Instinctual anger, a self-protection conversation with rage, libertarian bailouts for abusers, laughing at self-destruction, is it necessary to experience anger, in praise of panic, living in a garage at 46 years old without any savings and addicted to helplessness.
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main Radio. | |
| Saturday night! | |
| Mark 2. | |
| S-A-T-U-R-D-A-Y. Night! | |
| That goes out to you, Patrick. | |
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| It is massively, massively appreciated. | |
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| So, Mike, who do we have up first? | |
| Alright, up first is William. | |
| William wrote in and says, I live with the incredible amount of instinctual anger that I learned from my childhood. | |
| How do I decondition myself from this level of anger? | |
| Well, we can begin by describing it accurately. | |
| I don't think we learn anything from our childhood exactly, right? | |
| That's like saying, I learned something from the library. | |
| It's more these specific books that we read in our childhood, right? | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| I guess the first question is, let's hear about the great spawning of William. | |
| What happened when you were a kid? | |
| Well, I don't have an incredible amount of memory from it. | |
| I think that's a mixture of seven or eight year drug addiction and also blocking out quite a bit of stuff. | |
| My father is a very work-driven person. | |
| He's the owner of a small business. | |
| I can tell he's a terrified human being at his core, and so his most interactions are defensive. | |
| He can completely communicate in size, like, and literally you get like three conversations worth of shit and you know to go in the other direction. | |
| I just remember being scared all the time. | |
| I mean, my earliest memory... | |
| I grew up in a Christian household. | |
| We started in Catholicism. | |
| And my earliest memory is crying in bed at night, begging Jesus to come into my heart because I kept having dreams that my parents would be in heaven and I would be in hell, and they'd be walking around saying, like, where's Will? | |
| Right. | |
| And how old did you, do you have any idea how old you were at that time? | |
| Maybe like seven, eight. | |
| Right, right. | |
| Yeah, the begging Jesus to come into your heart is, I didn't experience that so much. | |
| And I don't want to make it about me, but I do understand that desperation to achieve a salvation that doesn't exist is really tortuous to children. | |
| What's wrong with me? | |
| Why isn't God talking to me? | |
| What have I done wrong? | |
| It's the emperor's new clothes. | |
| Everyone else says, oh, Jesus is in my heart. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| He's taken up residence. | |
| He's got a duplex. | |
| He's kind of a cat person. | |
| He's got nine tabbies and one tuxedo cat. | |
| He puts his feet up, pops beers, watches reality television. | |
| I mean, he's not just taken up residence in my heart. | |
| I mean, I can't get him out here with, you know, four sheriffs and an eviction notice. | |
| So everyone else is talking about how much they've accepted Jesus and Jesus has spoken to them and healed them of their ingrown toenails and extended their life and turned water into wine. | |
| And, I mean, it's all complete bullshit or psychosis. | |
| But I do sympathize with a child Who is told that this is a genuine and the most necessary human experience that does not happen. | |
| That does not happen because there is no Jesus, there is no gods, and there's no grace that can enter your heart other than perhaps a surgeon named Grace who's going in there with a coat hanger to pull out a blockage. | |
| So... | |
| I really, really sympathize with that because you feel like your parents are going to be bungee lifted out of the stormy sea of reality to heaven while you are going to go down to be eternally eaten by devil sharks. | |
| And that is a terrifying, terrifying experience for children. | |
| Well, I mean, I think that there's just this big, big trend of this outsider feeling where I didn't understand as I grew up that most people were acting and putting on masks as personalities and stuff like that. | |
| Wait, wait, what do you mean? | |
| Like trying out different personalities, like saying, you know, well, I'm going to be interested in this, or I'm going to be interested in that, and that's who I am. | |
| Well, I felt like those, like I couldn't... | |
| Wait, no, no, no, sorry, sorry. | |
| I really want to follow what you're saying, but I feel like we just jumped a whole bunch of places there. | |
| I sort of understand the words, and I think I understand the sentiment, but I'm not sure. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, a perfect example of just a symptom of it is when I was getting into high school, like it came from a very small, like we had like 40 people from my K through 8. | |
| And then I get into high school and I start interacting with these people. | |
| It went from 48 people to 4,000. | |
| And I really turned into this chameleon where I realized that people pleasing was the way you get attention. | |
| Where you figure out what they like and you put on that mask and then they like you. | |
| But previously in my social interactions I didn't know how to do that so I was often very alone. | |
| I couldn't really either relate or communicate with people. | |
| I didn't have a lot of friends that hung around. | |
| Sorry, I feel like we're rushing, so I just need you to sort of slow down. | |
| We have all the time in the world. | |
| I really, really try not to rush callers, which is another reason why we don't do commercials. | |
| And you know I've spent an hour or sometimes two hours with callers, right? | |
| I know you're trying to sort of compress an email as soon as you turn on JPEG this bitmap, right? | |
| So you can slow down. | |
| We can take it slow because if we go fast, Then I have to make assumptions or I have to stop you all the time. | |
| And I don't want to make assumptions and I don't want to stop you all the time. | |
| Okay. | |
| Well, can you point me, you know... | |
| Okay, so we started off with religion. | |
| And at the age of seven, you were begging for this fantasy possession of bearded, hippie, strangely white guy in the Middle East, dude, to come into your heart, right? | |
| Mm-hmm. | |
| And... | |
| Bring me your Bedouin blue eyes and stare deep into my soul and heal me from the desperate fate that may await me. | |
| And how long did that process go on for? | |
| Are you still a believer? | |
| Did that end? | |
| I just want to do it with the religion thing and we can move on to other things. | |
| Okay. | |
| I no longer subscribe to any of that whatsoever, but I'm incredibly interested in mythologies and religions, mostly because I was so manipulated by it. | |
| But no, no, I no longer have any hallucinations and delusions about... | |
| Okay, so this is the second, sorry to interrupt you, but this is the second time that you have ascribed a moral action to a non-material entity. | |
| You're saying that childhood taught your anger and that you were manipulated by mythology. | |
| You're right. | |
| Childhood did not teach you your anger and you were not manipulated by mythology because mythology is a concept, not a noun, right? | |
| Well, I thought it was a noun. | |
| I didn't know it was a concept. | |
| No, who manipulated you? | |
| Well, a lot of people in the church. | |
| I mean, I was very surrounded by youth groups. | |
| Why were you in a church? | |
| Because my parents insisted. | |
| So you were taught anger as a child by your parents, and you were manipulated by your parents. | |
| The tool was religion, but the manipulation, the moral responsibility would sit with your parents, right? | |
| Yes, yes. | |
| Okay, and that's sort of the language. | |
| Like I spent half the day, God help me, researching Elliot Rogers, the Santa Barbara shooter. | |
| And one of the things that struck me was the degree to which he was programming himself to escalating rage through the repetition of certain language phrases. | |
| You know, it's so unfair and rotting in loneliness and so on, right? | |
| That you could see him programming himself with this Neuro-linguistic approach to the point, and again, I'm not putting you even remotely in that category, but when we describe things incorrectly, we get lost extremely easily. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, if the map is like north and south are reversed, we're never going to get where we want to get, right? | |
| And so you need to speak accurately on Which is not to say honestly, I don't think you're being dishonest at all, but you need to speak accurately about what occurred to you. | |
| Otherwise, your anger is going to be like a bull charging around an enclosure looking for an exit that it can't find. | |
| The exit is always truth, right? | |
| And whenever we have an emotion that repeats, it's because we are not describing its origin truthfully. | |
| Yes. | |
| So this is why I'm sort of stopping you and saying, look, you need to describe what happened to you truthfully. | |
| So you were indoctrinated by your parents into a religious mythology, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay. | |
| So with that in mind, okay, so when did you begin to disbelieve in these fantasies? | |
| I think once I started... | |
| Maybe two or three years before I started using substances. | |
| So, I started using drugs at 14. | |
| So, maybe 11 or 12. | |
| Now, 14, you had gone from the 40 to the 4,000 schools, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And what... | |
| How did it happen that you ended up starting to use drugs? | |
| Um... | |
| Well, I was very lonely. | |
| I wanted companionship, and I found some of the more accepting people were the outcasts of that school, and those people used substances. | |
| And when I started using substances, it gave me temporary relief from that fear. | |
| Which fear? | |
| I mean, just inherent fear. | |
| I mean, I've lived my life completely afraid. | |
| Right. | |
| And the fear was, it had some origins in religion that was more of an existential fear? | |
| Yes. | |
| Right? | |
| You can leave abusive people, you cannot leave an abusive deity because he's everywhere, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| When you say that the more accepting people were on drugs, would they have accepted you if you hadn't used drugs? | |
| To an extent they did, but I think because I wanted that deeper companionship or something to relate with them to. | |
| I mean, I wasn't really pressured. | |
| I voluntarily went in to it and seeked it out. | |
| I even remember lying about using them previously so that they would be okay with me Coming in and then using them and then having to act like, oh, I've been here before, like I've done this before when I'm just blown out of my mind and I have no idea how to deal with it. | |
| Right. | |
| And how did you pay for the drugs? | |
| It's always been a mystery to me. | |
| It's a creative process. | |
| A lot of times it would be either, I mean, my first substance was Adderall. | |
| And it was prescribed to a friend of mine, and we would go to his house, and he also had a back injury, and he would give me his Adderall and his Tramadol, which is a painkiller, and we would do that. | |
| A lot of times it was free or just given, but the other times I would steal money from my parents. | |
| My parents are very well-to-do and often didn't notice. | |
| You mean there'd be sort of cash lying around and you'd take it? | |
| Yeah. | |
| How much would you take? | |
| Like 20 bucks at most in the beginning and then in the end when I was really out of control before I left my parents home I knew my mother's ATM pin and if she hadn't reconciled her account she would have never noticed hundreds of dollars leaving a couple times a week. | |
| A couple of times a week? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So like a thousand bucks a month? | |
| I mean, that didn't last very long, but I mean... | |
| No, but seriously... | |
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| How fucking rich are these people? | |
| They don't notice a thousand dollars a month? | |
| Well, I come from... | |
| I mean, I come from... | |
| My grandfather is one of the richest people I know, and he's one of the most terrifying people I know, and so I come from money. | |
| I come from kind of... | |
| Wow. | |
| I mean, to give you an idea, my grandfather is... | |
| No, no, it's okay. | |
| It's okay. | |
| I just... | |
| TFR. Totally fucking rich. | |
| Got it. | |
| Okay. | |
| So the TFR. Because that's, I mean, that's an astonishing thing. | |
| I mean, I'm like, hey, where's my five bucks? | |
| People have a thousand bucks a month. | |
| Who cares? | |
| Who notices, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| And you said a seven, so you said you started when you were 14, so you ended when you were 20, 21? | |
| Around there, I was able to actually get a handle on it. | |
| We'll make it so that I wasn't so inherently in agony just through persistence and educating myself and self-awareness so that nowadays I'm not seeking to completely destroy myself every day. | |
| I mean, assume if you were doing a thousand bucks worth of Was it mostly prescription meds or was it other stuff too? | |
| I mean, I can honestly say it was everything I could possibly get my hands on. | |
| After my parents kicked me out, I started selling drugs for three or four years. | |
| When did your parents kick you out? | |
| I was 17 or 18. | |
| Wow. | |
| And was it because of the drugs? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Had they tried to get you into rehab or therapy before? | |
| I've been to four treatment centers before I was 18. | |
| One of them was 14 months long. | |
| Wow. | |
| Was it like a wilderness-y kind of thing or was it more in-house? | |
| I've been to a wilderness one and that was 42 days and then that didn't work and then I got sent to a 60-day one and then I thought I was going home. | |
| And I was directly transferred to one in southern Arizona, which is in the middle of the desert, and I would stay there for 14 months. | |
| And you didn't know that was going to happen, of course? | |
| No. | |
| Wow. | |
| All right. | |
| So, what happened other than religion in your childhood that was scary? | |
| My dad has a lot of anger problems. | |
| The physicality was like a real minority in the way his anger expressed itself, but mostly it was just rage, verbal. | |
| Can you give me some examples? | |
| You're a pig. | |
| I know you're smarter than this. | |
| It's hard to explain. | |
| It's mostly, like I said, he can communicate anything in just a sigh that he's pissed off. | |
| And I was very vulnerable and sensitive when I was young, so I would internalize that right away and get afraid. | |
| Because I would try to stay away from him. | |
| Because it would turn into an argument over things I found silly. | |
| Do you think that you were unusually sensitive when you were younger? | |
| Yes. | |
| Why? | |
| Why do you think that it was unusually sensitive? | |
| Because I couldn't associate myself at all from the things around me. | |
| Like when my dad was mad. | |
| Compared to who? | |
| Who were you comparing yourself to? | |
| I'm not disagreeing with you. | |
| I just really want to understand your thinking. | |
| Who were you comparing yourself to? | |
| When you felt oversensitive? | |
| My peers, they would have screwed up family situations and they were able to kind of dissociate themselves from it and act normal, but I couldn't really do that. | |
| Okay, and would you say that the dysfunctional families that your friends experienced, were they on a similar level to yours? | |
| Some were worse. | |
| I come from a very affluent area, and that seems to be the trend of familial dysfunction. | |
| Right. | |
| Okay. | |
| - Okay. | |
| And did your parents consider you to be oversensitive? - They thought I was intelligent. | |
| But I don't think they understood or really knew that I internalized everything that came around me. | |
| I'm hearing a lot of self-blame here. | |
| Yeah, that's the tendency. | |
| I'm oversensitive, I internalized, right? | |
| Well, they didn't understand the animal that they were getting, and they didn't seem to want to very much. | |
| Did you just feel something strongly there? | |
| I feel it strongly right now because I don't really talk about my childhood. | |
| And most of it is a black hole. | |
| Good for you for doing it. | |
| I appreciate that. | |
| And I appreciate that you're doing it with me. | |
| The animal that they were getting, what do you mean? | |
| Well, I mean, I learn things very quickly. | |
| I'm decently intelligent. | |
| I'm very emphatic about things that I enjoy. | |
| I get totally sucked into things I'm interested in, like completely. | |
| I mean, nowadays I can't stop feeding my mind. | |
| I can't stop teaching myself. | |
| I can't stop trying to learn things new. | |
| And that's kind of I don't know. | |
| I've just felt different. | |
| I couldn't relate to a lot of people around me. | |
| I felt like something was wrong. | |
| But as I've grown older, I've found that it's something that can be very beneficial. | |
| I think you felt more strongly when we were talking about how you seem to be self-blaming. | |
| Yeah. | |
| All right. | |
| Why would you self-blame, do you think? | |
| Because my parents have all the outward signs of good parents. | |
| I mean, we have money. | |
| My parents stay together. | |
| All my physiological needs were met. | |
| And so that was kind of The argument used as to why, you know, why don't you just fucking act normal? | |
| Sorry, excuse me. | |
| Oh, don't worry about that. | |
| But, you know, why can't you just function? | |
| So, yeah, because, I mean, they would be very frustrated by your drug use, right? | |
| Yeah, yes. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, I mean, the shooter from last night, Elliot Rogers, His parents bought him a BMW and he had $300 sunglasses that he was really proud of. | |
| He had lots of money. | |
| There's video of him with his parents. | |
| His father was an assistant director on one of the Hunger Games movies. | |
| He was at a private Katy Perry concert. | |
| He was on the red carpet for the Hunger Games opening. | |
| All the red carpet previews for the Star Wars prequels and all that. | |
| You'd think he'd be happy. | |
| You know? | |
| Right. | |
| But that's been the thing I've had to really deal with, is that you can have all the outward trimmings of what we're told makes people happy, and a lot of times it doesn't do a damn thing for you. | |
| Well, in some ways it's a negative, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Because it becomes harder for people to have sympathy with you if they're as shallow as other people are, right? | |
| Yes, yes, yes. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| So you're talking about your father calling you a pig and things like that, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Which is a kind of animal. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Was there anything else that you remember from either of your parents with regards to anger when you were a kid? | |
| I just remember that when my dad got started being angry, it was very difficult for him to stop. | |
| I mean, there was spanking In my family, but most of it... | |
| Oh my god, man. | |
| Trying to get you to connect with the responsibility of your parents is like trying to push two opposite pole magnets together. | |
| It is. | |
| There were spanking in my household? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Who spanked you? | |
| My father spanked me. | |
| Your father hit you as a child. | |
| There was spanking in my household is like there was some ghost. | |
| In your household that we call Spanky, right? | |
| I learn a vocabulary to dissociate myself from... | |
| Oh, I get it. | |
| And you're trying to do that with me too, unconsciously, right? | |
| You don't want... | |
| You both do and don't want me to connect these words, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| And how often were you hit? | |
| I maybe once a month or once every two months, but that could be completely wrong. | |
| Because like I said, I don't know if it's a mixture of me blacking out my childhood and the drug use. | |
