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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:25
Escaping From Prison
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Time Text
Hello?
Hello, go ahead.
Oh, hi, how are you doing?
I'm very well.
How are you doing, my friend?
I'm okay, thank you.
Thank you very much for having me on your show.
I really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Sorry if I'm a bit nervous.
Yeah, so I'm sorry if this question comes across as a bit, I don't know, unspecific or annoying, but basically, I just wanted to get some advice really on how to sort out what I perceive to be as quite unhappy with my life basically, i.e.
mine, and I've got all the reasons there to describe it like that.
I know what is wrong with it, but I just find it hard to kind of, I don't know, implement changes to sort it out.
I'm just trying to think.
Do you want me to ask questions, which I'm happy to do, or I'm happy to listen?
Whatever works best for you.
Yeah, I mean, if I give you kind of like a general overview of what I'm getting at, I'll do that.
It's basically just
I don't know, it kind of lacks, I lack the enjoyment of it and to me it's really frustrating and sad because I'm 25 and I've had friends who've, well I've got one of my best friends who, well, he died in 2012 and he was only about two years older than me and I kind of get a bit, I kind of feel a bit stupid as like, you know, he had no choice and he had all these
It has a life.
I'm healthy, and I'm relatively young, and I feel a bit ungrateful, and secondly, clueless, really, and a bit lost.
It probably would be useful at this point for you to ask questions, I guess, because otherwise I'll sort of ramble on in my nervous No, I understand.
I've had some friends who died.
My best friend, when I was 11 or 12, he had a congenital heart defect.
He just dropped dead of a heart attack and that was very tragic.
And then another friend of mine was beheaded in a motorcycle accident in my teens.
And when I was in boarding school, a boy who was very popular and A great soccer player and all that, he jumped into a pool and bumped his head and was underwater for just that little bit too long and then was, I mean, mentally crippled and physically crippled and was just wretched.
So, when you see some of these random bullets that rain down on people, you know, through, you know, the motorcycle guy was a bit of a nut job in some ways in hindsight.
But, you know, when you see the random bullets that rain down on people, largely through no fault of their own.
It does give you some pause and you know the death thing doesn't always give you this feeling that life is something to be treasured and it can make you a little bit more alarmed about life that there can be these random things occurring in your body and in just you know well Jesus I mean just look at me I wake up one day it's like hey by the way you have cancer.
Fuck!
Based on what?
No family history really that healthy as can be and exercise and eat well and all that kind of stuff but so there is I mean there is part of you that says well you know life is at least for me the life is a treasure and not something to be taken lightly and you know love and enrich every day and so on but there's another part of you that's like well some you know random bad shit can really happen and it's not so much energizing as it is a little paralyzing sometimes.
So I don't want to sort of tell you your experience I just wanted to show you some of my thoughts.
I can certainly understand why your friend who died might not lead you to have this wonderful appreciation.
of life.
You know like we've all had these situations if you drive where if you've done something a second earlier or a second later things could have gone really really badly and that doesn't make you appreciate driving and think how wonderful driving is.
You're just sitting there sweating and your heart pounding and you know it makes you a little bit more alarmed to drive sometimes.
So these near misses I don't think that they automatically translate you into a deeper and richer appreciation of life.
I think it reminds us of life's fragility and that sometimes blends some of our ambitions and commitments to our future.
Does that make any sense?
To me, it kind of, I don't know, because what frustrates me, I've even said to him in his life, I've been moaning to all my friends about the same thing for the last at least three years, I think.
It's not that I'm a particularly stupid person or anything, it's just there's something stopping me from fixing these problems.
So, just a quick rundown, it's no sort of, you know, career path direction, bad relationship with my parents, lacking friends, and lacking the people, what lacking people I actually want to associate with, because I live in the sticks, or in the middle of nowhere, over here.
I kind of, with no offence to Redneck himself so to speak, I'm just surrounded by people who are very prodigious and hateful and it's uncomfortable to even spend time with anyone locally so I guess I'm always looking for people who have a like-minded way of looking at things but it's really hard to find so I guess really another point I want to make is sort of one of the main things I guess which kind of
What frustrates me the most is that I don't really have this kind of focus that a lot of other people have.
I'd really like to dedicate my life to something and try and find happiness that way, but at the moment I'm just sort of, not repeating mistakes, but just not getting out of things I don't like, and not really enjoying anything.
