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June 26, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:52:43
"My Father was Raised by a Witch and Drank My Blood" Freedomain Call In
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So we are here today with Natalie, who has quite a tale to tell.
Do you want to just read what you sent to me?
Yes, sure.
So I'm writing to you because I desperately need help for my son.
He's a 24 year old, very successful.
He's extremely diligent with his finances and is a beautiful outgoing friend who attracts people to his charismatic personality.
He loves order and routine, and as a child he did excellent in school.
I only ever had two issues with him growing up.
One was being suspended for assaulting a kid that attacked him and I one night.
The other was he was caught shoplifting.
My reaction was, when that happened, I took him to the police station, made him apologize, made him write an essay on what he had done, and even arranged a tour for him to the police station so that he could see his face if his behaviour did not change.
I didn't put this in the letter but he never did that again.
So a bit of background.
His dad and I met when I was 14 and he was 17.
He was my first boyfriend and we were married when I was 20.
We had both come from very destructive backgrounds.
Both our mothers were very promiscuous, and I'm being kind.
His mother would sleep with different men literally every night.
That is not an exaggeration.
And even slept with his best friend.
My mother was constantly having affairs.
We both had absent fathers.
Mine completely abandoned me.
His dad was a part-time father.
There was also severe sexual abuse.
Domestic violence and generally a very shitty childhood for both of us.
When I met his dad, he was taking drugs such as pot, acid, quaaludes and alcohol.
I was abusing alcohol and marijuana too.
However, as our relationship progressed, I eventually stopped doing all of that.
He stopped with all the other drugs with the exception of marijuana.
We married and Nick was born prematurely at 28 weeks.
He was a little fatter and 6 hours after his birth he was breathing on his own and has had no effect from the birth.
The minute I saw Nick I fell madly in love with him and honestly my love for his dad started dying.
I knew this relationship was doomed.
However, as I was an only child, I really didn't want Nick to be the only child.
And two and a half years later his sister was born.
I had suppressed the sexual abuse but by the time my second child was born I had gone into a severe depression and found out later that I was overwhelmed in protecting my children from suffering the same abuse I had.
Our marriage steadily declined with his dad.
His dad had assaulted me a couple of times.
And eventually we divorced when I was 25.
After the divorce I slipped into a nihilistic human being.
Started abusing drugs and eventually after a year was addicted to heroin.
I abandoned my children with their father.
I had several suicide attempts.
One where I would have died if I had not been found in time.
All this happened around the children.
Their father also started taking hardcore drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy.
However, he still took care of the kids.
Eventually, close to death, I ended up in an extremely good rehab, had extensive counselling for eight weeks, and finally admitted the sexual abuse I had suffered as a child.
I moved towns, got myself a great job, stopped taking all the drugs, and within a year I had gotten my children back.
I know you, Stefan, have negative thoughts about single mums, but I believe, and I'm 100% certain, that the children will say that the two years of just the three of us building our relationship again, spending time together and healing the damage I caused was probably the best experience we all had.
I met my current husband three years later and we were married a year after that.
He was not a bad stepdad, no stepfather.
He provided very well for the children, and even though they had their spats, I think the children will agree he was not the evil stepdad.
He has never had children of his own, and today refers to the kids as his own.
We relocated from South Africa, and when this happened, my extreme mental illness started again.
I was abusing medications, neglecting my children and really did destructive things to both my husband and my children.
Again, I had many suicide attempts and reverted back to my self-destructive place again.
Eventually, I got myself sorted and I would say that for the rest of their childhood and even as teenagers, we had a very stable, loving home.
The children are extremely smart.
Well mannered.
Every friend's parents that ever had dealings with my children would compliment me on how well mannered they were.
I had a fear that my children would rebel as I did as teenagers, but honestly, it was a wonderful experience.
I have apologized to my children and I seek any way in which I can fix what I've done.
If you decide to speak to my son and tell him it's better to not associate with your mother, it would break me in pieces.
But his well-being is the most important thing.
And as long as I can get him healed, I will do anything.
Sorry for the rambling, but I felt it was important to be honest and give you a detailed background.
He has been in a serious relationship with a girl for eight years.
They met in high school and eventually moved in together five years ago.
A week ago, he believed he caught her cheating on Snapchat.
He questioned her about it and eventually beat her.
That both her eyes were bruised and her lip is split right up to her nose.
This is not the first time he has assaulted her.
He's done it many times and he left bruises on her body.
He and her, he has a massive rage problem.
He goes from 0 to 500 in a second.
He loses complete control.
There's no reasoning with him when he's in that rage.
He becomes violent.
He becomes abusive.
He's vicious with his mouth.
The girlfriend eventually packed all her stuff about two weeks ago while he was at work and left him.
He takes full responsibility for his actions.
He started therapy and he realizes that he needs help desperately to figure out Why he behaves in this manner.
There was never any domestic abuse with my current husband and his dad, although he did assault me, I believe only witnessed it once when he was about a year old and never again.
The therapy sessions only happened fortnightly and I've suggested that he start going to the gym to get rid of the excess rage and energy.
He also has a very depressing attitude after he has blown up with severe rage.
He does not feel good at all about his actions, but feels as though he can't control them.
I believe he needs to find the root cause of this.
And if it's me or my ex-husband, I believe we will both be willing to do whatever it takes.
Take all responsibility and try to fix the damage we did to our beautiful boy.
Please help me, Stefan.
Please, my dream for my child is he finds the root cause of his rage.
He meets a beautiful woman and becomes a great father.
That is his dream too.
As previously stated, in most of his life he is extremely successful, but this rage could end him up in prison or eventually killing someone.
I know that sounds dramatic, but it could happen.
And then I just said he's willing to speak to you, I'm willing to speak to you, and I believe even his dad would be willing to speak to you, so we can help our boy become a great person.
Sorry.
No, no, listen, I mean, you care passionately about your son and his future, and you fear jail, you fear the effects of his rage, which you are wise to do so.
I mean, when people are in that kind of rage, Even if they don't mean to harm someone significantly, people can trip and fall, they can land on a glass table, they can go down some stairs, even if you just mean to push something.
The moment you unleash that demon of violence, you never know where it's going to take you.
And so I get your fear and I respect it.
I agree with it.
And I just wanted to, before we get in, just for those who say, like you said, well, if you tell my son to not see me, I don't do that.
I mean, I've never said to someone... No, let me just finish.
Let me just finish.
Because it's something like, this is sort of a myth about, I don't tell people what to do.
There's no point.
People substituting my judgment for their own thinking.
So I will give perspectives, I will give arguments, I will give ways of looking at things, but I'm not going to tell people what to do.
So I just wanted to correct that because that was in the email.
And that's fine.
I'm not upset or anything.
I just wanted to point that out because it's an emotional time.
You're in a difficult place.
And I just wanted to gently correct that for the record, if that's all right.
Well, I meant if defusing from me is the best thing for him.
It would break me, but I would accept it.
That's what I mean.
You'd rather him not end up in prison or whatever could happen out of this.
Even if he doesn't end up in prison, he's not going to get a quality relationship if he's a violent guy.
I mean, he's going to be going through a series of increasingly worse and worse women.
And the other thing, too, is that if he's with a woman who will stay with him when he's violent, she may very well become violent to him in turn.
And, you know, women can inflict a significant amount of damage because they'll use implements rather than fists usually.
And so he's not at risk just of committing violence, but also being on the receiving end, which would be terrible for everyone involved, right?
Absolutely.
And just saying that reminds me of my Mother and stepfather, because my mother was a worse fighter with her hands than most men.
It was shocking the way she was, so I understand that completely.
All right, so I assume we can be blunt with each other, and if I ask anything that you don't want to answer, you're perfectly free to say no.
But I think the first question that I want to ask, and this is particularly related to when you were saying, Natalie, that you fell out of love with your husband as you fell in love with your son.
What was the nature of the abuse, particularly the sexual abuse, that you yourself suffered as a child?
Okay, so, um, it's going to, so, when I was a very little girl, my mother fell pregnant at 16 with me.
And she had me, and my, apparently, the story is, my grandfather made her marry my father.
And she married him and my father was I mean, just a real, you know, back in the 70s, drugs and free love and kind of gar.
And that lasted for about six months.
And they got divorced when I was six months old.
And do you know, was it the same violence, and you've mentioned drug abuse and so on.
Do you know if there was violence involved in the marriage?
Well, no.
He was on drugs.
So I've got most of my histories from my mother, but I've got a bit of confirmation from him.
He was on drugs, but also he was literally a male whore.
So he would just sleep around with everybody.
They lived in an apartment block and he was sleeping with, according to my mother, every other woman that was in the building and whatever.
That was the story.
So, he used to work in a little hospital, which was like a little... I lived in Johannesburg, which is a big city, but in the suburbs they'd have little, back in the day, little mini hospitals that would take care of, you know, small issues so that you didn't have to go to the big general hospital.
