Sept. 10, 2017 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:47:50
3818 Time Is Running Out! - Call In Show - September 6th, 2017
Question 1: [2:00] – “I can't stand my sister's boyfriend. He's 27 and my sister is 20. We have the same ethnic background and I've known his parents for over 10 years. Initially I was alright with him, I found him a bit weird but I felt relief because I knew his parents well. As it currently stands, they've been in a relationship for 1 year. Throughout this time I've found him to be a very impulsive, superficial and fake person. I think he is a negative influence on my sister and dread contact with him. A virtue I value strongly is that of being a genuine and honest person. It's very easy for me to fake being friendly with him and avoid conflict but I don't like acting contrary to my true feelings. I was hoping you can give some insight on how one should behave with someone they dislike that they can't avoid.”Question 2: [33:45] – “I've read and watched a lot of your content regarding atheism, and theism, but have yet to hear your views on the concept of the idea of an Aristotelian unmoved mover, especially with the surfacing scientific evidence that our universe had an absolute beginning. Is it not valid to use a deductive inference to the best explanation to conclude that a transcendental being created the universe?”Question 3: [1:02:26] – “I have been listening to your podcasts for about 1 year and my husband has listened to some of them recently. I have started reading real time relationships and am about half way through. I have already been hit with many truths most of which are physically painful. I am contacting you because I feel time is running short for our marriage and I cannot pretend anymore. I have tried to speak with my husband many times about this but he avoids it and or doesn't understand what I mean. I don't want to break up our children's home and damage them even more. I have many regrets about the kind of mother I have been even though I swore I wouldn't be like mine. My objective with contacting you is to try and minimize any further damage to my children and to survive my marriage. There is no physical or verbal abuse in our marriage but we avoid everything that may bring a conflict. It is fake. To sum up our relationship you can substitute our names for ‘Bruce and Sheila’ in Real Time Relationships. I know you can't tell us what to do but I feel you could give us or even just myself the kick in the ass we need. I know that we avoid any conflict because if we were really honest with each other and our families, everything we have would come crashing down. This terrifies me.”Question 4: [2:05:18] – “After 6 years of being an ‘empty nester’, I accepted the responsibility of helping my boyfriend raise his 13-year-old daughter. She is 10 years younger than my daughter and came from the type of home I can only imagine but have a hard time truly understanding. I come from a highly K-directed background (I grew up on a ranch in Wyoming, my parents are still married, and my father was in the military). I am struggling with the obvious R characteristics displayed by my stepdaughter, and to some extent my boyfriend. How can I help her overcome her early experiences and become a productive member of society? She is now 14, do you believe there is a point when it is just ‘too late’?”Your support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hey everybody, Stefan Molyneux, Free Domain Radio.
Hope you're doing very well. Please don't forget to check out The Art of the Argument, my new book at theartoftheargument.com.
Please leave a review with your thoughts when you are done.
I appreciate that. And also, freedomainradio.com slash donate to help the show grow.
Now, the first caller, he can't stand his sister's boyfriend.
He thinks that they have a bad relationship, they've been police involved.
What should he do?
How can he save her?
What is missing in his resolution?
Well, he got the answer he needed, but not the answer, I think, that he liked.
The second caller says, look, there does seem to be some strong physical evidence, some strong scientific theories, that the universe, space, time, and matter, energy, Popped into existence.
Doesn't that seem to indicate that there's a deity, a god, a transcendental consciousness that created it all?
It's a great question.
We dove deep into that.
The third caller was a woman who is very distant from her husband.
They... Have been drifting apart in their marriage.
Nothing particularly catastrophic, just a slow icing over of the heart valves, I suppose.
And we had a talk about the sort of deep roots as to why that might be happening and talked about what might give her the resolution to close that gap and save the marriage.
The fourth caller, well, her husband left her for a woman who was younger than their oldest daughter.
And then she got involved with a guy who has a 13-year-old daughter who's really drifting towards the edge of incredibly self-destructive behavior.
And we delved into that family history.
Is it too late to save someone?
At what age might that happen?
At what age do you try and save yourself rather than expend your energies drowning with somebody else?
A great question. Please follow me on Twitter at Stefan Molyneux.
And thank you so much for listening and for watching and for supporting this most essential conversation.
Alright, well up first today we have Max.
Max wrote in and said, As it currently stands, they've been in a relationship for one year.
Throughout this time, I found him to be very impulsive, superficial, and a fake person.
I think he is a negative influence on my sister and dread contact with him.
A virtue I value strongly is that of being a genuine and honest person.
It's very easy for me to fake being friendly with him and avoid conflict, but I don't like acting contrary to my true feelings.
I was hoping you could give me some insight on how one should behave with someone they dislike that they cannot avoid.
That's from Max. Hey Max, how's it going?
It's going well. Clearly you need to get on the dark web.
Okay. So, fake.
How does this sort of fakeness show up?
Um, well, I could give like one specific example, you know, I haven't, I don't have a perfect recollection of everything.
But in general, it comes down to over exaggerations that are clear, and that, you know, he'll act extremely interested in something that he's clearly not interested to, I believe, try to appear as a,
you know, interesting person as a So, he's scared of disapproval and manipulates to try and gain approval in the moment,
is that right? That's, yes.
I would say that's correct.
It's funny, you know, I grew up with a guy.
He was famous for, oh, let's get together next week and do a movie and we'll do dinner.
We'll get together. And everybody knew.
It was just what he said in the moment.
The phone call would never, ever come.
Ever. Ever.
And I remember once there was a woman I knew.
And I put her up for a couple of days.
She was having some trouble in the place she was staying.
I put her up for a couple of days.
She was in the publishing business and she basically said, hey, I'll get your books published if you become my boyfriend.
But anyway, so I was at this other friend's place.
And he was like, oh, you're wonderful.
Oh, you know, we should really – we'd like to invite you into our circle.
Become friends, friends, friends, right?
And then she leaves, closes the door.
I can't remember why I was still – and he turns to me and is like, she's just awful.
It's just like, but to her face, you just – I didn't invite you into the circle.
It is difficult.
It is difficult with those kinds of people because you never know where you stand.
It's like trying to dance with a hypocritical tendril of fog.
And what does your sister see in him?
Well, I mean, I have actually had this conversation, but, you know, she's pretty not open to really telling me Honestly, I mean, he's, you know, much older than her, seven years.
And like, that's the oldest she's been.
I don't know, maybe the fact that we have the same ethnic background.
I know he I mean, he's attractive.
He goes to clubs a lot.
He brought her into the club scene.
They were going to clubs at least three times a week at some point.
I would have called them discos when I was younger.
Sure. Dance clubs, not like opium dens, right?
Yeah, like nightclubs. And I know he has good connections.
He's doing well financially.
His friend group, who are all in his age range, in their 30s, they all are doing pretty well.
And she ends up seeing, I don't know, I guess quite the high status image from him, I think.
Right. Now, the fact that he's older than her, seven years, is not too bad from a sexual market value standpoint.
Women generally tend to go with men a couple of years, sort of five years, or four to five years older, and who make more money.
So, as far as that goes, that is entirely within the bounds, in my opinion, although it's obviously a big chunk of her life, like a third of her life, in terms of age difference.
But... Who's in control in the relationship between the two of them?
Who's in charge? Definitely him.
Definitely him. Really?
Yeah. Yes.
And how do you see that?
Well... I guess I can't say it 100% because their more intimate side is not really shown to me.
I... I don't know, I guess.
I thought the impression I had was that he is the one, you know, just from his attitude in general, you know, very like, hey, let's go here.
Hey, let's do this. Hey, let's do this.
You know, very, like, I found him to be pretty impulsive, like, you know, like very quick decision making.
And I can kind of just see how that can manifest itself in their relationship.
Yeah. Yeah. And how are you doing in terms of your finances?
I'm doing all right.
I mean, I'm a student currently, so everything is stable.
Now, you've known his parents for over 10 years, but not him?
No, no.
Why? I can't really say.
I mean, I haven't seen his parents That often over the years, but my parents in particular, you know, we kind of have a lot of family friends that share the same ethnic background.
No, no, but sorry, you've known his parents for 10 years.
Have you known this young man for 10 years?
No, no. Whenever we would meet his parents at certain events, family events, he just wasn't there.
I mean, again, I guess I say I knew them.
I've known their name and their faces, right?
But I haven't really spoken to them that much over the years, but I've known of them.
It's just he's never been present when they've been there.
Right. So when you see him, obviously he's not there to see you.
He's there to see your sister.
But when you see him, what are the sort of typical kinds of interactions that happen?
Well, I can see that he tries to, like, you know, from his perspective, I'm her brother.
And he generally tries to be very, you know, like, what's the word I'm looking for?
Very, like, have a comfortable relationship.
Dynamic with everybody in our family, right?
So, like, hey, you know, what's up?
You know, like, you know, gives me, like, one of those, like, bro hugs, if you want.
Like, hey, what's up? You know, like, talking to me, you know, he'll start, like, acting like he's interested in what I'm doing when he's just not, you know, just...
I think he just, you know, creates his own little world of how things should be.
And, you know, I end up just being the recipient of that whenever we're in the same area.
It's interesting, Max, you talked about this guy exaggerating, and you did yourself exaggerate just a little bit about sort of knowing his parents for over 10 years and so on, and that it's been very much a kind of here and there.
That's right. When I said that I knew his parents for 10 years, I just meant like, I gained a sense of Comfort just that, you know, my parents have known them, right?
So my parents have known his parents for a long time, and I just trust their intuitions about them and, you know, their general, like, friendliness, the way that we talk at dinner, those kind of things.
So I've kind of like knowing his parents gives me a sense of comfort.
Right. Right. Okay.
Okay. So he's impulsive, superficial, and fake.
Now, in that he fakes interest in what you're doing, and you think he is, obviously.
You think he's faking it.
And those are the major issues that you have with him, right?
Yeah. I mean, we've had some past incidents where he's been pretty irresponsible about It's a, like, circumstance.
I mean, I can't, there aren't, like, that many numerous times where this has happened, but, you know, there was, on my sister's birthday, we had, like, a pretty bad incident that happened for...
For my sister. And ever since my father heard about it, he was very angry and has still yet to talk to him about what happened.
And since then...
Wait, wait, wait. Sorry. God, what happened?
Oh, okay. Well, they went clubbing.
Well, it's like a day club.
And then they went to a night club later that day.
They went to a day club? I mean, it's only during the day.
It's not something that happens at night.
And is it like a bar during the day or what?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like lots of music.
It's a big area.
I mean, I live in a cabana club, if you would know where that is.
Okay, so they go to a day club and then they go to a night club.
This was on her birthday? Yes, with mostly a few of her friends and a lot of his friends that I guess would be her friends too.
Okay. And after that nightclub, they both ended up going to some kind of diner or some store, like at 1am.
And they had some argument.
I still don't know what the argument was about.
And he drove both him and her to that place.
And he just left.
He just took his car and left, didn't answer his phone, and just left her stranded there.
Uh, you know, for, like, no reason.
And she was crying because she thought he was going to have sex with one of her friends.
Like, just, uh, quite a not good birthday, if you want to put it that way.
And my, uh, um, I think, uh, my mom had to end up going all the way downtown to, to pick her up.
But then she, she had to, the police was involved.
And I don't, I don't have the specific details, but I know What I said about him like leaving her there and How are the police involved?
one of the One of his friends is where they were staying in between clubs and I guess was intended to be after the club after the nightclub and You know like I've heard he's like a wealthy guy and he has a really nice place like some condo and And he, um, apparently something bad happened.
I actually didn't get the specifics of it.
Like I wasn't, I wasn't even told.
What would really happen? But something happened in that room.
So, okay, so the police room, so they had a fight.
He took off. I don't know what you mean by abandoned.
I mean, she has, I assume, a purse with a wallet in it.
She can get into a cab and get home.
I mean, it's not like he left her on a desert island or somewhere up on the side of Mount Everest or something, right?
So she can get into a cab.
She can get home.
So, he's angry at her.
Maybe she did something. I don't know.
So, he leaves and abandoned is kind of like a, it's a white knight phrase, you know?
Like, he abandoned her.
It's like, no, he left. Right?
And then she can take a cab home.
I guess in terms of money, but she's very unfamiliar with that area.
I actually don't think she's ever taken a cab herself.
Oh, she's never taken a cab in her life?
Yeah. By herself, I highly doubt it.
She's just recently, after this whole thing, started getting Uber and started using that when she's needed it.
So it could be said that your parents, and perhaps even you to a small degree, did not exactly prepare her a lot for some aspects of adult life.
Is that an unfair statement?
I completely agree with that.
You know, and I felt like, I mean, I tried my times to do what I could.
And so she thought that he was going to go and sleep with one of her friends?
Yeah, yeah.
Like, which to me says there's something kind of wrong with that.
And how long have they been, sorry to interrupt, how long have they been going out when this happened?
Yeah, so I said that they were going on for a year, but that would have probably marked about a year.
So that was in June. So they've been together for a year, they have a fight, he leaves, and she thinks he's going to go sleep with someone else.
So there's no trust. Basically, that's what I interpret, right?
No, no, no, no. That's not what you interpret.
That's a fact. That's a fact, Jack.
If she thinks because they had a conflict, because they had a fight, and he's going to go off and sleep with one of her friends, she doesn't trust the guy at all.
Maybe he threatened to go and sleep with one of her friends.
You know, I'm just going to share, probably an overshare, Back in the day, yes, when I was working at Mnoth.
So back in the day, I was staying in a cabin.
It was like a really, really remote, kind of like a hunting lodge where you could go and we sort of stayed there from time to time and we were completely sick of the bush.
And, oh man, one of the worst fights I ever heard from a married couple was in that godforsaken middle of nowhere hunting lodge.
And I still remember the man screaming at his wife, yeah, well, your sister gives way better blowjobs than you do.
And I'm like, oh, man, I never ever want to be in any situation where I'm even within six light years of people like this.
Now that I'm not saying this about your sister, it just sort of popped into my mind.
And so it's not a very mature relationship if she thinks he's going to bang a friend of hers because they had a fight, right?
Right, right. Right.
So, Max? How dirty do you want to get your hands in this situation?
I believe that it's not my place to decide where this relationship goes to the point where it really heavily impacts something like that.
If you're not that interested in acting, what are we talking about?
