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Oct. 27, 2023 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:16:38
ESCAPING JAMAICAN VIOLENCE!
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Okay, well, actually I became exposed to your material maybe like in 2012-13.
I watched a video from you called Putting Off Procrastination and it was pretty eye-opening for me because it made me realize, you know, how my parents were actually treating me in reality versus, you know, kind of I guess the The way it was justified to me and the way I had justified it to myself.
But it was a bit frightening for me at the time.
So I kind of stopped listening for a while.
And then recently I started getting back into it.
And so I finally made the decision, unfortunately, 10 years too late.
But I guess it's never too late.
Because I've been living with my parents for a long time.
I'm 32 now.
And so I finally made the decision to leave.
And so I've got an apartment and everything and currently in the process of finalizing all that.
I'm trying to commit my life to living more philosophically and cleaning up my life.
It's not an extreme mess.
There's nothing going on right now, but I'm just trying to live better.
Any advice that you could offer would be helpful.
Well, I mean, that's fairly general, and I guess we can sort of narrow it or specify it a little bit to see if we can provide more value.
So, can you tell me a little bit about your life as a child and your life as an adult?
Sure. I was born in a city in South Florida.
You don't have to do geography.
Yeah, just roughly. I was born to two parents.
They were married.
They've been married now for about 39, almost 40 years.
I have a sister. Growing up there, we grew up in a pretty quiet neighborhood and everything, but my parents are from a Immigrants from another country.
And so some of the values from there kind of seeped in, although we live in the United States.
So there was a bit of aggression and stuff in the house growing up, a bit of violence.
I was hit enough times for it to be a problem for me.
I remember Noticing that it was a problem as a kid.
I don't like being treated this way, but I'm just kind of stuck with these people.
I remember when I was five, I wanted to leave home.
I wanted to run away from home.
I told this to my parents, and they just kind of mocked me and laughed at me, which was unfortunate.
They don't have to be nice to you because they've got control, right?
They've got authority, and they've got...
Total control of your environment, so I guess they can laugh at you.
I mean, I'm sure that if your mom had said to your dad, I want to leave you, he might not have laughed at her.
Yeah, I guess.
Yeah, because that's more of a voluntary relationship.
Yeah, yeah. She can do that, right?
So, yeah. The mocking kids who want to run away is just appalling.
It's just a straight-up exercise of power, but I'm sure you know that.
So, sorry, go ahead. Yeah, I actually never thought of it that way, but it is kind of like a power exercise.
Like a power play, like them flexing their muscles on me a little bit, you know, because it's like, what can I do?
I'm a five-year-old kid. I can't drive a car.
I still remember even in like, I don't know, there was an old comic book strip, Calvin and Hobbes, and Calvin was like, I'm running away, and it was always for some petty, silly, whatever reason, but his parents were like, oh, we'll help you pack, and you know, it's just like, ugh, it was so gross, rather than listen to his Grievances and his problems.
It was just like, yeah, we'll help you pack and good luck.
And, you know, they wave him down the driveway.
And, oh, it's just a straight up exercise of power because everybody knows the kid can't go anywhere.
Yeah, so that's like the other end of the spectrum.
On my end of the spectrum, it was they just laugh at me.
On that end of the spectrum, indicated in Calvin and Hobbes, they say, oh yeah, sure, we'll help you pack.
But really, on either end, you're not getting to the important stuff, which is the actual grievances and the reason why the child actually wants to leave.
Yeah, and in the Calvin and Hobbes one, it was, of course, portrayed as...
Well, you know, I'm just not getting what I want, and I don't get to stay up all night, and I don't get to eat candy all day, so I'm leaving.
Like, it was always just minimized to some foolish, vain thing on the part of the kid.
Yeah, I mean, kids don't want to run away unless they're kind of going through hell in many ways.
It's kind of funny because kids don't really want to eat candy or stay up all night normally.
I think maybe there are factors that make them want to do that, probably on the part of the parents.
I remember being a kid, I remember naturally wanting to stay up all night playing video games.
The only reason I played video games, which I guess that's part of my childhood too, is because I was just miserable as a child and I wanted to drown it out.
Oh yeah, so people get addicted to these kinds of highs when they don't have the natural high of happiness, right?
Then it's like, well, I might as well have candy because I'm depressed.
I might as well stay up and play video games because it's distracting and I'm down, right?
So yeah, I think keeping kids down makes them chase after these dopamine highs.
Yeah, 100%.
So I went to public school, of course, elementary.
Elementary was rough in the second grade.
By then, I think most of the times I'd been hit were like 5, 6, 7, somewhere between 6 and 13.
So by the time I was in public school, I'd already experienced violence at the hands of my parents.
And so I would go to school.
I'm Jamaican, so I was the only Jamaican kid at the school.
And all the other kids were Hispanic or something else.
So I was already a bit isolated in that way.
I remember before I even went to public school, I remember my mother was like...
She was at the gym or something.
Sometimes at the gyms, they have a little area where you can leave your kids to play or whatever.
I was left in that area and there were a bunch of Mexican kids there or whatever.
One of them spits in my face.
I think I was four or five years old.
He spits directly in my face.
Then I go to the lady that's in charge of us or whatever, the daycare lady.
I say, hey, that kid just spit in my face.
Are we going to do something about this?
I probably didn't say it so articulately, but she said, well, and she said in a heavy, thick Hispanic accent, she said, it's just a baby.
What's the big deal? So that kind of got stuck in my craw.
But anyway, so going to public school...
A lot of kids would pick on me and make fun of me, call me unsuitable names, and I would rage out and hit them or stuff like this, be physically violent with them.
I remember hitting a kid in the head with my lunchbox one time or throwing it at him.
It was one of the two. And then another notable thing that I remember was two kids were bugging me, so I grabbed their heads and bashed them together.
Which is not nice.
I shouldn't have done that. So tell me what your experience was like transitioning to, I hate to say violence, because it does sound to some degree like self-defense.
I don't want to put this big negative label on it.
But how was it for you to sort of transition from being pushed around to like knocking kids' heads together and hitting them with lunchboxes and so on?
Was that kind of instinctual or was that like a big step for you or did you like bottle it up and then, you know, rage back or how did that go from like being picked on to fighting back in that sense?
No, it wasn't.
In those days, it wasn't bottled up.
It was pretty instant.
Somebody would say something, and the reaction would be pretty instant, almost immediately after.
I don't think there was a whole lot of processing going on.
I didn't like being called.
In a way, there was a bottling up, because I already had experienced ridicule in my family home, and so now I go to school, and I finally get to be away from my family, but the ridicule has followed me here.
It's still there in front of me.
And I think that made me very angry, too.
Oh, like the no escape?
Like I can't get away from it no matter where you go?
Yeah, like I just can't get away.
No matter where I go, I'm just going to be treated in a way that I know in my deepest parts of my soul, I know I'm not supposed to be treated this way.
And no matter where I go, there's just people waiting there to treat me this way.
It's like that horror movie where you run from the ghost in the forest, you finally get You know, back to your room and then you turn around and the ghost is like sitting on your bed.
Like, it's like, wait, didn't I just get away from you?
Like, why are you here? Yeah, exactly.
It's exactly like that.
Or like the boogeyman or something.
You go to bed to try to get some rest and some sleep from the day, and then he's just there waiting for you to cause you more stress.
Right, right. Okay. So I think that's what it was.
So that was elementary school, second grade.
In the second grade, we were given journals to write in.
For school. So you just get a journal and at the top of the day, you write whatever you're thinking about.
Whatever's on your mind, you just write something.
And so what I wrote down was One day, I wrote something about killing my own mother and, like, hammering a nail into her neck.
And I even drew, like, a picture of this, like, with stick figures.
And, of course, they notified my parents.
Well, hang on, hang on. So, I mean, it feels like we need a little backstory for this.
Or, I mean, did you know that this was going to result in a huge amount of mayhem and chaos or, like, consequences or no?
No, I didn't even think that they, like, no, it never crossed my mind.
Because, yeah, I know, I would have remembered this if it was like, oh, yeah, I know they're going to show this to my mom, so I'm going to write this down.
But it wasn't like that at all.
It was just, oh, here's a book, and you can write whatever you're thinking or feeling in it.
I said, okay, well, this is what's on my mind right now.
And I just wrote it in there at, like, seven years old.
Why do you think your mom? I mean, as opposed to, say, your dad or both.
Well, a lot of the beatings that I'd experienced as a kid, and it was usually like getting swatted across the head, but when you're like a little tiny kid and like a giant man swats you across the head, like the entire earth shakes.
Oh, yeah, yeah, for sure. I say this to people, like if someone five times your size was hitting you, I mean, you'd wait to meet Jesus, right?
Yeah. Yeah, it's really that way.
I lost my train of thought there.
Okay, here we go. Okay, so yeah, a lot of the beatings were at the hands of my father.
But, you know, my mother would just kind of, I would just see her kind of stand by.
And not do anything about it.
You know, later, years, like fast-forwarding, like maybe 20, 30 years later, well, no, maybe 20 years later, I remember talking to my mom about this, and she would be like, well, you know, when you weren't around, like when it was just me and him, I would tell him, hey, you should stop doing this.
But, you know, in the moment, there was no defense on my behalf, so I figured I was just kind of alone.
In ways you can't verify I was totally on your side.
Yeah, something like that, yeah.
And I mean, I believe her, you know, because her dad used to crack her pretty hard, too.
And she said that she felt a lot of resentment.
And she's been pretty honest about how that made her feel later on.
But, you know, so I would just kind of see my mom not do anything about it.
I would see my sister kind of not do anything about it.
My sister's about seven years older than me.
And she used to get it, too, before I was born.
