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Nov. 9, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:52
HOW TO FIND PEACE!
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Such a great question from a listener.
I wanted to give this a solo. This is probably an eyeball to eyeball one.
So watch the video if you can.
He wrote, I want to become a parent within one to two years.
I noticed a problem within myself I'd love feedback on.
Whenever children or animals cry asserting their needs, I recognize this is totally normal.
Part of my brain reacts with an impulse that says, Shut the hell up!
Be quiet! You're fine! And I'm terrified of this impulse.
That is exactly how I was raised, which was terrible.
And I recognize that it's not an acceptable way to respond to a dependent person or creature asserting their needs.
How do I put a stop to this impulse?
I do not want this impulse anywhere near my future family.
Please help. Great question, really the most essential question of human progress.
Here's what's going on.
You experience great stress and hostility when children cry or complain or assert their needs and crying is an unpleasant experience for others.
It's a negative stimuli, which is why we work to try and help it.
So why would you feel this way?
You said this is how you were raised, which of course we would know from just your reaction.
So what happened to you as a child?
Well, as a child, you internalized a predator in order to keep yourself safe from that predator.
You cannot keep yourself safe from a predator without internalizing that predator.
So if you're in the water and you see, it looks like a shark fin, it's a dorsal fin, you feel stress and anxiety until you see a dolphin.
A dolphin is not going to attack you.
A shark might attack you.
So the visual stimuli leads you to, is this a predator or not?
And once you realize that it's a dolphin, you know the dolphin's not going to attack you, and the shark might attack you, so you feel relief if it's a dolphin, and extra stress if it's a shark.
Because you know that the shark is an eating machine that will attack swimmers on occasion, whereas dolphins are not.
You can't keep yourself safe from a predator without inhabiting the mind of a predator.
If a lion starts running at a zebra, the zebra runs because the zebra has internalized the lion and the lion's desire to kill and eat the zebra.
So when you're a child, if you have a father who beats you, When you disagree with him, whenever you disagree with him, say, I don't agree, you disagree with him, beats you within an inch of your life.
And all violence against children is a death threat because children are very fragile and you can react and you can respond.
You could fall down stairs. You could fall down, hit your head in just avoiding the blow and so on.
A nose could be broken, could go into your brain.
You could lose an eye from a belt buckle or a fist even for that matter.
So if you get attacked physically, For disagreeing with your father, then you have to, to survive.
This is an automatic process.
You internalize the predator.
And you say, they're a particular stimuli that cause someone to physically attack me and threaten my life, threaten my existence, threaten my continuation.
So your brain is constantly looking for these patterns.
And your brain will very quickly figure out, very quickly figure out, Whenever you disagree with your father, he attacks you.
Or it doesn't even have to be obviously every time.
It could only be 10% of the time.
It could only be 5% of the time because if only 1 out of 20 Skittles is poisonous and might make you sick or kill you, you're not going to have any of the Skittles.
It could be only a small amount of time, but your brain is constantly looking for patterns.
If the pattern is automatically generated within your brain, I disagree, I get beaten.
I disagree, there's a good chance I get beaten.
I disagree, there's some chance I get beaten.
Then what happens is you internalize your hostility towards disagreement.
You internalize it.
In other words, you internalize the predator, you internalize the abuser, and whenever you feel the desire to disagree rising within you, Your internal father, your internal predator, will create great stress and anxiety in you in an attempt to stop you from doing what could get you harmed or killed.
Right? You're looking for patterns of survival.
You're looking for patterns of survival.
If you see someone, you're in some primitive tribe, you see someone...
Attempt to pet an animal, that animal bites off his hand, you will then feel stress and anxiety at the very thought of petting that animal.
If you see someone eat a red and green berry and then die or get very sick, then you will feel stress and anxiety at the thought of eating a red and green berry.
We are internalizing danger.
So, your external father is a predator.
Your internal father...
Who prevents you from acting in a way that triggers violence from your external father.
Your internal father is there to save you, to help you, to protect you, to keep you alive.
So let's say that every time you cry, which is your childhood experience, every time you cry, Your father yells at you, screams at you, insults you, belittles you, threatens the bond, right?
If you cry, I will attack you.
I will cut the bond.
You can't survive as a kid without your father.
You can't survive without your father, without your mother.