Sort of like a working clinic, right?
Yeah, but it was a proper hospital, so he worked there and he worked night duty.
And my mother, for some or other reason, used to leave me there.
And him and a nurse, I can't remember the exact details because I think I've suppressed it very, very much.
But I do remember them having me, when I was a little girl, Always around my birthday, she always used to take me to him on my birthday.
I was naked laying on one of those gurneys and they were doing whatever they were doing, these two.
And I just remember this lady wanting to cut me and to take my blood.
And my father stopped her and said to her, do not cut her there, cut her on the inside of her mouth.
And this lady actually cut the inside of my mouth and they drank my blood.
So I know it sounds insane, but that was the one.
I don't know what else happened that night, but that was it.
And afterwards, they took me down to the mortuary and they said if I ever tell anybody, this is where my mother will be.
They literally took me there.
And I was about four or five at the time.
The other occasion with him was at this hospital.
They had a section where the hospital staff stayed.
So it was like single quarters.
There's a swimming pool there and that.
And one day during the week, we were at the swimming pool.
Him, me and this lady and him and the lady molested me.
They did their sexual things with me.
together.
So I had suppressed that completely and I was terrified of everything when I was a little kid but I didn't realize why.
With the abuse that I did remember and it was sexual abuse with penetration, I was seven years old and my mother had remarried to my stepdad and his son was about 16, 17 I was seven years old and my mother had remarried
at the time and he groomed me and he made me feel loved because my parents were just disengaged completely and after school in the afternoons we would go into his room and he would do what he needed to do and to this day I can see the curtains that were there and I can see the bed and I can even...
smell, what the room smelled like.
So those were the... and that happened for about two years of my life.
And how old were you with the stepbrother?
A seven.
I was in grade two, so I was seven.
Wow.
And that was the termination of this activity?
So what had happened was, is the stepbrother had then gotten a girl down the road who was 13, pregnant.
And he then, they got married.
She married him at 14 and they had their child and they moved out.
And then the sexual abuse stopped.
Right.
And how much older was the stepbrother?
He was 17.
He was about 10 years older than I am here.
So, I mean, the molestation didn't stop, it just switched to his child bride, right?
Yeah, well, I didn't even think about it until I was an adult and I was like, did no one think that she was 13?
You know, I'm like, it was just a normal thing.
Nobody even thought about it.
I thought about it a few years ago and I was like, did no one think that that's a bit odd that he's made this child pregnant, but apparently they didn't because it was never an issue or it wasn't even a gossip.
It was just like, oh, it was more like she was bloody stupid for falling pregnant.
You know, that was the attitude of everybody.
Not that he was probably a bit of a predator, you know?
Right.
And what happened to your relationship with your dad, Natalie, over time?
So from about five years old, I refused to go to him.
I refused to go.
I didn't say why, and I'm honest with you Stefan, I don't remember the full details of what happened, but I As a child I had this horrible fear of him without knowing like why.
Did you remember at the time the molestation and the cutting and the blood drinking?
Did you remember that at the time or did that come back later after?
That came back after.
But I had a horrible fear of him that he scared me.
So what I was told was I had disassociated from Those activities because they were so horrible as a kid.
But so I didn't remember the details of what had happened.
But I knew that being around him terrified me.
And I was a bit of a sassy kid and a mouthy kid.
And from five years old I was determined to never ever go there.
And the cruelest thing of all is my mother who never asked why she never inquired.
She didn't really care.
But what she used to do to me if I misbehaved or made her angry, she would threaten me and say to me, she would send me to him, she'll just send me to him.
And she knew it scared me so intensely that I would be paralyzed with fear and just behave because I was so scared of ever going to him, ever.
I remember when I was, it was my 10th birthday.
From five, I just refused to see him anymore, and he didn't contact us or anything.
And when it was my tenth birthday, her and I were in the Woolworths doing our, you know, buying our stuff for my party, which was the next day, my birthday party.
And we just happened to bump into him and his wife, and they had a couple of little kids, two or three years old.
And I was just like, hello, hiding behind my mother, no, you know?
Not knowing why, but not really wanting to associate with him.
And my mother invited them to my birthday party the next day.
And I didn't say anything, but that night she was busy making the little things that you do for the birthday party.
And I remember going into the kitchen and I was laying on the floor.
I now realized I was having a panic attack.
But when that happened, I didn't know what was going on with me.
And I was laying on the floor and I was screaming at her that I can't breathe.
And I was like, there's something wrong with me.
There's something wrong with me.
I was begging her to help me.
And I said, I can't breathe.
I can't breathe.
There's something wrong with me.
And she just said, get off the bloody floor.
There's nothing wrong with you.
But years later, when I had a panic attack and it was said that that was it, I had one at 10.
And it was a direct result of the fear of him coming to this birthday party the next day.
So I was terrified of him.
Have you, just out of curiosity, have you ever looked up your father and found out how his life arc turned out if he's at all on the internet or social media?
So, I have not really, what had happened was, when I had gone into rehab, after I'd gone totally destructive, because a little bit before that, on my 16th birthday, we were away on holiday, it was mum, like a couple of people, and my ex-husband was there, my best friend was there, her boyfriend was there, and it was a big, her family was there, it was a big thing, and my mother got drunk,
this one night and in front of everybody she turned around and she told him that he raped her and that's why I was born I'd never heard that before I was 16 so and she said that with you there I was everybody was there everybody was there well of course why am I going to be shocked that a woman who married a child blood drinker is going to say something wildly inappropriate
so I was I was confused so that that was one of the most traumatizing things in my life because it was first of all it was embarrassing but it was also horrible to think that that's why I was around that's why I was yeah and And after I had been in this rehab, which was an excellent facility and I had the best therapy and the best treatment,
It was amazing.
I needed to find out some closure, especially because that's when all those memories are drawn out.
But I didn't want to contact him and just go, listen, I think your people were into some ritual abuse or something.
I didn't want to go that far.
So I rang him and I said to him, my mother said you raped her.
Is that true?
And his answer was pretty shocking.
He hadn't spoken to me in 20 years.
And he said to me, well, it's not rape if you were meant to be born.
And that's all he said.
And when he said that, I just was like, OK, then I put the phone.
I just said, OK, goodbye.
Seems like an odd kind of confession to me.
It was bizarre like it wasn't like oh your mother's insane or that never happened or it was just like It's not rape if you were meant to be born.
Wow.
Wow.
And you have no particular relationship with your father, right?
None at all.
A couple of years ago, he added me on Facebook, which I just declined.
And now, because of political reasons, I am off of Facebook completely.
But you've never looked up his life arc, right?
No.
And with regards to your mother?
My mother's passed away.
What would you like to know about her?
Well, you maintained a relationship with her, is that right?
Well, yes.
So, when I was a little kid, I really, really loved my mother.
My mother was the only thing I had.
I didn't have brothers or sisters.
I had my stepdad, and even though my stepdad was the most dysfunctional human being, and his son is the one that actually raped me at seven, my stepdad was the only human being in my life that I can say anything good about, you know?
My mother, she... Well, other than he raised the boy who raped you, right?
Yes.
That's kind of important.
And he also wasn't there to protect you.
Yeah, there's many, many other things about him that were bad.
But he, how can I put it?
He took an interest in me as a human being.
Whereas my mother, my mother was an extremely materialistic, image conscious woman.
Everything about my mother was How she lived, what she wore.
My stepdad was 23 years older than her.
He was very, very wealthy and she got whatever she wanted and I got whatever I wanted, but I never got any love.
Not one day did I ever believe when she told me she loved me that it was true, even as a child.
Well, it's a common pattern.
I'm sure you're aware of it.
Often, though not always, the more ghastly the inside, the more pristine the outside.
In other words, the more horrible people are on the inside, the more they want to present this perfect image on the outside.
It's a honey trap, so to speak.
Well, that's exactly right.
We had the best house.
I had the best bedroom of any child you could see.
Everything was the best.
It was so ugly if you just scratched the surface.
It was so horrible.
Yeah, she's spending more time creating an envy-inducing external appearance and not any time protecting her daughter from being raped at the age of seven.
That's correct.
I'm so sorry about all of this.
It's an incredibly heartbreaking tale, and an enraging tale, but we'll get to that.
This may be what's going on with your son, but I just... What a terrible series of experiences.
I mean, this is probably about the worst.
I've been doing this for a long time, as you know Natalie, and this is pretty much about the worst, and I just...
Want to extend a huge cosmic hug and sympathy and horror and anger and loss and sympathy for everything that this truly bottom layer of hell landscape inflicted upon you.
Yeah, it was pretty awful, but thank you.
Thank you.
So can I just take you on a slight, it sounds like a bit of a sidebar, but I think it's kind of important.
And it's really shocking to me how famous people can be and how little moral outrage there is when there's Significant evidence of them doing terrible things to children, right?
I'll put a link to this below and I won't read the whole article, but this popped into my mind and it's important and I'll sort of tell you why, right?