Why are you calling? Well, like I said, There are inevitable situations whether he's coming to dinner or coming...
Oh, no, no. I understand. I'm sorry to drop me.
I understand. You don't like him.
My question is, how far are you willing to go to do something about it?
Okay. I mean, are you looking for you to adapt to him or are you looking to get rid of him?
I was hoping to let him know how I feel and to understand that there's nothing friendly between us.
Would you rather your sister was not dating this man?
Yes. Okay, so you want to get rid of him.
I don't think it's my...
I'm not asking what you...
I'm asking, what do you want?
I can't help you if you don't even tell me what you want.
Okay, okay. Yeah, yes, I would like that.
Okay. I will tell you how to get rid of him, if you want, or to find out if you're the issue, right?
Okay. All right. I won't even tell you the circumstances here, but at one time in my life, I was working somewhere, and there was someone, he had a temperate.
And I went to talk to the manager about this person having a temper.
And, you know, when I was a boss, I would take a lot of ribbing, a lot of jokes.
I didn't mind that at all.
But no temper, no disrespect, no insults.
And this guy crossed the line.
So, it really wasn't too hard.
I just provoked him in public.
Not in any obvious way, obviously, right?
But, you know, I just, I contradicted him.
I refused to back down.
I very politely and persistently held my position, and he escalated, blew up, and got fired.
You need to, if you think this is a bad guy, Max, you reveal his badness to everyone.
You don't play the game called, he's a good guy.
You don't play the game called, well, I'm just going to conform to whatever he puts out and I'm going to think my bad thoughts in isolation and deep in a pit of my own invisibility.
You stand up, you step forward and you say, I think that you're lying about something.
If you think he's lying, I think you're faking something.
I think this, I think that. Or when he says something that is false, you say, that is false.
And then if he gets passive aggressive, you say, that's passive aggressive, I think.
And then if he starts getting hostile, I'll say, and now you're getting hostile.
And you take down his defenses piece by piece by piece until people see what's behind the mask, right?
If you think your sister's dating a bad guy and he's going to be bad for her, Then you step in as someone who loves her, and you peel the mask off the person who you think is the bad guy.
You're not telling her to date him or not.
You're just turning the light on, right?
right, so that she can see him for who he really is.
Okay.
I mean, the main circumstance I had in mind would be like, let's say the next time I'd see him, when he comes over to our house with my sister, and he like sees me and he comes up, you know, like I said, to like give me like a bro hug.
Like I said, I don't like doing that with him.
You know what I mean? Like that's something I do not like.
So then you can be honest and you can say, I find hugs with you repulsive because I find you a fake person and I think you're damaging the heart of my sister or you're just about to.
I mean, how honest are you willing to be?
So pretty much just be very direct about it.
Be honest! It's the first virtue.
Without that virtue, nothing else is possible.
Just, you know, and it's funny, Max, because everybody, and it's not just you, and I understand, I grew up in England, I understand all of this, everyone plays this avoidance game.
Everyone says, let's all get together and lie like a rug to each other.
Let's all sit in the same room and avoid any truth whatsoever.
Let's all gather around the barbecue and eat the truth along with our bison burgers.
Everybody wants to get together real tight and face the opposite direction, if that makes any sense.
Everybody wants to hang out.
Nobody wants to let it all hang out.
So just be honest.
I don't like you.
I'm not saying it's you.
This is what you could say. I don't know if it's you.
I don't know if it's me. I don't like you.
And here's why. You take my sister out to a day club, to a night club.
You go to some diner in the middle of the night.
You leave her. She's crying.
She thinks she's sleeping and gonna go and sleep with someone else.
She doesn't know how to take a cab home.
That's not entirely your fault, but I'm sure you knew that.
I can't let that go.
So let's have it out.
Let's have a conversation.
What happened that night? Why were there police involved on my sister's birthday?
These are things I have a problem with.
I'm happy to be corrected.
I'm happy to hear a reasonable explanation.
But I'm sorry, I cannot spend the next 50 years stuffing a sock of falcet into my mouth so I don't accidentally spit out an honest syllable or two.
Yeah, that makes sense.
It's like that great...
One thing I remember from the movie Aladdin, you know, the one with a really hyperkinetic, well, always hyperkinetic Robin Williams.
Right. And the prince, he's got to be, you know, he's got to tell he's not really a prince, right?
He just... And he's like, oh, how do I tell Jasmine?
What do I say? And the genie is like, I don't know.
How about you tell her the truth?
You know, in this big neon sign, the truth with rotating lights.
And it's like, I don't know.
How about you just tell the truth?
Yeah, I guess it's fear of conflict, fear that I'd mess something up.
No, it's not any of that.
Max? Do you have any fears in your life that you overcome?
Of course. Okay.
Give me an example, please.
I used to be very afraid at approaching women, and I ended up not being afraid at approaching women after really going through those moments where it was terrifying.
Right. Why did you do that?
What motivated you?
Because I felt like I was improving as a person because I knew I was doing something that would be better for me.
Oh my lord. You're horny!
You can't have sex without approaching women.
We like to have sex, right?
What was it that gave you the motivation to overcome your fear of approaching women?
Which we, you know, if we have any brains or any sense, If you're not scared of approaching women, you're not aiming high enough, right?
I mean, it just, you know, if you're going to pick up some drunken skank at three o'clock in the morning off the floor of a bar and bang her sawdust studded ass on the side of a pool table, well, you're not aiming high enough.
Probably not that scared to approach that.
But if you, you know, you want to aim high when it comes to who you're going to be friends with, what you're going to do with your life, who you're going to marry, who you're going to date, you want to aim high.
And so, of course you're going to be scared.
Of course! Because you want something and you don't know if you're going to get it and it's very, very important to you.
So, what was it that drove you to overcome your fear of approaching a woman?
Like I said, it felt like I just acknowledged that it was the right thing for me to do.
That I knew that I should overcome it.
And so I kind of put myself to a high standard sometimes.
I go, if I can't do this...
Okay, so you had a desire. Yeah.
You had a desire. Yeah.
Right? So you had a desire and you overcame your fear of rejection, right?
Yes. Okay. You need to love your sister more.
If you have a high enough love for your sister, then you would overcome your fear.
Like, you had a high enough desire to approach a woman, so you overcame your fear, and you approached a woman.
Because you... You grabbed your balls and you said, cover me boys, we're going in.
Right? Deep.
You'll see daylight and dark and daylight and dark.
So, you had a desire strong enough to overcome your fear.
So, my question is, in terms of, if you think this guy's bad for your sister, do you love her enough to overcome your fear of disapproval?
Absolutely. Then?
Because, you know, when I brought this up, you said, well, I guess I, you know, I don't want to I don't want things to be awkward.
Well, sure. And we don't want to be rejected.
But we need to have the possibility of rejection in order to make things worthwhile.
Right? Right.
So, you need to have enough love to overcome your fear of social awkwardness.
Because that's what love is.
Love is if we see someone we love doing something or getting involved in something that's bad for them or we think there's We act.
We do something. Now, you can't make her date or not date this guy, but at least you can give her enough information that she's making an informed choice.
And if everyone's conforming to this guy's superficiality and lack of trustworthiness and impulsivity, if everyone's just conforming to this like it's normal, she's not getting...
The right feedback about how to make a decision, right?
I don't think she really cares about our opinions.
My father is very unhappy with him, and he completely avoids my father now.
Right, so this is what you find out, Max.
Here's the thing. Do you want to know how to die spiritually?
I will tell you how to die spiritually so you can avoid it.
I will tell you how your heart can just be turned into an ant in the bottom of a muddy caterpillar track from a World War I tank driving over your future.
Are you ready? Here we go. Here we go.
The way to die spiritually, Max, is to love people more than they love themselves.
So here's the thing. You act out of 100% love for your sister.
You act like a tree fell on her on a hike.
I mean, if you were hiking out with your sister and a tree fell on her, smashing her leg, what would you do?
I'd, you know, help her out.
You'd move heaven and earth, right?
You'd tear half your back muscles out trying to get the tree off her.
You'd call, you'd scream, you'd enlist the help of a nearby coked up bear, I don't know, but you'd do something to help her, right?
Yes. Right. Because you care about her.
Now, if an inclement dude has fallen on her rather than a random tree, then you must do as much to help her.
Now, you act out of 100% love for your sister, which doesn't mean you're not nervous or whatever it is, but you go and do it, right?
So you act out of 100% love for your sister, and this guy's character is revealed!
You know, he gets angry, he storms out, he throws things, he yells, or he completely cucks out, conforms, and empties out, and then badmouths you to other people, which you can then confront him on.
The next time you see him, you're relentless, right?
You're relentlessly honest with people, and it either draws them to you, or it drives them away from you, and they sit there on the far fence throwing rotten eggs at you, thinking that they're hitting anything other than their own delusions, right?
Trust me, I've been in the public sphere for more than a decade.
I know a little bit about this topic.
Now, if it turns out, Max, that your sister sees who this guy is and doesn't have the goddamn self-respect to dump him like two days old internal Indian food, well, then you say, okay, if I love my sister 100%, but she loves herself 10%, I can't love her more than 10%.
Because I'm just going to get used.
I'm just going to get destroyed.
I'm going to get eaten up.
I'm going to get chewed under. You cannot love people more than they love themselves.
That is a recipe for spiritual suicide.
Europe, are you listening?
So this is what you need to do.
You act out of 100% love.
You expose the truth about this guy.
If she sees the truth and decides to keep on dating him, you give up.
Because if you love someone more than they love themselves, your life will collapse around you.
And what if she gets knocked up by this guy this time next week?
Then what? Then this guy's around for two decades.
And that's the best possible outcome.
What if this guy is untrustworthy?
She's right that he's going to sleep with some other guy if they have a conflict.
He's going to sleep with some other woman if they have a conflict.
And then he goes and gets some god-awful, spine-rotting, sexually transmitted disease and passes it on to your sister.
What if she's right about his untrustworthiness sexually?
Are you going to look back and say, well, at least I didn't make things awkward?
Yeah. Definitely not.
Honesty is not aggression.
Right? I mean, I hope you don't feel like I'm somehow being aggressive or putting you down or whatever it is.
I'm just being honest about what I think is virtuous and needs to be done.
Not at all. Not at all.
So I'm being honest. I'm being direct.
But I'm not being abusive.
I'm not being hostile.
I'm channeling the passion that is escaping you a little bit.
When people are on fire, you put them out.
If they then set themselves on fire again, you move on.
Okay. All right.
Well, I hope that works out, Max.
And I hope that if he's a bad guy and she sees it, she's able to drop him up her standards and move on.
And I hope that you can model that kind of assertiveness for your whole family.
I'm sorry that your father hasn't.
But thanks very much for the call. I appreciate it enormously.
Let's move on. Thank you very much.
Alright, up next we have Aiden.
Aiden wrote in and said, That's from Aiden.
Aidan, how are you doing, my friend?
Hey, doing well. My sister was on the show a little while ago.
It was after the OSU attack, and you might remember having her on, but yeah.
Yeah, yeah. How's she doing?
Yeah, she's doing great. She's doing good.
Still on Students for Trump at OSU, and yeah, it's going well.
Excellent. Excellent. Yeah, she was great.
Do give her my very best.
All right. So, do you want to talk about the Aristotelian Unmoved Mover?
Sounds like a cold-hearted guy who helps you change your house from one place to another.
But all right. So I wanted to give people a bit of a balance.
A block of granite. Yeah.
So what I'm really talking about is kind of cosmological arguments.
And I'm sure that you've heard of them.
Specifically, what I'm talking about is a Kalam cosmological argument.
And so, in the question, I cited scientific evidence talking about the beginning of the universe.
There's this thing called the Bord-Guth-Vilenkin theorem.
And the theorem was proved in 2003.
And it proves that any universe that is on average in a rate of cosmic expansion has to have an absolute beginning.
So this applies whether there's a multiverse, a best-to-mean absolute beginning.
And so the argument goes like this.
It goes, premise one, everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise two, the universe begins to exist.
And then the conclusion, of course, is the universe has a cause.
And so I was wondering what your thoughts are on that.
Well, I mean, it's fairly unassailable, you know, from...
From a validity standpoint, right?
There's three areas of logic.
The truth of a premise, the validity of an argument, and the soundness of the argument if the premises are true and the reasoning is solid.
So the issue is everything that begins has a cause, right?
Right. Now, how do we know that that which causes something to begin does not also have a cause?
Okay, so what I'm talking about here is efficient causes, as opposed to material causes.
So I'm saying that, let's say that we have a block of granite, and then it's sculpted into a statue of David, right?
What I'm saying is that it doesn't go from granite to the statue of David without something acting upon it.
Do you understand what I'm saying? If that clarifies it at all?
No, it doesn't. So if we say, let's go...
Something, let's sort of abstract it a little bit more.
Sorry. Something which comes into being must be caused by something, but how do we know that that which causes the universe was not itself caused by something else?
Oh, so you're saying that what caused God?
Yes. Oh, okay.
So, that's a good objection.
And we could, like, a hundred years ago, a lot of atheists thought that, you know, the universe was uncaused, so then it doesn't need a cause, right?
So, the first premise says everything that begins to exist has a cause, so I'm maintaining that God didn't begin to exist, so he doesn't need a cause.
How do you know that God did not begin to exist?
So it kind of goes back to, if I could postulate a thought experiment with you, it was formulated by the mathematician David Hilbert.
It's called Hilbert's Hotel.
And so it's supposed to demonstrate the absurdity of an actual infinite physical chain of events or physical substance.
So the thought experiment goes like this.
So let's say that we imagine a hotel and there's 100 rooms in it and all 100 rooms are filled.
So if a person comes in, they want a room, the person will have to be turned away and they'll say, oh, I'm sorry, like you have to find somewhere else.
But let's say that we have an infinite number of rooms and every single room is filled, right?
So what we can do if someone comes in is we just move the person from room one to Into room two, from room two, into room three, and so on.
And we make room for the person.
And then it gets even crazier when we try to add an infinite number of people.
So there's an infinite number of rooms, and every single room is filled.
So an infinite number of people come in.
So what we do is we move the person in room one to room two, the person in room two to room four, and we just double the number.
So now there's an infinite number of rooms freed up.
So this is supposed to demonstrate that an actual infinite physical couldn't exist because it's So, is it sort of like...
I don't follow that example particularly well, but is it sort of like...
