July 20, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:17
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| Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio. | |
| I hope that you're doing very well. | |
| I would like to take a few of your precious minutes, if you'd be so very kind, and talk to you about a very important topic, which is forgiveness. | |
| And its relationship to your happiness, to your future, to trust, to love, to peace of mind, to self-acceptance, and to the building of truly valuable and productive relationships in your life. | |
| So the first thing that I'd like to sort of help you to recognize from a rational analysis standpoint is that forgiveness is a form of restoration, right? | |
| If I knock a wall down of somebody else's, I need to build it back up, and there is a kind of restitution that is involved in forgiveness. | |
| So that's sort of the first thing. | |
| It is a restoration of a prior situation. | |
| So, if I borrow your car and dent it, clearly the minimum that I would need to do, the minimum actions that I would need to take to gain your forgiveness would be to have the car repaired. | |
| So, the restitution of the wrong in question is the bare minimum. | |
| If that standard is not met, forgiveness becomes impossible. | |
| Because forgiveness is a level of trust is up here, something knocks it down. | |
| Forgiveness is when it is then back up. | |
| At the original level. | |
| That is at least the bare minimum that is required for forgiveness. | |
| Forgiveness is something that requires A bad action which itself requires a willed action on the part of another. | |
| So if I drive across your lawn, you're going to get upset with me. | |
| If you find out that I've had a seizure that was completely unpredictable, then you will have sympathy for me and you may not feel the need for restitution. | |
| In the same way if I cut down a tree that falls on your house, clearly I've done a bad thing that I need to restore your house to its original state. | |
| And take the tree out of it. | |
| But if lightning hits a tree and it falls on your house, there's no restitution in that sense. | |
| There's no, you've got insurance, but it's not like you need Mother Nature to apologize to you because this is simply an accident. | |
| So the feeling of being wronged, the feeling of having your persons or your values violated, your trust violated, these occur after the willed and malevolent actions of someone else. | |
| So you have a feeling of offense, you have a feeling of hurt, and you have a feeling of diminished trust or active mistrust of somebody else based upon what their actions are. | |
| So that's of course the first thing that needs to be understood about forgiveness. | |
| Now the interesting thing about forgiveness is that because it is a state that is generated, the need for it is generated by somebody else's actions, forgiveness cannot be willed into existence. | |
| Because I think we've all been in this situation. | |
| I know I have. Maybe you have as well. | |
| We've all been in this situation where someone does something wrong to us or hurts us or hurts our values or something we care about or someone we care about. | |
| And then they begin to insist that we forgive them. | |
| So they'll apologize in a kind of aggressive way, like, I'm sorry you got so upset, you know? | |
| And we won't feel that sweet relief that comes when someone genuinely empathizes with our hurt and works diligently and with integrity to make amends. | |
| We don't feel that sweet relief that comes from the restoration of trust back up to a reasonable level. | |
| And what happens is then the person gets aggressive. | |
| And what they will then do, what this person will do almost inevitably, is they will accuse us of holding a grudge, right? | |
| So somebody will do something that is offensive to us or hurts us. | |
| And then they will say, well, sorry, you know, I'm sorry. | |
| Look, I told you I was sorry. | |
| How many times are you going to make me apologize? | |
| I told you I was sorry. | |
| I've told you once. | |
| I've told you a thousand times. | |
| I'm sorry. Can you let it go? | |
| They'll get more aggressive if you withhold this forgiveness because they see the forgiveness that they want from you as something that you can will, that you can choose. | |
| But forgiveness is fundamentally an emotional understanding. | |
| It is an emotional reaction to somebody else's. | |
| In the same way that being offended, being upset is an emotional reaction to somebody else's behavior. | |
| I think it's really important, in order to avoid being manipulated by others, we always have to retreat back from the habit of self-attack. | |
| If you do not attack yourself, if you do not become hostile with yourself, if you do not roll your eyes at yourself, if you do not get down on yourself, if you do not attack yourself, it is almost impossible To be manipulated. | |
| So if someone says, look, I said I was sorry. | |
| You're just holding a grudge now. | |
| It's ridiculous. Come on. | |
| Let it go. Let bygones be bygones. | |
| It's all in the past. Chill. | |
| It's okay. Relax. It wasn't a big deal. | |
| Now you're just punishing me, right? | |
| If you accept that as a criticism, then you can be manipulated into saying, fine, I forgive you when you don't really feel it, and then the relationship is built on a house of cards, right? | |
| But if you are self-trusting, and if you will not attack yourself just because somebody else is attacking you, they have no leverage. | |
| They have no place to sink their hooks into. | |
| It's like throwing a grappling hook up an infinite glass wall. | |
| It just comes skittering back down. | |
| And as someone who's received a fair amount of comments over the years on YouTube and in my inbox and on my board and other places, I know that if I don't self-attack, it becomes very hard for other people to get their hooks into me, so to speak. | |
| It doesn't mean I don't take criticism, but I don't just self-attack if someone's upset. | |
