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July 27, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
50:51
5229 THE TRUTH ABOUT SINÉAD O'CONNOR

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Time Text
Hit me with a Y if you want foreplay.
Hit me with an N if you just want me to go ball steep with no loop.
Do you want me to just go straight in?
I'll go straight in, man.
I don't even need to buy you dinner.
I don't need to ask you to grab the headboard.
Y for foreplay.
M for just going straight in.
Come on, baby.
Tell me what you want.
Daddy'll give it to you.
And, okay, so everybody wants me to just go in.
Alright.
Cheesy Irish accent time?
I can't remember any more than I've given my publisher, except for that which is private or that which I wish to forget.
The totality indeed of what I do not recall would fill 10,000 libraries.
So it's probably just as well I don't remember.
So, uh, all right.
So this is a little bit about Sinéad O'Connor.
And, again, it's cheesy accent time.
It's Christmas.
I'm at my paternal grandma's house.
The one that usually smells of cabbage.
The house, not her.
The lights are on the tree.
I'm in the other downstairs.
Lights are off.
The grown-ups are in blue shadow with their backs to the parlor, concerned with one another, running all up and down the stairs.
I'm little enough that they won't notice me if they don't look any lower than straight ahead.
My grandma's parlor is verboten for me without adult supervision.
The Christmas tree is in here.
I got away with sneaking in to feel the presence, but something else is what I really want.
So this is the beginning of a book of remembrances published a year or two ago by the recently deceased, today deceased, Sinod O'Connor.
Against the wall rests an old piano.
The keys are yellow, like my granddad's teeth.
There are echoes in the notes, a strange sound like the ghost bells of a sunken ship.
I sneak in here often by myself because the piano summons me.
It makes the air around itself vibrate in huge waves with just the slightest suggestions of colors, so as to catch my attention.
When I play the notes, it sounds so sad.
The thing is desolate.
Once at dusk, I asked it why.
It answered, because I'm haunted, and told me to put my ear against this underbelly, the flat panel of wood that's in front of your shins when you're playing.
I pressed my right cheek against it, and the piano said, now, play some notes.
I played, stretching my left arm up so my face would stay where it was.
Underneath the notes above, I heard a lot of voices jumble together, all whispering over one another.
I couldn't make out what they were saying.
There were so many of them.
I shot up and said, who are they?
The piano answered, history.
It said, they're stuck.
They can't get out if no one plays me and I can't breathe with them all in here.
It said, I don't mind if you play me badly.
I just need to be touched.
Play me very softly, gently, gently only barely because I am a very tender thing and the ghosts are very sore.
I said, you didn't tell me whose voices they are.
It said, it didn't want to tell me.
I asked it why.
It said, because of war.
It said, a child shouldn't know about war.
It said, people don't talk.
So the feelings fly into musical things.
It said, the ghosts are things people don't want to remember.
So what's interesting about this?
I mean, the writing is good-ish, very sort of mystical and all of that.
But what's interesting about this?
The people are immaterial, the things are alive.
The people are immaterial, but the things are alive.
Isn't that wild?
This girl was so violently abused as a child, the late Sinead O'Connor, was so violently abused as a child that
She avoids people and puts all of her connections into things.
Have you ever known someone like this?
They live in this world of mysticism.
They live in this world as, you know, houses have memories and, and clouds have dreams and Enya's, the trees have memories, right?
Have you, have you known someone like this?
Where things are alive and people are barely there.
This is one of the effects of child abuse is our natural capacity to bond with other people is stripped from us because other people are so threatening and dangerous and violent, crazy, chaotic.
We can't bond with people, so instead, we take all of our personality, attachment, connection, and we throw it into things.
In this case, with her, it was into music.
We throw it into things rather than connect with people.
Now, this is one thing that happens, is we throw it into things when we're little kids.
I remember as a kid, a little kid, I don't know, five or six years old, I had this little red toy train.
It was a little metal thing.
And I was, you know, sad, of course, at this point in my life, and I remember
On the carpet, rolling this little train away from me, thinking how sad the train was and how alone the train was.
Of course it was me.