The argument of infinite regression, or turtles all the way down, that if we say that which exists must be created, and therefore God exists, therefore God must have been created, who created God?
Super-God. Well, Super-God must have been created, Super-Super-God ad infinitum.
And therefore, at some point, given that infinite regression doesn't really answer anything, it's just like saying that you have more money by holding a dollar bill up between two mirrors and saying, I've created the Federal Reserve.
So this infinite regression stuff, at some point, you have to drop the hammer and say, okay, well, at some point, something has to exist that wasn't created.
Is that fair to say? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's exactly what I'm saying. Okay.
But if something exists, which doesn't have to be created, why not the universe?
Oh, that's a great question.
And that goes back to what I was talking about with the Bord-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, right?
So a lot of people used to think that the universe was eternal, but we have really strong scientific evidence that proves that the universe began a finite time ago at an absolute beginning.
And this is very well regarded among physicists.
I have a quote from one of the proponents of the theory, if you want to hear that.
Sure. All right, so Alexander Blinken said, it is said that an argument is what it takes to convince a reasonable man, and a proof is what it takes to convince an unreasonable man.
We now have the proof of a cosmic beginning.
So an absolute beginning, where no time, no space, and no matter existed prior to that, and then we had time, space, and matter.
Right. But I'm not sure how that implies the existence of an intelligent creator.
I mean, to take an example, at some point, The sun did not exist.
Then enough matter collected and the gravity and the, I guess, the fission started or whatever it was.
And now we have a big giant flaming ball that lasts for 10 billion years, right?
Right. So there was no sun.
Now there's a sun, source of light and heat and, for me, freckles and sunburns.
Now, the fact that the sun came into existence, the fact that the sun...
Bursts into flame does not imply that it's a giant match struck by God, right?
I agree. I understand the conservation of matter and energy and so on, that this is a rearrangement of matter and energy that already exists in the universe.
But here's the example of something coming into being or manifesting that does not require a creator.
And I'm just wondering why that would not be the case for the universe as a whole.
Alright, so like I said, I agree with you where gravity can produce universes and suns and other planets just over a long period of time, billions of years.
But what I'm saying is that the material that the sun is made of didn't always exist, right?
So something...
The principle is that something can't come from nothing, right?
If a rabbit popped onto my desk right now, I wouldn't just say, oh, it came from nothing.
I would try and deduce a cause of it.
So there's an unknown, which is assuming that...
I got to tell you, I mean, I am obviously no scientist, no physicist, but I have been floating around physics.
I remember When I dated an engineer in my late teens, early 20s, reading about superstring theory.
It's the next big thing that's going to explain everything.
And this is what, like 30 plus years ago?
And now, as far as I understand it, it's still just a bunch of equations and so on.
Yeah, yeah. So, I have some skepticism as to physicists have a final answer as to the origins of the universe.
I'll just tell you, again, I understand that I have no competence to say this.
I'm just telling you whether this is bias or skepticism or whatever.
I just want to be completely honest with where I'm coming from.
So, there's that. Now, the second thing, of course, is that we don't – let's say that the universe did pop into existence out of nothing.
That there was nothingness, there was no matter, there was no energy, there was no space-time, and out it comes, right?
Right. That could be a physical process.
There is no evidence for that that conclusively proves an intelligent designer or creator.
It is something we don't know.
What happened, or how it happened, or what the cause was.
And I think the I don't know is the importantly honest statement, saying some giant, incomprehensible, omniscient, all-powerful being that we can't possibly comprehend or understand in any way, through some completely unreproducible, incomprehensible method, did something we can't understand to produce the universe, and then we say, oh look, I've answered something.
It's like, I don't think X is much of an answer, if that makes sense.
Oh, it does. It does.
And I want to say that I'm not arguing for an omniscient, a morally perfect being, what I'm arguing for.
So let's take the original argument, right?
So everything that begins to exist has a cause.
And, you know, we talked about, you know, science is never 100% sure on anything.
So there's always skepticism to be had there.
The universe began to exist, of course, so the universe has a cause.
So if we talk about what the cause of the universe must be if there is no time, no space, and no matter, it has to be spaceless, so it can't be within space.
It has to be timeless because it transcends time.
And so what we're left with is we're kind of left with two options.
So we're either left with a personal being or an abstract object, right?
We have an X. We don't know, assuming that all of this stuff turns out to be correct.
At the moment, we have no idea what created the universe from a scientific standpoint, right?
Saying God is stepping outside the realm of science, right?
Right, right. I'm not proposing a God of the gaps argument right here.
What I'm saying is that...
Deductively, so you know abstract objects like numbers, like the number one didn't begin to exist necessarily.
It just exists in itself, like a platonic object.
Do you hold to that or do you affirm that?
Wait, I would say that concepts did not exist in the universe until beings capable of generating and defining concepts, i.e., to our knowledge so far, mostly human beings, with the exception of people at Berkeley.
So I would say that...
Concepts did not exist in the universe.
Coconuts, four coconuts did, but the number four did not until a sentient being defined, the number four, and then the concept came into existence.
So the number four, like the physical material objects, the old is the universe, right, for carbon atoms or whatever.
But the concept of four is probably no more than maybe 10 or 20,000 years.
I mean, I don't know.
We're sort of digging back into prehistory.
I would assume maybe even older in terms of like, "I'm going to go and hunt three buffalo today," or whatever, right?
So the concepts came into being billions of years after the individual things they described existed.
See, I would disagree with you there.
What I would say is that these concepts exist, but we actualize them and we thought of them and recognize them when we have consciousness.
So this is a platonic argument that the concepts exist independent of consciousness?
That is correct. Yeah, I've seen absolutely no evidence for that.
Okay, so I guess that's one of the big things that we don't really see eye to eye on when it comes to abstract objects.
No, this is not a potato potato, not a chocolate versus vanilla.
If you wish to suggest that concepts exist independent of consciousness, You need to prove that, right?
And the idea that I need proof because I'm an unreasonable man, you understand that's a tiny bit of a douche move, right?
Well, he wants proof.
He must be unreasonable. Come on, that's not fair, right?
Wait, what? Didn't you say earlier that an argument convinces a reasonable man, but proof convinces an unreasonable man?
Oh, no, no, no. That was a quote from a scientist talking about how certain he was pertaining to the beginning of the universe.
I wasn't saying that towards you at all.
All right. Yeah, so if you have proof of the existence of concepts independent of consciousness, that would be a truly staggering step in a platonic direction.
Okay, yeah. I don't have any arguments put forward in terms of abstract objects at the moment.
That's not something that I've necessarily looked into.
I thought we were talking about this because it was part of your proof.
I was talking about how some philosophers think that abstract objects exist.
They're not caused necessarily.
They just exist independent of anything else.
So God would be something else similar to an abstract object that exists independently of mind.
Well, I don't think that concepts can exist independent of consciousness except in the mind of God.
Say that again, say that again.
I don't think that concepts can exist independent of human consciousness except in the mind of God.
There can't be a number four floating around in there.
There can't be a concept which is embedded in consciousness that exists independent of human consciousness without itself being embedded in some other consciousness, which I assume would be a god.
Okay, yeah, I get what you're saying.
Right. So, no, I'm not of, and this is my very first video, oh, those many moons ago with the grocery bag in the background, understanding concepts, that concepts are imperfectly derived from instances in reality as transmitted through the senses to the brain.
Concepts exist in the brain, and concepts must always bow to the absolutism of empiricism.
So they do not exist independent of the material objects, and they certainly don't exist outside the human mind.
I see what you're saying. If we could get back to the initial argument, if that's okay?
That was good to talk about.
But what I was talking about, I think that you said, after we were talking about, we agree that the universe has a cause, but you don't agree with saying that that cause is God necessarily.
Is that correct? Yeah. Well, again, I'm not a physicist enough to understand the arguments as to the origins of the universe, but if it came out of nothing, then something happened.
What happened? I have no idea.
And I'm going to resolutely stand in that place of not knowing.
I'll tell you this, just by the by, sort of person to person.
Aidan, whenever I have been certain, Of something without working through it myself from first principles, I have made terrible mistakes.
Terrible mistakes.
So I have, you know, this is after many years and decades of being certain of things that turned out to be false.
I'm certain, I know.
What ethics is. Because I've read Aristotle and objectivism and other...
I'm certain I know. I'm certain I know how society should be organized because I read Atlas Shrugged or I read John Locke or whatever, right?
And it turned out I was wrong, baby wrong.
Goes to the buzzer and Simon rolls his eyes.
So... I don't at all anymore like to extend any certainties to any proposition unless I really understand it, unless I've really worked through it from first principles.
You know, this is part of my skepticism towards, you know, catastrophic anthropogenic climate change and so on.
I have not worked through the models.
I've done a bit of environmental modeling in myself in my career in the past and know that it's garbage in, garbage out.
And they don't know, you see, they don't know if the hurricane is going to land in Florida in six hours.
But boy, do they ever know what the temperature is going to be in 100 years.
So unless I've worked things through, I have some certainties, right?
And I've written books on them.
I have real certainties.
But, but...
When it comes to things I don't really know much about, when it comes to methodologies I can't work through as a lack of knowledge and expertise in physics and assume math, then I am just skeptical.
And I don't believe or accept reports of things.
So some physicist says, I have found God's footprint in the, you know, whatever it is.
I'm not saying this guy, right? I was like, eh, sorry, don't.
You know, if I can't work through it myself, I just assume I'm in the, you know, house MD corner.
I just assume everyone has a motive.
Everyone is following a particular hallucination sometimes, just as I have done in the past.
Stripping things down to their Cartesian bare elements, building things up from scratch, realizing and letting go of everything I thought I knew.
Just letting it all go is a hard thing to do.
Hard thing for me, I think, for everyone.
And saying, okay, if I can't build it from first principles, like, you know, UPB or practical anarchy, everyday anarchy, or the art of the arguments, if I can't build it up from first principles, or the new book I'm working on, An Introduction to Philosophy, if I can't work it up from first principles, if I can't do the reasoning myself and follow every step and...
Accept the evidence? So, I don't know.
I don't know what caused the universe.
Nobody does. And I think that claiming any sort of conscious direction to the beginning of the universe is not valid.
It's not valid. Because we don't know.
Yeah, so it sounds like you've been reading a lot of Descartes.
That's just a joke, talking about uncertainty.
But yeah, I'm not saying that.
I'm certain. I'm just saying I'm trying to deduce, because if we agree with the primacy, and it sounds like you do, to the best of your knowledge, I know you're talking about how you don't know the science necessarily, haven't looked into it.
And I would really encourage you to do that.
I think it's really interesting. It's not going to happen.
I'm sorry, I don't mean to reject what you're saying, but I have, as somebody who's an expert in a few things, I recognize expertise and the idea that I'm going to follow this mathematical or conceptual reasoning is not helpful.
But let's say, see, here's the thing, here's the thing.
Aidan, even if I accept that everything you're saying is true, even if I say, yes, some conscious entity that is eternal, and I assume pretty much all-powerful since they created the universe, some conscious- Cool, powerful enough to- I'm sorry?
Not necessarily omnipotent, but powerful enough to create the universe, right?
Right. So even if I say that, why has that changed?
Oh, I think that's the best starting ground when it comes to looking into a higher power or a deity.
Because if we follow what you said, and there's a transcendent consciousness that created the universe, I think it kind of wants us to look into what that consciousness is like and if he interacts with us.
No, no, no. Here's the thing, right?
Here's the thing, Aiden. Now what you're doing is you're moving from identity to motives.
Because you're saying, okay, well, if this is the proof of God, then God must want us to do—and now, come on.
You have something on the entire other side of the universe, what, 14 plus billion years ago.
You have something incomprehensible outside of space and time with no direct reference, and you're able to impug motive to that?
No, no, no, no, no, no. Sorry.
I'm sorry. That's not what I'm claiming at all.
I'm just saying that this is a good starting point.
Well, okay, if I said that, I didn't mean to.
Okay, no, I'm not trying to catch you or make you – I'm just following what you said.
Now, if you want to withdraw that, that's perfectly fine with me.
Lord knows I say stuff that I have to back away from.
But what I mean by that is, let's say that there's something on the other side of the creation of the universe, 14 plus billion years ago, inaccessible to us, no direct evidence, outside of space and time.
What does that mean? What does that change?
Let's say that I know that there's a big diamond right in the center of the moon.
Does that make me wealthier?
No, it doesn't.
Can I say, well, that diamond controls the future?
I mean, that can say anything about it.
What does it change? Oh, so what I was hoping to change your mind on is a kind of atheism and...
Hope and shift your position from atheism to deism or something like that.
I am a practical man.
This is my issue with determinism.
I've just been writing about this, so I might as well tweak the determinists, who should never be tweaked, because I'm not responsible for any of the contents of my mind, apparently, Sam.
But when somebody tells me they're a determinist, but they still get to debate and argue and they get to change people's minds and they get to have ethics and they get to love things and they get to say that there's preferred states and truth is better than false.
And it's like, okay, well, so you're exactly the same as a free willer.
You just call yourself a determinist, right?
I'm an atheist, but I go to church.
I believe in Jesus Christ.
I pray and I expect to get into heaven.
It's like, well, you're not really an atheist then, are you?
Right.
And so for me, if...
Being a deist, which is more common, I guess, in the...
I guess it's having a resurgence now, sort of an 18th century position.
But to be a deist, and a deist is the idea that God wound up the universe and withdrew to watch and observe, but never interferes and wouldn't respond to prayers or anything like that.
How is that distinguishable from atheism in terms of what you do?
I don't think that it's distinguishable in terms of how you act necessarily.
I think that only theism would really change the way that you act.
But all I'm saying is that I think that truth is better than falsehood, like you said.
And I totally agree with what you said in terms of determinism and free will.
And I would love to talk to you about that sometime, but that's a different conversation.
I'm just trying to pursue the truth.
I'm sorry to say, but a truth that is immaterial.
You know, like if I can't pay my mortgage and I go to the bank and I say, hey man, don't worry.
I'm going to give you a deed to a diamond in the center of the moon.
What's he going to say? He's going to say, that's worthless.
And I'll say, no, it's not worthless.
It's a diamond. It's a big diamond.
It's bigger than the Cullinan diamond.
It's a big diamond.
It's going to be worth a fortune.
He's going to say, it adds nothing to my wealth because it's not going to change my behavior in any way.