| So if you feel that someone has offended you or done you wrong, I think it's important to tell them how you feel. | |
| Then I think it's important to see how their actions, which result from what you say to them, how their actions make you feel as you move forward. | |
| So, for instance, there was someone in my life who I had some, oh, this is quite some years ago now, but basically what happened was I did something financially generous for them and then they did something kind of that returned the favor, but the amount of money that transferred from one way to the other was they couldn't sell stock, | |
| so I sold some of my stock on behalf of this person and then this person sold the exact same amount of stock a year later when it was worth far less and gave me the amount of money back and said, fine, that's The letter of the law, and I fulfilled my obligation. | |
| And of course I tried to say, well, if letter of the law was the whole point, then I never would have sold these stocks and given you the money to begin with, blah, blah, blah. | |
| But when someone does something like that and you feel upset or you feel hurt about the interaction, you tell that person and then you see what that person does and then instead of trying to make yourself forgive that person or make yourself change how you feel about the interaction, I think the absolutely essential thing to do is to say, check in with yourself, trust your instincts, trust your feelings and say, I still don't feel better. | |
| I still don't feel better. | |
| I still don't feel that the relationship has had its proper restitution. | |
| That it has come right for me. | |
| I still don't feel that we've got the trust level back up to here. | |
| Now, of course, this is going to make the other person feel bad, and their anxiety will then probably express itself as further attacks, right? | |
| So they do something, bring your trust down, they give you a mealy-mouth or sort of kind of forgiveness, and it takes it down further. | |
| Then they get mad at you for not granting them the forgiveness which causes them more anxiety, so they just keep driving the relationship down. | |
| So I think it's really, really important when someone has done you wrong, you tell them how you feel. | |
| Be open, of course, to other interpretations. | |
| Maybe you've mistaken something. | |
| Maybe they did have a seizure and I don't know. | |
| But then I think it's really important, don't let them bully you into forgiveness. | |
| Don't let them bully you into forgiveness. | |
| Don't let the initial offense be then subsequently negatively affected or don't allow yourself to be additionally hurt by someone saying, They hurt you, and then they give you a bad apology, and then they insult you further by saying, oh, you're just holding a grudge. | |
| Oh, now you're punishing me. | |
| I said I was sorry. What more do you want? | |
| Or, another way that people will blame you for remaining offended is to do the old trick, which is to say, what do I have to do to gain your forgiveness? | |
| What do I have to do to gain your forgiveness? | |
| Now, this, on the surface, seems like a plausible request, of course. | |
| But it's not. Because if someone empathizes with you, they will know what to do to regain your forgiveness or to restore the relationship back to a proper degree of trust, a healthy degree of trust. | |
| If they say, I have no idea what will make this better, what they're really saying is, I didn't hurt you in any way that's real, and now I just need to follow some arcane, join-the-dots path that you're going to make up in order to gain this forgiveness. | |
| I need to appease you, I need to do this, that, or the other, right? | |
| I mean, if I knock down someone's wall, and then I say, well, and I apologize, but I don't offer to rebuild the wall or do anything to actually restore to its natural state that which I broke... | |
| And then I say, well, what do you want me to do to gain your forgiveness? | |
| Tell me! Tell me! I don't know what to do! | |
| Tell me what I should do to gain your forgiveness! | |
| All that I'm really saying is I don't have any idea or I'm claiming not to have any idea what I've done or how to restore that. | |
| That actually will not restore trust in a relationship, right? | |
| Because if someone says, well, I have no idea how I've offended you. | |
| I have no idea how to gain restitution. | |
| I'm just going to ask you and then I'm going to fulfill it to the letter of the law. | |
| Then they obviously haven't learned anything. | |
| They haven't gained the empathy which will prevent recurrence of offense, right? | |
| Because if you do something to offend someone and then you self-examine and say, gee, why did I do that? | |
| Why was I cold? | |
| Why was I mean? | |
| Why was I indifferent? Why was I callous? | |
| There's a lot of depth in those questions if you've offended someone that you need to go back and ask about your childhood, your moral development, your formative choices, and all this. | |
| Really, it's a deep, deep thing to go and dig out and unearth areas where we're Cold and dark in the empathy section. | |
| So, if I just get irritated and say, fine, tell me what to do, tell me what to do, well, I'm actually driving the possibility of forgiveness even lower. | |
| It's sort of like going up to some woman and treating her badly, and then she says, well, I don't want to go out with you anymore, and then you say, well, tell me what would be attractive for you and a man. | |
| Tell me, and I'll do it! | |
| Well, something fundamental is missing there if you're supposed to be this puppet master making someone perform certain tricks or gymnastic moves in order to grant their forgiveness. | |
| Grant them forgiveness. | |
| So I think it's really, really important when you are faced in a situation where the trust has been diminished, be honest, be open about what happened, be curious about how the other person felt, continue to engage. | |
