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Aug. 26, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:59:39

I Taught My Girlfriend How to Shoot - Then She Wanted to Shoot Me! Freedomain Call In

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	Stefan, I have this unbearable feeling like I'm being consumed from the inside out while I'm strapped against the torture table.
	I know there is a reason I'm not content with life right now, and every night I'll deal with the insomnia caused by my mind trying to deeply evaluate every situation and relationship of my past to find the answer of why.
	Currently, much of my mind is on a recent past relationship.
	I'll try to understand things done to me by my ex that I don't have an explanation for.
	I'll replace scenarios in my mind and imagine what I could have done better.
	I'll look at old pictures, overly evaluate social media posts by family members from this person.
	I'll look for hidden messages in their behaviors.
	I'll bring myself to almost go and knock on her door to see if I can get some sort of clarification, but then I'll just sit in my car for hours, hesitating until I just turn back to go home.
	This has been going on since my ex and I separated in May.
	I go through phases of being depressed, feeling sorrow, sorrowness, blaming myself, helplessness, anger, hopefulness, happy, and back to being depressed again.
	It's like there is some sort of demon that keeps roping me back every time I try to move in a positive direction.
	I've tried to put some mental distance between myself and the past, but there is always something that comes up that reminds me of it all.
	I'll see her car past mine.
	I'll see her in a parking lot.
	I'll find a letter she wrote me.
	I'll hear a song that we always used to play.
	I'll see a car I know that she likes.
	The list goes on. I've thought about writing to you before, but keep telling myself that I can figure it out on my own.
	It's getting worse, and this last time I was sitting in my car wasting precious moments of my time, I finally compelled me to seek help.
	I'm a senior starting my last semester of college this month.
	And I fear that this is going to affect my ability to complete my degree, especially since her and I both go to the same school.
	Will I be driven to do something stupid ending my semester early and attempt to find answers?
	Will I be so focused on this that my grades will slip and I'll fail out?
	I'm already over $100,000 in debt from student loans and my parents are co-signers on the loans.
	I can't afford to mess up another semester or do something that would potentially ruin my chance at obtaining a career after graduation.
	I have two younger siblings that still have to get their own educations to pursue.
	If I were to mess up, I would put that on the line because my parents would be busy paying back my debt.
	I've already failed out of one semester a couple years back because I prioritized the next over my success caused me to basically waste around $30,000.
	I currently feel like I have no friends, leaving me to feel like I have to figure out this all on my own.
	I don't feel close or comfortable enough to talk about such a deep topic with any of my family either.
	I've been trying to hang out with people more often and make friends, but I'm not sure how that'll go if I remain in this destructive cycle of mine.
	I would like to move on.
	I would like to be emotionally available to find a person I can make a healthy connection with.
	I want to be able to trust.
	I'm afraid that if I find a good person, I'll just ruin it because I haven't figured out my own issues yet.
	I know that I have a lot going for me and despite all this, I feel happiness is just around the corner, but I have this last little straight to go and I need help to make it.
	I don't know if I'm properly communicating the urgency I'm feeling and that another part of this that caused me to hesitate writing to you, but I'm at a point where I can't afford to put this off any longer.
	If you can, please, a conversation with your fellow.
	This would make a world of difference for me.
	That's a solid email, and I certainly commend you for reaching out for help.
	I think that's a great idea, and I'm sure we'll be able to get someplace useful.
	Do you want to tell me a little bit about the relationship with the woman that ended this year?
	How long were you guys going out, and what course did it end?
	So total about a year we were going out.
	It started last summer.
	We were both in the same summer class and she sat across from me and she kind of caught my eye and I just went up to her one time after class and it was like a communications class where we were practicing like speeches and stuff like that and I went up to her after class and I just complimented her on her speech and Asked if she wanted to hang out or go on a hike or something one time and that's how we started.
	We ended up going on a hike and from there...
	I'm sorry, I just need to interrupt you for a sec because I'm getting a lot of wind noise from your microphone.
	I don't know if you're breathing on it or...
	Oh, sorry. Yeah, no problem.
	Is this better? Well, I don't know as yet, but we'll find out.
	Okay, okay. So we did our hike, and from there, things kind of progressed fairly fast.
	I started calling her randomly, and she appreciated the calls, and we would just talk, and I'd go over to her place quite often, and We play card games or watch movies or something and then I guess next thing you know we're together and I remember pretty early on too I wrote her this fairly long letter exclaiming how basically how great of a person she is and how much she has going on for her and She had expressed,
	too, that she hadn't had the best childhood.
	Like, she told me in, I think it was high school and middle school, that there was a group of girls that would bully her and held her down and would use razor blades to cut her eyelids.
	What? Hang on, hang on.
	Use razor blades to cut her eyelids?
	Yeah, she... I guess she was bullied quite badly.
	Oh my God!
	Where was she?
	I mean, there's bullying and then there's this like, I don't know, like half-blinding King Lear virtual assault.
	I mean, that's...
	How did this come...
	I mean, I guess she gave you some backstory.
	What was the animus? What was the hatred involved?
	So, I don't know why.
	This group of girls, I don't know who they were, but I have no idea why.
	I'm sorry, I'm getting a background rumble on your microphone.
	Are you in a windy place?
	No. Okay, well, we'll just struggle through.
	If there was anything, don't worry about it.
	Just keep going. Go ahead.
	I never asked as to why, but I did ask, well, did your parents know about this?
	And she said they didn't, and that's what surprised me as well.
	I was like, well, why didn't you tell them about this?
	And maybe they could have done something to stop it.
	Well, don't you come home with your eyelids cut?
	Yeah, that's what I was wondering, but I guess they never knew, and I guess she never told them, but I was kind of always still a little skeptical of that, because...
	She said she would also cut herself on her arm and I could tell she did because she had scars on her arm as well.
	So she was a self-cutter?
	Yeah. And was this continuing into your relationship or was that in the past?
	It was before our relationship but it did end up happening later on in the relationship as well.
	And what else do you know about her childhood?
	I got clues.
	I never got the details because she never gave me the full explanation when I would ask.
	But it seems like she was in gymnastics as well.
	And one of her coaches, probably they either touched her inappropriately or did something with her.
	I can't say for sure, but...
	She kind of explained like something happened but not didn't say what for sure but from the way she was afraid to talk about it it seemed like that was it.
	And then there was a time she told me I guess she was like almost drowning in a lake or something and her dad was there but he wasn't doing anything to help her and Those are some of the major events that I know of.
	She wasn't a very happy kid, from what I understand.
	Well, yeah, I mean, just from what you told me, we've got self-mutilation, potential sexual abuse, physical assaults to the point of possibly losing an eye in school, and a father who's playing out that old Phil Collins song, and, you know, if you told me you were drowning, I would not lend a hand, right?
	I mean, so this is a, you know, with all due sympathy for her childhood, which is not her fault, but, I mean, she's a mess, right?
	Yeah, and I suppose...
	Part of me was, I felt so bad for her, right?
	And I would always, I guess, I think part of that in me kind of tempted me to be like, I can be there for this person, if that makes sense.
	Okay, so then we have to go.
	You've listened to this show for a while, right?
	Yeah.
	Okay, so naturally we have to go and say, who trained you to be the rescuer of women when you were a kid?
	I don't know.
	I don't know where this came from, but...
	It's been a history with me.
	I do know that. Well, then we have to figure out where it comes from.
	These behaviors don't just appear out of nothing.
	Like if you speak Japanese and I say, how did you learn Japanese?
	You say, I have no idea. Well, you have to have learned it somewhere.
	So let's talk a little bit about your...
	I guess we'll start with your mom.
	What was she like when you were growing up?
	So I remember earliest memories.
	My earliest memory of her is...
	She was yelling at me, because I don't know what I was doing at the time, but she was upset at me, right?
	And I had this toy, and she forced me to sit on the couch, not physically or anything, but just as a time-out thing.
	And she said if I didn't behave, she was going to let some other neighbor kid take my toy that I had, and she left it outside on the front porch for someone to take.
	Let's see. She would yell quite a lot.
	She was very strict about cleaning.
	We always had to clean all the baseboards and do all these chores in a very specific way.
	There was a time when we went out to a restaurant and there was a worm in the drink because it was like a strawberry lemonade and occasionally The strawberries grow outside, right?
	So inevitably there's going to be something inside of a strawberry at some point.
	And we saw it and it freaked me out.
	I was quite young. I started crying a little bit.
	And she got annoyed that I was upset over it.
	And we went to go to a different restaurant, though.
	And in the car, she got so annoyed to the point where she told my dad, just leave him outside and let him out.
	He'll be out there on his own.
	There was a time when I was...
	How old were you roughly here?
	Roughly around, let's say, maybe under 10.
	Under 10, but older than 7.
	That's a pretty broad spectrum there.
	I mean, that's a decade, right?
	Somewhere between 7 and 9, maybe.
	Okay. And did you take this threat seriously?
	No. Yeah, I started to cry even more.
	What did you tend to?
	He was driving at the time.
	He didn't say anything to me.
	He wasn't silent, silent, but he didn't encourage her, but I don't think he really did anything, honestly.
	Okay, so go ahead. There was a time when I was playing a video game and I was maybe around 11 years old and I was getting mad at the game.
	Sorry, I started to yell at it and then she came in and was getting mad at me.
	And then I got more upset at the way she was reacting to me.
	She eventually got so fed up, she told me to go to my room and I didn't want to.
	She just dragged me by my leg and then I kept yelling at her as she was dragging me, like screaming, yelling at her.
	And then she just slapped me across the face.
	I've never been hit until that moment, like across the face by her.
	And it just shocked me.
	I just stopped out of just surprise.
	And sorry, how old were you here?
	I was around 11.
	And I remember I stopped yelling, and then the next thing I said, I just said, I hate you to her.
	And she dragged me to my room, and I sat in there for a couple minutes, and then she came in, and then she came in, and she...
	She apologized, but she justified her actions along with her apology, saying something along the lines of, I had to calm me down, or you were just too much to handle, some excuse like that, right?
	And I remember she was saying she loves me, and then it said it back to her, but I remember behind my back I had my fingers crossed.
	She got less yelly as time went on with me as I got older.
	She started to have more actual conversations with me when I got to around my junior year of high school around there.
	Wow, you're getting bigger. That's just kind of funny that your mom yells a lot, and then you, having absorbed that behavior, yell at your video game, and your mom was like, that's completely unacceptable!
	It's like, but where do you think I got the yelling from, mom?
	I mean, she's a yeller, right?
	Yeah, and I think part of it, too, is also not just because I got bigger, but I think she realized that she knew I was going to leave for college, right?
	She knew I would go.