Because to get to the moon, to drill down to the center, to extract that diamond, whatever, right?
It's immaterial to my financial transactions in the moment.
Yeah. So if somebody said, I can tell you there's a diamond or not, it's like, or I can sell you some way, or I can charge you some amount of money to send echolocation to the moon and see if there's a diamond in the middle, I'd be like, this doesn't change anything.
So why would I invest a lot of time into pursuing knowledge that changes nothing?
Okay, yeah, that's a great question.
So let's continue with the diamond analogy, right?
So let's say that this diamond exists, just for argument's sake, it's in the center of the moon, and there was a way to extract the diamond.
Would you be interested in that?
Well, of course, yeah, because then I can change my behavior, right?
Right, right, right. Exactly, exactly.
There's a ton more kind of arguments that I would love to talk to you about.
And I agree totally that this doesn't change behavior or anything.
But when it comes to, let's say that theism was true, you would change your behavior, right?
Let's say that. Well, hang on.
It's just a pretty bored category.
Oh, sorry, sorry. Christianity.
Let's say Christianity. Okay, let's say Christianity was true.
Of course, yeah, if Christianity were true.
If I had a non-psychotic, non-medically induced, non-banged my head on a low-hanging premise, if I had an experience that I could verify that put me in touch with...
You know, bearded guy from Galilee walking across the waves and, you know, driving demons into pigs or whatever, then for sure that would be empirical evidence.
If I prayed to a god, or if I prayed and I received information that I could not possibly have, then that would be evidence that I was in contact with a higher being.
A benevolent higher being, not IRS style.
And so, for sure, there are empirical tests by which we could figure out the efficacy of prayer, the existence of the possibility of human connection to a divine intelligence or omniscience, or if there were documented miracles.
I mean, there are lots of empirical ways wherein an avenue to a deity could be established beyond a reasonable doubt.
So yes, if there were things that were proven to be true, that would be incredible.
Wonderful. And I love that you said that.
So there are a lot of things I think would lead to that.
If we could maybe have the conversation again another time in terms of those things, if that sounds good.
Yeah, I actually, I saw, I don't know if you've seen this, I saw a documentary preview the other day.
The search for historical Jesus, it's some skeptic who starts to look into or look for the evidence for the historical existence of Jesus and evidence for miracles and so on.
I'm going to watch it. Yeah, that's called The Case for Christ, right?
The Case for Christ. There we go.
The Case for Christ. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I've seen the movie. Is it good?
It's, so, you have a wife, right?
I do. So, it's very kind of sappy at some points, and so you kind of roll your eyes at some points.
Wait, what does that have to do with my wife?
I'm just kind of curious. Oh, I was just saying that I was watching with my mother, and I was sitting there, and she had tears running down her face.
Okay, we'll get into the Freudian stuff of you conflating your mom with my wife next time.
Sorry, sorry, sorry.
I'm just kidding. I'm kidding.
No, no, I mentioned it.
And I was like, yeah, I'm watching.
I mean, I'm curious.
I'm open.
I'm interested. I, you know, I try not to deny myself access to any facts that could be relevant.
And I don't know, the...
Fact that Jesus could be the Son of God, yeah, that's something I was raised with and something that I think could be fairly relevant to life choices and all that.
So, yeah, I'll have a look and approach it with, of course, an open mind and all of that.
So, yeah, listen, if you want to – I'll watch that.
I'll try and watch that this week. It's hard finding any time these days, but I will try.
And if you want to call back in and talk more, I would certainly be happy to.
All right. Thank you so much for the time, Stefan.
All right. Thanks, Aiden. A great pleasure.
And again, say hi to your sister for me.
Will do. Okay. Bye. And your mom!
Just kidding. Yeah. Well, no, you say that too.
All right.
Thanks, man. Alright, up next we have Lisa.
Lisa wrote in and said, I've been listening to your podcast for about one year and my husband has been listening to some of them recently.
I've started reading real-time relationships and I'm about halfway through.
I've already been hit with many truths, most of which are physically painful.
I'm contacting you because I feel time is running short for our marriage and I cannot pretend anymore.
I've tried to speak with my husband many times about this, but he avoids it or doesn't understand what I mean.
I don't want to break up our children's home and damage them even more.
I have many regrets about the kind of mother I've been, even though I swore I wouldn't be like mine.
My objective with contacting you is to try and minimize any further damage to my children and to survive my marriage.
There are no physical or verbal abuse in our marriage, but we avoid everything that may bring a conflict.
It is fake. To sum up our relationship, you can substitute our names for Bruce and Sheila in real-time relationships.
I know you can't tell us what to do, but I feel like you could give us or even just myself the kick in the ass we need.
I know that we avoid any conflict because if we were really honest with each other and our families, everything we have would come crashing down.
This terrifies me.
That's from Lisa. Oh, Lisa, my goodness, what a message.
I am sorry to hear about that.
Sorry that your husband's not with us.
Wait, that sounds a bit sinister.
I'm sorry he's no longer with us.
And I hope that I can help.
And for those who don't know, Real Time Relationships is a book that I wrote called The Logic of Love.
And it is about the philosophy of honesty, intimacy, and love.
It's available at freedomainradio.com slash free.
So I'm glad people are still reading it.
So I'm glad that you're finding it.
Helpful. What is going on in the marriage that is so painful?
Because the idea of surviving your marriage rather than enjoying your marriage as a powerful flourishing is a scary idea.
Yeah, it sounds really horrible after hearing him read that email.
I mean, we do care about each other a lot and I guess really it's just the falseness of the relationship that gets to me at times.
And that we don't have a connection.
I've heard you talk about with other people, and that's really hard to live with.
Yeah, this...
Same planet, different worlds kind of marriage thing.
I find quite fascinating.
I can't remember the number, but to me it was some extraordinary number.
I'm not putting you in this category, Lisa, but it's some extraordinary number.
Of couples, they don't even have sex anymore.
Like 20% of couples, like the married couple, they don't have sex anymore.
Like they kind of float around in the same area.
They're in the same proximity.
They breathe in the same air.
But it's like, you know, like you think of a chimney being built around people that are just kind of shuffling around inside of a prison of bricks.
It just sort of feels that way to a lot of...
I find that, like that to me is, I tell you, to be honest, it's torture to me.
It is very painful if I'm not connected to the people around me, which is very rare, but it's like I feel it like somebody's got like a fishhook around my ribs and it's just pulling.
Like I feel it like and I need to close that gap.
And is it a kind of isolation or a separation of hearts that is going on in the household?
Everything you just said is pretty much it.
I felt it for a very long time and tried to express it or tried to figure out what was going on or what I could change.
I always ended up feeling like I was crazy.
I'm just imagining it.
Either he doesn't understand what I'm saying or doesn't want to.
Maybe things have gotten a little better.
He's been more willing to go to some counseling last year, and that went a bit better.
But if he does learn something, it doesn't last for long.
And I feel like I have to keep pushing him to do it, and then it might last for a week or two, and then it will stop.
And then I have to get on top of it again, and it gets very tiring.
Yeah, and it feels like, what's the point, right?
I'm pretty much getting to that point which scares me about the future of the marriage because we took our vows and we both take them very seriously and we do not want to break up our marriage and I don't want to harm my children with that.
It's just hard to look ahead, especially when the kids will be on their own as to what it will be like.
It looks very empty.
Right. Right.
And what's the history with the drinking that you've mentioned in the introduction?
It was my father.
And it's actually everywhere.
On my husband's side.
And my father was an alcoholic.
He died when I was 15.
Did he die of drinking?
Smoking, I guess. Lung cancer.
He was heavy into both.
It's very heavy on his side of the family and still is.
So, is it fair to say?
Because alcohol...
I have very little experience with alcohol.
A couple of times when I was a teenager, I went over to friends' places and we cracked a case and I would drink too much and...
It was never that fun.
Like, I used to have this thing.
I would... If I could remember the definition of a galaxy, then I would know that I wasn't really drunk.
So what would happen is I would get the physical symptoms.
I'd get the spins. I'd get, you know, whatever.
Lose physical coordination.
Get giggly. But I could always...
Define a galaxy. You know, a galaxy is a spiral-shaped cluster of suns held together by a central gravitational mass.
And so I could never tamp down the top brain, right?
The post-monkey beta expansion pack called humanity.
And I could never tamp it down.
It would be kind of fun, but there would also be a kind of like a self-conscious, you know, I'm drunk and, you know, and then people would go off in pursuit of Bad decisions and good stories, right?
Like there's that t-shirt that says, no great story ever started with, I had a salad, right?
And But then what would happen is, so I wouldn't get, I don't know what self-erasure people get or what happens to people who drink who really, really like it.
So I tried it a couple of times when I was a teenager.
I would get unwell, and the spins were horrible, like you'd lie on a bed with that old Dean Martin thing.
You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.
And... And then what would happen is I'd feel like crap the next day, and that would last for most of the day, sort of on dinner time.
So I was like, okay, well, I'm pretty much the same.
I'm just physically uncoordinated.
I can never lose the definition of a galaxy.
I sometimes will throw up, and then I get the spins and can't sleep well.
And then I have a headache the next day.
Like, I mean, it was just like, this is not...
Anything that was tempting to me.
So I don't know what...
I'm just sort of sharing this with you.
I don't know what the attraction is for alcohol.
Now, I'll have a light beer once in a while.
And I guess last time I got drunk was when I was probably 21.
After I played Macbeth at a cast party, we got drunk and it was fun.
Sangria pitchers. My nemesis.
So I don't really quite understand...
The drinking, but I do get this from drinking, which is that alcohol divides.
It separates.
I know a lot of people drink because they're socially anxious or they're uncomfortable with themselves or they feel like they don't have any value to others unless they're conspiring to make bad decisions under the influence or whatever, for great stories later or whatever.
But there is a lot of isolation that occurs with drinking.
Like, if you ever want to see that, and you probably have, but if you ever want to see that, go to a group of people who normally drink, hang out with them, and don't drink.
And what you'll see very clearly is that they are like galaxies in the universe.
They're all just spiraling away from each other, but they don't know it because they're trying to scrub out everything that divides them to get the lowest common denominator of general idiocy, but there's no contact in that place.
We can only contact using the higher faculties, which generally go dark under alcohol.
So what I see is this kind of hysteria of attempting to connect, but scrubbing out the very faculties which allow us to connect, which is sort of our higher reasoning and our identity, the identity aspects of our mind and hearts.
And so I guess with that hopefully not too long conversation, A speech from me.
Do you think that as you grew up, the alcoholism that was in your family created a normalization of this distance and that may have continued into your marriage?
Oh, that could definitely be, yeah.
I didn't ever think about it like that, but that could definitely, I mean, it causes a ton of problems in families.
Yeah, isolation is definitely one of them.
And shame, too. Yes.
You know, I mean, if you have something significantly dysfunctional within your household, and you and I both know this one, I think, deep in our spines, Lisa, it's tattooed in the marrow.
It's really challenging to socialize, right?
Hey, kids, come over to my house.
It's going to be great.
And that shame and that What's that song?
He's home again and he's drunk again and he's...
Where is this love that will open the door?
Anyway, there is this isolation, not just within the family, but between the family and everyone outside.
Because, you know, if there's falling down drunk, if there's abusive drunk, if there's yelling drunk, if there's dysfunctional drunk, if there's driving drunk and so on, you go to school the next day when you're a kid and you can't, you know, how was your weekend?
Terrifying. I thought someone was going to fall on me.
Or yelling or scary or, you know, we can't pay the bills because all the money is being spent on booze.
You have to lie in the general population.
You get isolated by falsehood, by hiding what the hell is going on in your home, this giant cotton ball wall of silence and falsehood and misdirection.
You can't even show that you're that sad because then God for the sake, God help you.
If somebody asks you why you're sad and you tell the truth, it's going to be incredibly humiliating.
And there's two things that can happen if you tell the truth about what's going on in your terrible household.
Number one, people will do nothing.
It's terrible. Number two, they'll do something and that might be even worse.
Yeah, we didn't live with my dad after I was seven.
But, yeah, I don't...
I mean, there's a lot of...
I guess a lot of dysfunction with everyone in the family.
Even when we didn't live with him, that even after he died, it just keeps going on and on.
And I guess everyone we were around family-wise, everybody drank.
I thought that was just normal.
I don't... Like, I don't remember...
Thinking I have to hide anything or be ashamed of it.
I think it was just, oh, that's the way it was.
So even in school, like your friends, their parents would all drink and stuff?
Oh, I mean more like all family.
We would be around. Yeah, my best friend, their family, yeah, they had a lot of drinking going on too.
Yeah, maybe I just hooked up with other people with the same problem.
Well, at least then there's less to hide, but there's also less to share.
And what was it like for you, Lisa, growing up when your parents or your father or extended family or just the social gatherings when there was this drinking?
What was your experience of that?
I guess...
To me, it just seemed like everyone was always having fun.
My dad and one of his brothers, they would usually end up arguing with everyone who thought it was funny.
That's just what happened.
I guess it always was a fun thing.
There would be lots of music and dancing and lots of drinking and some people would argue and it was all funny.
Where did the dysfunction show up if it did?
I think more Maybe with my mom and how she handled things and like all the fighting, you know, just at home, not in family gatherings, but just at home with my parents and their kids.
A lot of fighting and lots of anxiety, lots of being scared.
You mean for you because of the violence or aggression?
Yeah. Right.
The opportunity costs of alcoholism is something that's hard to see, and maybe this is partly what's showing up in your marriage at the moment, Lisa.
The opportunity costs of every time you get together with people and you're drinking, you're not learning how to socialize without drinking.
It's one of the reasons why it becomes so socially addictive, and why the person who The person who would even remotely suggest to get together without drinking would be viewed as like crazy, right?
Yeah. That won't be any fun.
Why? Are you saying it's a problem?
Yeah. I remember a guy I knew years ago was talking about being up the cottage.
And he said, you know, whenever you get a whole bunch of people coming up to a cottage, It's always the same thing.
It's mostly cool people who are willing to, you know, sit on the dock in Muskoka chairs and crack a few beers and put their feet in the icebox when it gets too hot, jump in the lake once in a while, shoot the shit, listen to some tunes.
But then there's always one guy, one guy who comes up and says, Hey, everyone, let's play Pictionary!
I was that guy, just in case anyone's wondering.
