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July 13, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
43:25
694 Foo Fighter (Video Available)
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Good morning, everybody.
Hope you're doing well.
This is in the Don't Try This At Home category, and this is a conversation that I had with a listener wherein I think some very useful things come out in terms of a personal breakthrough, in terms of personal growth and philosophy.
So this is from the Free Domain Radio Board, freedomainradio.com forward slash b-o-a-r-d.
This is entitled, The Thread In Which All My Issues Come To A Head.
He says, we'll call him Bob, as usual.
A bit over a week ago, I experienced a strong urge to take a dozen or so extra sleeping pills and just be done with it all.
Once I got out of this, I was shook up, so I dumped them all in the toilet.
Since then, my sleep has inched backwards thirty to forty-five minutes a night, all the way from the usual eleven-thirty to where I'm now writing this at four-thirty in the morning.
I have made up for this by sleeping in a couple of times, but for the most part have continued my usual habit of getting up around eight-thirty to nine AM.
I'm not sure I'd call this insomnia, because it's not like I have trouble getting to sleep, so much as no motivation to sleep.
It is also worth noting that I have significantly decreased my consumption of stimulants such as caffeine and ephedrine in the past half month, because I'm... anyway, we don't need to think about that.
I want to know what I can do to renormalize my sleep patterns.
It would be nice if the Earth slowed its spinning just a wee bit and gave me an extra half hour a day, but that's not a realistic expectation.
And then, that same day, but not early in the morning, but rather late in the afternoon or early in the evening, he said, one of my friends here killed himself early this morning.
And the weird thing is, I don't care.
Somebody posted back and said, this all sounds very alarming, which is not very helpful.
And somebody else posted and said, what do you suppose is going on with you?
What are you hoping we can say to help?
That hasn't already been said in 690 podcasts.
There is apparently something you aren't getting, that you are reaching out for, something you obviously, to my knowledge, did not get from your parents at all, for sure.
These things are all symptoms and not the real core of the problem, which I imagine is hell for you to face.
And then, I'm missing a little piece of text, and then he says, I'm perfectly able to be independent of my family, but I don't wish to be.
Every lashing with my dad's belts, every slap I got for not practicing for my mom's piano lessons, every humiliating thing they made me do as a child that I'm still not comfortable mentioning here.
All of it can be used against them.
And I have.
He's talking about his feeling that he is capable of sadism.
Three weeks ago I reduced my mother to a sobbing puddle of tears while she was trying to check her email.
I loved it.
The next day she brought me out to town and bought me a couple of hundred bucks of shit I didn't want anyway.
And yet through all this I believe I have been damaged.
The ideas Stefa shared with me have been enormously empowering, but power corrupts.
I have no interest in being good anymore.
My only interest is making my parents suffer, turning them against each other, against themselves, against me.
I would liken myself to Shakespeare's Iago, but without all the finesse.
And here I am now, so corrupted that I feel driven to brag about it.
There is only one twinge of guilt I feel, and that is with regards to this community.
You have something here.
You really do.
But it is not for me, and I am not for it.
I am not an asset to you.
In fact, I have become so toxic that I think I can only damage you.
It is for this reason you should consider yourselves lucky to be rid of me, and I shall be happy to rejoin the mainstream as a moderate Republican with full knowledge of my evil and all the benefits of being, quote, normal.
And I wrote to him.
I said, Do you think that your anger against your abusers is unhealthy?
Do you think it makes you the same as them?
Excuse me?
And there's a recent podcast called Mommy's Letter.
Pardon me!
Which you should listen to.
He said, not my anger, my actions.
I only wanted to hurt them.
Now I only want to hurt others.
I only want to hurt myself.
I only want to hurt you.
I hate you, Stefan.
I hate you because I can't dispute your philosophy and I can't live by it either.
So I can either loathe myself every time I'm not in agreement with status and theists, or I can relish in the evil I'm enabling.
And somebody asked him, why can't you live by the philosophy?
Who or what is stopping you?
If you don't love yourself, if you hate yourself, then you can't possibly love anyone else.
So that you hate Steph is redundant to say, did you listen to the podcast?
He said, I need friends that I can discuss issues deeper than the weather with, which is ironic because you're right.
I do hate everyone.
And he said, and somebody replies and said, where does the blame for that really lie?
Where does all that hate belong?
Who are the correct targets of your hatred?
Why are you not allowing yourself to fully experience these emotions, but instead react to them by lashing them out?