	And I think part of it was something in her mind triggered saying, if I don't improve right now, at least to some degree, she knew I'm the type.
	I could leave her and not talk to them ever again if I really chose to do that.
	And I think that's part of what triggered the yes yelling and her kind of getting more in control of herself.
	Was she a stay-at-home mom?
	No, she worked as a CSO. Do you know what that is?
	I don't. Basically, she worked for a police department as a community service officer.
	That's what a CSO is. She did different things to help officers out.
	Sometimes she'd go into crime scenes.
	She told me one time she saw brain matter all over the walls and pretty gruesome stuff.
	That's what she did until she got hurt at work.
	Okay. And then she quit or did something else?
	So she got – her truck got rear-ended and bent in and messing up her back.
	So she continued to work for them but just doing office work.
	And then she got in a battle with the city trying to – Because they tried to say she wasn't actually her.
	Well, she was, and she had to get lawyers and all of that.
	Eventually, she did quit. She went back to school to get a different degree, and now she's doing real estate stuff.
	Okay, so when you were a kid, if your mom is threatening to you, like, if you don't behave, I'm going to let the kid next door take all your toys, and if you're crying because there was a worm in your drink, which I can completely understand, you know, she gets so frustrated, she says to your dad, just leave him outside and let him make his own way or whatever.
	So you had to manage, I would assume, because your mom was kind of giving you big threats there, right?
	I mean, if you say to a 7 or 8 or 9-year-old kid, we're going to just leave you here and drive off, I mean, that's a death threat, right?
	Yeah. So you had to manage your mom's moods and you had to try to make sure your mom didn't get too upset, which is why when she says she loves you after hitting you in the face, you said back to appease her, but you got your fingers crossed, right?
	Yeah. Yeah.
	So does that fit with your experience that you had some concern over your mother's moods or temper and weren't getting much protection from your dad?
	I did feel that way.
	I felt like there was a huge chunk of my life where I knew, like, I wanted to get out of there.
	I wanted to leave and not talk to them again.
	And when I got around the age of 13, 14, I would say that openly.
	I would say I'm going to leave and never come back.
	I'd threaten to leave even then and just walk out of the house.
	Right. And that's when she started to become more reasonable in her conversation style.
	Yeah, around then as well.
	Okay. All right.
	So what did you do when you were younger, though?
	I guess prior to the massive masculine rush of puberty, what did you do when you were younger when she would get aggressive or angry or yelly?
	Most of the time I would kind of shut off internally.
	I would just, in my mind, I'd imagine...
	I remember there was one time she was just yelling at me, yelling at me, and I just shut it off, and I imagined her head as just a watermelon, and I was just focusing on that until the sound of this mumbling just kind of stopped, because somehow in my head I was able to...
	Turn it into just a mumbling noise and just imagine her head as a watermelon.
	And so I focused on that.
	So that's one of the ways I dealt with it.
	But there were times I would yell back as well or scream and things like that.
	And your parents stayed together?
	Yeah. And your father, was he, I guess, a similar belief in parenting or a similar vein of parenting, which is you escalate aggression or threats until the kid just complies, which is not wildly outside of police work, I suppose.
	I considered him the nicer parent.
	There was actually one time when I remember I wanted to play a video game with him.
	I was maybe five and...
	He had to go to work, though, because, yeah, they did both do police work, basically, and he had to go to work, and I said something along the lines of, well, why do you always have to go to work?
	Why is it always you?
	Why does mom not go to work as much as you?
	Because she didn't work as much as him.
	And she took offense to this and got mad at me for that, but in terms of things he would do, he wouldn't yell quite as much at me, but he would yell.
	There was a time he was playing a video game, and I was just watching him, and he started to cuss and yell pretty bad at it because he wasn't doing so well in it.
	And it started to make me sad, and I was 5'6 at the time.
	And I told him that I didn't like him doing that and it made me sad and then he made some sort of comment about me not to be a baby or something like that.
	And then he continued to do it and it made me more sad and I started to cry over that.
	But he There was a time I do remember him yelling at me though.
	I was playing a game and I was getting mad at it and I started to yell at it.
	And then he was in his room sleeping because he typically worked like night shifts.
	So he would sleep during the day and then go to work at night.
	he so he was sleeping in his room and he heard me yelling at the game and he got so upset that he just came came into the living room and started yelling and uh he grabbed the the game system the console and just like ripped it out from the cords and was about to smash it against the floor and yeah and then well he and I started screaming at him and yelling at him and
	He didn't smash it against the floor, but he took it away.
	At that point, I ended up going to my room and just sitting in there.
	The end of that. He never hit me though.
	I guess the reason I considered him a nicer parent was because he didn't as frequently yell or do things like that as my mom would do it.
	There was a time, though, I remember we were in a store shopping and it was just me, him, my mom, my brother.
	And we were maybe 13.
	Because my mom was pregnant with my sister.
	And my mom did something to make him upset.
	And they went to separate sections of the store.
	And I was with him, and then he said something under his breath, calling my mom a bitch or something like that.
	And I don't remember.
	I remember there was a period of time when they were arguing, though, pretty heavily.
	um He was working for a different police department that was about an hour away.
	And there's this group text.
	They had police officers.
	I don't know if you're familiar with the culture, but within the department, they get pretty close.
	And they become almost like friends, and they text each other quite regularly.
	And there was this group text, and there was this one girl in it who wasn't flirty, but she was that friendly type.
	Where she'd say things like, I guess you could consider flirt, maybe, I don't know, because it's in a group text, but she'd be like, love you guys, and things like that, right?
	But not in a romantic sense.
	But my mom didn't like that that was happening, so they had big fights over that, and...
	She would say that he was cheating, but I don't think he was in the slightest.
	I don't think that's something he would do.
	And I never got the feeling that he did, but I remember those.
	I hated hearing those because my room was right next to theirs.
	And those ended, though, after a couple months.
	I don't know what else I should go on about.
	Okay, so let's fast forward to this girl, which is called her Sally, right?
	The gymnast or the ex-gymnast.
	So how pretty was she?
	Like eight and a half, nine.
	Okay. And where would you put yourself on the scale of looks?
	Solid nine. Okay.
	So what were her virtues?
	You said, because you wrote this letter, she's such a wonderful person.
	And so what were the virtues that drew you to her?
	See, I knew you were going to ask this question.
	I was driving home from work last night and I was trying to find an answer.
	And honestly... I could say there are these virtues, right?
	I could say she was empathetic, and I could say she was...
	All these things, right?
	But actions that she portrayed toward me in the later half of the relationship, they contradict it, so I can't say that they held true.
	But I guess what I told myself at the time...
	Things like, oh, she's very understanding and sweet and she...
	All these things that may not even be virtues, right?
	She's intelligent. She's into the same things that I was, so I guess those are the excuses I gave myself for being with her.
	She spent time with me.
	She was available to me.
	Those are the reasons why And then how did things end?
	So they ended kind of on and off, actually.
	Things ended a few times and they come back a week or a few days later.
	But the first ending started when I was sitting at my apartment and she left because she said she had to go study.
	For some sort of test or something with her group in a class.
	And she was at the school library.
	And a few hours went by, and then she called me and she said, Hey, just letting you know, I'm still studying, but I'm taking a break.
	And I was just calling to let you know we're going to be a few more hours maybe.
	And I said, Okay. So then a few more hours go by, nothing.
	A few more hours, because she was supposed to come back to my place after.
	A few more hours go by, still nothing, and then it's like 12 at night, and the library's closed by then, so I'm like, what's going on?
	I was worried about her.
	I was like, did she get in an accident?
	Did something happen?
	Did she get kidnapped? All the worst things are going on in my mind, right?
	So I call her, and she just starts crying.
	And that's all, and then she hangs up.
	So I'm like, what's...
	What the heck's going on right now?
	So I start getting dressed to go out and look for her because I'm like, what the heck?
	So I get dressed.
	I assume the worst, right?
	So I also have my carry gun on me just in case.
	And then I know in case she's probably not at the school, first place I'll check is her apartment.
	And I had the key for her apartment because she gave me a key.
	We had keys to each other's apartments.
	So I go up to the door.
	I see her car parked out there.
	I go up to the door and I start to unlock it.
	And as I'm unlocking it, before I could even pull the key out fully, I hear this voice.
	This guy gets up and he's like, what the hell is something like that?
	And he gets up and opens the door.
	It seems like he has no idea who I am or how I'm coming in.
	And he's like, what are you doing here?
	And stuff like that. And then she starts telling me to just go, to just leave.
	She gets all freaked out that I ended up showing up.
	I don't know who he is at the time.
	I assumed it was just a friend.
	So I was like, Telling her, like, hey, if you just needed to talk to her friend about something, that's fine.
	I'm not upset at you. I don't understand as long as you're honest with me about it and tell me what it was.
	I'm perfectly okay with that.
	And she just kept telling me to go, to go.
	She wasn't explaining anything.
	He was just telling me to go.
	When you called her, she just cried and hung up.
	Was she still emotional or just upset that you were there?
	No, she was still emotional.
	She was crying as she was telling me to go.
	He was starting to get close up toward me.
	Not physically coming into contact with me, but getting pretty close and telling me I need to go.
	He was trying to Tell her, like, oh, do you want me to get the key from him?
	And she said no, but in my mind, I was like, you're not touching me, dude.
	Like, no way.
	I told this story to a couple of people I know, and they're like, I'm surprised you had the self-control to not pull your gun out on him.
	Like, I would have done that, is what they said.
	Everybody talks tough, but that's never a good idea, unless you're in immediate physical death danger.
	Okay, so your girlfriend's crying.
	There's a strange guy in her place who's saying, I'll just take the key from him or whatever.
	And you didn't know this guy from anyone, right?
	I didn't know who he was at the time.
	But then after I left, I walked down the stairs.
	I sat on my car. I told her as I was walking down the stairs.
	The neighbor also came out and heard him like yelling and stuff.
	So the neighbor is like telling me to go because they don't have context.
	They don't know what's happening.
	They just see me outside the door and everyone telling me to go.
	So the neighbor jumps in on that.
	And I was just worried. I was like, I don't know who this is.
	In my head, I was thinking, is it someone that kidnapped her or something and is forcing her to be here?
	And she's telling me to go because she wants to protect me or something like that?
	And then I get down the stairs.
	And then I call her mom.
	And I'm like, hey, this happened.
	Like, I'm worried about her.
	I don't know what to do. And we both, we call the police to do a wellness check on her.
	And the police determine that she wants whoever is there to be there.
	So I'm like, okay.
	And then the night just goes on.
	And then I realize, I see the car that's parked across from her parking spot.
	And it's her ex's car.