And even the things I used to love, like playing music and things like that,
reading that even that's become kind of dull and boring and not boring but just I don't know I haven't really I've lost a spark I haven't really when people say oh you're a great musician or whatever and I just don't I don't really care about it as much and that sounds bad so I guess I'm just looking for this I would like to in a way of um achieving sort of a happiness or goals and hopefully everything else around me friends and
people and you know moving out would fall into place because of this but I just find it very difficult to actually pinpoint that exact thing and I've been searching for years and it's frustrating and brings me down and down all the time and my girlfriend picked up on it last night when she said are you okay with me do you feel the same and I said oh yeah I do it's not you it's you know this and I explained to her and um I don't know she's I don't know she just sort of says I'll pick anything and stuff but
If you don't mind, let's start.
You said you had a bad relationship with your parents.
How would that be characterized?
How would I know that if I saw it?
It's just, I don't know.
I live with them as well, so it's not like you can escape them.
It's just been sort of, I basically live on a farm so it's just always very very stressful and stress isn't dealt with properly and I think it's just passed down to everyone and so people just sort of get, family members just get sort of sucked into the stress and it's always an unpleasant place to live in.
So the only cure to that is to move out but because I've got like anxiety problems I tend to find a job and then have a panic attack and walk out and not get back to it and then end up doing a really crappy job and being too scared to get back to it.
And then it's a constant cycle.
I keep trying to get out of the household and live my own independent life and then come crashing back down, crawling back through the cat flap into a very, I don't know, it's just, I have so much sort of Anger in a way.
I don't even bother really.
I think I'm almost as bad as them perhaps, but I'm not aggressive.
I'm always just saying, chill out, relax, don't be stressed.
That never really helps.
So that's one issue I guess.
Sorry for not being very clear.
Sorry to interrupt.
So you said that the farm is a stressful and anxious place to be?
Because of the uncertainty of the weather and crops and prices of, I mean, yeah.
And their capacity to be able to deal with stress.
They can't process it in a very good way.
It just comes down badly.
And is it right for me to understand that if you're not available to work on the farm, that's tougher for your parents, right?
Because they need the labor and if you have somebody who's able to work for cheap or for free, right?
Well, I've always been involved.
You know, it's too much work, seven days a week, whatever, so I haven't got involved.
So I'm not really part of their working relationship, but I am part of the family relationship, which sort of feels a bit of that.
So that's one of the aspects of, you know, I don't enjoy living here.
And if nothing in particular changes, What do you see 35 as looking like?
So what's happening in 10 years for you?
Well, I still have panic attacks in certain situations because of whatever reasons it hasn't been overcome and I'm still at home and it's still awful and terrible.
I still haven't got the friends I want.
I still haven't I've got the people around me that I want, and I haven't got the job that I would like, which I don't know yet, but I'm desperate to find out.
Right.
Okay.
And I imagine that things would be a little worse, right?
I mean, just because... Oh, definitely.
Panic, you know, panic in a situation that doesn't change tends to escalate until something changes, right?
Oh, yeah.
It would just be... Yeah, it would be horrible.
And how were you disciplined as a child?
Well, I can see it.
I can see it now of how they talk to other people and children.
There's no reasoning at all.
It's just yelling at a raised voice.
And in the past, yeah, I was hit as well sometimes.
And so you hit and yelled at and how was the hitting?
I mean, was it spanking?
Was it butt face?
How was that?
How did that happen?
Well, it would be, most of the time it would be, yeah, it would be spanking or whatever.
But there were more, there had been a few extreme situations where I've sort of been chased at by my father and, you know, had a fist thrown at me or been hit by a mop or something.
But I was quite young.
Right, okay.
And when you say that you weren't reasoned with, what did that look like?
like?
It just rather than sort of, well, the situation when I was sort of chased was literally just me laughing with my the situation when I was sort of chased was literally just Laughing with my friend.
I don't know what I was doing.
I don't think I was being particularly mischievous.
I mean, I was laughing with my friend and messing around.
And next thing, I was just chased, pretty much.
So there was no warnings.
There was no, you're annoying me.
There's nothing.
Yeah, it was just from one extreme to the other.
And I find that there isn't much Wait, so you mean sort of sarcastic?
Yeah.
Yeah, oh.
Sarcastic British parents.