| I don't know what predominantly made it so that I can't remember a lot. | |
| Well, your fear didn't come from nowhere, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And how would the spanking manifest? | |
| What would happen? | |
| Spanking covers a wide variety of topics. | |
| It would mostly be just misbehavior and not listening. | |
| Sorry, I wasn't clear. | |
| What I mean is, how would it occur? | |
| Would it be pants on, pants off, hand, open hand, fist, implements? | |
| Pants off, open hand. | |
| But my dad is a very strong guy. | |
| Right, so bare buttocks, red marks, welts? | |
| Not that I remember, but I'm sure. | |
| Right. | |
| I've never understood how a parent can be slapping their child's bare ass hard and not look at themselves and say, what the hell am I doing? | |
| Like, what a completely weird thing to be doing. | |
| I mean, as an adult, that's a sexual fetish. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, it's a sexual fetish act on a helpless and dependent and physically confined and subdued child. | |
| I'm incredibly sorry. | |
| And of course, as a big, scary guy, there's a lot of terror. | |
| And in between, of course, you don't know when the next one's going to happen, right? | |
| No. | |
| And so I think it was more the kind of fear of that that made it so that when he didn't spank me, it would still seem just as powerful. | |
| Sure. | |
| And what about your mom? | |
| My mom is very different from my dad, but I've learned that she enables that. | |
| And kind of has subscribed to the way he looks at the world. | |
| I often look to my mom for help from that. | |
| Was she present when you were being spanked? | |
| Was she in the house? | |
| Most of the time, yes. | |
| So how the fuck is she so different from your dad if she didn't... | |
| Like take you to a safe place and demand that he never do it again? | |
| As in just outward personality? | |
| That's about it. | |
| Well, I'm not interested in outward personality. | |
| Yeah, but that's the thing. | |
| This is not a show about what kind of fucking earrings she wore, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Or how she presented herself to an enabling society? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay, so she fully approved, I would assume, of your dad's spanking of you, right? | |
| I mean, by her action, she would sometimes... | |
| Sympathize, but not do anything to change. | |
| Mostly just his anger, too. | |
| She justified it. | |
| She justified his rage. | |
| His anger. | |
| Okay, so his rage. | |
| And how would she justify his rage? | |
| And how would this come up? | |
| Give me a sense of conversations. | |
| What would happen? | |
| After it would happen, I would try to come talk to my mom and explain to her, like, try to get some sympathy or some protection, and she would agree with him as to what I've done wrong. | |
| And I guess in that way, enable him. | |
| I never really felt protected from him, from her. | |
| Well, never really. | |
| In what way were you ever protected from him by her? | |
| Not really. | |
| Sometimes I could tell she was a little sympathetic, but it didn't come out in action. | |
| Right. | |
| And are you someplace private at the moment? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Are you physically relaxed? | |
| Like, are you sitting down or lying on a bed or something? | |
| I'm sitting on my bed. | |
| Okay, do me a favor if you can. | |
| Just try and sort of physically relax your body. | |
| Okay, take a couple of deep breaths. | |
| Now, imagine that you are walking through a mall. imagine that you are walking through a mall. | |
| Mid-afternoon. | |
| Maybe it's one of those funny malls where birds fly around or something and they have those weird trees in the middle. | |
| You don't know if they're plastic or not. | |
| The usual innocuous mall sounds are playing. | |
| A couple of bored shopkeepers standing in the front of the store because I guess that's the closest they can get to getting some air in a mall. | |
| And you round the corner And in the food court, you see a father holding down a child over his lap, ripping the pants off, and slamming his open palm down on the child's tender butt cheeks. | |
| And what would your reaction be? | |
| I would be infuriated. | |
| Go on. | |
| I would get in his face. | |
| I would not be able to help myself. | |
| I wouldn't be able to walk away. | |
| What do you mean when you say you would get in his face? | |
| I would start calling him out as the coward that he is. | |
| Go on. | |
| He says, mind your own fucking business. | |
| My business is to make sure you're... | |
| I mean, you're huge. | |
| You're huge compared to him. | |
| What do you think you're doing to him? | |
| He wasn't listening to me. | |
| He wasn't listening to me. | |
| I don't care. | |
| He's a fucking child. | |
| And you're supposed to be a grown man. | |
| Yeah, and he's my child. | |
| And I'll deal with him how I see fit. | |
| He's not your goddamn child, so move on, buddy. | |
| I'm not going to do that. | |
| What are you going to do about it? | |
| I would probably assault him if he didn't stop. | |
| Right. | |
| Or get him away from the kid. | |
| Call security? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Of course, the reality is that in many places this would be perfectly legal and you'd go to jail for assault. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But nonetheless, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Now, why did I suggest that? | |
| To make me look at What happened to me in a light that isn't influenced by my self-blaming? | |
| No. | |
| No? | |
| It's a great guess. | |
| Would you like to try another one or should I give you a hint? | |
| Give me a hint, please. | |
| Who were we just talking about? | |
| My dad. | |
| No. | |
| I've missed the boat. | |
| Well... | |
| Thank you. | |
| No, you haven't missed the boat. | |
| You just have the estrogen fortress around the female heart of evil. | |
| My mom. | |
| So who were we just talking about? | |
| My mom. | |
| Right. | |
| So who was I trying to get you to inhabit right there? | |
| My mom. | |
| I gave you a mall. | |
| I gave you shops. | |
| I gave you lots of feminine cues, right? | |
| That's what I wanted from my mom. | |
| Of course. | |
| You wanted your mom to say... | |
| If you hit those fucking children again, I'm going to divorce you and take half of everything you've gotten and give it to a well-hung Spanish gardener named Raul. | |
| I tried that so much with my mom to say, why are you married to this person? | |
| Why do you allow your kids to be around someone who's so angry all the time? | |
| Right. | |
| And why? | |
| Do you think she did it? | |
| I think she felt some sort of, like, he's the kind of rock in her life. | |
| Like, the constant. | |
| Oh my god. | |
| I mean, not excusing at all, whatsoever. | |
| Yes, you are excusing he's her rock. | |
| No, not in a good way. | |
| But in a way that says, I don't know what is in my mom's childhood to think that it's beneficial to be around someone like that. | |
| Oh, of course! | |
| We're talking about moral responsibility for your mom, and you have to start talking about her childhood. | |
| You're right, yeah. | |
| You didn't talk about your dad's childhood, did you? | |
| I know tons about my dad's childhood. | |
| I know, ugh. | |
| I got it. | |
| I got it. | |
| Okay, you've done drugs, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Let me give you a baseline. | |
| Money! | |
| It's a gas! | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| He's rich. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He's rich. | |
| Did your mother work? | |
| My mom works as their co-managers in the same business. | |
| It's his business though, right? | |
| It's his business. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I just found out that it's 51% my grandfather's business a year ago, and that made a lot of sense. | |
| And does your mama like to spend the money? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, she doesn't even notice when a fucking thousand dollars is missing from her bank account, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, so your mom is like, hey, fill my wallet, fine, hit the kids. | |
| Right? | |
| If your wallet is big enough, if your resources are enough, you absolutely can hit my offspring. | |
| My offspring's asses are for smacking sale, right? | |
| Ka-ching! | |
| Aisle 5! | |
| Tender child bottoms for striking. | |
| All it takes is hypergamy and a river full of money, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's so difficult for me nowadays because I feel like the way I describe it is that I have the defense attorneys of my parents in my head. | |
| Sure, of course you do. | |
| And I don't want to constantly feel rage against them because it hurts. | |
| Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| This is where your self-ownership lies. | |
| You absolutely do want to constantly feel rage against them, because you are. | |
| I'm not saying it's conscious, I'm not saying it's willed, but you have to accept that nothing in you happens for no reason whatsoever, right? | |
| There's no internal state that is absolutely against everything that you want, otherwise it wouldn't occur, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, you absolutely do want to feel rage against them, because that's What substitutes for a connection? | |
| That is really the only connection. | |
| That's what substitutes for the bond. | |
| It's the rage. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You're bound together, not by love, not by shared history, not by respect, by ethics, by virtue, by courage, by admiration, by love. | |
| You're bound together by the fiery neck, noose, cord, circle jerk of hatred, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| What did your mother say when you said, "Why stay with a man who is so violent, sorry, who "Why stay with a man who is so violent, sorry, who is so full of rage, who hits his children and screams at He's my husband. | |
| That's a meaningless, that's tautological. | |
| Why is he your husband? | |
| Because he's my husband. | |
| That doesn't mean anything. | |
| I know. | |
| So what does he say? | |
| Um... | |
| I mean, because I love him, because we're companions, we're partners together in this, we're... | |
| Partners together in what? | |
| In life. | |
| In parenting? | |
| Yeah, but I felt... | |
| You spent that too, right? | |
| I feel like... | |
| I felt like a liability. | |
| I felt like I was looked at as an expense. | |
| Wait, who? | |
| Are you your mom or you now? | |
| No, I'm me. | |
| I felt like I was a liability. | |
| To my family. | |
| Like I was looked at as... | |
| Well, you were a liability to your family. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, you were on drugs for seven years. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I'm not trying to say that you're a kid. | |
| I'm not trying to say it's all your fault, but you were a liability. | |
| Yeah, most definitely. | |
| And you stopped believing in God. | |
| I assume they're still religious, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, it's funny how the love your enemy shit doesn't seem to apply to children, where it's spare the rod, spoil the child, right? | |
| I don't understand. | |
| If you beat your child, he shall not die. | |
| But if you do not beat him, he will not enter the kingdom of heaven, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I felt like they never actually read the book. | |
| Oh, God, no. | |
| To read the book is to flee the book. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, it's a Stephen King without end, right? | |
| What is your rage for? | |
| What is it trying to tell you to do? | |
| I think my rage is because I feel helpless in fear. | |
| And so I want to take control again. | |
| Feel helpless towards Okay, I mean, let's not... | |
| Hang on, hang on. | |
| Rage is such a primal emotion. | |
| We're not talking about bemused resignation or wistful melancholy and shit like that. | |
| We're talking about rage, right? | |
| The four-letter, base of the brain, reptile fight-or-flight shit, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So let's not make it overly complicated. | |
| Any emotion that you share with a cornered rat is not a haiku, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So what is rage for? | |
| Self-protection. | |
| See? | |
| It's not that hard, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And so what is your rage for? | |
| What is it telling you? | |
| What does it want to tell you to do? | |
| To get away. | |
| Do you want to be your rage or talk to your rage? | |
| It doesn't come out when I want it to. | |
| Oh, no, no, no. | |
| Trust me. | |
| Yeah, Rage wants to talk to me. | |
| Let's try it. | |
| Let's try it. | |
| Okay. | |
| Maybe it works. | |
| Maybe it doesn't, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, William's Rage. | |
| William's Rage. | |
| When were you born? | |
| 1990. | |
| The Rage was born in 1990? | |
| Oh. | |
| I'm talking to the Rage now. | |
| now. | |
| Don't give me your... | |
| Seven or eight years old. | |
| What was your hospital? | |
| What was your birthing day? | |
| I mean, babies aren't born with rage. | |
| So when did you first come into being? | |
| When were you born? | |
| Seven, maybe. | |
| Eight, maybe. | |
| Okay, great. | |
| And were you happy at being born? | |
| Do you want to be there? | |
| No. | |
| Okay. | |
| So if you weren't there, what might be there in your place if you were free? | |
| Safety. | |
| What are you costing? | |
| I mean, look, I respect what you're doing, and I hugely respect that you're there to protect William, but what is it costing him to have you there in perpetuity? | |
| Because you want to be free, too. | |
| You want to release all this emotional energy and not just be this caged, bald, scalded tiger at all times. | |
| You want to be free to be spontaneous and expressive and creative and all this kind of stuff. | |
| So tell William what he's not getting because of you, because he's not accepting you. | |
| Peace. | |
| Go on. | |
| Contentment. | |
| Happiness. | |
| Connection with other people. | |
| Love. | |
| Companionship. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Keep going. | |
| Intimacy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Communication. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Go on. | |
| Freedom. | |
| Just... | |
| Ability to choose. | |
| Go on. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Oh, William's rage. | |
| You're holding out on him. | |
| Oh my goodness, you're holding out on the poor fella. | |
| I can tell you what he doesn't get because of you. | |
| Maybe you've forgotten too, can I tell you? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh, William's rage. | |
| What William doesn't get because you're there is memory. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| Aren't you there? | |
| To redact the history? | |
| To black out the memory? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So what doesn't he remember that you're there to distract him from? | |
| What do you remember that William doesn't? | |
| Pain. | |
| Go on. | |
| Fear. | |
| Sadness. | |
| Confusion. | |
| Lack of safety. | |
| No, Rage, come on. | |
| You're getting there. | |
| You can be honest with me. | |
| I'm the guy who's going to really listen to you and help you. | |
| So, William's Rage. | |
| Rage! | |
| What are you keeping from William? | |
| What does he not remember? | |
| Abuse. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Attack. | |
| Assault. | |
| Assault. | |
| Physical agony, helplessness, the feeling of being swallowed alive by the bestial emotions of a primitive father. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like being swallowed whole by a shark and dissolved in its innards. | |
| That's what it feels like. | |
| I'm gone. | |
| Never getting out. | |
| Yeah, never getting out from inside the lived psychosis of a dangerous caregiver, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So what are the memories that provoked you? | |
| And justly provoked you, I fully accept that. | |
| Being helpless to defend myself or let have anyone else understand me or have empathy for me or love me Yeah, when you're being assaulted, rage is empathy. | |
| It's not sympathy, but it's empathy, because you are correctly identifying the emotions of the attacker, which is sadism, and the desire to destroy an entire personality without even doing the fucking kindness of killing the body, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, William's rage, and remember, this is anonymous, and we never have to publish this at all. | |
| But if it was just you and me in a deep underground bunker, eye to eye, what do you want to do to these attackers? | |
| I want to kill them. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| Go on. | |
| I want them to hurt as much as I hurt. | |
| I want them to understand what they're doing to me. | |
| Do you think they don't? | |
| No. | |
| You don't think they know what they're doing to you? | |
| I don't think they understand the extent of how it just destroyed me. | |
| But you can't kill them, right? | |
| No. | |
| Because they've got food. | |
| They've got shelter, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Can't kill them. | |
| That's like you got a gun and you're in jail and you shoot the jailer, but the jailer is the only one who's got the key and no one else is coming, right? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Now the jailer's dead and you hate the fucking jailer, but you can't now get out of prison, right? | |
| yeah so William's rage Thank you. | |
| What... | |
| Is William not listening to? | |
| Or rather, what do William's in appearance not want to listen to? | |
| What essential information do you have for our good friend and your protectee, William? | |
| What do you have to say to him that he's not listening? | |
| That you can't be free of your cage? | |
| That it was okay to feel that way. | |
| That it wasn't my fault. | |
| Go on. | |
| That I didn't... | |
| That it wasn't me. | |
| It wasn't something wrong with me. | |
| That made that happen. | |
| And that I deserved empathy and compassion and an attempt to understand and care and just someone to just hold me and protect me. | |
| I mean, he won't let you speak, right? | |
| He won't let the rage speak because he keeps... | |
| Remember, you probably heard me talking to him About his childhood did this and they were spanking in the house like a vase or something. | |
| You heard me trying to get him to talk directly, right? | |
| Which is what you need. | |
| What you're saying, right? | |
| Will has all the tools to be able to run away from this. | |
| Go on. | |
| He's built his intellect as defense mechanism not to embrace the Pain. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, you heard him talking about rage, and I said, look, it's the brain reptile stuff, right? | |
| Which is what you and I are talking about here. | |
| I mean, he's bringing, building this big ice castle of abstractions over top, and you just want something very simple and clear to get across to him, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| What frees you from where you are? | |
| What do you need William to do to accept, to understand, and to do? | |
| Because it's not just about listening to yourself and thinking about yourself and feeling for yourself. | |
| Feelings must result in action to be extinguished or to be integrated. | |
| I mean, you put your hand in fire, the pain is supposed to make you take your fucking hand out of the fire, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And if you just leave it in there saying, well, I accept the pain, it's like, well, it just gets worse, right? | |
| It doesn't end until you take your hand out of the fire or die, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So what do you need, William, to understand and to do in order to let down your guard and let all the other great stuff that you were talking about in past your moat? | |
| Will needs to understand that I did this for survival. | |
| That... | |
| Well, tell him, tell him. | |
| He's here to listen. | |
| Tell him, tell him. | |
| You need to understand I did this for your survival. | |
| And I couldn't be helped. | |
| And there was no other direction that could have been chosen. | |