	And... And then I remembered her description.
	I've never personally seen her ex, but I remember the description she gave me.
	How did you know it was the ex's car?
	She's told me what his car looked like in the past.
	I knew he went to the same school as us, so he had a parking pass sticker on there.
	So I knew based on the description of the car she gave me.
	Why did she give you a description of her ex's car?
	Was she scared of him? Oh, she's a very...
	She has a very good memory.
	She knew his license plate.
	She knew...
	She knows everyone's license plate that she knows.
	She memorizes...
	She knows like four languages.
	She has a very, very good memory.
	But yeah, she was scared of him in the beginning, which is weird.
	That's kind of why I thought maybe she'd be kidnapped even more so after I realized it was her ex.
	But... She would say she saw him and she would kind of hide behind me as we were walking around school.
	Sorry, did you stay in the parking lot all night?
	How did you know in the morning it was his car?
	Did you come back? No, not the morning.
	That's when I came down the stairs and started to drive off.
	Ah, okay, okay. Yeah.
	But yeah, she would always express feelings of either being scared or very...
	Nervous. And she'd even get sad when she saw her ex's car even just on the road somewhere.
	And she'd tell me as we were driving, she's like, I'm feeling sad just because I saw his car, things like that.
	So it surprised me that he was there when I figured out it was him.
	I'm sorry, you just cut off there.
	Are we still together? Yeah, yeah.
	Yeah, okay. I'm not quite sure when you finish the story.
	Okay, so what happened then? So after the police show up and all that and they leave and determine that she wanted him there and she was safe, her mom recommends maybe just let the night go on and try to talk to her tomorrow again.
	So I say okay, but I'm still feeling like I'm stressed out over this.
	So I call up a friend and go to her house just to talk about everything that happened.
	And I was like, I don't know what to do.
	And my friend recommended that I go there and just go in anyway into their apartment.
	But I knew logically, I can't do that.
	They told me to go.
	I'm not going to risk the cost being called on me.
	Because I just went in without permission, you know?
	So I just go home and...
	Did you get any decent advice from...
	I mean, I can tell you the advice I would give you.
	I really don't think I did get any...
	Okay, what do you think the advice...
	If you'd called me and told me this story, what advice do you think I would give you?
	Leave her and never talk to her again, maybe.
	Well, if she wants to hang out at 1 o'clock in the morning in an apartment with her ex and she tells you to leave, that's it.
	I mean, that's done, right? I mean, if you want to be alone with your ex in the middle of the night without telling me, And you tell me to leave, even though obviously you're in no danger, and the cops come and you say, no, no, no, I want him to stay.
	I want my ex to stay.
	I want my boyfriend to leave.
	You'd be like, well, look, clearly you have things to work out with your ex, and I'm going to give you a space called infinity in which to do so.
	Yeah. I mean, how on earth can you...
	I mean, that's such bizarre behavior.
	I can't even explain.
	I'm not bad in powers of explanation.
	I can't even explain just how a completely bizarre circumstance this is.
	That she's lying to you.
	She says she's studying. You know, she doesn't call you when she says she's going to call you.
	You call her. She cries and hangs up.
	You go over. There's a guy there.
	I mean, that's just... That's so...
	I mean, it's such untrustworthy and destructive behavior that...
	I mean, why you'd want to take another step into that swamp is sort of beyond me, but that's what I would say.
	Yeah, I could understand.
	And the only reason you'd want to keep going is because she's great in bed, she's hot, or you love drama, or some combination of all three.
	But someone telling you to go back, I mean, my God, and this other friend who says, oh yeah, go back into the house where you've been ordered to leave, go invade her property, and my God, with a guy who's already physically threatened you in a way by saying, like, I can take away his keys, or do you want me to take away the keys that he has?
	And he didn't know who you were, obviously, and she didn't refer to you as, oh no, this is my boyfriend.
	Right? She's just like, get out, get out, right?
	Okay, well, you know exactly what it means when a woman doesn't introduce you to another guy as her boyfriend.
	You know exactly what that means, right?
	Yeah, because she says she didn't do anything with him that night.
	It doesn't matter.
	I mean, why on earth would you believe somebody who's been lying to you all evening and chooses her ex-boyfriend over you and doesn't refer to you as her boyfriend to her ex-boyfriend?
	Like, why on earth would you believe anything she says?
	And again, I have sympathy with her for her childhood.
	She's got a heavy set of burdens to carry, but, you know, there are people who are heading in the right direction for healing, and there are people who are heading in the wrong direction for healing, and, you know, maybe you can help people along in one sense, but you can't drag people back the other way.
	Okay, so, anyway, how did it...
	It's a wild story, I tell you.
	How did it play out from here? So...
	Over the next few days, I kept...
	Actually, that next morning, I went over to her apartment, and I went in, and he wasn't there.
	And she was asleep in her bed.
	I'm sorry to interrupt, but the cops had been by there at what, like two in the morning in the wellness check and established that he was still there?
	Around one in the morning.
	Okay. Yeah. But...
	He was gone by the time I showed up later that morning, around 8 or 9.
	And she was asleep in her bed, and when I went in, she was completely calm.
	She heard me come in, and she didn't say anything, but she was completely naked in her bed, though.
	And I didn't know what to think of it because she would sleep like that sometimes, but I don't know.
	It made me think maybe something happened.
	So I questioned her. I was like, what happened last night?
	What was all that?
	And she said, I just needed someone to talk to.
	And I was like, well, why him and not me?
	Why the ex-boyfriend you're scared of rather than the boyfriend you're currently with?
	Yeah, and she said, I just didn't feel like I could...
	Talk to you about it.
	And I was like, about what was it?
	And she explained how...
	Because I've done things that aren't exactly nice to her either.
	She went on about how there are times when we'd be playing a video game together or something, and I wouldn't yell at her, but it was pretty clear that I was annoyed with something she did in the game.
	And I don't know where this comes from to me, but I have this thing.
	I would do that sometimes.
	You don't know where yelling at people about video games comes from?
	Come on. You have no idea?
	It's just a complete mystery to you?
	No, no. I wouldn't yell at her.
	But it'd be pretty clear to express that I was annoyed, though.
	Yeah, yeah, I get it, but your parents' go-to emotion was annoyance, right?
	Yeah. Okay, so, I mean, it's like you're speaking English to me.
	You grew up with people teaching you English and speaking English around you.
	You're in an English culture, and then you say, I don't know where I got this English from.
	But anyway, we can come back to that.
	So what happens then?
	You've got the naked ex-gymnast, who's probably naked as a way of appeasing you in the morning, and then what?
	And then we talk, and then...
	I don't remember exactly what went on from there, but she didn't explain fully everything they did.
	She was like, I'll tell you when I'm ready, basically.
	And it was about three days.
	It took three days for her to finally say, okay, this is exactly what happened.
	I was actually studying for a bit, and then I was sitting in a room...
	Um, in like one of the private study rooms and, um, he saw me crying in there and he came in to check on me because he saw me crying and we just started talking from there.
	She said she didn't plan to meet with him or anything.
	He just, he just happened to see her crying and we started talking and then, uh, she started saying how she wasn't very, uh, happy about, uh, things going on in her life and, uh, She didn't say she mentioned who I was or what I looked like or anything.
	And I guess they went to dinner and drove around for a few hours and spent time together and then went back to her apartment just to talk and that's what she told me.
	And that was, again, three days after all this had happened.
	She finally opened up a bell. Did she say what they were talking about that she couldn't talk about with you?
	Or wouldn't? Not specifically.
	She just mentioned that she talked a little bit about how she wasn't happy with her relationship.
	Oh, she was complaining about you to her ex-boyfriend?
	Yeah. Oh my god, dude!
	Oh my god!
	I don't know what exactly complaints she said.
	It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter that you would go and complain about your current boyfriend to your ex-boyfriend.
	Who you say you're so scared of.
	Yeah, that's monstrous.
	It didn't make sense to me.
	Because she expressed being scared of him and then all of a sudden she sees him.
	And she said she blocked him and she said she wasn't going to talk to him anymore.
	But then as the next few weeks, I noticed she was on Snapchat with someone and I... Well, hang on, hang on, hang on.
	So what's your...
	So when was this occurring?
	How long had you guys been going out when all this went down?
	Let's see. That happened...
	I just moved out by then.
	Because I lived with her for a few months into the semester because I had to move out of my apartment, but my new one wasn't ready, so I had to stay with her.
	So that happened maybe November, maybe four months, five months.
	Okay, and when did you move in with her?
	How long after you started dating?
	Maybe about two, three months, maybe.
	Okay.
	Okay. So, a couple of months after you start dating, you move in together, and then this thing occurs, what, four or five months into it?
	Yeah, yeah. I didn't move in, move in officially.
	I was... But I was staying with her because I was supposed to move out of my apartment and into a new one.
	But I show up to the new one.
	They tell me it's still not ready because part of it is still under construction.
	So I had nowhere to go. So I ended up staying with her.
	But yeah. Well, no, no. Come on.
	Come on, you had places to go.
	You could have crashed with friends.
	Yeah.
	But they won't give you sex, so you go to the ex-gymnast, right?
	But don't give me this, like, you had to move in, but you didn't.
	Yeah, I did have other options, but we were together at the time, so I think...
	Yeah, but that together doesn't mean, you know, within a couple of months of starting to seeing someone, you move in with them, right?
	That's... So what happens then is you end up bonding with her because your body doesn't know about the modern world and birth control.
	Your body is just like, oh, we're living together, we're having sex, we're now bonded for life.
	That's what your body is doing.
	Right? So, just to point out, right, so this is why, if you don't know enough about the woman, about whether you can trust her, she's reliable, she's honest, she's diligent, she's, you know, all of the virtues that we're courageous and all of that.
	Like, all the virtues that you'd want, your body is like, oh, we're having sex with this woman and we're living together, we're pair-bonded for life.
	That's what your heart starts doing, right?
	And the reason I'm saying all of this is you're going through unbelievable torture with this girl not in your life, right?
	Yeah. And that's because your body is experiencing a death.
	Because when you have sex, you move in, you bond, that kind of way, your body's like, oh, well, we're together.
	And then your body, if she's not around, is like, oh, she died.
	Or, like, you're going through a foundational grieving of a life partner.
	That's what happens when you have sex, move in together, right?
	That's why it's supposed to wait until marriage, right?
	Because you're supposed to really know the person before you commit in that kind of way.
	Just so you know, there's a reason for these old-fashioned things, right?
	It's not just made up and, you know, it's not just prudes or Amish people or people toilet trained at gunpoint.
	It's like, no, there's a reason for these things because our penis can sort of just like the grappling hook, but then it drags the whole emotional system behind it, right?