Let me just make a note here.
you're right aren't you you're just very sarcastic like they sort of brush it off with that defense like oh you know the thing don't you yeah you know the thing sort of thing so there's never any wait so you mean sort of sarcastic yeah yeah oh sarcastic British parents let me just make a note here I've never heard of that before just you know I like to get something new out of every every Sunday show But yeah, eye-rolling, sarcastic British parents.
Anyway, right, okay, so as far as I understand what you're saying, one of the major issues, if I were to sort of throw in my opinions from outside, one of the major issues here is unpredictability, right?
Like you're just laughing with a friend.
You're not breaking any rules, right?
They don't say, don't go play with the woodchipper.
And you're like, oh, I'm gonna go play with the woodchipper.
I hope I don't get caught.
Oh, I've got caught.
Right now I'm going to get punished, right?
It wasn't like that?
Right, right.
This is something that Ayn Rand talked about, and she had a great experience with tyranny, of course, growing up in Russia.
And she said that the problem with tyranny is the unpredictable nature of it.
Right?
So if there's a death penalty for spitting on the sidewalk, don't spit on the sidewalk.
But the essence of tyranny is not harsh rules but no rules and random harsh punishments.
Unpredictable, unguessable harsh punishments, right?
Our fight-or-flight mechanism is designed to process particular information, right?
Like there's a big giant lion's tail waving through the grass coming towards me, I better do something, right?
But if you're in an environment where punishments are random and unpredictable, then I think what generally happens is your fight-or-flight mechanism gets completely screwed up.
Because it's random, you can't see the lion, but there's always a lion.
The fight-or-flight mechanism is designed to spike.
You either get away, in which case you feel better, Or you don't get away, in which case you feel nothing.
Either way you're fight or flight mechanism.
Fight, flight, or freeze.
But if you're in a situation where you simply do not know what is permitted, what is not permitted, and if you cannot appeal to your punishers for any just explication of rules, right?
So if you're being chased and hit and yelled at or whatever, and you say, what did I do wrong?
And if your punishers won't give you an answer, then you are in a situation of tyranny.
And technically this makes the entire West a tyranny.
I just sort of wanted to point this out.
It's not just family, it's political.
Anyone can be audited.
There are books out there which say we break an average of five felonies a day without even knowing it.
We are all in a stressed out situation with regards to our governments because We are in a situation of no rules.
There are so many rules, so many tax rules, so many regulations that it simply is impossible for us to be secure in avoiding illegality.
And that's sort of the point, to keep us on edge, to keep us anxious, to keep us afraid of criticizing the powers that be.
That's the whole purpose of these rules, is to keep everyone on edge and to make the attack of the tyrant subject only to his whim.
I point that out politically because it's probably easier to see that politically than it is to see it within your family.
But if you're in a situation where you cannot appeal to the rules and where punishment occurs on the whim, on the emotional whim of the punisher, then you are in a situation where your fight-or-flight mechanism is going to be likely in perpetual activity to some degree or another.
You're never going to feel fully relaxed.
You're never going to feel fully secure.
And you're never going to feel fully safe.
Right, right, right.
So the panic attacks, you know, I mean, it to me, it's the difference between if you go into a boxing ring, you know, like, and you've got boxing, like, you may not be that great at boxing, but at least you can see the blows that are coming, right?
Whereas if you're tied to a chair and they put a burlap sack over your head and then they hit you ten times a day at random intervals, you never go to relax.
You know, you lie down in the boxing ring, game's over.
You're not going to get hit anymore.
You're done.
Ooh, I can relax, you know, and find my teeth, right?
But if you're in a situation where If the rules are not defined, the punishments are made up on the fly, and the attacks occur randomly, then you are going to be in a situation of great emotional challenge.
And it has health effects, right?
I'm sorry, go ahead.
Yeah, definitely.
I mean, I've had, out of the family, but I know it's probably from there, I've had massive problems with anxiety since I was, well, since 2004, so nearly 10 years.
And that problem itself, that anxiety is the reason I'm not out of this situation because in order to get out of this situation I need a job which pays the bills and which I can actually stay in for more than a month.
Because my last job I was out after a month because of these panic attacks I have and it causes a great deal of stress to my body.
So it wasn't me, it wasn't really me sort of leaving the job in a way.
It was actually my body saying, I can't handle this anymore.
I lost two stone in the month I went there.
And I just couldn't handle it anymore.
My body just said, no, you're going.
And it's always going back to square one.
I'm just pretty bad at finding this means of leaving the place.
But I guess the problem is the place itself, which created the anxiety, sorry, the anxieties which were created as part of the place, I still persist outside of it.