| And that I suspended free will. | |
| The pun. | |
| I love that conscious is so great with playing on words. | |
| You suspended free will. | |
| Go on. | |
| I suspended free will so that we could survive and that I am a tool to keep you alive but I am not the root of your reality and I don't define you and I don't make you A bad person, | |
| or a sick person, or an unlovable person. | |
| I kept you alive. | |
| I know that I'm a tool. | |
| But I'm not the person, I'm not you, Will. | |
| And I need you... | |
| Because you know Will called up for an exorcism, right? | |
| You know that, right? | |
| Because he views you like as an enemy. | |
| He called me up saying, how do I get rid of my hatred? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like he wanted some sort of exorcism, like he views you as a devil or an enemy, right? | |
| Which is completely... | |
| I mean, how un-fucking-grateful can you be? | |
| You, William Frates, keep this son of a bitch alive. | |
| And then you're his enemy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, you weren't the one spanking him. | |
| You weren't the one screaming at him. | |
| You weren't the one giving him fake syrupy feminine bullshit sympathy. | |
| While holding him up to be spanked for money? | |
| You kept him alive! | |
| And he comes to me and says, how do I get rid of this thing? | |
| It's a problem. | |
| Yeah, it's a fucking problem. | |
| Like a suit of armor is a problem in medieval combat. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Anyway, I just want to say, I understand where he's coming from. | |
| You're inconvenient because you are the memory, the true memory of his history. | |
| So you're inconvenient to him now! | |
| Yeah. | |
| But you really weren't very inconvenient to him in the past, were you? | |
| No. | |
| So maybe a little fucking gratitude might not be the end of the world. | |
| Like, hey, thanks for not getting me killed! | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Like, you understand, I'm in your corner, right? | |
| I want him to listen to you. | |
| Because he's not getting rid of you without listening to you, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| What else do you have to say? | |
| Will, I know... | |
| That you're a good person, and I know you don't want to hurt people, and I know that you care so much that you use me to try not to care. | |
| But you have to be able to accept that and not use me as a tool to run away. | |
| Oh, so he says, I'm full of anger, therefore I can't be connected to people, I can't be intimate, I can't be open, vulnerable. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Wow. | |
| And of course, it is connection that will cool your jets, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| If he's around people who actually really care and love and are connected to him and would never hurt him, then you're not as necessary, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| You can let down your guard, you know? | |
| Once the tiger's in the cage, you can put your feet up, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So he's actually keeping you around people who continually provoke you, and then he's saying, well, you know, Rage, you're the problem, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Which is like me jumping into hungry shark tanks over and over again and then saying that my fear is somehow a problem. | |
| No, the fear is saying don't get into the fucking shark tank, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Who provokes you in William's life? | |
| Who are the people who provoke you the most and reactivate you and don't let you rest? | |
| There's not many anymore. | |
| Oh, but there's enough, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I actually just, on Wednesday, broke up with my girlfriend of two years. | |
| Wait, is this Will or Will's Rage? | |
| This is, well, Will just broke up. | |
| Okay. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And why? | |
| Why did you break up? | |
| Because I couldn't reciprocate the love. | |
| Okay, I need to go back to talking to Will's Rage, because I was getting much better answers from Will's Rage. | |
| Will's Rage, you still there? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay, good. | |
| So Will's Rage, why did Will break up with the girlfriend? | |
| Because Will is cold. | |
| Go on. | |
| Because Will doesn't know how to be vulnerable and allow people in that care. | |
| And he's very conditional with love. | |
| This is Will's Rage? | |
| Yes. | |
| Alright, I think we need to add someone else to the mix, because that seems like fucking bullshit to me, and I think Will's Rage might work a lot. | |
| That's fine. | |
| Alright, hang on. | |
| Do we have a Will's Vulnerability somewhere in there? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay, so Will's vulnerability, what was wrong with Will's girlfriend? | |
| She depended. | |
| Because the reason I'm asking is that Will and Will's rage blamed Will for the girlfriend, right? | |
| Now, let's say that that's completely true. | |
| I don't know the girlfriend. | |
| I don't know the relationship. | |
| Let's say that's completely true. | |
| Will is cold. | |
| Will keeps people out, shuts people out, blah-de-blah-de-blah, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Why the fuck would some woman want to be with someone like that if she's all that, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So that's why I'm asking Will's vulnerability, what was wrong with the girlfriend? | |
| I'm not saying nothing was wrong with Will. | |
| My question is what's wrong with the girlfriend because Will has a bit of a habit of saying what's wrong with him, right? | |
| And not what's wrong with other people. | |
| What was wrong with the girlfriend? | |
| She depended upon Will and me, his vulnerability for her happiness and whether or not she was okay. | |
| And I, as Will's vulnerability, am just beginning to feel again and be a part of Will's life. | |
| So she was needy? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Codependent? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| So manipulative? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Yeah, people who are needy, they view other people as threats that they have to be around. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| So if you're locked in the room with a hungry dog and you've got a pile of steaks, you're going to keep throwing steaks to one side or the other, right? | |
| You can't get away from the dog, but the dog needs to be fed or it's going to bite you, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| All right. | |
| What, Jake's, sorry, Will's vulnerability, what did William's girlfriend think of William's parents? | |
| She shared in the anger towards them when Will expressed it. | |
| And then what? | |
| I don't know. | |
| She would say, yes, that was terrible? | |
| Yes, and be emotional about it. | |
| And what was her family like? | |
| Her mother is a very caring and supportive person. | |
| Her father left her mother for a younger woman during her childhood. | |
| How old was she? | |
| I'm guessing like 13. | |
| So again, the mom's great, but the dad is a problem. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh my god. | |
| Oh my god. | |
| So I guess that's William's girlfriend's story about her mom. | |
| Yes. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, given that I can't talk to William's girlfriend's balls, I'll have to continue this conversation, right? | |
| Let's go back to William's rage, and thank you for letting the vulnerability speak. | |
| I appreciate that, and thank you, vulnerability, for cutting through the clutter a bit. | |
| So, Williams Rage, you must be pretty fucking tired, right? | |
| I'm exhausted. | |
| Right, like rage is like, it's a... | |
| I mean, it's like holding up a central tunnel support on a subway line, right? | |
| I mean, it's exhausting. | |
| And you want to do an Atlas Shrugged thing, right? | |
| Just shrug it off, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And get on with something else, because you're really trapped, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, if you could snap your fingers, take control of the William Bott machinery, what would you have him do so that you could turn off these exhausting force fields? | |
| I would have William learn how to be... | |
| Okay, being alone. | |
| Oh, God! | |
| That's not a doing! | |
| So, Rage, stop censoring yourself. | |
| Right? | |
| Because if he's... | |
| Yeah, I understand. | |
| So, if he's alone, right, then you are not going to face any imminent threats, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| What do you need him to do? | |
| Not what state of mind do you need him to get into, which is not a doing thing, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| What do you need him to do so that you can feel safe enough to turn off the force fields or at least lower them? | |
| I don't know at this point. | |
| You do, but it's not to be spoken of. | |
| So, Williams Rage, who has caused you the most harm? | |
| Why are you trapped where you are? | |
| Because I work for my parents. | |
| I don't live with them, but I work for them. | |
| And that's why it can't be spoken of, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| So you get that just like your mother let you be hit for money, you are placing yourself in the presence of abusers for money. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I hope it's a lot. | |
| It's not. | |
| Well. | |
| Williams Rage. | |
| If you could safely, through one-way glass, say whatever you want to William's mother and father, With no financial risk, with no professional risk, with no repercussions, what would you say? | |
| Why did you find it okay to do this to me? | |
| Why? | |
| No. | |
| Your rage knows. | |
| What you're talking about is curiosity. | |
| I'm not talking to William's curiosity. | |
| I'm talking to William's rage. | |
| And William's rage doesn't have questions. | |
| Rage is an answer. | |
| It's not a question. | |
| Perplexity is a question. | |
| Curiosity is a question. | |
| Wonder is a question. | |
| Alertness to a sound in the night is a question. | |
| Rage is when the bear is halfway through the air at your throat. | |
| That is not a question anymore. | |
| There is something seriously wrong with both of you. | |
| You are completely emotionally detached. | |
| Your values and what you find important are meaningless. | |
| You find your status or your success in things that have no real deep Connection with what you should care about. | |
| Take a deep breath. | |
| You're holding back like crazy, right? | |
| Your whole body's tense. | |
| Okay. | |
| Deep breath. | |
| This is fantasy land. | |
| You can say the stuff that you want. | |
| Try it again. | |
| again, go ahead. | |
| Alright, so Rage, you were probably birthed when William was being hit. | |
| Now imagine you had the fantasy force fields to stop the hitting, to turn around, and to drill language so deep into the father's brain that he would hesitate to do it ever again. | |
| What would you say in that moment when he was seven and being hit? | |
| You are fucking dead inside. | |
| Go on. | |
| You are terrified of death. | |
| You are terrified of the future. | |
| You are terrified of the past. | |
| You are terrified of your reputation. | |
| You are terrified of wrongdoing and getting in trouble and doing anything that deviates from what you inherited. | |
| You are terrified of doing anything that might be different or free thinking from your parents. | |
| You are terrified of everything. | |
| And I don't want it. | |
| Right. | |
| Do you see where the fear comes from? | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's your father's. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Violence is terror. | |
| I remember after one of the really, really long fights, my dad standing there with tears in his eyes saying, Will, you don't understand. | |
| There's not enough time. | |
| There's not enough time. | |
| And it's just going to end. | |
| And I never forgot that. | |
| What, life is just gonna end? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I never forgot that. | |
| But that's very non-Christian, right? | |
| No, it's completely non-Christian. | |
| I mean, he's supposed to live forever, right? | |
| The problem is, when you compare your life to eternity, it really does seem pretty fucking short, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Alright, so, great. | |
| Great fucking work. | |
| Now, O William's Rage. | |
| William's mom is standing in the room while William is being hit and screaming and crying and choking on his own spit. | |
| Snot running out of his nose, trying to wriggle away from this giant beast of a man who's slamming him with a stone hand on his bare buttocks, almost hitting his nuts. | |
| The mom is standing in the room. | |
| What do you want to say to her? | |
| Why the fuck are you not protecting me? | |
| Why did you let me be around someone who's like this? | |
| So often, why do you call our relationship love when it doesn't reflect in the actions that you have? | |
| Why do you not have any compassion for the pain that I'm going through or even try to understand why I'm hurting or why I'm acting in a different way or why I don't understand or why I can't do what you want me to do? | |
| Why the hell are you not trying to stop this? | |
| Because I don't know any other way to be and I'm being punished for it. | |
| That was extraordinary bullshit. | |
| Very eloquent bullshit, William. | |
| Good job! | |
| I'm good at it. | |
| Why was that bullshit? | |
| Because it was a question. | |
| Why, Mama? | |
| Why? | |
| That's helplessness. | |
| Your rage does not want you to be helpless. | |
| Rage is action, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, let's try that again! | |
| Once more, with balls! | |
| William's Rage. | |
| Mom is in the room. | |
| William is getting the shit beaten out of his bare and tender ass. | |
| You are a coward. | |
| You will take pain that is being inflicted upon you and your entire family and your children that you're supposed to love, and you will accept it for your comfort and security. | |
| You'll accept Fucking up your kids, both of them, for comfort and security. | |
| And you are a coward. | |
| And you chose this. | |
| And it's not anybody else's fault. | |
| There's no excuse for it. | |
| There's no excuse to let your kids get treated like shit constantly. | |
| And there's no excuse to enable this war zone that your home turns into. | |
| And there's no excuse to just divert every wrong action your children do to just, well, you know, it's your fault. | |
| You did it. | |
| I didn't teach you. | |
| There's no excuse. | |
| And you should have, the second you saw this rage, you should have ran. | |
| You should have gotten the fuck away from him. | |
| You should have seen the terror in his heart. | |
| And you should have looked at the material and the future prospects as inconsequential. | |
| Because that's honest. | |
| And that's not delusion and lying to yourself and filling... | |
| Bullshit. | |
| Where love and compassion and empathy should be. | |
| You're a coward. | |
| And you failed both your children. | |
| And she might have liked it. | |
| Right? | |
| She might have found grim, sadistic satisfaction. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I don't know her. | |
| I'm just saying it's a possibility. | |
| Because even the, like, you're a coward, it doesn't give... | |
| Women, the moral possibility of sadism, which women certainly have. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I'm just saying. | |
| It's possible. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, Williams Rage, thank you. | |
| Thank you, thank you, thank you. | |
| Thank you, thank you, thank you. | |
| Thank you for Williams' continued existence. | |
| Thank you for Reminding him of the moral horror without having him act on the rage, which is a sort of Mendez's moment. | |
| Thank you for navigating through these fiery tentacles of random lashings and getting him here tonight to this conversation. | |
| Great, great fucking job. | |
| If there were medals enough to sink a battleship, I would pin them on your Fabio-style, though very hairy chest. | |
| So no, seriously, great, great, great job. | |
| What do you need William to do? | |
| I need him to cut the maternal cord and walk away. | |
| Go on. | |
| Make it clear to him. | |
| I need him to face the fear of insecure income and go and do what Will loves and is passionate about without the censorship of my abusers, his abusers. | |
| And to stop relying upon their success to define, get out of this purgatory situation. | |
| Where, yeah, someday I'm going to go and do something different and I'll get out. | |
| And to stop telling, for Will to stop telling himself that even though his parents aren't always directly involved in the work he does, that his proximity around it holds him back tremendously. | |
| So, William's rage... | |
| What do you think will happen? | |
| And I think you know, but what do you think will happen? | |
| If and when William speaks the real truth to his parents about his experiences. | |
| The apocalypse. | |
| hips. | |
| laughter Go on. | |
| They will defend tooth and nail their position. | |
| And it will turn into... | |
| So they'll fuck him again, basically. | |
| Yeah. | |
| He'll be crazy. | |
| He'll be unstable. | |
| He'll be needy. | |
| They'll bring up the drugs. | |
| They'll bring up... | |
| They'll do anything to shit on his opening egg of truth. | |
| The best one is, what are you on? | |
| Right. | |
| Do we need to get you checked? | |
| Please pee into this cup, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Is there any way to communicate to the parents in a way that will cause them to not be defensive or will help them to not be defensive? | |
| No. | |
| All right. | |
| And that's what you need, William, to know, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| That there is no possibility to not be In a non-abuse, sorry for all the negatives, there is no possibility to not be in a non-abusive relationship with them. | |
| Yes. | |
| non-exploitative relationship and non-destructive relationship. | |
| I need William to know that even though he sees improvement in these people, that he'll die before he actually gets what he wants from them. | |
| Well, what's interesting is that they're older than he is, but you said he will die. | |
| Yeah. | |
| You mean spiritually, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| Is there anyone else who wants to say anything in there? | |
| it's okay to be afraid I don't know who's saying it. | |
| It's essential to be afraid. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That I'm not wrong. | |
| It's essential to do something about being afraid. | |
| Yes. | |
| Anything else? | |
| That you have a lot of promise. | |
| And you have a lot of things you love. | |
| And that you can live a life of passion and adventure. | |
| But you have to do these things to allow that to happen. | |
| Everybody inside you wants you to be safe and happy. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But you won't get there if you don't listen. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Every part of you wants you to be safe and happy. | |
| The self-critical parts are saying get away from the outer critics because they stimulate the inner critics. | |
| The fearful parts are saying get away from those who cause you fear because they provoke anxiety. | |
| Fix relationships or end relationships That's always what I've always said. | |
| And I, you know, strongly urge people, you know, if you feel there's any possibility of fixing the relationship, go for it. | |
| But don't go for it to the point where you end up destroying yourself. | |
| But every single part of you wants you to be happy, loved, healthy, and free of pain and fear. | |
| Every part of your body wants you to not be in pain. | |
| And the pain is there so that you're not in pain, but you have to move your hand out of the fire for the pain to stop recurring. | |
| All recurring emotions are because the provoking stimuli has not been dealt with. | |
| I know that's a shitty way of putting it, and I wish there was a more poetic way to put it, but all repetitive emotions arise out of the repetition of stimuli. | |