I couldn't tell anyone about it.
I didn't have any connection with the people around me.
So when people are dead to you, things, things come alive.
Things come alive.
Now, what happens is, just so you know, what is going on in the modern world.
Just so you know what is going on in the modern world.
People are dead to many people's souls.
They can't connect with them.
They're brutalized by them.
They're rejected by them.
They're isolated from them.
So people are dead.
And what happens is the abused child first throws her connection into things because things are safer.
They throw their connection into animals because animals are safer.
And then when they get older,
They can't connect to people.
They connect to things and animals.
Do you know what happens when they get older?
This is your absolute key to the modern world.
When people get older, they throw
Their passion's not into connection with people, they've outgrown things, they've outgrown animals usually.
What they do, if they're particularly analytical, they throw their connections, their bonding, into ideology.
Haven't you ever wondered how it is that people claim to love about, like, I love people, I want to be there for the working class, I want to make the world a better place.
Well, your ideology has killed a hundred million people.
Doesn't matter.
Because they've bonded, not with people, but with things, animals, and then they graduate to ideologies which they then use as revenge.
upon people.
This is an old thing.
The more I love mankind in the abstract, the more I hate individual people.
And the more you love individual people, the more you hate ideology.
This is the true pulse.
Ideology is where you bond with ghosts at the expense of people.
Love is when you bond with people at the expense of ghosts.
You get rid of ghosts, you keep people.
So mystics
And she's there.
She can't talk to anyone in her environment.
Everyone in her environment hates her.
She hates them.
They're violent.
They abandon her.
She can't talk to people.
She talks to the piano.
She talks to the piano, she connects with the piano, and then she pursues music at the expense of people.
This woman, this poor woman, and she was a vicious and nasty woman in many ways as well, but this poor woman, we've got to start with the sympathy.
There's so much to get about this.
We're going to start with the sympathy.
This poor woman who had... I mean, she had four marriages.
She had an abortion.
Her son committed suicide while she was still a teenager.
There was a rabid migrationist.
She hated white people.
She converted to a variety of belief systems.
She tore up a picture of the Pope on live TV.
She converted to Islam.
She rabidly hated non-Muslims, or as she referred to them, white people in somewhat incomprehensible fashion.
And I've read the beginning of her autobiography where she was talking about having an emotional connection to dead people in a piano.
Which is like having an emotional connection to dead concepts in an ideology.
All right.
So this, a little snippets from Sinéad O'Connor's childhood.
So I've stopped knocking on doors around Glen Agley, asking people if I can be their child.
Been doing that off and on since I was about six.
They always only bring me home anyway, imagining my mother to be like other people's mothers.
So as a little kid, as a little five, six years old,
She would knock on random strangers' doors, begging to be taken in and begging for them to be her parents.
Can I be your child?
So she talks to one woman, brings her home.
When she brought me home, my mother acted all nice at the door.
That's what I thought about all the time.
Her knee went into my stomach, up against the wall.
So, the level of abuse was just appalling.
So listen to some of this.
Usually I'm the bad girl because I'm always stealing people's lunches, particularly peanut butter sandwiches, or shoplifting from the dress shop, or stealing money from the candy store, or from the teacher's handbags in the staff room.
Mrs. Shales, who was a teacher, used to ask me if my mother made me do it, but I said no.
She'd ask me where the welts on my legs came from, or about the massively swollen black eye I once had.
She'd say, it's your mother, isn't it?
But I'd deny it.
I'm jealous when I see the other girls walking down the Marion Avenue after school with their mother's arms around them.
That's because I'm the kid crying in fear on the last day of term before the summer holidays.
I have to pretend I lost my field hockey stick because I know my mother will hit me with it all summer if I bring it home.
I shall just use the carpet sweeper pole instead.
She'll make me take off all my clothes and lie on the floor and open my legs and arms and let her hit me with the sweeping brush in my private parts.
She makes me say I am nothing over and over and if I don't she won't stop stomping on me.
She says she wants to burst my womb.
She makes me beg her for her mercy.
I won the prize in kindergarten for being able to curl up into the smallest ball.