So you won't do anything that will threaten the bond, which is the awesome power that parents have over their children.
This is threatening of the bond.
If your father yells at you, gets angry at you, threatens you when you cry, then when you have the feeling of crying, you will suppress that. then when you have the feeling of crying, you will You will suppress that.
And eventually suppression, which is the temporary reduction in emotional intensity, turns to repression, which is you no longer feel sadness.
So crying triggers attack.
So within yourself, crying or the impulse to cry will cause great anxiety and you will either flee or you will suppress the emotion or something like that.
Fight or flight, right? You'll fight the emotion or you'll flee and then indulge in the emotion without your father knowing.
But then, of course, there's a danger.
You come out with your eyes red.
You've been crying, kid! Whatever.
So you've got two dads.
Do not mistake them. Think of your body.
You have a virus and you have antibodies.
So you get some illness and your body develops antibodies and the antibodies are a mirror of the virus designed to diffuse or protect you from the virus.
So you have an inner father that gets stressed as hell Provokes negative stimuli in you in order to avoid you acting in a way that triggers external attack.
You provoke inner anxiety, inner stress, inner negativity, inner hostility towards the feeling.
Just don't say it, man.
Don't say it.
Don't do it. This is the great line.
It's not a great line in isolation.
It's a powerful line in my novel, The Future.
Don't do it. If you do it, you'll be attacked.
So when sadness, a desire to cry and assert your needs against the preferences of your parent, a baby who cries is doing an action to get his or her needs met against the pleasure of the parents because crying is an unpleasant sensation for the parents.
Your inner father is there to help and protect you and keep you safe.
Now, When we evolved, we evolved in relatively small tribes, relatively small communities, small villages, and it was the case that just about everyone's childhoods faced the same restrictions and punishments and so on, right? That was just a common feature across childhoods everyone knew.
So if you were yelled at or threatened or beaten for crying, that would be universal.
So, if you understand that, then you understand it's not just you, it's everyone.
Every child who cries is facing attack.
If it happened to you, again, this is how we evolved.
We didn't evolve well, it was just my childhood, I'm sure everyone else's childhood was different, because no, throughout evolution, in our small communities, just about everyone's childhood was more or less the same.
The cultural standards of the hitting, the whatever, right?
So, when you hear a child cry, you anticipate the child being attacked.
Now, your desire to stop the child crying is your desire to protect the child from attack.
It is...
I wouldn't even say a twisted form of sympathy...
But assuming that the childhood is the same as yours, you are helping the child.
So if you are an older brother, let's say, and you want to protect your younger brother, and you know, because of your experience with your parents, that every time the...
A child cries in the family.
The child gets attacked. Then what you're going to do is you're going to say to your younger brother, you know what you're going to say to your younger brother when your younger child cries.
When your younger brother cries, you're going to say, don't cry, don't cry, don't cry.
I'll give you candy. Or at least cry into the pillow.
Don't let mom and dad hear you.
Now, is it because you just hate your younger brother and don't want to express any emotions?
No! You're trying to save his life.
You're trying to save his existence.
You're trying to maintain the bond between sibling and parent.
Because, you know, he's... Part of your genetics and how we evolve, right?
So, you feel hostility and impatience towards children crying.
And you feel anger towards children crying.
Yes. Because...
We want to protect those children from attack.
And our anger motivates us to try and protect those children from attack.
In other words, we won't beat those children if we just hit at them.
Don't. Stop crying.
Please stop crying. Stop crying.
Whether we do it pleadingly or aggressively, we have to stop the baby crying.
That's a MASH episode.
It was a comedy from the 70s, I think it was.
And Hawkeye Pierce, who's the doctor played by eternal marshmallow Alan Alda, he's in a school bus with a bunch of other people and they're all hiding from the Viet Cong who will kill them if they find them.
And there's a baby crying.
Now, of course, the baby crying is going to draw predators.
It's one of the reasons why crying evolved, is that crying draws predators, and therefore you want to solve the crying, but you can't solve the crying by killing the baby, so you give the baby what the baby wants in order to keep the predators away.
And I sort of won't play it out.
It's a very powerful episode.
But that's the issue. Why are they trying to get the baby to stop crying?
Because the baby is drawing the predators called the Viet Cong who will kill everyone on the bus.
So, if you understand that your hostility towards children crying...
It's your internalized father who kept you safe and did keep you safe.