He said, you won't get anywhere with that line of reasoning because I'm not arguing against it.
I could defoo right now and live in poverty for the rest of my life.
No, I will be a good son and go to church and get married and get a nice cushy government job after my parents pay my tuition like they did for my sisters.
Blah blah blah, and this is all very important stuff.
And somebody asked him, exactly why continue to contend yourself for the crimes committed against you?
Why continue to hit yourself in the face after being forced to hit yourself in the face in the past?
And he replied, What I need is money.
If I don't get a good job, I won't have any money.
If I don't finish college, I won't be able to get a good job.
If my parents don't start helping me soon, I won't be able to finish college.
If I don't appease my parents, they aren't going to help me pay for college.
Subscribing to your philosophy only undermines me at every level of my ambitions.
So I saw a pattern here and I jumped in and I said, You feel frustrated and angry, but helpless.
You want to avoid that helpless feeling because it will propel you into action which you fear.
Because you will not process your fear and frustration, you are provoking it in others, here on the board, by attacking virtue, talking about suicide, and rejecting all help.
Board members, don't get sucked in.
Bob, get off the goddamn fence and get rid of your family.
And then I didn't hear from him for a little while.
A while?
A couple hours.
And then he said, Thank you, Steph.
It is finished.
And the most terrifying part was that my dad called me on the phone as I was writing this, which he maybe does once a semester.
I told him I didn't wish to talk and hanged up, and then sent this little gem along.
Dear Mom and Dad, It is with regret that I am now terminating our relationship permanently.
Through counseling, I have come to understand that my mental, social and physical well-being must be my top priorities, and you are an obstacle to all three.
From the humiliating beatings you inflicted upon me as a child, with belts and wooden spoons, to your attempts at damaging my grip on reality by imposing your insane mysticism to withholding my medication to force me to come home.
Yesterday, I found out where all this can lead to, and to say it's been close at times, for me, would be an understatement.
But it's not for me.
I will do what is necessary to get myself through college, even if that means taking years off to wash dishes and live off ramen noodles.
But I will no longer have to loathe myself for my dependence on abusive people.
Please mail me all my paperwork, birth certificate, tax papers, etc., and don't bother having my sisters email me.
I'm cutting them off, too.
Goodbye, Bob." And I said to him, you are a great golden god of truth.
How do you feel?
He said, happy, terrified, light as a daisy, and vulnerable as one, too.
And he talked a little bit more.
There's lots of congratulations to him.
He talked a little bit more about the stuff his parents had done to him, and it's just Madness.
It's just madness.
Anyway, so I thought it was a very, very interesting... And again, thank you so much to this fine gentleman for sharing his thoughts and feelings in this regard.
And I think it's useful, and I sort of wanted to explain why I took the approach that I took, and it has a lot to do with a psychological defense mechanism called projection, which is a very, very... I mean, if there's one psychological defense or one thing that's going to mess up your relationships that you should get a handle on, I would say that it would be this one of defense through projection.
So, sleeplessness.
I mean, there's a couple of patterns that I've noticed.
But just before that, let me just mention something.
I did also say this.
Bob said that he needed his parents to get through school.
He needed their financial support and so on.
And I said, don't give me that because I got... My brother and I kicked my mom out when I was 15.
I worked a couple of jobs.
We had roommates just to make it through.
Because when you have an abuser around, you've just got to get them out of your life.
So for those who are on the YouTube and who haven't heard much of this family stuff, this may be worth me spending just a minute or two to explain where I'm coming from, to forestall the inevitable emails that come in sort of two categories, and I don't dispute that they could be rational.
I'll just keep my response to them.
One is that I had a horrible and difficult family life, and now I'm encouraging everyone else to dump their family because of my own unresolved issues and so on.
I don't believe that that's the case.
I'm overjoyed when people have a good relationship with their family.
I think it's wonderful.
So I don't think that's the case.
I just don't think that we should be abused.
I mean, that's my basic principle.
And I don't think parents get off scot-free, especially when we're adults and we have choices that we did not have as children.
I don't think the parents get off scot-free in that regard.
So that's one issue.
The second is that people will then say, but Steph, you're so anti-family.
You're so anti-family.
And to that I simply will offer a feminist reply, that feminists throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries, and now into the present, but it's a little more accepted now, would say to women that it is not acceptable for you to be abused by your husband.
It is not acceptable for you to be abused by your husband.