But after I was born, I only saw her get yelled at.
But I never saw my dad actually beat her.
Maybe he did it when I wasn't around, like in times when I wasn't around.
My mom used to shout at her.
Sorry, go ahead. Yeah, my mom had fertility issues.
Her cervix was too small.
So both of us were C-sections.
And actually, before I came, there was a baby that was a miscarriage.
So it's mainly like a fertility issue.
And after me, she couldn't have any more children because of this.
So yeah, that's the reason that I understand why.
But yeah, it's a big gap, seven years.
It made me feel really lonely too because there's a lot of things you can't really do with a sibling that's seven years older than you.
So it's almost like being an only child in a way.
Right. And a lot of people would mention this to me.
They would ask me if I'm an only child based on the way, I guess, that I behave or something about my character lends them to think that I'm an only child.
But yeah, so it was mostly just...
Just having this happen to me and seeing that we have a family pet like a cat.
Nobody beats the cat.
I used to throw the cat in the swimming pool and I wasn't allowed to.
I got scolded for that. I have a sister.
I never see anybody beat my sister.
I have a mom. I never see anyone beat my mom.
I never see anybody beat my dad.
And also, I never see anybody in my family go out and beat anybody else outside the family.
So to me, I read that as like, okay, I guess I'm the worst person on planet Earth or something because I'm the only person that gets beaten and it's perfectly legitimate and justified to beat them, to beat me, but not anybody else.
And I would even get in trouble or called to the office for beating on other kids.
So that damaged my self-esteem a good bit, but I'm kind of going off topic.
The question was, why am I mom?
It was about the picture and what happened.
My mom screams a lot, but she used to scream a whole lot more.
As parents get older, they kind of chill out, but the bad stuff is still there.
It's the difference between a coal and a burning torch or something.
The heat is still there, but it's just less noticeable or a bit reduced.
If it's any consolation, one of my best friends when I was in my early teens was a Jamaican guy.
His mom wasn't too quiet either.
It may be a bit of a cultural thing.
Oh, it is. It certainly is.
I was just talking to a guy that I ran into who's Jamaican, and his girlfriend was pulling the guns on him and stuff.
I even talked to another guy.
He wasn't Jamaican, but he married one, and he said that she pulled a gun on him, too.
This never happened in my household, as far as I know.
There was no guns pulled or anything.
Jamaican women can be very...
Violent, yelling, screaming, combative, argumentative, things like this.
I mean, being argumentative and combative, I guess, depending on the circumstances, isn't so bad.
But they do yell.
They do get violent.
Aggressive, I guess I should say aggressive.
Jamaican women are known for being aggressive.
And so it's stuff like, you know...
If I did something that my mom didn't like and it became too much for her, she would scream at us.
Me and my sister, I've seen her scream at us.
Full on veins in the neck, banshee shrieking, not even just raising your voice, but top of the line.
Yeah, not like banshee screaming.
I mean, my mom has a pretty deep voice, like a deeper than usual voice, I guess, for a woman.
So it doesn't sound like shrieking or anything.
Yeah, it wasn't shrieking, but it was like very loud, like yelling.
I wouldn't call it screaming, top of the lungs, but I would call it certainly yelling.
And it was very loud yelling.
I guess when you're a kid, it sounds a whole lot louder.
I remember it being very loud.
You take a little bit more food out of the stove than you were supposed to, and you just get this yelling.
Sometimes it would startle me.
It would frighten me at times, because you wouldn't see it coming necessarily.
Things like that. My mom used to yell at us a lot.
And she hit us a few times, but not as frequently as our dad did.
No, no, but we didn't finish the picture story.
Yeah, I don't know why.
I remember my mom asked me because the school notified her.
And then she asked me, hey, I saw you drew this stuff.
Why did you draw it? I said, I don't even really know.
I don't know. And maybe I said, I don't know, because I was terrified in the moment.
And I didn't want to give the wrong answer to get myself in any trouble.
So I just said, I don't know.
I did this again later in other circumstances where I got in trouble in school for doing erratic things.
Some of that's in high school.
That's a bit later. So nothing ever followed up from the picture?
I mean, I don't know, and that was it?
Yeah, I don't remember anything else.
I think my mom kept it quiet.
I don't even think she showed it to my dad.
If she showed it to my dad, he would have lit me up, and I would have remembered that.
So I think that was just kind of kept on the down low for some reason.
Yeah, I don't know. When I was seven, my grandfather on my mom's side actually killed somebody, too.
He was schizophrenic.
So this is around the same time frame.
This was maybe months after the drawing situation.
And it just kind of made me think about that.
Because my grandpa was schizophrenic.
He was very violent. He did drugs.
He did marijuana, I think.
He was a longshoreman.
He married my grandmother when she was 15 and he was 30 in Jamaica.
I'm sorry, how do you know he was schizophrenic?
I mean, if he did drugs and was violent, he could just be, like, drug-addled and, you know, kind of evil.
I mean... You know, I never really knew him that well.
He was always nice to me.
He drove an ice cream truck and he would give me free snow cones a couple times.
You know, so I never had any issues with him personally.
I remember I saw him when he was in the detention center after he was convicted, or maybe before, I don't remember, when he had been in prison.
And I remember he said, oh, you know, hey, it's nice to see you.
You're still a crybaby just like before, aren't you?
Like you just said that, you know, to be kind of funny.
I don't think he said it to be mean or anything, but he was always nice to me.
The reason I say that he was schizophrenic is because he was
he was Baker acted to to a hospital because he was like confined.
Is that right? Yeah, he was confined.
Well, I don't know the details, but I know that he was known for pulling guns on people.
And so he pulled his gun on some neighborhood kids or something because they were making too much noise.
And then they took him...
To a hospital or something, and they determined that he was insane or something like this.
So Baker Act is like when somebody gets arrested and then they determine that the person is insane.
Instead of sending him to prison, they send him to a hospital for mental examination.
I believe that's how it works.
I've never actually looked into it.
For me, schizophrenia, I'm no expert, obviously, but my sort of understanding of it is something like no contact with reality, hearing voices, seeing things way out there.
So if he's driving an ice cream truck, that doesn't seem quite in line.
Again, not knowing much about it.
He's driving an ice cream truck.
He can hold the job. He was able to write a will for himself.
He raised my mother.
Now, he didn't do a good job for a lot of reasons, but he raised my mother well enough that she could go out and find a husband.
Yeah, I guess exactly.
But... Yeah, you know what?
I don't really think, based on my private personal experience with him, I don't think anything was really that deeply wrong with him, if I'm going to be totally honest from my perspective.
I mean, and he did go to prison, right?
They didn't keep him in the mental...
Asylum, right? Well, because he went to the mental place.
It was really just a hospital, but they took him there.
And I don't think...
It wasn't a mental hospital. It was just a hospital.
Because I ended up working there many years later doing some construction.
But... Yeah, he went...
They took him to the hospital, and then he said to the lady, I need to go back home to feed my dogs.
Then he went back home and got a gun and came back, and I think he shot the doctor or something.
Oh, is that the murderer?
That's the murder. Oh, but what was he in there for to begin with?
Oh, because he pulled the gun on the neighborhood kids, right?
Yeah, because he was doing something crazy, quote-unquote crazy, and then he was arrested and then they decided to send him to the hospital probably for mental examination, I would assume.
So the doctor who released him, he came back and murdered the doctor, right?
And murdered her, yes. And according to my mom, he had called my mom to be there, because he may have wanted to kill my mom too.
But I don't know if that's true or not.
I don't know if he really wanted to kill my mom, but that's what my mom told me.
So when I was seven, and I was getting into all these violent altercations, and then this news came out, my mom took me aside, I still remember the place, under a tree somewhere.
And she said, hey, you know, this such and such happened with your grandpa, blah, blah, blah, you know.
I think the reason why she wanted to tell me that was because, you know, she saw the violent tendencies in me and she just wanted to inform me, I guess, a bit of our family history.
So she really worked to prevent your violence but not so much your dad's?
Yeah, I'm sorry to laugh but No, because, you know, if a kid's getting beaten by a dad, the first person you want to lecture is the kid, obviously.
Don't be violent. Yeah, not at all.
Yeah, not at all.
I know that's sarcasm, yeah.
Obviously, no. Yeah, it's sarcastic.
My mom says that she talked to my dad privately, and the beatings did stop when I was 13, but I was listening to your book, RTR, and you kind of talked about the same thing, like once you get past a certain age.
And I've heard other people say this too, like I talked to a priest, and he said, oh yeah, I used to beat my kids, but eventually they get so big, they can beat you.
So I think it's very common, like, yeah, we'll stop beating him now, because pretty soon he's going to start a revolution.
Sorry, what that means is your dad didn't hit you because he lost his temper.
Because he was fully, like, once you got bigger, he was fully able to not hit you.
Oh, yeah. Like, he never, because people say, oh, you made me so mad, or I was under so much stress, and then the moment you come big, magically, it all stops, right?
So it could have stopped anything. No, I remember I asked my dad why he hit me, and he said, it's because you're a child.
Oh, because he's bigger, you're smaller, and that's the way it is.
Yeah, because you're a child, basically, and I'm an adult, and so I have to keep you in line.
Is his name Frank? It should be, because he's admirably Franky.
No, but actually my grandfather's name was, well, yeah, maybe I shouldn't have said that.
Okay, so, sorry, how old were you when your grandfather killed the woman?
Seven. Okay.
Seven years old. And I guess he was pretty much gone forever then, right?
Yeah, well, not gone forever.
I mean, he was gone physically, but he would make phone calls to the house, and my mom would get really angry and scream at him.
And sometimes she would even make fun of him.
He would send letters and stuff.
