"Stef, can you please help me deal with my past trauma in fuller form, shedding the last of the weight and challenges once and for all. "I want to have a family and do an amazing job; and I have significant, meaningful work to do in the world and my past is still getting in the way. "Especially as far as anger, pain, sadness, depression and self-doubt, self-loathing and shame."Adverse Childhood Experience Test:https://acestoohigh.com/got-your-ace-score/▶️ Donate Now: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ Sign Up For Our Newsletter: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletterYour 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▶️ 1. Donate: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate▶️ 2. Newsletter Sign-Up: http://www.fdrurl.com/newsletter▶️ 3. On YouTube: Subscribe, Click Notification Bell▶️ 4. Subscribe to the Freedomain Podcast: http://www.fdrpodcasts.com▶️ 5. Follow Freedomain on Alternative Platforms🔴 Bitchute: http://bitchute.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Minds: http://minds.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Steemit: http://steemit.com/@stefan.molyneux🔴 Gab: http://gab.ai/stefanmolyneux🔴 Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/stefanmolyneux🔴 Facebook: http://facebook.com/stefan.molyneux🔴 Instagram: http://instagram.com/stefanmolyneux
He's been a listener for a long time, which, of course, I hugely appreciate.
And he also did the right thing in terms of setting up a call and show in that he sent me his Adverse Childhood Experience score, his big five personality trait score, and so on.
And I just wanted to first of all say, Chris, thanks so much for taking the time to chat today.
Well, likewise, Steph. As I said, it's my distinct pleasure to speak with you.
Yeah, I've noticed that other people have done that over the years, and certainly in my case, I thought it would be especially helpful.
It seems to do some people good, and I'm certainly pleased for that.
Philosophy has a lot to offer.
Childhood trauma, mostly in the realm of moral examination, which is kind of what I wanted to work with you through today.
So I hope you don't mind.
Let me know, of course, if there's anything that you want me to not do.
But I was going to read a little bit of your intro, and then we go through a little bit of the adverse childhood experience score to figure out where you stand.
Sure. Yeah, please. Okay.
Great. Now... So, Steph, you wrote, and you gave me a lot of material, but you said, Steph, can you please help me deal with my past trauma in fuller form, shedding the last of the weight and challenges once and for all?
I want to have a family, you say, and do an amazing job, and I have significant, meaningful work to do in the world, and my past is still getting in the way.
Especially as far as anger, pain, sadness, depression, and self-doubt, self-loathing, and shame.
Now, you get that list of words, right?
And a lot of people are like, well, there must be something wrong with him if he's got all of those negative emotions churning around.
And that's cold-hearted for people, and I want to chide people who have that impulse, because we can go through a little bit of this Adverse Childhood Experience score.
It's worth taking for people, you know, even if you had a great childhood or you think you had a great childhood, just getting a sense of where you stand, it also opens you up, if you had a great childhood, it opens you up to the kind of horrors that can occur for other people who weren't quite as lucky.
So I just wanted to sort of point that out.
So the Adverse Childhood Experience Score, I can put a link to it below.
And the first question is, did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often swear at you, insult you, put you down, or humiliate you, or act in a way that made you afraid that you might be physically hurt?
Now, some of these, Chris, you put in qualifiers, but not this one.
Yeah, I wasn't...
Sorry, I could have written a better qualifier for the rest of them.
Yeah, I don't know. My father was...
Look at that. First thing you do is apologize.
Oh, we got some work to do today, my friend.
Because it wasn't a criticism, I'm just pointing it out.
Some of them you were like, I feel it could be, but this was like, yes.
And that's good. That means what's not good.
It's good that it means you're certain about this one.
So what happened in your childhood that made this one so certain for you?
Well... Initially, it was my father, who was, you know, the one who would insult me, yell at me, and was very, you know, sort of an angry person.
You know, even friends, for example, if I ever, very, very rarely ever brought a friend to the house, they came but once, and he didn't even have to say anything.
He'd just look at them and scowl at them, and they'd say, wow, your dad is a scary person.
Oh, wow. You know, he's a very big man.
He's not my biological father.
He adopted me when I was about one to two, somewhere in there.
And, you know, I'm quite tall and lanky, basketball, volleyball type of body, you know, cycling, that kind of thing.
And he was a football player, lots of muscle, 225 pure muscle, right?
And so he would get in my face when I was really young.
He didn't really hit me a lot, many times, in fact.
Sorry. Now you apologized again, and I won't have it.
I'm just... I won't have it. No apologizing to me, my friend.
I'm just feeling emotional. I'm going to warn you that, you know...
I don't want you to apologize.
Listen, if you didn't feel...
You've heard these calls I've had with other people, right, Chris?
Chris, if you didn't feel emotional about being insulted and attacked as a child, that would be a terrible thing.
Like you're apologizing for humanity, for feeling, for having a sense of emotional, moral outrage about being abused as a child.
That's not something to apologize.
I think that's something to treasure, something that keeps your humanity.
No, I agree.
I just found as an adult that it's It's tough for me to cover things, even that I find inspiring and beautiful, without being a little bit overly emotional, as opposed to perhaps some of the colors that you've had that have been unemotive.
Overly emotional. But either way...
Yes, overly emotional is a judgment state, right?
Overly emotional is a judgment state.
I think what's generally the case, and correct me where your experience, of course, has been different, Chris, but for me, people blather on like little bubble-headed carbonated sea foam about nothing in particular.
As the old poem goes, you know, life dribbles away in a series of headaches and worries, and people just float on the surface about nothing in particular while societies and economies and cultures collapse all around them.
But then the moment someone gets emotional or passionate about something, everybody's like, oh, God, the predator called emotion is loose in the conversation.
Tamp it down, put it down, get rid of it.
And that, of course, is something that's programmed into us, I think, by the powers that be, because if we get passionate, Then we self-actualize, we get emotional strength, we get deep roots, we get connection, we get courage.
And the powers that be don't want us to have a lot of courage.
Whether the powers that be are your sort of immediate family authority if you have bad parents or priests, teachers, politicians, you name it, right?
So I recognize and welcome the passion and the emotion which you feel.
As long as the emotion is not manipulative, which yours is not, There's no such thing as too much emotion.
No, I'm just warning you. I'm going to get choked up often and easily.
That's all. All right. Good. Good.
Good in that you're connected to it.
So the second ACE, did a parent or other adult in the household often or very often push, grab, slap, or throw something at you or ever hit you so hard that you had marks or were injured?
Well... Yeah, and as I'd said, my father didn't hit me a lot, if many times, but, you know, I remember the thing that was getting me choked up and caused me to apologize last time was the memory of him head-butting me, which, you know, wasn't... You know, he would refrain.
I knew he wanted to, you know, he just made me feel like he wanted to kill me, but was trying with everything in him not to.
And I know he came from a violent background, but...
You know, it still made me terrified.
How old were you when he tried to headbutt you?
Oh, gosh, like...
Well, he did headbutt me.
That was his restraint. That was the...
He would headbutt me.
And he did that on...
You know, I don't know...
Not often, but, you know, many times.
A healthy few times at minimum.
And I was...
That would have began at a pretty early age, probably...
Around six or five, six, seven.
So you've got a 220-pound ex-footballer plowing down at you, shoulders squared, head forward when you're six.
Yeah. Tough, tough guy.
What a brave man.
Yeah, and you could hear him, you know, coming.
If you were, you know, anywhere in the house, if he was ever angry, you know, you could just hear his big footsteps, and it was terrifying.
And, you know, he would, the only time he...
You know, once I remember, he just picked me up and he put me right into the drywall.
He was a carpenter.
And, you know, he probably just didn't enjoy having to repair that afterwards.
The fuck was your mom doing?
This is always my big question when this stuff is occurring, Chris.
And I'm so sorry. What a terrifying experience.
But what was your mom doing during these episodes with the man that she chose to be, your stepfather, I guess, right?
Yeah, I mean, well, they had, you know, my two sisters five years apart, like I was five when my first sister was born, and then I was nine, almost ten, when my second sister was born.
And we, you know, and then the family split up when the youngest sister was only about two or three years old.
I would have been about twelve when the marriage fell apart.
They were together for thirteen years before No,
no, no. None of this is off track.
Yeah. So, I return to my original question that you white knighted off into tangent land.
I don't know where she was.
What was your mother doing when you were being physically attacked by your father, stepfather?
Well, I can't remember her.
Being in the room or in the presence, maybe he found it easier to do it when she wasn't actually standing right there.
I don't know. I don't recall her actually standing right there or putting her hand on him and saying, hey, leave him alone or something like that.
I don't ever remember her doing or saying anything about it.
Wow. And I suppose, or tell me if I'm wrong, did you ever talk to her about this?
No. No.
Everybody knew. Well, because I think it was apparent, everybody knew what kind of man he was.
Do you know if he hit her at all?
No, I don't think he did, no.
She was, you know, I remember, you know, being up and hearing them fight and stuff, and I think, you know, the most closest thing to violence I ever heard was just plates and stuff smashing, and I think that my intuition told me it was her.
Oh, okay. So she was a bit of a thrower, too?
Well, not very often.
That was pretty rare.
I think that only happened maybe a few times in my life as well.
But there was a lot of yelling, of course.
You know? Number three. Did an adult or person at least five years older than you ever touch or fondle you or have you touch their body in a sexual way or attempt or actually have oral-anal intercourse with you?
God, this one's tough.
I got a new friend. It's horrible.
It's horrible stuff to talk about. It's horribly common, but it is very much a conspiracy of silence around this stuff, right?
Yeah. Well, I think I was just a vulnerable kid and one time in that neighborhood I was walking home and some old man approached me on a neighboring street not too far from my home and, you know, invited me into his house and performed oral sex on me.
I've talked to a healthy few people.
Well, just a few, I guess, actually.
A few of my closest friends over the years.
I guess it's not the rarest of things to have happened.
How old were you?
I think I was about 12 or 13.
I've said this before, but I really think it bears repeating, Chris.
Well, first of all, again, I'm incredibly sorry for this kind of horrifying, pedophilic predation upon a child.
But it is amazing to me.
Like, you think of the risks that these pedophiles take.
It's, like, if he misjudges you, right?
Like, so let's say that you end up having, like, you run home and you tell your parents, right?
Well, what happens? Well, your parents call the cops.