	So you're pair-bonded.
	And you're pair-bonded with somebody who is extraordinarily unstable and unreliable.
	Mm-hmm. Does this make any sense?
	It does, it does, yes.
	I don't want your feelings to be a complete mystery to you.
	I guess the part of it that doesn't make sense, though, is if you apply that to her, does she feel that same way?
	I don't know, I'm not talking to her.
	But I will say that she did not bond in the same way you did.
	Because she could just go and...
	Hang out at one o'clock in the morning with her ex, complaining about you, as she says, and tell you to leave and the ex to stay, right?
	It's like, hey, if, I mean, if I was in that situation, I can't imagine being, but if I was in that situation, the woman said, no, you, my current boyfriend, you have to leave at one o'clock in the morning, but my ex could stay.
	Be like, okay, well, he can stay and I'll leave, but I'm not coming back.
	Because she chose the ex.
	Yeah. I mean, you're supposed to have loyalty, I mean, to your current boyfriend, right?
	Especially when you've complained about the ex to your current boyfriend, that he's scary and dangerous and makes you sad and you have to hide, right?
	Okay, so then if she wants to have the ex around, then okay, that's her thing.
	She likes, that's what, I mean, maybe that's what turns her on, right?
	This scary, dangerous guy or whatever, right?
	And he was getting kind of punchy with you in a way, right?
	Like, oh, take his key. You want me to take his keys?
	Right? Yeah, and it was odd because he's smaller than me, but he still had that level of aggression.
	Right, okay. So I'm still trying to figure out the timeline.
	So a couple of months after, you've been together for seven months, is that right?
	No, the total time was about a year, but that happened about six, seven months in.
	Six, seven months in, okay.
	So then, did you think about breaking up with her over the 1am thing?
	My first thought was, like, I want to give her a chance to explain, like, what the heck this is.
	And the thought occurred to me of breaking up, but I didn't seriously consider it.
	Let me understand this.
	You wanted to give her a chance to explain.
	Yeah. So that is taking your power and handing it to someone else.
	That's taking your free will.
	It's incumbent upon you, as a rational student and lover of philosophy as I am, to have her own thoughts.
	So basically what happens is that I'm horny, she's hot, I hope she can talk me out of breaking up with her so I can have sex with her again.
	Because you're not evaluating the situation and making your own choices.
	Giving her a chance to explain the unexplainable.
	There's no way to explain that.
	There's no way to explain that, other than it was a hostage situation, which obviously it wasn't, right?
	So basically she's like, you're like, I'm bonded in some way.
	Maybe it's sexual, maybe it's romantic, whatever it is, right?
	So I want her to talk me out of breaking up with her because I want to keep going out with her.
	But you're not even making the decision to keep going out with her.
	You're not saying, okay, I'm going to overlook this, I'm going to accept this, I'm going to whatever, right?
	So you're handing your free will, your choice, your entire being is being handed over to a very untrustworthy person.
	Because there is no way to explain that.
	That she lied, she cried, she ordered you to leave, she told the police he's there by choice, and she basically kicks you out into the night and stays in her place at 1am with her ex-boyfriend.
	You can't explain that. There's no explaining that.
	You know, it's like, well, she did strangle my dog, but I'm going to give her a chance to explain it.
	What does that even mean?
	How can you possibly explain this?
	I'm happy to be corrected, but I can't see how.
	No, you're right.
	That's not even the worst thing I guess she's done to me.
	Alright, let's keep going. Anyway, time goes on and she says she's not talking to him anymore but I find out she is on Snapchat so I take her phone and block him on her Snapchat and she gets upset at that.
	Wait, wait, wait, hang on. How did she explain that she lied to you about being in contact with her ex-boyfriend?
	Did you give her a chance to explain that one as well, or how did that happen?
	No, I just kind of...
	At that point, I just accepted that she was lying to me.
	I guess this is where that biological response of...
	Well, and here's the thing too, right?
	So what your mom did was like...
	I'm taking away your toys if you don't obey me, if you don't behave, right?
	So then, because you've had that imprinting over and over again in your childhood, when she's doing something that you don't like, you take away her toy.
	You lock her phone, you cancel her Snapchat or whatever you do, right?
	So you understand, you're just doing to her what your parents did to you.
	Yeah, I see that connection now.
	And, of course, you're escalating aggression here and control over her.
	So she's acting like a sneaky child and you're becoming a dominant parent, right?
	Yeah. This can never work out.
	Because when she was a child, adults abused and exploited her.
	So if you become the adult and she regresses to childhood, you just put in the category of abuser and it just gets worse from there.
	And it did continue to get worse.
	Okay, so what happened then? So I block her phone, and she gets upset over that.
	She obviously unblocks him later on, but then she says she stopped talking to him on there.
	I convinced her to delete her account altogether, so I know for sure she can't talk to him on there.
	She does that, and then we're sitting in a hallway outside.
	I'm just sitting with her.
	She's waiting to go into one of her classes.
	And I noticed she gets a phone call from a number, and I just see the number pop up briefly on her phone.
	It's not saved as a contact, but I memorized the number, and she told me it was just a doctor's appointment, a hospital calling her, which is like, because that's where we are.
	Yeah, you can keep the geographical details off.
	Okay. But I noticed she's getting a call, and...
	And I memorize the number, and later on I go and look up the number, and I find out it's her ex-boyfriend.
	So I find out she's still talking to him somehow.
	So we confront her about that.
	She finally stops talking to him.
	And then time goes on.
	Then we end up going into our break from school for the end of the semester.
	And she goes back home.
	And she lives maybe seven, ten hours, ten, eleven hours from where we're going to school.
	And we're communicating over the phone, but it's always arguments.
	It's just always arguing about something.
	I can't even say what anymore because it happened so many times.
	But it turned into her yelling at me and me yelling at her on the phone and her saying we're done and Then we'll go back to, we're not done, and then we're apparently together again, but not explicitly saying so.
	So I was getting fed up with it, and I ended up just, I downloaded Tinder, and I was like, okay, I'm going to use this basically, I used it as a distraction from the whole situation.
	And then we get another argument over the phone, and I'm like, okay, I'm done.
	I'm just going to go and drive there and We're going to talk this out and sort things out.
	So I start driving, and I tell her I'm driving.
	She says, no, don't come here.
	I'm driving there anyway.
	And my original home, where I'm from, is on the drive there.
	So even if I ended up driving and she refused to talk to me by the time I get there, I only have a few-hour drive back to where my parents live.
	So I'm driving anyway, and as I'm maybe about an hour away, I tell her, hey, I'm an hour away, and she's completely happy with me and completely calm.
	All the arguments stop, and her mood completely changes up.
	And she's excited that I'm there and she wants me to come there and stay and visit with her.
	And that was the first time I met her mom.
	I've met her dad before. But I meet her mom and they're inviting and welcoming and we all have dinner together and everything's fine until she finds out that I was talking with a friend, and she finds out that I told my friend about everything that had happened, because she sees the text on my phone, because she checked my phone as we were sleeping.
	And she wakes up in the middle of the night, and she's mad at me.
	She's not yelling, because her parents...
	Wait, are you sleeping together?
	Yeah. In her parents' house?
	Yeah. Right?
	I think they were okay with that.
	But... She's upset at me, and she's threatening to just start screaming if I didn't leave.
	So I was obviously scared, because if she starts screaming, her parents are going to come in, and she's going to obviously be upset at me.
	I don't know what's going to happen.
	So she's threatening me in that way, but I managed to calm her down.
	Sorry, she's mad because you told a friend about what had happened?
	Yeah, she didn't want me to talk to that friend anymore.
	Hang on, so the woman who was complaining about her relationship with you to her ex-boyfriend is upset because you're complaining about her to a friend?
	Yeah. Okay, so there's no consistency of any kind here, right?
	It's completely hypocritical.
	Yeah. Well, she's attractive, right?
	So she's got power, and power is the ability to be completely hypocritical and get away with it.
	That's kind of one of the definitions of power.
	But, okay, so she's obviously completely ridiculous as far as having any principles about this, but what happens then?
	So, I get her to calm down to the point where we're able to go to sleep together in the same bed, and then everything kind of continues.
	I'm staying with her for a few more days.
	Nothing happened, really.
	We're not talking about anything that went on.
	We're just spending time with her parents and her dogs.
	And she's showing me around the place she lived and where she went to school and things like that.
	Then I go back to where our college is.
	And we get back into this cycle of getting on phone arguments.
	There was a time when I was just asleep, right?
	And she called me apparently, but I was in too deep of a sleep to hear the phone.
	And apparently she got so upset that I didn't answer that she went into the bathroom.
	And this is when she started to do this again at this point.
	She went into the bathroom and apparently cut herself off.
	And then she told me the next morning, and I woke up to all these angry texts on my phone as well, and she told me the next morning how she went into the bathroom and did that, and she tried to say, it's because you didn't answer, and it's because you make me feel all these ways, and because I looked at myself in the mirror, and I just think I'm ugly, and so I cut myself because you weren't there for me.
	You didn't answer. So she's a bully this way, right?
	Yeah. Okay. She's blaming that on me and I tried to explain that I was just asleep.
	I'm sorry that I didn't answer your call.
	I would have if I had woken up and I was just asleep.
	She continued to be mad at me and say how I couldn't be there for her.
	But then we give that some time and We got into this cycle.
	We'd argue. We just, pretty intensely, some time would go by, and then it'd be like nothing happened.
	We'd act just fine together again.
	And we got back into that state of It being fine, and she came back.
	You know that is a cycle of abuse, right?
	The abuse is followed by the honeymoon period.
	Both are necessary for the abuse to continue.
	I mean, if it were all just horrible and abusive, right, then you'd break it off.
	But because there's these good times, that's part of the whole cycle.
	But anyway, go on. Yeah.
	No, I see that. But we got back in the state of being fine, and she was driving back Back to where we went to college from home.
	She came straight to my apartment.
	She didn't even go to her apartment first.
	So she started her suitcases and everything.
	We were excited to see each other at first.
	Then we got into this argument just minutes after.
	She stormed off back to her apartment.
	The cycle just kept going and going until we eventually got to a point where we broke up for a good few week period.
	And then I wasn't dealing with it so well.
	So I came back to her and I said, hey, I just want to Understand things between us.
	And I want to talk it out and just one final conversation before we part ways.
	So she agrees.
	We get into my car.
	We start going on a drive.
	And we're driving for hours and hours.
	And we're just talking about things.
	And she says how she has this new...
	Boyfriend, though, already.
	Like a couple of weeks after you broke up?
	Yeah, she says...
	Well, but to be fair, you were on Tinder when you were taking a break, too, right?