And she would mock him a lot and also get really angry with him at times when he would call.
Was she angry at him just because obviously he killed a woman or was there something else?
Things that he would say, I guess.
Maybe he said some things that were hurtful or something.
And then also his wife.
His wife came over to live with us.
My grandma came to live with us around the same time.
I think I was maybe seven or six when she came to live with us.
And she was always very normal, I guess.
She was never abusive when she was with us.
Although, if anything ever happened, she would side with my parents.
But she never hit me. She never screamed at me.
But she was apparently horrible with her kids.
She tied one of my uncles to a donkey and dragged him through the road.
And she did this to another one of her children as well.
A donkey, yes.
In Jamaica. And she threw a coconut shell at my uncle's head because of something that somebody else said that he did.
She didn't even do an investigation.
She just threw it at his head.
Gave him permanent eye damage as a result.
He has to wear glasses to this day because of that.
So she was terrible.
And so was her husband, my grandpa, the one who killed the lady.
He was known to be violent with her.
He used to beat her.
And he used to beat my mom and all of his kids and stuff.
Well, not all of his kids. My mom was the only one.
Because when they separated, I forgot to add that detail, they separated When my mom was about in her early teens, or maybe even before that.
Oh, your grandparents?
My grandparents on my mother's side, they separated, and basically the story was that they were playing tug-of-war with my mom.
They separated, but they wanted to have my mom, but they couldn't both have her, so she chose to be with my grandpa instead of my grandma, which was probably the right choice.
Because although he was abusive, he wasn't nearly as abusive as my grandma was.
So she went to live with my grandpa, and he came to the city where I live now.
And so she grew up with him, and then as soon as she could, well, he kicked her out when she was 18.
And then she was just kind of on her own ever since.
A few years later, maybe four, five, six years later, she met my dad, and they got married.
And so that's how the family started, I guess.
Got it. We went into a whole bunch of different stuff.
There were other instances where I showed violent tendencies.
There was a time when I threatened to kill my sister because my parents made me go to my room for something.
I wrote a note and slipped it under the door or something so my mom could see.
I got yelled at for that.
What do you mean? What did you say?
I said, let me out of here or I will kill my sister.
That's what I wrote on the note or something like that.
Because they sent me to my room and obviously I wasn't allowed to leave.
They didn't lock the door or anything, but I wasn't allowed to leave.
Let's see. What else was there?
So that was about seven or eight years old when that happened.
9, 10, 11, 12, elementary school.
I guess I kind of calmed down after a while.
I didn't really get so violent in school anymore because I think other kids kind of knew what to expect from me.
So I didn't really experience that much violence after...
Like, third or fourth grade, I didn't experience that much violence.
And then I had other outlets, too, because, like, at six years old, I had already been introduced to video games at four, but by six or seven, I was playing them quite frequently.
I had, like, a console, and I would just play video games, and that's kind of, like, that kind of kept me...
Nintendo 64 used to play Super Mario Bros.
64, Donkey Kong.
There was a game called Banjo-Kazooie that was around in those days.
So, like, platformers that collect their coins and not like...
Yes, platformers, yeah.
Three-dimensional platformers.
Actually, we weren't even allowed to play those games, like shooter games where you shoot at people with real guns and stuff, or super violent games, Mortal Kombat.
We were never allowed to play stuff like that in the house.
And also, video games were restricted to weekends only, so Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then during the summer, pretty much whenever you wanted.
But on weeknights, couldn't play video games.
Got it. Okay, so we move into your teen years?
Teen years, so I go to middle school.
No altercations in sixth grade.
Just got picked on by students a little bit, but I just learned how to...
It wasn't as bad as before, and I'd just gotten used to it by this point.
Unfortunately, apparently this is life.
Kids are going to pick on you or something.
I think my mom had me to read a book about bullying at some time when I was in elementary school too, although I don't remember too much of it.
Basically, the idea was that people who are bullied become bullies.
I think that was the basic concept of the book.
So I get to 6th grade.
I'm 11. Not too much happens.
Then I get to 7th grade and the hormones start kicking in.
And I remember I had this habit of squeezing girls' butts at school.
I would just sneak up on them and touch their butts.
And only one girl ever actually turned around and slapped me.
And that was one out of maybe...
this maybe less but the rest of them would like you this over and over or
just once per girl like once or twice per girl there were maybe the girls
that really didn't like it for some reason I would I would do it more but
the ones that like like there was one girl specifically like I did that to her
and she like smiled and I said you know I'm a 12 year old kid but like other
kids around me were saying stuff to girls like would you go out with these
So I decided I would say to this girl, would you go out with me?
And she said, no, I have a boyfriend.
And then like the next day, I'm waiting outside for my bus.
And she like approaches me and she says, hey, I broke up with my boyfriend.
Let's go out. She's got a big smile on her face.
And I got nervous. And she was like 12 too?
Yeah, she was probably younger.
Wow, you're moving pretty fast at the end of latency.
Yeah. Yeah, I know.
I don't know. I don't know what was going on, really.
I don't know. Maybe it's just when you get to be 12, you just start to I really don't know.
Was she Hispanic or black or white?
Yeah, Hispanic. Hispanic. Okay.
Interesting. Yeah.
So she said to me, you know, so she said this to me and I said, yeah, you know, I got really nervous and I was like, you know, I have to go catch a bus.
I have to go now. I just kind of ran away from her.
Not really ran away, but I just walked to my bus.
Nervously to get away from her. It would be ironic if she grabbed your butt on the way out, but all right.
Yeah. Yeah. Probably.
Yeah. Yeah, you're absolutely right about that.
But it never happened. Did anybody ever do that to me?
I think I can remember one time, but I don't remember it clearly.
But that was later in life, I think.
Much later. Anyway, so I was doing that.
Oh, I got exposed to pornography at age 11 or 12.
I think I was in the 7th grade.
Was that like a kid in school kind of thing?
Eighth grade, sorry. I was 12 in the eighth grade.
No, it was...
At middle school, I became a latchkey kid.
So both my parents were out of the house when I got home from school.
So I carried a key with me and I took the bus home.
And I was going online a lot, you know, because we had a family computer and like looking up videos or whatever.
What was I looking up? Because I liked video games, so I was looking up videos about video games or something.
But the website that had the little cartoons or whatever I was watching also just happened to have porn on it too.
And so I just stumbled upon it at age 12, just searching for stuff.
And... And yeah, I was exposed to pornography.
And I had heard about masturbation before, and so I did that too, also.
And so that's when that started for me, at age 12, I think it was, in the eighth grade.
And after that, that was like a big, big nail in the coffin there.
Because, you know, it just kind of...
I noticed.
I had a pretty keen sense of like, yeah, this is like negatively affecting my social interactions,
this habit. Because it became a habit and it was negatively affecting my social interactions.
I wasn't as fully expressed as I used to be.
I wasn't interested in girls at school like I used to be because now I'm looking at women that are adults.
When you're caught up in women that are adults, why are you going to look at Like girls at your school, you know, there's like a huge difference there.
Like there's basically no comparison.
And so I was doing that for a while.
Not good.
That became a habit for many, many years for me.
That was terrible.
I just used that to dissociate.
On top of that, I was miserable as a kid, still.
Miserable about my family situation, my house situation.
Just generally not happy.
Then I just fall into this habit that It's such an easy access for quick, temporal, momentary happiness.
And it kind of drains you of energy and ambition.
It's kind of like weed in that way, right?
Yes, because there's been some studies on semen retention that I know about now.
But yeah, that stuff really does.
Masturbating, pornography, frequent ejaculation, whether it's with pornography or not, just doing that frequently does sap you of your will to live, I guess.
And I had a keen sense of that, but I just didn't care in those days.
I just didn't care. I hate to say it, but you're grabbing whatever pleasure you can Because it's pretty scarce in your environment.
Yeah, 110%.
I forgot to add that I didn't have friends growing up at all as a kid.
No friends. I was pretty embarrassed of my parents and my family situation.
At five, I already knew it. I don't like these people.
I don't want to be around them. I don't want to live here.
I don't want to be with these people. At five years old, I knew this.
And I was telling my parents, I want to run away from home.
So why would I want to bring kids?
To my house so they can watch my dad like veg out in front of the TV for hours.
And that's what he would do when he got home.
He would have a long commute home from work.
And then he would just like veg out front of the TV for hours.
And like you just hear him like belch occasionally, you know, stuff like this.
And, you know, it becomes money making piece of furniture.
Yeah. Yeah.
And, you know, it's a shame because, you know, I think there's a lot of things kicking around in my dad's head that if he was more available, you know, that stuff would have been kind of useful to me.
You know, if he was like a little bit more available.
He'll go to grave with all of the great things still stuck in his head.
Oh, yeah. What a waste.
That really sucks. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, that really sucks.
It's all the more reason, you know, to become a parent, to have kids, which is what I'm working on now, trying to find somebody.
Had a few bad experiences with a couple women recently, but I guess we'll get to that still on the childhood.
But, yeah, so I didn't have friends.
And, you know, there was, oh, I skipped over something.
When I was like six years old, I think, There was another kid at our school, and our parents, our moms, had made friends, I guess.
But I didn't like his mom, because she would call kids brats.
She would say, like, oh yeah, they're all brats, you know.
And I remember really taking an issue with this, personally.
I never voiced my concern, because I knew it kind of wouldn't be listened to.
But I remember thinking, like, yeah, this lady's kind of, like, evil.
Like, why is she calling her son a brat?
She's calling me a brat. Like, this isn't...
This isn't a suitable way to refer to children.
But anyway, they were friends.
Our moms were friends. And so they tried to kind of put us together as friends, me and this other kid.
This kid just wasn't really...
We were kind of from very different backgrounds.