It's like, okay, I'm really bored of drinking and staring at the water now.
Can we do something that's going to engage my brain?
I think he may have mentioned that story to me to warn me in case I was ever at a cottage with him.
Anyway, to not do that.
But you're not learning how to interact with people without alcohol.
You're not learning how to have conversations.
And... Alcohol is like an excuse for spontaneity, and it gives people a lack of responsibility about their actions that I guess some people find funny.
You know, like, I was so drunk, that.
And it's like, I don't understand.
You know, I mean, you could stick your, you know, you could stick a fork in an electrical socket and say, I was so electrocuted, that.
It's not funny.
I was hit on the head with a shovel so hard I fell down the hill.
Let's play Pictionary.
So, you're not learning how to interact without alcohol.
Now, I'm going to assume that it's diminished or stopped, the drinking.
For you, for your husband, is that right?
Well, my dad's side, there's still alcoholism.
My dad is gone, but My husband's side...
There's still...
I think his dad is probably an alcoholic, but very...
He's not a stumbling around drunk or anything.
He's a high-functioning, yeah. Yeah, very.
Yeah. But his uncle is a really hardcore alcoholic.
So it's in both sides of the family.
Although we don't see his side of the family.
They live in a different country.
Except for his father.
I mean, that's a different story, yeah.
Now, are we talking like full-on Jim Morrison?
Yeah, I woke up this morning and I got myself a beer.
Are we talking like that?
Breakfast beers? Or what are we talking here?
His dad? Yeah, the uncle.
He probably has a few every day.
So, I wouldn't say he gets drunk, but it almost seems like he just needs to have a few every day.
Right. Probably starting it after, you know, around lunchtime.
Right. I mean, I don't think my husband didn't grow up with the same kind of drunk, I guess you could say, as I did, but there was a lot of other kinds of abuse.
Yeah, so what, um, that was my next question.
What is it that you did as a mom that you regret?
Or what are the things you did as a mom that you regret?
There'll be some new moms listening to this over the next 5,000 years.
No pressure! But what would you like to, like what message in a bottle would you throw back through time to young Lisa or younger Lisa to enlighten her?
I guess I didn't realize I had these problems when I first started having children.
I was 24 when I had my first child.
And I've heard that part of growing up in an alcoholic family, some of us just kind of drift along and we don't really think about what we're doing.
We just sort of go where the wind blows us.
And I didn't do a lot of preparation for having children.
I also had postpartum depression with each one.
Pretty badly.
Wow. And what was that like?
I mean, Brooke Shields style?
Or I mean, that's pretty dark stuff, right?
At a time when you should be happiest.
It's horrible.
I could not understand why people have children.
When they were first born, it was like that amazing bond and joy.
And about a week later, it's like a tidal wave crashes down on you of complete terror and despair.
Do you know what the thoughts were that preceded the postpartum terror and despair phase?
A lot of anxiety.
Anxiety got worse and worse and then insomnia and thinking you don't know what to do.
You don't know what to do or just that this part is so hard and isn't going to end.
And it was just like kind of uncontrollable, even though I tried to talk myself out of it or it just, I don't know.
It was just such a, like a switch flipped about a week later.
And, um, but I mean, I did get help with it at first.
I didn't know what it was.
And the public health nurse came and noticed and said, well, like you should go see your doctor.
This is This is not a normal way to be, which was kind of comforting to hear because I thought it was normal and couldn't understand why people had children.
But then my doctor said she'll give me two weeks and if my hormones don't regulate by then, it's probably postpartum depression and it was just getting worse.
So then she did put me on an antidepressant and so that A week or two later, that did start helping.
I guess it helps with the anxiety and then helping to sleep.
And then I would stay on it for the first year and then go off of it.
And then I would be good.
But it happened with every child, and I had four.
I thought antidepressants took four to six weeks to kick in, but what do I know?
It would calm me down a bit, but it would take...
You know, yeah, four to six weeks before it was fully working, but I think it would just help to calm down the anxiety a little bit at the beginning.
It wasn't immediate that day.
And do you know what, do you have any sort of, maybe, it could have been hormones for all I know, but do you have any idea of any other causes or psychological causes or environmental causes?
Well, I have been talking about it on one, a call for, on one show.
That you were saying something about it being like unprocessed trauma from childhood or something like that.
I can't remember the exact words that you used.
So I'm wondering if maybe that's part of it.
Do you know if you, I mean, I assume that your father was drinking when you were born.
Yes. Do you know if your mother was drinking as well?
Probably. Kind of like a social...
I guess it was a social thing.
Everybody did the whole...
Everyone in that circle would drink.
I've never asked her if she drank a lot when I was born.
I'm not really sure, but she was a very...
She could be a very scary person when I was younger.
That was without drinking.
So she also had mentioned what a hard baby I was and how stressed out she was with me and there was always a lot of fighting and going on so I don't know if that's part of it.
And your parents were, I guess your mother, since your father was dead, but your mother was part of your life or was around when your babies were born?
Yes, she's still around, yeah.
She doesn't live that far from us.
I mean, she has definitely calmed down a lot.
And she's much different with my children.
And if I see something I don't like how she's behaving, I will ask her to stop.
But yeah, she was a lot different when I was young.
Why do you think she's different with your kids?
I'm less stressed maybe.
It's pretty painful though, right?
If you were treated badly by your own mother to some degree and then you see your mom being great with your kids, it's like, okay, so you know how to do it.
You know what needs to be done.
Maybe because she's not around all the time and it's just less pressure.
I guess there's a lot of stuff going on when I grew up with...
I had a stepsister, and she's a paranoid schizophrenic, and she was on drugs, and there was a whole bunch of...
There was always drama and crises going on.
I'm sorry to hear that.
You know, I do...
The question...
I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, so let me know if this makes any sense.
Would you say that it's fair to say that some aspects of your mother's relationship with you was abusive?
Yes. I'm sorry, if you need to deal with something in your house, I don't want to.
It's totally fine. No, I think I just have my youngest daughter here.
She has special needs.
I couldn't get someone to watch her.
No, that's fine. It's fine with me.
It's just if there's something you need to do, that's totally fine.
No, she's good now. He figured out what she wanted.
Okay, thank you.
She said hi. Well, hi back.
So, here's the thing.
I speak about myself, not because I want to make this about me, but I don't want to characterize your mother in any way.
That might be unfair. I know my own a little better.
When the question is, does an abusive parent know how to behave better?
Now, if they don't, then to me, there's really no moral responsibility embedded in the interaction.
Right? So, I mean, let's take a sort of silly example, right?
So there's something called shaken baby syndrome, which is, as you know, people who get so angry, they shake their babies until the baby gets injured or sometimes even dies.
Now, they would have moral responsibility for that.
And on the other hand, If a mother with no history of epilepsy suddenly shakes her baby because she has an epileptic attack, we would consider that a tragedy and we would not punish her for something which would be beyond her control, right?
Right. And to me, it is the question of, is there hiding of the behavior?
So, you know, if my mom's yelling at me or hitting me or whatever, if...
Someone knocks on the door or the phone rings or a policeman shows up or something, does the behavior change?
Does it stop? Well, okay, so if it stops, then she has the capacity to stop it if the incentives are strong enough within her mind.
Now, my pain, my fear, that's not a strong enough incentive, but the phone ringing or somebody coming by, that's enough of an incentive to stop.
Or, of course, if they're very different in public than they are in private.
That's another question.
Because that means that hiding the abuse is very, very important.
And the way that they do that is to not do it when there are witnesses, particularly witnesses who might have some power over them.
Right. And so the reason that I'm talking about all of this is that when you're a child and you're dependent, if a mother acts out or a father acts out against you in an abusive way, well, you're helpless, you're a kid, but when you're an adult, if they were to behave that way against your own children...
They would threaten, I would hope that they would threaten, the continuity of the relationship, right?
So, they won't do it because they don't have power over you or those kids anymore.
Therefore, they are restrained in the negative behaviors.
Not because necessarily they become better people, maybe they have, but in particular, I would argue, it's because they lack the power.
Okay. You know, it's sort of like some guy works for the IRS and he's storming around the neighborhood and threatening everyone or whatever.
Then he gets fired from the IRS. Well, he ain't storming around the neighborhood so much and threatening people anymore.
I'm going to get you ordered it! Whatever, right?
Even if it's nonsense. So if somebody's behavior improves because they lack power...
You know, Obama is not dropping 100,000 bombs in the Middle East anymore because he's not president.
But it's not because he had some change of heart.
He just doesn't have the power to do it anymore.
And so with parents around better behavior with grandchildren, I don't know, maybe they've matured or maybe they just don't have the same power that they used to.
And maybe you're an adult now who can evaluate their behavior independent of dependence, if that makes sense.
Yeah, that does make sense.
She will let little comments slip over time if I've asked her not to do something.
Later on, she might say, oh yeah, you won't take any advice.
You won't let me say anything about your children or you're so controlling or you're so stubborn or She'll say those little things.
So yeah, you could be right.
The woman who chose a drunk to be the father of her children is going to venture you about parenting issues.
Yep. Yeah, he was a drunk when she married him and she knew it.
And my older sister, she married, apparently he was abusive to start.
So she picked him too.
You mean a stepsister or someone else?
Yes, my stepsister's father.
So your mother has a thing for abusers, right?
And she hates men.
I've never grown up hearing one good thing about men, ever.
I still have never heard one good thing about a man from her.
Was your first child a boy or a girl?
It was a boy, right? Boy.
I wonder if that had anything to do with it.
The postpartum, I mean.
After I heard you talk about it, I'm really wondering.
And I just have most of my regrets with him because I think I was more hard on him than the other three.
Once I started learning how to be a better mom and not get so frustrated or...
I mean, it got better, but I still can't go back and be a better mom to him.
And it just... That breaks my heart.
That I was not as good as I could have been for him.
And I have apologized to him, but I just feel like that's not enough.
What I would say to other young moms is just really get to know yourself and really learn about yourself.
Do a lot of reading about how to raise children.
Just don't go into it blind, especially if you didn't come from a stable family.
Right.
If you can't even go to therapy before you have your children, that would be really great.
Yeah.
And the other thing, too, is that boys and girls are different.
You know, I see, I know, I really get this looking back down, back through the tunnel of time, which, as I said, has been a big feature of, I'm getting brought back like a salmon going upstream to spawning.
I'm getting drawn back through the tunnel of time.
It's a half-century thing.
Maybe I'll be released from it.
This is my 51st birthday month, so maybe I'll be released on the 24th from this...
This tidal backsplash to history that's going on.
And one of the things that I'm really looking back and seeing, Lisa, maybe this is part of what happened with you, is I see an incredible amount of frustration looking back, like I grew up in a single mom environment, of course, right? And like most of my friends were sons of single mothers.
And I saw an incredible amount of frustration from these single moms that the boys weren't behaving like girls.
Yeah. And you see this, like, I mean, I have a daughter, and I do sometimes think about what it would be like if I had a son, because she's different.
Yeah, they're different.
They're different. And, you know, vive la différence.
I've got no problem with it. I think it's a wonderful thing.
But I was not always Mr.
Rules when I was a kid.
And my daughter, she's great.
Like, hey, let's go play over there.
No, there's a sign that says don't play on the grass.
It's like, oh, come on, there's no one around.
No, daddy, there's a sign.
It's like, okay, well, this is just, this is different.
It's, you know, it's fine. And I just, there's a lot of frustration that...
You know, there's this idea in society that boys are broken girls and they need to be fixed so they'll be like girls.
It definitely comes in government schools in particular, right?
And I think it comes from moms too.
It's like, why are you doing boy things?
That's bad. That's wrong.
And especially if you've got this from your mom, who thinks she hates men, but she doesn't hate men.
She hates herself. Yeah.
Because she chose bad men.
Yes. And so she thinks it's about the men.
It's not. It's about her choice.
And of course, given that some personality traits are genetic, choosing bad men will change the outcome of the kids.
It's not determinism.
And there can be wonderful things that come out of that kind of resoluteness.
But she doesn't hate men.
She hates her own choices.
But I'm guessing she's not recognizing that pattern as yet.
No, she never will.
She's not interested in working on anything.
She's not interested in getting any help with anything.
That was pretty regular, even when I was a kid.
And at some point, I remember a psychologist, we did speak with her once because of my older sister.
And I cried the entire time and the psychologist said, you know, to my mom, she should probably come in and talk to someone.
And my mom said, no, no, she'll be fine.
And that was how it pretty much always was and still is.
There is a strange species of people who are resolutely immune to any capacity or curiosity regarding self-knowledge.
That's my mom. And they are as emotionally movable as your average granite statue.
Actually, these days in the South, statues seem to be more movable than these people.
Like, I had a friend once, he was divorced.
But before he got divorced, he tried to work things out with his wife.
He went to family therapy, or went to marital therapy.
I don't know if this is the right or wrong thing to do, but this is what he said.
He said, one session, one session.
My wife went down to go and get the car, and the psychologist pulled me aside and said, she's not going to change.
Never going to change. If you can't live with her, you got to make your choices, but do not be around her thinking she's ever going to change.
She's not going to change. Right.
Now, of course... Why would people change if they continue to get what they want?
Right? Why would your mother change if you continue to hang out with her, if she has access to the grandkids, if she's part of your life?
Why would she change? Some people change for internal reasons, and other people change for external reasons.
And if she's not an internally generated changer, then if her external situation doesn't change, she's not going to change.
Yeah, I agree. What's your relationship between your husband and your mother like?
Uh, it's polite, I guess.
Well, he usually just, he ignores a lot of things.
He usually just ignores everything.
A couple of times he's gotten upset by maybe something she said.
Um, she's very, she's really difficult to be around because she takes everything personally and thinks everything that happens is about her or someone's mad at her, which I also, uh, I also carry that trait.
And I've been working on that a lot.
But she's very tiring to be around.
So if he's quiet, she will follow me and say, I did something to make him mad, didn't I? What did I do to make him mad?
And I'm like, he doesn't...
Nothing. You didn't do any...
It's always like that. It's just...
It's tiring. I wouldn't...
I don't even know... I don't even know if he likes him, but...
I've told her, you know, he's my husband and this is how it is.
He's not going to change and I know you're not going to change.
This is just how it is.
And what's the plus in having your mom around?
I mean, at one point I needed her help because we farm and she would help me watch the kids while I was working.