It kind of always brings me back.
Because of, yeah, I have massive panic attacks and have to walk out of these situations.
I've had therapy for a long time with the NHS and also privately as well.
I've taken, you know, antidepressants and I'm not on them now.
I don't know.
There are improvements because I used to have issues with getting on public transport and going to the supermarket, but that's fine now.
There's been some improvements.
It's just actually finding… Okay, I don't want to talk about the stuff that's going right, if you don't mind, just because I understand that.
So there's two things that I would talk about.
Again, this is all just off the cuff, idiot amateur hour as usual, but the first thing that I would focus on is the degree to which anxiety breeds isolation.
Anxiety breeds isolation and I think that's obviously that's one of the major issues that you're facing.
But we're so focused on the anxiety that we sometimes miss the isolation.
All abuse breeds isolation.
All abuse is designed to breed isolation.
Because when you have horizontal support systems, they reveal hierarchical abuse in your environment, right?
Because people, they come over and they say, holy shit, your parents are treating you, this is not good, whatever, right?
And so the sole purpose of abuse is to isolate.
And also isolation because it removes horizontal support structures, i.e. friends and lovers and companions who can give you a clearer view of your situation.
What happens is you end up with this hysterical empty bond with your abuser, right?
Because you can't spread out horizontally and get your own life, so you end up kind of attached in a very nonproductive way, in a very empty way.
You end up attached to your abusers, right?
So you lack the view from outside and you end up with this completely unsatisfying bond with your abusers that doesn't nourish you and doesn't let you get free and you just hang in this empty dead orbit, like a… little rock floating around Mercury, you know, like it doesn't get anything satisfying and you can't leave and you can't connect and this is the null zone.
This is the dead zone, which I think is really, really important.
Yeah, I mean, Stockholm syndrome is one way to put it.
That's usually a bit more of an extreme situation, but there is this issue that occurs.
So that's number one.
Number two is that the antidote to anxiety, in my opinion, one of the antidotes to anxiety is anger.
And I've been listening while you've been talking for any sense of anger.
Like, you got kind of fucked, if you don't mind me putting it so bluntly.
Of course.
Your whole neurological system is kind of hardwired against freedom, progress, liberty, security, growth, adulthood, all of this stuff, right?
You got hardwired against yourself.
Through no fault of your own.
I couldn't have put it better.
You've become your own tripwire, and through no fault of your own, and through no desire of your own, and through no error of your own, just because of what you had to survive with this random attacks from on high, you have, and for me, It was the spiderweb versus the flamethrower.
That was my experience of beginning to really deal with this stuff.
I felt like when I was younger, I felt like everywhere I moved were these spiderwebs.
And they weren't like chains because chains are obvious and chains are like, well, I'm going to saw through these bastards and get out, right?
It wasn't like a bear trap.
It's like these little acidic lashing little spider webs that just kind of irritate your skin and they kind of paralyze you and you don't want to move anywhere.
And it's not that bad, but you can kind of get by.
And for me, I think I had a dream about this when I was in therapy.
I can't remember, but it basically was like a big ass flamethrower.
And the flamethrower was the anger that burned away the spiderwebs that did not even give me the dignity of being chained.
You know that story of Gulliver with the Lilliputians, right?
There's all these tiny little threads holding him down.
I think that's why.
There's all these tiny threads called culture or history or family or religion or nationalism or whatever bullshit we're forced to swallow as children, right?
So it's these tiny little threads and you can't identify any one of them and you can't unpick any one of them.
Lock on your leg.
You know what to focus on.
You saw on that mother – until you get free.
But if you've got all these tiny little threads and nothing is particularly obvious and it's all just kind of binding you, it's like it's cocoon.
It's like being tied down by ants and it's just one big-ass flamethrower, which is – I'm angry about the whole situation.
I'm angry about the degree.
Personally, I speak for myself.
I don't tell you your experience.
My experience was I'm very angry that that which was supposed to help me, my fight-or-flight mechanism, which was supposed to protect me from evil, is now keeping me from good.
My whole fight-or-flight mechanism, which was supposed to make sure that I got to freedom, is now keeping me from freedom.
My whole fight-or-flight mechanism, which was supposed to serve my life, is now throttling my life.
I was very angry, and rightly so, and justly so, and healthily so, at the degree to which my body which was supposed to be my protector, my saviour, my temple, was turned against me and became my prison.