I didn't like him too much.
But he came over to sleep over one night.
And we had to share a bed.
And he showed me his penis the following morning, which was...
Not nice. I remember telling my mom, like, hey, this kid just showed me his, you know what?
She's like, oh, you know, I don't even remember what she said.
I don't know if she had a talk with him.
I don't even remember too clearly what had happened there.
There's a lot of detail I'm going into.
That's kind of an uncomfortable, that's a bit of an uncomfortable memory, seeing someone's penis.
I actually mentioned that, since we're on the subject of that particularly.
When I was around the same age, well, maybe younger, because I think I was learning how to pee on my own, I used to pee all over the place.
I wouldn't go directly into the toilet.
And so my dad volunteered to show me how to pee.
Well, I guess I don't have to go any further than that, right?
He volunteered to show me how to pee by giving me a demonstration.
That wasn't really helpful, because I just kept doing it anyway.
I don't see, like, now looking back on it, like, how would that have helped me?
Right, it's traumatized you.
It's like, how the heck would that have helped me?
I now never want to pee again.
I mean, I kind of didn't want to pee, too, because, like, you know, I would pee on the floor, and then I would get kind of, like, scolded about it.
You're peeing on the floor and it's a problem for us because we have to clean it up and blah blah blah, and you need to clean this up and everything.
Which is understandable. I should clean it up, but as a kid, I don't think you fully understand that pee is really gross or whatever.
I remember my dad volunteering himself to demonstrate for me how to pee without missing the inside of the toilet.
Yeah, I don't know. That's not very normal, is it?
I don't know. I don't know how many other...
I've never asked around with other kids and said, hey, did your dad show you how to...
I'm the wrong guy to ask, but it doesn't sound too normal to me.
I'm sorry to hear that.
Sometimes I wonder, though.
Sometimes I wonder. Because with a lot of the fathering that's going around, sometimes I wonder if it's better to go without.
That's really harsh to say.
No, no. I mean, I've thought about that a lot of times, too.
And, you know, in another life, we'll talk about that.
But I want to keep focused on you.
Yeah, sorry about that.
Yeah, so that happened.
Those are two instances where I saw someone's penis or whatever.
Back to middle school.
In the eighth grade, I got in a couple of major fights because once you get to middle school, the penalties against fighting are a lot more stringent.
Stringent, the right word, or maybe strict?
I'm not sure. There was a kid that I had some bad blood with.
I didn't like him. He didn't like me.
Things kept boiling up.
I would yell at him in class.
It eventually escalated to hitting.
One day, close to the end of the school year, he was saying some pretty not-so-nice things to me.
He started throwing food at my face.
I hit him directly on the nose with my fist.
It seemed like he was waiting for that because as soon as I hit him, he got up behind me and started hitting me three times in the back of the head.
And I remember when he was hitting me, I didn't even really feel it that hard.
I didn't feel any pain.
He punched me three times in the back of my head.
And the whole time I felt very calm.
And then it's funny because I was thinking about this recently because I was listening to your book again about, I think his name was Simon the Boxer, and how he would...
He had learned to feel very safe in, what do you call it, in violent situations.
Or not safe, but in control in violent situations.
And so I remember feeling that way when this kid came behind and hit me in the back of the head three times.
And then I engaged him in a fight.
I fought him. I didn't hit him that hard, I don't think.
I didn't beat him that hard, but I did fight him.
I did hit him a few times.
And so it was found out by the administration.
We were taken to the office and everything.
And we were totally fine after that.
We got along just fine.
It wasn't a serious thing.
There was no blood spilled. There were no bruises or anything.
We just kind of got in a scuffle.
And we both got indoor suspension for three days for that.
But yeah, that was before this fight where the kid hit me three times in the back of the head.
And that one was a bit more serious because it was maybe a month after.
And so they said, okay, you can't keep getting in fights.
So they suspended the three of us for the rest of the year.
And it was close to the end of the year.
I think there were three days left of the year.
So they suspended us both for three days.
And... Yeah, after that, I got home from school early, you know, before anybody else, as usual.
And I get a phone call to the house and it's my dad.
He's like either at work or he's on his way home from work.
And he calls me and he says, Do you know what I'm going to do to you when I get home?
And I said, I don't know.
I mean, I knew, but this was the first time that he had like actually threatened me before it would just be he would flip out hit me, you know, but now he's like, making a direct threat like I'm going to hit you or whatever.
Can you still hear me? Yeah, I got you.
Okay, good. So, you know, I wait for him to get home.
I'm filled with, like, anxiety.
Also, another thing I should mention was, like, I would always have this tremendous fear of my father that he was going to do such and such to me, you know, like hit me or whatever.
So I would lose sleep at night, so I wouldn't be able to function cognitively at the level that...
That I should because I think I'm pretty smart, actually, but I didn't really know because my self-esteem was so low.
So I didn't know for many years how smart I actually am.
And then on top of that, I'd be doing some yard work with my dad and I'd forget something or make a mistake and he'd be like, what's wrong with you?
And I'm thinking to myself, I'm actually way smarter than you, but I'm so stressed that I can't actually fully actualize that.
And so that was always a pain that I had growing up.
So he says this thing to me, and he makes this threat to me, and so I'm completely freaked out, scared, anxious, waiting for him to get home.
I mean, if there was ever a better time to run away from home, that probably would have been the best time.
So he finally comes home.
And he doesn't hit me. He takes me out.
This is when I'm 13. This is when the beating stops.
He takes me out to the back and he says, listen, you know, we can go one way or another.
I can keep hitting you or I cannot keep hitting you.
But if I stop hitting you, you have to stop getting in fights.
You know, I said, well, I don't want to get hit anymore.
So I'll just make him this promise and then we'll be cool.
And then since that day, I haven't been in any kind of physical altercation at all.
I haven't been in any fights.
I've never been. Yeah, look at that.
He kind of reasoned with you in a way and it kind of worked, right?
Yeah. If only he had done this from the beginning, then there wouldn't be all this baggage that I have now with my father, which is never going to go away because there's no way he can make restitution on that, really.
So you can't make restitution on breaking somebody's heart.
I can put somebody's heart back together, you know, um, so anyway, um, so 13, you know,
then I go into high school, 14.
You know, so at this point, it's like, okay, I gotta navigate my life in such a way, you know, I already do this as a kid.
I have to navigate my life in such a way that I avoid getting hit as much as possible.
So, it's like, well, now I know that if I don't want to get hit, I just have to not hit anybody.
So, if anybody, like, bugs me or makes fun of me, I'll just, like...
Like, absorb it, I guess, and not respond, like not do anything about it.
And so I never really learned how to resolve conflict the right way.
I just learned how to, like, receive abuse from people and just accept it.
So I became very, what's the word?
You fight, you only know how to fight or not fight back, nothing else.
Yeah. And so I became very—exactly.
So there was no negotiation, no reasoning, nothing in between.
And so I just kind of learned to be complacent.
And then, you know, the porn use made me even more complacent because, you know, you're using porn and we already went into how it saps you of your willpower.
Yeah. Um, basically, like, nothing happened for me, um, you know, in terms of, like, friends and stuff for, like, the first two years of high school.
There was one moment where, like, a kid, um, was, like, severely, like, berating me and saying really mean things to me on the bus in front of, like, a lot of people.
I just kind of sat there and looked at him, you know, and it hurt.
It hurt a lot, but I just kind of sat there.
It's like, what am I going to do? Um, if I fight this kid, then I have to Then I'm going to have violence exercised upon me by someone bigger than me.
Is it even worth it?
That was one instance.
Kids at school, they're just really nasty to each other too, which is something that I noticed.
Kids in school, they're all there because they hate being there.
They're just really nasty to each other in a lot of ways.
They kind of use each other a lot.
A lot of friendships that you make in high school aren't really that valid because it's just people using each other to get through the nightmare that they're in.
I made one friend who tried to kill himself later, actually.
His parents put him on psych meds.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I was never put on psych meds.
But when I was in middle school, I used to be a bit of a troublemaker in ways, especially when I was getting into verbal arguments with that other kid that I eventually fought.
In a middle school.
But they called a meeting for me, a parent-teacher conference.
It was one of these conferences where the parents and the teachers conspire against the kid when he's not there.
And the teachers were all trying to make the case that I had ADHD so that they could prescribe me medication to chill me out.
But my parents said, no, we're not going to do that.
That's one of the things that I appreciate.
Yeah. Yeah, that's one of the things that I appreciate that my parents did.
Because those psych meds, I mean, they will just...
Ruin you. I had a classmate in band.
I took band in middle school. That's where I started to learn music and stuff.
It was in 7th and 8th grade.
I took band. And I remember sitting next to a kid.
He was playing trombone. My instrument was tenor sax.
And he was playing trombone.
And he was just nodding off like he couldn't even really play.
I'm like, hey kid, hey buddy, you okay?
You alright? And he said, it's these meds that my parents put me on.
They make me drowsy or whatever.
I just remember thinking, holy moly.
They make you manageable.
Yeah. Whatever they make him, it's not his true self.
I was like, wow, your parents put you on meds, huh?
I didn't even realize what kind of meds they were.
But until much later in life.
So in high school, they did this with me too.
Because in high school, I used to go after my English teachers a lot because I didn't like the books that they wanted us to read.
And so I would just kind of make fun of my English teachers or make jokes in class or cut up in class, cause trouble, especially in English class.
English and math. I had a math teacher that I used to be able to mock his voice pretty accurately, and so I would do that in class to him.
And he was kind of not a good guy.
He used to ogle the female students and stuff, which I ended up finding this out later when I came back to that school as a substitute teacher.
Yeah, so in like 10th or 11th grade, 11th grade I think it was, no, 10th, it was 10th.