So this is from the Phoenix New Times.
Eleven rock stars who allegedly slept with underage girls.
And I won't get into all of the gruesome details.
I mean, it's worth reading because these are people who are, in general, highly venerated in the court of public opinion.
Right.
So, I mean, there's David Bowie, Jimmy Page, of course, from the guitarist for Led Zeppelin.
You know, what he did is appalling.
And here you have Barack Obama and Michelle Obama sitting next to the guy singing along to a wonderful festival of Led Zeppelin music.
They've got no problem with this guy.
They think it's great.
R. Kelly, of course, Ted Nugent, you know, wrote a song called Jailbed, where he said, well, I don't care if you're just 13, you look too good to be true.
I just know that you're probably clean.
And here's the lyrics.
This guy, Ted Nugent, he's like, oh yeah, he's pro-Trump.
He says, right, so, the lyrics are, it's quite all right, I asked your mama, wait a minute, officer, don't put those handcuffs on me, put them on her, and I'll share her with you.
A thirteen-year-old girl.
Steven Tyler!
Steven Tyler.
The guy's in his twenties and this woman just turned sixteen.
She meets him and Her mother, so she'd had this terrible life, of course, her father abandoned her mother early on, her younger brother died in a car accident when she was 13, so this is a woman who's had massive, massive issues.
And she meets Steven Tyler, and her mother grants Steven Tyler guardianship over her, the reason being so he could bring her on tour with him over state lines.
And, of course, everyone knows Jerry Lee Lewis and Marvin Gaye and Bill Wyman.
This is the... Right?
In the mid-80s, Wyman began a sexual relationship with a teenage girl.
She was 13 and he was in his 30s.
It became sexual when she was 14.
14.
Now, no one sits there and says, well, God Almighty, we can't have anything to do with the Rolling Stones!
Right?
I mean, it's Elvis Presley.
Again, it's the whole thing.
Iggy Pop.
Not particularly shocking, of course.
Mick Jagger, Laurie Maddox, relates a story about having BDSM flavored sex with Jagger when she was 17.
And so, I mean, we can go on and on, right?
I mean, the cover-up of the rapes of little white girls in England by the police, Jimmy Savile, and I mean, just this, you know, I mean, just look at Steven Tyler, right?
Steven Tyler showed up in a kid's movie.
I think it was epic or something.
He played a giant caterpillar and sang a song.
This guy's in a children's movie.
They got no problem with the guy.
Ah, great.
We'll get Steven Tyler to come in and play this caterpillar and sing a song.
He's a judge on some singing show.
Nobody has any problem with the guy.
I mean, according to these reports, he took guardianship of a girl so that he could take her across state lines on tour.
Nobody has any problem with it.
Steve Tyler goes on Joe Rogan.
Now, Joe Rogan, of course, had a good old go at me a couple of years ago because why?
Because I say people shouldn't have to stay in abusive relationships, right?
But Steve Tyler sits across from Joe Rogan after Steve Tyler did what Steve Tyler did.
Joe Rogan isn't sitting there saying, I don't think that was a very good thing to do, to get guardianship of a girl from her parents so you could take her across straight lines.
You have no problem with that.
But even what was his name that fled to France?
Roman Polanski.
Yeah, he raped at Jack Nicholson's house, that 13-year-old girl.
I can't remember her age, but yeah, that seems pretty well established.
Do you know, Stefan, mentioning all of this and one thing, my father was in a band and he was a musician just by the way, obviously, but
The worst thing about being sexually abused I found for myself was my home life was so terrible and the only person that showed me love and interest and attention was this 17 year old pedophile.
So even though I was 7,
And even though it hurt me when it was happening, the guilt and the filth you feel about yourself as an adult because you craved that love because you didn't get it from anyone else, that destroyed me more than the actual events, if that makes sense, that I craved it.
Because I wasn't getting anything from anybody.
I hope that you don't blame yourself for that or think worse of yourself for that.
A starving man will eat food off the floor.
That doesn't mean he's a pig.
It means he's starving.
Yeah, I know, I'm good now.
I've been through years of therapy, years of therapy.
I don't want to leave any of that sitting out for the audience, right?
But no, but I'm saying when I, before, when I started the drug, because I went, funny story, my mother came to me one day and she was screaming at me and she said, why, why heroin?
Of all the drugs, why did you go on to heroin?
And I said to her, because it makes me not feel.
And she looked at me and she, because she was very much about image and what everyone thought about her and her, you know, it wasn't about what I was going through.
And she said to me, what do you mean you don't want to feel?
And I said, it makes me feel nothing.
And she looked and she said, that's insane.
Everybody has to feel.
But, but that's how it made me.
That's how much pain I was in that the heroin was the one drug that made me feel nothing.
And I would rather have felt nothing than the filth I had felt about myself.
Because I did blame myself when I was younger and I did think I was to blame.
No, you have to.
I mean, this is a very common pattern and it is virtually universal for everybody who survives those childhoods.
The way that you survive is you take ownership.
You take ownership because what's the alternative?
The alternative is you run away or you kill people.
And if you run away, you can end up in an even worse situation.
And if you kill people, well, that's not good.
Although I can understand it.
It's still not good.
And so how do you survive?
You know.
You know as well as I do.
The way that you survive these situations is because no one else is taking any ownership for the wrongs being done, so you have to take ownership yourself.
It's a way of paralyzing your natural desire for a fight or flight, right?
Because you're trapped!
What do we normally do when we're preyed upon as mammals?
What do we normally do when we're walking through the woods and we think we see a bear?
Well, we get an adrenaline dump, we get cortisol, we get our fight or flight mechanism going, and it's supposed to last five minutes.
Either we get away or we're dead.
That's our fight or flight.
But when you're trapped with predators in the house, What do you do?
Well, you end up with this slow burn fight or flight that goes on for years.
You can't fly, because you're a kid, and you can't fight, because you're a kid, because they'll overpower you, and then you can say, oh, well, you know, I'll stab them in their sleep or whatever, but then you've got a whole other world of hell, and then you've got that to live with, and it's all kinds of messy, and so on.
So what do you do?
Well, you say, I have no control over my environment.
Everything's happening to me that's horrible and I can't do anything about it.
So the only control that I can have is to believe that I am the cause or I am in control and that allows you to survive without the fight or flight possibly putting you in a worse situation, but it gives you a pretty heavy burden to carry until you shrug it off, right?
Yes, and then when the adults that are in charge who Because obviously I never told anybody about this as a kid.
The response to... Because I was a pretty good kid until I turned 14.
I was just a good kid, just generally.
When I turned 14, I obviously rebelled to the worst human being.
Wait, hang on a sec there.
Sounds like we may have dropped a little judgment bomb in there, Natalie.
What did you just say?
There are bouts of the worst human being.
So are you saying that you went from being a good kid to being the worst human being?
And that was what my mother told me.
My mother told me... Okay, I don't want to talk to your mother, Natalie.
I consider her satanic.
So, I don't want to talk to her.
I want to talk to you.
Now, did you do some bad things as a teenager?
Yes, you did.
So did I. So did I.
But in the struggle to survive, you've got to put these things in context.
Did you rape children, Natalie?
No.
No.
Did you burn down houses with old people?
No.
I got involved in some shoplifting, I drank a little bit too much for a couple of weekends, and I kissed another girl when I was dating one girl.
But in the context of the wrongs that were swirling around us and the lack of moral instruction in our society.
I mean, you talk about the 70s, right?
So, we're a little bit older, Natalie and I, so we remember the 70s as a hellscape of disintegrating social norms and the translation of a higher civilization into a very ornate, technological, and well-adorned pack of fucking apes.
Rutting and beating and shitting and eating and grabbing and molesting and just a bunch of apes.
We were a bunch of apes in a cathedral of civilization.
We had an entire collapse from the 60s onwards of any kind of rational moral standards, any kind of general social judgment, any kind of ostracism of wrongdoers.
And it just became this Nietzschean will to power, satisfy your lusts at any expense whatsoever, and because of the welfare state there was no capacity for social ostracism of wrongdoers anymore, and it just became this low deviant devolution to A bunch of highly sophisticated prowling mammals with all the ethical standards of single-celled organisms.
And you had to break down the family, so you had children exposed to a wide variety of predators, right?
I mean, as I've said before, one of the reasons why some, not all, not maybe many, but one of the reasons why some men want to be around single moms is access to children.
Not many, but some.
And I've talked about this before, that single moms need to have eternal vigilance because there's not a dad around, a biological dad or whatever, to protect the children.
This is why children of single mothers are 30 times plus more likely to be abused by the succession of boyfriends roaming through the apartment.
Given the prevalence of pedophilia, you don't need to date that many guys as a single mom to have one in the house.
That's right.
as you well know, right?
I mean, with the son, right?
I mean, who knows what happened to that 17-year-old boy?
And again, I know we can do this domino forgiveness.
