger would come and go when you were a kid, right?
	Exactly. You need time of peace, you need time of serenity, of self-introspection, of understanding, of gentleness with yourself because you're not gentle with yourself, right?
	No, I'm actually very self-critical at times.
	I know, you're very self-critical at times and that's just something else that was inflicted on you, right?
	Yes, yes. So you have to get to a state of calm and peace so that you can begin to differentiate the shrapnel from the bone, right?
	You can't start operating until you can figure those two things out, right?
	Exactly. And if you listen to this earlier in the conversation, you cannot yet tell, and there's no reason why you should, nobody could, at the age of 20, after three months away, you cannot differentiate the bone from the shrapnel yet.
	Because when you listen to this recording back again, you will know what I'm saying.
	Because you're saying, well, I did this, and I'm guilty of this, and I committed these crimes, and I have these defenses, and it's all about you, so it's all bone, right?
	And you don't want to take it out, right?
	But it's like, no, it's mostly shrapnel right now.
	Most of what you know about yourself, most of who you are consciously is shrapnel.
	It's a defense. And my subconscious is trying to push shrapnel out.
	But I can't do that yet until my subconscious is looking at the shrapnel and looking at the bone and able to say, okay, well, this is the shrapnel and this is the bone.
	Let's get the shrapnel up. Well, first thing you have to say, your unconscious is doing a lot of things.
	It doesn't just do one thing, right?
	Part of your unconscious gets it.
	Part of your unconscious is your parents' defenses that wants you to think every piece of shrapnel is your own bone or if it's not, you fired it yourself, right?
	So your unconscious is doing a lot of things.
	But the first important thing to understand is that you don't know What is you and what is your parents' infliction?
	And what is your siblings' infliction?
	And what is the trauma of your history?
	You don't know what is you and what is your history yet.
	And it's okay. I mean, you have to not know that in order to begin examining it.
	Because if you come up with an answer which says, okay, well, I'm this.
	Well, then you'll have a great urge because you're young and because you've got a lot of defenses, which is totally understandable.
	You're going to have an urge to jump over this and to say, because not having an answer about who you are is really uncomfortable, right?
	It is. It is.
	But this is the discomfort that heals the world, which is to say, I don't know who I am.
	Because I've got so many things that I have just reacted to in my life, and I had to react to them because they were dangerous and violent, right?
	Yeah, so...
	Sorry, I'm trying to catch up with you here.
	So what I'm saying is, you know, if you're running across a field, dodging sniper bullets, you're not mulling over what you want to be when you're 30, right?
	No, there's that progression you've got to make.
	You've got to take care of the one level of need before you go on to the next.
	You can't self-examine when you're starving.
	You can't examine who you are.
	You can't do the existential stuff while you're figuring out where's my next meal coming from.
	Right. So your reaction times, your defenses, the automatic responses to dangerous stimuli within you is a massive machine, right?
	And you don't know how to dismantle it.
	And I can't tell you how to dismantle it because it's a personal journey for everyone.
	But you just have to say, I don't know what's mine.
	I don't know what is just a reaction to my violent environment.
	I don't even know why I was drawn to this girl.
	I don't know if it was love.
	I don't know why she broke up with me.
	I don't have a clue why I was doing what I was doing.
	And that's where the fertility of curiosity and exploration begins, right?
	As opposed to religious dogma.
	Well, or your dogma, which is, well, she said she loved me, but it turns out she was just a total sadistic bitch, right?
	Well, you don't know. You might have been using her as much as she was using you.
	You might have a template which says, women betray me, so you chose a woman to betray you.
	You might have a template which says, I am rejected.
	I get rejected.
	Nobody cares for me. And so if you're not getting enough of that from one person, you'll go find somebody else to give that for you.
	That's the Simon the Boxer thing, right?
	It's the whole self-fulfilling prophecy slash addicted to helplessness or rejection or betrayal thing that we kind of touched on the last time we actually talked.
	Now, this is defense number eight, right?
	Okay, you're going to have to fill me in on this one.
	I told you something about a relationship that you're very passionate about.
	I think that there's some truth in what I say, though of course self-examination will tell that for you.
	You immediately began abstracting and analyzing it, right?
	No, I'm just saying this is partially related to...
	No, partially related.
	Not partially related.
	This is someone that you were passionately involved with that ended disastrously to the point where you were reeling with agony, right?
	Yes. And you have, in your description of it, it was like, well, it was great, I was great, she just turned out to be a bitch, right?
	Kind of, yeah. Okay, and then when I say to you that you were doubtless seeking this out in some unconscious manner...
	You immediately start abstracting and analyzing that.