| But if you start to feel worse and worse, and if someone adds insult to injury by saying that... | |
| Your forgiveness is being withheld because of your pettiness or your meanness or you're holding a grudge or you just can't forgive people or you like playing the victim, all that kind of crap. | |
| Well, that just drives the relationship further and further into the ground. | |
| And the last thing that I wanted to mention was that it's really important to recognize when the cord that gets stretched Through bad actions in a relationship to get that Chekhovian string twang that occurs when it breaks. | |
| That occurs when it breaks. | |
| And this is so, so important in your relationships. | |
| When you drive down someone's trust, you hurt them and then you insult them and then you tell them they're holding a grudge. | |
| At some point, and if you're on the receiving end of this, it's really important to be sensitive to this. | |
| At some point, it's just going to break. | |
| It's just going to break. | |
| And it's so important to not let a relationship get to that point where you simply don't want to talk to the person anymore, where you simply don't want to have an interaction. | |
| There's too much unreality. | |
| There's too much brain-twisting manipulation that's going on. | |
| The person can't admit that they're wrong. | |
| They can't create honest restitution. | |
| They can't restore the relationship trust. | |
| If the only direction that the trust is going is this way, at some point it goes off camera and can't be recovered. | |
| They say, and I think it's very true, that relationships need ten times the good times as they do the bad times. | |
| So if someone has done something harmful to you and then for a couple of months, I'd say six months afterwards, They have continued to evade responsibility, to blame you, to avoid restitution, to demand that you tell them how to fix it. | |
| And of course, if you do, then they just do it and then you still don't feel. | |
| Sorry, this isn't a trap, right? | |
| So if someone says to me, well, Steph, what can I do to give you restitution? | |
| And I say, well, you need to do the hokey pokey, right? | |
| And then they do the hokey pokey and I still don't feel because there's no trust, right? | |
| I've just told them what to do. | |
| They haven't figured it out. Well, then I don't feel forgiveness, right? | |
| And then it's a trap because then they can attack me and they can say, hey, you told me to do the hokey pokey. | |
| I did it and you still won't forgive me. | |
| You see, it's your problem. You can't forgive people. | |
| You hold grudges. Life's too short, right? | |
| But if someone has banged down the trust in your relationship for six months, Then what they're doing is... | |
| Every day that you don't fix something in a relationship is 10 days of perfect behavior you're adding. | |
| To just gain back to where you were. | |
| This is the absolutely crucial and essential thing about relationships that are going wrong. | |
| Every time you take one spadeful of earth, you're 10 feet in the ground. | |
| Two spadefuls, you're 20 feet in the ground. | |
| Every time you dig that hole or leave it alone, the elevator goes down. | |
| So if someone has spent six months Not working to gain your trust back, not working to figure out how they hurt you and what they did and why, and working to really regain your trust. | |
| What's happened is that they've set a pattern of six months of betrayal of trust and of sort of surly demands for forgiveness. | |
| And then what happens is you actually need approximately five years of perfectly trustworthy behavior in order to get back to where you were. | |
| Five years of perfectly trustworthy behavior. | |
| I mean, I've never had a relationship where that occurs because we all make mistakes, right? | |
| And I've certainly made my share as well. | |
| So it's so important to sort these things out up front and to deal with them very, very quickly. | |
| When relationships go through these kinds of things, they go down very quickly. | |
| And they go down at a much faster rate than it takes to drag them back up. | |
| It's like dropping an anchor into the water. | |
| Easy to go down, really hard to swim down and pull it back up. | |
| So be really sensitive to when that thread, that thread of the relationship, the thread of the possibility of the restoration of trust, when that breaks. | |
| That is so important to understand so that you can stop tunneling after people who are going to China and beyond and never coming back. | |
| So I hope this helps you understand. | |
| Do not try to will forgiveness. | |
| Forgiveness is something that is evoked in you from someone outside. | |
| Like a comedian is supposed to make you laugh. | |
| You're not supposed to fake a laugh. | |
| Someone is supposed to cause you through their virtue and happiness and sensitivity to cause you to fall in love with him or her. | |
| They don't just bully you and say, well, you're supposed to love me because of X, Y, and Z. Why are you withholding love? | |
| Love is an involuntary response to virtue. | |
| Forgiveness is an involuntary response to empathy and restitution. | |
| Do not let people tell you that you must forgive. | |
| Do not let people tell you that it is your job to forgive. | |
| Do not let people... Manipulate you into providing false forgiveness. | |
| That is only setting you up again for another betrayal. | |
| It is their job to evoke that warm and happy feeling of restitution within you. | |
| It is not your job to tell them how to do it. | |
| It is not your job to give them that which they have not earned. | |
| It is not your job to will something like trust, like love, like forgiveness. | |
| Which fundamentally cannot be willed. | |
| And the more you will it, the more you break up your original instincts, which will absolutely lead you to intimacy and joy. | |
| Thank you so much for watching. | |
| I really do appreciate it. |
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