The cops go to him and they will question him and whatever, right?
I mean, I don't know if they could find his saliva on your penis or whatever godforsaken...
Incidents were occurring, but he could then go to jail for 10 years.
And we all know what happens to pedophiles in jail.
It's usually not very good at all, right?
Because so many prisoners are the result of pedophiles preying upon children, turning them to criminality to some degree.
So it literally is.
Like, if he gets it wrong, it's almost like a death sentence for him.
It's certainly the end of his free life as it stands.
And so this incredible...
Instincts that they have developed, these horrible predators, these incredible instincts that they have developed to figure out which children We'll stay quiet because they're taking their life in their hands every time they approach a child.
And the degree to which they're like, you know how sharks can smell like a tiny little bit of blood in something the size of a swimming pool or a lake or whatever?
These guys, some women as well, they know down to a T exactly which children they can pray on.
I guess occasionally they'll make a mistake, which is why they end up in prison.
But man, he knew...
Your family structure, just from looking at your body posture, like he knew that you couldn't go, or wouldn't go, rather, and talk to your family about it.
And it's always just astounded me just how well-developed those evil instincts are.
Well, actually, when you say that, it reminds me of just, I know that people in my experience with, you know, let me be a poor father figure role model early in my business and career and so on, it was par for the course to be taken advantage of by those men as well.
You know, and I, well, just, you know, by way of, you know, just being overworked, abused, I take it literally stolen from, you know, I take it literally stolen from.
You know, I remember I did some work for a man in Vancouver one time at a guy at a coffee shop and told me about this great business he was doing.
And we did some call center work with him and this and that.
And, you know, he owed me a big paycheck before Christmas and he took off with all of our money.
And then he sent me this note to say, hey, don't you remember I told you that, you know, something in our earlier conversations that he was a wily guy that, you know, had taken advantage of people in the past and that I should have known better.
But, you know, that's just a good example.
And I think, you know, what the early...
Early jobs, I just, I felt like that was the case.
I mean, thank goodness I've had a partner, co-author of a book now, seven years, who never even had a disagreement, like a loud fight or anything like that, but it took me a lot of years to be able to, yeah, I think, I don't know, do you see a correlation there between those, the male role model that can suss out who can be pushed around as well, you know, within a work environment, not just in, with respect to pedophiles.
Oh yeah, no, I mean, the, the, the, The blowback for picking the wrong mark or the wrong victim is pretty intense even in business and yeah, they know how to pick him.
It's a rough thing.
Alright, so then we get to four.
Did you often or very often feel that no one in your family loved you or thought you were important or special or your family didn't look out for each other, feel close to each other or support each other?
Well, I think we get a pretty good vision of that answer.
Yeah, that's the crux of it.
I mean like I just always felt like that.
Always, in a very, very deep sense.
I just felt like I was completely alone in my family.
My father didn't...
And, I mean, there was the distinction, you know.
You talk a lot about men raising other men's kids.
And, you know, I say to friends often that I will never, ever, ever, ever do that.
And I have friends who are doing that, who look at me and, you know, wonder why.
And I say, well, don't you feel different about your own blood?
Well, yeah. And I say, well, exactly.
And... You know, that was really, really apparent, especially once my sisters were born.
And, you know, he didn't say a lot of things to me, but, you know, my mother would always tell me that he did, which didn't necessarily...
Wait, what would your mom say that your stepfather said about you?
Well, just that, you know, he didn't understand me, didn't love me the same, didn't care about me as much at all.
And it just was very, very different.
I mean, I knew that he never liked me and that we were...
You know, very, very different types of people with very different skills and outlooks in life and capacities.
You know, I was quite bright and he was not.
And, you know, just lots of things that made us very different people.
I mean, our athleticism is about the only thing that we share, but it was also expressed in a very different way.
Did you get much of a chance to get to know him before your mom shacked up with him?
Well, no. I was so young, I was like, you know, I mean...
My mom met him when she was pregnant, I think.
They were together already by the time I was born, or shortly thereafter, maybe.
Sorry if I missed that timeline.
Okay, I understand. That's okay.
And actually, I'm a bit confused, too.
Maybe she met him just after I was born.
But either way, it wasn't like you got a chance to do a job interview or a dad interview, right?
No, no. I mean, I was three and they moved up to, from Ontario where I was born, they moved up to Northern Manitoba, you know, where he was working in a nickel mine.
And then, you know, they moved on.
Like I say, by the time I was five and my first sister was born, they bought a family house in another big city in Canada and that's where we stayed.
It's funny too, something you said struck me, Chris, where you said you felt alone in the family.
I don't know what the word is, but it's worse than alone.
Like, I'll just give you a little example.
So, last night, yeah, last night I went out for dinner with my daughter.
And a couple of tables over, the restaurant was pretty empty, and a couple of tables over there was a family, just a mom and a dad and a little boy.
He was maybe five or four or five, maybe six.
And... You know, they chatted a tiny bit to the waitress, they handed their son a cell phone to watch videos on or something like that, and they just kind of stared off into space.
And they said, it wasn't like I was tracking them, I was chatting with my daughter, but we did comment on it, about how this family...
Had nothing to say to each other, no conversation.
Now, I was saying that's a kind of torture for me.
Because for me, I like to be alone in contact with my own thoughts and ideas and musing and mulling and, you know, all the wonderful little waterwheel churn that goes on in my brain on a fairly continual basis awake and or sleeping.
So I enjoy that process.
If I go for a walk, I can think.
I like that time in the morning after you wake up, before you get out of bed, where I can just sort of daydream my day into existence and all that.
So I really, really enjoy that time of being alone.
Now, I also really enjoy time with friends and family because we're having great conversations, for the most part, right?
But that time when you're with people...
But there's no conversation occurring, or things are tense, or things are distant.
That, to me, is a kind of torture.
It is a spiritual agony for me, because I'm not with my own thoughts, but I'm also not connecting to other people.
It is a limbo land of an ex-haunted house.
It doesn't even have a ghost in it.
Does that make any sense? It's more than just, I felt alone in my family.
You're isolated. You're cut off from yourself.
In these kinds of environments, you have nothing!
Well, the truth is, definitely, I concur in such a complete sense, I didn't quite realize until I was older how much...
I mean, I confess to you that, you know, despite really enjoying writing, I actually enjoy conversation, I think, a little more.
And I never knew that until...
You know, I was an adult, and I still, like, I don't, I wouldn't put myself in such a torturous position as you describe now with any friends or whatever.
I mean, I would just never, Participate in, you know, with people and be around them if they didn't enjoy the conversations the same as I do.
Oh, if I'm in a situation where there's some...
Sorry, if I'm in a situation where there's some block to conversation, I'll just grip my teeth and use whatever verbal and emotional dynamite I need to break that block and reestablish connection.
Like, I just won't have it at all.
To me, that's like driving with the door open down the highway.
It's like, well, we've got to fix that before we go any further.
And I just... I can't do it.
Like, I literally, if I'm in a relationship where there's something interfering with communication, I don't care what I gotta do, but I'll do it.
Yeah, and I don't even like small talk.
I mean, my sister, my older sister, I talk to her a lot, the middle child there, always have, and we talk almost every day, and she loves small talk, and I hate it, but she knows that, and so But in general rapport, even with strangers and this and that, I just don't do small talk very well, and so I get right into deep conversation with people, and if they can't handle it, like you say, that's it.
I'm out of there. Yeah, no, I was once in a hot tub chatting with a woman who had a daughter.
I was a parent, of course, and the kids were playing together.
I was sitting there, and she was talking about the need for massage.
I said, oh, why do you need massage? Oh, I have chronic pain.
Oh, why do you have chronic pain? Oh, because of my childhood.
And it's like, okay, we'll go there.
We'll talk about that. I'll never see her again, but let's at least have some Something more than this baton handoff of empty syllables known as the perpetual distraction of small talk.
Small talk to me is kind of like candy.
Eh, okay, once in a while, maybe, but you can have a steady diet of it or you rot your brain.
All right, so number five.
Did you often or very often feel that you didn't have enough to eat, had to wear dirty clothes, and had no one to protect you, or your parents were too drunk or high to take care of you, or to take you to the doctor if you needed it?
Yeah, that's hard. Sorry.
No, no, that's a tough one, too, because that's one you can't hide, right?
Because other stuff you can hide, like you get beaten up or whatever, assuming you're not in some paper-thin wall, although that doesn't seem to matter.
I had all these...
I had hundreds and hundreds of people who could hear me regularly being beaten up as a child, and no one even made a cursory phone call to try and get the authorities involved or safe or protect me.
And people don't care. They say, oh, we've got to care about the kids.
No, I don't care. They don't care.
But you can at least hide that, but if you've got to go to school in dirty clothes or clothes with holes in them or whatever, that...
Well, that wasn't my case, but...
Oh, what was the one for you?
Well, for me, I told you that my parents split up.
I was about 12, 13, and my mother tried to kill herself a number of times very shortly thereafter, and it was very apparent that I knew that I couldn't live with her.
I mean, I tried a couple of times.
From about 12 to 14, maybe 15, I bounced around between them a little bit.
Wait, I feel like we're on a rather express train and I'm missing all the villages here.
So, let's just rewind for a sec.
Okay, so do you know what it was that brought about your parents split up when you were 12 or so?
Sorry, you just brought about what when I was 12?
Your parents split up when you were about 12 or so.
Like, what was it that brought it about?
Why did they split up? My mom left my dad.
She said the big reason at the time was, you know, just, I guess, A very unhappy marriage, and the catalyst was apparently her doing a bunch of therapy and discovering repressed memories of childhood abuse, was what she told us.
Do you know what kind of abuse?
Yeah, she said she'd been subject to sexual and physical abuse as a child.
Wow. Do you know what drove her to therapy, or decided her to go?
No, I think she seems, you know, like my mother was very intelligent and could put on an incredible show, you know, and I said that there wasn't a lot of deep conversation, but I could go to her, you know, when I said I was completely alone, I mean,
I did go to her with problems in my childhood sometimes, and she would, you know, make an effort to console me, and I think that she had, you know, has You know, with her intellect, just the awareness that she needed to do that, I would guess that, you know, in order to try and live a better life, although I often say that there was, you know, two mothers.