And they would cheer whenever a woman would leave an abusive husband.
Now there were some feminists who went too far and said that all heterosexual intercourse is rape and all marriage is exploitation and love is impossible and blah blah blah blah blah.
But that's certainly not my perspective, either on marriage or on family.
What I am saying is that if you are involved in an abusive relationship with your family, you should try to talk to them about it as best you can.
But there needs to be a cut-off point where you say, that's it, I'm done, this is a deal-breaker.
If you treat me badly, if you disrespect me, if you denigrate my ideas and my ideals and that which I treasure and find most beautiful, If you put me down, if you undermine my confidence, either verbal or, God forbid, physical abuse, or things that are even worse, then you just don't have that relationship in your life.
I mean, you can have it in your life, you just want people to be aware of the costs.
It corrupts you, it destroys your capacity for love and joy, or even any kind of remote happiness.
And of course, what it will do is it will, if you keep your abusive parents in your life, it will cause you inevitably to commit the greatest of crimes.
The greatest of crimes, which is the abusing your own children or other children in one form or another.
And it probably won't be as direct and overt because social standards have changed, but you will end up harming your own children.
And that is the one crime which our conscience will never let us resurrect ourselves from.
You can never survive harming a child because they are so beautiful and so dependent and so helpless.
And it is the greatest Disparity of power is the greatest hegemonic structure between a parent and a child.
This does not mean that the parent-child relationship is innately corrupt, any more than the teacher-student relationship is innately corrupt.
But it does mean that there's great danger of corruption, and that corruption can easily continue into our adult lives.
And I just say, say no.
Say no.
I do not accept that behavior in my adult life.
If you want to be around me, you have to be You have to not just say love, but do love, but be love.
So, it's not that I'm anti-family.
If I say that women should leave abusive husbands or husbands should leave abusive wives, does that make me anti-marriage?
No.
It means I have a higher standard for marriage than abuse.
I think that is being entirely pro-marriage.
When you raise the standard for something, it's because you think it can be great, because you think it can be fantastic and wonderful and beautiful and magical.
And family life can be that.
Family life can be that.
But not until we start raising the bar.
And this is how the world is saved.
One human being at a time.
So what was going on for this gentleman?
Sleeplessness is, for me at least, and for others I've talked to, and perhaps it is the case for you as well, When you can't sleep anymore, you should rejoice.
And it's a very hard thing to do, because sleeplessness is a form of torturous behavior.
I went through, I don't know, 16 months of insomnia before I ended up breaking with my family.
It is a really torturous thing, but it's your brain reforming.
To use metaphorical, but I think valid concepts, which I've talked about before, It is your false self.
They say sunlight is the best disinfectant.
It is your false self being brought wriggling into the light like a snake and biting and spitting venom and so on because it is frightened and angry.
When you are ready for a great leap forward within your personality, within your ethics, within your life of philosophy, within your life of virtue and integrity and truth, when you are ready for the great leap forward, your brain gathers itself and it cannot rest because it is reforming and changing your core beliefs and your core assumptions.
And it is a hellish thing to do alone, but we need to do it alone, at least in some measures.
I think it's very good to have a therapist, a competent counselor, therapist, psychologist, psychiatrist, whatever, with you in the journey, but there's a lot of it that just has to be done alone.
Read books by Alice Miller, read books by Nathaniel Brandon, Psychology of Self-Esteem is very good.
Read stuff like that so that you have some sense of the theory.
My podcast may also help.
In that extent.
But that's another reason why the sleeplessness occurs.
Because it gives us that stare at the 4 o'clock in the morning staring at the ceiling time.
But the important thing is to relax.
You can't force yourself to sleep.
You can't make yourself fall asleep.
You can't make yourself stay asleep.
I would go dancing myself, but there's lots of things that you can do.
And meditation is helpful.
I found yoga and ashtanga yoga and aromatherapy and massage I found quite helpful.
But the process is occurring.
It's like puberty.
It's just occurring, and you're not in control of it.
It's the process of growth, right?
We take steps towards becoming a person of integrity, and it becomes a rocket, right?
We think we're climbing a staircase, and it becomes a catapult.
Waaah!
Off we go!
And we're not exactly in control of the journey.
We are latent philosophical gods, and all you need to do is poke around in this seeming graveyard, and you bring an entire chorus line.
Personal growth to life, and they just carry you off, whether you like it or not.