	Yeah, yeah. I never met anyone, but I was on it.
	But she says she has this new boyfriend and how she's doing all these things and learning how to fix cars or something with him and Drive a stick and things like that because she's into cars.
	Oh, so now you're the ex-boyfriend she's hanging out with, whereas before she was hanging out with her last ex-boyfriend, now you're the new ex-boyfriend she's hanging out with.
	Well, supposedly, because by the end of the night, we're driving back and I'm going to drop her off at her place and the plan is to never see each other again or talk to each other again.
	We obviously see each other because we go to the same school.
	And then this song...
	We have this one song that always plays.
	It's like our song that we love to play together.
	And it comes on because we wanted to listen to it together one last time.
	And it ends and I say goodbye and she doesn't get out of my car.
	She just starts crying.
	Just uncontrollably crying.
	And says how she's sorry and how She doesn't want to leave and how she wants to try one more time.
	She has a boyfriend!
	She said she lied about having a boyfriend.
	She said she was just saying that just to try to distance herself from me.
	Oh, so I just lied to you.
	Let's try again. I'm sorry.
	I don't mean to laugh, but go ahead. You're right.
	I see that now in retrospect.
	Yeah, she said she lied about it.
	Well, you can listen to me because I don't have a lot of cleavage, but anyway, go on.
	I knew this person that she was talking about was real.
	I knew that she was going down out of town to hang out with someone, but she said he was just a friend and that it wasn't actually her boyfriend.
	And so... This happens and I agree, okay, we're trying one more time.
	And then we go and a few weeks go by and we're trying things out and we go down to this one donut shop that she likes that's a few hours away and we get donuts and then we get back to my place.
	Wait, you drive a couple of hours for donuts?
	Yeah, yeah. That's what I call an addiction, brother, but all right, go ahead.
	It's not just for donuts.
	There's this one city we go to.
	We kind of make a trip out of it.
	We do various things together there.
	At the time, I wasn't paying for gas because...
	She had this gas car, and her parents knew that they were fine with it.
	She would let me use the gas car any time we went places to pay for gas, so I never had to pay for gas.
	So driving a couple hours wasn't really too hard.
	But we get back to my place, and then I'm picking up a donut, and I'm kind of like...
	Maybe I get this from my mom.
	I probably do. Kind of a clean free...
	So I go grab a donut and she goes to bite it as I'm picking it up out of the box.
	But I knew that I was going to drop it on accident or someone was going to fall on the floor.
	So I get snappy, not yelling, but a snappy kind of tone.
	Don't do that.
	Stop or something like that that indicated that I didn't want to do that.
	And she gets sad over that and leaves and Storms off.
	And I try to apologize. I'm sorry.
	I didn't mean to get that way with you.
	But she storms off anyway.
	And at that point, I don't know what drove me to this.
	I suppose I just had enough.
	But I followed her in her car as she was driving around.
	And we had this maybe 30 minutes of me just following her in her car.
	And I'm trying to, at the same time, I'm driving and trying to call her at the same time.
	And Because I'm like, I get tired of this.
	I mean, that's very dangerous, right?
	Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, that was life-risking, and please, everybody out there, don't do this shit.
	But anyway, go on. Yeah.
	I regret that I did it, too, of course.
	I guess the emotions got the best of me.
	And then eventually, I just stopped following her, and I go to pick up some lunch and And then I go back to her place and she's there and we're just arguing and arguing and eventually we argue enough and then she's fine and I go to work and things are fine.
	Again, back to that cycle and then we have a few days go by and I'm just...
	Playing a game together, and then she starts getting these messages from someone on the game.
	She doesn't open them, though, but I can see she's responding to them on her phone through the Messenger app on there.
	And then I go under her.
	She says she has to leave because she has a job interview in the morning, so she wants to get sleep for it.
	So she leaves. We say bye, and then I go under her account, though, because I have it on here.
	And I see that it was someone messaging her about wanting to play a game with her.
	So I find out that she didn't leave to go sleep.
	She left to go play with them online.
	So I go and try to confront her about it.
	And I still have access to her apartment.
	So I didn't realize she wasn't home, though.
	And I go into their apartment and see she's not there.
	And she had just gotten a new alarm system.
	That I never got the code for yet.
	And as soon as I go in and I realize she's not there, the alarm's about to go off.
	I call her to let her know, like, hey, I thought you were here.
	And the alarm's going to go off, she's letting you know.
	But she doesn't answer.
	And then it just starts going off.
	So I'm like, I don't know what to do. So I leave.
	And the cops show up.
	And they... Search the place.
	And I know this because I left the apartment, left the parking lot, but I still had a place where I could see it in my car.
	And I see them show up and they search the place and they leave.
	And then she calls me after all that happened saying, I can't believe you did that.
	And I never want to talk to you again.
	I'm breaking up with you because you did that.
	And because you showed up to my apartment without me there.
	And that was the end of it.
	She says she never wanted to talk to me again.
	And that's the... End of it there, but there's some crazy things she's told me, too.
	I taught her how to shoot.
	She's pretty good at it, too.
	I'm impressed with how good she is, but there was a time where she told me, there was one time when you were in front of me and I just thought about shooting you in the back of the head.
	She told me that. She told me how one time she saw her ex a last final time Just to have that over me, just to say she did it to hurt me in case I hurt her.
	She's told me how she's thought about killing me in other ways.
	She's told me how she's thought about killing your ex.
	She's threatened to kill my friends if they looked at her a certain way.
	Things like that as well.
	But that's how it ended.
	Well, when did she tell you all of this lovely stuff?
	Somewhere in between.
	They would come up in the arguments as she was...
	I can't say for certain, but somewhere in between the period when we last finally talked to each other and when she saw her ex for the first time.
	Okay. All right.
	So then she says, because you were in her place at night, that she never wants to see you again, and that's the case, right?
	That's taken? Yeah, she says because I went into her apartment when she wasn't there.
	And that was in May?
	Yeah. So, like three, four months ago, right?
	Three months ago? Yeah, about three months ago.
	Okay. And this feeling of desolation and rejection and so on, what's your understanding of it?
	Why is this occurring for you?
	Well, I know right now, even now, I don't know how I could...
	If she tried to talk to me right now, If she knocked on the door right now and wanted to talk, I would let her in.
	Almost like I feel like there's something that can be saved or something good that can Continue on with all this.
	What's the good?
	Like, what's your fantasy ideal outcome?
	Let's say she knocks on the door and what do you want?
	Do you get married to her, have kids with her, have a lifetime together?
	What is the scenario that you're torturing yourself with not getting?
	Basically, she comes up and she's...
	So she wants to try again, and we do, and everything is fine, and we're arguing, and we both graduate together, and I go into my career, she goes into hers for a few years, and then have kids, and then, yeah, have a family and be okay, but that's the imaginary scenario, of course.
	Yeah, no, no, of course, but I mean, if it's in your head, you know, we know dreams are imaginary scenarios, it doesn't mean they don't have power over us, right, or trying to tell us something.
	Yeah. Okay. And what are your regrets in regards to this relationship?
	I regret that...
	I regret the times I did yell at her.
	I regret the times I did call her a bitch sometimes, too, when she was at this point where she was just yelling at me and That's when I would get to that point.
	I regret...
	There was a time, actually, I don't remember what triggered it or caused me to start this feeling of distrust in her.
	But there...
	There was a time when I just started to heavily just distrust her.
	This was even before she saw her ex.
	And I didn't do anything to it, but I saved this porn on my phone and I knew she'd found it.
	But I regret doing that.
	I regret going onto Tinder.
	I regret following her.
	Her car, there were times when we would argue as we're coming to the place of the Donuts or that city where we'd have that drive back and we'd be arguing on this drive and she would get so upset that she wanted me to just leave her there on the side of the road in the middle of nowhere.
	Oh, like your mom threatened you, right?
	Sorry, go ahead. Oh, like your mom threatened you when you were seven or eight or nine, leave you by the side of the road because you're upset about the worm in this movie.
	Well, she wanted me to leave her on the side.
	No, no, I get that. Yeah, I can understand.
	But yeah, it was like that.
	And it would be the middle of the night, and I'd be like, no, that's crazy.
	I can't just leave you on the side of the road in the middle of the night in the middle of nowhere where you don't even have barely any reception, right?
	But then she'd be like, I'm going to call the police, and I'd be like, I'm not going to leave you.
	On the side of the road, so I'd take her phone and grab it from her and not let her have it.
	Then there was a time when we stopped for a little bit, and I was trying to calm her down, but she just got out of the car.
	I just started walking off, and I was trying to get her to just come back.
	I was like, I'll take you back to your apartment, but I won't talk to you.
	I'll leave you there. But I can't let you just be out here in the middle of nowhere on your own.
	Someone could kidnap you.
	You could get attacked by some sort of animal that's out here.
	You could get ran over. There's a number of things that could harm you.
	She kept walking off.
	There's no lights or anything either.
	It's pitch black. I can't let her do this, so I I grabbed her by the arm and I basically made her come into my car so I could finish driving her back.
	Things like that. Right.
	Okay. Now, in the interest of time, because I want to make sure we get to the conclusions, you've been listening to the show for how long?
	So, there was a time, I was maybe around 16 when I first heard of you.
	And I watched a couple of videos, but I wasn't watching you consistently.
	But recently, maybe about four years ago is when I more consistently started to listen to you.
	Okay. All right. So we can go at a fair clip here, right?
	This is not – you're not a noob.
	Yeah. This kind of philosophy.
	Okay. So – The purpose of your relationship is the feelings that you're having now, not sex or even love.
	So the purpose of your relationship, when you were growing up, you were not bonded with your parents.
	I think that's a fair thing to say because your parents threatened your bond continually.
	And also you said, you know, I just want to leave.
	I'm going to leave. And you've said I'm the kind of person, you know, even with regards to my family of origin, my mom and my dad, like I could just get up and leave and never look back, right?
	Yeah. So you understand that for you, you couldn't have any control over whether your parents bonded with you or loved you in a way that made you feel secure and safe and treasured and valued and all that kind of good stuff.
	So you managed being unbonded.
	So you don't have any control over whether your parents bond with you, but you do have control over the feelings of being unbonded.
	That's the only kind of control you do have.
	So this is back to an analogy I use in my book, Real-Time Relationships.
	Which is Simon the Boxer, right?
	So there's this guy who's a boxer.
	Why is he a boxer? Well, because when he was a kid, he was beat up all the time.
	He couldn't control how he was beat up.
	But he could control his response to being beaten up, to manage and control the feelings of being beaten up.
	But the problem is then, when he becomes an adult, he doesn't feel like he has any control at all unless he's being beaten up.