One was the bit of a rock that held the family together until I was about 12 and, you know, read to me voraciously, in fact, before I was, you know, up until about the age of five, which was probably the best gift she ever gave me.
And, you know, did do some, you know...
I mean, I think she worked in childcare with, you know, children with disabilities, physical, mental, all kinds, and is very, very good with like young, young, young children.
And this will come up later, you know, because she adopted and continues to You know, take care of foster kids and things like that, which we find horrifying as her adult kids because we know the abuse that she turned into an alcoholic, a raging alcoholic, immediately after leaving my father.
Like I said, tried to kill herself a number of times, ended up immediately in a violent and abusive relationship, which I was in that house for a couple months and then left.
Okay, okay, hang on. So the villagers are blurring past again for just a second here.
There's lots, yeah. Your mom left, did she leave the household or did she kick your dad out?
Well, like, initially, he left.
And got an apartment. But then when she met this new guy, they moved into a house together.
My dad moved back into the family house, which was his pride and joy, and kept it thereafter.
And in fact, once my mother became completely incapable At the end of that relationship was just short-lived, about a year or two maximum, not even...
The violent one that she...
Right. Did she hook up with the guy before your parents split up, do you know?
I don't think so, but like immediately thereafter, which I found shocking.
And then, you know, my smaller sister...
You know, it was only two or three, like I say, when they split up, and then maximum, and then she went to live with my father, and my other sister ended up being raised by my mother, and then I just left the house entirely.
So getting back to the original question, for me, I just bounced around from, you know, I had a group of about five or six close friends, and I would stay with their families for as long as they would And that's how I spent my, you know, all my high school years and part of my junior high.
And it was really, for me, the food was a big thing because the families always, you know, even just approaching their fridge was terrifying for me.
I didn't want to help myself.
It was always a thing, and even as an adult...
Were you concerned that you would wear out your welcome if you took food?
Exactly. Well, exactly, because in fact that did happen in a couple of cases.
In fact, one of my close friends mentioned that that was...
And they were rich doctors, like millionaires living in.
But they mentioned that that was, I should never go to the fridge and help myself, and la-la-la, and I was just like...
Did anyone's... Sorry to interrupt you, Chris.
Did anyone's parents ever ask you...
Why you couldn't go home?
Yeah, you know, they did.
And I don't know if I just couldn't articulate it well enough for their liking.
They just always seemed like, oh, well, it's not a big deal.
You should be able to go back with your father.
So they would put up with me for, you know, a month or two or three maximum.
And that was the end of that.
I was back on my own or looking for another friend to stay with.
Because they would just try and send me home.
You know, one of them phoned my best friend, lived only two hours down.
The street and she was the only one.
She's one of Canada's most recognized public doctors in a certain aspect and always on CBC radio.
Very, very smart woman and she was a single mother.
But either way, she tried to talk to him and sent me home.
Did your mother drink before she left your dad much?
No, they were never big drinkers.
I remember that they would go out every once in a while as a couple or something like that, not even once a week or anything like that.
And then they would come home, I remember smelling alcohol in their breath, and they would always oftentimes be in a good cheery mood, kissing us goodnight or whatever.
And yeah, so they didn't really do a lot of that.
Although... I recently reconnected with a friend who our families had vacations together in the summer.
That was one of the best things, if not maybe the best we did as a family.
Every summer we would take like a week or two and rent a cottage somewhere in Canada and go.
And for three of those years, we did it with the same family.
And I just reconnected in the last week with the boy that was my age, which is pretty cool.
And he reminded me that they used to, you know, drink a lot together.
And I guess our next neighbors on the other side were good friends of theirs and they would drink together.
But it was always out of my purview and never...
Drinking at cottages in Canada.
Never heard of that before. Right, exactly.
So when your mom left your dad, you said she really became...
So she drank a lot and then you say she immediately got into this very violent relationship?
Yeah. And how much was she drinking?
Like it was... A bottle of wine a day?
I guess you don't know if you weren't living with her, right?
Yeah, exactly.
I mean, I don't know, but I mean, almost immediately it seems as though she slipped into that where, yeah, it was like at least a bottle of wine a day and it never has gotten better.
It's only gotten worse. I was to finish off that previous statement.
It was like one woman and then another woman and that second woman who was supposed to heal through therapy and so on.
Just always digressed instead.
Well, it's The arc that's supposed to happen, right, is you get some illumination of self-knowledge or you hit kind of rock bottom, you go into therapy, you learn about your history, you learn about your past, you try to fix your relationships.
If you can't, you can upgrade from them or move beyond them or whatever.
But it sounds like your mother went from some sort of self-knowledge crisis into therapy and then ended up with a worse guy than your stepdad and an alcoholic to boot.
Yeah. And then remarried eventually to a man 11 years younger than her that she just tortures to death.
And in fact, he tried to kill himself just in recent months.
And has threatened to do so many, many times.
And we all knew. And we just can't even...
None of us can stand to be around them because she's so awful to them.
Is one of the reasons.
How did she try and kill herself...
When you were sort of, I think, 12, 13 or so, if I understand the timeline correctly, how did she try and kill herself and how did you know about that?
I think she did it a couple of few times with some pills.
One time she took a car and drove it into a tree.
I don't know. It was always...
I was really young at that stage and some of that stuff.
In fact, you know, later...
I almost feel guilty but there was a reluctance on my part to not want to get into her own childhood abuses and her own suffering because she just you know like I remember visiting the most pivotal story in my relationship with my mother growing up in some ways also is just at in high school my first year of high school She was in a little rooming house.
She was very down and out in the moment, just recovering from one suicide attempt.
I don't know how again.
But I went to go see her in this tiny little...
She was on the third floor of a big old house in this city.
And she had one knife, one fork, you know, one spoon, nothing in this house.
And she wouldn't get out of bed.
She spent a lot of years in that sort of situation where she just could barely get out of bed.
And all she would say to me in that moment was that she just wanted to die.
And that's when it really hit home that, you know, man, you need to get serious about parenting yourself and taking responsibility and trying to do the best you can to figure out what you should do.
And as I think I mentioned to you, I just made the decision to continue in schooling, for example, because I felt that that would be an important thing to do socially, to just...
I really enjoyed sports and my friends.
I made the decision to do that, but whether it was things like deodorants and foods and all those things, those were the two big things for me.
The clothing.
It never was as big a deal.
I was able to get some clothes from some friends, and we were never a well-to-do family, and I somehow managed to scrape through.
I didn't have to wear clothes and feel like a vagabond at school.
I never encountered that, but the biggest thing for me was the food, because even as an adult, I've ended up starving myself for most of my life.
And I know that there's a relationship there.
I just won't eat and don't eat.
I get very excited by work and stuff and follow my creative chutzpah, you know, around for 24-hour cycles sometimes or longer, work hard, very hard all the time.
I love my work and I love to do those things.
But food is always just the last thing on my mind and I've had to work really, really, really hard to build positive habits.
I can't cook very well and I don't feed myself very well.
Yeah, I've noticed that, just for myself, I don't really eat much during the day, but come evening, I have more of a tendency to eat, and that's because my family evenings would be very stressful, and so I would tend to want to eat as a result of stress, whereas during the day, if my mom was gone, it was much more relaxing, so I'm just sort of working on that correlation to make sure I don't overeat in the evening, which is kind of the worst time to do it, because then you go to bed or whatever, right?
And it's funny, yeah, the clothing thing, yeah, I'm glad you didn't have that.
I remember I picked up a girl when I was about 14.
I used to do swimming and diving and all that kind of stuff and chatted with her.
Really nice girl.
And we went on a date.
We went to go see the movie Airplane.
I remember being very embarrassed because there's a Toffler scene.
I remember being very embarrassed at that.
And the only pants I had had holes in them.
And I had to kind of cover up The holes in my pants while I was sitting there, hoping that she wouldn't notice.
It is a real déclassé or low-rent bat signal that you can't really help avoid.
Well, I worked as well.
Sorry? I started working when I was about 15 as well, which helped.
Then I could buy deodorants and food, or deodorant and clothes and things like that.
Has your mother ever expressed any sorrow or regret or guilt over how you were treated and who she chose to be in your life?
Yeah, but she wouldn't put it that way.
I mean, I've put it to her that way in recent years.
How would she put it? Well, she would just say, I'm sorry for all the And, you know, whatever have you, but she wouldn't, you know, with respect to the choices that she made in picking a partner, that was something specifically I pointed out to her about three years ago, maybe? And she just couldn't even stomach the reality of owning that decision.
Well, it's funny how people say...
I'm sorry for the mistakes that I made.
Now, I don't think that people should be sorry for mistakes.
So it's kind of what I call a BNAB, bullshit, non-apology.
Because if somebody has made a mistake, I don't really think that they have anything to be sorry for.
And so when somebody says, I'm sorry for the mistakes that I made, it's kind of a manipulation.
Because if you remain angry, well, why would you be angry at somebody who just made a mistake?
Whereas somebody who repeatedly made bad moral choices that afflicted and affected children who had no choice, that ain't a mistake, honey.
That's not just an oopsie.
I always felt like her apologies were half-hearted and she just wanted me.
You know, she would always say, and here's another big sign along those lines, you know, she would often say, well, let's, you know, can't we just get past it and move on?
You know, like I've gone years.
I went... You know, I started when I was about 18, 19, where I went a year without talking to her, another six months at another time, this and that.
It's now been, for me, three years since the last time I spoke with her.
For my sister, middle sister, it's been seven.
And, you know, my youngest sister needs the childcare.
And it's just... Well, that's another story.
She's a mess herself, but she's out in my mother's vicinity and has lots of contact with her.
But for me and my other sister, we found that very, very...
I found it a little more challenging to fully separate at all.
But, you know, she would always say all the way through the years, can't we just get past this?
Your mum was that, right? Yeah, can't we just get past all that crap?
And Well, it's kind of funny that the woman who spent years being unable to get out of bed is now telling other people to just let it go.
Was she able to just get past whatever was keeping her in the bed?
Was she able to just move beyond whatever was causing her to try to kill herself?
Has she been able to move beyond the sadistic relationship she has with the man who's 11 years younger?
Who she tortures on a daily basis, you say?
I mean, it's so funny when people, they're wallowing in their own emotional problems and seem unable to deal with them at all, but then when other people have problems, it's like, ah, just move on!