These are landmines of explosive growth, I guess you could say, and we can't see where they are.
So you can initiate it, and you can control it after it's underway, but there's a bit of a geyser that occurs, at least for me, at the beginning, and I think for this gentleman as well, that is important to note ahead of time.
So you're not shocked by it, not surprised by it.
So, what was arising in this gentleman, because of his highly abusive, and not just physically abusive, and the physical abuse is usually the easiest part of abuse that you may have faced as a child, because the physical abuse is something where you have a pinnable horror, right?
You can identify it.
It's got shape.
The mental abuse, and I understand the crazy mysticism.
My mother was very much this way inclined.
She would talk about knitting people their psychic helmets to defend them against bad thoughts.
It would just be very, very bizarre about reality.
Of course, this is what you have to do when you have abused children.
You have to make up this alternate reality.
People think it's to cast God into.
God is in some other reality where it makes sense.
People create alternative realities.
People create religious realities.
They create countries and states.
They create these things as a place for their conscience to go.
As a contradictory place wherein the bad things they've done aren't bad.
That's why the new aminal realm, the abstract realm, the platonic realm of ideas, that is the scar tissue of personal guilt.
I mean, this is why people create these alternate realms, these other dimensions, these psychic realms.
This is why they have past lives, because they've done very bad things in their life.
And their conscience eats away at them.
And so they are forced either to confront their conscience and grow and face the bitter truth that they have done wrong, or they are forced to leave reality and to think in some other realm, to live in some other realm, to imagine a realm where 2 plus 2 is 5, where doing bad things is not bad, and it's just scar tissue.
They are propelled by the demons of their conscience.
The conscience is inescapable.
We know everything all the time.
We know the truth about everything.
We know the truth about everything we've done.
We know the morals about everything we've done.
We know the right and wrong of everything we've done.
We know down to the deepest little scar tissue every wound that we have inflicted on other people.
We know all of this.
And we pretend that we don't, and that simply causes us to split from reality.
And people say, well, maybe God exists in some other dimension.
What they're saying is, I've lied to people about God, I feel guilty, and now I must create another dimension wherein I can put my conscience, place my conscience, a realm wherein I can eject my conscience.
But it doesn't work, of course.
It doesn't work.
The misery continues and escalates.
But we can talk about that more another time, the mysticism as a scar tissue of guilt.
But this gentleman did have a horrendous past, and his parents were manipulative and cold and destructive, even now.
Even now.
And everybody has this belief that their parents will fall apart if they stop seeing them.
It's not true, because they have no relationship with you anyway.
Somebody who's abused you can never have a relationship with you.
Can never have a relationship with you.
You can't call a girl up you've raped and say, let's go on a date.
You can't have a relationship with somebody if you've abused.
You just can't.
So, when you leave, the amazing thing is, they don't care.
This is the whole pantomime that's going on.
This whole ridiculous, empty pantomime of being together and let's have dinner and come on by and let's go shopping and let me buy you... It's all nonsense.
If you go, they don't care.
Because they're narcissistic and they're destructive and they're violent and they're corrupted.
And it's evil.
Harming a child in the manner of hitting a child... God!
God!
God!
If I could wipe one evil from the world, it would be the children.
The abusive children.
Particularly the emotional abuse.
If you want to know what's at the root of the Muslim violence, it's the treatment of their children.
It's all about the treatment of the children.
That's where people learn how the world is.
They'll fuss and fight and kick, but they don't care.
I mean, they don't care.
You vanish from their life, and you feel that you're so important to them, but you're not.
You're not.
In fact, they're quite relieved when you leave.
At least my parents were.
They're quite relieved when you leave, because they don't want to talk to you.
What they want is for you to be around and pretend that nothing happened so that they can feel less guilty about what they did to you.
That's what they want.
They want you to be around pretending that nothing happened.
But the moment that you start talking about your past in any kind of real way, everybody wants you the fuck out of there.
I'm promising you.
Everybody wants you out of there.
Everybody wants you out of there.
Everybody wants you gone.
And they will force it if you don't.
They will end up pushing you away because they just don't want to know the truth.
It's too painful.
It's too agonizing.
Nothing happened.
That's what they say.
That's the rule.
Nothing happened.
So, what happened for this gentleman?
I don't know what the instigating incident was.
It could have been some of my later podcasts about the family and about corruption.
But I can tell you this, that he saw a crack in the dungeon wall.
He saw a crack in the dungeon wall.