| If you bring your sunburn into the sun, it's going to hurt even more because of the repetition of the initial damage. | |
| And so you want to be free of your fear, but your parents want you to be free of your fear without them having to change. | |
| In other words, they want you to blame yourself for your fear so that they don't have to confront anything that they did, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| They want the cake and eat it too. | |
| They want me to be so strong that regardless of what they do, that I just be okay. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Abuse is fundamentally, I want to treat you like shit and I want you to stick around. | |
| I want to have my cake and I want to vomit my emotional traumas and dissociations and self-abuse and terrors. | |
| And harm you as a child. | |
| And that I want you to stick around and respect me when you grow up. | |
| That's wanting to have your cake and eat it too. | |
| And the degree to which we enable that, we enable abuse. | |
| The degree to which we hold abusers free from the consequences of their abuse is the degree to which we guarantee abuse continues in the world, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Libertarians hate subsidies except to abusers. | |
| Right? | |
| But the biggest bailout is the false forgiveness of the harmed child. | |
| That's the biggest bailout on the planet. | |
| That's the only reason all the other bailouts actually exist, right? | |
| Banks are mommy and daddy. | |
| Taxpayers are children, right? | |
| Government is the superego. | |
| And the taxpayers, the children must be sacrificed to bail out the mistakes of the banks. | |
| And people don't fundamentally get how immoral it is because it happens in families all the time. | |
| All the time. | |
| Well, we might have made mistakes, but we were doing the best we could with the knowledge that we had. | |
| Hey, if that's your fucking values, then why hit me when I was a kid? | |
| Surely, as a kid, I had much more reason to pull out the I was doing the best I could, but the knowledge I had at the fucking time card. | |
| I was six! | |
| Don't I get that card when I'm six? | |
| How the fuck can you people get it when you're 40 or 50? | |
| It's bullshit. | |
| And I... I'm going to tell people what to do. | |
| Only once have I ever told someone what to do. | |
| But I will tell you that I will not subsidize unapologetic abuse. | |
| I will not subsidize unapologetic abuse. | |
| That is the fundamental root of all controversy, such as there is, such as there is left about me. | |
| I will not subsidize. | |
| Unapologetic abuse. | |
| And that is such a shocking break with tradition, with the cycle of violence. | |
| Abusers abuse children because they never imagine that children have choice as adults about who they see. | |
| Children have less choice even than women throughout history. | |
| Throughout history, women, it was considered acceptable to leave a man for cases of abuse and infidelity. | |
| Before no-fault divorce came in, those were the two very common. | |
| Abuse and infidelity. | |
| Well, sorry that I listened. | |
| Right? | |
| Abuse is a reason to leave a marriage if you cannot reform the abuser. | |
| Abuse is a reason to leave a family of origin if you cannot reform the abuser. | |
| I will not fucking subsidize abuse. | |
| Because I know it comes at the expense of good souls like yours, William. | |
| And I also know that it guarantees the repetition. | |
| Are the banks going to change their ways if they get bailouts? | |
| Of course not. | |
| Are parents going to treat children better if they constantly get bailed out by the guilt and Stockholm Syndrome of the victims? | |
| of course not so if you think that there's any chance to talk to your parents about things and get things moving towards repairville I think it's a great thing to do If you mull it over and you accept the information that you have in your heart of hearts and maybe you feel like there's no possibility, I would accept that too. | |
| It's not your job to fix your relationship with your parents. | |
| It's not your job to fix your relationship with your parents. | |
| I view child abuse as As analogous, not equivalent, analogous to rape. | |
| And we never expect the rape victim to heal the rapist, do we? | |
| No. | |
| We never say, well, he did rape you, young lady, but he was struggling with a lot of stress at the time, and he had a bad childhood, so, you know, and he was doing the best he could with the knowledge he had at the time, Maybe he'd had a few drinks. | |
| So, dear young lady rape victim, it's very important that he become your boyfriend. | |
| Anyone who said that to a rape victim would be considered an inhuman monster. | |
| But we expect children who suffered years of abuse at the hands of parents to just suck it up. | |
| and go over for Mother's Day and stay and stay and stay and stay and stay and stay and stay and stay. | |
| And then if a woman was raped at the age of 15, is she supposed to bring her 15-year-old daughter over to the house of the rapists and leave them alone? | |
| Of course not. | |
| And yet, people who grow up with unapologetic parental abusers, Are supposed to expose the grandchildren to those abusers. | |
| It's in fucking sane. | |
| For anyone who truly wants to end, put a fucking stake through the heart of this endless vampire of the cycle of violence. | |
| For me, for me, it was like, apologize, get therapy, maybe. | |
| Don't do that. | |
| Take a flying, long fucking walk off a short pier. | |
| Get the fuck out of my life, you tumors with legs. | |
| Because I don't have the right to expose myself to your abuse because that echoes it back out into the world and I certainly do not have the right to To expose my child to child abusers. | |
| To people with a documented and recorded history of significant child abuse. | |
| And because I can't expose other people, myself or children, to abusers, I am stuck in my life. | |
| While you're around, I can't move on. | |
| Because you guys are like... | |
| Anathema, you're like sunlight and garlic to vampires with good people who come into my life because they look at this unholy troll clan that birthed me and they say, whoa, oh my god, right? | |
| Don't you feel the kind of stuckness? | |
| Like you can't get to a better place. | |
| You can't move forward. | |
| It's like Groundhog Day over and over again. | |
| Yeah, but I'm insanely persistent. | |
| That's the only thing that's really... | |
| Oh, I get that from the call. | |
| Good for you. | |
| And to me, if people want to say, well, victims of child abuse should just stay with their parents no matter what, I think that's a fine argument. | |
| And the moments that those people strenuously advocate for banning all divorce... | |
| Including drug addiction, rape, violence, neglect, hitting your wife. | |
| If those people who say that adult children must always and forever stay with abusive parents, no matter what those parents do, I will start to take those arguments with even the slightest fucking vestige Of seriousness after those people worked strenuously to ban all forms of divorce, no matter what. | |
| That women have to stay with abusive husbands and husbands have to stay with abusive wives, no matter what. | |
| Then they have a necessary but not sufficient case to make for adult children staying with abusive parents. | |
| Because married people choose each other. | |
| We didn't choose our parents. | |
| Ooh, bad lottery tickets, Steph! | |
| Sorry! | |
| You get a psychotic, paranoid, institutionalized German nutbag lady who'll beat the crap out of you, have a braid of men through the house, and then go insane when you're 12. | |
| Sorry! | |
| Bad luck! | |
| Stay with her forever! | |
| Well, if there was a marriage lottery and you were assigned and forced to marry people, well, As soon as these people start making sure that they go to countries with arranged marriages and agitate for laws that says no matter how abusive the husband or wife, you can never ever leave that marriage. | |
| Well, then I think, okay, so they really are. | |
| So even if relationships are voluntary, you can't leave them. | |
| Then they'd at least be able to say, well, look, I have relationships that even though there's abuse, you shouldn't be able to leave them. | |
| Also, they'd have to advocate that the renouncing of citizenship would be illegal in all countries. | |
| But people don't do that, right? | |
| Because it's only children who have these insane standards of having to stick with abusers, right? | |
| All it does is tell us how guilty people are about how they've treated their children. | |
| I am perfectly content with saying to adult children, You don't have to see your family of origin. | |
| If you love them, fantastic. | |
| I think that's wonderful. | |
| How great could that be? | |
| If they're unrepentant child abusers, yeah, you don't have to see them. | |
| And I'm perfectly comfortable making that stance because I treat my daughter extremely well. | |
| And I have no fears whatsoever that she won't want to see me when she gets older. | |
| I mean, who would be the people most hysterical about granting the right of divorce? | |
| It's the abusive husbands. | |
| All those who were against the voluntary family are family tyrants. | |
| Of course they are. | |
| There are people in the post office, there are people in government agencies who are really competent and will do really well If those agencies or the education system as a whole is privatized, do you think John Taylor Gatto would have a big problem or John Gray would have a big problem getting students if they privatized? | |
| The educational system? | |
| Of course not. | |
| Those people would do enormously well. | |
| It's the shitty teachers, the abusive teachers, the boring teachers, the child-hating teachers, the sadistic teachers, They are terrified of the introduction of voluntarism to a coercive system. | |
| And no healthy good parent would ever be against the introduction of voluntarism to the adult family structure. | |
| If some woman comes up to my wife and says, you know you can divorce your husband at any time, she'd be like, yeah, so? | |
| I love him. | |
| We're with each other until death do us part, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health. | |
| I take that vow as seriously as I take my commitment to truth and honesty, as best as I can. | |
| But if someone comes up to a woman and says, you know, marriage is voluntary, you can leave your husband at any time, and the husband goes insane with anger, all he's doing is confessing he's a shitty husband and an abusive husband. | |
| The people who rail against voluntarism in the family are abusers, plain and simple. | |
| The people who rail against privatizing whatever government agency is on the block are shitty workers, abusive workers, lazy workers, shit for brains workers. | |
| Anyway, this is all so obvious. | |
| It doesn't even need repeating, but I really do want to thank you, William, for... | |
| The honesty and work that you put into this call. | |
| You are an extremely nimble and adept explorer of the self. | |
| That is an incredible strength. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I didn't expect this to go this way. | |
| Wow. | |
| How are you feeling? | |
| I'm drained, but I'm good. | |
| You definitely helped me open up some Mysteries to me about this. | |
| It's huge. | |
| It's huge because I felt so helpless because I didn't know and that appreciation of my rage is huge. | |
| To know that it helped me, it's huge. | |
| Mike, did you want to add anything? | |
| Yeah, I also want to compliment you, William, on your emotional availability throughout this call and the ability to switch in and out of roleplays like that. | |
| That's absolutely fantastic. | |
| I mean, thank you for being so generous and opening up your heart and soul on the show. | |
| And I want you guys to use this. | |
| You have to. | |
| You have to. | |
| Please. | |
| So... | |
| Keep us posted, will you? | |
| Of course. | |
| And if anybody has a great job for William, let us know. | |
| Please, please do. | |
| Please do. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| Well, great job. | |
| Great job again, and thanks again. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you very much, guys. | |
| All right. | |
| All right, Mark is up next, and Mark wrote in... | |
| Mark, follow that! | |
| Hello? | |
| Mark wrote in, and his first question, he's got a couple. | |
| He wants to know, would human history have been more humane if there had been no religion? | |
| What would happen if we removed religion from the world today? | |
| Do you think it would be a better place? | |
| Could I ask you real quick about the previous talk? | |
| Yes. | |
| Why the Senator Palpatine approach? | |
| Oh, the embrace your hatred kind of thing? | |
| Yes. | |
| Is that necessary? | |
| I'm just curious. | |
| I don't know what the word necessary means in this situation. | |
| Is that the only way to approach these type of childhood issues? | |
| What would you do? | |
| I'm asking you. | |
| No, no. | |
| Listen, if you have an issue with what happened, you must feel that there's an alternative, right? | |
| No, no. | |
| I'm actually curious because I went through the same thing and hate did solve my problem, but I kind of regret Using hate in a way, I mean, I think it worked, but I'm curious if it's necessary. | |
| Like, I try to think it's not necessary. | |
| I don't know what you mean by necessary, though. | |
| Necessary. | |
| Necessary for what? | |
| To overcome all this childhood issue. | |
| I didn't say that hatred would have him overcome all his childhood issues, did I? No, but letting it out, and then the problem I have with it is that, okay, so he's going to I don't know how to explain it. | |
| I used to hate my mother a lot, and I really made a big deal about it, but now I just let it go. | |
| I mean, I understand her. | |
| She was terrible. | |
| She destroyed me, but what is hate and anger going to do for me? | |
| How did she destroy you? | |
| Well, you know, childhood, the same story that everybody... | |
| No, no. | |
| Don't tell me I know when I just asked you a question, right? | |
| Oh, wow. | |
| How do I get to Bracebridge? | |
| Well, you know. | |
| It's like, no, I don't. | |
| I actually wanted to be brief with this question so I could ask you the other stuff. | |
| No, no, no, no, no. | |
| This is not a brief question. | |
| And I don't mind. | |
| We'll spend time on this. | |
| That's totally fine with me. | |
| So how did your mother destroy you? | |
| She was very abusive with me. | |
| She kept telling me that I was a problem, that I was ruining her life by being a problematic kid. | |
| Not getting good grades, you know, comparing me with other kids. | |
| Look, everybody gets good grades and you don't. | |
| Like, you know, that sort of... | |
| Wait, what else? | |
| Because you like... | |
| I bet you she didn't like you comparing her with other parents though, right? | |
| Oh, no. | |
| It drove me crazy, right? | |
| But I believed it. | |
| You know, when you're a kid, you feel that you are a fucking problem, you know? | |
| No. | |
| No, I don't know that. | |
| I think it's adaptive, and it's a great survival mechanism to pretend to believe in the justice of your parents' irrational attacks on you, for sure. | |
| It's a great survival mechanism because it doesn't provoke further attacks, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| You know, like dogs, when the bigger dog gets the little dog on the ground, the little dog goes limp, right? | |
| What's that? | |
| Can you repeat that? | |
| When the big dog gets the little dog on the ground, the little dog goes limp, so it doesn't get its throne torn out. | |
| It complies because it's smaller and it's beaten. | |
| And children comply with their parents' insanity or abuse if it's occurring because they're smaller and dependent, not because they agree with it. | |
| It's just that's the best survival strategy for getting through the situation. | |
| Of course, I didn't choose to agree with it. | |
| It just seemed logical at that point. | |
| I didn't have any... | |
| I mean, when you're six, seven, you don't really have a... | |
| Yes. | |
| Well, I'll tell you this. | |
| I adapted to my mother's abuse, but I didn't agree with it. | |
| I didn't think that she was like a just and good person. | |
| Well, I did believe it for a couple of years. | |
| All right. | |
| And that just means that it may have been more extreme or intrusive, or it may have been more dangerous, or there may have been more people around who supported your mother. | |
| Not really. | |
| I just thought, well, she's the adult. | |
| I'm a freaking problem, you know, and that makes you really sad. | |
| Okay, but what did she do rather than what did she say? | |
| Was there spanking? | |
| See, spanking is very, not really, but a lot of hair pulling and a lot of, you know, anger, like filled with anger complaints. | |
| Like, why did you do that? | |
| What, you know, but really angry, like we get scared angry. | |
| But there wasn't much besides the constant, every freaking day, you're the worst child, I hate you, and you're the reason why I'm unhappy. | |
| Oh my God, are you kidding me? | |
| She said she hated you, you're the worst child, and you were the reason that she was unhappy. | |
| Yeah, I was the problem. | |
| And I believe that, which is messed up. | |
| I'm so sorry. | |
| Well, look, every day, that's... | |
| And of course, that threatens the bond, right? | |
| That threatens the bond, which is like, I could just drop you off at a street corner and say, fuck you, kid, because you're this close from being abandoned, right? | |
| Oh, well, she did it a bunch of times just to make me feel... | |
| Okay, don't laugh at this. | |
| This is not a fucking cute story. | |
| And I'm sorry to be abrupt with you, but you're inviting me to find this funny. | |
| Well, the thing is, I've gone through this so many times that it doesn't affect me... | |
| Please, please, don't sell me this. | |
| Okay, so what is it? | |
| I'm so integrated, I'm invulnerable stuff. | |
| I mean, this is not valid. | |
| I'm not saying I'm invulnerable. | |
| I'm just saying, like, I don't, I don't know why I don't see such, I mean, it's messed up if the kid tells me that that happened to him, but I just try not to, I don't know. | |
| I guess I just stopped feeling sad about what happened to me. | |
| Okay, well what does that mean? | |
| Did you go through a lot of therapy? | |
| No, I just, I didn't talk to her for like five years after I moved out and then I realized, why am I even doing this? | |
| She can't do anything to me. | |
| Why am I angry at her, avoiding her? | |
| So I just stopped caring. | |
| I'm not going to go, oh mom, how are you? | |
| I love you, right? | |
| But I'm not going to avoid her and tell her you were a monster. | |
| But I think when you don't talk to her, you weren't avoiding her, right? | |
| I was, because she, the thing is, she was very, I don't know if you would call it bipolar, I don't think it qualifies, but she would, you know, get really angry at me, and then the same day at night, she would cry and apologize, oh my god, I'm so sorry, I'm never doing this again, and the next day, same thing, right off the bat, you know? | |
| Yeah, I mean, you can say bipolar, I just say asshole. | |
| Yeah, well... | |
| You know, like, bipolar, look, I'm not a doctor, I'm not a psychiatrist or any of that kind of stuff, but that's just an asshole, or a bitch, frankly. | |
| You know, like, if you feel bad about something, stop fucking doing it. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But don't be this, like, because this is what abusers do, right? | |
| The guy who beats up his wife and then brings her flowers, I'm so sorry. | |
| You can see this in A Streetcar Named Desire after Stanley Kowalski is abusive, he... | |
| I love you, Stella! | |
| Bipolar is just something that's invented so that assholes sound medical, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| In my opinion. | |
| I could be wrong. | |
| Maybe there's some big giant breakthrough just around the corner that makes me completely wrong, but this is where I stand at the moment. | |
| So, how are you avoiding your mom? | |
| Like, I don't talk to my mom. | |
| I don't avoid her. | |
| We're not walking down the same street and I dive into the sewer or something. | |
| I mean, I'm not avoiding her. | |