It wasn't arbitrary.
He kept you safe as a baby, as a toddler, as a little boy.
He kept you safe.
Because when you had the urge to cry, which would bring attack, you got hostile and angry towards yourself crying badly.
And that stops you. Right now, you had to get hostile and angry because sympathy can sometimes make you cry more.
Like when you, you know, if you've ever had this thing where you're kind of upset about something, someone gives you a big hug and maybe you'll burst into tears.
You can't give yourself sympathy because that could increase the crying.
You have to be hostile and angry towards your own crying in order to keep yourself safe.
It's a self-protective gesture and you are trying to protect other children by being hostile towards them crying.
Shut up! There's a predator here!
And again, because we evolve with the same kind of family structures, the same kind of childhood abuses, their parents are going to be just like your parents, and therefore by getting hostile towards other children who are crying, you are protecting them from beatings or threatening of bonds or verbal abuse or whatever, right?
So please, please understand, because you think, oh my God, oh my God, I'm just like my father, right?
Now, of course, your father acted this out, right?
So your father was beaten for crying, and when you cry, then it evokes fear, hostility, and anxiety within him, and he's trying to protect you from his father.
Again, I'm not saying it's not immoral because we are responsible for understanding these things about ourselves and we have standards of behavior in order to provoke the kind of mental discontinuity that leads to growth.
Like if you say, I'm not going to yell at my kids, I'm not going to insult them, I'm not going to hit them, I'm not going to threaten the bond.
If you say that and you grit your teeth and do it, Then all this childhood stuff comes up that you can deal with.
As long as you're acting out, you're avoiding the knowledge, which is why having these standards is so important.
It doesn't solve all your problems, but it reveals all your problems, which is, of course, the first step to really solving them.
So, do not be hostile towards your inner father.
He was there to protect you.
It's like being hostile to your immune system.
It's like being hostile to your blood clotting system.
It's there to keep you alive.
It's there to help you prevent injury.
You wouldn't want a zebra to lose all anxiety about alligators or I guess it would be crocodiles there.
So you wouldn't want the zebra to lose all anxiety about predators.
You wouldn't want the zebra to lose its fear and anxiety about lions because it would die, right?
So please understand your inner father is there to protect you.
It is a self-protective gesture.
It is your friend. It is your ally.
And it is constantly telling you here's where the danger is.
Here's where the danger is. Here's what we have to do in order to survive.
And understand that your impulse to shut Other children up when they cry or get upset, or animals for that matter, is to keep them safe.
It is a benevolent impulse.
It's a benevolent impulse because you look at yourself and you say, oh my God, I'm such a horrible person for getting angry at children crying.
It's like, no, no, no, no, no. You're trying to help them.
Your instincts are trying to save them.
I mean, if you have to, you normally, of course, would never grab a child by the...
Jack it and yank it one way or another, but if that child was running into traffic, you would, right?
You say, oh, I manhandled a child, I aggressively grabbed a child and yanked it.
It's like, well, yeah, to keep it alive.
So please stop being hostile towards your inner father.
He's not your external father.
Your external father was doing evil unto you.
And your inner father was trying to keep you alive.
They're not the same thing.
They're the opposite in the same way that antibodies and an infection or antibodies and a virus are opposites.
You understand? Your blood should normally be thin and liquid and yet when you get a cut it clots and becomes a semi-solid, right?
So that's not the opposite of blood.
That's blood trying to keep you alive so you don't bleed out from a cut, right?
So it's still blood. It just looks like the opposite.
It's still blood. It's there to keep you alive.
Say, oh, well, this blood is so bad.
It's like, well, it's bad if it's in the wrong place.
You don't want clotting into your heart valves, I assume.
So you've got to make friends with your inner father and thank him for keeping you alive, for keeping you safe, or as safe as possible, okay?
Thank him. Because your hostility towards him is unjust.
Your hostility, and of course it's easy to get hostile towards your inner father than your outer father, right?
So this is why I've always said to people, you know, if your father was abusive, your mother was abusive, sit down and have a talk with them.
Reason with them. Tell them your thoughts, your experience, your history, what's going on for you.
And one of two things will happen.
Either there'll be some kind of breakthrough.
They'll apologize. They'll make restitution.
They'll try and figure out a way that's not going to happen again.