And when we see a way out, when we see a place that we can escape through, when we see a bend in the bars or a crack in the wall, Or we hear their thunk as the rusty lock falls from the door, as the chains crack.
Then what we think is that escaping will be death.
I'm gonna hide here.
I'm gonna hide here.
We think that beyond the wall, outside the barred window, in the hallway beyond the door, is somebody who would kill us the moment we step out of our cage.
The moment we step out of our dungeon.
The moment we decel.
And we're terrified.
We're terrified.
And with that terror comes great shame.
And this is a moment.
This is a moment.
This man just changed his whole life.
And not just his whole life, but the life of everyone who he's going to have any kind of meaningful relationship with.
First of all, he's now going to have the capacity to have meaningful relationships now that his abusers are, at least for the moment, at least out of his life.
But Everybody that he has relationships with in the future are going to be more freed by his freedom.
More freed by his freedom.
When he has finished his defooing, he's getting rid of his family of origin.
When he's finished his defooing, And somebody else says, oh, I'm so guilty, my mom did X, Y, and Z, and they just, they're mean to me, or they just, I don't like their company, they're boring, they're this.
You just say, well, get rid of them.
You don't, you're not, it's not a sentence, you're not chained to these people, you're not Siamese twins.
Life is short.
If they don't find, if you don't find value in people, why pull along this ridiculous charade in your life and sacrifice your happiness?
For the sake of what?
Their happiness?
No.
Easing of their conscience.
I don't think that we should be more than That solves for bad people's consciences.
I think that virtuous people should strive for just a little bit more.
So everyone he talks to in the future is going to get this echo of freedom from him.
He's going to say, well, I did it.
Now it's a possibility.
I've been saying this for over a year.
I did it.
It's a possibility, and it's a great thing, and it's a wonderful thing, and let me tell you about all the wonderful things that occurred after I got the abusers out of my life.
Beautiful marriage, great job.
This fantastic conversation with you brilliant people, you geniuses of the web, So it's a good thing.
It's a good thing.
And the other thing too, which I'd say just before we continue, is that if you're going to do it, then now's the time to do it.
If you're going to do it, now's the time to do it.
Because you wouldn't want to end up being someone who did it 10 years from now or 20 years from now.
Or after your parents died in 30 years or 20 years or whatever, said, oh man, well there's 20 years I'm not going to get back where I was unhappy, my relationships were bad and I was I kind of loathe myself for my cowardice and kind of loathe myself for allowing myself to be subjected to the whims and emotional brutalities of bad people.
So, if you can think of yourself 20 years in the future with 20 years of wasted time dealing with a bad family, you'd probably send a message in a bottle back to say, do it now.
Save these 20 years.
They don't add up to anything but misery.
Do it now.
Do it now!
And I know how terrifying it is.
I know.
But it is like pulling off a band-aid.
It looks bad, but when you're done, it's done.
And it's not nearly as bad as you think.
Afterwards.
And later, you're like, what the hell was I thinking?
Literally later, when you look back, you say, wow, God, all those years, what was I thinking?
What was I thinking?
What was I hoping to achieve?
And this is how the world is going to be freed.
So what was occurring?
He stopped sleeping, which is an indication that he's gathering himself, he's gathering his strength to make a leap.
He's gathering his strength to make a leap.
And what he does then is he begins to panic, as we all do.
It is a thousand mile walk to the computer to send that email, or to the... I dropped a letter off in my mom's post box.
And it is a hellish thing to do.
So he begins to panic and he begins to find ways of doing it.
He's feeling frustrated, angry, helpless, afraid, terrified, which is natural and healthy.
If you didn't feel those things, you'd be more like your parents than we would care to think about.
And so he can't handle those feelings.
How should he?
How could he?
He's a young fellow too, right?
So, I mean, all the more nobility, all the more heroism.
And so he can't handle these feelings, and this is where the concept of projection comes in.
The way that I was able to post what I posted, which I think was helpful, was I said to myself, what am I feeling?
When I was reading his posts about some guy killing himself and he doesn't care and he doesn't feel anything and he's feeling suicidal and so on.
And he's rejecting all help, and he's talking some pretty good street trash about becoming a Republican, and so on.
And I don't mean to laugh, because it wasn't serious.
It was serious.
But looking back, I think it's easy to see how funny it was, in a particular kind of way.
So he's talking all this trash about how he's going to become a virus of corruption and so on and relish in his evil of hurting his parents and so on.