If I was having a call with him, I'd find out about his childhood and feel some sympathy for that.
And I get all of that.
I mean, it's a complex thing between sympathy and justice.
I just did a call with a guy who was abusing his daughter.
I get that that's a hell of a tightrope to walk, and I understand all of that.
But there was a genuine black hole nihilistic hellscape that was occurring in the 70s.
And it really, I mean, again, it's hard to know beforehand because it wasn't really talked about, but the uncorking in particular of revelations of Christianity, crimes against children, sexual crimes against children, which had occurred before under the tutelage of Sigmund Freud.
He touched upon it and then backed away from the topic and said it's all fantasy, as I talked about in Washington at a Night for Freedom last year.
So the crimes against children It is really astonishing.
It is really astonishing just how prevalent they were.
And there are a lot of people who wish to commit these crimes against children who are welcoming cultures wherein that becomes normalized.
That is normalized.
And that's one of the reasons why.
They just want to... I mean, you can see this happening on the left all the time.
They really want to relax these standards against the sexual exploitation of children.
Which drives me insane.
It really does.
It really is horrifying.
The pain that those children feel as adults is unbearable.
The pain is...
It gets to the point that it's so bad that you would rather die than wake up and feel that pain again.
That is how horrible the abuse of a child is.
It is just, it is just the most excruciating pain a human being can go through.
And there is of course a tipping point because when you're young you feel that this pain will pass and then there comes a time where there is a concern for a lot of people that the pain is not going to diminish over time but may in fact get worse.
And also, in the contrast, I remember this, I've talked about this before, and I'm not trying to equate this in terms of pain, but I remember in my family, particularly around Christmas, when Christmas you're supposed to have this great time, you've got the TV on, there are all these happy families on TV, if you're having a miserable, screaming, throwing, violent kind of Christmas,
It's all the more painful because you have this expectation of something better and then when you get the inevitable shit sandwich of family dysfunction when you're expecting some wonderful meal, that's some of the worst stuff.
And I think what you were talking about when your son was born and you felt this wonderful bond I was when I first read this I was like okay well why did why did Natalie begin to fall out of love with her husband when she fall in love with her son?
And that's because you recognize that you weren't in love with your husband.
It wasn't like you fell out of love with your husband.
It's like look at the bond you have with your son.
That's not the bond you have with your husband.
And so it begins to the happiest times become the worst time.
Oh I've become a mother.
And then of course it reactivates a lot of this pain, this trauma, and so you can't even really enjoy being a mother that much because you're wrestling with this demonology, I guess maybe even literally in your case with the blood drinking, with this demonology of history which arises and pounces upon a crib that should be overflowing with love and contentment and bonding.
Yeah, and I think when I was born it was It was a love that I'd never felt before.
And it was beautiful, and although my ex-husband was not a great man, but I wasn't a great person either, so I'm not just going to paint him as bad, because he just has as much trauma as I did.
It was just everything, and I was privileged enough to stay at home with him, so I was a stay-at-home mum, and it was easy to Just protect him from everybody.
It was easy for me.
But by the time my daughter had come around, it was now two children.
I was at the toddler, two year old, where he was busy.
And my daughter was just a hard baby.
She was a good baby, but she was a crier.
And she'd only want to be in my arms.
And I eventually, without knowing it, I was I couldn't protect both of them.
Do you know what I mean?
I don't know what I was trying to protect them from, but I couldn't protect both of them.
I wasn't powerful enough to make sure that both of them were safe, but I didn't know what I was protecting them from, if that makes sense.
It's like something's going to happen to them and It was one individual but now it was two individuals and he was venturing out and she was crying and it was like something's going to happen to them and I can't take care of both of them.
It was very, very hard after she was born.
I had severe depression, severe depression after she was born.
Well, of course, the fact that it's a daughter and you were a daughter and the fact that she was a little baby or a little girl and you were a little baby and a little girl when terrible things happened means it's probably going to activate more memories, right?
Yeah, exactly.
Exactly.
Right.
But I will say this, Natalie, when you think about it, which I know you have, of course, but when you think about it, whatever you did as a child to maintain your capacity to bond with your own children was a truly remarkable feat.
I mean, talk about like a running race holding an egg that's on fire while being attacked by cormorants.
That is an incredible feat to have maintained your capacity to bond with a child after everything you went through as a child with people who hadn't bonded with you.
I mean, you can't mistreat someone you love.
This is why, you know, when people say, well, he abused me, but he loved me.
It's like, nope.
No, he didn't.
I mean, he did abuse you, but he didn't love you.
You cannot hurt someone you love.
Now, that doesn't mean that you can't tell tough truths to someone that you love, but in terms of abusing someone, if you abuse someone, you're just not in love.
You've not bonded.
The bond is there to stop you from doing that, right?
Right.
And all I knew, this is all I did with my children, because I thought whatever my mother did, I was going to be the exact opposite.
That was my theory.
Whatever she did, I was going to do the exact opposite.
Right.
You know, I had no rules.
I didn't have a bedtime.
I mean, Fridays were the worst because we'd either have police coming to our house with one of them bashing the other, gunshots shooting at each other.
It was a... Wait, sorry, what was happening on Fridays?
I may have missed this, I apologize.
Sorry, so, the domestic violence, I mean, the sexual abuse happened... Oh, with your parents you mean?
With my parents.
Okay, sorry, sorry, we skipped generations there for a second there.
Yeah, sorry, sorry.
That's fine, that's fine.
I'm just trying to keep up, so I've got no problem.
Keep doing what you're doing.
There's nothing wrong with what you're doing.
I just want to make sure that I don't skip over something.
Yeah, no, this was my stepdad and my mother.
I mean, she was a fighter.
I have never lifted my hands to another human being.
And she was aggressive, fought like a man.
My dad would fight, they would fight each other like two men and it would be, on a Friday night was the worst night because you, that was when he'd get drunk.
She never ever drank any alcohol but he was an alcoholic.
So Friday night he'd come home, he'd get drunk, they'd start fighting and by 10 o'clock that night we either had the police at the house or the ambulance at the house or
My mother had taken me and we were walking in the streets or my dad had put me in the car and he was drunk and he was driving around like an every weekend was just a war zone just and it was embarrassing because in the suburb I lived all the kids went to the same school and I've known these children for long and it
Weekends came and all the neighbors would see the police were at our door, the ambulance was at our door, all the screaming and shouting and breaking and smashing.
That was my, that was every single week of my life in my childhood.
Which is funny because you were saying, not funny of course, but tragic because you were talking Natalie about how concerned with the appearance your mom was.
That's not helping appearances very much.
The appearance is what she wore, what her house looked like.
She was so insane about her appearance.
If she didn't get what she wanted, she would cause a fight with him and then she would go and take her scissors.
And my mother had clothes and shoes and handbags which were revoltingly massive.
It was just insane how much But she would go and she would cut through everything, like just cut it and shred it all with it and then the next morning after her and my dad got in a fight and he beat her up or she beat him up and they were all sorry in the morning, he would then take her out and buy her a whole new wardrobe full of stuff.
Where did he get his money from?
I mean, this amount of dysfunction, this amount of drinking, this violence, this cop presence.
I mean, it's hard to imagine someone making a lot of money with that amount of cash.
Well, you see, when they met, so my mother was a very attractive woman.
Yeah, no, I'm going to get that.
If she bagged a rich guy, then that's usually the way it works, right?
After she had had me, she was, if you remember back in the day, in the 70s, The ladies that used to model with the lawnmowers.
So she was one of those models.
That's what she did.
And it's funny because, sorry to interrupt, but these catalogs would get mailed to people's houses, right?
And there'd be guys, you know, they'd open these catalogs, they'd look at your mom modeling with something, right?
And they'd be like, wow, she's so pretty.
Boy, it'd be great if she was my wife.
Can you imagine how great my life would be if I had a woman that pretty and that slender and that poised and that well put together as my wife?
And these guys were like, I wouldn't say just lusting after her in a sexual manner, but as a status manner.
And they're like, wouldn't that be great?
This is what happens.
People look, they open up these magazines, they look at these models, right?
They say, wow, these people are perfect.
And yet, of course, if you lift the lid or you peel back this modeling thing, I mean, she's having fistfights and drunken cutting up of bags.
Not that she was drunk, but the stepdad was drunk.
Police and nightmares and bloodies and bruising and unable to protect her child is getting raped by her husband's son.
You peel back the layers, right?
It's like the beginning of the movie Blue Velvet.
You start with this That's right.
This guy mowing a lawn in the suburban household, and you zoom in to all of the insects battling at the base of the grass.
And it's just a weird thing when you lift the matrix or the platonic ideal of how people look, and you flip the page to what's actually going on in their life.
And it's a complete nightmare.
That's right.
And he was like a senior manager, and that's how he met her because she was doing a photo shoot at the place where they were selling their lawnmowers or whatever.