They all call like another parent-teacher conference, this time in high school, and they say the same thing.
My parents say, no, we're not putting our son on any medication.
So I was a bit of a troublemaker at times.
You know, I picked my moments.
I guess I picked the English teachers because they were a little bit softer than the other teachers that I had, which is not good.
Yeah, shop teachers and gym teachers, not so much, right?
Yeah. Yeah, I didn't take shop until 12th grade, and I never messed with that guy.
He was pretty much like, yeah, you don't mess with a shop teacher.
The gym teacher was a woman, but she was nice to me, so I never had any issues with her.
She was actually a very nice lady, and I liked her a lot.
I took weight training and swimming with her.
Although she embarrassed me one time, because apparently I had been diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma or whatever, and she brought out the inhaler in front of everybody, so I felt kind of embarrassed.
But other than that, she was okay.
I think she didn't really know what she was doing.
I don't believe she was deliberately trying to embarrass me or anything.
I didn't get any sense of that.
So, in the 11th grade, I did develop a habit of antagonizing people that I felt that I could get away with antagonizing without...
Winding up in a physical altercation.
So it was around that time that I got into the habit of getting inside of people's heads or noticing things about people and then pushing their buttons a lot.
It was around late middle school, early high school.
And that became a habit for me for quite a few years.
I just started getting out of that habit maybe a few years ago.
Maybe a year ago, I just started getting out of that habit, but like being socially uncouth and things like this and just like Especially if I noticed that a person was indifferent towards me, that would make me even more antagonistic.
Because I'd already faced so much indifference in my life already, so that would just make me even more antagonistic towards the person if I noticed that they were indifferent towards me.
Because I felt that I had good qualities, but I didn't feel like people were treating me the way that I should have been treated my whole life.
And so that sort of thing kind of compounds, and it kind of just...
It colors the way that you behave with people.
But I don't want to go too far off the topic because now I'm kind of fast forwarding.
High school... In the 11th grade, I got in trouble because there was a guy who shot up a school in Virginia Tech, and he had a famous picture that he took of himself where he had his arm stretched out and a pistol in either hand.
And so my teacher saw me.
It was an intensive... One of these English teachers, actually.
I was in class. I was getting into computers, and I knew how to use Photoshop.
So I was photoshopping out the guns and putting game controllers in his hand and saying he learned how to shoot from playing video games or something.
As a joke, my friend was with me and he was kind of chuckling.
Just a high school buddy. Not anybody that I'd taken to my house or had met my parents or really gotten into my life or anything.
She went and reported me, and they found something else on my student allocation.
Every student at that school had an allocated space on the school servers where they could put files for homework and things like that.
I was getting into coding at age 15, 16, and I figured out how to make a website that would show this shock image.
And you couldn't close the window until you closed a prompt maybe 666 times, or you went into the task manager and closed the entire browser manually.
So I made that to play a prank on another student.
It was a friendly prank.
We knew each other.
We were cool and stuff.
But when they went into my drive, they found the shock image.
When they went into my allocated space, they found the shock image.
And so I got called to the office for that.
And they showed the image to the counselor and everybody.
And they called my mom in.
I said, Mom, maybe you shouldn't go.
She went and saw it.
And she didn't tell my dad.
She didn't say anything. And I told her it was a joke.
But it was a shocking image.
It was like an image of a man's anus spread wide open.
It was pretty grotesque.
My mom didn't say anything to my dad about this.
At least I don't think so.
Maybe she did, but he didn't do anything.
I don't know the details about that.
But trouble that I got in high school.
And did you say that at all?
Nope. Not at all. No.
Well, technically I did.
By then you should be dating.
I had girls that I liked but I never talked to them because of extenuating circumstances with the porn use and everything.
But there was a girl that liked me a lot and I liked her.
And she was showing me a lot of signs.
The biggest sign that she was showing was that we used to talk on AIM and Skype and stuff.
Well, not Skype, AIM. There was no Skype back then.
It was MSN, sorry.
We used to talk on MSN a lot.
We went to the same school.
She was a grade below me.
And she was Chinese. She had tiger parents.
She was really talented, really high IQ, talented at drawing.
And her parents hated her for that.
They wanted her to go to Ivy League school and they used to scream at her and hate her for that and stuff.
Anyway, she had eyes for me.
And she would invite me to hang out with her group of friends after school.
On Wednesdays, we would go see a movie at the local shopping mall or whatever.
And every time that she would invite me and I would go, there would be less and less people.
And then eventually, it was just me and her.
And I knew what was going on, but I never made a move on her or anything.
I never, I guess, made her mine in any way.
And I liked this girl, but she just got tired and bored of waiting for me.
So she got with a guy that looked exactly like me, almost identical to me, which was pretty funny.
But not funny. It's actually extremely sad.
But it's funny that she...
Sorry, this guy passing with a motorcycle.
It's funny that she would...
That she would make that choice or whatever.
But not funny at all. It's actually perfectly normal that she would make that choice because she was getting impatient with me.
So she chose somebody else.
And so that was the closest I got to dating.
And she would lean on my shoulder and stuff on the bus for a little while, a short while, a few days she was doing that.
And at the movies too, we would watch a scary movie and when the scary part came up, she would grab me and stuff like that.
I really liked this girl, but Nothing ever happened with that, unfortunately.
And there were several more instances like this that occurred, actually.
It wasn't until I stopped the porn, which was maybe, I think, a year ago, that I started talking to girls again and getting into relationships and stuff.
But yeah, there were a lot of times when girls would be into me or something, and I was too scared, I think.
I was scared. Partially for the same reason that I wouldn't have friends.
I was just embarrassed of my family and my parents and I didn't want to bring people around them because it was too weird for me.
Like, oh hey, why don't you come and meet these people that beat me and scream and yell at me and expose me to all these indignities.
They didn't even notice that I was addicted to porn either.
They didn't really care. Yeah, my parents.
They didn't really notice. They didn't really care.
So all these things, it's like, why would I bring people into my life?
Look how miserable my life is.
I can't bring myself to bring people into my life.
And then you add to that the lack of willpower associated with the addiction.
And yeah, there was no real dating.
In middle school, even, there was a girl that liked me.
And we sat close to each other, like real close, like touching on the bus, like on the last day of school.
And then I never saw her again, because I was in eighth grade.
She was in sixth grade. So I went on to high school that year.
And I never took her contact information, because I don't even think I had a cell phone.
I didn't get a cell phone until I was in high school, actually.
So I never kept her contact information.
There was another girl that liked me too in middle school.
We mostly just argued.
We didn't get along, but I had a sense that this girl...
It's one of those situations where a girl is acting like she's mad at you, but she likes you at the same time.
It was one of those with this girl.
And she was definitely probably my type.
She was very artsy, and I liked the artsy kind of girls the most.
But nothing ever happened with that.
I remember I took a trip to the Bahamas when I was nine, since we're talking about dating now.
I took a trip to the Bahamas when I was nine, and there was a girl there that I really liked a lot.
The first time I ever liked a girl was probably in the sixth grade, just to point that out.
That was when I first noticed, oh, women or girls are kind of different.
And I like such and such about them, and I feel kind of attracted to them.
Not sixth grade, sorry.
First grade, second grade, I think it was.
But anyway, I don't know if that's really early or not, but I went, so, so, where was
I?
Yeah, I go to the Bahamas to visit some family.
We all go to the Bahamas on a vacation or a trip.
There was a girl there that I really liked.
Yeah, I didn't really say anything to her either.
I remember one time she came over.
They left me in my aunt's house alone.
I was just sitting there playing video games or something.
And she comes over. She's like, hey, is your aunt here?
And I said, no.
And she said, oh, okay. And I said, okay, well, bye.
And she left. And that was it.
I never tried to talk to her or anything.
Yeah, exactly.
That's been my love life for many, many years, actually.
It's like, hey, I'm making myself extremely available to you.
And then I'm like, I'm nervous, I gotta go.
It's really bad stuff.
But that's how my life had been for many, many years, if I'm being totally honest.
You don't have to tell me your exact age, but what sort of age range are you in at the moment?
32, sir. 32, okay.
Yes, 32.
So, yeah.
So where are we now?
I guess we're in high school. Yeah.
So that was that girl.
And so after that, there were really no other girls.
There was a girl who was kind of popular when I was in the 11th grade and she was in 12th.
She was kind of popular, but she also had a bit of a reputation for doing stuff with guys.
She didn't have a good reputation.
And I guess nobody really wanted to go to prom with her or something.
So by 11th grade, I had a little crew, I guess, of kids that we would play cards in the morning and during lunch in the library.
And we had our little table, our own little territory and everything.
Sometimes other kids would come in and pass through and play some cards or whatever, but we had a pretty solid group of kids that would show up pretty much every day, maybe three or four kids.
And so one day this girl is sitting at our table.
She just comes and sits at our table, and she's doing her homework or studying or something.
And she just suddenly busts out and says, I just said my name, or whatever.
She said, would you go to prom with me?
She said, would you go to prom with me?
And I said, No.
And she said, why?
And I said, I don't know, because I'm socially awkward and I like to be away from people or something like that.
I think that's what I said. She said, oh, okay.
And then that was it. And I never went to prom either.
I just stayed home, played video games.
And by 16, I was already on the track to go to art school, too, because the art teacher at our school, he was the only person that ever, like, said, hey, I noticed, like, you have something in you.
Let's try to get you into this thing.
And so... He helped me to build a portfolio and get into art school.
So that's what I did after I graduated high school.
I didn't like my graduation.
I didn't want to be there. My parents wanted to take pictures and stuff.
I was like, let's just go home.
I didn't stay. I was like, let's not stay.