But my teacher never knew why I could do it so well.
Once the Holy Spirit came and sat with me, though I didn't ask it to.
It happened this way.
There was a button missing off my dress which used to be my sister's dress and we were supposed to go away for the weekend to my mother's friend's house.
I got beaten up naked again and my mother took the light bulb from my room and locked me in and went away with the others.
When I'm frightened, I find bits of paper and write because I'm not allowed to say I'm angry at my mother.
So I write.
I then tear the pages into tiny little pieces and eat them so she won't find them.
This was on a Friday when it got dark.
I felt about my room until I found some paper and a pencil.
I wrote to God.
I said, please help me.
I was kneeling on the floor facing the bed.
Then out of the corner of my eye, I saw a small, white, very misty cloud come and sit to my left, a little behind me.
It stayed there all night.
The spirit didn't come back on any of the other days.
I didn't eat anything all weekend.
I peed on the floor.
When my mother got back, she was cross and hit me for that.
I had to go to the hospital later that day because I had a terrible pain in my stomach.
The nice young doctor said, this child hasn't eaten.
My mother said I'd eaten goulash, but I hadn't.
She's locked up all weekend.
Let's do one or two more bits.
It's really, really important because we'll get to why this is all so important, right?
Why this is all so important, not just for you, not just for me, but for all of us.
I asked my mother's doctor to put her in the hospital because of what happened after my brother Joe ran away.
She called the police and they put out an APB and he agreed to meet her near our house.
She took me in the car with her.
Joe got in and told her he wasn't ever coming home.
She told him if he didn't, she would put me in the passenger seat of the car and drive into oncoming traffic in order to hurt me and force him to come back.
I didn't believe her and he got out of the car and walked away.
And she did.
She did it.
Put me in the passenger seat and deliberately smashed into a car that was coming the other way.
Luckily we were both okay but I did scream at her.
When we got home I called her doctor and he came and said that for our sakes he would put her in the hospital.
We were alone in the house for almost the entire summer without a soul checking on us since they took her to the hospital.
Not even the doctor?
Nobody?
We were having the time of our fucking little lives.
Ah, it's wild.
She also said, in real life you aren't allowed to say you're angry, but in music you can say anything.
Her mother was an insane thief.
She said, this is a wild story to me.
When the new traffic circle was made at Avondale Road, she drove down in the night with trowels and black rubbish bags of steel that just planted baby bushes.
When they planted new bushes, down she went again and took those.
I don't know what she did with them.
When she was in hospital, she took the crucifix off the wall.
She even sent me home with weighing scales from her hospital room under my school gabardine.
She goes to visit houses that are for sale just so she can steal trinkets.
She has a gazillion books all piled about three feet high off the floor all around her bedroom.
She stole every one of them.
She steals everything!
I'm addicted to stealing too.
That's why I like to sing hymns.
It isn't bearable to be such a bad person.
I have to do one holy thing so I can live with myself.
I knock on people's doors and sell them their own flowers.
I've stolen from their gardens.
I stole a ton of money for weeks from all the pockets in the changing room at the Yacht Club.
I got caught because I asked a milkman in a van to give me bills for my coins and he got suspicious.
I stole a wallet from a handbag in the staff room at the shoe shop and the lady let me try on ballet shoes.
I went back to see if I could do it again and they kept me there and called the police but the policeman was really nice to me.
I begged him not to tell my mother and he didn't.
Anyway, they steal from charities.
It's just crazy.
Crazy.
And then she confesses finally to a priest about how, what a terrible thief she is.
He said, she said, he listened really carefully.
And after a while he asked me, what job did I think I might like when I'm an adult?
I told him I like singing.
He said, ah, did you know that he who sings prays twice?
Yeah.
And she ends up going to live with her father who's remarried and it's chaos and, and violence and so on.
And this one, this is a wild one.
So, she goes to live with her father and her stepmother.
The reason my siblings and I lived with her then was that my mother lost custody of us because the day my father left her, she put us to stay in a hut he'd built for us in the garden.
Once he'd gone, we started crying.