And what he's actually doing there is he's beginning to inhabit his parents' mentality of destruction and rage.
He's beginning to truly understand his parents, right?
As long as you're blind to your parents, it's like you've got an injury on your back, but you're on heavy morphine.
You can't tell.
So why would you get it fixed?
Why would you deal with it?
Not feeling is very, very dangerous.
Feeling can be unpleasant.
Physical pain can be unpleasant.
But let me tell you, I just got a bad tooth yanked because it had cracked all the way to the root, and I knew that because it had hurt me.
And if it didn't hurt me, then it would still be in my head, rotting away my jaw.
So pain is a damn good thing.
Pain is an emotional Negative, what are called negative emotions, the pain, fear, rage, they're all absolutely essential to you and if you reject them, you're basically doing a trapeze walk blindfolded with no balance beam and not even knowing you're on a trapeze.
Well, of course you're going to fall and keep falling and then you're going to have to, you know, your pain escalates and you have to keep getting rid of your pain and you get more pain and you have to keep getting rid of your pain and this is how we end up winking out of existence and self-erasing.
So he is beginning to feel the fear and rage that he felt at the hands of his parents, which has been suppressed for many years, which is exactly healthy and exactly right.
What you need to do when you're a kid is get through at any cost.
And he's also beginning to feel the sadism that his parents have.
And his parents are sadistic.
And I won't even get into the details there.
You control the board if you want.
Prowl the board would probably be a better way of putting it.
So he is beginning to feel all of this, and this is going to propel him into action.
Now he knows, excuse me, he knows that it's going to propel him into action.
He knows that if he feels deeply what he's going through, it's going to propel him into action.
And he doesn't want to act.
None of us want to do this.
Who would choose this as a crossroads?
Nobody.
Except those of us we save in the future.
They would desperately choose that we take this right road.
So he can't handle his feelings, because his feelings are going to propel him into action.
So I said to myself, OK, I'm reading over this guy's post.
What do I feel?
I feel frustrated.
Fundamentally, I feel frustrated.
I feel afraid.
And I feel angry.
Now, because I don't know this gentleman very well, These feelings were being evoked in me and were being, in a sense, provoked in me by what he was doing.
I turn against virtue, I will now become a bad guy, and I'm going to corrupt this board.
If I stick around, you're better rid of me, and so on.
This all sounds very melodramatic, and I don't mean to say that it is, because this man was in a general and genuine extremity, and this is not melodramatic.
This is not melodramatic.
I don't want anybody to think of the phrase drama queen or anything like that.
This is not the case.
This is an extremity.
This is a soul in agony.
This is an extremity.
It is not dramatic to cry out if your leg is amputated.
It is not dramatic to be in an extremity when you're facing the disintegration of your family or accepting that your family was never there to begin with.
So I said, well, what am I feeling?
And I'm feeling frustration, fear, and anger based on this guy's responses that he's not letting anyone... that he's saying, I am in grave danger and he's refusing all help.
That is naturally and inevitably going to provoke frustration, fear and anger in other people.
Frustration that you won't take the help, fear for your safety, and anger that you're rejecting.
Anger at the setup.
The setup is, I'm in grave danger, and then you reject all help.
That's a setup, and that's designed to make other people feel angry and frustrated and afraid.
So, once I got that, once I understood that, then I realized that what I was feeling was what he could not feel, but needed to.
That what I was feeling was what he needed to feel, and was feeling, but couldn't feel.
Because we can't handle our own emotions at times, and they're so overwhelming, and they propel us to do things that we just damn well don't want to do.
Because of that fact... Excuse me.
Good heavens.
Time to take the car detailed, I think.
What we cannot feel, we provoke in others.
What we feel intensely but can't handle, we provoke in others.
The feeling's gotta go somewhere, and we won't get into all the subtle reasons and psychologies as to why and how and all this works.
You can look all this stuff up.
It's a basic psychological defense called projection.
I feel angry But I can't express anger, so I'm going to provoke anger in others.
And then what's going to happen is, I'm going to make them angry, and then I can release my anger by getting angry at their anger.
Sorry, that's a little bit of a convoluted way of putting it.
I feel angry, but I can't express my anger.
So, I'm going to passive-aggressively needle other people until they get angry.
And then I can reject their anger, and so control my own, but at the same time I can also start snipping back at them.
Then I have a legitimate excuse to get angry, to express my anger towards somebody else.