And you'll learn about their childhoods and, you know, family hugs and progress.
And that's wonderful stuff, right?
Or they'll double down.
They'll escalate. They'll gaslight.
They'll just say that you're wrong.
They might threaten you again. And whatever it is, they're just going to amp up, right?
Now, the purpose of your inner father is to keep you safe from aggression.
Assertiveness is just asserting your needs.
Aggression is asserting your needs and destroying other people's needs, harming other people's needs.
Like, if you don't want to serve other people's needs, just don't be in a relationship with them.
It's not that complicated. But if you want to have it mutual, then you'd be assertive but not aggressive.
So, if you sit down with a past abuser and you can find progress, you can work things out and so on, then you're safe.
Assuming that they stick to it and all that and go to therapy, whatever they need to do, then you're safe.
Now, when you're safe, fight or flight, even if it lasts for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, when you're safe, it will cool down.
Your body is empirical. It's not stuck in history.
Oh, all this early trauma just around and around in my head.
It won't when you're safe.
When you're safe, if you have to swim for a whole day to get to the shore, once you get to the shore, you may still feel a little bit like automatic swimming, but you'll stop swimming pretty quickly because you're on the beach.
You can't swim on the beach. On the sand.
So the purpose of your inner father is to keep you safe.
Now, as long as there is an external provocation, he will continue to act in great energy and great self-protection with you.
He will continue to draw your psychological and emotional resources.
He will continue to draw your energy.
Like a shield around Star Trek takes, like around the Enterprise, takes all this energy, right?
When it's being attacked.
When you're not being attacked, you can divert the energy from shields to motive power, to life support.
You know, you get this analogy.
It's fairly deep and rich, right?
So as long as you're being externally attacked, you will continue to have this stress, hostility, anxiety, aggression, and so on, right?
Of course. Shields up, right?
So getting Klingon torpedoes launched at your dish or legs up engines, right?
So the purpose is to get you to safety.
Now once you're at safety, once you are in a place in your life where you don't have people abusing you, once you're in a position or situation of safety...
Then, and really only then, will your inner father relax.
We're safe.
We're not being attacked.
We've either disarmed our prior attackers, because they've become nicer, and apologized.
And an apology relieves you of the burden of saying it's your fault.
That's one of the purposes of apologies, to relieve you of the burden of saying to yourself or to others, oh, it's my fault.
I triggered this. I caused this.
I was a bad kid. Whatever. Get to a place of safety.
Shields down. Energy goes to life support.
I mean, people do say, gosh, how could you write all these books and do all these shows and, you know, one-man operation and so on.
Well, it's because I don't have shields up, right?
Because I don't have. Abusive or destructive people in my life.
I don't have people I need to defend myself from or manage their craziness or their aggression or their hostility.
I don't have those people in my life so I can get a lot done.
I'm not constantly diverting to shields, right?
You can't get rid of your inner father by saying he's bad or I'm abusive or I'm a bad person because that's mistaking the antibody for the virus.
And then what happens is when you attack your inner father and you say, well, I've become my father.
You're just like my father. We're bad, right?
Then he'll just fight back against you because he's there to defend you, even from you, right?
So be at peace with yourself.
Thank your inner father for protecting you from your external father.
Get angry at your external father who caused and triggered all of this.
And get to a place of safety in your life.
I can't overemphasize this enough.
You can't just will yourself to relax in the presence of a threat.
You know, if somebody was in a burning building and you said, hey man, chill out, just relax.
You know, the dog, right? This is fine in hell, right?
The reason that's crazy is you can't relax when you're under threat.
And you can't relax and love children while you're under threat and under attack.
So honor, honor as a soldier drafted Into an endless, well not endless, a soldier drafted into a war by your father.
A provocation, right?
Your immune system is provoked by bacteria and viruses and other invasive things, right?
Your father attacked you, you had to internalize the predator in order to give yourself the best chance of survival.
That internalized predator is there to save and protect you and did.
Right? You're here. You're alive.
You made it. Largely thanks to your inner father, inner mother, whoever.
You know, give honor where honor is due.
Give medals out where medals are due.
Thank that person for keeping you alive.
And then listen to that person and that your inner father will say, we're not safe, we're not safe, until you're safe.
And they'll be like, oh, thank you. Finally, finally.
I can lay down my arms and join you in the enjoyment of life.
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