Let's just go home. I didn't want to go to the graduation at all, actually.
But my parents saw it as this big accomplishment.
But I didn't feel like I tried that hard.
I didn't feel like I accomplished anything.
But they really wanted me So I went to appease them.
Grades in high school were mediocre.
I had a 2.8 GPA or something when I graduated, which is pretty average.
I was smart, but I was stressed and I wasn't getting enough sleep at night.
I was waking up early to take two buses and a train to get to this school.
And I wasn't getting along with the kids.
I didn't have any friends, really.
I had kids that I knew in school and kids that I would hang with in school, but I didn't have anybody that I took home to see my family or anything.
And I never saw their families.
So I was pretty isolated.
And so it's hard to be motivated to do good in school when you have all these factors at play.
And then you don't even know what your future is.
You don't know what you're going to do with your life.
I had no idea what I was going to do with my life until my art teacher came in and gave me that idea.
And so I just went with it. So I got a bunch of student debt as a result of that.
My parents absorbed most of the expenses, but I have like $40,000 of student loan debt right now that I'm enrolled in a forgiveness program to take care of.
And so how long did you spend in art school?
Was it at all helpful for getting you artwork or...?
Career prospects? Absolutely not.
If anything, it was detrimental because I lost four years that I could have been using to be an earner or learn a trade or learn a business or learn something.
So it was a complete waste of time.
Not complete because the only good thing was that it was in another city.
So I was able to get away from my parents a little bit.
And that felt good to be away from them a little bit.
And that was when I started, you know, I started learning how to do things, like I learned how to compose music on my own, because I wanted to write music for video games, you know, so I learned how, I taught myself how to do that.
That's good to write music for porn, because that's just 70s-based disco nonsense, but all right, so yes, I guess the plus?
Yeah, certainly a plus.
I didn't have an interest in being involved in porn at all.
It's one of those things where you do it and you're abusing yourself and you kind of know, but you just keep doing it because it feels, I guess, kind of good in a way.
It's a little bit of pleasure, but you kind of know.
I think everybody who does this knows on some level that it's It's kind of self-abusive and it's painful and it's disgusting.
Everybody that consumes porn, I should say, kind of knows this on some level.
So I wasn't really looking to be involved in porn at all.
But I did really like video games and I wanted to write music for them.
And so I just taught myself in my second year of college.
While also doing all my classes and stuff.
Because I didn't have a social life in college either.
I didn't have friends. I had people that would try to be my friend and I would just kind of duck them or shrug them off.
Actually, the friend that I made in high school that tried to kill himself, he went to the same school that I did.
We both got put on the same path, basically.
And he ended up leaving after the first year because he was like, yeah, this place is stupid.
It's not for me. I don't like it.
I was majoring in fine art at an art school.
And fine art, I thought I was just going to learn how to paint really good and be like John Singer Sargent or Whistler or something.
And then it's like some guy's getting naked.
So that's the next time that I see somebody's penis, actually.
Some guy's getting naked.
And rubbing peanut butter and milk and bread on himself and vomiting.
And then after, his friend's helping him clean up, and he's like, I wish more people would have left.
And that's his art.
That's what I was witnessing.
That's probably the worst example, but there were three or four or five examples where people were just getting naked for no friggin' reason.
And then a lot of the other stuff was just more normal, like abstract visual art.
But some people were really weird about this stuff.
And I never participated in that.
I just did my paintings or whatever and tried to keep my head low and not get in any trouble.
But yeah, that was art school.
Yeah, I didn't have a social life.
Actually... I went to see the counselor, because I was worried about the fact that I wasn't making friends, and I was becoming a bit antisocial as well.
Not asocial, but antisocial.
I was becoming antagonistic in ways, and it was starting to get me in a bit of trouble.
So I went to see the counselor, who was kind of like a therapist, and he said to me, Well, if you're having trouble making friends, why don't you come to the school cafeteria, the college cafeteria, and just sit with some people and talk to them and make some friends?
And I said, oh, okay, I guess I'll do that.
But the day comes when I go to the cafeteria, and I would always just get my food and go back to my dorm.
And so I'm getting my food, and I beeline it for the exit so I can go to the dorm.
And he sees me, and he yells, again, you disappoint me.
Again, you disappoint me. In front of people, in public.
And I'm like, oh, well, I guess I can't talk to this guy again.
Like, what the heck?
Where are the boundaries there?
So that was kind of the end of that.
And that was pretty painful. That just made me want to isolate even more.
Now people know that I know the counselors.
So they're like, oh, this guy's seeking counseling.
What's wrong with him? People are probably thinking this about me.
And then on top of that, I have this guy yelling at me.
It's just the same garbage interactions that I've dealt with.
Since my childhood, it's like, this is just not good, so I'm just going to isolate myself even further.
It got worse and worse, the isolation worse.
I would just stay in my dorm and, like, watch old anime stuff and, like, video games.
It's such a shame, because I have such a...
I think that I'm fairly intelligent, but then my head's just filled with garbage, like video games and anime and cartoons and porn and stuff, instead of, like...
The stuff that I guess you fell your head with when it's like philosophy and self-knowledge and stuff like that.
And that's really a tragedy.
Well, until you become a dad and then you watch funny videos until the end of time.
Well, I guess.
But the groundwork is there at least.
The foundation is relayed for you as opposed to with me.
Now I'm just starting to learn all this stuff now when it's a bit late.
Although some of it I think I instinctually knew.
For example, I knew that my parents shouldn't be hitting me and stuff from a very young age.
But I just couldn't fight against it.
But anyway... Where was I? College, yeah, counselor, didn't work out.
I used to ride my bike around the city at night and just look at stuff, look at alleyways, talk to homeless people, and just wander around.
That became a habit, just wandering and stuff late at night.
And that's kind of how I... I dealt with the desolation of college for those four years.
Actually, there was one year where I spent the whole month, didn't go to any classes, didn't go to a single class, just stayed inside and played video games.
And then when I finally came back to class, the teacher for one of my core classes, the professor, he said, Hey, you've missed a lot of days.
Technically, we could fail you, but...
I don't know. In your paintings, you make such interesting marks.
We're going to keep you. It's totally fine.
And I'm like, okay. And so they just passed me and I graduated that year.
And I remember asking for job prospects, like, hey, when I graduate, what am I going to do for a job?
And they had no answer.
I kid you not. They had no answer for how I was going to make some money when I graduated.
It was crazy. They didn't have any job placement or anything like that?
They did, but it wasn't very robust.
It wasn't very robust.
You get emailed a bunch of jobs and none of them are anything that you're particularly interested in or they're not really related to your degree at all or anything that you've learned, any of the skills you picked up in school, in college.
I think that'd be one thing that you or your parents might check before you drop all that money.
It's like, okay, what kind of jobs am I going to get out of this?
Yeah, I wonder about that.
And then later after I graduated, I just get clubbed over the head over this.
Like, oh, we sent you to college and we spent all this money and now you're not doing anything with your life.
I remember getting clubbed over the head with that in the years after I graduated college and really hating life because of it.
It's like they trapped me.
They put me in a trap in a way.
They will never characterize it this way.
They'll say, well, you wanted to do it, and so we just did whatever you wanted to do, and it was your idea.
But it's like also at age 18 when I made the decision to go to this school, no one had ever made a decision.
I had never made a decision for myself in my entire life.
So was I ready to make that kind of a decision?
Certainly not. But none of this is taken into account.
It's just the fingers pointed at me.
And so that made me feel really desolate.
And then my dad's like screaming at me and cursing at me that I need to get a job and everything.
And, you know, just a hostile environment at the house, even more hostile than before, because now it's like you're like sleeping with the enemy because the very people that sent you to this school and paid all this money for it.
I agreed to do it voluntarily are now attacking you.
I finally got a job somewhere.
I worked for a while and then I worked my way up.
I went back to my art teacher who told me to go to the school in the first place.
He couldn't even come up with a job for me.
He just said, well, you could always be a substitute teacher because we could always use substitutes at the school.
I was like, no, I guess I'll do that.
I substituted for about four years.
And then I became a teacher, but I was hating all of it.
I didn't want to do any of that. I didn't like being a teacher.
I tried to get a job as an art teacher, but there were no jobs.
So I just passed a sixth grade math exam or something so that I could teach sixth grade, sixth to eighth grade math.
Or no, it was kindergarten through eighth grade math.
And so I passed that test and then I got a job as a math teacher for a year and I hated it.
And then I talked to somebody who I'd met at a church.
And he was doing electrical work, and he said it was a pretty good deal.
So I got into that, and that's kind of how I got to where I am now, basically.
Wow. Okay. So things are going relatively well?
Like financially, you've got an income and all that?
Yes, enough of an income where I can move out of my parents' house, which is very good.
And then I work another job as a personal driver as well.
On the weekends, I drive people around the city in their cars.
It's not Uber or anything.
It's different. It's a different company, but I drive people in their own personal vehicles and stuff.
I'm doing pretty good money-wise, better than ever before.
I had some women that I dated.
One of them was introduced to me by—it was two specifically, two major ones in the previous year or so.
One of them was introduced to me by my aunt, and she lives in the Bahamas.
And basically that didn't work out because she was really deeply religious in the Pentecostal faith.
And so she believed that God was sending her messages that she should wait.
On God's time for her romantic relationships.
And I kind of ignored that a bit.
I just said, well, you know, maybe she'll turn around.
She didn't. And also, if I had gotten with her anyway, she was going to beat my kids and then say that the Bible told her to do it.
So... Yeah, not a plus.
Yeah, not a plus at all.
I thought I could convince her out of that too, but she was very firmly held in her position because she had a bad history, and the church, I guess, did something for her.