She said, if I loved him so much we could go live in a hut!
I knelt on the ground, fronted a gable wall and wailed up to the landing window to get her to let us into the house when it got dark.
She never responded and off went the light in her bedroom and everything went black.
That is when I officially lost my mind and also became afraid of the size of the sky.
When I think about that moment, my mind goes blank.
I can't remember what happened after.
Nothing until I found myself walking around a judge's garden, holding his hand, not wanting to say painful things that could result in more pain.
So yeah, it's incredibly... And she ends up really bonded.
She ends up basically going to what we would call Borstal, I guess, a reform school and so on.
And she has a priest there.
And she's still a complete kleptomaniac.
And the priest, sorry, the nun there, she said, Sister Margaret tried to break the hold my mother had on me.
That was the toughest job for her because she couldn't get to me at all.
I'd never say a word, just cry totally silent and red-faced big buckets.
After a while, she'd come round to my side of the desk and hold me like I was one of her African babies.
So I would cry into her nice blue nun's blouse and snot upon it, which would make me giggle, and she'd say it softly, Oh, Sineadie.
It's a real bond with her mother, right?
A real bond with her mother.
I mean, that's the terrible bond.
That happens with children who are roughly abused.
You end up bonding with your parents.
And of course, I'm writing about a lot of this stuff when I'm working on the Peaceful Parenting book, which I'm doing.
Let me get to your comments.
Not a bad accent.
Needs a little bit more Scottish.
Aye!
All those years in theatre school are really paying off.
Pets and trees are guardian spirits, yeah.
Yeah, the dryads in the trees, right?
The druids who believed that everything in nature was alive, right?
The people who... The people who bond more with animals than with people.
It's brutal.
Manuel says, I used to be very sentimental about places I lived in.
Then I understood I was never really connected with anyone while living in those places.
You got to connect with something.
We all connect with something.
You either connect with people or you connect with ideology or you connect with animals or some general personality erasing collective.
All of it is sorrow.
All of it is gravestones over the natural bonds of health connection.
Yeah, politics.
She was not hot anymore as an old lady, so she must've been really lonely.
You know, I mean, I'm not one to talk much, but I don't think she aged that well.
I mean, she had a 30 year, incredibly thick smoked marijuana addiction.
And of course this is just self-medicating for the crazy thoughts, for the instability, for the guilt, for the abuse, for the history.
I'm sure, I think she was diagnosed with,
Her complex post-traumatic stress disorder.
She said at one point that she was diagnosed as bipolar.
I don't think that was particularly true, and that other doctors said she wasn't.
She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorders, which is one of the worst diagnoses that you can get.
Stuff doesn't sound as bad with an Irish accent.
Yeah, yeah.
Reminds me of Catherine from Almost, I think her name was.
Well, Catherine from Almost was based upon my aunt in Ireland, so... Her mom was nuts.
No, her mom was not nuts.
No, her mom was not nuts.
Her mom was evil.
Well, she was a compulsive thief, right?
And she kind of stole the first song she became famous for, right?
It was Prince's song.
Somebody says, uh, I would have taken this kid in and given the mother a beatdown.
I'm sorry, I realize this is non-violent channel, but this is appalling.
I'm sorry, why do you think this is a non-violent channel?
I'm just curious.
She has a very high adverse childhood experience score.
Yes.
Yeah.
And normally, so people with a high adverse childhood experience score usually die, well, often die about 20 years earlier than everyone else.
Um, I've always felt I've been on a bit of a clock.
I find the, uh,
What is borderline personality disorder, if you can summarize it?
It's a lack of ability to... I'm sorry, you can go look it up.
This is just my understanding.
It's a complete lack of ability to attach extreme mood swings and a complete inability to manage your own emotions and up and down.
A lot of times, particularly when combined with physical attractiveness, it's great powers of seduction followed by, once you've got the person enmeshed in your life, just basically torturing and rejecting them.
They're drawn incredibly to people.
And then they recoil from any actual connection and they spend this life in this, you know, Freddie Mercury I think had the same kind of thing, just this desperate loneliness and this desperate thirst for attachment.