| The thing is, I moved to the US and she stayed in South America, Peru. | |
| So she would try to call me to apologize and I was like, no way. | |
| You're not going to apologize again. | |
| I don't need to hear that shit, right? | |
| Yeah, she already apologized hundreds of times and it didn't change anything, right? | |
| Yeah, so I just avoided every contact because it didn't make sense to me. | |
| I had nothing else to hear. | |
| Okay, so what changed? | |
| I just realized that I was putting effort into avoiding her when I shouldn't even give her that effort of avoiding her. | |
| What? | |
| She wasn't worth my... | |
| Okay, hang on, hang on. | |
| No, come on, come on. | |
| Come on. | |
| So you're back in contact with her now, right? | |
| I mean, yeah. | |
| She can call me anytime and we can talk. | |
| Okay, but this idea that you're putting effort into continuing to avoid her, let's say, to take an extreme example, just for the point, right? | |
| So let's say there's some guy in Milwaukee who says, Steph, if you ever come back to Milwaukee, I'm going to break your kneecaps, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| I don't really want to go to Milwaukee. | |
| There's a whole other planet out there to explore, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| Am I spending a lot of energy not going to Milwaukee? | |
| Yeah, but if your boss is calling you every day to tell you that he's going to do that to you and you don't pick up and you don't answer, you are trying to avoid them. | |
| Right? | |
| Wait, so your mom was calling you every day for five years? | |
| Not every day, but you know, every two months she would try to do, forgive me, not forgive me, because she never... | |
| Well, why don't you just block the number? | |
| Well... | |
| I didn't have a phone. | |
| She would just call me and, you know, your mom just called you. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. | |
| I didn't have a phone? | |
| My mother just called me? | |
| I don't understand. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I lived with my dad. | |
| I was 16. | |
| She called to the house and my dad would tell me, Harry, your mom wants to talk to you. | |
| Oh, wait. | |
| So you were a kid when you didn't talk to her? | |
| Yes, of course. | |
| When I was 16. | |
| And did your dad know why you didn't talk to her? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And why did your dad hand you the phone then? | |
| Why didn't your dad say, look, he doesn't want to talk to you? | |
| Click. | |
| Some people like to wash their hands. | |
| I'm sorry, what? | |
| Some people prefer to wash their hands and just, you know, let other people deal with the situation, I guess. | |
| Well, no, not when the person in question is a child who's been abused. | |
| Oh, that's my dad. | |
| Right? | |
| I mean, that's not what we do, right? | |
| If some kid gets yanked into a windowless van, we don't say, well, you know, the kid can probably chew through the ropes and get out, right? | |
| Yep, well... | |
| That is the case. | |
| What is the case? | |
| My dad always let me handle the situation because he didn't want to get involved. | |
| No, your dad wanted you to handle the situation because he didn't know how to handle your mom, right? | |
| So he as an adult couldn't handle your mom, which is I guess why they split up. | |
| But he as an adult couldn't handle your mom, but you as a 16 year old are somehow supposed to be able to do it, right? | |
| Yeah, I mean, I know it doesn't make any sense, but that's what happened. | |
| Oh no, it makes perfect sense for a fucking coward. | |
| Yeah, it does. | |
| Here, you go deal with your mom. | |
| You're 16, you should be able to handle it. | |
| Yeah, well, that happened even when I was younger, so... | |
| Alright. | |
| Well, it doesn't sound like you particularly want to explore this, which is fine, but you had another question? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Alright. | |
| So, sorry about that. | |
| It's just that, I mean, it's actually curious because you're trying to dig in this, but I'm not really emotional about it. | |
| I don't know if it's blocking it or what, but I simply don't feel hurt by my past. | |
| I just, whatever. | |
| Like, we all have shit, so why let it bother me now? | |
| That's really why I act this way. | |
| And how's your life overall? | |
| Oh, I'm super happy. | |
| I just look at my past and I laugh at it because it's really where I was born. | |
| They didn't do anything besides, you know, having sex and having a kid to bring me and I went through all that shit and now I'm here. | |
| Why should I give a shit about that? | |
| That's true. | |
| And are you married? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| I'm 21. | |
| And do you want to get married? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, it sounds like a scary, you know, you can really mess up, but I do want to do it. | |
| I don't believe... | |
| And why do you think you haven't gotten married yet? | |
| Because I haven't found anybody that qualifies, that isn't really, you know, concerned about not messing up. | |
| Like... | |
| Because I'll tell you this, man. | |
| What? | |
| If... | |
| I'm just telling you this, this is not any kind of philosophical argument. | |
| Okay. | |
| I'm just telling you that if I was some... | |
| Woman you found attractive and you were talking about your history in this kind of way, I would not marry you. | |
| I wouldn't even date you. | |
| Really? | |
| Why? | |
| Because you would be emotionally unavailable. | |
| I don't... | |
| I haven't had that issue actually. | |
| You are laughing about your mother saying she wished you were dead every day. | |
| But I've cried for years. | |
| Don't tell me that your emotions are available to either yourself or another human being. | |
| That is some traumatic shit. | |
| And you can say, well, I just decided to not feel it and to will it away and to wish it away. | |
| And I don't believe you. | |
| No, I don't wish it away. | |
| It's just what it is. | |
| But it doesn't make sense to me to invest myself in something that I had no control over. | |
| That's all it is. | |
| You laughed about it. | |
| That's a defense mechanism. | |
| I laugh about everything. | |
| Well, some things aren't funny. | |
| And that's what I mean by emotionally unavailable. | |
| Like if you're giggling at a Holocaust museum and you say, well, I find everything funny, I'd say that's fucked up. | |
| And your childhood was kind of like a little Holocaust there, brother. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | |
| So laughing about it is fucked up. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And that's what I mean when I say, you say you want to get married, you say that you're super happy, but you're not married. | |
| I assume you have no prospects of getting married anytime soon. | |
| You can't find the right person. | |
| No, I actually was going to, I mean, I dated somebody and I was really into her, but then, I mean, I didn't, like, what was it? | |
| No, it just didn't, something seemed, something was off, like she lied a lot, so I kind of, you know, it just died out, but I was going to do it. | |
| What do you mean she lied a lot? | |
| She had the habit of bullshitting. | |
| Like, she would say, oh, I'm home. | |
| She was in a party. | |
| So that really... | |
| Dude, you get... | |
| Oh my God, do you not see this? | |
| What? | |
| Please, tell me. | |
| You are falsifying your history to me and you're falsifying your current emotional experience to me and then you complain that you had a girlfriend who lied a lot. | |
| Okay, what am I lying about? | |
| I'm curious because I've always been convinced. | |
| I don't think you are curious. | |
| I think that you have sealed this stuff off. | |
| You said, I'm not going to deal with the trauma. | |
| You've buried it. | |
| You've buried, I imagine, a good portion of yourself in the process, at least the part that can be emotionally sensitive and available to other people. | |
| And I think you're doing a lot of damage to other people, frankly, because you're saying, well, I don't know why these people are whining about their history. | |
| I don't know why this guy is getting so upset. | |
| You can just snap your fingers, decide not to be upset by it, and move on. | |
| Okay, so that's bad. | |
| Yeah, it's bad. | |
| But do you think everybody who's traumatized by childhood has the capacity or should do just what you do, snap your fingers, turn off the emotions and move on and laugh about it? | |
| I just think there's no reason to hold on to it. | |
| That's all I think. | |
| No, but even the language is annoying. | |
| What? | |
| You don't hold on to trauma. | |
| If somebody has arthritis, do you say that they're holding on to the pain in their joints? | |
| If somebody has a chronic back injury that causes them agony, are you saying they're holding on to the pain? | |
| No. | |
| The pain is spontaneously occurring as the result of what's happened to them. | |
| They're not holding on to it. | |
| It's what is happening for them. | |
| I don't know what trauma I may have. | |
| I was referring to the whole story and the feelings. | |
| Are you telling me you don't know what trauma you might have? | |
| Did you not listen to what you were telling me about your childhood? | |
| No, I was listening to you, not myself. | |
| Do you have any idea what you said to me about your childhood? | |
| I repeat it back to you once already. | |
| Okay, that it was terrible for me, that I got destroyed. | |
| That's what I said. | |
| You said you were destroyed by your mother. | |
| Yes, I was. | |
| Right. | |
| And then you just told me, I don't know what trauma I might have. | |
| I don't. | |
| I don't. | |
| I mean, I have suspicions, right, but not something clear. | |
| No, it's very clear. | |
| Your mother told you, you are the worst child in the world, she wished you were dead, and you are the source of all unhappiness. | |
| And then I talked to someone who connected with childhood emotions, and that bothered you. | |
| No, it didn't bother me. | |
| I'm not saying that. | |
| What I was saying was that I'm curious about how you tempted him to really open up about telling his dad what he felt. | |
| And I was curious if that was the only way, because I did that too. | |
| I was extremely vocal about it, and I said, don't talk to me ever again. | |
| I don't want to see you in my life. | |
| I did the same thing, and I wonder if that's the only way. | |
| That was my only question. | |
| Well, I think that... | |
| I'm going to just take you at face value. | |
| You're not unhappy. | |
| Your life is super happy. | |
| Everything's going great. | |
| And you found some way to deal with your history. | |
| And so I think that, but the call bothers me. | |
| So I don't think I'll be able to have a productive conversation with you about your other questions. | |
| But I'm not going to tell you you're unhappy if you tell me that you're not. | |
| I mean, I'm not going to override what you're telling me. | |
| So sorry about that. | |
| But Mike, if we could move on to the next caller, that would be great. | |
| Alright, up next is Diego. | |
| And Diego wrote in and said that he often fuels moments of inspiration and focus when he has privacy late at night. | |
| But he can't keep that mentality going during the day when he's engaged in social situations and personal activities. | |
| I was wondering if you had any thoughts on why that might be the case and what he can do to regain that clarity and focus. | |
| You're a night owl. | |
| You're a night thinker, a night inspirationalist. | |
| Yeah, can you hear me? | |
| Yeah, yeah, go ahead. | |
| Yeah, I'm kind of like that. | |
| And what bothers me about it is I get really inspired and I... And I make all these conclusions about what I'm going to do and what I should do. | |
| But as soon as I start my day and, you know, start interacting with people, everything completely changes. | |
| And, you know, I'm just, like, the mechanisms override. | |
| Yeah, it's really interfering with my advancement personally. | |
| Right, right. | |
| And... | |
| What happens if you share your inspirations with the people around you in your waking hours? | |
| I can't. | |
| I feel like people maybe feel they're too big or they will try to put me down. | |
| I'm kind of afraid of doing it. | |
| I feel too vulnerable, I think. | |
| Yeah, I feel like... | |
| People will maybe laugh at them or maybe not take me seriously. | |
| And I've kind of developed an attitude of not trying to care what people think and trying to objectively... | |
| No, no, no, no. | |
| That's not possible. | |
| Yeah, it's not, but I'm trying, you know? | |
| I mean... | |
| No, no, don't try. | |
| Don't try. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Don't try. | |
| Don't try. | |
| Don't try to not care what other people think. | |
| We're social animals. | |
| You're not a cat, right? | |
| Yeah, I agree with you. | |
| You care what people think. | |
| We can't help that. | |
| And we shouldn't try. | |
| But I've had people in the past not believe in me, so, you know... | |
| Well, I didn't say care what everyone thinks, but saying that the goal is to care what nobody thinks or not care what anyone thinks is not realistic, right? | |
| I mean, because if you say, I don't care what people think of me, then you're closing yourself off to love. | |
| Of course, no. | |
| I think I expressed myself wrong. | |
| I mean, I care what you think. | |
| That's why I'm making this call. | |
| So I'm trying to find people... | |
| Okay, good. | |
| I mean, I just wanted to be clear for everyone. | |
| I just had this conversation with someone the other day, but it is important. | |
| We are incredibly vulnerable to what the people around us think. | |
| And that is both a strength and a weakness. | |
| It is a strength if we're surrounded by good people. | |
| It is a weakness if we're surrounded by bad people. | |
| And the reason I'm hammering this point, and I get that you said that's not what you meant, but for the other listeners, please, God, do not think that you can make yourself invulnerable to other people's opinions. | |
| Because that will not give you the emotional sensitivity to make sure you're surrounded by good people. | |
| Because any time you're bothered by what some asshole says around you, you'll blame yourself and not assign the responsibility to the asshole, right? | |
| It's like saying, well, I could be around people who either give me massages or punch me in the face. | |
| Either one is fine with me. | |
| I don't care. | |
| It's like, I don't think that's a very healthy perspective, right? | |
| Repeat after me. | |
| We are always going to be vulnerable to what people think of us. | |
| I'm incredibly vulnerable. | |
| To what my daughter thinks of me, to what Mike thinks of me, to what my wife thinks of me, to what my other friends think of me. | |
| I am incredibly vulnerable to that. | |
| If Mike says, Steph, you did something wrong, I'm like, ooh, really? | |
| Okay, right? | |
| If my daughter's upset with me, it means a lot to me. | |
| If my wife is upset with me, it means a huge amount to me. | |
| So this sort of Howard Rourke indifference to the general opinions of others is not how our social brain works. | |
| But anyway, but sorry, go ahead. | |
| Yeah, I guess you get to a good point. | |
| I think my problem, better said, is I care about what people that I don't respect think of me. | |
| So people that I don't think are good people, sometimes I care what everyone thinks about me, so I don't want that. | |
| I want to be able to Distance myself from people whose opinions wouldn't matter, you know? | |
| Okay, so you said that there are people in your life that you don't respect? | |
| Yeah, definitely. | |
| Such as who? | |
| I mean, I respect selectively. | |
| I have friends for different things in a way, so I respect them in some way, but I agree with you, we're social people. | |
| That's the foghorn, right? | |
| Which is, you said something very simple, I asked you, I reflected it back to you, and now you're hyper-complicating it, right? | |
| Yeah, I guess it is complicated. | |
| Okay, so stop doing that, because life is short, so don't fog me, bro. | |
| Don't fog me, bro! | |
| Yeah, yeah. | |
| Do you have people in your life that you do not respect? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay, why are they in your life? | |
| Because they live around me, and I see them, I mean, basically. | |
| You see them, what, going to their cars, barbecuing in their backyards, what, playing with their dogs? | |
| What do you mean you see them? | |
| I guess, I mean, it's a combination of all of these, but some of them are in my group of friends, family. | |
| Some of them are in my group of friends. | |
| See, there we're getting somewhere, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Why are people you do not respect In what you call your group of friends? | |
| Actually, like one year ago, I kind of left that group in one of my inspirations at night, you know, kind of that stuff. | |
| But then after a while, I've kind of... | |
| Decided that if I just take everyone out of my life, I'm going to be alone. | |
| So kind of adapting, knowing what their virtues are, what's wrong with them, and just... | |
| Okay. | |
| Wait, wait, wait. | |
| You are one slippery mofo. | |
| I'm just telling you that. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Can I tell you why? | |
| Yeah. | |
| There are people in my life I don't respect. | |
| Where are they? | |
| Oh, just around. | |
| Oh, really? | |
| In the neighborhood? | |
| No, they're in my circle of friends. | |
| Oh, so you have people in your circle of friends who you don't respect. | |
| Why? | |
| Well, if I get rid of everyone I don't respect, I will be completely alone, right? | |
| So they're not in your circle of friends. | |
| They are your circle of friends. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Yeah, they are. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| So all of your circle of friends are composed of people you do not respect. | |
| I mean, do not respect. | |
| I think it's too strong of a statement. | |
| Isn't it? | |
| That's your statement, not mine. | |
| Yeah, of course, but it's not black and white. | |
| I would like to disagree with my former self of 35 seconds ago and say that he was exaggerating the case. | |
| I have now stepped up with some additional fog to cover the enemy. | |
| Yeah, I guess. | |
| I mean, I try not to look at it black and white, more of like gray and make judgments with everyone. | |
| You did describe it as black and white. | |
| You said, I don't respect these people. | |
| Yeah, yeah, sorry. | |
| I have trouble expressing this sometimes. | |
| What is your question? | |
| How do I have inspiration with people I have to hide my inspiration from? | |
| You can't. | |
| Because we all conform to the people around us. | |
| We all conform to the people around us, which is why it's so important to To choose your companions wisely, right? | |
| So if... | |
| If people around you are excited by your creativity, then you will be very creative around those people. | |
| If people around you roll their eyes and sneer at your creativity, you will not be creative around them. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| If you ever watch these auditions for these X Factors and Idol shows... | |
| Somebody starts singing, and people are like, wow, they're good. | |
| And then they sing, and then they hit some note, and they cheer, and then they really go for it, right? | |
| Now, if everybody starts booing the singer who comes on the stage, the moment they start and they boo louder and louder, how well can the singer sing? | |
| Not good at all. | |
| Not well. | |
| Not well. | |
| Not well at all. | |
| Freddie Mercury said, I can only sing as well as the crowd wants me to. | |
| So you don't think there's a way to kind of adapt? | |
| I mean, not all the way. | |
| I mean, you're right. | |
| I shouldn't totally try to submerge myself in this society, but kind of middle ground. | |
| What middle ground? | |
| Like still... | |
| Do the people around you, God Almighty, do the people around you welcome your creativity and your inspiration? | |
| Not really. | |
| Oh, come on. | |
| My God Almighty, this is like trying to nail Jell-O to a wall. | |
| No. | |
| Yes or no? | |
| No. | |
| Okay. | |
| Now, what is not really? | |