So I guess she loves to help that way.
She loves to help watch them.
She loves to be involved in their lives.
I think that's really all she has.
She doesn't really have her own life.
So I guess and she does really love them and she does try to be in her best behavior with them.
She loves them. Yes.
So she's capable of love.
Yes. She says she loves me too.
I mean, we don't have...
I'd say we have a very superficial relationship because we can't talk about deep things.
We just kind of silently agreed to not do, which is sort of like...
So do you understand, right?
The connection? Yes.
Yeah. My husband's family is exactly the same.
So you have...
Surrounded. Yeah, you have proximity isolation syndrome, so to speak, right?
We're around each other, but we can't be honest.
Now, that's fine for a little bit.
Because, you know, it's like appeasement.
It works for a little while until it doesn't.
And avoidance works for a little while until it doesn't.
Yeah. Right? So if you grew up with...
Someone who can't be criticized.
And I tell you, just from my own perspective, Lisa, nobody is more boring than people who can't be criticized.
Oh, yes.
Because they dominate the relationship.
Nothing changes. It's like a museum where you can't even dust stuff.
Things like the dust drifts down from the ceiling and all the glass cases get obscured.
You can't see anything and you can't write your name and you can't clean them.
Nothing changes. Stasis.
Yeah, it's frustrating.
It's like Groundhog Day of descending, depressing, solitary stasis.
Yeah. Nothing changes, and then someone dies.
Oh my gosh.
There's an old joke about, I don't know if you've ever read, Anton Chekhov, the 19th century Russian playwright, Uncle Vanya.
The wood demon. The cherry orchard.
There's a cliché about the shortest Chekhov play.
Actually, I remember this.
I was in...
Which one was it?
The Seagull? Yeah, The Seagull, which is well worth reading.
And I remember they brought in an expert to teach us about Russia so that we knew the sort of situation.
And then the director was saying, you know, he was a doctor.
Chekhov, the actual playwright, he was a doctor in Russia.
He delivered babies.
He saw the hole, the hole.
And we all just started laughing because, you know, he's delivering babies, seeing the hole.
It was just kind of funny. Anyway, I just thought I'd resurrect this joke that nobody else remembers from 30 years ago.
But anyway. And the cliche about how to write a Chekhov play goes something like this.
One woman turns to the other woman and says, it has been 11 years since Uncle Vanya died.
And the other one says, no, no, it has been 10 years since Uncle Vanya died.
And the first woman says, yes, yes, yes it has.
And still, nothing has changed.
That is the shortest Chekhov play, but it pretty much is the entire Chekhov oeuvre.
But this is the challenge with people who are predictable.
And there is a boring kind of predictability.
You know, you want people to be predictable in that they're not insane, but you don't want them to be predictable in that they know what you're going to say next.
So earlier I talked about Aladdin.
And I got a little comment from Mike.
It's like, I knew that Aladdin story was going to come up.
And it's like, oh, caught again.
And I hate repeating myself.
Unless I'm going to say I'm repeating myself.
Which is why I'm digging up jokes from 30 years ago from theater school.
But anyway. This isolation.
People who are snowflakes, who are very raw, who are hypersensitive, who are self-conscious.
And who are...
We're constantly jumping to conclusions that dominate other people when you just have to strive to manage them all the time because they're always going off the rails.
You have to put them back up and set them back up and so on.
That is a very isolating situation because when you're managing other people, you couldn't be further away from another human being.
If you're managing them.
Because you see, as you know, nothing is more isolating than managing others.
Because you're not with yourself.
You're not sitting there thinking about your own thoughts or having your own memories or reading a book or enjoying your own company or whatever it is, right?
You're not having the richness of being alone.
You're not having the richness of interacting with someone.
You're just managing someone.
Managing someone is extraordinarily isolating because you don't connect with the other person and you can't connect with yourself because you never know when the next crisis is going to hit, right?
Yeah. And so the idea that other people's proximity evacuates you from your own being That they evict you.
You know, like you don't pay your rent, the sheriff comes up after six months and you get kicked out, right?
People show up and you get evicted.
Now, if the presence of others means the absence of the self, then this may have some explanatory power as to where your marriage has ended up and why, if that makes sense.
Yes, it does. Yeah.
I've spent my entire life managing people, even when I was a kid, trying to keep people happy.
From getting angry, I went into my marriage doing the same thing with my husband and his family.
I managed my children until I started going to therapy in Alamon.
I mean, that's definitely gotten better, but I was a snowflake myself, and I'm pretty sure I drove my husband crazy with that.
What do you mean? Doing the same thing, taking everything personally, always thinking he was mad at me.
I'm always asking him if he was mad at me or why he was mad at me or just being very anxious about it all the time.
I've learned to let that go.
It's gotten much better.
My mom is still the same though.
Even my husband is a bit, I still feel like I have to manage him.
It's just all very tiring and very isolating, yes, you're right.
Right. And here's the thing too, when you're around these sort of hypersensitive, raw-skinned people, Is that any kind of honesty is like pulling the pin on a grenade.
Oh, yes. You know, it's funny.
I've noticed this in life, Lisa, that the people who are most concerned about other people being upset with them are the people who most deserve other people being upset at them.
That makes sense, yeah.
You know, oh, are you mad at me?
Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me?
Well, if you are, what can you say?
And now it's like, well, I'm mad at you now because you keep asking me if I'm mad at you.
Now I am. Oh, you can't be mad.
Right? I mean, so this kind of hysteria where you're not with other people, you're just using them.
Yes. You're just, you know, manipulators and people you have to manage, they're just using you.
Yeah. Like, you know, if you get a sudden big cut, you grab a cloth and you press it against it, right?
You're just using the cloth.
Soak up the blood. Stop the bleeding.
Yeah. And people do this with their spiritual wounds, with their emotional wounds.
Just grab someone, jam it up against the blood.
You don't care about the feeling. You don't say to the cloth, hey, do you mind?
You're going to get a little dirty here.
It's something I need.
It's like, grab, staunch the blood, right?
So this is the fork in the road, and it's the same fork in the road that I was talking about with the first caller whose sister's boyfriend he despised, which is, are you going to go to the grave with your history stuffed in your mouth, silencing you forever?
Or are you going to start telling the truth?
I want to. It's just really scary.
It is. It is.
It's terrifying. What's going to happen with your mom if you commit to the truth with her?
How's that going to go? I'll say something.
She'll say, well, I can never do anything, right?
I guess I did everything wrong as a parent.
Or, fine, you'll never have to hear from me again.
Oh, wait. Does she really threaten to pull the plug on the whole relationship?
Yeah. Oh, yes.
She's done that several times.
I'll tell you this, Lisa. I will tell you this.
People only do that with me once.
Yeah. You know why?
Because I cannot trust a relationship where somebody, if I disagree with them, if somebody's just willing to pull the plug on the entire relationship because I disagree with them, it's like, bye.
I'm not going to be controlled that way.
I mean, that's like one step up from, oh yeah, if you disagree with me again, I'm going to swallow a face full of sleeping pills.
It's like, bye!
I'm not going to have control freaks like that around, because that's just going to empty everything out.
I have no respect. There's no respect.
So she's really, she's pulled out the thermonuclear escalation option of, if you upset me, I will never talk to you again for the rest of my life.
She's pulling the maternal bond.
She's like, she's taking a buzzsaw to the entire psychic umbilical.
Wow. Yes.
She has. And then we just kind of tiptoe around that now.
What if you don't? I've been thinking that myself since I've been listening to you.
Doesn't sound like you have an enormous amount to lose, just in my humble opinion.
I know. I know.
I guess it's like the guilt thing.
What if you stop serving people?
And start serving, not you, because then that's, in a sense, might trip over to the same kind of selfishness.
What if you just start telling the truth?
What if you just start serving honesty?
If you want to connect to people, you understand, you have to tell them the truth.
Yeah, I guess every time I did as a kid, that didn't go well.
No, no, and you should not have told the truth as a kid.
Essential survival mechanism.
Yes. Don't yodel when the panther is loose.
It's my new hip-hop album.
Right? No, it's an essential survival.
When you're dependent on crazy parents or you're dependent on abusive parents, you shut the hell up and you conform.
Yeah. You have what choice exactly?
I'm going independent.
No, you're not. In fact, for me, as I mentioned before, when I was like three or three and a half and I had such a terrible time at home that I packed up the cookie jar and tried to flee the house in the middle of the night.
Almost got beat half to death.
Nope. Can't go anywhere.
Can't do anything. And people will listen to me being beat up against the wall and will do nothing.
So I have to shut up and I have to conform and I have to submit and I have to obey.
Yeah. But not forever.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't have to do that anymore.
I'm not a kid and I'm not dependent on her.
No, you're not. No, in fact, you hold all the cards.
As you say, what does she have?
Yeah. I don't like bullies.
I'll just tell you this, Lisa, I do not like bullies.
And moms in particular who threaten the bond...
I mean, I tried for years with my mom to be present and have a relationship.
I tried and I tried and I tried six different ways from Sunday.
Literally, I tried everything I could.
Can I be in the same room?
Can I be myself and have a relationship?
And I couldn't. I had a choice.
Am I going to be empty, clear water of nothingness?
Surrounding somebody who's hysterical and abusive for the rest of my life, am I going to turn myself into a ghost for the sake of haunting the empty mausoleums of the dead, or am I going to be myself and see what happens?
Am I going to be honest and see what happens?
Am I going to open my mouth and speak the truth and see what happens?
And there were two phrases that rolled around in my head during this period.
Number one, speak the truth and shame the devil.
Love that one. And number two, that was from my childhood, and number two, speak the truth though the heavens fall.
And so many people go to their graves speaking the same lies they were forced to speak as children.
Their entire continual existence It's bullied lies, voluntary lies, dying lies, and then lies in the epitaph and lives on the fucking tombstone.
Lies and lies and lies and lies and lies.
And I sympathize with the lies.
But I'm... Here to remind people that you don't have to.
You don't have to.
You don't have to serve the needs of the petty for the rest of your life.
You don't have to manage the open, largely self-inflicted wounds of the hysterical for the rest of your life.
And if there's any shred of care in your heart, Lisa, for your mother, you'll stop doing it because...
It's harming you, and it's harming her, because it is allowing her to continue a highly destructive path through her life.
You are enabling self-destructive behavior.
I'm not saying you should do it out of love for your mother, but please understand, you're enabling her destructive behavior much in the same way that she would go and buy drinks for your father.
Yes, I agree with that.
So it's the old thing, you know the right thing to do, All you have to do is do it.
Easier said than done. I know.
I know. Easier said than done.
But be honest. Nobody can connect to you without you being honest.
And people may run a thousand miles from you if you're honest.
And your choice is what?
Your choice is what? It's your choice then to just lie for the rest of your life, to cease to exist, to be a slave to the empty, to not...
You know, life...
Life is lived in the truth.
There is no life without the truth.
There is conformity, there is emptiness, there is fear, there is regret, there is depression, alienation, distraction, escapism, addiction.
All of these things rush in to fill the void when truth is driven out, like a demon by the evil.
But there is no life without the truth.
And people say to me, how can you say these things that you say?
In your conversations with the world, with people, my choice is what?
To shut up and comply like the world is my mom beating me against a metal door when I'm three for the rest of my life?
No. No, no, a thousand times.
No, there are many people who want to step into that role and shut me up.
Can't do it. Won't happen.
Won't happen. That time is past.
Then I was a child. Now I am an adult.
I put away the childish things.
Compliance and fear being first among them.
Then I had no choice.
Then you had no choice, Lisa.
Now you have choice.
Yeah. Yeah, I do have a choice.
That's, I guess, what I'm struggling with a bit is being more honest.
I think I've come to a point with my mom where I'm almost looking forward to it, and it looks like freedom on the other side.
Well, and you talk about, sorry to interrupt you, Lisa, but you talk about, this is to me very important, the most important thing, and then I'll shut up, I promise.
But you got very emotional, which I understand, about not being the mom that you wanted to be for your son.
Yeah. If you're not honest, Lisa, if you're not honest, what kind of woman is he going to end up choosing to marry?
Probably a dishonest same one as me.
Yes. So, it is not too late to be a salvation mom.
Mm-hmm. You understand?
Yes. It is not too late to change the course of the wheel of history.
It is not too late to reorient the genetics towards something better.
It is not too late to reshape his heart in the pursuit of an honest woman.
Because here's what's going to happen, Lisa.
Let's say that your son meets a direct and honest and courageous and good woman.
And she comes over and she sees you kowtowing and complying to a dominant and bullying mother.
And she sees him, your son, saying nothing about it.
Everyone going through this pantomime of kneeling towards the nothingness of hysteria.
What is she going to feel and what is she going to do when she looks at that tableau?
Want to join us?
No. This could be your next 30 or 40 or 50 years.
Want to slide on into the picture?
What's she going to say?
She'll have nothing to do with us.
She will look with great regret at your son and say, great guy.
Yeah. But there's something about that family that...
Honesty is not what I can expect from this young man, no matter how great he is.
Because nobody's modeling it, nobody's doing it.
Everybody steps around the necessary chasm of telling the truth.
I can't trust him.
Now, there will be another kind of woman, as you know, Lisa, who's going to step into that scenario and say, oh yeah, no, I can work this.
I know how to do this.
Oh, he's already broken and quiet.
Oh, he's already tamed.
Oh, he's already used to being dominated by falsehoods and femininity.
I love it.
And she is going to take him apart.
That makes me sick.
Right.
you And that may be the price of having somebody help you on the farm.
It doesn't have to be.
Yeah, I don't have to have her help me.
If... And I'm not just talking about your son, you have other kids, but if your kids see you standing up to a bully and standing your ground, it will fundamentally reorient what they call reality.
You understand? Yes. Fear is the matrix from the old movie.
Yeah.
All we need to see is one courageous person, and then it becomes possible for courage to manifest.
Yeah.
I guess they see me do it with my father-in-law, but not with my mom.
Right. So that's where I have to change that.
And then you can be more loved, because you can be admired, you can be respected.
Now, do you understand that to open up the capacity for love is going to guarantee you the capacity to be hated?
Yes. Right? There are people who love me in the world.
There are people who hate me in the world.
And that's inevitable.
If nobody loved me, I would be immune from the toxicity of hatred.
Right.
Nobody bangs their nose on a door that isn't there.
And we so fear the hatred that we won't act in ways that generate the love.