It's like you're dying of thirst and every time you reach for a glass of water you knock it into the sand.
It's a completely tortured existence as far as I understand it.
And again, that's just my amateur understanding of it.
You should look it up of course and see the actual literature, but that's my
See, to me, a sociopath wasn't bonded and gave up on bonding completely.
A borderline didn't bond, can't bond, but desperately wants the bond.
And that's the hell and the torture that they live in.
So that's where they are.
And her voice, I never particularly liked her voice.
So gosh.
She did an album, I can't remember what it was called.
She did an album of classics.
You had plenty money 1922.
You let other women make a fool of you.
Why don't you do right like some other men.
Like really old good classics in the way that Joe Jackson did as well.
And I love those old classics.
I really do.
Pennsylvania 65,000.
I'd love to get you on a slow boat to China all by myself alone.
A twist in the rudder and a rip in the sail.
I love those old bouncy peppy songs and she did an album of those.
I never hugely liked her voice because to me her voice it just sounded like an open wound.
It just sounded like a cry of pain every time she opened her mouth.
Not dissimilar from from Kate Bush.
And of course, like most tortured women, at least in the music industry at that time, she had a relationship with Peter Gabriel.
I think Peter Gabriel sang with her.
I know it was Kate Bush on the album version of Don't Give Up, but I think she did it live.
Sinead O'Connor did it live sometimes with Peter Gabriel.
And so she had that kind of life.
But yeah, just let's see here.
Her address, yeah.
Bipolar is a license to be a bitch, although these people have been severely hurt.
Unstable sense of self.
To me, unstable sense of self is too broad a category.
Rabies does that.
You die of thirst.
Is that right?
Borderlines have no responsibility.
Somebody says, my parents were musicians and would go on tour.
Leave me, my brother, and sis with strange women babysitters for weeks or months at a time when I was 9 to 12 years old.
I fell into ideology in my late teens.
I got myself out years later, but only recently understood why.
Do you, does sort of what I'm saying make sense?
We've got to bond with something.
And if you want to push an ideology, you must promote whatever behaviors break the bond with the infant, right?
If you want to push an ideology, you have to promote whatever breaks the bond between mother and child.
As if you don't have the bond with mother and child.
And you're intelligent and analytical and have good verbal skills and so on.
You will bond with an ideology.
We're going to bond with something.
Again, unless we're total sociopaths, we're going to bond with something.
So yeah, she had a very tough life and
She self-reportedly tried to kill herself on her birthday when she was 33 years old.
After a couple of years of gynecological issues, she got a hysterectomy and then she says that, or she said that the hospital didn't put her on hormone replacement therapy and that she spiraled into more depression and mental health issues and so on.
Now, I obviously can't speak.
For this late woman.
I don't know her innermost thoughts.
Obviously we know her perception of her childhood to some degree based upon what she wrote.
And I haven't finished it.
I only wanted to read about her childhood in preparation for the show tonight.
Hit me with the why.
I want to do the show for you.
I'm always really want to be here to provide the greatest value for you.
Would you be interested?
In why, so often, victims of severe child abuse, why do they kill themselves?
If she did, I don't know if she did, but it's a very common phenomenon.
Or act in manners which result in their death.
Yeah.
I mean, I think in general, and I could be wrong about this, but people who've suffered from severe child abuse will, on occasion,
Wrestle with thoughts of self-destruction.
Am I wrong about that?
If you've suffered from severe child abuse, at times you will wrestle with thoughts of self-destruction.
And if that's not the case, that could just be my perception and I'm perfectly happy to throw that aside.
But hit me with a why if you've suffered significant child abuse.
I don't mean like you're suicidal, but you know, you've wrestled with thoughts of self-destruction.
Right.
I mean, of course, my absolute deep and heartfelt sympathies and a big virtual hug across the universe to you.
Tell me the most dangerous thing you've done.
What's the most dangerous thing you've done?
What's the most dangerous thing you've done?
I mean, I certainly could think of things when I was a teenager, playing chicken with trains and doing crazy things on dirt bikes and so on.
It's
Can be quite a common, deep and powerful thing.