| I guess they don't say it overtly, like, I don't like what you do, but, you know, it's... | |
| They don't respond positively to it. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Okay. | |
| So, can you be creative around people who respond negatively or indifferently, which is the same thing? | |
| Can you be creative around people who are indifferent to your creativity or who don't like it? | |
| Sorry, again? | |
| Sorry? | |
| Can I be indifferent? | |
| Can you be creative around people who don't like your creativity? | |
| I mean... | |
| I guess... | |
| Have you found a way to do it yet? | |
| I'm trying to. | |
| Have you found a way to do it yet? | |
| No. | |
| Okay. | |
| You know there's only one way to do it, which is to be creative in front of these people. | |
| Have you ever tried that before? | |
| Yeah, but I guess not fully, not at full throttle, you know. | |
| Of course not full throttle. | |
| Of course you try something first, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay. | |
| Has there been any positive responses to your creativity as you have expressed it to this group? | |
| Yeah, there has been sometimes, yeah. | |
| But sometimes... | |
| Then what is your question? | |
| Be creative with the people who value your creativity. | |
| Don't with the people who don't. | |
| I don't even know what we're talking about now. | |
| I thought none of your friends were worthy of your respect or responded to your creativity. | |
| I mean, not specifically my friends, other people in my life, I think. | |
| I mean, it's very little. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| I'm going to give you one more round because this is just too annoying. | |
| I'm sorry. | |
| This is just too confusing. | |
| I don't know what the hell you're talking about. | |
| It just feels like every time we get to a conclusion, you change the story. | |
| And that could be because I can't hear what you're saying or it could be because you're just defensive or whatever, right? | |
| But the simple answer is if there are some people you can be creative around and some people you can't, then be creative with the creative people and don't worry about the other people, right? | |
| I don't do podcasts when I'm at my dentist because she's about Cleaning my teeth, not listening to my show. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, and Mike doesn't do my dentistry because, you know, he's got shaky hands. | |
| So, okay, so I think we solved that one. | |
| Mike, who's the next four? | |
| I don't think we did solve, but I think that the guy is, but I'm not getting enough straight answers to be able to work with it. | |
| So, it's like I'm a doctor that says, oh, it really hurts here. | |
| And he points to his elbow. | |
| I say, oh, it hurts at the elbow. | |
| No, the other elbow. | |
| Oh, is it the other elbow? | |
| No, it's my knee. | |
| What? | |
| Is it your first elbow? | |
| No, no, I said my knee. | |
| Oh, I checked your knee. | |
| Okay, no, no, it's my foot. | |
| Now it doesn't hurt at all. | |
| It's like, okay, sorry, I've got to go to a patient who's going to tell me the truth. | |
| But anyway, if we can move on to the next column. | |
| Alright, Chris writes in and says, My question is about my presence in my brother's life, and especially the lives of his children, ages 3 and 5, to whom I am very close. | |
| Could you please assist me in coming to some healthy understanding of my responsibilities to these children, who I'm related to but are not mine, kids I would like to say from the hell world that raised their parents and me. | |
| But they are not my children, so in a way I'm interfering. | |
| Thank you for your time, Steph. | |
| What is your issue with your brother's parenting? | |
| Okay, first, sorry. | |
| Thank you for having me on. | |
| Oh, you're welcome. | |
| Thank you for your concern for your brothers and sister-in-law's kids. | |
| Happily. | |
| We should do the family background first, just so that there's a context in you. | |
| Can understand where... | |
| Instead of going backwards from my concern directly to the kids, I could just give a context of my brother and me first. | |
| Is that okay? | |
| Yeah, please do. | |
| Okay, thanks. | |
| So I'm 46. | |
| Born in 60... | |
| You know, it's funny. | |
| I used to think that was really old. | |
| I know. | |
| I'm 47. | |
| I'm going to be 48 this year. | |
| Anyway. | |
| I used to think it was impossible, and now I know it's really old. | |
| How do people stand being in their late 40s? | |
| My God! | |
| It's like, well, after what happened last year, I'm just happy to be 47. | |
| Anyway, go on. | |
| Selective delusion. | |
| Okay. | |
| 46. | |
| I was born in 68. | |
| I'm the older brother. | |
| For the first four years of my life, it was just my mother and me. | |
| My bio dad... | |
| Sorry, for the first how many? | |
| First four years. | |
| Right. | |
| Right. | |
| Just my mother and me. | |
| My bio dad was not there. | |
| I don't know the story of why he left or why he didn't... | |
| Why don't you know the story? | |
| Because my... | |
| Because my asking is not welcome. | |
| So I've brought it up twice. | |
| In my life with my mother. | |
| The first time after a session of psychiatry when I was in grade six. | |
| When eventually my questioning whether the man that my mother married when I was four who adopted me and then they had a kid, my brother. | |
| There was lots of fighting in the family and lots of not getting along. | |
| I'm so sorry. | |
| I'm so sorry. | |
| I just want to make sure I got that. | |
| So after you were four, your mom met the guy she had a stepbrother with. | |
| Well, they married when I was four or just turning four. | |
| So they dated a little while before that. | |
| How long did they date? | |
| Not long. | |
| A while? | |
| I can't remember. | |
| Sorry to interrupt. | |
| The reason why I'm just trying to piece this together, and I apologize for interrupting, is that you said until you were four, it was just you and your mom. | |
| Right. | |
| But she was engaged, right? | |
| So you must have met your stepdad before they got married, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Sloppy language on my part. | |
| No, no, no. | |
| It's not sloppy. | |
| It may not be sloppy at all. | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| I can't remember the beginning of their dating exactly, so I can't say how many months it was or whatever, but it couldn't have been more than a year, I don't think. | |
| And I remember going by plane to visit him. | |
| He lived in a nearby town, but we had to fly there to visit. | |
| So I remember going to visit him with her. | |
| A bunch of times. | |
| I don't know for how long. | |
| But I don't think it was, it wasn't more than a year, I don't think. | |
| And then they got married and soon after, well, after they got married, we moved to a new house. | |
| And where did they meet? | |
| I'm not sure. | |
| I mean, it's a long way to go. | |
| You got to fly to meet a guy, right? | |
| I know. | |
| This is before internet dating, right? | |
| So I'm just kind of curious. | |
| I know. | |
| And huge swaths of this story don't make any sense to me. | |
| Like, what's the problem in talking about it? | |
| People have such happy stories about their, this is how we met, and This family story and that family story. | |
| Well, it probably means that it's something she wasn't proud of. | |
| Maybe she put an ad in a newspaper, which was sort of the old way you used to do dating. | |
| Maybe. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I think it was a group of friends thing, but I really don't know the circumstances. | |
| I don't know what attracted you to each other in the first place. | |
| What did you like about each other? | |
| What do you like about each other now? | |
| None of that. | |
| Like, none. | |
| Oh, I can tell you that. | |
| No, I can tell you that. | |
| Okay. | |
| Don't I sound like an arrogant prick? | |
| Maybe I am, but I think I can tell you why they married. | |
| Because of my brother? | |
| Well, it could be. | |
| It could be that she got pregnant. | |
| Is the date suspicious? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Oh, so she got pregnant and then they got married? | |
| Yeah, I don't know. | |
| It's close. | |
| It's like right in there. | |
| Either that or they got married and then they got immediately pregnant, but... | |
| I was already there, so it happened before. | |
| Let me take a while to ask guests here. | |
| Yes, please. | |
| Is your stepdad a little bit on the compliance side with your mom? | |
| I don't know if he... | |
| There... | |
| In as much as they've never gotten married, I mean, never gotten divorced, even though I don't think, like, they don't seem to get along. | |
| They don't seem to like each other much. | |
| So not leaving is a form of compliance, but they argue and disagree all the time. | |
| It's not like a... | |
| All right, but she's not, like, she's not the one who wears the pants or anything, right? | |
| In couples that don't have rationality, reason and evidence and win-win negotiation skills, somebody has to become the tyrant, right? | |
| People who can't negotiate end up having to be naggy or bossy or whatever, right? | |
| Yeah, I understand. | |
| It's just that in my experience, it's like the never-ending power struggle for each of them to be that. | |
| They both want to be that. | |
| Right. | |
| But, I don't know, I have distortions, so... | |
| No, no, no, I'm sure you don't. | |
| Look, if you have distortions about your parents' marriage, then there's no truth about anything. | |
| I mean, if you've known them for decades and you still don't have any clue, then you can't, right? | |
| I'll accept it, what you're saying is true. | |
| Like, I know some stories about parts of their past and things like that, but, like, okay, just to get back to the original context, so... | |
| I'm four. | |
| They have my brother. | |
| We've moved to a new house in the nice part of town. | |
| The new dad is... | |
| I've been hyped up to be excited. | |
| You're getting a dad, all of that kind of business. | |
| Was he a good-looking guy? | |
| Yep. | |
| What? | |
| Is your mom gorgeous? | |
| I think she... | |
| Yes, I think she was attractive. | |
| But my experience of her is that she's very abusive, so... | |
| No, it's just, I mean, why would a good-looking woman hook up with a single mom? | |
| I guess she is. | |
| So she was hot, right? | |
| I guess so. | |
| All right. | |
| I guess so. | |
| Steph, when I say it was just me and her for the first four years, what I mean is that was their... | |
| The boyfriend's not catching her anger and frustration. | |
| You can have a family system where the vomiting and all the dreck goes into one of the people in the constellation. | |
| I'm the person in the constellation that the crap goes to. | |
| Until him and my brother came along, it only went to me full brunt. | |
| I was just a baby and a toddler. | |
| Sorry, it's all very abstract. | |
| What did she do that was destructive? | |
| She's angry. | |
| A lot of your first caller resonated with me if you switched it from the dad to the mother tonight. | |
| His father was angry and spanking him and Rage and stuff. | |
| Me, the spanking was from my mother. | |
| Right. | |
| And she would She would probably say, oh, I'm not the kind of mother that would swat her kid on the behind in a supermarket or something like that. | |
| But the spankings took place on a particular spot at the base of the staircase. | |
| Pants down, bare bottom, spanking. | |
| And then escalating, if that wasn't working or I was crying loud or whatever, to the hairbrush with the wire bristles on it. | |
| And she'd hit you with the bristle end? | |
| Yeah. | |
| God, that's fucking painful. | |
| Oh my God. | |
| Yes. | |
| And it's... | |
| Like, that's like torture. | |
| Yes, exactly. | |
| But it's mental torture because it's like, what the fuck? | |
| What the fuck are you doing? | |
| I'm a kid. | |
| Like, it doesn't... | |
| The cognitive... | |
| It makes no sense at all. | |
| No, it makes perfect sense if you're a sadistic bitch, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Well, exactly. | |
| So is she attractive? | |
| Not to me, but... | |
| No, but physically. | |
| I'm just talking about physically. | |
| I guess she... | |
| Penis, not soul, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So for the first couple of years of the new setup, new marriage, new dad and everything, we're going on the momentum of enthusiasm. | |
| And it was okay. | |
| It was good. | |
| I remember being happy that we had a new house and I had a dad and I had this little brother who I loved. | |
| It was all good. | |
| Then the bickering and fighting started. | |
| Hang on. | |
| All good. | |
| Big statement when you're living with a woman who's sadistic, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| Or who has sadistic tendencies. | |
| Okay. | |
| I remember that the bickering... | |
| The bickering and constant strain and constant threat that came after that first little, what I just called all good. | |
| I meant all good relatively, so again, I'm being sloppy. | |
| They got married. | |
| We moved to the new house. | |
| I was happy to get a little brother. | |
| I had a family. | |
| I was psyched. | |
| And then it started to turn shitty. | |
| No, no. | |
| Listen, you keep saying you're being imprecise, and you're not. | |
| Okay. | |
| You're being defensive towards your mom, right? | |
| Because you're sort of saying, well, look, she got married, and everything was great. | |
| Which is to say that it was her environment that made her bad or good, not her. | |
| It's taking away her choice, her will, her moral responsibility. | |
| I guess maybe when you say it that way, I guess maybe I'm seeing it like that because maybe it was like a break for a while. | |
| Well, or maybe, you know, you're still four at this time. | |
| Maybe this is just a family story. | |
| Maybe this is just what you were told. | |
| Maybe your mom had different hormones when she was pregnant. | |
| I don't know. | |
| Whatever, right? | |
| But the reality is that, you know, because like my mom moved us from, like when I was 11, moved us from England to Canada. | |
| I never knew why. | |
| I figured it out years later. | |
| It's because we were getting old enough to talk about the abuse. | |
| But I asked her, why did we move? | |
| And she just said, basically, well, I just wanted a new start, right? | |
| And what she basically meant was she hoped she'd be a better person in a new country. | |
| You know, but unfortunately The bitch got a passport too, right? | |
| Not just my mom, but my mom's bitch got the passport too and knew where we were staying. | |
| No matter where you go, there you are. | |
| And there's this debt for people who don't take moral responsibility. | |
| I'm not putting you in this category. | |
| For people who don't take moral responsibility, there's a great mysterious question as to why their lives have turned out so shitty. | |
| Why do their parents, sorry, why do their kids not love them? | |
| Why are they divorced? | |
| Why did they get fired? | |
| Why don't they have any money? | |
| For people who don't take responsibility for their own lives, there's this giant mystery question. | |
| Why is my life so shitty? | |
| And like all people who don't take moral responsibility, there has to be a scapegoat, right? | |
| Maybe that scapegoat is white people. | |
| Maybe that scapegoat is some internet philosopher. | |
| Maybe that scapegoat is the environment. | |
| Maybe it's the ex-husband. | |
| Maybe it's the government. | |
| Maybe you don't know what. | |
| It's got to be someone or something. | |
| Because if I don't take moral responsibility, somebody's got to be to blame for the shit my life turns into, right? | |
| And so there probably was a story like, well, when we got married, well, everything was great, right? | |
| Okay. | |
| It was the guy who left me, and because I was a single mom, and that was the problem, right? | |
| I guess. | |
| But, like, that doesn't even get acknowledged or talked about, right? | |
| It's just the new guy adopted me, and then that's the story. | |
| So the reality of me, I have... | |
| My act... | |
| I'm telling you that right now, but if they were in the room, they'd be saying, that doesn't matter, why are you still going on about this? | |
| But I can't even give the guy who adopted me, I can't even give him the appreciation that you might if you had an open family, emotionally, for saying, wow, thanks a lot for coming along and marrying a single mom. | |
| Like, I needed a man to come in because she fucking spanked the shit out of me. | |
| So thank you. | |
| But I can't even acknowledge that he did that because we have to pretend that that never happened. | |
| And we have to pretend that he's actually my dad. | |
| So... | |
| What do you mean? | |
| We've got to pretend that the asserted reality... | |
| You've got to pretend like he's your biological dad? | |
| Yeah, you've got to pretend that the asserted reality... | |
| Sorry, no, wait, wait. | |
| You have to pretend that he's your biological dad? | |
| I had to pretend like he is my dad. | |
| And I was told that... | |
| But not your biological dad. | |
| When I was four, I didn't understand the difference yet. | |
| No, but now, right? | |
| Now I know. | |
| No, but now you can call him, like, you don't have to pretend he's your biological dad. | |
| He's your dad, you can use the word and all that, right? | |
| I have to pretend... | |
| Well, sorry. | |
| To myself? | |
| No. | |
| Not until I was in grade 6 and I went to the psychiatrist and I figured it out. | |
| And finally he got me to say, yeah, I don't think this guy is really my dad. | |
| And he's like, what do you mean? | |
| And I was like, well, I started hearing about how the sex works in the schoolyard. | |
| And this guy came along later, so that couldn't have produced me. | |
| So something else must have happened. | |
| Oh, so you figured it out rather than being told by your mom. | |
| Exactly. | |
| And by that time... | |
| Well, that's not very healthy now, is it? | |
| It sucked. | |
| But leading up to that, there'd been bickering between them, but also lots of fighting between me and my mom because the button pushing and the download of crap and the... | |
| Just to give a... | |
| My relationship with her, just dealing with her on a face-to-face kind of thing, like in a conversation, to describe it, I could make a statement like, the sky is blue, and she would say, not if it's cloudy. | |
| Or I could say, the sky is up, and she would say, not in Australia. | |
| Everything... | |
| Yeah, it's designed to paralyze your cognitive abilities. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Everything was an automatic argument back against me, even if what I was saying made sense. | |
| So that's extremely frustrating. | |
| And when it's unfair, and you know that it doesn't make sense as a kid, And I argued back. | |
| And it just escalated until... | |
| And this would be like, you know, in an after-school type time of day or situation. | |
| Hang on, are you saying that your mom is a woman who has difficulty admitting when she's wrong? | |
| Oh, hell yeah. | |
| Shit, I've never heard of that before. | |
| God, what a bad fortune. | |
| I'm just kidding. | |
| So escalated to the point... | |
| Thank you. | |
| Escalated to the point where... | |
| Either she annoys me until I say something back and then the threats come so that I will capitulate and conform. | |
| Then she gets her win and there's a little jollier I don't know what there. | |
| Or I don't and then it leads to the threats to call my dad at work so that he's gonna be pissed off that he got interrupted and the Then I'm going to have to deal with that when he comes home. | |
| Plus, he's mad at her for not dealing with it herself and bothering him. | |
| So now they're going to get in a fight, which means she's going to be pissed off later, which means it's going to come back to me anyway. | |
| But if I do anything except capitulate, ultimately, whichever way it goes, spanking will be the end. | |
| Oh, so wait. | |
| So your father spanked you instead of your mom? | |
| No, she would do the majority of spanking. | |
| I think he only spanked me maybe once or twice. | |
| But he's very tall. | |
| He's like 6'4", and even as a kid, enormous. | |
| And he's a very intimidating person. | |