Oh, so he was a successful businessman and... And she was a hot 17-year-old.
Right.
Because she was 17 and he was 40 when they got together.
Wow.
Wow.
Now did you inherit your mother's looks?
I'd say my mother and my daughter, I would give them probably a 10, where I would rather be an 8.
So I was not as pretty as my mother.
I wasn't unattractive, but my daughter is as beautiful as my mother was.
Now, my son, I'd give him, he looks a lot like his dad, which I would say is a seven.
Right.
Right.
Okay.
Okay.
Which is also a big issue for him because his sister is, as I said, beautiful.
She is, she's, that's the hardest thing.
These kids have been together forever.
She has never had a issue in her life.
She's in university.
She's doing well.
She works hard.
She's soft-spoken.
She's had one boyfriend that she's, I mean, she's 22 now.
They never argue.
She's just, she's healthy.
She's always in the gym.
She's just so well put together and very resentful.
Of the fact that his sister is very opposite to him.
Well, and she was a difficult baby, right?
She was a horrible baby.
No, no, no.
Come on, there's no such thing as a horrible baby.
No, I always say to her, if you were my firstborn, I'd never have another one.
She was a beautiful baby, but God, she did not shut up.
And she would only sleep in my arms.
You could hold her for three, four hours, in your arms and try and lay her down and she was up again.
She was just, until she turned two and from two, she's just been calm and quiet.
She would play for hours by herself.
She's just, she's the complete opposite of, and he has a lot of resentment towards her because she's that way.
And, you know, so I've got that issue going on as well, that you've got this, you've got the looks.
Because I have got a paler skin, whereas my skin's got a darker skin.
You know, she's blonde, but she's got darker skin and she gets a nice tan And we, unfortunately, have got way too much Irish in us.
So we are very red kind of thing in the sun and just Silly things like that he's resentful about her, and she's also made a lot of right decisions in her life, whereas he has made, I'm going to go my own way, so he's suffered a lot by doing his own thing.
Do you know, where she's stayed at home, went to school, does it, and it's just completely different.
Well, the first place I go to is, you know, there can be significant IQ differences between siblings, but given how smart your son is and how well he does in his profession, I mean, he's not, I mean, she's not, I mean, maybe you tell me, I mean, that can be, there's an average of eight IQ point differences between siblings.
And that could be one, like you may just see a little further down the road and modify her behavior accordingly.
Well, I can tell you, The thing is, well, is the most diligent human being I have ever met.
That this child will, if he starts something, he will work at it until he's 100% perfect at it.
His sister is in no way like that.
Never took a day off of school.
He would always be doing his homework.
He would always be up until two, three o'clock in the morning, Making things, and he did very well.
On the other hand, would take off of school so often, I remember when she was in grade nine, she came home and she said, oh, mom, I've been awarded DUCS for, DUCS is like a, you know, the best in the grade for a subject.
So she's like, I wonder what it's for.
So I said, I still joke and I said, probably for absenteeism.
Because she was never at school and they never contacted me because she just did well.
She doesn't have to work for it where he has to work for it.
Does that make sense?
He's diligent, she's not diligent and it comes across like things just fall in her lap.
Now, let's go back a little bit to when they were babies, and you said that you wanted to do the opposite of what your mother did, so there were no rules.
When I was a kid, there was no rules.
Oh, when you were a kid, there was no rules.
So you wanted to give some structure to your kids, is that right?
That's right.
So I wanted them to eat at a certain time, I wanted them to bath at a certain time, they would have bedtime at the same time, everything would be organized before they went to bed, so in the morning, Their little lives were organized, you know?
Right.
School stuff was ready, lunches were packed.
Because with me, it was just go to bed when you want, wake up, you don't know where anything is, give you some money and go get food at school.
Nobody cared where I was.
We were always in the streets.
They didn't ask where I was.
I was way more different.
If my kids were going somewhere, I would want to go and meet the parents.
Sit with them, discuss them, see where my children are, where I would just be dropped off and do your own thing.
So that's what I meant in that way.
Right.
Do you think that your father was involved in the occult or worship of Satan or dark forces because this torture of children and the blood drinking, I mean that goes beyond I mean, that goes so far beyond normal realms of child abuse that it's hard not to think that there would be sinister forces involved in that somehow.
Well, when I spoke to my mother about it, because when I told her about that, she didn't seem surprised.
But when I told her about my stepbrother, she got angry at me and she said she's going to go tell my dad, who's my stepdad, but I refer to him as my dad, that I'm accusing him His son of doing this to me.
She got mad about that.
But with my real father, when I told her what had happened, she said, her expression was, yes, but his mother was a witch.
And I was like, what?
My dad's mother.
And I'm like, what are you talking about?
And she goes, oh no, she's a witch.
We used to go there and play glassy glassy.
I don't know if you know what that is.
They would put a glass.
I'm afraid I'm going to know what it is in just a moment.
So it's like, it's like a Ouija board, but they don't have the board.
So they just do, and then they conjure up spirits and that sort of thing.
And she, so his mother was a very high in occultism and that sort of thing.
Wow.
And the interesting thing about it was when he raped my mother, she was 15.
And my granny was very, very sick at that time, because my granny passed away when she was 21 years old.
And instead of her being out and doing what all the other kids did, she would come home every day and be with my gran.
So she was known as the town virgin, where all the other girls weren't.
said she was a virgin when he, because what had happened was she was walking home from school and his mother came to the gate and she, he said, she said to him, oh, you need to come inside.
He, I won't say his, oh Lionel, that's his name, but I don't care.
Lionel was very, very ill in bed and my mother was like, oh no, I can't come inside.
I need to go home to my mother.
And she's like, no, no, no, just come inside, come inside.
So my mum said she went into the house and she said just go take him the soup because he's really sick.
She went into the room and his mother locked the door and he had the music blaring loud and that's when he raped her.
So it sounds almost like some ritual of some sort of devil worshipping cult that you have to rape the virgin and that's how you gain ascendancy or imaginary powers or some sort of, you know, it's like in a gang, you had to kill someone and in this cult or whatever they were doing that you got to rape a virgin.
Maybe that's, I mean, the equation.
Well, I didn't want to say that but that's what I thought because when I'd spoken to him after I'd gotten out of rehab, And I said, well, my mother said this about you.
Is that true?
When his response was, yeah, but you were meant to be born, that's when it was like, okay, I think these people planned it because they thought she was a virgin and they wanted a virgin, a child born from a virgin, sort a child born from a virgin, sort of mocking the Jesus Christ route.
Do you know what I mean?
Yeah, I mean this is the traditional story about how the Antichrist is born, right?
A woman is impregnated in some satanic ritual and she's often a virgin or usually a virgin and then the child that is born then becomes demonic in some manner, right?
That's right.
That is what I think their whole And like I said, my mother was like, oh yeah, she used to speak to the spirits, and she was a medium, and she told me that my brother did this.
I heard my mother's dead brother was there, and he spoke to my mother.
Like bizarre stuff.
I don't even know how they could do stuff like that, but that's what they were, she told me they were into.
Wow.
That is, I mean, that is truly monstrous.
And I've been thinking a lot about these dark forces in the world.
Mike Cernovich was talking about how he believes in dark forces.
And, you know, looking at some Billie Eilish lyrics, it's a little hard to avoid that this is powerful stuff in the world.
And I've probably never come closer to an emotional acceptance of the idea of God as looking at these dark forces in the world, whether they're psychological, which is, you know, I'm sure they are, but it's hard to avoid that sense of a specter over humanity that is manipulating and moving people in horrible directions for the sake of Well, I can tell you that I am a Christian.
I mean, not a great one, but I am a Christian.
happening in the world these days.
I'm just putting that out there.
It's not a philosophical argument.
I just sort of wanted to point out where I am emotionally.
And maybe this has had, you've obviously had a lot of time to think about this stuff, Natalie.
And, you know, there's some pretty dark forces going on here.
Well, I can tell you that I am a Christian.
I mean, not a great one, but I am a Christian.
And I believe I am where I am today because no matter how they try to destroy me, I feel that the power of God kept me sane, kept me from killing myself, kept kept me from killing myself, kept me from doing complete damage to myself.
Right.
Right.
So, even though there was all this darkness, there was God protecting me.
A lot of people are like, oh, if there was a God, why did this happen to you?
And I'm like, if there is a God, there's a devil, and he's the one that does it to you.
Well, and it can make you pretty strong.
Yeah.
It can make you pretty strong.
And I survived it.
I survived it.
And I was broken for a long time, but I'm I'm fine now.
I also wanted to point out, I've had Dr. Gaber-Mattei on this show twice, I think, and he talks about this in his book, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, about drug addiction.
He said that everyone he treated for heroin addiction had been sexually abused as a child.
that if you look at the prevalence of opioid deaths, and what are they like per year in America?
They're like the death toll of the Vietnam War or something.