Just, you know, snap your fingers and boogie on down the yellow brick road to happiness and mental health, and it's like, if you have the answer that's called just move on, why don't you apply it to yourself?
Oh, the hypocrisy is so rife, it makes it very easy.
It's one of the biggest... You know, tools that I'm able to deploy in separating myself from her at all.
I mean, it's just very easy because she is such an abhorrent hypocrite.
Now, when she was unable to get out of bed, how did she...
I'm always curious about this.
It's probably just like growing up poor.
Like, how do you pay the bills when you can't get out of bed?
I mean, assuming you're not a prostitute, I mean, how do you pay the bills when you can't get, was she being supported by a guy or how did that work?
Yeah, she would just find different boyfriends all the way through the years that would support her.
It was one of the things that, you know, I learned a lot from my sister, you know, and my sister, she would spend, you know, she was so irresponsible.
My mother was just ridiculously irresponsible with money and I know that was a cause of conflict in my mother's marriage to my father.
But she's never developed strong habits or any habits that are positive in that sense.
And so in all of her relationships to date even, the men are just constantly paying for all of her addictions and mistakes as she runs around and spends money on things that she can't afford and does all kinds of asinine mistakes.
And for my poor sister that lived with her, was raised by her, it was a constant struggle.
Because she would spend the last $20 that she had in food on alcohol or whatever, and my sister wouldn't even have bus fare to get to school.
So yeah, she used men, and I think she actually did prostitute herself for a brief period.
Not on the street, but at that time in Canada.
It was telephones or whatever.
She had a little business card.
I guess that brings me to my next question, which is how pretty is she?
Not that pretty. When she was younger, maybe?
Before alcoholism and abuse took its toll?
Seven, Max. A seven?
Not even like...
By the time she left my father, she's just not even that attractive.
But like I say, she's very, very smart, manipulative, and has a reasonably pretty face and can be quite charming in her own right.
Right. Now, some of these questions we can skip because we've talked about them as we go.
But then the question 10, did a household member go to prison?
You said not before age 18, but at age 18, I myself went to jail and feel strongly that this is a yes.
So what happened there?
Well, my first big full-time job, I quit school, you know, to take a sales job, blind sales ad.
And Then I had an accident.
I actually was going to drive.
I was doing really well at that sales job, climbed the ranks pretty quickly, and in fact, again, that manipulative situation.
I guess I can say I was selling curvy vacuums.
The local distributor in the city that I was living encouraged young up-and-starters, whether it's big apartments, penthouses, bills, this and that.
I always wanted a Jaguar.
It was my first car ever.
I got leased a Jaguar.
And then I had an accident.
I was going to take my mom for Christmas.
We were going to drive to see some family in another part of Canada.
And I went to go see her that night.
And I was warming up some soup on the stove for her and had changed into sort of a fleece button up shirt and leaned up against the stove and then caught fire.
And still has some scars on my back, suffered second, third degree burns on my back from that and what not.
And the trip was no more, but also the job was no more.
And, you know, a lot of the bills and it was a real learning experience because nobody came to visit me, nobody really cared from work, this and that.
Because you were off recovering from the burns, you got fired or you were let go?
Well, it's just I couldn't keep up with my bills by the time I was like almost two months off work.
I just couldn't keep up with the bills.
Nobody really cared. In the same sense, I was just leveraged way too far.
It was just stupid.
But they encouraged that.
In any event, I ended up in...
Then I found another job.
Another mover and shaker in the city.
We were doing some different things in the insurance industry.
And all things were going well.
Some bigwigs came up from the US, shut us down.
I guess we were moving too fast.
They didn't like what we were doing, breaking some regulations or something.
And one of the younger guys I was with, he was 10 years older than me, but working under this big guy, he said, look, I got a deal in Calgary, you know, another city.
Well, let's not get into too many geographical details, but go ahead.
But yeah, he said, let's go to this other city.
I got a good deal for us.
So we went out there to try and strike a deal with some people who wanted us working on this other deal, apparently.
And it just fell through when we got there.
And that's when this guy turned to me and said, look, I got something we can do.
And essentially, his idea was that we would sign up for the local charity walk and just walk through the rich neighborhoods in town collecting donations, give the charity the checks and pocket the cash.
I did that for 30 days until we were caught, roughly.
Wait, sorry. There was a charity walk, so you go through the rich neighborhoods and you would take donations but not give them to the charity?
Well, we would give the checks but not the cash.
Oh, I see. I see. Okay.
Do you know how you got caught? Yeah, we recruited a couple of other young kids that were staying in the local hotel that were runaways.
And, you know, they said they were needing help.
We told them what we were doing. And they ended up, I don't know, one of them was a runaway.
The police found them, whatever.
They told them, how are you guys supporting yourselves?
They told on us. And we got tackled one day outside the hotel by the police.
And so that happened at 18.
And yeah, I went to jail for five months.
I got the same sentence as the guy 10 years older than me that unbeknownst to me had a record of doing this.
And so yeah, I don't know.
That was that.
But as I said, it was still a rather impressionable age.
And I think I've heard you talk quite a number of times as I've heard others talk about the And not just the maturing of our brain, but when certain types of people, character traits, whatever have you, are more prone to criminality for various reasons, tends to dissipate after about 26.
It just really struck a chord with me because it was a big life-changing moment.
I really did a lot of soul searching and decided that...
Because up until that point, I remember vocalizing even that I was willing to step on whoever and do whatever I needed to do to get where I needed to go.
And after that happened, I thought, no, that's not the way you're going to live this life.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's something that I've thought about, which is if you grow up with this kind of family, Then what happens is you are surrounded by a whole bunch of people.
Other people, that's why I was asking about your friends, parents, teachers, priests, policemen, whoever.
And then society says, well, you see, you have to obey all these rules because we're such a moral society and we care about the kids and...
We're so good and the laws reflect our dedication to moral ideals and, of course, if you grow up and you're abused and you float through the society and nobody gives a rat's ass about it, why on earth should you believe any of society's claims To its high moral standing.
Darn tootin' Steph. I remember exactly feeling those thoughts exactly.
That the world didn't care about me and why should I care about it.
And coming very close to those nihilistic, horrible thoughts.
And it was at that moment in my life, in fact, where, you know, I described that dark night of the soul began.
And, you know, I eventually, as I say, very, very quickly came to the personal decisions inside that, you know, Regardless of what had happened to me that I wasn't going to take anything out on the world and then I was going to help it heal And be a better place As well as myself and that no matter how long it took and no matter how many rounds of counseling it took or whatever that I would Be the man that I knew lived inside of me that I felt like I was getting further and further away from and so yeah so And that's why I've always said to myself,
if I ever got to a position where I could listen to people and help and validate what terrible experiences occurred to them as a kid, like, this show doesn't come out of nowhere.
This show doesn't come out of nowhere.
And even my vaunted ability to analyze and deconstruct irrational statements comes out of battling with my mother's insanity for many, many, many years in order to survive.
This is not a fun or pleasurable skill.
This is an ability that emerged out of a desperate desire to save my mind.
And of course, if you end up working a muscle because of adverse conditions, you end up stronger than if you'd never had those adverse conditions.
To begin with and so yeah my dedication to listen to people who have experienced child abuse and and sympathize and validate and so on you know I just boy you know you try if you're a healthy person I think you try to provide to the world what was not provided to you and that's sort of foundational to what it is that I do now let me ask you something that we we skipped past I wanted to sort of circle back Chris You did say you felt a little,
if I remember rightly, you said you felt a little bit guilty about not being more sympathetic to your mother's trauma, your mother's childhood trauma.
Yeah, I mean, like, it's only a minor amount.
I mean, it's just, you know, I wish I, you know, I mean, I guess you wish you could be there for anybody to, you know, whether they're a family member or not, at least in part, but because of all the You know, the trauma at her hand and the continual, like I say, hypocrisy that continues to this day, you know, it's just, it's pretty well impossible to ask that of me.
And I recognized that.
But it, you know how tough it is.
I mean, you've said it before. I mean, never mind the white knighting for the mothers that goes on.
It's just, it's tough, you know, as I spoke to in the letter, to be a child of parents that are so toxic and dangerous.
So as to just be continually abusive and you need to actually never ever talk to them again.
Well, I'll tell you this more from an anecdotal standpoint.
I think there's some valid theory behind it, but I'll tell you this from an emotional standpoint, Chris.
The people I've known who were abused as children, who ended up sympathizing with their abusers, were utterly destroyed psychologically and morally.
Yes. Utterly destroyed.
That's right. And so I knew I couldn't do that, but it still wasn't easy for me to turn my back on her suffering or her as a human being, being that she was my mother.
I mean, it says in the Bible to honor your parents, and that haunts me.
Yes, it does say that.
In the Bible. And it is unfortunately not a conditional statement based upon their virtue.
It is, well, I mean, unfortunately, that's the way religion often gets sold, is the parents say, oh, I can indoctrinate my kids into honoring me, so sure, I'll choose this religion, because I don't have to be a great parent to have them honor me.
I can just tell them that God said so, and there you go.
But no, it is, you know, I'm not saying that people like your mom should not be sympathized with.
I mean, there are some people who will justly and fairly sympathize with what your mom went through.
It just can't be you.
Because you're the victim, right?
I mean, so a rapist, usually rapists have been raped themselves often as children, and there is some significant percentage of rapists who claim to have that, who knows for sure, claim to have that experience.
So... If someone's a rapist, and let's say you're a therapist, you're a scientist, you can sympathize with the childhood of the rapist, and that's because you haven't been raped by that person.
But if you're the victim of the rapist, asking the victim to sympathize with the abuser For the sake of the abuser's childhood is asking them to tear themselves in two and to entirely deny the anger and rage, in fact, that they may have about that kind of violation.
So, yeah, I mean, I used to have these people be like, oh, man, you don't see your mom.
That's so terrible. She must be lonely, blah, blah, blah.
I'm like, hey, man, you know.
I can put her in touch with you if you want to give me your phone number, she can call you, you know, if you're concerned about this, and I'm just like, nobody, right, nobody ever took me up on that.
That happened many, many, many times, and people don't even bother anymore.
So, yeah, there may be some people who can sympathize with your mom, maybe professionals, maybe even some friend or something like that, but not you.
