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Aug. 7, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
09:11
How Do I Apologize to My Brother?
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How do you feel about the things that you did to your brother?
Because listen, it was tougher on your brother than you in many ways because you had the vent of dumping on your brother.
He didn't have anyone to dump on, right?
Mm-hmm. So all the shit that rolled downhill from your bullies, from your dad, from your mom, down to you, down to him, they all ended with him.
He had to absorb all of it, right?
Yep. And...
In some ways, and I'm not putting you in the same category because you say it was only a couple of minutes every other day, but as the bullies were to you, you were to him, right?
Exactly. I'm not even going to lie.
Okay. Okay. So as the bullies were to you, you were to him.
Now, you know how bad the bullying made you feel, right?
Mm-hmm. How it made you kind of dread going to school sometimes.
How it made it hard to concentrate sometimes.
How it made it hard to feel secure, how it made it hard to feel supported.
If you produce that in your brother, the apology, the emotional connection better be pretty big and deep if you want to rekindle something with it.
Right? Mm-hmm.
So if you were a bully...
I mean, what would you like to hear?
Or what would be healing for you to hear from the kids who bullied you in school?
Let's say that you run into one.
One day. And he takes you aside and he says, Oh man, I messed up so bad.
I messed up so bad when I was a kid and you took the brunt of it.
And you probably internalized a lot of the shit that I was talking about with you and the bullying that I did.
And I gave...
You, who was having a hard time, so much of a heavy additional burden when you were two years old.
I mean, I just did the worst stuff in the world.
And I can't take it back.
It shaped, to some degree, you into who you are.
And I didn't have the right to scratch those words on the surface of your being.
And to make a kid who was growing up in a messed up household make that life even worse.
Man, we should have stuck together.
We should have stuck together like Frodo and Samwise.
We were all dragging our asses through Mordor.
We should have stuck together, not turned on each other.
I should have been your brother.
I should have been there for you.
I should have been teaching you.
I should have been giving you hugs.
I should have been telling you it was going to be alright.
I should have been taking your side.
You know? I shouldn't have made your life tougher.
Because it sure as hell didn't make my life any easier.
And now I've got this additional guilt of how I treated you as a child in addition to everything else that is going on for me.
I got all that too.
It's horrible. And it's horrible because I don't want to make this about me.
This is about you. It's about you and it's about all the burdens I put on you that I had no right to lay you with.
I was always so much older and you looked up to me so much because, you know, I was like the big older brother.
And now, like in the family, I had one toxic masculinity thing to look at, which was your dad.
But you had two. This is your dad and me.
And now I look in the mirror and I see another bit of toxic masculinity staring back at me, which is how I treated you as a child.
And I hate the idea that you've taken anything that I did or anything that I said and put it inside you and made it come alive.
And that you ran to mom all the time when I was mean to you.
Mom didn't do much of anything because mom was part of the whole messed up system we were stuck in.
It all rolled downhill to you.
And I hate the idea, my brother, I hate the idea that we got another 60 or 70 years on this planet.
And for the sake of me doing some shitty things when you were a kid, I might have no brother.
For the next 60 or 70 years, because of shitty things I did when you were a kid, I might lose out on my only brother's company.
Because I don't have a relationship with you, you don't have a relationship with me.
You know, when our parents die, there's going to be nothing from our childhood.
Like, we were witnesses to each other's childhoods.
We could be the only people who go through from beginning to end of our lives.
And because I was a bad brother, I was a shitty brother, I don't get a brother for 70 years because of the stupid shit I did for 5 years 10 years ago.
And I'm not blaming you for that.
I mean, if I was in your shoes, I can completely understand why you'd sit there and say, look, I want this guy in my life.
When he had power over me, when I really needed support, he kind of dumped on me, he kind of messed on me, kind of tortured me a little, kind of made my life harder when my life was already pretty bloody hard.
So I completely understand why you wouldn't want to have anything to do with me.
And I'm not asking you for you to trust me because that's absolutely unfair.
I can't just have treated you like that for so long.
And now I've spent seven years not talking about it.
And five years we've barely been talking to each other and that's five years that went by where I didn't bring up a damn thing about the way I treated you.
There's even more reason not to trust me.
But if I can get on my knees and beg you not to trust me but to give me Five minutes conversation a week.
That's all I'm asking. Five minutes conversation a week.
And if I've got to order HelloFresh to deliver food to you every day so it's easier for you to get those five minutes a week to talk to me, just talk to me for five minutes a week and see if you like it.
Just try it for ten weeks. Try it for five weeks.
Hell, try it for one week. That's all I'm asking.
One week, man.
One week. Five minutes.
Because I am desperate to have a brother.
I am so sorry for what I did.
I am so desperate to have a brother.
And I just, five minutes, you can set time, whatever's convenient for you, just five minutes a week, and try it for a couple of weeks.
Try it for a couple of weeks. And if after those couple of weeks you don't want anything, that's fine.
That's fine. But what if we could find some way to build a bridge back to each other?
What if I could just apologize?
And what if I could somehow earn your forgiveness?
And what if we could have a positive relationship and you could have a brother again for the next 60 years of your life?
You could have an uncle for your children.
You could have, you know, we could be in the vicinity of each other when we get old.
And we could remember all the way back through the tunnel of time to the beginning of our existence.
And we could Have linked arms all the way through the decades.
I mean, I think that's worth something.
I want to try for that.
I want to try for that. Just a tiny bit.
Just a tiny bit. And you have every reason to not want to do it.
And I completely understand that, which is why I'm absolutely at your mercy, man.
You think you were at my mercy when you were two?
And I was 10. I am completely at your mercy.
And if you want to take a month to think about it, that's fine.
And, you know, I'll ping you again and just, you know, five minutes a week and if there's anything I can do.
And then, you know, if you can beg him to give you just that little bit of time and you can figure out the best way to make things positive for him, you know, send him some shit.
I'm telling you, like, it matters a little bit.
Like, send him tickets to his favorite concert.
Send him... A gift basket of his favorite foods, like whatever, you know, just that you're thinking about him and that it matters to you.
And that's how you start rebuilding things.
You just work, and you just be willing to submit to what the other person wants, and you try and find something to offer.
And that's how you try to undo damage.
Because the damage isn't just when you were a kid.
Look, I have sympathy for what you did.
When you were 9 or 10 or 11, I mean, you were just struggling to survive, and it sounds like you were a bit of a jerk, but, you know, you were under a lot of pressure, and you were being bullied, too.
So that's different, right? But not having talked about it with him for half a decade now that you're an adult, that's a whole different matter, right?
Now that's all on you.
That's all on you, right?
And that's why you don't let things go that long in a relationship without talking about stuff.
You just don't. Because people scar over, right?
They get shields up.
They get like an exoskeleton.
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