| He's a lawyer and very clever. | |
| He has a way of making his personal tone extremely threatening. | |
| In a way that, to a child, it's terrifying. | |
| And my niece now, he's scary to both of them. | |
| He's made friends of theirs, cry at Easter parties. | |
| Intimidation is his mode in the world. | |
| Right. | |
| Well, I'm very sorry about all of that. | |
| I think it's just appalling. | |
| And I'm sorry that your father didn't stop your mom from hitting you. | |
| I guess if he's an occasional spanker, he does not against it on principle. | |
| Thanks. | |
| I've had moments... | |
| I said this in a call recently. | |
| Hang on. | |
| I said this in a call recently. | |
| I just... | |
| I just... | |
| I really... | |
| I really wish that there was two and a half shreds of masculine assertiveness in this world. | |
| Me too. | |
| You know, I just like, don't hit your fucking kids, women. | |
| Now, I mean, look, there's asshole parents and all of that. | |
| I mean, I get all of that. | |
| And there's asshole dads and it's not confined to women or whatever. | |
| But, you know, these studies of women hitting their kids 930 times, like the men should just like stop the women. | |
| Like, stop it. | |
| No. | |
| Stop it. | |
| Like, no. | |
| Especially women are so sensitive to domestic abuse. | |
| It's like, well, then stop doing it, bitches. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Anyway, um... | |
| So... | |
| Go ahead. | |
| Uh, so... | |
| So I wanted to get out of there. | |
| I wrote my grandmother... | |
| No, no, listen, we've got... | |
| We've taken up a lot of time with background. | |
| Oh, I'm sorry, Steph. | |
| We have to get to the question itself. | |
| So your brother and sister-in-law have kids, right? | |
| Right. | |
| And are they... | |
| And I'm through a series of attempting to get myself out of the quagmire of... | |
| No, no, no. | |
| You're going back in the background. | |
| How are they as parents? | |
| Oh, um... | |
| They're good. | |
| They don't spank their kids. | |
| They don't yell. | |
| Okay, so what's the issue? | |
| The issue is that I'm living at their place. | |
| When you were saying a minute ago, the people who don't have any money and can't create success and they're scratching their head like, what's the big mystery? | |
| Why can't I get this right? | |
| That's me in some ways. | |
| Mostly the financial one. | |
| Yeah, and sometimes the scapegoat is oneself, right? | |
| I mean, but anyway, go ahead. | |
| So I've tried to leave my... | |
| I've tried to defu several times. | |
| I tried to run away as a kid. | |
| I eventually got them to send me to boarding school which was like a lifesaver in high school I went at 14 so I was old enough to go away and it it saved me but it wasn't a complete departure into my own world so everything has been half measures and most recently I was every time I've gone and almost Made it to go and | |
| leave on my own. | |
| My dad will show up somehow, like a pinball flapper almost, knock me back into the center. | |
| And how old are you? | |
| I'm sorry, 46. | |
| I'm sorry, I'm a tad baffled. | |
| Hang on, hang on. | |
| Your dad, you've been an adult for More than a quarter century, right? | |
| Right. | |
| So I don't know why, why is your dad responsible for your behavior at the moment? | |
| Because I'll be about to go and do something and then he'll come and say, well, what if I help you do this? | |
| Or don't go and rent a place yet. | |
| You know, I got married when I was 30. | |
| I married a woman. | |
| No, you're not. | |
| God almighty. | |
| God almighty, man. | |
| Do you ever answer a question? | |
| I'm trying to. | |
| No, you're trying not to. | |
| Oh. | |
| My God. | |
| How is your father responsible for your decisions when you're 46 years old? | |
| He offers help when I'm about to do something. | |
| How is your father responsible for your decisions when you're 46 years old? | |
| Offers help. | |
| Come on. | |
| He's not. | |
| Remember I said I wanted a little bit more masculine energy in the world? | |
| This would be one of those times. | |
| How is your father responsible for your decisions and your choices and your life when you're 46 years old? | |
| He's not. | |
| Okay, so don't tell me that he is. | |
| Okay. | |
| Because your scapegoat is your dad, right? | |
| Thank you. | |
| Okay. | |
| I mean, at what age are you going to be responsible for all your own decisions? | |
| Well, this age. | |
| That's just why. | |
| Not in this call. | |
| In this call, you're trying to fob it off on your dad. | |
| And I'm sorry for your childhood. | |
| I really am. | |
| But it's a quarter century or more ago. | |
| What is it going to be? | |
| 50? | |
| 60? | |
| 70? | |
| 80? | |
| After he's dead? | |
| I don't know, right? | |
| But the best way to help the children around you is to model the behavior that you want them to inculcate, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So if you want them to not be susceptible to malign influences, don't yourself be susceptible to malign influences. | |
| Influences, right? | |
| If you want them to take responsibility for their own life, take responsibility for your own life. | |
| If you don't want them to blame others and make excuses for themselves, don't blame others and make excuses for yourself. | |
| Okay. | |
| Then, in order to do that, I need to have a discussion with my brother Telling him why when he renovates his basement this summer I don't want him to build a room for me to live in in it so that I can be in their | |
| house later so they can quote help me because I keep accepting the help out of like a feeling of guilt because if I say why I don't want it I'm calling bullshit on the whole... | |
| No, no, no. | |
| The whole pack of lies. | |
| You don't accept their help out of a feeling of guilt. | |
| I mean, I can't believe that. | |
| You accept their help because it's easier for you than something else. | |
| Right? | |
| It's easier for you to live... | |
| At your brother's house than to get a place of your own. | |
| I mean, if you're still struggling at 46, of course it's easier to accept charity than to start pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| yeah so if you want to help the kids then show them a life that they will want to emulate We're always saying to the next generation, hey, do you want to live in my shoes? | |
| Well, make sure that those shoes are comfortable and smell good, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So the best thing that you can do for your nephews and nieces is to be someone that they aspire to be. | |
| Right? | |
| And don't tell them anything about Free Domain Radio until you're out of your brother's basement. | |
| I've already played the bad philosophy show game with my nephew, so it's too late for that. | |
| But he doesn't really know what it is. | |
| But you think that there's something you can say, but it's you who need to be saved, not Not your nieces and nephews. | |
| They're fine, right? | |
| You said that your brother and sister-in-law are good parents? | |
| Yeah. | |
| They're fine. | |
| It's you who you need to focus on saving, right? | |
| I find that really, really hard to do because I find it really difficult to weigh my needs over getting everybody else's done first. | |
| So it's easier for you to be a people pleaser than to pursue your own interests, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay. | |
| So you can be a people pleaser and then, you know, in a couple of decades you can die and they can throw you in a hole in the ground in a box to be food for worms and over it they can put a gravestone that says, you know, people found him convenient. | |
| He didn't disturb other people with his own interests. | |
| So, in doing that... | |
| In doing what? | |
| In stepping forward to break this loop that I do, where I agree to things in employments and stuff like that where I agree to something that doesn't cover my end enough. | |
| I have no idea what you're talking about. | |
| I'll agree to jobs where I have to do a lot, but I'm not getting paid enough to take care of myself well enough while I'm doing it. | |
| Wait, so what do you mean? | |
| Again, I don't know what you mean. | |
| Do you mean that you can't I'll do a project and I'll finish the project well, but I won't get paid enough to do it so that I haven't really gotten ahead by the time I'm at the end of it. | |
| Then don't do that! | |
| If you can't make money, do something that makes money! | |
| I mean, are you saying that at the age of 46 you don't have enough marketable skills that you could get at the age of 18 working at McDonald's and living in a studio apartment somewhere? | |
| Yeah, I can do those things. | |
| Okay, so make enough money to be independent. | |
| Okay. | |
| Is that a problem? | |
| It's hard because to not get super anxious and just start figuring out what How to make people feel at ease or whatever around me and just to keep my mind on... | |
| No! | |
| No! | |
| Oh God! | |
| I'm sorry to interrupt you. | |
| I don't feel at ease around you. | |
| That's because... | |
| Now, people who do feel at ease around you are comfortable with you being a half-deflated non-sex doll, right? | |
| You being convenient to other people, they're fine with that because you don't have any existence and nobody's kicking you in the ass saying, get your own fucking life. | |
| Right. | |
| You're very convenient to everyone around you. | |
| Probably because they're narcissistic. | |
| I don't know, right? | |
| Yes, exactly. | |
| But who cares enough about you to say, oh my God, get moving in your life. | |
| Stop being helpful. | |
| Stop being helped. | |
| You're 46 years old. | |
| When are you going to start? | |
| When you're 66? | |
| Maybe you want a wife. | |
| Maybe you want kids. | |
| I don't know. | |
| But there's no one around you. | |
| They're all very comfortable with you being like this butler ghost to everyone else's preferences, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So don't be comfortable to those people. | |
| How do I... Don't be praised by selfish people. | |
| That's not the mock of honor. | |
| Okay. | |
| That's the mock of disrepute. | |
| Yes. | |
| You're judging yourself by the wrong standard. | |
| The KKK love my barbecued chicken. | |
| I don't want them to. | |
| I'm not saying your family is a KKK, but it's hyperbole, right? | |
| Do not be convenient at your own expense, because then the only people who will like you are exploiters. | |
| Yes, that's what has happened, and I'm breaking that cycle. | |
| Are you breaking that cycle? | |
| I defood a year ago. | |
| I left all of it. | |
| I moved to Toronto to start over. | |
| And for financial reasons, while I moved to Toronto and was looking for an apartment, I ended up staying at my brother's place because of job changes. | |
| So now it got into a rut and now What do you mean it got into a ride? | |
| You stayed there temporarily while you were changing jobs and a year later you're still there? | |
| Yes. | |
| And why is that okay with them? | |
| This is the thing, Steph. | |
| They're pleasant and nice to me and they say, we're so happy you're here and you're wonderful to the kids and everything. | |
| And I try to say to them, but you wouldn't live in my fucking garage. | |
| How can you say that to me? | |
| Wait, are you living in a garage? | |
| Well, it's an office, but yes. | |
| Let me ask you this question. | |
| In your office or in your house, do you push a button and have a wall open? | |
| No. | |
| Oh, then it's not a garage, because that's what happens in a garage. | |
| You push a button and the door opens, like the big rolly door, right? | |
| I see. | |
| There aren't any cars in there with you, right? | |
| No. | |
| Okay, so you're probably because you're like living babysitting, right? | |
| I guess. | |
| In a pity case that you get to look good for being nice to? | |
| Yeah, I mean, look, it's not caring for you to have you live in a garage, right? | |
| No, it's not. | |
| They're enabling your laziness and insecurities and whatever it is that's keeping you there, right? | |
| Yes. | |
| So, I mean, there must be some benefit to that. | |
| But that's... | |
| Like, even from him? | |
| From who? | |
| Your brother? | |
| Yes! | |
| I feel like... | |
| Like, even from you? | |
| But he doesn't want to talk or... | |
| He just wants to watch TV and zone out at the end of the day. | |
| We don't really have much of a relationship with me here. | |
| And I feel like I'm in the way. | |
| It's wrong for me to be in the house. | |
| Do you eat dinner with them? | |
| No. | |
| Okay, so you basically stay in the garage? | |
| Yes. | |
| I come in and out. | |
| And do you work? | |
| Yes. | |
| I'm just starting up. | |
| You have no savings, I assume? | |
| Right. | |
| And why do you have no savings? | |
| I might remind you, 46 years old, you have no savings. | |
| things. | |
| What the hell are you going to retire on? | |
| I don't know. | |
| Aren't you freaking out? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I mean, you're 19 years from retirement. | |
| I know. | |
| What are you going to do? | |
| What are you going to, like, live in a garage and eat cat food that the cats haven't finished? | |
| Where's your freak-outedness? | |
| You're telling me about what happened when you were four, and I sympathize with that, but dear God, let's turn the flashlight ahead a little. | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| I mean, isn't it time to panic? | |
| I guess. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Okay, it doesn't sound like you want to. | |
| No, I mean, how am I going to function if I'm in full panic mode? | |
| Yes, it's time to act. | |
| Oh my god, do something! | |
| Do something! | |
| Get out of the garage! | |
| Okay. | |
| Don't be like an old car! | |
| Don't be like... | |
| The summer lawnmower in December. | |
| Do something. | |
| Panic is good. | |
| Okay. | |
| It's time to panic. | |
| Okay. | |
| You're 46. | |
| You have no savings. | |
| You're living in a garage. | |
| Oh, God. | |
| Isn't it time to panic? | |
| Am I wrong? | |
| Tell me. | |
| I'm happy to be wrong if I'm wrong. | |
| But my heart would be like leaping out of my chest and attempting to attach itself to some rich woman at this point. | |
| Or maybe it wouldn't be my heart. | |
| I don't know, but it would be some damn organ would be slithering up some rich woman's legs and saying, yours for the low, low price of, right? | |
| Yeah, then I'd be right back where I started. | |
| But I put a lot of energy into not panicking to try and stay calm and No! | |
| Don't stay calm! | |
| Okay. | |
| If you're on the tracks and the train is coming, don't ignore it. | |
| And there's a train full time. | |
| Like, you get you don't have a lot of time left, right? | |
| Very clearly. | |
| Yeah. | |
| No, I don't think you do. | |
| Because you say you're not panicking. | |
| Oh, okay. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And if you don't panic, nothing will change. | |
| That's why I'm saying panic is healthy. | |
| You've worked at not panicking for at least a year, right? | |
| And what's happened? | |
| It's dragging. | |
| Yes. | |
| Nothing has changed. | |
| You're in the garage a year ago. | |
| You're in the garage now. | |
| Yeah. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Panic is good. | |
| Okay. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I mean, you're the son of a lawyer, high-functioning, intelligent, and you're living in a garage. | |
| Exactly. | |
| Right? | |
| If that doesn't make you panic, what will? | |
| Okay. | |
| Okay. | |
| How much do you make when you work? | |
| I make like under $30,000 a year. | |
| Well, that's enough to live on. | |
| Yeah. | |
| If it was regular, which it can be. | |
| So, yes. | |
| And? | |
| I just need to get on with it. | |
| I've done a series of creative work. | |
| I do stonework. | |
| I... I do renovations. | |
| I make, you know, I make furniture. | |
| I make stuff. | |
| Basically, I make stuff. | |
| Like a handyman. | |
| Pardon? | |
| You're like a handyman with some furniture skills. | |
| Um, that's... | |
| Sure. | |
| If that's not correct, then you're like handyman. | |
| I can see 30K. If you're like a skilled stonemason or whatever, then... | |
| Yeah, okay. | |
| We'll call it that. | |
| Yes. | |
| All right. | |
| No, tell me what... | |
| What you'd rather call that. | |
| I don't want to be insulting or anything. | |
| Well, I've done a series of artisanal apprenticeships, but they jump around. | |
| What do you mean they jump around? | |
| Well, I jump around. | |
| You jump around! | |
| Oh my God! | |
| Oh my God! | |
| Do you see? | |
| You're still trying to snowdrop me, right? | |
| Oh. | |
| They don't jump around. | |
| You jump around! | |
| You know, it's like you're a fisherman. | |
| and you throw your rod tackle into the water and say, well, the fish just got away, I guess. | |
| Right. | |
| You're right. | |
| You jump around. | |
| Because you feel you've drunk the blood of the vampire Lestat and somehow you're going to be immortal and therefore you don't have to panic about the fact that your life is more than half over. | |
| And it's not like the last 20 years of your life are going to be massively productive economically, right? | |
| Right. | |
| You have 19 years with which to save up money on which to retire or you will be living on $500 a month and you will never get out of that garage except in an ambulance, which is a one-way trip. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Do you want to get married? | |
| No. | |
| Why? | |
| Because... | |
| It's too much being responsible for somebody else's happiness and making their life come true. | |
| Oh, no, you didn't say that. | |
| Oh, my God. | |
| What do you mean responsible? | |
| You know, it doesn't have to be a codependent narcissistic exploiter that you get married to, right? | |
| That's all I attract. | |
| Well, because you're in a garage! | |
| You can't get a quality woman from a garage! | |
| I haven't been in the garage the whole time, but yes, you're right. | |
| But you have no savings! | |
| You have no job skills that are worth more than 30k of uncertain work a year. | |
| Yeah. | |
| It's like... | |
| A friend of mine who's now very successful, but when he was pursuing his education, he was living in an abandoned school bus. | |
| And he was like, you know, I'm dating this great woman. | |
| I just can't get her to commit to me. | |
| And it's like, commit to what? | |
| You live in an abandoned school bus. | |
| What is she going to commit to? | |
| Exactly. | |
| Right. | |
| You are addicted to helplessness, and so you think that the only value that you can supply other people is making them happy, which is a slave's black minstrel entertaining the king because you're a slave kind of role. | |
| That's how it feels. | |
| Yeah. | |
| I'm not trying to make my wife happy. | |
| That's not my job, and I would consider that an insulting job, and she would be insulted by it. | |
| My only desire, honey, is to wake up in the morning and just do everything to make you happy. | |
| And she's like, ew, fuck you. | |
| Just be yourself. | |
| That's who I chose. | |
| Be yourself. | |
| I'm happy with that. | |
| Don't try and make me happy. | |
| That's manipulative as shit, right? | |
| Exactly. | |
| I mean, imagine my daughter comes to me and says, Daddy, the only thing I ever think about is how to make you happy. | |
| I'd be like, oh my God, what did I do as a parent? | |
| That's so bad that this is all she can think about Yeah And the more you try to make other people happy, the more you self-erase. | |
| Yeah. | |
| And then you become like this ghost in the garage, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Hey, we got a show title, The Ghost in the Garage. | |
| Yeah, it's... | |
| What did your mother say to you when you were very little that she hit you for? | |
| What did she say to you about you that she burned and branded into your brain with physical assault? | |
| What did she say about you? | |
| What was her excuse or justification for beating you? | |
| That I talked back and that I wasn't obedient and that I was a little Ugger Bay. | |
| Ugger Bay? | |
| What's that? | |
| It's a way of saying bugger without saying bugger. | |
| All right. | |
| Thinking you're being clever and not swearing at your kid and calling them names. | |
| Yeah, because Anking's Bay is way better, right? | |