	Well, it's like this principle or that principle or whatever, right?
	Instead of saying, you know what, you just might be right.
	Or, how do I feel when Steph tells me that?
	Like, oh my god, maybe he's right and I've got to think about this more.
	Don't think! You need to feel.
	Your problem is not thinking.
	You're very intelligent, right?
	Well, I like to think I am.
	You have no problem. This is one of the things you listed and what's attractive about you, right?
	Yeah. So you have no problem.
	I mean, you can come up with metaphors.
	You can come up with arguments.
	You can come up with analogies.
	You can come up with lists of what it's like and how it metaphorically relates to X, Y, Z, right?
	But I can't relate that to my emotions.
	I can't. There's that disconnect.
	No, there's not a disconnect.
	There's not a disconnect. If you stop intellectualizing, you will feel.
	You intellectualize because you're feeling.
	You think that your feelings aren't there?
	They are there. We know they're there because you start intellectualizing.
	Which is defense number eight.
	Yeah. So when I say, look, you weren't a victim in this relationship.
	You sought this woman out because you are betrayed by women and you are rejected.
	I ended up saying, well, actually, this is related to this, this, and this.
	Yeah, yeah, fuck the related to.
	We're talking about your heart here, not a thesis.
	As opposed to saying, oh my god, yeah, you're probably right.
	No, no, no. See, I appreciate the patience, but this is important.
	Oh my god, maybe you're right.
	It's an intellectual evaluation.
	I need to think about it as an intellectual plan, right?
	Okay, yeah. So when I say to you, you sought this woman out and used her as much as she used you, what do you feel?
	I'm not sure what I feel.
	I'm not sure how to categorize it.
	Okay. What if you didn't have to categorize it intellectually?
	What do you feel?
	Do you feel good or bad?
	Bad. Okay.
	Do you feel angry or hurt or suspicious or jealous or gassy?
	I mean, what do you feel that's bad?
	More, uh...
	Well, something directed at myself, like...
	Like, I don't know, like...
	It's not anger.
	It's not anger. But it's like...
	You know, something more akin to annoyance.
	Maybe self-annoyance.
	Like... You know, annoyed at myself that...
	If that's what motivated me, then annoyance that I would do something like that, that I would seek that out.
	Annoyance that I'd let my history of being betrayed or ignored or whatever translate into how I dealt with other people.
	Annoyance that I, instead of trying to move past, that I sought to make myself a victim.
	Do you see how you're going back into description land again, right?
	Yeah, but what I'm saying is it's a sense of self-annoyance.
	Like, you idiot.
	Okay, hang on. Are you at your keyboard?
	I'm at my keyboard.
	Are you in the chat room? I am in the chat room.
	Okay, do you see the smiley?
	Which smiley? Right next to the size.
	Yeah. Okay, click the smiley.
	There's a bunch of...
	And they're loading.
	They're loading. When you see the emoticons, tell me which one you feel like.
	Okay, hold on.
	Because these emoticons don't have any theories.
	And I'll give you two.
	Thank you.
	Thank you.
	Here, I'll put it...
	There you go. That's probably the closest one that I'm spotting right now.
	And what's your second one? If you had to put two up, what's your second?
	You put up a blue, perplexed, angry face.
	and somebody wants Chinese food.
	I guess the other emotion would be surprise.
	Surprise.
	Okay, so what I'm getting is you're perplexed, you're surprised, you're shocked.
	I get a little angry from the first blue face.
	More annoyed than angry.
	Annoyed at the possibility that...
	Annoyed at the possibility that that would be a motivation.
	Annoyed... See, the annoyance is not the real feeling.
	And the reason that I know that is that the annoyance is not your experience of what I said, but your judgment of what I said.
	But the actual emotion here is the surprise.
	No, but you're talking about annoyance, right?
	Because you're saying, I would be annoyed if I did such and such to this girl and didn't know it and was acting out of my history or whatever, right?
	Yeah. But that's a judgment of whether it was good or bad to do what you did.
	That's not your emotional experience of what that possibility is that you did that.
	Yeah. Okay, and I'm really trying to be honest with what, you know, with myself, with what I'm actually experiencing here when I think about what you said, you know.
	You know, when you said, hey, have you thought about this is, you know, this might be why you did what you did or why you got involved with this girl.
	I'm still trying to pin that down.
	You know, it's one of those abusive things.
	Sorry, you don't chase emotions.
	You relax and they come.
	Emotions aren't like rabbits.
	You don't sort of hunt them like a fox.
	Because you're trying to use your head to run your life.
	And it doesn't work.
	We cannot run our lives with our conscious minds.