My body which was supposed to liberate me and propel me to the future became my prison, and that was an incredible injustice that was done to me when I was younger.
That is exactly how I feel now.
Do you think it's possible that this past has led me to not be able to make important life decisions now, i.e.
career path, job path, and things like that?
Of course.
Listen, sorry, if you lost two stone, also known as balls, if you lost two stone in your last job in a month, that's dangerous, right?
So, of course, of course your ability to make decisions about your future has been violently interfered with.
Yeah.
I mean, you might as well be on a freaking space station, right?
Yeah, yeah.
As far as your access to the rest of the planet goes, right?
Yeah, it's like whenever I think I know what I'm going to do, I'm interested in economics, but I'm not so sure about pursuing it in this country because it's, you know, No, no, no, no, listen, sorry to be annoying, but you're trying to over-leap your history to get to your future.
There's nobody with long and strong enough legs to over-leap their history to get to their future.
You can't do it.
No, no, no, no.
Listen, sorry to be annoying, but you're trying to overleap your history to get to your future.
There's nobody with long and strong enough legs to overleap their history to get to their future.
You can't do it.
You have to go back.
Right?
You want to find a way to break out of your prison and get to the wide and open fields of your future.
Thank you.
But the whole point is you've got to pick the lock.
I mean, you're just running at the wall saying, damn, I'm really trapped now because every time I run at this wall, I hit it and fall back, right?
But you've got to spend the time, effort and energy to pick the lock.
Do you know the best way?
In my opinion, the best way is the simple virtues, right?
You sit down with your folks.
Sorry, that's a ridiculous Americanism, which I really dislike.
They always use this in political.
You know, the folks who are trying to help you are the folks who really want to be folksy with you, and I think there's some folks over there.
We've got a big pile of folks over there, and oh, we're all so folksy.
You're from Hawaii!
You don't have folks!
Anyway.
But sit down with your parents, with the people who were around you when you were a kid, and say, hey, I've got some stuff I want to talk about.
You know, you blow on the lock with honesty and it falls away.
It's not easy.
It's terrifying.
It's terrifying.
But you've got some legitimate complaints about how you were raised.
You sit down with your family and you say, I need to talk.
Like you may have noticed, I'm kind of fucking stuck here.
Yeah.
And I have some complaints about how I was raised.
I have some issues with how I was raised and I'm angry, you know, and I'm not saying that this means I'm right, I'm not saying this means you're wrong, but this is my genuine experience of being in this family.
I have some problems, I want to talk about it with you.
You know, they say that nothing is, you know, the blood is thicker than water and family is everything.
Great!
Right?
If this is the strongest bridge known to man, let's drive The tank called Honesty Across It.
Right?
I mean, if family is everything, then let's, you know, let's talk about it.
If in my family I am to be censored, if in my family I am not to be allowed to speak the truth, if in my family I am not allowed to criticize, if in my family I am not allowed to have any genuine emotional experiences that are somewhat inconvenient to other people, then I better damn well know that.
Because then lies are thicker than blood.
Yeah.
Suppression is thicker than family.
And family is an incredibly weak structure.
Sorry, go ahead.
No, that's right.
I just think by bringing that up, it would be... I know it's bad to sort of assume the response or reaction, but I can imagine it being like me suddenly speaking Spanish to them, and then just saying, what?
And almost laughing, saying, are you mad?
I want to point out, first of all, it's not bad to anticipate the response.
It's impossible to not anticipate the response.
You know your parents, right?
Quarter century, you know your parents.
So it would be insane for you to not anticipate a response.
Right?
So I mean, that's not bad.
And you know, gosh, I hope that you won't get anything out of this like what you're going to do is good or bad.
But what you want is, is the truth.
You know, there's, I don't know if you've ever seen the movie Aladdin.
But in it, Robert Williams plays this hyperkinetic blue puff of smoke genie.
And at one point, the prince is like, I don't know what to say to Jasmine.
I don't know.
And he's like, how about the truth?
And there's this big flashing sign neon at the truth.
You know, it's so simple, right?
You're not a prince.
You're the truth.
Well, this is what my life is.
How about the truth?
You know, because if they attack you, if they mock you, if they laugh at you, if they dismiss you, then you have a pretty fucking important truth about your family.
Which is, they choose their own immediate emotional comfort over the reality of your genuine experience of the family.
That they do not want to hear the truth from you.
And in fact that they will attack and oppose you for speaking the truth to them.