I think it would be an entire act of spiritual self-destruction to attempt to Sympathize with an abuser, not just because you're violating your own experience of being violated, but also because it is most likely going to only reproduce and exacerbate the abuse.
Because when you sympathize with an abuser, they're like, aha!
I have leverage.
I have power now.
I have control over this person.
And you can see how your mom is treating...
Her new boyfriend or her boyfriend in a couple of years, right?
So when she has power, she deals with it badly.
When you sympathize with evildoers, They gain power over you.
And if they have an experience, if you have a history of them abusing you with their power, then giving them power is just setting them up to abuse you more and for your life to get worse and their life to get worse.
It's actually poisoning them and poisoning you.
So I consider it a desperately unhealthy and self-destructive thing to do to attempt to empathize with your abusers.
Again, it doesn't mean that they don't deserve any empathy at all.
It just can't come from the victims.
Right. And I guess, you know, Tied to that difficulty, I really wish the world could understand these things and I really honor your work in this area.
It's been very helpful for me.
But you know, it's so hard, even the best friends, the brightest ones I've ever had, just don't seem to understand and always I encourage and won't ever stop until I just flat out say to them, look, you say that to me again and we're going to have a problem.
Oh, you're like, you got to reconnect with your mom and boy, you know, she's going to die one day and there's going to be all of this unresolved hell.
You're never going to be able to move forward.
You're never going to be able to love. You got to forgive her.
It's a weird voodoo curse.
It's a weird, well, you see, you're the victim of child abuse that went on for years and was brutal and destructive.
And you have to find a way to love your abuser or this supernatural multi-generational curse will descend upon you and you will then be abused by reality or others or yourself until the end of time unless you surrender your moral independence and sense of ethical judgment to your abuser.
It's a horrible thing to say to the victim.
of child abuse. I mean, nobody would ever sit there.
I mean, this is a more extreme example, of course, right?
I don't think a lot of people would sit there and say to the Jews of Europe after the Holocaust, well, you know, you've got to find a way to love the Nazis.
Like, I'm just telling you, I don't really think...
And our entire legal system couldn't work if there was this absolute commandment for forgiveness, right?
Like, everybody would then have to forgive.
Nobody would ever press charges.
There'd never be any consequences.
And crime and violence would run rampant, as we know what happens, you know, in New York in the 70s when the Democrats got in power and let everyone out of the prisons or refused to enforce a lot of the laws and so on.
We see this in Sadiq Khan's London.
If you don't have the laws, if you don't have the rules, Things get worse and worse and worse, and it's just this specific group of people who've been abused as children, who are supposed to do what nobody else in society ever is supposed to do, and that is deny their own experience, put themselves back under the tender mercy of a prior abuser, and cross their fingers in the hopes of escaping a curse that is being put on them by outside the situation.
It's a wretched and horrible thing to do to a victim of child abuse and it's how people collaborate and participate in more abuse.
Sorry, Chris, you were going to say?
Well, I just, yeah, I mean, it sounds so light, you know, in comparison to, you know, obviously, you know, your terrific examples of the real insanity of it on larger degrees.
but, you know, again, probably the most intelligent And caring friendship I've ever had.
You know, real virtuous friend that continues to this day, met here in Spain, has been just a real brother, you know, real kindred spirit, just so brilliant.
Will still, you know, until I said, don't ever say that again, would say things like, I just hope for you that that can change.
I just really believe that that's possible and I really, I just can't understand it and I, I, I, I think that that will be better in the long run, and I just hope that you guys are able to move past this stuff.
Well, with all due respect to your friend, and I don't mean to put anything between you and your friend, because it's so common, it's almost hard to get mad at people about this, but my question is always, why are you focusing on the victim?
Changing. Like, why doesn't he call up your mom and say, listen, you abused Chris for years, you exposed him to abuse, and you traumatized him, and you bullied him, and you hit him, and, you know, you married a guy who beat him up, and, like, you really need to find peace, you need to apologize, you need to take on, like, why is he not calling up your mom, if he's so concerned?
About this relationship healing, why is anyone and everyone perpetually focusing on the victims of child abuse to change their behavior rather than the perpetrators?
It seems kind of cowardly, like picking on the victim on the more reasonable person, right?
This is always my concern about being reasonable in the world, because society generally has, or people have generally this scan, and what they do is that in any time they feel anxiety, they look at relationships and they say, okay, who's the most reasonable person in this relationship?
Okay, what I'm going to do Is I'm going to go and attempt to get that person to appease the more aggressive person.
I mean, you can look at this in Europe between Christians and Muslims and so on.
What does the government do? Or people who are like, I'm very brave at criticizing.
Christianity, in other words, I'm very brave at criticizing people who, say, turn the other cheek and forgive your enemies, but I'm not brave at all in criticizing Islam because they look at these two relations, these two belief sets, and they choose the more reasonable and nag that person rather than taking on the challenging work of criticizing the least reasonable and therefore really in the most need of robust criticism.
So it really bothers me that people focus on the victim.
You know, people can call up and say, oh, you've got to fix things with your mom.
It's like, you know, you can find her.
You can call her up. If my mom were to come to me with wisdom and knowledge and apologies, that would be a beautiful day.
Maybe you feel differently.
I'm just telling you what my thoughts are.
That would be a lovely day. I would never say no to the people in my past who want to come and solve problems.
I've certainly put my years in of trying to solve these problems and have these conversations.
I put my time in. Years and years and years of trying to work in And solve these issues.
Not only to no avail, but to a negative avail.
In other words, I wasted that time where I could have spent it building more positive and benevolent and beneficial relationships elsewhere in my life.
That time was worse than wasted.
And I'm not going to live forever.
And I don't have decade after decade to squander on attempting to one-sidedly heal relationships with permanently dysfunctional people.
Like, I'm sorry. If I live forever, maybe I could spend another couple of decades.
But... I am entirely mortal, and I don't have an infinity of time with which to somehow one-sidedly fix a relationship.
You know, like if you go the whole skipping game you play where you roll around the skipping rope, you can't do it if you're the only one holding the rope.
You need somebody else on the other side to make it work.
That's right. Yeah, I would not say no to people who wanted to fix things from my past.
I would be happy to listen.
But my first suspicion, of course, would be that people want to fix things in my past Because they want things from me in the here and now.
Right? I want people to try and fix things before they desperately need something from me.
Because then it's just bullshit.
You know, then it's just like, okay, well, I'll apologize if you now come and take care of me because I'm old and sick.
And it's like, nah, you know, if you'd have done it before you got old and sick, maybe.
But now that you're old and sick, I can't trust anything because you need things.
And once you need things and you suddenly find it, you have so much sorrow and apology in your heart because you need things from me now.
And it's like, yeah, I'm sorry. Now that you need things, I don't believe it at all.
But, you know, there are people who are younger.
They could have come to me any time.
Over the past 10-15 years, last time I had really anything to do with my family, they could have come to me any time.
And they hadn't. And so I chased and I tried to solve and I tried to fix.
It didn't work. Other people have never responded.
Like at some point you just have to be an empiricist and accept the truth about these relationships.
I agree wholeheartedly.
I mean, I certainly would if I saw the changes in my mother's life, you know, if I saw her...
Like I say, she fosters children and is in a worse place these days than she was when I was growing up, you know, in a lot of ways.
I mean, she's not with a violent man, thankfully, anymore.
But just the fact that he's a pushover and wants to kill himself, I don't think that makes it better for the little kids that they're raising.
Well, it's almost like, you know, something that...
I was told once, I won't say by who, but something I was told once about my mom is that she had an unlived life as a murderer.
And that phrase popped into my head with regards to your mom, like if she's driving a man to suicide, that's almost murderous, right?
Yeah, no, she's got a real dark side to her, that's for sure.
Alright, so the question is, let's get back to where we started, and I appreciate all of this frankness about all of this.
So, your question was, deal with my past trauma in a fuller form, shedding the last of the weight and challenges once and for all.
You say, I want to have a family and do an amazing job.
I have significant meaningful work to do in the world.
My past is still getting in the way.
This is the anger, the pain, the sadness, depression, self-doubt, self-loathing, and shame.
Okay, so my first question is, when people have perpetual experiences of their childhood, I never, ever like to say, well, you're just holding onto it, or you won't let it go, because that's meaningless.
That's absolutely meaningless.
The question is, are you in a secure environment emotionally and relationally now as an adult?
In other words, is there anything in your environment that's triggering past experiences?
Not in my relationships.
I basically have none other than, you know, a couple of just very, very, very small group of close friends.
I've isolated myself in a lot of ways and my camaraderie comes through my work.
Well, I mean, it's lonely.
I mean, it's a little bit lonely, but I really love just thinking and being alone with thoughts and ideas.
No, but you want the thinking to produce something in your relationships, right?
Right. And I mean, I guess I would like to be able to go out and find better relationships.
And I'm just scared because every time I've...
You know, I've done those things in the past.
They haven't gone well.
And the last break I'd mentioned was seven years from the last big relationship.
I wasn't, you know, happy with that at all.
And, you know, maybe, you know, I could give you a couple of key stories.
But in my past, I don't know if we need to do that with relationships or not.
But, you know... Do you feel...
Give me a 1 to 10 scale, Chris.
How confident do you feel in your ability to figure out who's crazy and who's not when it comes to dating?
Pretty good about my vetting at this stage.
I feel pretty confident.
Although I haven't been out there Weeding through the muck as thickly as one can be by any measure.
Alright, that's very abstract.
So when was the last time you asked a woman out or were interested enough for women to contemplate it?
Oh, just a couple of weeks ago, I met a couple of women out at a restaurant and knew immediately that they were the last thing on the earth I need to spend time with.
But that's part of the problem is that, you know, like, I mean, I just don't meet anybody who I think warrants it, you know.
And when I first got to Spain, there was a woman who was, there was a couple of women who were really interested in me.
And again, I knew immediately that these were not the right women.
And, you know, to be frank, I just, I don't have a lot of confidence that there are a whole lot of great women.
I just haven't met them. I don't have the time.
I'm sort of hand-to-mouth working really hard and that's one of the other issues I want.
You don't have the time because you need to work to sustain yourself?
Yeah, I mean that's one of the big issues I want to bring.
Okay, so why do you need to work so hard to sustain yourself?
I don't know. That's one of my big problems.
Economically speaking? I'm sorry to keep interrupting.