	Because his whole emotional sense of control and power is coming from managing the feelings of being beaten up.
	Now, you... I assume when you were a kid, you were rejected, it sounds like.
	That's really hard, and I... Huge, massive sympathy for all of that.
	It's brutal to go through. So you were rejected as a kid, which meant you didn't have any security.
	You didn't have any safety. You didn't have any protection that you felt you could rely on.
	Because the people who were supposed to protect you were the people who were threatening their bond with you.
	So you manage...
	Rejection. You control your feelings about rejection.
	You manage being rejected.
	You can't control whether you are rejected by your parents, really, but you can control the feelings that arise from that.
	So controlling and managing feelings...
	I'm sorry, go ahead. I read that book, actually, maybe a couple weeks ago.
	I was making that connection.
	I had to manage myself in some way, so I connected that to the Simon the Boxer story.
	Right. So then when you become an adult, you choose a woman who is utterly untrustworthy.
	And listen, I'm not trying to bag on her or be down on her.
	She had a hell of a childhood and she's not exactly in a culture that's going to help her very much.
	She's in hookup culture and she's very attractive, so she's going to be led all the wrong direction.
	So I'm not just trying to dunk on her, but...
	Of all the women you could have chosen, you chose a woman who exactly reproduces what happened to you as a child.
	I'm sure you had some good times with your parents, and then you got rejected, and then there were some good times with your parents, and then you got rejected.
	And then you choose a woman, you have some good times with her, and then you get rejected, right?
	Yeah, and that's consistent with Each of my other past relationships as well.
	I have no doubt. I have no doubt.
	So this sick feelings of despair and hopelessness and isolation and all of that, that's childhood stuff.
	And again, massive sympathy for you as a child.
	No parents should threaten to just have your neighbor's kid take away the toys.
	Force you to sit down on the couch in the same way you manhandle the woman from time to time.
	If you have a worm in your drink, it's going to freak you out as a kid.
	Just leave him outside, let him fend for himself when you're seven or eight or nine.
	No. Right?
	Your mom gets mad at you for yelling at a video game, drags you to your room, slaps you across the face.
	You say, I hate you, comes in and apologizes, but justifies, right?
	And then you're like, oh, I love you, but your fingers are crossed.
	Around 13 or 14, right?
	You wanted to leave your family, you threatened to leave and never come back.
	Now, that's a way of saying, I don't feel loved, I don't feel treasured, I don't feel respected, I don't feel protected.
	And did your parents say, oh my gosh, that's a terrible thing.
	I'm so sorry you feel that way.
	Let's try and figure out how to fix that.
	You know, there's this joke.
	It's a really tragic joke.
	I remember this being in Calvin Hobbes way back.
	The kid wants to run away.
	And the mom's like, oh, I'll pack you a lunch.
	Here, let me put some clothes in your backpack.
	Off you go down the road, right?
	That's just like bullying.
	It is, you know, screw you, kid.
	You've got no protection. You've got no resources.
	You've got to just sit here and suffer because we hold all the cards.
	Mm-hmm. Sorry, go ahead.
	I would escalate it too when threatening to run away didn't work out of it.
	I remember there was a time I yelled at my dad and I was like, I wish a bullet would just, some random stray bullet would just come through the wall and just end me here.
	I would escalate it even more.
	Oh, that's interesting. So you wish a bullet would come through the wall and kill you?
	Yeah, I told him that one time.
	I was pretty young, too. Maybe around 12, 13.
	So, I mean, that's a sign of extraordinary desperation on the part of a child, right?
	Yeah. So you wish you'd been killed by a bullet, right?
	Or you were saying that you wished you'd been killed by a bullet, and then you end up dating a woman who fantasizes about killing you how?
	Right. With a bullet?
	Shooting me in the back of the head, yeah.
	With a bullet. Right.
	So you have a sort of pray for death scenario and then you are with a woman who's fantasizing about shooting you, fantasizing about killing you in other ways, fantasizing about killing your friends and is assaulting herself with knives, right?
	Yeah. So you have some unhappiness to process with regards to being rejected as a child.
	Because if you're not processing and experiencing the rejection you had as a child that made you, in a sense, self-destructive or suicidal or have those thoughts, then you're just used to managing those feelings and then you're going to pick people who are extraordinarily dangerous, who are going to have good times, bad times, accept and reject, to just manage these feelings.
	These feelings are the purpose of this relationship.
	They're not a tragic outcome of a relationship that didn't work.
	This woman rejected you early, chose her ex-boyfriend over you, and you pursued this because you're very used to, and I sympathize with this enormously, you're used to managing feelings of rejection, of isolation.
	And there are a lot of women around who aren't like this at all, but you don't want them, right?
	I do, but, like, I haven't gone for them.
	Well, no, I get that.
	So, look, there's, I mean, there's more than one part of you, is there's more than one part of me.
	So, yes, part of you wants to not have this crazy drama, right?
	But the other part of it's like, well, this is all I'm used to.
	It's hard learning a new language, right?
	Yeah, yeah, you're right.
	I... It's weird because I'm very good at reading people and I can pick out these people that are like her and like my past exes.
	I know who they are.
	I don't even have to say anything to them.
	I know who they are.
	I suppose you could say I even got a sense of that when I first saw her.
	Sure.
	I have no doubt that she presents herself in a way that anybody with four and a half brain cells or more can be like, yeah, this woman's really out there.
	Now, why does she keep rejecting you?
	Because, I mean, she's probably got the same thing with her father who wouldn't protect her when she was drowning with her parents who wouldn't protect her from the girls who were trying to use razor blades to cut open her eyelids or whatever crazy stuff.
	I doubt that story, but, you know, that's neither here nor there at the moment.
	So she's in a state of unprotection, right?
	So her parents should have loved her for who she was, but now she can only be loved because she's pretty.
	So if you choose her because she's pretty and because she's sexually available, she's going to hate you for it.
	I'm telling you straight up, if you choose a woman just because she's hot and sexually available, she'll hate you for that.
	Because you just want to have sex with her, you don't care about her as a person.
	You want to use her for sexual gratification.
	She would say that too in some way.
	She'd be like, you only want me for sex and Right.
	And, okay, so if she was some guy, right, with these personality traits, right, lying, self-mutilation, wanting to shoot you in the head, wanting to kill your friends, if she was some guy, would you be like, yeah, totally, let's hang, man? I wouldn't, no.
	No, so you're using her for sex.
	As she was used for sex, perhaps by this coach that she mentioned when she was young.
	So you step into the role or she invites you into the role.
	And I'm not saying she doesn't have agency, so I don't want to make her a victim in this sense, right?
	Mm-hmm.
	So, she has a relationship with her parents, which is hot and cold, to put it mildly, right?
	Because you're just sitting there, hey, I'm going to come and break bread with this guy who refused to protect my girlfriend and then refused to try and save her when she was drowning, and I'm just, yeah, I'm just going to go have a meal with this family, right?
	Yeah, and it's weird because when I started, she explained how they weren't Yeah, so she runs hot and cold with her parents and she runs hot and cold with you.
	And she's an expert at wallpapering over abuse, like there ain't no hole in the wall, right?
	And so when you guys would have these blow-ups, these fights, and you'd point it out, she's like, yep, then she'd just switch and we'd go back to normal and everything would be fine.
	And then there'd be another one, right?
	So this is the same thing as covering up abuse within a family, right?
	You have to present things as positive.
	You have to... Because she had to bond with her parents.
	If they mistreated her and you had to bond with your parents to some degree because they provided your food, your shelter, health care, whatever, right?
	You have to have a place to go home.
	Otherwise, you're living on the street and God knows what worse things are going to happen to you, right?
	So, yeah, you've got to appease your parents and she's got to appease her parents and you've got to say, oh, things are great and then things go to hell in a handbasket and because...
	You need your parents to survive.
	You can't survive without your parents.
	And so they can treat you however they want in a sense and you've just got to keep running back, right?
	Yeah. So all of this stuff is to do with relationship or anti-relationship habits of self-management that are evolved during situations of neglect and rejection as children.
	And this sickness is trying to return to you because the sickness and nihilism and despair that you felt as a child wants to be experienced so that it can protect you.
	It doesn't want to be managed so that it endangers you.
	Because the more you try and manage negative emotions, the more you need people to put you in those negative situations.
	Now you, with this woman, were extraordinarily lucky.
	Extraordinarily lucky that she didn't have a pregnancy, that she didn't transmit an STD. She did, actually.
	Oh, she did with you? A pregnancy.
	Yeah, I didn't find out because I was gone for a trip, but we were not on good terms at the time.
	So I had her blocked the whole trip.
	It was maybe about a week long, and she tried to call me and tell me about it.
	But I got back and found a note on my door saying – she explained that she was.
	And I immediately go to her apartment, and by the time I get there, she had already taken the whole abortion pill and all that.
	Well, assuming that any of this is true.
	I wouldn't assume any of it is true.
	Yeah, I could see that.
	I mean, the fact that you're unavailable to her, I mean, she escalated enormously.
	The one time she couldn't call you, she ends up cutting herself and then blaming you, which is a truly horrible bullying thing to do.
	So then another time, she couldn't get a hold of me and she's like, oh, no, no, I had pregnant.
	Oh, no, no, it's already fixed.
	I mean, how do you figure out if you're pregnant in a week?
	Unless it was before and then she got tested at the right amount.
	I don't know. Yeah, that seems unlikely to me.
	She was a good liar.
	She's very good at lying.
	She's very good at knowing people are lying.
	No, it's a survival. You know, if you practice anything for 20 years, you're pretty good at it, right?
	And that was a survival mechanism that she had.
	It's not right for her to do it as an adult.
	She also, you know, wasn't she threatening to call the cops here and there?
	Was she, you know, threatening to scream?
	Okay, then what? You get charged with God knows what, and then you spend the next five years trying to figure this out, right?
	Yeah, she explained that to me one time, too.
	She was like, you should be afraid of me.
	You should be afraid of me because I have this skill to know when anyone's lying and to lie to people.
	Oh, so she's directly warning you that, yeah.
	Yeah. Okay. So, listen, this literally is a life or death.
	Like, you've got to get this shit sorted out because you kind of dodged, like, Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction.
	There's bullet holes all around you, but nothing hit you, right?
	Yeah. Yeah. So you've got to, and you know, trying to call someone while you're driving, while you're upset.
	I mean, you're really rolling the dice here, brother.
	This is why I wanted to talk to you, because first of all, you don't love her.
	Like, get that shit out of your brain.
	You do not love her. Because she's too wounded, she's too broken, she's too dangerous.
	She's too false, she's too manipulative.
	You don't love her. You bond it based on sexual hormones.