	It's like saying we're going to run our entire bodies with our liver.
	Our conscious mind is just one organ.
	Exactly. And because you...
	And I won't keep hounding you about the emotion thing, because you can mull it over, but you want to think through your life.
	And this is the danger of FDR and philosophy, and it's something I keep trying to remind people, right?
	That you cannot substitute all of your intellectual, emotional, spiritual apparatus, your entire being.
	You cannot use...
	Your conscious mind to replace everything, right?
	Especially since my conscious mind still has the shrapnel in it.
	Well, exactly. And it's because you...
	Well, yeah. And your emotions are dangerous, not to you, but to your family.
	Your emotions are not dangerous to you.
	Your emotions want to help you now that you're free.
	Your emotions are dangerous to your family, and that's why...
	You want to avoid them.
	Because they were dangerous to my family, and my family's reaction to that danger was dangerous to me.
	Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, absolutely.
	If you'd have processed the abuse, you would have gone to the cops, right?
	Yeah. Or you'd have gone to a teacher, or you'd have done something, right?
	Yeah. And children can't do that.
	We can't do that. No child has ever been able to do that that I know of.
	No, it's always been an adult who swoops in and says, okay, this is wrong and we've got to go after these people for doing this to the child.
	Children who judged and rejected the corruption of their parents did not make it through the Stone Age, right?
	Probably didn't make it out of the protozoa stage.
	So it's just bred out of us, right?
	And it should be, right? But your emotions, now that you're free, your emotions will help you.
	But if you keep substituting your intellectual judgment, and that will show up as shallow emotions, like annoyance, like irritation, like lust.
	If you try to substitute your deep emotional reactions and thoughts and feelings that way with just your conceptual intellectual mind...
	You'll be in first gear your whole life.
	You'll hit the gas, you'll burn out, right?
	Yeah, I'll just totally destroy and tear apart my transmission there.
	Yeah, it's not good for the...
	I mean, it's fine, right? It's a great and wonderful part of our entire being, our whole personality.
	But I can't do everything. Yeah, you can't...
	I mean, this is like we want to not have a government because there shouldn't be one final authority, but there should be a free market, and that's the same is true of the personality, right?
	Exactly. You can't have my mind dictating everything else that goes on with my person.
	Yeah, we know that there's no central planet who can run an economy, and there's no conceptual, logical, intellectual part of us that can run an entire life from top to bottom.
	That's not how we're designed.
	Exactly. Because each one of us is unique.
	Our conscious minds aren't designed.
	Our emotions run beneath our unconscious minds.
	It's like trying to use Microsoft Word to run your entire computer.
	Yeah, that's right. And of course, our conscious mind is only a couple of hundred thousand years old, but our DNA goes back two billion years, right?
	Because the mind can't live without the body, obviously, and yet the mind wants to take everything over and wants to tyrannize and run everything and haughtily rejects feedback from the mere commoners called the emotions, right?
	And then we say, well, but aristocracy is bad, right?
	But we've got to not live that in ourself in order for it to...
	To be really true, right?
	Yeah, but we're not Vulcans.
	We're humans. We need our emotions.
	And Leonard Nimoy was a raving drunk who burst into tears all the time when he was playing Spock.
	Even he couldn't be a Vulcan.
	No, and you're absolutely right, and if you ever actually listen to anything he says, he's just totally violent, vulgar, and very emotional when he speaks.
	So, no.
	God damn. Anyway, I've given you a whole bunch of stuff and you'd have a chance to listen to this again.
	And it was worth spending the time because this is not an issue that you alone have.
	This is a hugely common issue because of the way that we're raised.
	And so I wanted to spend time on it because I think it is of use to a lot of people.
	And I have wanted to do some of this sort of stuff because this is something which younger people have a much greater chance of fixing than older people.
	As somebody was saying in the chat room, you don't want to wait until your shrapnel gets completely embedded and calcified within your skin.
	So I think that where you are in starting to do this, I think is fantastic.
	I think it's just the right time.
	I think you're in just the right environment.
	And I can guarantee you that at the end of this process, and actually not that far into it, within six to ten months, you will start to be someone that people can't forget, let alone can't remember.
	And just to ask you, is this something that maybe we can revisit back in the future, maybe dig more into?
	Oh, absolutely, yeah, for sure.
	Obviously, if I try to dig into this myself, I'm not going to be entirely 100% successful because my defenses are going to pop up, and since they're ingrained, I'm not going to be able to recognize them as such, and then I'll just say, screw it, and then declare myself cured, when I'm obviously not.
	Right. Well, the other thing too, and this is why I tell people to do the therapy if they can, right?