I mean, okay, you can look at Chinese drug manufacturers, you could look at Mexican drug cartels and so on, but they are supplying a demand.
And this is not just supply creates its own demand.
You know, like if I find a boxer There is a demand in this area.
I'm not going to take it, right?
I mean, supply doesn't always create its own demand.
There is a demand in this area.
And I think that the lack of protection that children are experiencing since the '60s, I think is producing significant amounts of abuse.
Now, it's very complicated and I don't have data, right?
Because, unfortunately, data doesn't really... I mean, until after the Second World War, people didn't even really think of the physical abuse of children.
I mean, the first doctor who's like, wow, there's a lot of kids coming in with broken arms and broken noses and so on, and he was the one who first began to piece together that it might actually be physical.
Like, it wasn't even thought of.
And with regards to sexual abuse, there's no...
There's no data, as far as I understand it, going back in time, so it's really hard to tell.
But I do know that a lack of, in particular, a biological father in the household is associated, as I said, with high rates of sexual abuse.
And so my concern is that if sexual abuse is on the increase of children because of the smashing up of the family and of the communities, then that is creating a demand for horror erasing drugs in society, and we're seeing a symptom.
I mean, I've pointed this out on Twitter a bunch of times.
In the black community, between 40% and 60% of black girls report being raped by a black man before they turn 18.
And that's, I mean, beyond horrendous.
It's beyond horrendous, what's going on in the black community.
And so the idea that the problem is a statue somewhere of a Civil War general, that that's the issue, is such a red herring.
I mean, the people who are abusing children in the black community, again, according to the women, it's black men for the most part, I mean, they love it when you talk about reparations for slavery and this statue, because that way everyone's looking over there rather than what they're doing, which of course, you know, the harm that's being done to the black community by black child rapists far exceeds, to an infinite degree, the presence of a statue somewhere of a Civil War general from the South.
So it's kind of a big distraction and a red herring.
I do think that I want people to sort of understand that where you see a lot of drug addiction, in my opinion, and it's not just my opinion, there's data to back it up, but in my opinion, where you see increasing levels of drug addiction, you are seeing increasing levels of child predation.
And the drug addiction is a way of attempting to deal with that pain.
Oh, well, you know, the manufacturing jobs left and that, come on.
I mean, come on.
There were not massive drug addictions in the 1930s.
when 25% of people were unemployed.
And there's nothing that takes your pain away like heroin.
There's nothing.
It's gone.
You don't have pain.
And you're not aiming to feel happy.
You're just aiming to feel not in pain.
It's not a drug that makes you feel great or makes you feel wonderful or makes you feel high.
ecstasy.
It's something that because you have this constant pain in the pits of your stomach that never leaves you.
And as soon as you take that opioid or that fentanyl or that heroin, it kills that.
And then you feel normal.
You feel nothing.
So it feels good.
Well, and the way that I would try to get people to understand this, and please tell me if I go astray, because I'm talking about your experience more, but imagine that, like, if you have to have a tooth pulled or a root canal or something like that, imagine that.
Imagine doing that with no anesthetic.
Imagine doing that with no numbing.
You've got to get your wisdom teeth pulled and it's straight up, no laughing gas, no injections of whatever local anesthetic they put in your gums or whatever.
That would be a screamingly horrible experience.
So the reason that you get the numbing is not because you want to feel good.
It's because you don't want to feel the mind-bending pain of dental work without anesthetic.
It's the same thing like if you have to have your appendix out, you want the anesthetic not because you want to be high and have a great time, you just don't want to be conscious when they saw open your body, right?
And so from that, if people can understand it that way, there's not people chasing a high any more than you're chasing a high when you want anesthetic for an operation.
It's avoiding the agony that they're experiencing.
That's right.
That's right.
That is 100.
That is beautiful.
That is exactly right.
If every day was dental surgery.
Okay, so let's talk about childhood.
Did he show the kind of temper that he has now?
Did it show up when he was a kid?
No, so when he was a little kid, he was a busy boy, very, very busy, but he was a lovely child.
Every time I would go to a parent's teacher conference, he was always the teacher's favorite kid.
He always had a thousand friends around him.
He never got into trouble in primary school.
Smart.
He was, there was no, the only thing with, as when he was little was he was the absolute golden child when it came to my mother and father, my mother and stepfather.
He was their everything.
I think the only person my mother ever loved was.
So what they would, but what they would do is they would, Like, they would overindulge to a degree which was insane.
And they would not do the same for me.
That's my daughter.
She was... She knew.
She knew that it was all about... They would say, oh, we're taking the kids somewhere and it would be where they wanted.
Or we would get a toy and they wouldn't get a toy.
All about *** all the time.
How much time did he spend with them?
So when *** was born, she was also a preemie.
She was a preemie baby.
And she was very, very sick.
Very sick.
She was on ventilators and breathing machines.
And it was pretty bizarre that every time I left her, her blood sats would drop, her heart rate would drop, her heart stopped beating in front of me.
Actually gave her an adrenaline needle in her chest right in front of me.
So I eventually got to the stage with her that I decided I'll never leave the hospital because as soon as I go home to shower, I get a phone call to say, come back, it doesn't look like she's going to make it.
But when I'm sitting there with her, she's fine.
So I then decided for three weeks, I would just stay at the hospital and live like that.
And how old was she at this time?
She was two and a half.
So at that time then went to, was working and with my mother and father.
And then came home and like I said, she was a difficult baby.
She cried a lot.
The only way I could keep her happy was in my arms, which annoyed the living life out of my mother because she kept on telling me, put her down, let her cry.
And I was like, I'd rather not have her cry.
So I don't mind holding her.
But my mother was like, you neglecting and I'm like, I'm not neglecting.
I just doesn't want to stop crying.
The only time she stops crying is when she's in my arms.
So I didn't, maybe that was a bad parenting technique for me, but I didn't feel comfortable leaving her to cry.
Well, she had a hell of a start to life, right?
I mean, she was hovering a death door for weeks, right?
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
She was very, very, very sick as a baby.
But why your parents?
Because I had nobody else.
Couldn't your husband take a sabbatical?
I mean, you're leaving your son with a guy who raised a pedophile.
My husband Couldn't even make time to come and visit his daughter in hospital.
So there was no, there was no one?
There was me alone with and I had no one for you.
Could you have brought to the hospital with you or I mean I'm just because I'm just going back to So no, they're not allowed to because they're in the NICU, so it's Neonatal Intensive Care Unit, so they don't allow children under the age of 30.
No friends, no other relatives, no community, no... I had cousins and aunties and that, but no one that would have helped me with Luke.
They wouldn't have helped me.
And how much exposure did he have to his grandparents before he was two and a half and your daughter was born?
Well, they would see him all the time.
They would see him all the time.
Okay, so now let's rewind because we don't have the emergency of your daughter.
So, he bonded with his grandparents, right?
Absolutely.
So why, given how much pain they have caused you, why would you put them in their orbit so consistently?
I believe it's because I had suppressed how terrible my life was.
I had not faced it.
Because the story as a teenager was, from my mother, The story to everyone was that I was rebellious and I was ungrateful because they gave me everything and I didn't appreciate it.
That was the story that played in my mind.
I never thought about the domestic abuse.
I never thought about the sexual abuse.
I never thought about how violent my home was.
When did that knowledge arise within you?
When I went into that rehab facility.
And how old, sorry, how old were your kids then?
Well, I was 26 so it was five and it was three.
Okay.
So before that, The story was I was an ungrateful spoiled child.
Oh, no, no, sorry.
I get all of that.
I apologize for interrupting.
I just want to make sure.
No, no, no.
Okay.
So, when you were 25, 25 was three, you went into rehab.
You did the emotional work to understand how terrible your childhood was.
Did that change your children's relationship to your parents?
That changed Everything, because when I got out of this facility, I took my children and I moved to a town 200 kilometers away from everybody.
I had got a really successful, good job.
I was provided company housing.
It was a smaller town and I had removed them from the situation.
Okay, so this is the big difference that I see.
that had very little exposure to her grandparents when she was little because she was in the hospital and then she was with you and so on, right?
And had continual exposure to his grandparents during his formative years from zero to five, right?
Yes.
Whereas men wouldn't go.
Men never spent one night at their house ever.
Okay, so you understand the difference here?
Yes.
Now, do you think that might have been over at the grandparents when the pedophile son was around?
Absolutely.
Right.
Do you think that he might have preyed upon the...
I don't know.
Might be something to ask.
Might be something to ask.
How do I ask him that?
Well, the anger's come.
So, he bonded, as far as I understand it, right?
Because he was hyperindulged, which is, of course, very bad.
And you understand that the hyperindulgence is part of your parents' vengeance against you, right?
Which is, look how wonderful we can be to a good kid.
I'm going to tell you something, Stefan, that happened to me when I was three years old.
I don't know where my mother was, and I was at home, and I remember this as clear as day.
I was playing in my bedroom, and in South Africa in those days, they would have your mage or nanny would look after you.