	So that's not love.
	You don't love her. Can I ask something then?
	Of course. So why do I still have this feeling?
	I can't figure it out.
	Right now, I don't have on my mind that I'm going to get back with her, but I still have this feeling of I want to help her to process all the things that have gone on in her life.
	I really want her life to be better.
	But I know I can't introduce myself.
	Well, no, come on. You raised your voice at her.
	You called her name. You manhandled her.
	So don't talk to me about how much you want to care and help her.
	Well, maybe it's I want to make up for it because I do feel bad.
	Well, no, no, because listen, absolutely.
	I'm sure when you guys broke up and made up that you'd be sitting there saying, wow, I'm really sorry for the things I did.
	I'm not going to do that again.
	And then you get into a fight to do exactly the same thing again.
	Right? It's not just now where you said I shouldn't call her names, I shouldn't raise my voice and all that, right?
	Yeah. Okay, so again, all due respect, and I appreciate the sentiment, but no, that's just a lie you tell yourself to get back into the relationship so that you could re-experience this rejection and manage and feel a sense of power and control and predictability and sick familiarity, like the repetition, compulsion stuff, right?
	Mm-hmm. Because if you want to make someone better, you don't use them for sex, right?
	Yeah. Fundamentally.
	You don't find somebody with a really disturbed personality, hold your nose over the stench of that personality, and have sex with them because they're hot.
	That's not how you help someone.
	You understand? Yeah.
	I mean, if there was some therapist who was like, oh yeah, yeah, no, I mean, I take really disturbed people, I have a lot of sex with them, and that helps them, what would you say?
	That's not... Okay, so let's get off this I-want-to-help-her stuff.
	That's not it at all. Yeah.
	If you wanted to help, you could help her as a friend.
	You don't need to have sex with her, right?
	Yeah. And can you help her as a friend?
	I don't know. I can't diagnose anyone.
	I'm not a professional of any kind.
	The word borderline comes to mind, but I don't know anything about anything, so I can't say anything like that.
	But these kinds of extreme personalities, self-cutting, murderous fantasies, pathological lying and manipulation, I mean, how are you going to fix that?
	How are you going to fix that? I have no idea.
	You can't fix that. You can't.
	You can't fix that. I mean, professionals, well, personality disorders, right?
	That's where it's not just you are a personality with a problem.
	It's like your personality is a problem.
	They don't know how to fix these people.
	Like professionals. Otherwise, people would get into mental health institutions and they'd come out fine.
	So even if you have total control over the people, you can control their schedule, you can control their activities, they can't leave, you can control their drug intake, nobody knows how to fix these people in any long-lasting, predictable manner.
	So the idea that you could fix it, I mean, that's a fantasy.
	And the fantasy is something you need to tell yourself so you can continue to have sex with her.
	Because I assume having sex with her was fun and pleasurable.
	And so that's at the one level, right?
	Oh, I just want her life to be better.
	I want to help her. I want to help her, right?
	No. Well, you don't enable her bad behavior, right?
	And you don't try and control her, and you don't try and bully her, and you don't try and manhandle her, and you don't call her names, right?
	And you don't get back together, keep fighting, break up.
	I mean, you understand, that's not helping her at all.
	Yeah, you're right.
	So, as far as your virtues of big kindness and...
	No, no, no. I don't see that.
	Again, I'm happy to be corrected, but...
	Being with her was not because you wanted to help her.
	Because you didn't help her, right?
	I didn't.
	And you said the only reason that you really were with her rather than just have her as a friend was because of sex, right?
	So if you're with her for sex, and you know she's been sexually exploited, or at least there's indications she's been sexually exploited in the past, well...
	No, I see.
	Now, let's go to your parents.
	If you have someone who genuinely falls in love with you and genuinely cares for you and wants the best for you, how are your parents going to react to that?
	Um... I think...
	I think that they'd be fine.
	They would be fine with it. I think they're at a point where they would accept it, especially since now I'm pretty much completely independent.
	Um... So you don't think that if somebody really loved you and bonded with you and was a virtuous and good person, what would that woman think of your parents?
	I think she would say that my parents, the way they treated me and acted in the past was completely wrong.
	And would that woman want your parents around to grandparent her children?
	They're... I think...
	I think so, because they're not like that anymore.
	I know my mom has...
	She hasn't directly said anything about it, but I could tell...
	But they're not around little kids, are they?
	They are, actually. Oh, okay.
	All right. Oh, yeah, that's fine.
	Okay, fine, fine. Okay, so your parents have reformed, but without any particular mental health services, therapy, or apologies.
	Is that right? Yeah.
	Yeah. And once she began to absorb how much your parents had mistreated you as a child, what would she feel towards your parents if she loves you?
	Probably a little, maybe a little anger?
	Maybe a little?
	What do you mean? Maybe a little?
	Angry that I was treated like that.
	More than a little. Well, if you love someone, don't you not like people who mistreat them?
	Yeah. I mean, if you genuinely love someone and someone beats them up, do you like the person who beats them up?
	No. How about someone who rips that person off and steals from them or defrauds them or whatever, right?
	How do you feel when someone harms someone you love?
	I know I personally would feel like I'd want to do everything in my power to make it right.
	What? Okay, that was a short circuit for me, which doesn't mean you said anything untoward.
	So if somebody harms someone you love, the general feeling is anger and disgust and hostility towards the person who harmed someone you love, right?
	Yeah. But you took this on like, I am the white knight.
	I must make everything all right again.
	Now that's a way of bypassing the anger.
	Then you have this responsibility to fix everything.
	Well, why would you fix everything?
	You didn't break it. It's like, you know, somebody threw a vase at your girlfriend and hit her on the head and the vase broke and you're like, well, first I must replace the vase.
	Like, if someone harms someone you care about, then wouldn't you have, and they're still in that person's life, right?
	Wouldn't you feel some hostility or anger or...
	Yeah, sorry, that's what I meant, Mike.
	No, no, but you went straight to, I've got to fix it all.
	When I meant fix it, like, let's bring the vase scenario, someone throws a vase, like, say I have a wife, and throws it, like, I'd fix it as in, take that person to the ground and hold them there until the cops come.
	Okay, and let's say that, I mean, you...
	You broke bread and had a meal with these parents who produced this child, right?
	Produced this woman, right?
	With their self-cutting and murderous fantasies and manipulations and lying and all that, right?
	So you didn't have any particular...
	And that's the reason. So I dated a woman many, many years ago.
	And her father was abusive.
	And I didn't date her for super long.
	But she's like, hey, my father's in town.
	Let's go for lunch. And I'm like, nope.
	She's like, what are you talking about? It's like, he mistreated you.
	I don't want to go. I want to go have lunch with the guy.
	What about you? I want to go have lunch with him.
	What, are you crazy? I just said, what are you crazy?
	But that's my sort of thought.
	It's like, no, I'm not going to...
	I'm not going to go break bread with someone who harmed you as a child and is not particularly apologetic and...
	He just wants to pretend nothing happened and everything's fine.
	I'm not participating in that.
	Like, I... I was in my 20s at this point, right?
	I'm like, no, I'm not... Then I could have lunch with my own mom.
	So I wasn't super consistent, but at least at that point, I was like, no, I'm not going to go and have a meal with someone who harmed you and has not made amends.
	So where is that disconnect for me between where I'm willing to go and have a meal with her parents and stay at their place and get along with them, but then...
	If there is some sort of immediate, like, physical threat that I'm perfectly willing to flip that switch and get aggressive and angry and deal with it.
	Okay, so when you have a thought in your mind that feels irrational, the question is, who is it rational for?
	If you have a thought in your mind or a particular approach or perspective that is not beneficial to you, the question is, who is it beneficial for?
	Who does it benefit?
	Right, so if you're told in a medieval society you must serve the king and the priests, well, who does that benefit?
	Benefits the kings and the priests, right?
	Yeah. So, who does it benefit that you don't get angry at abusers?
	The abusers. Well, sure.
	Now, What did your parents do or say about you being in this toxic and dangerous relationship?
	I didn't tell them anything about it.
	Okay, did they ask until they got answers?
	The most that I said is after we finally stopped talking to each other, and I said, I aren't together anymore, this girl.
	That's the name I'll use for her.
	And... I forget.
	Sorry, I forgot the made-up name you gave.
	That's fine. It's all right. It's fine.
	And her and I aren't together anymore, and that's it.
	And they're like, well, what happened?
	I was like, she just did something I didn't like.
	Well, like what? And I was like, just something I didn't like, and that was the end of it.
	Wait, so hang on, hang on. So your parents are paying for your college.
	You move in with this girl they don't even know?
	Yeah, they didn't meet her until...
	No, but did they not know that you were moving in with a woman you had only just started dating?
	Well, yeah, they knew I moved in.
	Okay, so what did they say about you moving in?
	With a girl you just met, ish.
	They didn't oppose it at all.
	Okay. Did they give you any warnings or give you any advice or say this, you know, why don't you stay with a friend or, you know, you're going to end up bonding with this girl.
	You don't know her that well.
	Let's hear a little bit about her family.
	Let's hear a little bit about her history.
	Did they look out for you just a little bit?
	Did they try and help or protect you at all?
	Mm-mm. Okay, so they're fine with it.
	They're fine with you rolling your balls like dice, hoping that doesn't come up snake eyes and you end up in prison.
	Which means that this relationship served their needs in some manner, in my opinion.
	Sorry, can you say that again?
	This relationship served their needs in some manner...
	Oh, yeah, yeah, because if you're caught up in the drama of this relationship, you're not thinking about your parents and their dysfunctions and their problems with you.
	Right. They got camouflage.
	They got a smoke grenade, so to speak.
	They look pretty good by comparison, right?
	Oh, yeah. So yeah, it's a way of elevating your view of them without them having to improve.
	And to hell with the risk to you, apparently, right?
	See, I mean, when you're a parent, it doesn't like...
	There's not a termination date.
	Because your kids are always facing new situations and new circumstances.
	So when my daughter becomes an adult...
	She's going to date, she's going to have friends, she's going to have jobs, she's going to have bosses, whatever, right?
	It doesn't mean that you're 18, man, good luck.
	It's my job to be available as a resource if she wants it as she goes forward in life, right?
	So your parents, the parenting doesn't end just because you're in a new environment dating.
	They've still got to help you.
	They've still got to protect you.
	Because they're funding you to go to college far away.
	It's not like maybe back in the day when everybody was in a tribe of 50 people and every day was Groundhog Day, Photocopy Day over and over again.
	But now you're off in a new environment.
	And there's new dangers.
	And men in college get accused of crimes.
	Well, it's not like it never happens, right?