So, a minor example.
Last night, Christina and I, we had a free dinner from a restaurant for various reasons, and we were going to go, and I had a bit of a headache yesterday.
I didn't podcast.
I had a bit of a headache yesterday.
And so when I got home, I lay down for about half an hour, hoping that the headache would clear.
And when I got up, I still had a bit of a headache, and it was uncomfortable, and I felt a little tired.
And I was still... I'm fine.
Like, I don't take it out on anyone.
I was fine to go to dinner and we could have had a perfectly nice time.
But Christina felt a little bit sort of stressed because we had already reserved this dinner.
They were making it for us if we didn't go.
Like, if we cancelled it because I had a headache, we would lose this free dinner, which we'd been looking forward to.
Particularly me, Mr. Cheapskate.
And...
So she felt that we couldn't cancel the dinner, but because of her own family history, she was afraid that because I was feeling a little under the weather, that I would take it out on her and we'd have this bad time.
And that's very frustrating, of course, for anyone to have that occur in a relationship.
So she felt a little tense about all of that.
And we talked it out.
It was fine.
But there's an example, right?
I mean, in her family, if this sort of thing occurred, Sorry, I'm just trying to fix my lane here.
If this sort of thing occurred, what would happen is people would say, would just start getting snippy, right?
So she was telling me about a photo op she went to with her mom.
Her mom had a headache.
They were getting their pictures taken, and her mom was just sort of snippy and witchy the whole evening, and the photos turned out bad, and everyone had a bad experience.
Photos turned out badly.
Everyone had a bad experience, and so on.
She remembers that to this day.
So, because of course, when she said to her mom, oh, you have a headache, we don't have to do it, we can cancel.
No, no, I'd be happy to go, and blah blah blah.
But then of course she's not happy to go.
So all these impossible situations.
So lots of frustration, lots of anger.
Not in my marriage, but in Christina's family, and of course in mine.
So, Christina couldn't say to me, you're a jerk for having a headache.
Not that she was thinking it, I'm just saying, this sort of situation.
She couldn't say to me, I'm angry at you for having a headache, because I've been looking forward to this dinner all day, and now you're feeling under the weather.
She couldn't say that, right?
She also couldn't say to herself, I'm angry that Steph has a headache, and that's irrational, so let me deal with it, because there's family history wrapped up, and I don't want to sort of portray her as enraged or anything like that, but she wasn't.
I mean, and it just took like 10 minutes to talk about it and clear it up.
It's just something that I noticed.
So, and this can occur in many ways.
This can occur by somebody being extra happy and peppy, right?
So if you're feeling under the weather and somebody's really peppy, it's kind of aggressive, right?
It's kind of passive-aggressive.
Because, not that you bring them down, but they should at least be somewhat remotely sensitive to your mood and not be, you know, all peppy peppy peppy when you're feeling down or under the weather.
Just be a little bit more gentle and conciliatory with your mood so that you can at least feel visible from that standpoint.
So, That's sort of a minor example of the kind of thing that can happen.
But this gentleman was going through a very major episode of that and handled it magnificently, I must say.
I mean, this is all nothing but paeans of praise to this golden god of integrity who just did an incredibly difficult and unpleasant thing with very little coaching and very little prompting.
I mean, he was totally ready.
I totally got that.
He just needed a push, right?
And so he couldn't handle his own frustration and fear and anger.
But it had to go somewhere.
It had to go somewhere.
So what happened was he logged onto the board and he expressed his pain and he expressed in a pretty negative and difficult way.
He expressed all the difficulties he was going through.
His friend who killed himself and so on.
What that does, of course, is it provokes an enormous amount of concern and sympathy from those who are reading the posts.
And rightly so.
I mean, this is a difficult and dangerous time for this gentleman.
So, then, after provoking fear and concern, or posting stuff which would naturally create fear and concern from other people, he then rejects all help, which is naturally going to make people feel frustrated and upset.
And more concerned.
And themselves a little angry, right?
Because it's like somebody showing you that their leg is broken and then refusing all help.
It's like, but then why the hell did you... Did you show me that your leg was broken?
If you're gonna... Like, it's a setup.
It's a game.
It's a difficult and dangerous game.
That's not because this guy's a bad guy or anything like that.
I mean, he's a great guy.
But this is all of the emotional skills that were taught by our parents.
This is how sad it all is, right?
And our schools.