She must have been out in the backyard and my dad was home and this stepbrother and I walked into the bedroom and him and my stepdad were in bed together.
Sorry, I just lost a little track of that.
Can you just give me that one more scenario one more time?
So I was about three years old and the nanny was outside.
I was playing in the room and I came in to My dad was there with the stepbrother that molested me a few years later.
And when I walked into the room, him and my dad were naked in bed together.
So, the stepbrother who molested you later and your stepfather were naked in bed together?
Yes.
Right.
So, it's possible, based upon this scenario, that the stepdad was also a child molester but focused more on boys.
Yes.
And had continual access to your son?
Yes.
Right.
But, they, he loved my stepdad.
He loved him.
Well, so did you.
I, yeah.
Come on.
So, how do I, how do I say this?
That's the one thing that I've thought about, but I've been too I've spoken to them about my abuse because, but how do I say?
Well, he may, of course, he may not remember consciously if he was very young, right?
Right, like I didn't remember.
Like I didn't remember.
And I can't just go, hey, you think Opa did something to you?
He'd be angry.
He'd be mad at me.
He'd be furious.
But there's something.
There's something in that child that's not in my daughter.
There's something there that I don't understand.
There's something... Or something there that you understand all too well.
Yes.
Right.
Is he angry at women, do you think?
Your son?
Yes.
Why is he angry at women?
More so than men?
I don't know.
Well, if something bad happened to him when he was very young, then he may be more angry at you than even at the perpetrator.
Because you sent him there.
According to his perception, perhaps.
Well, I would agree with that perception.
Then he should be angry at me.
I have thought this.
I have never spoken to anybody about this.
But I have believed that something's happened for years.
But I've never even spoken to my husband about this.
But we do know that your son was around one, according to you, confirmed child molester.
And another, which you talked about when you saw him in bed with his son naked when you were three.
Yes.
Which would explain the son, to a large degree.
Again, there's still free will and morality, but this is dominoes, right?
So if he was in this environment, and of course it is not unknown for child abusers to buy off silence with presents, right?
And you say that the grandparents spoiled him like crazy.
Like crazy?
Right.
Like he got everything he wanted.
Yeah, well that could be just buying silence, right?
Yeah.
But then that makes me the worst human being because then I didn't protect him from the thing that I thought I needed to protect.
Hold on, hold on.
No, listen.
No, no, no.
No, don't go there.
Don't go there.
That's not what I'm saying and that's not what any... That's how I feel.
No, no, no.
I'm sorry.
You're going to have to put your feelings aside.
This is a philosophy show, which means we look at the morality.
Okay.
If you say that you're the worst person in this situation, that's entirely false.
Because if something happened, and I guarantee you something bad or a series of bad things happened, whether it went all the way to molestation, we may never know, right?
But he was with child abusers, right?
As a baby, as an infant, as a toddler.
And a lot, right?
You said he was there all the time, right?
So I know it's not all the time, but a lot.
From two years old.
Before his sister was born.
He was always with me.
He never stayed with them.
So from... Oh, I'm so sorry.
Let's go back.
Because I got a note here and I must have taken it incorrectly.
I want to make sure I'm... So you said at two and a half he stayed with his mother and father.
With your mother and father a lot.
With my mother and father.
Yeah.
I thought that before that they saw him a lot.
They saw him but he never stayed over alone.
So I would be there with him.
He was never... I think he slept at my mum and dad's house once.
And that was when the World Cup Rugby happened in South Africa.
That was the only time until... But would they have him without you from time to time?
Alone?
Not before two and a half.
Okay, alright.
Sorry, I got that.
Sorry, they saw them a lot because I saw them a lot.
Yeah, yeah.
You know, every time I went there.
But he only stayed there once in that time, and that was in 1995.
And when he was born, that's when he was there all the time because I was dealing with this very, very sick baby.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I got it.
Okay.
All right.
No, but... No, it's the people who harm the children who are the ones morally to blame.
You understand, right?
If you suddenly go to the worst person in this equation, that's your mom talking.
Right?
Which is, whatever happens, you're the worst.
Right?
Whatever problems there are in the family, they're caused by you.
Like, that's your mom talking and I won't stand for that.
And I've got bipolar, according to her.
That's what's wrong with me.
She diagnosed me with bipolar.
Which she can't do, right?
Which I don't have, and according to the entire family, I... First of all, you can't know what you don't know.
Having a standard called omniscience is unfair and self-abusive.
You did not knowingly, consciously send your child to people who had been dangerous to children, right?
Because you had been subjected to a huge amount of propaganda and you had accepted that as the price of survival, which we all do to a large degree, right?
You did not knowingly and consciously do something that was wrong or bad or dangerous to your son.
I'm sure your son loved going over there because they were spoiling him and so on.
I remember when I was a kid, I had a babysitter.
This all sounds like the beginning of a bad story, but it's not.
I had a babysitter who, whenever I would go there, would give me a Curly Wurly, which was like a kind of thick spiderweb caramel chocolate thing that I just adored.
And she would also let me stay up late.
And I remember it's the first time I ever watched the news that came on at 10 o'clock or whenever it was.
Maybe it was 11, probably 10.
And I just loved going over there because I got candy and got to stay up.
It was fantastic.
And I remember I thought I was going there that night.
I guess I'd been told she was going there one night and I just, I cried all night.
When I was like, I don't know, six years old or five years old or something, probably five because I think it was before boarding school.
And I remember clearly crying all night because I just wanted to go there because this is somebody who was nice to me.
And so if there is the situation where your son is dying to go, you've got your daughter who's very needy as a baby.
You don't have any memory of what you don't remember.
Obviously, omniscience is not a valid standard.
So it's understandable, given the lack of options that you had, given how helpful, quote, helpful your parents were, given how your son probably wanted to go over there a lot.
This is all understandable, right?
Because I don't want you sliding into this story of now you're the worst person in this situation.
Maybe nothing happened.
We're just looking at Differences, and the big difference, it seems to me at the moment, would be exposure to the grandparents.
Even if nothing happened in terms of sexual abuse, if nothing happened in terms of physical abuse, they're twisted people, right?
Absolutely.
And just having them, like having him bond with twisted people, which your daughter didn't really do, right?
No, not at all.
Then, if you're looking at how this, quote, virus of dysfunction may have transferred itself to your son.
It could just be through exposure, and it may have nothing to do with sexual or physical abuse.
It's just he bonded with some very twisted people, and that may conceivably have had a rolling effect going forward.
Okay.
Does he know?
Or how much does he know about your parents?
Well, he knows about my stepbrother.
He knows about what my father did to, not the details obviously, but he knows that I was sexually abused by my father and sexually abused by my stepbrother.
He knows that.
He knows that about the violence and the domestic abuse and the police being called and the houses being smashed and broken and the alcoholism and he knows all of that.
And does he know what your mother says about your conception?
Yes.
When he hears these things about his grandparents, how does he react?
So my mother passed away two years ago and I, my reaction was not what he wanted it to be because I was, because just before she died, she had come over and she'd visited us and she was on more medication than you get in a pharmacy.
It was ridiculous.
And she ran out of her medication after a few weeks and she sat one day on the patio talking to my husband and I and she looked at me and she said, You ruined my life.
You ruined my life.
Having you ruined my life, and I've never loved you.
That was the last face-to-face conversation I ever had with my mother.
Wow, she really went out with a snarl, didn't she?
So when she died, I didn't have that.
At first, I was upset, obviously.
But after a couple of weeks, I was like not speaking positively about Granny.
He would go crazy.
He would go mad because I was like, she didn't love me.
She did love you.
She did.
And I was like, she didn't love me.
And every time she told me she loved me as a kid, I thought she was lying.
And I've said to both of my children, because I knew instinctively as a kid, I knew she was a liar and I didn't believe what she was saying.
And I asked my kids because it troubled me so much.
And I've asked them both individually, I'm like, do you really believe that mommy loves you?
And they're like, of course we do.
Like, we've never questioned that.
And I never believed she loved me and she admitted that to me and my husband the last time I ever saw their faces.
Okay, so he's still bonded with your mother?
Absolutely, and my dad.
He's still bonded with your mother and with your stepdad, right?
My stepdad died in 2008.
And my mother died two years ago and he still cries if you just mention them.
Right.
Okay.
Well, then he's bonded with some very damaged and damaging people.
So, of course.
Of course he's doing what he's doing.
Because that's the thing, you know, I don't understand.
I always thought that People that beat, husbands that beat wives or boyfriends, I thought it's because they saw it in the home.
I never allowed that in my home because I grew up with that and I would never ever, after their dad did it to me, and it happened once in front of people.
Yeah, but who knows what he saw at the grandparents?
I mean, your mother was so nasty that at the end she still said, you ruined my life, right?
There was no thawing of this frozen, broken heart at the end, right?
She was still blaming you for her life.
So she died as unrepentantly horrible and ghastly a human being as she seems to have lived.