She had some kind of spiritual experience, and so she's not willing to part ways with that.
And so that ended.
And then I, you know, that lasted about four months.
I even went to visit her in the Bahamas for like five days.
And we had a good time, I suppose.
But, you know, she was supposed to come and visit me in July.
And she just said, no, you know, we can't do this because God's telling me such and such.
It was very confusing for me because I know that God doesn't work that way.
Why would God give you a free will and then control you?
It doesn't make any sense to me.
Well, it's a way that she doesn't have to negotiate.
It's like, hey man, God told me.
What, are you going to tell me that God's wrong now?
Yeah. Yeah, it really is.
And I kind of have this problem with Christians.
I'm a Christian myself, but I have this problem with Christians where God just becomes an excuse not to think.
And it's really annoying because then I can't talk to or be around 90% of Christians because most Christians are like this.
I've seen people say, I don't need to study philosophy because I have Jesus.
And it's like, well, are you sure about that?
I don't think that's true.
And then, like, people don't understand, like, that the Bible doesn't actually say you should beat your kids with a rod.
Like, they don't understand that.
They think that a shepherd's rod is for beating sheep, things like this.
They don't understand the difference.
And they don't really—it's not even that they don't understand.
I'm sure they could understand if you explained it, but they just don't care because they need to beat kids for whatever reason, probably because their parents beat them.
But, yeah, so, you know— That has me struggling a little bit with Christianity and everything.
I do believe in Jesus and I believe in God and everything, but just the way that people in the church are, it's not satisfactory for me with regards to how a person should conduct their relationships and things like this.
It's just not been satisfactory for me, what I've witnessed so far, being in the church.
And I'm pretty involved.
I would say I'm pretty involved.
In the church as well, the Orthodox Church.
And yeah, it's just no good the way people are.
I haven't seen much good.
I've seen a lot of bad and not a whole lot of good.
Because people, they join a church to kind of just disappear, stop growing.
They're like, well, I have Christ now, so I don't have to grow anymore.
And so they just kind of rot away.
Yeah, also not ideal.
Yeah, not ideal at all.
And I've kind of been noticing this over the past three years.
And so, I'm spending less and less time with these people, going to church, less.
And just taking my life into my own hands and stuff.
Yeah. So, the other girl that I dated, I met her at a burger place.
And we got along really well.
And she comes from the same cultural background as me.
First generation, born in the country and stuff.
And her parents are from the same nation.
And we kind of got along pretty well, so I said, oh, well, I'm just going to ask for her number.
And so I asked for her number, and she gave it to me.
But I didn't know that she was kind of depressed or something was wrong with her.
But it was really hard to get her out of the house to go on a date.
And she also had a habit of smoking weed every day.
And I kind of knew instinctively that's not sustainable for a family situation.
Because I'm looking for family.
I'm not looking for just wham bam thank you ma'am or anything like that.
But I persisted with this girl even though she was not a good girl.
She was married, actually.
She told me she was married at the second date, but that she wasn't seeing her husband or involved with him because he cheated on her nine years ago.
But she's still in the process of filing for the divorce.
But me, I'm like so determined to start a family that like I kind of ignored all
the warning signs that she was giving me and just kind of persisting with her, you
know, even though she wasn't really right for me. And eventually like we were
supposed to go on a date on a certain holiday.
And I told her, hey, I'll be there early in the morning so we can go and watch the sunrise and do a bunch of other things.
And so I get there and she's not there.
She's not there. Well, she's there, but she's not picking up the phone.
And I'm waiting outside her apartment, and she's not picking up the phone.
She turns off her phone on me.
I eventually find out. And I'm sending texts.
I'm like, hey, what's going on? I waited there for four hours, maybe, five hours.
I even waited long enough where I could get up, walk down the street to a diner, and get a steak and some eggs and stuff and some hash browns, and then come back and sit in my car and wait some more.
I waited there so long that her landlord, which she didn't even live...
Like, she lived there, but she wasn't a tenant.
Like, she wasn't paying rent. It was her sister's apartment, and she was just kind of sleeping on the floor.
And her sister and her sister's homosexual girlfriend would just torture her all day.
So she was really depressed, you know?
Like, they would run vacuums next to her head when she was still sleeping early in the morning and stuff.
Really bad stuff. And we're the same age.
She was the same age as me. Anyway, so eventually, the landlord calls the police on me.
And so I had three or four sheriffs show up and question me.
And I was very polite, well-spoken.
So they let me go.
They took my license, ran my license, and let me go.
And then later, I call her.
I'm like, hey. She finally picks up.
I'm like, hey. I've been waiting outside your house all this time, and you didn't answer my calls.
You turned off the phone at me.
The cops were called on me.
What's the deal? What gives?
And she's like, oh, well...
I don't think the cops were calling on you.
They didn't call the cops on you.
I said, yeah, they did. She said, no, they didn't, because my sister's girlfriend went outside, and she didn't see any cops.
I said, yeah, well, I saw her come out, and I gave her a description of the woman that I saw come outside.
I said, that's her, right?
She said, yeah. I said, yeah, when she was out there, that was before the cops showed up.
She was like, oh, well, I don't think it really happened.
I don't think you're telling the truth.
But anyway, so...
So then she says, I have to go outside, and the neighbors don't like me talking on the phone while standing outside, so we have to go on text.
I said, okay, whatever.
So I started texting her, and she's like, hey, listen, I've decided to get back with my ex-boyfriend.
Oh, man, he could have been there, right?
Yeah, he could have been there. He could have come out and kicked the crap out of me because I don't know which ex-boyfriend that was.
She said one of her ex-boyfriends was a drug dealer.
I'm not hard like that where I could compare to a drug dealer in terms of apathy and evil or whatever.
I don't have that in me, really.
So yeah, he could have come out and shot me or something, certainly.
But he wasn't yet in the city.
He hadn't yet moved back to the city where we live.
Well, she actually lives in a different city.
She lives like an hour away from where I'm living.
Yeah, so she decided to get with her ex-boyfriend, and she said, let's just be friends.
I'm like, I'm not going to be friends with you while you're having sex with some other guy.
This is weird. I don't like this.
I'm sorry. I can't do this for you.
Have a nice life and everything.
And then for a week or so after that, I was getting stress headaches at work.
I wasn't feeling too good about this because I put a lot of energy into this girl, trying to get her out, having long conversations with her, trying to get her to open up to me more because she was very closed off at times, which is also very common with...
Jamaican people in general are not very good at articulating their feelings and articulating anything really.
So they just kind of get washed over by their circumstances.
So if you look at the island of Jamaica, they're not in a good position.
Other countries just come in and mine minerals out of their soil and...
They put all this dust in the air that makes people unhealthy and sick, and they just kind of suffer through it, and they don't really do anything about it because they don't know how to articulate themselves without violence.
And through listening to you and through listening to, well, I guess I can say Steve Franson as well, who I'm sure you know.
You had that call in with him recently.
But through listening to the two of you, I've kind of learned to be more articulate about my feelings, which has been very helpful.
That's great. Good for you.
Extremely helpful, because now I can stick up for myself.
I stuck up for myself with my sister recently, and our relationship has gotten so much better.
I'm sticking it up to my parents and moving out and everything.
And I just want to say thank you to you a lot because I know you're a good influence.
You are a good influence on Steven, and he's been a good influence on me.
And you have been a good influence on me, too.
And I want to say thank you very much for the good work that you've done.
And I'm going to be around.
I'm going to keep listening. I stopped listening for a while, mainly because I got into the church really deep, and they were like, oh, you know, atheism is stupid.
I was like, oh, Steph's an atheist, so I guess I can't listen to him anymore.
And then I stopped listening, but it was like, that was the worst, one of the worst decisions I ever made was to not pay attention to you.
Because the stuff that you espouse, nobody is espousing it, and you have more, I believe, more wisdom than anybody that I've met.
Yeah. At church, or any priest that I've met, or even any bishop that I've met, you're just on a completely different level.
And the stuff that you're espousing, if I just listened to it more, my life would be significantly better if I just applied those principles more.
I'm very grateful for that. That's very kind.
So listen, I really appreciate that.
I take that to heart.
Thank you. But we've got a little bit of time left in the chat, and I want to make sure that we get to what's most valuable to you, my friend.
So what can I help you with the most?
Okay. Well, I guess the biggest thing that I can say, and this is… This is something that I kind of glossed over, which I shouldn't have.
In the years after I graduated from college and I was kind of working, I was kind of preyed on by somebody who was maybe five or six years older than me.
I was 23. And he was like 28 or 27 or something like this.
And this is really embarrassing stuff.
It's really hard for me to say this.
But he was like a transgender or whatever.
And he was really coming on to me because I was the most, I guess, I was a nice person.
I wasn't combative.
I was very complacent.
I didn't make any trouble.
And I had good qualities.
I have good qualities.
I guess he took a liking to me.
And so he kind of tried to befriend me and stuff.
And at that time, I was feeling like at my worst, my most isolated, my most desolate,
had no friends, couldn't get along with my family.
And here's this person that's like kind of being nice to me.
And so I just kind of went with it.
And so we had, I guess you could say a relationship for like a few years.
Well, no, not for like a year, I think, like a year.
And so I had like...
Do you want to unpack that word relationship for me a little bit, brother?
Well, we were going places together and dating.
Also, there was some activity, some relations, I guess I could say, as well.
Like sexual relations? Yes, and that's how I lost my virginity was to this person.
And that was the first relationship that I'd been in.
And I guess the most difficult thing for me is like any woman that I get with, she needs to know about this.
And the woman from the Bahamas, I told her about this, and she said she was disgusted by it, but she appreciated that I was courageous enough to tell her.
And the other woman, she was like, I'm not sure about this.