Yeah. I see that.
Because if you want intimacy, you have to be there.
And when you're complying, you're not there.
Yeah. I'm just like a dead person walking around.
You are a prisoner of history.
Yes. And you were an unfairly imprisoned person as a childhood, but now the lock is not there anymore, and you're in the cage because of familiarity and a fear of the outside.
Yeah. I want out.
Everything changes when you act with courage.
Not all of it is for the better, I'm going to be honest with you.
Not all of it is easy.
Is your son dating at the moment?
Oh, he's married.
He's very newly married and this is also something that's driving me to change these things so I can try to make sure they are helped before they have children.
At least if they figure out it was wrong before they have children.
I don't want them to have Children before that, they can work.
I think he's probably married someone a bit weak.
Well, they're young.
They may be open to inspiration, which you can provide.
We're totally willing to pay for counseling for them, and I would love to do that for him.
But the counseling in the absence of your courage, I think, will have less effect, in my humble opinion.
Just an amateur opinion.
No, I totally agree with you.
I have to show them.
Like, I have to be the example.
Yeah. Yeah.
Is this enough to work with?
Yes. It's a lot.
It was really great to talk to you.
You help quiet my mind and clear it up.
Yeah, you won't like me tomorrow, but I appreciate that today.
It's great. I'll bask in it today and then tomorrow is like...
I will. I kind of knew what I needed to do and...
I just needed that push to talk to someone who understood it.
It was really great to talk to you.
I really appreciate it.
In my experience, my mom was between me and everyone.
That may not be the case with you, but it also may be.
Let us know how it goes.
I will. I really appreciate the call.
Thank you so much, Lisa. Thank you very much.
Alright, up next we have Sherry.
Sherry wrote in and said, I come from a highly K-directed background.
I grew up on a ranch.
My parents are still married and my father was in the military.
I am struggling with the obvious R characteristics displayed by my stepdaughter and to some extent my boyfriend.
How can I help her overcome her early experiences and become a productive member of society?
She is now 14.
Do you believe there is a point when it is just too late?
That's from Sherry.
Sherry, Sherry, Sherry.
How pretty is this man? Well, he's pretty.
And you know, I'm 46, so I'm way past my sexual peak there.
Yeah, but that doesn't mean you're past status.
Well, to be honest, had I... If I met him today, I probably wouldn't have gotten involved.
But it was about a year after my husband of 18 years left with a 20-year-old.
So I wasn't terribly healthy myself.
And now it is what it is.
And I've made a commitment and there's no going back.
So... Well, then why are you calling if there's no choice?
You're selling me on determinism in a philosophy show dedicated to free will and moral responsibility.
So you may have called the wrong number, but I hope not.
No, I'm not saying it's determinism.
I'm saying I have chosen to take on this responsibility of this girl who really has nowhere else to go at this point.
So that's healthy.
So at least for five years.
That's what it is.
But you're not married.
No, we're not married.
Why not? He has asked, and we may get married someday, but when I realized the situation that his daughter was in,
and we talked about getting her out of it, I had to look at the fact that there's a possibility at the end when she's off on her own that that was all he was looking for.
And so I really searched myself and had to decide, hey, if I knew at the beginning in five or six years he was going to leave, would I still do this?
And I decided, yes, I would.
I would still help her.
To be as much as she can.
So, you know, I guess I'm hesitant that way, but at the same time, I'm in it for at least my stepdaughter.
Right. Now, let me just give a sense of the timing.
How long ago was it that your husband left?
Four years now.
So, four years ago, your husband left for, so you were 42, and he left you, like, seriously, literally for a 20-year-old?
Actually, she was 18.
He told me she was 20, but he was 18.
So, it was a complete cliche at the time.
I was, you know, she was less than half my age, but, you know, and he got a ninja motorcycle and a 20-year-old Girlfriend and, and, and how old was she?
40. So she was actually younger than our daughter at the time.
Was, was he very good looking too?
Well, I ended So, he had a job.
Oh, that's it? Because in my experience, the 18-year-olds aren't necessarily going for the Wilford Brimley types.
No, he had a job in teeth.
So, you know. Teeth?
That was good. Right.
Okay. Okay.
So, that happened four years ago.
And the marriage that you had, you said your six years of being an empty nester.
So, when did your child leave or children?
We actually moved her senior year.
So, she lived and she didn't want to leave.
She had a lot of scholarships and stuff.
So, she stayed with my parents her senior year.
So, she hadn't lived with us for three years.
When he left.
Were there any signs?
I mean, I guess you said he got the motorcycle and...
There were a lot of...
Because he never really had a job from the time we moved to Missouri until he left.
I had helped him get his...
Because he just... We got here.
He didn't want to work.
He'd always done kind of physical things.
He was... in auto body technician sort of things and he wanted something different so he went ahead and got his GED and did a semester of college and did pretty well and started a new job he'd never worked with women before and she was actually at the place that he worked at so it was kind of I think a lot of changes he was sort of not he wasn't working he wasn't he actually was kind of living the life of A teenager,
really, because he didn't have any responsibilities.
I had just pretty much taken over everything.
I made all the money.
I did all the housework.
I had my own business at home.
I was making pretty decent money, so he didn't have to work.
So I can kind of see the appeal looking back where he was almost like a teenager for a while.
So, you know. Then, you know, I guess his testicles took a hold of him and said, hey, let's try a new one.
What happened to that relationship?
Well, he kind of stuck around in the house, still seeing her for about six weeks.
Wait, in your house?
Yes, because I owned everything.
Wait, he's boning an 18-year-old and sleeping in your house?
Yes. Well, of course he claims he wasn't sleeping with her.
Oh, he wasn't sleeping with her?
Of course not.
They were just friends.
But finally, I just said, look, I can't do this.
So I went ahead and rented him an apartment.
Wait, he's leaving you for an 18-year-old and you're renting him an apartment?
Is that where the hitmen were with the carpet to roll him up and dump him in the Everglades?
I'm not sure. Is that the trap?
Is there a big pit there with tigers and spikes at the bottom?
What? What? Here, honey, have your love nest with the teen.
Well, anyway, he did move her right in.
But that was the only way I could get him out of the house because, you know, you can't just kick somebody out of a house that they've lived in in a certain amount of time.
It doesn't work that way.
So... Once I changed his residence, then he couldn't come back.
I changed the locks. That was it.
He wanted to come back a couple months later, probably because she didn't do laundry and cook as well as I did, I'm assuming.
But at that point, I was just...
No. I couldn't do it.
So... Right.
Now, and if you can just avoid location details, that would be helpful.
But what's going on?
She's not your stepdaughter because you're not married, right?
So she's your boyfriend's daughter.
And what is the behavior that she's manifesting that has you concerned?
So from the time we've gotten her, she is just...
I mean, I realize that 13-year-old girls are kind of boy crazy and whatever, but it is just at a level that is insane.
And she, of course, picks aggressive kids.
The online stuff is the worst.
We've done our best. And then there's so much lying there.
That's just...
Lying and hiding is really hard for me.
Because I want to keep her safe.
And I don't want her to make choices right now that are going to affect her forever.
But like what? Like getting pregnant?
Like getting pregnant.
Yes. That would be the major concern.
Is she sexually active? Not that I know of.
But she's...
Very impressionable.
We sort of have her on lockdown a little bit.
We know where she is.
But of course, there's a limit to that.
They do have ways of sneaking out and sneaking around.
But she's very easy to talk into.
She wants people to like her so badly.
Right now, her entire...
Being is, I want to be in a relationship so my life will be wonderful kind of thing.
And it's like, that's not how it works.
And what's her exposure to her bio mom?
And what's her bio mom like?
We, so when I met, they were actually in state custody.
And also, no names, please.
Sorry. No problem. Met boyfriend, when you met boyfriend.
Yeah. They were in state custody.
He really didn't have anything to do.
There are two older kids.
One's 20 now and one's 18 and then she's 14.
Same mom? Same mom.
She is an alcoholic and I think there's some prescription drugs too that go on.
They had taken her away because the kids had no toilet paper, nothing in the house.
I helped him get into the court system.
Because you know, as a father, of course, the first thing she did was claim that he was abusive.
So they took all visitation.
That's how you get someone out of the house, right?
Right. Well, he wasn't living with them.
But they immediately took...
They've been separated for several years when this happened.
Sorry to interrupt, Jerry.
I apologize for that. But no one with slightly less drama around for you.
I know you got the giggle that goes on, right?
Which you were talking about with your husband who left you for the 18-year-old.
But it's not that funny, right?
We're talking about kids who are severely neglected.
We're talking about a mom with multiple addiction issues.
We're talking about a challenging teenager at the moment.
If you can cut that back a little, I know it's a bit of a habit, but was there no one with fewer problems around?
Not... So, we moved to a place where I didn't know anybody.
And my ex-husband was not particularly social.
So, you know, we were pretty much together all the time.
So, no, there wasn't a lot of – I wasn't really exposed to a lot of people.
I did have more friends than I realized when the breakup happened.
Sorry, sorry. I'm not understanding.
So, your boyfriend has all of this crazy drama.
You know, nutty, addicted ex-wife and just daughter.
And I sort of asked, wasn't there anyone less unstable or with less of an unstable situation that you could have gone out with or dated or gotten together with?
And you said, well, no, because my husband wasn't that social.
I don't follow that connection.
Well, I wasn't living anywhere that I had a lot of social contacts.
I'm from somewhere far away.
So that means you have to date the most dramatic human being in the universe?
I still don't quite understand that.
Neither does my family.
I guess so.
What's the draw with this guy?
Clearly he married the wrong woman, right?
Yes. Past judgment, terrible.
Terrible judgment. Very young.
Right? And so, what's the draw, given that he has, I guess you could say, more red flags than a Marxist parade, right?
Definitely. He's more emotional than I'm used to, and I like that.
He sort of... I tend to be a little bit over-logical and almost harsh sometimes.
I wouldn't necessarily go with the over-logical argument at the moment, given who you got involved with, but go on.
And he's a little softer side than I am.
And we get along well.
He's a good guy.
But you're right.
There's a lot of drama surrounding him.
Right. Is the bio mom still having much influence or seeing her daughter?
She does have visitation.
The state actually gave her back.
And we got to visit with her about a month after she got her back and went on to her cell phone and found out the mom was asking her to steal beer from the neighbor's house.
And we also, when we took her back, she asked us if we would send toilet paper, paper towels, and feminine items with her because she was afraid there weren't any at the house.
And it was at that point that I was like, you know, nobody should grow up like this.
It's so wrong.
I didn't know that toilet paper didn't just show up on the roll when I grew up.
I never thought about toilet paper or paper towels.
They were just there.
No one should grow up like that.
So that was when we talked about it and decided, you know, she's obviously hasn't improved any, even with all the state involvement and counseling that she had to go through and stuff.
We started court proceedings.
We had to actually go to court to get her.
So... Right.
Right. Okay. And just because we've talked about the sexual stuff a little earlier, Sherry, what happened to you as a child?
It's the only adverse childhood experience score that you had?
Yeah. You probably don't see anybody with a one very often, do you?
Yeah, but this is a one with...
No, I don't, but it's a one with a...
The one is a bit of a doozy, or it could be.
Right. It is. We actually had...
I was probably 11.
We had a hired hand on the ranch.
And my parents had gone somewhere.
My little brother and sister were taking a nap.
And he proceeded to try to fondle me during a TV show.
Right at the point that I started to get uncomfortable, I hopped up and said, Oh, I've got to make...
Because I was making soup for dinner or something.
Oh, it's time to wake up my brother and sister and I've got to make dinner.
And he's like, you know, no.
I'm like, yeah, I'm going to.
And then that never happened again.
He only stayed around for another couple weeks after that.
And I just never was with him alone after that.
And Had it happened again, I'm sure I would have told my parents and that would have been the end of it.
So it wasn't something that I felt like I couldn't tell because they wouldn't believe me or anything like that.
It just happened once.
I never was alone with them again after that.
I guess we'll just have to say stepdaughter.
I mean, the stepdaughter has an ACE of eight.
You have one, which is fairly mild, which is not to say, obviously, okay.
But she has an ACE of eight.
I won't go into the details, but it's bad, right?
Yes. Yes.
So, like I said, I can imagine...
But I have a hard time relating to growing up like that because that is nothing...
So when we got her, I made some very poor assumptions about what she knew and what she didn't know.
I assumed she knew that you don't send pictures of yourself smoking, vape, and drinking at your mom's house to boys in the new school.
I assume that she knew, you know, and those assumptions bit me because, you know, she didn't know that.
That was normal behavior.
Yeah, I mean, it would be incomprehensible to you, but it's second nature to her, right?
Correct. So she was actually in a place, because it's a fairly small town that we're in.
She was in a place where she could completely recreate herself and be whoever she wanted to.
Nobody knew her history. But unfortunately, she couldn't be somebody.
Like, she didn't know enough.
No matter where you go, there you are.
Right. Still the same person.
She didn't know enough to, you know, leave that behind.
And so, she brought that with her.
And it's a small town.
People don't forget. Yep.
So, she's dealing with some of that still.
And texting. I mean...
Never forgets. She doesn't have a phone any longer.
I didn't want her to have one before.
And dad's like, oh, well, everyone has one.
And it's like, no, she doesn't need one.
My daughter didn't have one until she was 16.
So what does a 13-year-old need a phone for?
Right. Right.
So parents who are not aware of what their kids are doing on vacation, The phones, it's horrifying.
And I don't know if it's a different culture where I'm at now, or if the 10 years, which I'm sure have made a big difference between the time, you know, I had a teenager before until I had a teenager now, have changed things so dramatically.
But it is horrifying.
What is it, the number one app, number one money-making app these days is Tinder?
Snapchat is terrible too.
What's bad about that?
Well, because the picture is automatically erased.
Usually it's the girls who are sending nudes and they're 11, 12 years old.
They think that because the picture automatically erases in 10 minutes, it's gone.
Well, they don't realize, hey, someone can take a screenshot of that and it never goes away.
If that were the case, there wouldn't be any evidence against Anthony Weiner now, would there be?
Right. So, they just don't have the capacity to think ahead to the repercussions of those things.
And I think that there's, in some ways, there's a false sense of intimacy with texting, but there's also a feeling of Being anonymous as well.
And you put those things together and people do things that they would never ordinarily do face-to-face just because.