Oh, hitchhiking?
Yeah, that used to be safer back when I was a kid.
But yeah, I obviously think it's become more dangerous now.
You know that old joke about hitchhiking, right?
Some guy picks up a woman in the rain.
And then says to her, she's driving along, high speed, turns to her and says, I mean, don't you ever worry?
I mean, what if I was a serial killer?
She says, do you know what the odds are that two of us would be in this car?
I'm not sure if we're non-responsive or if this stuff just isn't kicking in.
Oh, yes.
Here we go.
All right.
Robin Williams.
I'm so sorry, it's just really annoying, the tech here.
All right, so.
Just to hear you slam Kate Bush.
I didn't slam Kate Bush.
Heathcliff, it's a pretty good song.
Borderline was originally named because when it was first identified in the DSM, it was in between two existing diagnostic categories, or on the borderline.
Stefan's description is very spot-on, based on two sessions of BPD I know well.
Thank you.
Kate Bush also left the biz to raise her kids.
Very wholesome.
Oh yeah, the music business is almost purely satanic.
I mean, the music business is almost purely satanic, as far as I can see.
And has been for a long, long time.
Alright.
Oh good, I was wondering if, yeah, Robin Williams was also treated badly as a kid, wasn't he?
Yes.
Robin Williams' mother was cripplingly depressed and he had, he learned how to do his antics to cheer up his mother.
It became a, the reason why he was so insistent, compulsive and desperate in his provision of humor was that he was trying to keep his mother alive so he wouldn't die, right?
Yeah, we were playing on the train tracks a lot as kids.
There was a guy in my building who'd lost both his legs from playing on train tracks and what did I do?
Played on train tracks, yeah.
I also climbed out of, when we lived in a second or third story apartment, I climbed out, walked along the edge, climbed in, in order to get a TV, to get to a TV.
You crawled across a tiny ledge from one window to another five stories up.
Road trip by myself on the loneliest road in America during a blizzard.
12 years of BMX with no helmet.
Wow.
Somebody says had a raft in a flooded abandoned quarry full of old digging equipment regularly cliff dived in.
We also played armies with 2.2 air, 22 air rifles.
Oh, Lucifer was a musician.
Is that right?
Riding motorcycles at 230 kilometers an hour down a dimly lit street at night.
Oof.
Yeah, so we've been edgy, right?
We've been edgy.
Abusive parents threaten their children with death all the time.
Abusive parents threaten their children with death all the time.
Every
Threat of abuse masks a death threat.
Everything that underlies an abusive interaction is the phrase, or I'll kill you.
Or I'll kill you.
I mean, I've been really working on this in my book.
I'll just read you a little bit from here.
If you do the opposite of what your parents do, you will very likely end up with the opposite outcomes.
Since your parents reproduced, you will not reproduce, and the genes that influence this behavior will end with you.
The same pressure applies to the question of whether or not to comply with your parents.
Throughout most of our evolution, resources were scarce, predators were everywhere, and competition was fierce.
At least half of children died before the age of five, which meant that parents sometimes had to choose to withhold resources from sickly children.
If you have five children and one of them is weak and sickly, but you don't have enough food for all of them, you will tend to withhold food from the weak and sickly child.
Again, no morals at this point.
We're simply talking about evolutionary pressures.
If you have a child who defies you at every turn, you will be unable to implant your cultural and reproductive customs and habits in that child.
If it is the custom in your tribe for the males to spend two weeks doing mating dances in front of potential mates, but you have a son who opposes everything you try to teach him, then he will be an evolutionary dead end, and there's no point spending a lot of time and effort keeping him alive.
Of course, countless children were born throughout human history with rebellious streaks who fought and opposed their parents, even as toddlers.
And what happened to them?
Well, their parents were just a little bit slower to rescue them from predators.
A little bit more hesitant to give them any extra food.
A little less careful in protecting them from dangers.
Because the parents just didn't particularly like that child.
Thus blind rebellion against parents was selected out of the gene pool over tens of thousands of years, or really hundreds of millions of years.