That's okay. As far as savings go, or do you have investments, or do you have any way that you can work less without ending up on the street?
No. In fact, I'm walking a fine line as I often do.
I mean, sometimes I've been very rare in my life if I had any real sense of financial security, never had any savings.
Why? Well, I think one of the key things for me was that I always found it really difficult to find Good jobs that I felt okay about doing.
You know, I started off in sort of sales and marketing positions and whether it was, you know, banking or, you know, different types of things, I always felt like there were certain industries I never, never ever wanted to work in.
That was one thing. And then whenever, and it was always difficult to find, my cliche was on a scale of, you know, features and benefits versus the stack of cash I got, I needed to feel good that I was actually helping the world.
And that was always challenging to find, and then I eventually made the decision very early that rather than work for other people, I would just try and do things on my own.
And, you know, I just never, you know, I mean, my most successful endeavor was, you know...
A shipping and logistics company I built in one city and had going for about three years.
Did pretty darn well but made some mistakes and ended up shutting it down with my back against the wall.
From there I took a couple of corporate jobs I hated and couldn't really last any longer than about a year and a half in each one of them.
And at the end of that was when I decided that I would just try and write for a living and write, you know, and I knew the only way to get paid as a writer was maybe writing marketing copy, which I certainly had enough experience in the sales, marketing and business world to do.
And so I started off with a couple of clients there, then quickly met my current day partner who wanted initially me to ghostwrite a book for him, which turned into a co-authorship and partnership.
And, you know, he's put money down and I've put work down for a lot of years since.
I mean, not all the time.
I took a couple of years off where, again, I was doing a little bit more marketing writing.
I had a good rapport.
Actually, I had a pretty decent rapport with a A guy who just phoned me again last week.
That's a long resume. Let me just pause you for a sec.
So is it that you don't get paid enough for the work that you do that you can't save or invest?
Yeah, I don't know. I just don't seem to have enough.
I'm capable of living on next to nothing.
No, but if you want to be a family man, right?
If you want to get married and have kids, then you have to have more than just enough for you, right?
Because if you want your wife to stay home or whatever, you need more money, right?
Than just bachelor-style hand-to-mouth, right?
So I'm just trying to sort of understand.
So you're able to sell your services, but are you not able to sell them for enough that you're able to save some money?
I wouldn't say that I was able to sell my services exceedingly well.
Since I got one relationship, as I say, with a company, That looked to be really, really lucrative and great to start, that prompted my confidence in a move to Europe.
And then about six months in, sort of, you know, the bottom fell out of that and I was back to living on, you know… Wait, you mean the company shut down or the end?
No, I was really struggling.
The company was really struggling.
They really enjoyed my work as ever, but we were finding it hard to throw contracts my way.
And I spent about a year and a half, almost two years just kind of waiting for them to fix, and then eventually they shut down.
Wait, sorry, you spent a year and a half to two years waiting for them to throw you more contracts?
Yeah, too long. And I mean, I did.
I didn't really go out and try and seek lots of new stuff.
Okay, so why? Why? What's the issue with the marketing here?
What's the issue with selling yourself and being confident in the value you have to offer?
Well, I don't know.
I'm not entirely sure 100%, but there's a couple things that do come to mind immediately and feelings I encounter.
One is I was tired of all the just sort of felt like dirty, awful, horrible sales work that I did early in my life.
And felt, you know, that my work should speak for itself and things would work out.
And people did really enjoy my work that I did work with.
And so, you know, that was part of it.
And then the other part was that I formed again this sort of lifelong goal.
Big, huge, hairy, audacious ones with the co-author of that book that we wrote.
And so every spare moment I just put into that.
It's fine to have big, audacious goals as long as you've got the basics down, right?
So let's go back to this.
Do you feel that it's somehow beneath you to market yourself, to sell yourself?
There's got to be some thought about it that's blocking you from doing that.
I think it's maybe sometimes, I guess when push comes to shove, it's got to be a lack of self-worth.
No, no, don't guess.
If you're guessing rather than knowing, you're almost certainly wrong.
I am too when I do that, right?
Right. Right, okay.
So, as far as, I mean, do you have confidence in the value that you can provide to people in your occupation?
Yes. Okay, so when you go to people and say, I have this skill set, I would like to work for you, it can be very productive for both of us, you'll make money, I'll make money, or however you are going to phrase it or put it, what's the block behind that?
Like what is the, you said sort of dirty sales early, so is it dirty to sell yourself in that way?
No. I mean, I feel better about selling myself and the skills that I have now, as opposed to, you know, widgets for other people, ideas, products, or services in my earlier years.
But, yeah, I don't know.
I wonder if...
Maybe I think I'm above it now and shouldn't have to.
I don't know. I'm old enough now.
I'm good enough now that it should be easier.
I don't know. I've hated selling.
That was one of the problems in my business.
It's not like I hate it.
I'm good at it. I mean, I sold a couple of hundred corporate clients all myself in that shipping and logistics business, but I never hired salespeople and I could never keep on top of the need to sell more and run the business in all the different ways and shapes and forms.
I just don't want to do the sales anymore.
I just want to do the work.
I'm a very creative, very capable person.
I just would rather do that stuff.
And that's what worked well in a partnership that I had with a media organization back in Canada for the first little while that I was here in Europe.
They did all the selling and sometimes they'd call me into the boardrooms in the sales meetings and I'd help upsell and things because I enjoyed that and didn't mind doing that at all.
But I guess I'm tired No, but if you haven't been selling yourself for a while, how could you be tired of it?
Tired of the idea, I suppose.
I just, I hate, I don't know.
Yeah, there's something there. I'm not quite sure.
I'm not trying to avoid it at all.
No, no, it's good because this is the heart of the issue, right?
Because if you meet the woman of your dreams tomorrow, she's going to look at your bank account like, I'm sorry, but there is that trade, right?
I mean, she's going to look at your bank account and say, okay, give me the decade you're in age-wise.
Just 40. Okay.
So she's going to look at you and say, wow, he's 40 and he's got barely two nickels to rub together, right?
Right. So as far as your life goals go, not being able to make money is a big problem, right?
Yeah. And I think maybe back to your question, I don't know.
I mean, although I am confident in my ability to do my job currently and provide value, I suppose part of me isn't.
Well, no, it could be.
Sometimes it's just a perspective.
So I'll sort of tell you my approach to things.
I'm not a big fan of selling either, but I'll tell you what is important to me.
It's that I will do whatever it takes to get philosophy into the minds of people, right?
Right. Whatever it takes.
You know, if it's...
Pushing the envelope as far as acceptable ideas, well, if I genuinely believe those, I will do that.
If it is going to do live speeches, I will do that.
If it's confronting people in the media, I will do that.
If it's singing to people in Japanese, I will do that.
Whatever, right? Or maybe for some people, stopping singing to people in Japanese.
So, I have a responsibility to bring my skill set to the world because the world desperately needs this skill set.
It may sound like, oh, well, philosophy, that's really important, but marketing isn't.
No, marketing is very important because there are people who've got great products that could really benefit the world.
And the benefit of the world might be it cures cancer.
The benefit of the world might be it keeps their drinks cold on a warm day, which can actually be very satisfying, you know, like some sort of wraparound for the beer or something.
So I don't mean to denigrate in terms of levels of importance or whatever, but if you have a skill set, Then you should be responsible for bringing that to the world.
Because if they don't hire you, they're going to hire someone who isn't going to do as good a job.
And if people are going to need to get answers about big-ticket questions, and they're either going to listen to me, or they're going to listen to people who aren't as good at philosophy, or who aren't as whatever, right?
The X factor. So, as far as responsibility to bring your talents to the world...
You're hurting the world by hiding your talents, because you're lowering the competition for excellence in the world.
You know, if there's only one guy in the running race at the Olympics, he doesn't have to run very, he doesn't even have to, he doesn't have to run at all, he can just walk, right?
And so the more people who are competing in the Olympics, the faster the runners are going to get as a whole.
Which is why what the races, they have the, and the Greyhound races, they have that electronic hair race around the track, the electronic rabbit.
So by not roughing in and getting your skill set to the world, you are keeping good things from the world.
You're keeping excellence and quality and competition and all that from the world.
And if you believe that your skill set is important, like you'll find somebody who's got a great product and you'll work like crazy to get just the right language to help people understand how important that product is, you're doing the world a real service.
Sales and marketing are doing the world A real service.
Because it's overcoming people's inhibitions or just making them aware of the quality of the goods that's out there.
And that benefits not only your client, but everybody else who competes with you, who also have to up their game.
I agree. There's value there.
I don't think my issue is in the value with that.
I mean, I called it dirty sales just because early in life, whether it was Kirby vacuums or just different things, I felt like it was a little...
A little nastier in that sense, but, you know, I firmly believe you're right there.
I mean, I guess the thoughts that are coming to mind as you're talking are that, you know, I've been...
Part of my capacities that give me confidence are my ability to just make a decision about something I want to do and do it.
And oftentimes, it feels like being able to perform better than people who might have studied in that field or something.
However, Maybe I'm not as good.
And my dad always used to say to me, for example, that you just want the quick and easy answers.
Yeah, like head-butting a child who's disagreeing with you.
That seems like a pretty quick and easy...
This is a victory of history.
This is why I want to sort of pause and drill into this, because this is a victory of history.
And I don't know if you're aware, maybe you are, but I don't know if you're aware what a titanic battle is going on about your future between your parents and yourself.
In other words, if you win, they're wrong.
If you get love, if you have success, if you become a great dad, then they're totally wrong.
Completely, utterly, irrevocably wrong.
And they don't want to be wrong.
When people abuse you, they do not want you to be happy, they do not want you to be successful, and they try and implant within you this constant demonic kick line from hell of, Chris can't do it, he's gonna fail, it's not gonna work, he's not deserving of success.
They implant in you these squid-brained, hostile, tentacle-holding scimitars carving up your future.
Little bombs in the brain to make sure that you don't succeed.
Because if you don't succeed, they were right.
And if you do succeed, they were completely wrong and they can't take it.
If they could handle being wrong, they wouldn't be violent, they wouldn't be abusive, right?
They wouldn't need to dominate and crush and destroy children.
If they could handle being wrong, they wouldn't be abusive.
And so there is a huge battle about the second half of your life going on in your mind.
And the people who abused you in the past Desperately need for you to fail.