So there's no, there's no, there's no break in these clouds, right?
There's no break in these clouds.
So they were as nasty and vicious and brutal and violent when your son was there as probably when, when you were there or, or any other time.
That's the thing.
And everybody around me makes excuses for her saying that, Oh, she didn't really mean it.
Oh, she didn't have medications and she was, and I thought, no, like, Everybody, my husband, my children, everyone is up.
She didn't mean it.
She didn't mean it.
Now everyone gets forgiveness except the victims.
That's the sad thing.
It's a sad thing in this world.
Everyone gets forgiveness except the victims.
So, yeah, so your son is bonded with some violent, incredibly dysfunctional people who were emotionally abusive, physically, obviously, abusive.
And, well, based upon what you saw at the age of three, who knows what else, right?
And certainly, according to your experience, the son was a child rapist.
Yes.
So that's part of his bonding, right?
And the bonding is how the virus transmits, right?
Whatever we praise, we become.
Right.
Whatever we condemn, we avoid.
Whatever we praise, we become.
whatever we praise, what we become.
And so maybe because if he perceives that you failed to protect him deep down, then he's going to fail to protect you.
In other words, he is going to reenact against you, which is incredibly painful to you, and recreate the pain in you that he may feel you created in him by exposing him to these people.
Yeah.
And I believe it's solvable.
I mean, this is all fixable, right?
And again, I'm cognizant of the fact that you're going to have an inner mom, right, Natalie?
You're going to have an inner mom in your head who's going to try and blame you for all of this, right?
Yep.
But don't let her.
That's not going to help your son.
It's not going to help you.
And it certainly is not rational or virtuous to allow her to take over your system in this way, right?
Possession, right?
Possession is a very real thing.
It's just more psychological then.
Elemental.
Because the voice right now is telling me it's me.
It's my fault.
Right.
And what that does is it makes you not available to solve the problem with your son, right?
So that voice is not there to help your son.
It's there to help your mom at your expense and at your son's expense.
You've got to put that stuff aside.
Okay.
Right?
I mean, your mom's dead.
She can't harm you anymore.
So that voice, which is there, that voice is not aware that your son is dead.
Sorry, that your mom is dead.
And maybe, just maybe that voice is there to keep you from helping your son, so that you can collapse inwards and not be available.
Right.
Right, so it's extra control from the grave.
Oh, absolutely.
Almost nobody has more power than the dead.
I mean all the communists who set into motion the self-destruction of the West, they're all dead.
They have the most power of all.
Yeah.
You can't reason with the dead.
They dominate.
And there is all this bizarre, you have to have respect for the dead.
No.
You have to have respect for virtue and courage.
These are not attributes magically gained by ceasing to breathe.
Now, I assume, of course, that your son very much wishes to not hit his girlfriend, right? - Yes, absolutely.
He does not want to do that.
He does not want to.
So, then, of course, I think talking about the family history of violence, you know, this is like an exorcism.
I mean, if I were in your shoes, if I were in your shoes, Natalie, I would do something like this.
I would say, well, I've got to sit down and figure out How to interfere with this bond that my son has with some evil people.
And you know, again, just collapsing it on yourself and saying, I'm bad, woe is me, I'm the worst person.
It's not going to help you with that.
That's designed to help destroy your son's, I believe, chance of Becoming a better person and all that, right?
So that's all nonsense, right?
I mean, you have a problem which you didn't know about.
If this is the solution, it could be any other things.
This is sort of where my instincts go.
But you have the challenge, which is now you have to figure out a way to interfere or disrupt the bond that your son has.
And how you do that, I don't know.
I mean, I'm not the mom and it's not my son and so on, but if the price If the price of becoming a better person is giving up his bond with evil people, it's well worth doing.
It's going to bring out a lot of pain in him because this illusory bond is one of the ways he keeps his horrors of his childhood at bay, at least this time, this part.
But I would say that given that your daughter's doing well and she didn't have the exposure and your son is not doing as well and he had the exposure, that's the one big difference that I can see and that would be where I would be focusing my energies.
And I don't know whether that's questions, I don't know whether that's confrontation, I don't know whether that's brutal honesty, I don't know whether that's delicate queries.
I have no idea because that's not my relationship, but if you mull this over, that could be, I'm sure you can find the right way to do it.
Well, I'm stunned at how you showed me where the difference was between the two of them because...
Hey, I'm just telling you back what you told me.
I know, but I couldn't figure it out.
I couldn't figure it out.
I was like, what happened to... And that was it.
That was the only thing that was different in their lives.
I mean, obviously there probably were other things, but that's... Yeah, but that was the... I mean, when she...
went to my mother for school holidays or something, she would be there one day and she would ring me and literally say, Granny's being nasty to me, I'm coming home now, come and fetch me.
Oh, so she didn't bond with that?
She absolutely, and my mother did not like her, like, did not like her.
Of course, she had your mom's number, right?
Yeah, and she would, yeah, and she's very Very attached to me.
She's very lovable to me.
She's all about mum all the time.
And I think that annoyed my mother as well.
That Wes was just all about her and my dad.
Right.
And she could talk.
She used to talk badly about me to Les.
And he would listen and agree.
Wes, she couldn't do that with me because I'm going to tell my mom what you just said.
- Well, and also it could be, you say, that his resentment towards his sister could also be because she was not exposed to what he was exposed to, that she got away. - Yeah. - And this may be something to talk about with your daughter as well, right?
Like, what was the difference and did you ever hear anything or see anything with regards to your brother and, you know, this could be this, you know.
And again, I'm a big fan of talk therapy, you know.
If you guys get a good family therapist, you can sit down and talk about the stuff.
It won't be, you know, if this is the issue, then it won't be a massive exploratory session that's going to take you 6 or 12 months and Lord knows how much money.
It could be like, well, this seems to be the issue that he's bonded with.
You know, if he's bonded with his grandfather, well, his grandfather was physically violent towards his significant other.
So, of course, if he's bonded with his grandfather, it's going to be much more likely that he's going to be physically violent towards his significant other, right?
Right.
Right.
And that's their potting shot.
That's their potting gift, right?
Which is, okay, well, you can criticize us and you can move away, but we'll get you through your son.
Yeah.
That's right.
Wow.
Wow.
Yeah.
I think that's it.
I think I'm just...
I'm gonna...
I'm going to figure it out.
I'm going to bring it up.
I'm going to get him to... I'm going to do whatever I can to get him to see us.
And listen, you've done a magnificent job of ending the cycle of violence.
I'm sure you'll be able to solve this one.
I mean, if I can help in any way, just let me know.
I'm not sure that he's going to want to chat with me about probing the bond with his grandparents, but if he wants to, I'm happy to.
But you're like a Valkyrie, a female warrior, in terms of tamping down this cycle of violence.
And given all that happened to you, I think you've done a wonderful job and you should be immensely proud.
You were in desperate straits with your son.
I mean, I get that.
I understand that.
And you didn't know what you didn't know.
I just, I really want you to come out of this in particular, Natalie, with my intense admiration.
And I hope that means something to you because I don't just hand it out like candy.
But my intense admiration for your obvious love for your children, for your capacity to contain and work through the abuse that you suffered and to Break this cycle of violence and abuse and predation that has probably been going on for 10,000 years.
I'm not kidding.
Like, it's stopped with you.
It's diminished with you.
You can solve it with you.
And that is heroic beyond any language that I could summon to describe it.
Well, that is the most wonderful thing I could have heard from you because I know in my letter I was like, Tell my son not to be with me and what I meant was, and I didn't mean it as you instructing him, when I wrote that it was like, I must be that bad that I am one of those parents that a child should defoo from.
Do you know what I mean?
Because maybe it's me that's ruining them and you've just said the most beautiful thing to me.
That's given me hope and strength and coming from you is amazing because you're not really, you're tough on mums and dads that don't do the right thing and I love that about you.
And I thought that that's who I was.
I thought I was one of them and I didn't want to be one of them.
Right.
Right.
And look, I mean, if just from a complete tactical standpoint, the choice is to have you influence him or to have the continued dysfunctional ghosts of his grandparents dominate his behavior.
What would you choose if you were in my shoes, right?
To have you.
Because you know the truth about your grandparents and your grandparents denied the truth to him and to you and to themselves.
So you are the bearer of truth in this family?
Yeah.
And we have to deal with this because he could end up in jail.
He could.
He could kill somebody.
And if I do nothing then, now that I know, then I am responsible.
So I am going to do, I am going to Do whatever it takes to get that through to him.
Good.
And to help him heal from that.
Good.
And again, if there's anything I can do, please let me know.
I mean, I think we got there.
Please let me know how it goes.
But I think that's it.
I'll keep you updated.
Thank you so, so much.
You're very, very welcome.
Great job.
And I look forward to hearing what happens.
Thanks, Stefan.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest free domain show on philosophy.
And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement and your resources.
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