	Yeah. And I mean, the only problem with that is finding somebody that I can afford who's around and everything.
	It'll work around my schedule.
	Well, you know, but you're a resourceful young man.
	And if you were being paid $10 million to go into therapy, I'm sure you could find a way, right?
	Yeah, but I mean, the actual emotional revenue of fixing everything that's mentally and emotionally wrong with me, I think, is worth more than $10 million.
	It is, and look, I've made the cost-benefit analysis of therapy before, but...
	Therapy is a lot cheaper than a year-long relationship that breaks your heart.
	I mean, not only emotionally but just financially.
	How much money do you spend on a girlfriend over a year?
	How much does it cost you?
	That then ends up going nowhere, right?
	Exactly. Tell you what, I've got a lot to kind of absorb here.
	I mean, I'm not going to say think about, because obviously you can't just think about all of it, but I've got a lot to basically just absorb and let run through my bloodstream and everything.
	Yeah, well, I mean, I think that's what you were looking for, and that's why I think you brought this up.
	So I'm very glad that we had a chance to work through it, and I do appreciate your energy and patience as we work through it, because I know I was doing a whole lot of blocking of defenses, so I appreciate that.
	Oh, my patience.
	I'd say you're the patient one because, you know, you're the only person I speak to who will actually be honest with me and say, look, you know, you've got to think about this like this, but I'm not the only one who's come to you about these things.
	So I really do appreciate your honesty in just saying, look, just...
	Go figure out yourself.
	I mean, you know, stop bothering me about this.
	So, no, Steph, I really do appreciate it.
	And this has been extraordinarily helpful.
	And, you know, I don't know if I'm expressing that emotionally enough, but it's just been, you know, as always, it's a pleasure and very incredible speaking with you.
	I appreciate that, and I certainly do get your feeling at the end there, and I really do appreciate that, because I know it can be a little bit like trying to find a whale with depth charges getting your feelings up, so I certainly do feel that at the end, and I really do appreciate that.
	Sorry, I know that we had some other questions, and I'm sorry that I spent so long on this issue, but it is such an essential issue, and obviously I want this fellow, as I want everybody, to experience the kind of love that is possible.
	And that just requires that you be vulnerable and emotionally available and comfortable with yourself.
	I was just saying to Christina when we went to the gym today, I was just saying to her that the slings and arrows of people who fire various things at FDR that are negative or challenging...
	I'm sure it must be confusing to some people.
	It's like, well, it doesn't really bother me that much.
	Occasionally, but not very often, and sometimes weeks will go by where I don't think about any of the criticisms or negative things around FDR. But it is a cliche if you haven't experienced it, and the most beautiful thing in the world if you have, that love...
	Love makes you bulletproof. Love gives you the ability to walk through walls.
	Love is this most unbelievable powerful force that I want everyone to have access to.
	And a lot of what I'm doing is trying to open people's hearts to that possibility of the beauty that can occur when you are deeply and truly loved by 1.001 people.
	Just talking about the baby.
	But... Because look, learning more about how Lincoln was not really the great emancipator isn't going to make you loved.
	Learning more about philosophy isn't going to make you loved.
	Reading Nietzsche isn't going to make you loved.
	Being smart, intelligent, funny, any of those things not going to make you.
	What is going to make you loved is to be gentle, kind, wise, passionate.
	Emotionally available, devoted to someone.
	It is an operation of the heart.
	It is not an operation of the head.
	And that doesn't mean that there's no logic to it.
	I don't want to create those false dichotomies.
	But I just want people to have that amazing beauty that I spent most of my life without.
	And once you have it, it just makes you invulnerable.
	I mean, I can't do what I'm doing without my wife's, not just blessing, but feedback and support and her admiration for what it is that I'm doing.
	She has her eyes shine with devotion and admiration for what it is that I'm doing, and that's what keeps me going, and that's what drives me in terms of the motivation, because when you have someone watching your back and devoted to your self-interest in that way as I am to hers...
	You just never worry about going off the rails, really.
	Or if you do, it's a hiccup and you go back on.
	And that kind of trust and intimacy and all the health benefits and the financial benefits of a loving and happy marriage, I want that for everyone.
	I don't want to go to my grave as perhaps the best loved man on the planet and not share any of that beauty with other people because once you have it, You'll realize just how much more there is to life than mere thinking.
	So I hope that makes some sense.
	Sorry to cut off people, but we can perhaps have convos this week.
	And I will talk to you guys soon.
	Have a wonderful, wonderful, wonderful week.
	And remember to open your heart with people, to ask them questions about their life, and to reach real intimacy and happiness thereby.

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