We did not evolve with technology.
It's a new thing.
Didn't evolve with pornography. Didn't evolve with this kind of technology.
Didn't evolve with this kind of permanence.
Didn't evolve with the whole world as your village now.
Oh, it's a small town. Everybody knows everybody's business.
The whole world is a small town now.
Everybody knows everybody's business because the moment you put something on the internet, it's branded into the neocortex of the Borg.
Forever. So I've spent a lot of time trying to deprogram her, I guess.
From what? What is the programming that she needs to ditch?
From the fact that having a relationship is going to make her happy.
She wants, and I think most young women are like this, she doesn't want sex, you know, and we talk very openly about things because I've I had practice, I guess, with my daughter, and I was always very open with her.
That's not what she wants.
She wants affection, but she doesn't understand, you know, boys are not programmed the same.
They don't want the same things that she does.
So we work on that.
Hang on, hang on. You're painting with a pretty wide brush there.
Well, this is true, but we're talking about 13, 12 year old boys.
I don't think they're thinking exactly what she's thinking.
This means that they're incapable of having a conversation with a girl.
They're incapable of enjoying a debate or a discussion with the girl.
They're incapable of doing anything other than trying to ferret their hands into her pants.
I mean, come on. That's not how boys are.
I mean, there are shy boys. There are nice boys.
There are intellectual boys. There are sensitive boys.
And then there are the hairy-legged, grabtastic idiots, right?
But this is a pretty wide brush.
You know, I had great conversations with girls when I was 13.
It didn't mean that I didn't want to kiss them.
It just meant that I still could have great conversations with them.
I don't think she has a lot of conversations.
Well, okay, because my question is, and this is not just your stepdaughter, Sherry.
This is just the big question.
Because... Women can play the V card, right?
Correct. Or the sex card, if you will, right?
So they can play the S card, and that's going to get them attention.
It's going to get them interest.
I mean, of course, it's going to get them attention in an R-selected way.
I was watching some YouTuber the other day, and she said something.
She's a married woman, and she was saying something.
I thought it was interesting. She was saying, okay, so, you know, there's places where you post pictures of yourself, and these girls, they're posting pictures of themselves in bikinis, and they're offering themselves up as sex objects, basically.
Yes. And he said, but they can't really do anything.
You know, they can't cook a meal.
They can't fix a car.
Right? They can't clean.
They can't run a household.
They can't split the atom, right?
Like they can't actually do anything other than be sexy.
They can't play piano.
They can't discuss politics.
They can't, they don't read.
They're just objects, right?
And they're putting themselves up as these plastic flesh fantasies.
Right.
And that is a very interesting, you know, and one of the things that Alex de Tocqueville talked about in Democracy in America, when he first visited what was then, of course, the New World, and now which is rapidly becoming the very old world, a la Rome. and now which is rapidly becoming the very old world, But he said that the one thing that differentiates America from every other place he's ever been is the quality of the women.
You know, the intelligence, the accomplishment, the hard work, the resolution, the morality, the character of the women.
And playing the S-card for women masks a whole bunch of other deficiencies.
And it is, of course, the great temptation.
It is the great temptation to say, here's some junk.
Do I have your interest yet? And it masks a whole bunch of other deficiencies.
Now, in my humble opinion, Sherry, if she doesn't have anything else to bring to the table, she's going to end up with her ass on a table.
You have to find some way that she can bring things to boys that are more interesting, or at least as interesting as potential sexual activity when she's of age.
And if she doesn't have anything to bring other than sexiness, then that's all she's going to bring.
You know, if you're cornered in a fight, you grab whatever's around to fight with.
Well, I'm not trained, but oh, look, here's a piece of wood, right?
You wouldn't choose the piece of wood, but if that's all you've got, that's what you'll use.
Now, if you can fill her, like trying to restrain her from deploying the S card, Isn't going to work, in my opinion.
I think what you need to do is give her some other cards to play with.
Well, let me tell you about an exercise we did the day before yesterday.
Because she's not used to deep thinking and reasoning.
It's just never been part of her life.
So we sat down and I said, I want to know what kind of things would you like in a partner, in a man in your life?
And, you know, at first she's like, I don't know, what would you want?
Okay, well, you know, tell me something.
Do you want them to be nice?
Do you want them to be mean?
And so we kind of went through some things and we came up with integrity.
And she, of course, had good looking.
And then once she put her list of four things, I think there was an honesty, integrity...
She wasn't even sure what that was until I started giving her examples of things that would be integrity.
She knows she's not allowed to date until she's 16.
These boys who also know, you know, ask her, well, we won't tell your parents, you know, is that integrity?
No. Good looks came up.
And I said, well, yeah, you know, good looking can be.
That means he's probably healthy.
It means he may have good genetics.
So it's not something to completely ignore.
But, you know, so put it down.
And then we put it in order.
And at the end, she's like, well, good looking is actually last.
Well, yes it is. And I said, so if you've got a guy with integrity, do you think he's going to want a girl who lies to him?
No. Do you think he's going to want a girl who is rude and isn't considerate of other people?
Well, no. So you have to have all those things too.
And she's like, Oh, because there were a couple of boys that were buzzing around her, and one of our rules is they have to talk to us, like we have to meet these boys before she's allowed to really text them or anything.
And two of them just disappeared.
And when we talked about, because they found out she couldn't date until she was 16, and we talked about that, and she's like, oh, that's why those boys left, because they knew that I would get in trouble if they tried to date me.
Yes. They still talk to her, but they just don't do that anymore.
She's like, so they were really nice guys, and I thought it was me.
And I said, yes.
So if you'd asked that question of us, we would have explained that to you like last year.
Oh, but there's so much secrecy in their family culture that it's really hard for her to be open about things because she would get into trouble, you know, for crazy things.
But Sherry, Sherry, maybe I'm missing something.
It's great to have these lectures with kids, but if you're not modeling the behavior, I think they kind of go in one ear and out the other.
You know, it's like teaching someone a foreign language.
You can sit down and explain a couple of words, but unless they're seeing it and hearing it every day, it doesn't take, right?
Are there examples in her life between you and her father or others where low-quality relationships are maintained?
Because then saying, well, you need all of these and you need integrity and you need honesty and courage and morality.
If that's not what she's seeing around her, if that's not what the adults are choosing or manifesting, then saying you need these things is not going to take.
And this is, I agree.
I agree that you have to model that.
So, you know. She knows what the rules are.
She knows what happens when the rules are broken.
It always happens. No, no, no, no. We went from modeling to rules.
These are two different things, right?
I think if you have the modeling, you don't really need the rules.
So you need the rules because the modeling isn't there, in my suspicion.
So are you saying that my relationship with her father, because there's all this drama...
It's not modeling. Well, her father chose a crazy woman.
Right? Right.
So all of this talk is like, oh, well, you know, you want to choose a sane woman, you want to choose a, you know, boys want a woman with integrity, and boys like, well, that's not what dad chose.
Do you see what I mean? I, I, yes, I see what you mean.
So have you squared that circle?
Because if you're going to give her a standard that specifically calls her father's choices terrible, you can't hold those, you know, this isn't a 1984, you can't expect a kid to hold those two opposite thoughts.
You have to respect and love your father.
Now here's who you should date, who's the exact opposite of who your father dated.
Right? So how are you squaring this circle?
I'm not sure how to do that.
Well, you got to figure that out.
Otherwise, you know, people don't care about what you say.
They care about what you do.
And kids in particular.
Do as I say, not as I do, right?
Right. Your father needs to sit down and step her through how she ended up with the mom she ended up with, right?
And then she and you need to sit down, maybe all three of you need to sit down and say...
Why did you, Sherry, choose a man who chose this woman to be the mother of his children?
If integrity and honesty and upstandingness and decency is all so important, why is the family orbiting around this dual addiction nutjob?
Who doesn't have toilet paper in the house?
You see what I mean?
I do. Good, good, because that's what needs to be dealt with.
Lecturing from a shaky throne destroys the kingdom.
You need to have conversations about the clear parental mistakes that were made that you're telling her not to make without admitting that the parents made them.
That's going to look ridiculous and hypocritical, right?
Right. She's asked me about my mistakes and I've talked to her about mine.
But... I don't know that her father's really that open about talking.
No, no, no. Sherry, I asked you what you liked about this guy.
He's emotional. He's open.
He talks. I don't know if he would admit...
Well, he has admitted some things.
But I don't know if he's talked to her about it.
Well, it's going to be tough.
Right? Because if you say, basically, I picked the wrong woman to be the mother of my children...
You know what's going to happen next?
She's going to go over to the moms and they're going to have a conversation.
And then what? I don't know that she could say anything worse than what she's already said.
What, the mom? Yeah.
So the stepdaughter goes over to her mom's and says, my father told me this about getting married to you.
What's the mom going to do? Is that going to be a fun day for everyone?
Oh, it's not.
It's really not. And this is what I mean.
Given that the mom's in the picture, being honest to the daughter about the mom is kind of a grenade pull, right?
Right. So how much honesty can you do?
How much honesty can you have?
It's... It's a fine line.
No, no, no, it's not.
Sherry, you guys have to lie to the daughter about the mom.
Yeah, you should go over and see her.
Yes, she's part of the family.
Yes, she's a responsible caregiver for you.
No, no, we've never...
We don't run her down, but we're honest about...
You send her, right? Right.
We're working on...
Sorry to interrupt, but implicitly, if you send the daughter to the mom...
You're saying she's part of the family.
She's a responsible caregiver for you.
Off you go. Well, we don't have a choice about that.
Oh, okay. I understand that.
Well, whether you have a choice or not, I don't know.
I mean, that's not my area of expertise.
But you have to misrepresent things to the daughter to some degree, and then you're going to complain about her lying, right?
But you're not in a situation where you can be frank and honest about the mom, are you?
As far as everything or that she's not?
No, let me put it to you this way.
Let's say the mom was not the mom, but was just some local person who offered herself up as a babysitter.
Hey, I have no toilet paper in their house and I'm addicted to what?
Alcohol and prescription drugs, you suspect, right?
Right. Would you allow this person to be a babysitter?
No. No.
But you're sending her over to the mom.
Well, you wouldn't even allow that person to babysit your kid for 20 minutes otherwise, or 10 or 5 or 1, right?
Right. It's not funny.
It's not funny. And this is what you stepped into.
Yes. That you're in a situation with the boyfriend, with your boyfriend, that you can't tell The truth about a primary caregiver for your daughter and then you're getting really mad at her for lying.
But that's what's being modeled.
She knows the truth. You know the truth.
Nobody's talking about it for reasons that may be sensible in some particular context.
I don't know. But expecting the truth from a 13-year-old when the 46 and the 40-year-old can't manage it is kind of precious, right?
Yes. So if you can't tell the truth, you can't expect the truth.
I mean, you can if you want.
It's just never going to work. If you can't be honest, you can't demand honesty.
You have to stay home, you say to the stepdaughter.
You have to stay home because there are risks out there.
Now, off you go to the addict's house.
Where I'm guessing she's in more danger.
Or more risk.
Right? I think she is highly at risk there.
Yeah, so saying don't do things that are risky now.
Go off to your mom's.
She's living what is shown.
Lying, taking risks, misrepresenting, falsifying.
Isn't that the environment she's in?
Yes. We always think it's the others, right?
If I could just get her to listen to reason, she is listening, Sherry.
She's listening and she's watching.
And she's doing what she sees.
Legally, we can't not let her go to our moms.
Well, again, I don't know the answer to that.
I mean, that's not anywhere close to my area.
Right. Family court is interesting.
And a little gynocentric, I hear.
A little bit, yes.
The very fact that we have her indicates the depth of awfulness.
So, my question is, what's in all of this for you?
Why are you in a situation where you're demanding the truth of a 13-year-old, you're demanding integrity from a 13-year-old when you can't tell the truth about her mom and the environment you're sending her to?
How? Like, what's in it for you?
What am I asking? If I wasn't here, she would be with her mom all the time.
Hmm. Hmm.
She like the womb blocker.
I guess so.
I guess so.
Well... I don't know.
I mean, how far you can push the truth envelope before hitting a tripwire on the maternal side, I don't know any of that.
But I would certainly think about it and discuss it with your boyfriend to figure out where that could be.
Because I think as long as you guys are covering up basic facts and pretending that they're not there or not real, I think it's going to be really tough for her.
To really respect honesty and integrity, courage, right?
If fear of the ex-wife or fear of her mother is dominating things, and then you say, well, you should think for yourself and not be a compromise and be courageous, it's like, not going to work, in my opinion.
If you feel you can do some good, and I think it's good to give her some of these ideas, for sure, but you've got to Live them consistently in her presence for them to transfer, if that makes sense.
Right. You know, it's like when I was a kid, in junior high, I got better at math when I was in high school, but in junior high, my family life was so chaotic, I couldn't study really.
But so in junior high, what I would do is, oh, there's a math test Thursday.
So you know what I would do on Wednesday?
I'd flip through the math book and say, oh, yeah, I think I recognize that.
Oh, yeah, I remember when he did that one on the blackboard.
Yeah, I think I'm ready. And how did I do?
53! Or something, right?
Again, it got better later, but I just glanced at the book.
I didn't work through the problems.
I didn't empirically experience the process of going through it all, right?
Right. So, giving her moral Exhortations or commandments in the absence of living them in her presence, I don't think it's going to work very well.
Or it's not going to work as well as if it's lived.
And how much you can live them is a conversation you need to have with the boyfriend.
He wanted to listen to this.
He'll listen to it.
He may not like it, but he'll listen to it.
Right. And my sympathies.
I mean, this is a very, very...
Difficult situation. Which is, I guess, my first question to you was...
Why would you get into that?
Well, he has a job and some teeth, I hear.
All right. Well, I really, really appreciate that.
I hope you'll let us know how it goes.
And I certainly wish the best for you and your family, your boyfriend and his daughter.
I do want to thank everyone so much for the call.
Please go to theartoftheargument.com to check out my new book.
And you can use our affiliate link at fdrurl.com slash Amazon.
You can sign up for our newsletter at freedommanradio.com.
No spam, really.
We'll just give you the important stuff.
And you can follow me on Twitter at TheVanMolyneux.
Thank you, everyone, so much for listening, for watching, for supporting the show.
Last but not least, of course.
Oh, how could I forget? Thank you so much, everyone.