	Oh, yeah. It's happened in a past relationship.
	I didn't get accused by the ex, but the parents were accusing me.
	Right. Okay, so they know that the sexual politics and sexual dangers and sexual legalities out there are pretty horrendous.
	And what are they doing to help you protect you?
	Right? Oh, I met a new woman.
	Oh, tell me a little bit about her.
	What was her childhood like? What's her family like?
	What are her values? What are her beliefs?
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right?
	Oh, I just met this girl.
	Yeah, she was severely abused as a child and she just invited me to come live with her.
	You know, you have kids.
	What are you going to say to them if they come to you with that story?
	Oh, just have them avoid that situation altogether.
	What are you thinking?
	Especially since I've made those mistakes.
	Right. Did your parents lift a finger to protect you?
	No. There was one time with another relationship where things started to get bad like that, but this was until after the relationship ended and they had a talk with me and all that.
	Oh, so they knew that this was something that happened in your relationships?
	Did they say, my gosh, we've got to go to family therapy in order to figure out how this came about, and please, I'm going to beg you to help me vet your next girlfriend?
	No. Right. Good luck, kid!
	Off you go! So you understand that the rejection of the lack of protection is still going on.
	How I confront them with that?
	Well, no, no, see, I mean, you're now leaping into solutions and practical actions, right?
	Yeah. I'm just opening up this whole world of emotionality and you're like, but what do I do?
	Give me, because you're a dude, give me, don't give me feelings, give me actions, man!
	Give me a practical plan that doesn't involve just feeling things.
	Right? I understand.
	I understand. Because you know what's going to happen.
	You're going to go and say to them, why don't you protect me?
	And they say, hey man, we want to give you a space.
	If you've got anything to talk about, we're happy to hear you never brought anything up.
	I asked a couple of times, you kept it hidden, so don't blame us for the fact that you kept it from us.
	Blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
	Yeah. I think just accepting the fact that you don't have a circle of people who are protecting you.
	I mean, you're my friend and you're starting to get involved in this kind of relationship.
	I'm not saying I would punch you in the nads.
	I wouldn't, but I'd certainly think about it because that's where the source of the problem might be.
	No, but seriously, it would be like, no, no, no, dude, dude, dude, no, absolutely not.
	You can't do this. This is not safe.
	You can't just love this woman into being healthier.
	She's dangerous. She cut herself.
	She's not gone to intensive therapy.
	She claims significant physical abuse, potential sexual abuse.
	She is an unstable person.
	You can't do this. Now you'd be like, no, but I can fix her.
	Okay, I'd be like, okay.
	You had 20 years with your mom.
	Could you fix her? No.
	I'm trying to fix you.
	Can I fix you? Because if you continue going on with this relationship, you lose all credibility.
	Because you're saying, no, no, I can fix her.
	It's like, no, I'm trying to save you.
	I'm trying to help you by having you not get into this relationship.
	You're not listening to me. What makes you think she's going to listen to you?
	You're just proof that you can't get into this relationship if you want to continue with it.
	Who in your life was literally throwing themselves in front of you pursuing this relationship?
	Or who was like, whoa, ex-gymnast, way to go, man, high five!
	I mean, everyone around me was happy for it.
	Right, and that's not an accident, right?
	These are the people you choose to not interfere with your Simon the Boxer repetition stuff.
	Yeah. And they don't care about you enough.
	To help them. And I'm sure that, again, we want to do that 360 review.
	you.
	I'm sure that if you look in the mirror hard, some friends of yours got into some pretty bad relationships and you weren't exactly standing up to help them, were you?
	Yeah, well...
	I don't need the stories, but I'm just, you know, if they're there, you need to look at them yourself.
	Yeah. So as far as what you do, well...
	I mean, you're in school. I'm sure you have access to a therapist.
	Self-work therapy, talk therapy, all that stuff can be really good.
	But in my view, I think that unpacking the hurt that you experienced as a child is pretty essential.
	Because once you have processed and integrated that hurt, rather than just managing and controlling it, that hurt will turn from something that pulls you into danger to something that keeps you away from danger.
	Right now it's kind of like the autoimmune thing.
	I'm no expert but I think it's when your immune system attacks healthy cells and ignores the unhealthy ones.
	So your immune system psychologically to me is kind of reversed, right?
	You're being drawn towards these things and you have people enabling it rather than identifying these things and steering clear.
	I see that.
	I do see that. But in order for your immune system to work, it has to accurately identify dangerous pathogens and not attack healthy cells, right?
	And if you're in a situation where your emotions are drawing you into danger and everyone around you is urging you on and your parents are like, yeah, fine, go for it, or whatever, right?
	Then you've just got imprinting that draws you towards danger.
	And that's obviously, by definition, tautologically, that's really dangerous, right?
	Mm-hmm. So, the real hurt of having been neglected or abandoned or whatever happened for you as a child that gave you this mindset is to really experience that.
	Because your emotions of pain and suffering as a result of what happened to you as a child are desperately trying to protect you.
	But if all you do is manage and control them, then you'll just need people to continually do what your parents did so you've got something to manage and control and you feel like you've got some efficacy.
	I mean, it's kind of a weird thing where powerlessness can be your only sense of power.
	And so you end up in situations where you're helpless, right?
	You're helpless to fix this woman. You're helpless to keep the relationship going well.
	You're helpless to have a positive outcome.
	You're helpless to stop the fighting.
	It just comes in and out like some random thing.
	So that helplessness, managing that helplessness which you had with your parents.
	Treat me nice. Don't insult me.
	Don't threaten me. Don't hit me.
	Don't threaten to drop me out of the car when I'm a little kid.
	You didn't have any control over that.
	So managing those feelings of helplessness, you actually experience those feelings of helplessness, then you'll stay away from people who give you that sense of helplessness.
	If all you do is manage that sense of helplessness and that's the only way you feel like you have any control, then you just need people in your life who are going to make you feel helpless all the time.
	Also, it may be that you're so angry at your parents that you're willing to blow the hundred grand that they co-signed for, right?
	I don't think it could be that because I wouldn't want to risk my siblings their ability to get alone with my parents.
	Well, did your siblings help you with this girl?
	I mean, they're pretty young.
	I don't know that they could.
	Well, all right. Okay, so, yeah, I mean, I would certainly suggest some therapy, and usually these kinds of resources are available for students for free or for very cheap, so I would strongly recommend, you know, some of the sentence completion exercises.
	I've talked about these before, John Gray, Nathaniel Brandon, some self-work stuff.
	Dream analysis can be very helpful, and just...
	Writing down stuff that happened with you as a kid and sort of making it real for yourself and really just let yourself have those feelings.
	And again, if you have a professional therapist to help you with this process, which I'm pretty sure you can get a hold of, I would strongly recommend that.
	Yeah, I believe my school does have some sort of resource like that.
	But I'm a little worried.
	My career path, how do I... Because relating this to the Simon Boxer story, I'm looking, because I was going to go into the Army as an officer, so a second lieutenant, but then...
	So government work is what I'm looking at, basically.
	I'm not going to do that anymore because the COVID vaccine requirements...
	But I'm looking elsewhere because my degree is tailored to basically this government work stuff, counter-terrorism, surveillance, intelligence gathering analysis, things like that.
	How do I not continue the cycle with basically the line of work I'm going to go into?
	This is what I'm worried about basically.
	Okay, so, I mean, now there's a little bit of exploitation thing going on on your part, which I'm not mad at or anything, I just sort of want to point it out.
	Because, you know, we've just spent two hours on trying to help you survive these deadly relationships, right?
	And yet now you're like, okay, Steph, but if I could just drop in my entire career path and future as well, that would be excellent, right?
	Yeah. I can't answer that for you, at least not in this call, right?
	Maybe we just did two hours, right?
	And this would be at least another hour or two, right?
	Yeah, well, time has gone by fast.
	Well, no, no, and look, it's fine to ask.
	You can ask anything you want.
	I'm just saying that I'm not going to pursue that particular topic because that's not as imminent as you getting sucked into the next relationship of doom, right?
	So I would say deal with the past.
	Now, of course, if you start to deal with the past and all of that kind of stuff, Then your future path will become a lot clearer.
	But in the absence of dealing with those emotions, right?
	Because if the immediate thing is like, you know, if the ER doctor, you go in because, you know, you're bleeding out somewhere and he stitches you up and then you're like, yeah, I'm going to need some nutrition advice.
	What's he going to say? Sorry, I missed that.
	Well, if you're bleeding out, you go into the ER doctor and he stitches you up and then you're like, well, I need some long-term diet and exercise and health tips.
	Do you have another couple of hours to sit with me?
	What's he going to say? I don't know.
	You'd be like, yeah, there are people who could do that, but it ain't me, at least not right now.
	Yeah. Because I just spent two hours stitching you up, right?
	And that's the immediate thing that's occurring because you emailed me and you're slipping another one in, right?
	Because you emailed me and you said, basically, this is the disaster I'm facing is the hollowness and nihilism I feel at the end of the relationship.
	And now you're like, oh, but what about my entire future?
	And it's like, no, no, no. One topic at a time.
	Again, it's fine for you to ask.
	I have no problem with you asking, but I'm just sort of saying that that's why I won't take on this particular topic.
	Because I just think that you need to look backwards and deal with that stuff.
	Because giving you a forward view, you know, like if we're building on sand and you say, well, we've got to build the second floor.
	And I say, you know, we've got to pour some concrete first.
	Right? And say, no, no, no, I want to build the second floor.
	It's like, no, but we can't, because it's just going to fall over, right?
	So I'd say dealing with the past stuff will open up the future much more clearly, but trying to deal with the future stuff without having processed the past stuff, I think, will be very counterproductive.
	And it'll give you something to focus on other than the past, because I'm saying, look at the past, and you're like, no, no, no, my future!
	I'm like, no, no, no, this is the past.
	I think that's what you've got to work on, in my opinion.
	No, yes. Thank you for that.
	Oh, no. You're welcome. And I sympathize and understand the challenges that you're facing.
	All right. Listen, will you keep me posted about how things are going?
	Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
	And do we have a useful conversation under our belt?
	Yeah. This has helped me a lot.
	I was quite surprised how fast it happened, too.
	Yeah, well, I got a real sense of emergency, so I shuffled things a bit, but this was more of an ER thing, to use a hospital analogy.
	So, yeah, listen, I appreciate the call, and thank you for reaching out.
	I really do respect you for doing that and recognize that this stuff is not out of your control.
	You can manage it. You can get to a place of love and sustainable, happy relationships, and the way to the future, I think, is through the past.
	So, yeah, I hope that you'll get some therapy, and I hope that you'll keep me posted about how things are going.
	Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much.

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