As a child, you had to submit to your parents, because if you didn't, the odds of you making it to adulthood went down considerably.
So that's a brief explanation of what's going on in terms of parenting.
Somebody says about self-destructive stuff.
Driving at high speed on a small motorcycle down Old Sunshine Skyway Bridge.
Stupid things with vehicles and alcohol.
Firearms in the mix.
We've all heard, I brought you into this world, I'll take you out of it!
Watch the Barbie movie, it's funny.
Alright.
Me and a friend set fire to an entire hedgerow in a field.
We were 13 and wanted to see what happened.
Yeah.
Why do
Why do so many victims of child abuse come to a bad end?
Why do so many of them die?
Because their parents want them to.
Because their parents want them to.
I mean, my mother was fairly explicit with this stuff.
I hate you and all of that.
Wish you weren't here.
Now,
When you're the victim of child abuse, you have this... I mean, you have many problems.
One of the problems you have is that you can only find peace through community, right?
Because child abuse isolates you, right?
Hit me with a why if you felt isolated as a child because you couldn't talk about what was happening at home.
I'll start it off with a why.
Hit me with a why
If you felt like you couldn't talk about what was happening at home and that makes you isolated, right?
Now, why didn't you?
Why didn't you speak about what was happening at home?
I mean, Sinéad O'Connor is very clear in her book that the reason that she didn't speak about what was going on, the reason she covered it up, the reason she kept it silent is because her mother would kill her.
She felt her mother would kill her and she could have been right.
Could have been right.
And also because we know, right?
I mean, if you've not been abused, it's hard to see this.
And I don't mean to be exclusionary or anything like that, but if you've not been abused, you don't know what society is like.
If you have been abused, if you have been abused and you try and talk about it, people get very uncomfortable.
They get distant.
They reject you.
They don't want to talk to you again.
They may side with your parents and they just, they don't want to know.
They don't want to know.
They don't want to hear about it.
And please shut up and stop talking about this.
And so.
You have to believe when you're a kid, and I'm not speaking for all kids.
I just, I think this is a common phenomenon.
So if it doesn't apply to you, then you could ignore it.
But when you're a kid, don't you have to believe there's a way out?
I mean, you're born into hell, you're born into this asylum.
Don't you have to believe that there's an escape?
There's a way out.
There's something better to get to, some place of salvation and peace and reason.
You have to believe that, right?
So one of the, I mean, you put a couple of feelers out, right?
Like this girl was like, Oh, uh, this Senator Conner, six on, but she's knocking on random doors.
So that someone will take her in.
Someone will take her in.
There's no one to talk to.
Nothing made my parents stop arguing, like lecturing me about how bad it is for me to share what's happening at home.
Yeah.
Because I'd get in trouble if I spoke up.
Yeah.
Everyone I would talk to would just go to my parents.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You're right.
Her mother did try and kill her during the car crash.
That's right.
Right.
That seems to me entirely borderline.
Which is, I mean, most people have a kind of fuse, like, I'll do this, but I won't do that.
And borderlines, as far as I can imagine, they don't, they don't have a fuse.
Like there's nothing they won't do in order to get their way.
Somebody says, my private school called child protective services on my parents.
David says, I did speak.
No one cared.
Most still don't.
I do.
And I'm so sorry.
Yeah.
So you have to believe that you can get out, right?
But the problem is you're primed to stay in.
That's number one.
And number two, you stop putting feelers out.
You start putting feelers out.
Is there anybody out there?
Is there anybody out there?
Is there any place to build to?
Is there any place to go?
If I dig out of this prison, do I just come into a bigger prison?
Do I end up in the warden's office and get double my sentence?
Do I end up in the desert and die in the sun with flies on my eyes?
What happens if I dig out?
If I try?
If I get out?
If I dig out?
What happens?
So you have to believe there's a sane place to get to.
But the problem is, as a kid, anytime anybody sees anything, anytime anybody put, you put out feelers, anytime you try and broach a subject with someone, you get rejected, scorned, mocked, isolated, denigrated, ostracized.
And so you begin to, don't you begin doubt and fear that you're ever going to be able to get out, that there's any place to get to?