So, he couldn't feel his feelings, he provokes those feelings in others and then he rejects those feelings and controls his own feelings through rejecting those same feelings in other people.
And also what can happen is, when I say to you, my leg is broken and then I refuse all help, then you're in an impossible situation, because then you either walk away and leave me with my broken leg, in which case I can say, you know, what a heartless bastard, he just leaves me standing here with a broken leg, right?
But then when you try to help me and I reject all that help, then what happens is, you continue to try to help me, and then at some point I'm gonna say, look, stop trying to help me!
How many times do I have to tell you?
I'm fine!
And then you're intrusive and invasive and you're not listening to me.
See, this is an impossible situation, a no-win situation.
Whenever you end up in these no-win situations, which don't exist in reality, you know it's coming from a family, you know it's coming from parents, you know it's coming from the abuse of power in your early life, when you're given all of these nothing but impossible situations and abusive families.
It's how they destroy and corrupt your capacity for rationality.
So, I knew that if the board members continued to show concern and try to offer solutions, then they would continue to feel the frustration that Bob was not feeling.
They would continue to express all the frustration that Bob was feeling but couldn't process.
It was overwhelming him.
Trying to help someone in this manner is very complex and very challenging, and it takes a lot of instinct and a lot of thinking things out.
But I knew that if the board members continued to feel the frustration that Bob was not able to process, then Bob would not feel that frustration, because he'd be able to distance it by rejecting that frustration, and other people would be able to distance himself from his own frustration.
So the essential thing was to get Bob to feel his own feelings so that he would act.
The essential thing was to get Bob to feel the frustration, the fear, and the anger that he was actually experiencing that was coming as a result of him being up, and all the philosophy he's been listening to, and so on, the virtue that he wants to achieve, integrity, getting the bad people out of his life, all the basics, which are far from basic in execution.
So I knew with a laser-like accuracy that people needed to stop engaging with him and stop feeling frustration.
Feeling his frustration and his fear and his anger.
And that if other people stopped interacting with him in this gamey way, in this manipulative way, And I don't mean conscious manipulation.
He was manipulating others because this is what he's been taught and he desperately wanted to... his false self wanted to avoid the next step, which I totally understand.
It's not a criticism, it's just a process.
So I needed people to stop feeling his fear and frustration.
That's why I said to the board, don't engage.
Don't get sucked into this.
And I knew that I needed to explicitly identify both the feelings that he was experiencing but not processing, and also the projection that he was performing on the board.
Right?
So I needed to do three things.
I needed to get people to stop interacting with him on the grounds of his manipulation, so then it would cause his feelings to rebound back into himself.
He wouldn't be able to project them to others if they weren't reacting to him.
Secondly, I needed to identify his feelings to himself, because he wasn't aware of them.
He wasn't aware of them.
And thirdly, I needed to identify why he was doing what he was doing.
Because he's a man with a lot of natural integrity, so he would simply stop doing that, and that would cause his projections to collapse.
it would cause him to feel his own feelings, which would propel him to action.
So I'll just go through that once more, because it's important to understand, and there may be times in your life where this is valuable.
And I would say, I mean, certainly if you're talking to people who are suicidal, and I didn't believe this gentleman actually was, but get them to a counselor and so on as well.
But if you are in this kind of situation where no help is available, then this is the process, and it's not an easy process.
So.
Stop interacting with the person on the basis of manipulation.
Whatever you're feeling in this interaction is what the other person is feeling but can't process.
And I'm not using great language there, but I think you understand.
Right?
It's occurring for them, but they can't feel it.
So they project it into others.
They provoke that feeling in other people so they can reject it and control it.
And react to it.
So you need to stop interacting with that person on the basis of manipulation.
You need to understand that the feelings they're provoking in you are the feelings that they can't feel, that they are feeling but can't process.
And then you need to identify the mechanism by which this is occurring.
And that's why I wrote what I wrote.
And I was very confident that this was going to result in him being able to feel all the feelings that were churning through his system, which would then cause him to act.
Which would then cause him to act.
Because that's really what you want to get to.
And the feelings are great, but they need to be translated into action in order to be your salvation.
Thank you so much for listening.
And again, magnificent, magnificent work on the part of Bob.
My heart swells with admiration.
It is an amazing thing that you did many, many years before I was able to do it.
And you should be incredibly proud at the good that you're bringing to the world.
Looking forward to your donations.
Not necessarily Bob, because he's a student and so on, but I'll talk to you soon.
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