Because then they're right.
And then self-knowledge and self-responsibility and philosophy and psychology and you name it.
None of that helps.
Because you've been saying to them, I'm sure, consciously or unconsciously, you've been saying, it'd be really great if you just learned more about yourself, and it'd be really great if you just took responsibility, it'd be really great if you morally understood the history that you inflicted.
And so you're saying all of that.
Now, if you pursue that path, but you fail in life, Then they can safely disregard all of your advice and in fact feel pompous and successful and we made the right decision because look at what Chris suggested we do.
It ain't working for him so he's just full of shit and we win.
Whereas if you succeed, if you get what you want through the pursuit of self-knowledge philosophy and virtue and so on, Man, they lose it all.
And it tortures them.
And they don't want to be tortured.
So they would rather put the bombs of the brain in your mind to prevent you from getting what you want so that they can feel justified in everything they did.
And they can also feel justified in avoiding every piece of advice you gave them.
I mean, I understand the...
The glaring truth in what you're saying.
I mean, I haven't spoken to my father.
He's never phoned me in my entire life.
And I've only phoned him a few times in my adulthood, and he always just responds with, what do you want, you know?
And, you know, so I haven't done a lot of trying to help him see any kind of a light.
It's just a dead cause.
It has, I guess, more applicable, everything you're saying with respect to my mother, but My father would tell me when I was growing up, for example, that I would never be anything or amount to anything.
I'd be a bum living on the street and this kind of thing.
And as much as I want to feel like that doesn't have an effect, and then coupled with the quick and easy answers, whether it was the Kirby and the Jaguar or this business deal and that business deal.
I started my own business.
Or the fraud of charities. Right.
Or always chasing the big windfall, you know, riding the boat.
Hang on, hang on. Oh, God, this is, you're overloading me with unemotion at the moment.
I'm just, like, I'm feeling a pricklies all over my body and my spine is like a firework at the moment.
Because I'm the one who's getting upset and you're the one who's droning unemotionally.
And it's your life, not mine, right?
Like, my life's going very well.
Wow. And I feel like I'm the one who's getting upset about your lack of progress, which is what you called me up about, and you're not.
And I can't let that happen because that's what your parents want, which is for me to get upset and take all the emotional energy that you're actually feeling, have it projected under me, have me act it out so that you can distance yourself from it and serve the needs of your parents, right?
Yeah, it's killing me. Like, I literally walk a tightrope every day just convinced that, you know, Well, half of me is convinced that I'm worthless and never going to achieve anything, and I'm going to fail.
So do you know the solution to that is anger?
And that's, I've heard sadness, I've heard dissociation from you, Chris, but not anger.
Thank you.
Yeah. And the second half of your life is on the other side of getting angry.
Because they were wrong. They were wrong.
They were wrong factually, empirically, but most importantly, they were wrong morally.
You were shredded, attacked, abused, abandoned, neglected, tossed out of your home, basically like a gypsy running vagabond from parents to parents' household.
This was all viciously immoral, viciously destructive, and the people who did it are frankly deep pieces of shit.
I feel sadness when you say those things.
Alright. I don't feel anger.
I just feel broken.
Okay. Right.
I understand that. And I understand the brokenness.
And that's what they want you to feel.
Because if you're broken, they win.
Your comments about winning in the competition, them being right, whatever, it's sort of making me I don't mean to disagree.
I agree wholeheartedly with your logic.
It feels like it pushes me to more of a disassociative state with my emotions because then it's about them, but it's not.
It's supposed to be about me.
Well, like you say, they're right and that's what they wanted.
I mean, that's all unconscious.
They weren't destroying me as a kid because Right in their actions consciously, I don't think, even though, you know, that's the truth of the matter.
And just us talking about it in this sense makes me, as I say, just feel like, wait a sec, like, I don't care about those people anymore.
All I want to do is not feel broken and not I'm trying to help you off the tightrope.
Do you know how many people want me to fail every day in this world?
Sure. Yeah, lots.
Thousands and thousands and tens of thousands, I don't know.
There are so, and I'm not just talking about my own personal life, obviously, right?
My history and all, like all the people who said, oh, you know, this objectivism, this Ayn Rand, it's just a cult, it's bullshit, it's not real, it's not valid.
You know, philosophy is, you know, the race and IQ, you should never pursue it.
I'm like, ah, right? Should never talk about this, should never talk about that.
They want me, desperately want me to fail, because if I succeed, they fail.
And if they succeed, I fail.
It is a battle. It is a battle.
I don't like the welfare state.
It's immoral and incredibly destructive.
Now, let's say that I somehow get my way and the welfare state is dismantled.
Right. People will hate that.
Now, eventually they'll love it, most of them, and they'll go, oh my god, I can't believe I ever supported this crap, but it doesn't matter.
Down the road, you've got to deal with what people feel immediately in the moment.
They're desperate for me.
Like, I did this post the other day on Twitter where I said, you know, I went and talked to some very high-level people in Poland, talked about migration and a whole bunch of other very interested and important topics.
I did a whole presentation on the migrant crisis that Katie Hopkins and other people were kind enough to retweet and so on.
And, you know, next thing you know, Poland and Australia, they're not signing this agreement.
Israel as well, this UN migration compact.
Now... People are like, oh yeah, are you claiming total that's all because of you?
And it's like, no, of course not. I mean correlation is not causality, but it's interesting.
And the people who are saying, oh, you didn't cause this.
It's like, I'm not saying I caused it, but it's an interesting series of events.
That's all, right? I certainly had some effect and some influence.
I have no doubt about that.
Unless other people have also been meeting with high-level government officials and talking about these important topics in a way that almost nobody else can.
So the people who want this migration compact to go through don't like it.
The fact that I'm having this kind of influence or potential influence in the world.
So if I win, they lose.
And if they win, well, Poland and Israel and Australia and other places will lose enormously.
So I get that it's a battle.
I get that it's a battle.
And I want to win.
And there is a certain amount of, to hell with you, all of the people who said studying philosophy was going to go nowhere and reading Ayn Rand was bullshit and all this.
Like, to hell with them. To hell with all the people who are like, oh, you know, you just have mommy issues and therapy is a waste of time and blah, blah, blah.
Like, all the people who are like, oh, I'm not going to circle back.
I'm not going to deal with history. I'm just going to press on.
Well, especially now that I'm 52, all the people who said, forget about circling back and understanding your history, the important thing is to press on in life.
Well, they've pressed on right off a fucking cliff.
Right off a cliff. Their marriages are crap, their relationships, their children are crap.
I mean, I can see it. So, not only have I won and they've lost, but it's even too late for them to circle back and fix things.
Now, They can't go back and re-parent their children.
They can't go back and choose someone different to marry.
Maybe in the future they can, but...
So, I don't like that it is this way, but it is this way.
When people set themselves against you that deeply, it's win-lose.
I would have loved it if they just said, oh, there's something interesting in Ayn Rand, there's something interesting in Nathaniel Brandon, there's something interesting in psychology and self-knowledge and philosophy and reason and evidence and all these things.
And if they had pursued that to some degree, they don't have to take it as far as I... If they pursued that to some degree, that would have been wonderful.
And I didn't sit there yelling at them that all of this relativism and subjectivism and postmodernism and nihilism was going to lead them to a terrible place and they should turn around.
I didn't try and grab them by the collar.
Maybe I should have. But I did as much as I could with the resources I had at the time to try and turn things around for the people I knew when I was growing up.
But they just didn't.
Listen, Barton Fink style.
They just didn't. Didn't listen, and they set themselves up in opposition to what I was doing.
Now, I'm aware that there's this whole pantheon inside of my head I have to deal with.
I have to listen and recognize and accept.
I can't just reject them all because they're in my head, right?
And I call it the Miko system.
Every aspect of yourself has something important to offer.
And you can't just say, well...
You come from this bad person in my past, therefore you have to go.
No, you can get rid of the bad person in your past, but their effect upon you, you need to integrate into your personality.
You need to integrate and accept and absorb them.
Like, my inner mother was there to save my life from my outer mother, right?
So that I could scare myself into navigating through compliance or sometimes submission or sometimes fighting, rather than have her...
Kill me. You know, I mean, as I've said before in the show, like she grabbed me when I was like two or three years old and beat my head against a metal door.
I could have died or been permanently brain damaged.
So this was like the unlived life as a murderer is not hyperbole, my friends.
So this battle is going on.
And your choices, you say you're on this tightrope, but you have to commit.
There are people in your head and in your history who desperately need for you to fail.
And there's you, who desperately want to succeed.
Now, when you succeed, it provokes anxiety in all of those inner alter egos in your head that want you to fail.
Because when you succeed, they don't know that you're not in your family and home anymore.
They're permanent archetypes that have been activated in your brain through trauma.
So they don't know that you're not six anymore.
Because we're not designed for this wild change that we can actually achieve in society these days.
They don't know that you're an adult.
They don't know that you're independent. They don't know that you're free of the brutal tribe who raised you.
They don't know any of that.
They're like, danger, danger, danger, right?
They don't know that this lion will save you rather than eat you.
They're just like, lion, danger, lion, danger.
And the way that they know things have changed, the way that your inner alter egos know that things have changed, Chris, is the one thing that was absolutely unacceptable when you were a child.
When you were a child, you were allowed to be dissociated, right?
When you were a child, you were even allowed to be sad.
When you were a child, though, there's one emotion you were never allowed to experience, and that was anger.
Anger is the sign that you're free.
It's the sign to your inner alter egos that you're liberated from history.
It's the one thing that's unacceptable when you're in a brutalized environment is to get angry.
The reason that you were sexually preyed upon by that pedophile when you were a kid is because he knew you couldn't get angry.
He knew that from your body language.
He knew that from everything.
Your eye contact. He knew that from watching you walk alone.
He knew that from The slouch, the staring at the sidewalk, the shuffling, the way you carried your backpack.
I don't know, but he knew you weren't allowed to get angry.
And if somebody violates you to that degree, you should hit him on the head with a book or something, right?
Just do whatever it takes to get away.
And then you go and you march to your parents.
I'm so angry at this guy. Pray it upon me.
I'm angry. Let's do something about it.
Let's fix it. Let's solve it.
Let's make sure I didn't pray on anyone else again.