| Exactly. | |
| All right, so... | |
| So you had opinions that differed from your mother. | |
| Yes. | |
| You talked back, right? | |
| And you were disobedient. | |
| Yes. | |
| Right? | |
| And I did well in school, too. | |
| Well, she didn't hit you for doing well in school. | |
| No, but they held me back when the school wanted to put me forward. | |
| Oh, your parents held you back? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Your mother? | |
| Yeah. | |
| Alright, so you understand that that gets burned into your brain with physical assault. | |
| What gets burned into your brain is if you have opinions different from others, they will hit you. | |
| If you assert independent thought, they will hit you. | |
| If you disobey them, they will hit you. | |
| If you be yourself and you let yourself be yourself with any energy flowing, the wrath will come. | |
| And that translates into your brain in the following way. | |
| Do you know I've been using a lot of death metaphors with you? | |
| Right? | |
| Ghost, grave, headstone, and that kind of stuff. | |
| Do you know why? | |
| Because the equation that was burned into your brain when you were a child, my friend, is this. | |
| It's a two-fold equation. | |
| Are you ready? | |
| Yeah. | |
| To live is to die. | |
| but to die is to live. | |
| Do you know what that means, Chris? | |
| That I have to negate myself to survive. | |
| To live, to think, to exist. | |
| To have critical faculties, to have skepticism, to have doubts, to have curiosity, to have an alive mind that questions and examines the world and the people around you, which is life! | |
| It's one thing you can't program a computer to do. | |
| That is life. | |
| To live is to die. | |
| And when children are assaulted, when they are spanked, when they are hit, they sniff out the environment and they say, what happens if I keep resisting? | |
| And the fear is that if I keep resisting, I will get injured or killed. | |
| So to live, to exist, to have thoughts independent of those in authority or opposed to those in authority, to live is to die. | |
| But to die is to live. | |
| There's an old MASH episode, it was the final episode of MASH, which is a pretty good old show. | |
| Where, sorry if it's spoilers, but the show's like 20 or 30, 30 years old, I think. | |
| So Alan Alda is in a psych ward, and he was a doctor in the Korean War. | |
| And he was on a bus being shipped somewhere, and they were surrounded, and they were surrounded by... | |
| The chicken. | |
| Yeah, you tell the story, you remember it, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So, there's a woman at the back of the bus, and there's this chicken that keeps making noise. | |
| And if they're found, they'll be killed, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| So she kills it, but it's not a chicken, it's her baby. | |
| It's her baby that she strangles because the baby keeps making noise. | |
| She has to kill the baby in order to live. | |
| Yeah. | |
| To live is to die for the baby. | |
| But to die for the baby is to live for the mother. | |
| I used to wear shirts like that guy. | |
| That character. | |
| Oh, the Hawkeye character? | |
| Yeah. | |
| I had a bunch of shirts like that at school. - Right. | |
| And where you are is a kind of living death, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| And I'm in the midst of starting a new employment It's a really great opportunity. | |
| I know the person who's starting it. | |
| He's a good guy. | |
| We have communication. | |
| It's terrifying. | |
| But To walk in there knowing that my way of the people-pleasing way is manipulation and it negates me and it's gonna backfire because it does every time, even if it seems like it's not going to. | |
| So I can't do that, but I don't have any other... | |
| It's like going in there with nothing. | |
| I don't know what to do to just be me. | |
| So... | |
| I technically know what I should be doing at the job, but it's so hard to stay with that. | |
| But I feel super paranoid at the same time, and it makes me feel really awkward in dealing with everybody, because if I'm not trying to make a joke or do something to make them laugh so that I know that everything in the room is okay, then I get really scared. | |
| It's hard to focus on what I need to do for work. | |
| No, listen. | |
| You have to apply yourself to justice. | |
| Okay. | |
| In this situation. | |
| Okay. | |
| I don't mean to sound unsympathetic because I'm really not. | |
| But when people treat me like... | |
| I'm their abusive parents. | |
| It really pisses me off because it's so unjust. | |
| Did I just do that? | |
| No, no, no. | |
| But you're talking about these other people. | |
| Okay, okay. | |
| Right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| You're doing great. | |
| You're working hard. | |
| You're doing fantastically in the call. | |
| I really want to acknowledge that. | |
| Thanks. | |
| But you're terrified of being with these people because your mother beat you 40 years ago. | |
| But you are treating these people as if... | |
| They are your mother. | |
| That is bigoted. | |
| It's like me saying, well one black guy beat me up 40 years ago, so I'm now going to be terrified around Morgan Freeman. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That would be a racist extrapolation, right? | |
| It would be. | |
| But the thing is that the whole... | |
| I've had employment in those types of things in the past where it's not just my mother, it's the other... | |
| You end up getting hired and making bad arrangements by not negotiating for yourself and then you get taken advantage of. | |
| But you don't negotiate because you're treating everyone like they're your mother. | |
| Oh, fuck. | |
| They're not your mother and it's insulting that you do that to them. | |
| That's letting the bitch win. | |
| Then she's everywhere. | |
| She's like oxygen or CO2. She's everywhere. | |
| She's the shadow standing in the man pants of the guy you're negotiating. | |
| She's the guy on the bus, the guy in the taxi. | |
| You live in a fucking zombie world populated by the ancient ghost of your striking mother. | |
| She steps into everyone's shoes and you can never get away because you couldn't get away when you were four. | |
| And now you're 46. | |
| You still can't get away because you put her everywhere. | |
| Oh. | |
| Okay. | |
| Don't let the bitch win! | |
| Exorcise her from your environment. | |
| It is not fair to assume people are assholes because you are raised by a bitch. | |
| It is unjust to them to treat them as childhood losers. | |
| Do you know, in some airplanes, they will not seat a single man next to a child? | |
| Can I thank you so much for saying that to me? | |
| No, no, it's important. | |
| And the reason is because some women have been raped as children and then they think like all men are rapists. | |
| Yeah. | |
| That is so, I mean, that's so fucking sexist and unjust. | |
| It's horrifying and it's horrible. | |
| And it's so unjust. | |
| We all rail against that, right? | |
| Yeah. | |
| But you cannot treat everyone as if not only are they your mother, but they're your mother when you were four. | |
| Okay. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| Because you're not four, they're not your mother. | |
| It's anti-empirical. | |
| Okay. | |
| But tell me what you're thinking about. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Or what you're feeling. | |
| I feel relief. | |
| Because trying to sort this stuff out for myself, it's just a thought train that goes around in circles where I don't... | |
| Oh, I know. | |
| I got that from the beginning of the call. | |
| Enough perspective. | |
| When are we ever going to get to the question, right? | |
| Okay, thank you. | |
| So I need to go in there to work as we set this up with a really clear set of what I need in order to get the living arrangements fixed and get a new place. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Like, that's step one, step two. | |
| There's nothing. | |
| Yeah, and you said this, but the work thing is one thing, but you're also projecting your mom onto every potential date, right? | |
| Why don't you want to get married? | |
| Well, because I don't want to be fully responsible for somebody else's happiness and have to manage someone else all the time, like I did with my mom when I was four. | |
| Well, please have some respect for the fairer sex that they're not all like your mom, right? | |
| Yeah And may meet my daughter someday Please don't treat her like she's some abusive bitch from when you were four. | |
| Or I just know that I'm not going to have the money to be buying a house and set up a household. | |
| Well, who knows? | |
| You're saying this like it's a foregone conclusion. | |
| When you break out of the past, you don't know what you're capable of. | |
| Because when you break out of the past and you actually live in the present and you deal with people in the present, not as hand-up-the-ass animated ghost of a cadaverous history, when you actually deal with people in the present, you have done what very few people actually do, which is get out of the Groundhog Day ghost-inhabited revolving door of history and actually stride into the future with your eyes in the present and your emotional reactions in the present. | |
| So if you can break This habit of squirting your mom juice up everyone's leg and then dealing with them as if they smell just like her, you don't know what you're capable of. | |
| That's so gross. | |
| But you will have automatically gained the incredible superhero superpower of living empirically in the present, of not being your own mom-run hand puppet of a four-year-old frightened of being beaten to death. | |
| So I have to ask myself, who am I looking at? | |
| Who is this person in front of me all the time? | |
| I have to be asking myself that when I talk to people. | |
| Don't anticipate. | |
| Don't anticipate. | |
| Just ask, like, who are they? | |
| If the person's an asshole, be aware that they're an asshole. | |
| And don't deal with them. | |
| Okay. | |
| If they're not an asshole, then trust them until they prove otherwise. | |
| otherwise. | |
| Okay. | |
| But the garage is where antiques go. | |
| Don't be that. | |
| Okay. | |
| Thank you. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| And thank you for your patience. | |
| I will. | |
| Thank you for your patience. | |
| You're welcome. | |
| And thank you for your openness and your vulnerability in responding. | |
| Just remember that this is the equation that is branded onto most of the human hearts in the world. | |
| To live is to die, but to die is to live. | |
| That's what culture is, it's what religion is, it's what nationalism, that's what sports fever is, it's what racism and classism and all of that, right? | |
| To live is to die, but to die is to live. | |
| I was really psyched to get the opportunity to be on with you tonight, so I wasn't gonna, if I needed to be told things, I needed to go with you on it. | |
| So, thank you. | |
| Great job. | |
| Thank you. | |
| Thank you so much. | |
| Okay, good night. | |
| Thanks. | |
| Take care. | |
| Thanks, Chris. | |
| All right. | |
| Mr. | |
| Mike, I think that's it for us, right? | |
| Do we have any last announcements for our finalists? | |
| That's it color-wise, but we can make some speaking announcements. | |
| Coming up, June 6th and 7th, the Toronto Domestic Violence Symposium. | |
| That's going to be held at downtown... | |
| At University of Toronto. | |
| Just moved the venue, so make sure you go to torontodv.com, torontodv.com for the updated information. | |
| Steph is going to be speaking both days. | |
| And also, the International Conference on Men's Issues, June 26th through 28th in Detroit, Michigan. | |
| Go to avoiceformen.com, avoiceformen.com to get your tickets. | |
| Lots of cool people are going to be there, and we're going to do a lot of, like an FDR meet-and-greet type thing at dinner or something, so it should be a good time. | |
| Hope you can come out. | |
| But that's it as far as announcements go. | |
| Do we want to mention anything about, because I don't know if I'll have time to do it later, do you think that it's worth mentioning about how this Elliot Rogers is somehow trying to be pinned on men's rights groups? | |
| Might be worth talking about here in the show. | |
| I just found out in the context of the show that his 140-page manifesto Has made its way online. | |
| So there's quite a bit to go through. | |
| Was it true they found more bodies at his house or was that a rumor? | |
| I looked at CNN. Apparently there's three bodies they found in his apartment as well. | |
| So the death toll is mounting. | |
| Is it blonde women? | |
| I didn't get that information yet. | |
| They probably haven't released that yet. | |
| Yeah, they're holding back information until they can... | |
| Notify the next of kin or identify them. | |
| Yeah. | |
| But it's getting worse. | |
| The more you look in this story, the worse it gets. | |
| Yeah, but I just, you know, I really... | |
| So this guy, you know, was sexually... | |
| The story is that he was rejected by women his whole life, and therefore he murdered them. | |
| And this is... | |
| The things that people try to do to make causality out of something is just nonsense. | |
| Lots of men die virgins without going on murderous rampages. | |
| Lots of men are rejected by lots of women. | |
| There's not a man alive who's not been rejected by women. | |
| And the idea that this somehow is causal, that women rejected him and therefore, right, that's not why he killed. | |
| I mean, because again, lots of people, he killed because he was an evil motherfucker. | |
| He killed because he was a narcissistic sociopath who constantly and repetitively programmed himself into becoming more and more outraged until he had only one We're good to go. | |
| And he was a racist son of a bitch. | |
| You know, he had negative things to say about Indians and he was, I think, half Asian, half white and targeted blonde white women. | |
| It was a racial hate crime as well. | |
| And the idea that somehow Men looking for equality in family courts is promoting the murder of women is such an insane theory and it's so insulting. | |
| It is... | |
| I mean, it's literally the same as saying that feminism promotes... | |
| The Holocaust. | |
| I mean, it's just ridiculous. | |
| But it is not anything to do with men's rights. | |
| The pickup artist community is not anything to do with men's rights. | |
| Those are just guys who want to manipulate dumb women into getting laid. | |
| I don't know if it works or not. | |
| I have no idea. | |
| I don't even really care to know. | |
| I think it's pretty gross. | |
| The idea that the men's rights movement has some essential hatred of women. | |
| There is frustration in the men's rights movement, I'm sure. | |
| I don't want to speak for the men's rights movement because I'm no spokesman for the movement at all. | |
| But the idea that there's some sort of hatred for women There's some frustration for the lack of sympathy, the lack of sympathy for male victims of rape, for the lack of sympathy for the male victims of domestic abuse, half of which is initiated by women. | |
| There's some frustration with the lack of sympathy for the degree to which a woman says, my body, my choice for having a kid, but then can force a man who doesn't want to have a child to then pay for the next 20 years. | |
| It's not exactly making his body his choice kind of thing. | |
| And the lack of responsibility that women sometimes seem to take for getting pregnant and having kids, and it takes two, it's like, yeah, but the woman is the one who fundamentally says yes or no. | |
| So there's way, way, way worse stuff that's said about men in the feminist movement that is not repudiated by a lot of feminists than has ever been said about women in any sort of legitimate or public spokesperson that I've ever read about from the men's rights movement. | |
| So it is a sick and horrifying slander technique that is used. | |
| And I think it's horrendous. | |
| It's highly irresponsible, but it's inevitable. | |
| And of course, it's a way of trying to, you know, I would assume that as a kid, his primary caregivers were women. | |
| I'm only going to assume that. | |
| His primary caregiver... | |
| His father is assistant director for one of the Hunger Games movies, as we mentioned. | |
| And it is a way of making sure that women don't get blamed. | |
| Just automatically blame men. | |
| And... | |
| It's crazy stuff. | |
| It's crazy stuff. | |
| And it's probably fringe to link men's rights movements to this guy. | |
| But I just wanted to sort of mention how ridiculous it is. | |
| And... | |
| It's not politicians, it's not the National Rifle Association, it's not gun rights and so on. | |
| It is the result of a traumatic childhood. | |
| He was actually under the care of many therapists and his online internet ramblings, his apocalyptic ramblings were We're reported to the police. | |
| His parents reported them to the police. | |
| The police came and interviewed him and apparently their lawyer says they found him to be a lovely and fine young man and let him go on about his business. | |
| So it is just horrendous. | |
| I just wanted to mention that. | |
| I also don't know anything about the men's rights movements where men say that they're entitled to sexual favors from women. | |
| I've never heard or read anything to do with that. | |
| Sorry, did I say director or assistant director for one of the Hunger Games movies? | |
| I've never seen anything to do with men's rights that says that men are somehow entitled to sexual favors from a woman. | |
| You know, anyone can say, oh, I'm a men's right, I'm into the men's rights movement, and then can say all kinds of crazy shit, but that's... | |
| What has that got to do with anything? | |
| Feminists always say, well, the extreme feminists are not really part of the blah, blah, blah, even though they're usually academics and published and peer-reviewed journals and all that kind of stuff. | |
| But, you know, they find some crazy person on the internet who says, I'm into men's rights. | |
| And, I mean, what's that got to do with anything? | |
| I can say, you can say you're into anything and then do some crazy shit. | |
| I mean, the only news channel that this shooter's YouTube channel was subscribed to was the Young Turks. | |
| Does that mean that Senk Yungar or whatever his name is is somehow responsible for any of this? | |
| Of course not. | |
| Anyway, so We won't, of course, we'll see the usual stuff. | |
| We won't see much about SSRIs. | |
| We won't see much about parents or any child abuse that may have occurred. | |
| And everyone's going to play the victim, even though he was raised in a very prominent family in sort of Hollywood royalty. | |
| His mother is a famous... | |
| His stepmom was a famous actress who starred with Matt Damon in some movie and always in a movie with Matt Damon. | |
| And his biological mother lives in England, I think, where he left when he was five or so. | |
| And so he was raised in a very sort of public and prominent manner and he did go off the rails and you know his father did spend the last couple of years doing a movie about people's thoughts about God and You know, I've often wondered about this, about movie directors. | |
| I find gore very hard to take in movies. | |
| I usually have to skip it. | |
| But to be on set and to do it over and over and over again, I think it takes a certain personality type. | |
| But yeah, his dad was busy working on a movie about killing kids, for sure. | |
| But that doesn't mean that the movie promotes the violence. | |
| And people say, well, the kid had Asperger's. | |
| Whatever that means. | |
| It's just one of these things that is a label without any... | |
| Useful content, but Asperger's people are not violent. | |
| You can't find a cause for this kind of stuff unless we find out something horrendous about his childhood, which we won't do, of course, right? | |
| I mean, certainly the parents who are probably afraid of getting sued aren't going to reveal anything about his childhood, and we shall find out. | |
| So anyway, thanks everyone for a great show. | |
| Thanks, of course, to all the callers who call in. | |
| It's really, really appreciated. | |
| FDR or URL.com forward slash donate to help move the conversation forward. | |
| Have yourselves a wonderful, wonderful night. |