That's just information to have.
And we should never deny ourselves accurate information about our relationships.
The degree to which we deny ourselves accurate information about our relationships is the degree to which we remain futile, empty, lost in space, and lose time forever.
You need accurate information about your relationships more than you need accurate information about the weather, about whether cars are coming when you're about to cross the street.
That's what you need is an accurate map of your relationships.
And the accurate map of your relationships cannot be generated by you, but can only be generated by you in interaction with others.
You speak the truth to them and you see and you feel their response to it.
It's not a one-time thing.
It can be a whole couple of runs at it.
I spent months on this particular process when I was mapping out the truth about my relationships.
I just needed some facts.
You know, when you're lost, when you're paralyzed, it's because you have no facts, right?
If you're in the woods, you've got no GPS, you've got no compass, you've got no map.
What the fuck are you going to do?
You're paralyzed.
I don't know what to do, right?
And so if you're lost in life it's because you do not have an accurate map of your relationships.
You do not have the truth about those around you and their perspectives and opinions and views of you.
So you need to get to the truth about your relationships before you can build any kind of change in the future.
Otherwise you just, you know, I put you in the middle of the ocean in a little boat and I say go to Calais.
And you're going to be like, wow, I don't know where I am.
I don't even know which ocean I'm in.
I don't know where the wind, I don't know.
You need a map before you can get anywhere.
And the first map that you always need is a map of your primary relationships.
And the only way to get that is to be honest with the people around you.
And what does the map have to say?
What sort of information do you need in the map?
Because I'm thinking maybe you can just break away and try to escape that way.
But escape from what?
You see, if you don't have an accurate map of your relationships, then you don't even know what you're escaping from, which means that you're very likely to recreate it somewhere else.
Right.
Like just running blindly in the woods, you get away from where you were, but you don't know if you're getting anywhere useful.
Yeah.
Because look let's say that you try and get this map and you find out, I'm not anticipating but you know if I were to put money down, you find out that your family does not choose to listen, does not choose to examine, does not choose to be honest, does not choose to heal.
Yeah.
Well I bet you they've never told you that honestly.
I bet you they've never told you listen you know we're a family and we appreciate you being around here but we never want to know anything about your genuine experiences and we certainly although we criticized you heavily and punished you as children we never ever want to be criticized or punished or not punished but we never want to be criticized as adults and that this family is merely a convenience of biological life forms living under the same roof structure but is nothing to do with love or intimacy and you know if your parents have ever said things like
Oh, you know, we love you, we'll do anything for you, this and that, we're family, it's everything.
And then you actually put that to the test.
And then you find out that it's all nonsense.
Well, what happens?
What's your emotional reaction likely going to be?
Yeah.
What's your emotional reaction likely going to be?
Well, it has happened before.
What was your emotional reaction?
I ended up that exact night, I ended up being very drunken and arrested.
You ended up drunken and arrested?
Yeah, I was younger, much younger.
Okay, what if you didn't suppress your emotional reaction with alcohol and acting out?
Well, I burst into tears the second it happened, and I don't often do that.
Okay, let me give you an analogy then, since you are having a tough time getting to this, which is probably why you're paralyzed, right?
So I say to you, listen, I'm going to sell you this car.
It's a really good price.
If you have any problems with it whatsoever, I will pay for the maintenance for the next five years.
Right?
You get the car, and the next day, the brakes fail.
And you bring it back to me, and I say, no, I'm not paying anything.
I'm just kidding.
That wasn't true.
That wasn't real.
How would you feel?
Betrayed.
Yeah, mad.
You'd be angry.
Yeah.
Because I had made a claim which was the basis of an interaction of a relationship and then I did not fulfill my end of the relationship.
So the people in my life who said I love you and I care for you and I'd do anything for you, I said okay well I want to talk about these difficult things.
Well no we can't do that.
Well I'm angry about this stuff that happened in the past.
Well too bad, deal with it.
Grow up.
Move on.
Put it behind you.
It's all in the past.
Forget it.
Forgive.
Forget.
Move on.
Right?
So, the people say they do anything for me.
Anything!
And then I needed a half-hour conversation about something that was difficult.
Wouldn't happen.
Well, if I'm going to be pissed off about a guy not fixing the brakes when he promises, how much more am I going to be pissed off about people who made all these promises not because they had any intention Any intention of doing anything for me, but simply to lull me into a situation where I could be exploited.