That there's hell, and then there's people
Who turn your life into hell by rejecting the fact that you're in hell.
Somebody says, I wondered why people I knew in school had it better with their parents.
I was told grass is always greener on the other side.
Yeah.
Uh, somebody says, I spoke up once, child protective services came by, nothing happened.
And I got yelled at it and it was held over my head for years.
Yeah.
Funny how your first friends in school always have similar family dynamics.
I did just that as a kid and evil grabbed a hold.
Right.
And this is when you're, you've got teachers, priests, extended family, uh, and so on.
Right.
Who were all there.
Oh, we just care about the children.
We won't.
John says, I called out my mom for being a hypocrite when I was six.
She pulled over and beat my ass in front of my two older brothers.
Literally beat, speaking up, for reason, out of me.
So, you can only escape the effects of child abuse
By talking to others about it and having them listen and care and accept and sympathize.
And very few people do.
Most people want to live in this surface, paint-thin, shallow nonsense of talking about sports, the weather, politics, art, movies, video games.
Just, man, stay on the surface.
You drill down deep, and that cracks the matrix, right?
That cracks the illusion.
Cue the sun, auto-style.
You just want to stay on the surface.
And you die on the surface, right?
You die on the surface, like, it's two-dimensional, it's flat land, you can't live there.
Because you got abused, you have depth.
You have dimension.
You're 3D.
And you can't live for too long in that 2D world, right?
So you can only get comfort by connecting with people, talking about what happened, getting some sympathy, denormalizing it in your mind.
But the problem is when you try to talk about what happened to you as a child, even when you're an adult, even when you are independent and all of that, what happens to your heart?
What happens to your mind when you try to talk about what happened to you as a kid?
Just while you're responding to that, somebody says, my parents were never physically violent but emotionally neglectful.
Barely around and then divorced.
Everyone thought my mom and dad were just such good upstanding people.
Yeah, they're good camouflages, right?
Disgusting sports simulation.
Well, somebody says, I think my dad spanked me once but never again.
The more you pretend it's normal, the more screwed up it is.
Somebody says, James says, I also talked about it as an adult but never got moral clarity until encountering this show.
Gets confusing, right?
So, you are tortured until you talk to people, but talking to people, they torture you with their indifference or hostility or reserve or avoidance, and also, your parents say, you talk, you fucking die.
You talk, you die.
You talk, you die.
Snitches get stitches and end up in ditches.
Right?
The only comfort you can get is talking.
People talk to you but they're indifference and your parents say, you talk, you die.
You share, you die.
Chris says my heart rate goes up and I get shaky sometimes.
I fog out.
Sure.
I thought abuse was normal until I heard Steph talk about abuse.
But in reality you live.
No!
No!
Look, this is what I'm saying.
Jeanette O'Connor recently talked and exposed the abuse and what happened very shortly after she died.
You follow me?
You think all of this is just a bizarre coincidence that very much right after, right after she talked, she died.
And I would imagine, I don't know, obviously we'll never know, but I would imagine it had a lot to do with her mother passing a death sentence on her for talking in her mind.
You talk, you die.
She talked, she died.
She'd survived a quarter century plus with thoughts of suicide.
She talks, she dies.
Be very careful when you talk.
You've got to watch what happens in your head when you talk.
Do you think my mom is happy that I've talked?
My dad?
Other family members?
Do you think they're happy that I talked?
The next part, sorry to be annoying, I'm going to go subscribers.
Just in a minute or so, because the next part is not for general consumption.
Oh, Jared says, you never got moral clarity until encountering this show.
Same.
This was the only place with a coherent, with a consistent moral compass.
Yeah.
Well, thank you.
I appreciate that.
Oh, thank you for the tip, my friend.
I appreciate that.
If you want to join, you can join for free.
Just use the promo code, all caps, UPB2022.
You can join for free.
Try it out for a month and you can continue on with this.
But yeah, we're going sub for this next part.
Because I'm going to tell you how I survived.
How I did not die.
And it's pretty recent.
Yeah, it's pretty recent.
Alright.
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