But the one emotion... That your inner alter egos who are desperate for you to fail, the one emotion that will turn them around, the one emotion that signals that you're no longer under the thumb of abusers, is the one emotion that's absolutely unacceptable to abusers, and that emotion is anger.
That is the sign that you're out of the cave and into the light.
That is the sign that you have escaped your history.
Anger is a very hard emotion to feel.
When you've been brutalized and traumatized as a child, it is the hardest emotion to feel because we mistake the rage that was used to abuse us as anger and be like, I don't want to be an abuser, I don't want to be enraged, I don't want to be destructive.
But that's sadism, that's not anger.
Anger is healthy. Sadism is vicious and vile and evil and destructive.
Your parents weren't angry, they were sadistic.
Anger is a very healthy emotion.
Sadism is toxic. Cruelty is toxic.
Abuse is toxic. But anger, if you want to beat abusers, you have to express the one emotion that is anathema to them, and that is anger.
And so when I talk about, and I did this many, many years ago, healthy anger, healthy anger, Anger is what enlists the parts of your brain that wants you to fail into helping you succeed because they help you navigate the complicated world that wants you to fail in a way that allows you to succeed in ways you couldn't even have imagined before.
Anger turns it around.
Instead of those inner alter egos trying to squish you and keep you down and dominate and dictate and crush you, They can help you navigate the abusers out there in the world in a productive way, but you need to turn them around and get them on your side rather than opposing you, and the only way to do that is the giant Valhalla horn of just and righteous anger.
I don't know what to say.
Then there's an easy way to access it.
How?
Do you have a child that you know and care about in the real world?
Sort of.
My two closest friends here have a new baby.
Okay. If you don't have a child like this, you can imagine a child like this.
Imagine that you find out that a child you know and care about Is being treated the way that you were being treated as a child.
What would you feel? I suppose I'd be pretty pissed.
That's a pretty neutral statement.
Let me ask you this.
Let's suppose that you found out that someone you really respected was treating their children in this abhorrent manner.
I would hate them. Right.
You'd be angry. Yeah, I wouldn't.
If you read in the newspaper about a child who'd been treated as you were treated as a child, what would you feel?
Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, I would feel more confrontational in the last story because there's a chance of me doing something and talking to that person and saying, what the hell are you doing, you know?
So why is every child worthy of protection and righteous anger except you?
I don't know.
I don't know why this is this this this whole vein is so tough for me.
Uh I guess I just...
Because it invites attack.
It invites attack from your inner parents, from your inner abusers.
And as long as you submit to the fear of that attack, you're never truly free of the past.
You've got to face the fear, right?
So when you are angry about a child being abused, will you ever allow to be angry at your abusers?
No, not really.
I mean, in confronting them, and I think the biggest thing that struck me when thinking, as you were talking about that righteous anger, was the righteous anger that I no doubt felt and expressed probably in my schooling environments, where that was just not accepted very well, all of the... You know, from like my first moments in school all the way to the end, you know, anytime, you know, I... Yeah, you're not allowed to get angry at teachers or principals or anyone.
You're not allowed to get angry at priests.
You're not allowed to get angry at your friends' parents who aren't doing much to intervene and help in your extremity and are basically saying, don't eat food from our fridge.
Are you kidding me? You're not allowed to be angry at your society that lets all this happen and you're not even allowed to get angry at your friends who still are trying to say...
Reconcile, reconcile, reconcile, right?
You have to forbid them from talking about it, which is assertive but not angry, right?
Because basically when people tell you that you need to go and make peace with the people who've abused you when all they've done is continue to abuse you, they're siding with your abusers.
And that's What people do.
They see who's the most powerful and the most dangerous, the least reasonable, the most aggressive, and they just conform to that person and attempt to get the most reasonable person to shut the hell up and conform.
And it's a shitty way to live, but this is how society lives when it doesn't have any ethics.
And since the fall of Christianity, they can fuck all ethics to choose from.
So all we have is appeasement and base bonobo hierarchy pecking at each other.
So you're not even getting any support.
Well, you wouldn't get a lot of support from Christianity regarding that anyway because of the honor of thy mother and thy father.
But philosophy helps you out.
What you feel for a child who's not you who's abused, you should feel for yourself even stronger.
And until you can feel that anger, the past still wins because it's the one thing that's forbidden to you and the one thing that you need.
It doesn't make sense.
I feel beaten, not angry.
Right. Right.
And so if you don't struggle to assert yourself, if you don't struggle to make your mark on the world, if you say, well, I'm kind of beaten, but you struggle on, then you end up in this null zone, this gray zone, right? You say you're walking on a tightrope.
You're not broke, but you're not rich.
You're not Together, but you're not completely suicidally lonely.
You're just kind of in this null zone of, you know, he's a real nowhere man, right?
Yeah, and I felt like that sort of cliche cycle sometimes when things are going really well, you know, and stable, successful foundations are building, then, you know, sometimes I feel like I've imploded those things out of a lack of worth,
maybe. You have a son, let's say, and when your son gets older, he tells you that a child molester attempted to perform oral sex on him.
What do you do? Try hard not to end up in jail.
You'd be pretty angry, right?
Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah?
How dare you? Pray upon my child.
Yeah, I'd be over there in an instant.
Now, the anger that you have Towards the pedophile is certainly just.
But the pedophile is an effect of your parents.
It's not to say the pedophile doesn't have full moral agency, he does.
But the pedophile is an effect of your parents.
Because pedophiles are rarely caught, which means they know how to pick their victims, which means they know how to find the signs of parental neglect and abuse.
So the real anger that you have Which you probably have not thought of as much, is the anger towards your parents for putting the markers on you that a pedophile could pick up on.
It's true. I've just tried to forget about them and move on rather than focus on the anger I should have felt.
I mean, it just felt like, what am I going to do with that?
But I suppose you've articulated pretty clearly what it's for.
Yeah.
It's to gain you allies in your head rather than opponents.
components.
You have to walk outside the confines of a prison cell for your body to know you've been released.
And it's not necessarily that it's going to come flooding into you now.
But you were egregiously violated and abused as a child, as a helpless, dependent child.
You suffered unutterable evil from unutterable evildoers in a world that scarce lifted a finger to protect or support you in that battle and in a culture which denigrates the fight that you barely survived and counsels you merely to appease and bow down and kiss the Blackened feet of those who kicked you in the face when you were a child.
So how do I translate that into beating the pavement for more clients and more stability?
Well, you say you feel beaten, right?
Yeah. Well, you've kind of beaten in your career, right?
You're kind of getting by, but not really growing, not really saving, not really...
So you have to get the energy of your inner opposition behind you in getting out there.
And like, I don't know, I can't give you any sort of particular tricks about how to get angry and so on, but you understand intellectually that you have every right to be angry and should be angry and...
That anger is healthy.
Anger is like the immune system of the mind, right?
We want it to fight the illnesses.
When you get angry too, you will attract entirely different kinds of people in a dating sense because you will have closure and you will have, instead of the inner alter egos of history trying to keep you down, they're scanning for dysfunction in your environment.
They turned to your service rather than your suppression.
So I would say just...
I can't remember what I did.
It's been a long time, but I think I wrote a letter to little Steph.
I think I pictured children that I cared about being treated the way that I was treated, and how angry that made me.
I remember thinking that if I saw my mother beating up an adult in a wheelchair, how angry I would be at my mother, and then realizing that an adult in a wheelchair has far more options than I ever did have as a child.
And if you see someone beating someone up who's in a wheelchair, how much rage and contempt and disgust and anger you would feel towards that person.
And realizing that whole series of emotional dominoes, toppling, falling, smashing through all of that history, gave me a very clear moral sense of just how immoral my mother was, just how evilly I was treated as a child.
And just how complicit society as a whole was in all of that abuse.
And it's a hard thing to, you know, it's a black pill to swallow, as they say.
To realize how amoral and power-seeking and appeasing and evil-fearing society is.
And how little it cares about the innocent children being brutalized under everybody's nose every single day of every single week.
It's hard. But with that clarity, With that consciousness, with that acceptance of where society really is, well, from there, you get the courage and the commitment to change it.
Yeah, that makes more sense.
I mean, a lot of this stuff fuels, you know, my life's work.
And maybe also a little extra gas in the gas tank to do what's necessary in a foundational sense to support said.
Good. All right.
Well, that's the major thing that I was thinking about after I got your email.
So I hope it has some resonance.
And listen, I mean, you've been doing very well.
I sort of want to point out that just because I say you can get a gold medal doesn't mean I don't think you already have a bronze.
It means I think you can get a gold.
And so I first of all wanted to thank you for the conversation and I really want to thank you for listening to what it is that I have to say and submitting to this public discussion, which I think will be enormously helpful to very, very many people.
And I also wanted to express my admiration for everything that you've dealt with and survived and relatively flourished under.
It's a hell of a burden to carry and you've done a very good job.
Getting to where you are. And I think there's further to go, but let's very much be clear, at least I want to be very clear on how much I honor what you have done so far.
Yeah, thanks for that, Steph.
I think that's that, you know, when I talk about being on the tightrope, I mean, it's quite clear the courage and capacity that I have for me inside.
I mean, I really feel that very strongly.
As I say, it's this incredible It's a devastating balance between, you know, being just completely convinced of superhuman abilities in one moment and then just being scared to death that I'm lying to myself in the next and that I'm just gonna fail.
And so, yeah, no, I appreciate that.
I've certainly, I mean, I have to go through regular cycles of just All the different courageous steps.
I mean, I've just always chased work.
All of the aspects of you are waiting for your go signal, Chris.
All of the aspects of you are just like greyhounds trembling and misting in the morning sun or like hamstring-hewn sprinters waiting for the starting pistol.
Every aspect of you is waiting for you to charge and take capture of the second half of your life.
But the starting gun they need is the righteous anger regarding your history.
And if you can get that, and I'm sure you can, there's really nothing you can't do.
People who have come to moral clarity regarding their history are the closest things to superheroes that we have in this world.
Yeah, well, I also want to thank you for your time and insight today, Steph.
I've been really looking forward to talking to you over a great many years.
Surprised. I knew it would be surprising, as it always is for people, but I was wondering where it would come from for me.
And it shocked me into silence.
All right. Well, will you let me know how it goes?
Yep. All right. Well, thanks very much for the call.
I really, really appreciate it, and I'm sure we'll talk again.