A little bit more important than fucking brakes on a car, right?
Yeah.
So this is where you get the honesty and you get the map and you find out if these limitations exist.
You know, if your parents are like, well, we'll do anything for you.
We'd love, you know, we love you.
Then, hey, you want to talk about this difficult stuff in your past?
Of course, we're your family.
Of course, we're your family.
We will sit down and we will talk about it as long as it takes until you feel better.
We will be honest.
We will be open.
We will grit our teeth.
We will... We all go to therapy if we have to.
We will find some way to help get you past this.
You know, the fucking Marines who are strangers don't leave dead bodies behind.
You know, they go back and they risk getting their skulls blown off to go pick up a corpse.
Can we at least get one-tenth of one percent of that from the people who claim that we're everything to them and we're family and we want to talk about something that's difficult?
Can we at least get one-tenth of one percent of the commitment that relative strangers have in a war zone from the flesh and blood who raised us?
That's all I'm asking.
Can we at least get the guarantees in writing to be enacted in the real world?
So you go and you find this map and if the map is false, if the map is a lie, if the map is manipulative, if the map has been to keep you around to exploit you or to avoid the past or to You know, for the emotional convenience of self-involved people.
Well, then you have a clear view of where you are.
And once you have a clear view of where you are, you can then find that the paralysis about where you want to go will lift.
But if you do not have the fog lift from where you are, if you do not get a map, a compass, a GPS, which is the truth about your relationships, you can't get anywhere except to another place that's pretty much the same as where you started.
Right.
No, that makes a lot of sense.
Yeah, I'm doing that now, I guess.
Now, unless this, I recognize this is a somewhat costly call for you, not even just in terms of money, but I do have lots of other callers and I do want to make sure that we get to those.
But if you do get a chance, drop me a line and let me know how it goes.
And if you do have a chance to talk to a therapist and you are going to sit down with your family and be honest about your thoughts and experiences with them, which I mean, unless you're in immediate physical danger, in my opinion, this is just so important.
It's a weird thing to even say, be honest, because what I'm saying is be honest to the people who you claim to love and who claim to love you.
I mean, to me, it's like saying to someone, if you don't like the wet, come out of the It feels that ridiculous and that obvious to say and I don't mean this in any way shape or form to be any kind of deficiency on your part because it took me an embarrassing amount of time to come up with this principle myself.
You know we all said honesty is a virtue.
Well be honest with the people in your life and it's just it's weird to have to say that but it is what needs to be said and it is what needs to be done.
So if you you know I would definitely work it out you know prepare with your therapist and if you're going to go into any you know fundamental conversations about history with your family and you You don't have any prior experience of that and you fear and feel that it's going to go badly, strongly, strongly, strongly urge to engage with a therapist ahead of time to do the role plays, to have the support that you need because it can be a brutal and grueling experience.
My hope and my goal is always that there's a breakthrough in the families, there's an honesty, there's a communication, there's a commitment to something better.
That is not the most common.
reaction or response but it's certainly something always to be hoped for and the best chance of achieving that is to engage with a therapist a really good therapist ahead of time and not one who's just you know well family is everything forgive forget and who's just there to manage their own bullshit by getting it keeping other people in dysfunctional relationships but focus on that and I hope that you will give it a chance I think it's the best way to break out and the breaking out it's not breaking out of the family it's breaking out of the paralysis Right?
Because the solution to paralysis in a dysfunctional family is not to leave the family, you know, it's simply to get the truth.
And what happens after that is usually pretty obvious, you know.
I mean, if the truth is that you finally get a breakthrough and you can really talk about things that matter and important, fantastic!
And if you end up just being completely brutalized, dismissed and attacked and minimized and so on, Then I think that your fight or flight mechanism will kick in in quite a different way and much more productively.
So if you get a chance to do, you know, drop me a line and let me know how it goes.
But those would be my suggestions.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you.
You're very welcome.
Great, great chat and best of luck to you.
I'm positive that you can get the life that you want.
I am absolutely positive that you can get the life that you want.
And I'm very sorry.
I'm incredibly sorry that this is the barricade you have to climb over because it's Barbed wire, shark's teeth, glass, broken bottles, but on the other side is some amazing stuff, and I'm very sorry that you have to go through this and you have to do this.
It's not how your life should be beginning, but I really do feel very strongly that once you pursue it, you will get some amazing stuff.
We appreciate it.
Thank you so much again.
You're very welcome.
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