But then she kissed me goodnight, and I let her out of my car into her apartment or whatever.
But that's a hard thing for me.
Because I feel like what happened there when I was 23 was a mistake.
And I feel guilty and ashamed about it.
I don't know.
What happened with this relationship as a whole?
Well, um, you know, I was already like looking at a lot of porn by then.
So it was really just like this person wants, this person has made like a, cause I think
he had just started his transition or whatever.
This person has made a significant change in his life or whatever.
And so he needs companionship because he feels isolated by his family.
And so he sees me and I guess I'm also seeking companionship.
I'm isolated from my family.
And I also would like to have sex.
Eventually, because I'm 23 years old, and obviously, at 23 years old, you want to have sex.
Now, with a man, it's a question.
I didn't really want to have sex with a man.
I never wanted to, but this person looked enough...
I guess feminine enough where I could just ignore it a little bit.
But I knew it was wrong.
Every time I would go to his house to visit him or whatever, he'd never been to my house.
He'd never met my parents.
I couldn't because that would just be so horrible for me.
I mean, my family's Jamaican, and it's pretty well documented that Jamaicans are towards these kinds of things.
They're extremely aggressive and violent and murderous.
So I couldn't share this with my family at all.
So he had never seen my family.
But whenever I would go to his house, this voice inside me would be like, you can't go.
Just turn around. Don't go.
Don't go. Turn your car around and leave.
Don't go. Don't go. And I had this feeling for the longest time, but I would always go because I didn't know where else I could find any kind of kindness from any person.
Um, anywhere. So I just said, well, you know, yeah, this is wrong.
Um, and I shouldn't do this and all this, but, um, and, and, and it goes against, um, my principles, but you know, I guess I'll just do it.
Same thing with porn. Like porn was the same thing.
Like, yeah, this is kind of not good.
I shouldn't be doing this, but, um, what else do I have access to?
You know, that's going to make me feel better in the moment.
So what happened?
Uh, you had this relationship for a couple of years and what happened then?
No, a year. About a year.
He kind of got the sense that he was going full throttle.
He's already taking his hormones or whatever, and he's doing all this stuff to himself.
And he's committed, but I'm not committed because I can't bring this into my life or to my family.
Just like any other friendship I would have had, I can't bring anybody around my family because I'm embarrassed of them.
I'm not comfortable with them, and I don't want to bring anybody into my misery.
And it was the same thing with this, but even worse because this is like...
A person that would be generally considered to be the dregs of society or whatever because of his life choices.
So I couldn't bring this person into my life.
And he kind of got a sense of that.
Like, yeah, this isn't really going to go too far.
This guy's not going to move in with me or anything.
We're not going to really go that far.
So he just kind of like...
Broke up with me. He just kind of broke it off, and then he moved to another state.
I know what he's up to.
He's doing music or something, and he's got a girlfriend now.
He's dating a woman, but he still dresses like a woman, which is very strange.
So that's what they're up to now, and I'm kind of aware of that.
I don't contact him.
He contacted me once to say, I'm sorry.
A year after it broke off, I was about 24, 25 at this time, and I just told him to F off.
And then later, I felt bad about that, so I sent him an email to apologize, and then there was no further contact after that.
So yeah, that's how that sort of ended.
Now, so you haven't had a significant romantic or sexual relationship since that one, is that right?
Not significant. I mean, these last two girls, one of them lasted four months and the other one lasted a single month.
So I wouldn't really call that significant, no.
Okay. Okay, so again, how can I best help you?
Well, what should I do?
Well, obviously I can't ask you that question because you don't tell people what to do.
I don't know. It's just, you know, how do I broach that with somebody like a romantic partner, a potential romantic partner?
You know, what do I do?
Am I just in a hole and I just have to kind of just deal with this?
Or what? What do you think?
You mean the relationship that ended almost 10 years ago?
Yeah. You know, do you think that it's a significant part of your sort of mental construct or life now?
No. But, you know, I just feel, I guess I feel a little bit of guilt about it.
Yeah, I feel a little bit of guilt.
And I couldn't, you know, if I'm going to be an honest person, and I'm going to try to live philosophically, I can't, like, get in a relationship with a woman and not tell her about this.
Well, I mean, I'm sort of happy to hear the case, or hear the...
Hello?
You know, sort of hear the argument about it.
Why would that be something you would have to talk about?
Why would that be something I would have to talk about with my wife?
Well, no, with a woman you were dating.
Well, if I'm dating somebody, I'm dating in the direction of marriage, right?
So shouldn't we talk about our past relationships if we're dating?
Again, I'm happy to hear the case, but why would you want to talk about your past relationships if you're dating?
Because Because knowing a person's personal history
could Isn't that like vital information for deciding?
Thank you.
If this person is going to be a long-term prospect for you.
Well, if, I mean, if you're in your 30s, right, just about everyone you meet is going to have a history, right?
Now, I think it's obviously you need to know if the person has any sexually transmitted diseases, you need to know, I think it's important if they've maybe had an abortion, it's important, you know, to know their, the number of partners, but details about the relationships, I don't see that one in particular.
I don't quite see why the details would be...
I mean, again, if it was like you just broke up with someone that you were with for five years, then that would be important to know, right?
But I don't know how the details about a 10-year-old relationship that you have closure with and is not part of your thinking.
That's sort of why I asked if they're still a part of your thinking anymore or part of your sort of emotional makeup anymore.
If you've had the closure, then why would it need to be something that would be discussed with a future partner?
Like let me take it let me take a silly example, right I mean, let's say, heaven forbid, you had a sex tape, right?
No. I mean, no, I'm not saying you do, but if you did, right?
But if you had some kind of sex tape, and it had never gone anywhere, and I don't know, it was just sitting on some old hard drive, and you start dating some new woman, would she need to see that sex tape?
No, but... I mean, she shouldn't, right?
So when I was dating the girl from the Bahamas, she asked me, what was your previous relationship like?
And then I told her about this experience that I had when I was 23.
Hang on, but why would you answer that?
I mean, just because someone wants to know something doesn't mean that they get to know it, right?
Right. I think it's fair to say, listen, you know, it must take 10 years ago.
I don't really remember. I'm here now.
I'm living in the present.
I'm looking to the future. I don't really want to talk about old relationships with a new flame
Because if you have this like if you have concerned I guess a little bit that you have this rule called honesty and
openness and so on and so on Oh, no. Oh, no.
Maybe that's what it is.
I have no choice.
I have been programmed by philosophy.
I must reveal all.
No, not even philosophy.
That's something that I've carried with me for years.
Like, don't lie. Never lie.
Always tell the truth. Don't lie.
Well, no, nobody's asking you to lie.
I didn't say lie, did I? No, not lie, but like, you know, you have to answer questions that are asked of you and stuff.
No, no, no, you don't. It's not a courtroom situation.
And even in a courtroom situation, you get to plead the fifth, right?
Yeah, because my thinking is, well, I'm with this girl, and, you know, we have to be open and completely honest with each other and all this stuff at all times.
Oh, no, no, no, absolutely not.
Oh, God, no. Oh, no.
That's a nightmare. Really?
Absolutely. I mean, my perspective, it's like, I don't know, let's say you like some girl and it's like, I want you to list the top five positions you liked with your last five boyfriends.
It's like, shit, I don't want to know that.
Oh, okay.
Okay, I see. Like, holy crap, I know, you know, you're in your 30s, you're probably not going to be virgins or anything, but I don't want to see a sex tape.
I don't want to know these things.
I don't want to be a pirate. I mean, I don't want to, like, this is not appropriate to talk about with someone new.
But that doesn't mean that I would never talk about it, does it?
Tell me how it helps the relationship.
It was a 10-year-old relationship.
You regret it.
Sounds like you've worked on it.
You've moved on. How does it...
I mean, that's going back and digging up the past when you're trying to build the future.
I mean, tell me.
How does it help?
It was a particularly lonely and isolated part of your life.
You have regrets. What does it matter?
Why would it be something that would define you going forward?
Because here's the thing that's weird about telling the truth, right?
Is that for you...
It's 10 years in the past.
Now, if you have still a lot of emotions about this kind of stuff, then, you know, it's probably a good idea, as I've always sort of talked about, to sort of get therapy and talk about it and work through it.
But, you know, if it's done, right, if it's over, past, and done, and you've had your closure and all that kind of stuff, here's the problem.
Is that for you, it's 10 years in the past and you've dealt with it, right?
But for your partner, when they suddenly hear about it, does it feel like it's 10 years in the past?
No. No.
No, it feels very vivid, very right now, right?
Yeah. So it's not honest in a way because it creates something in your partner that is not the same for you.
Like, there's no way to get your partner to have worked through it over the last 10 years like you have.
She gets new information and she's never worked through it, so there's no way to communicate your experience of what happened.
You know, it's funny that you should say that because when I told that to the Bahamian girl, I also spent like 15 minutes explaining to her that I'm not the same person anymore.
Right. But if you aren't the same person anymore and it's not relevant, you can't be honest about it.
Yeah, you can't be honest about it because you can't cram into any conversation the 10
years, like the couple of years after the relationship and then the 10 years since.
So whatever you provide to her is not going to have much if any relevance to what you've
actually experienced. So all it does is divide you rather than unite you, if that makes sense.
Oh.
Thank you.
you Well, I never thought of it that way.
I never thought of it this way.
So actually what I'm doing is I'm giving her a portrayal of myself that is not accurate to who I am today.
It's impossible for it to be accurate.
It can't possibly in any way shape or form be accurate to what you're having today.
Now, I mean if you had some terrible disease or something like that, then yes, absolutely
you know she should know that or if you had some genetic disorder, like something that
would actually affect the future, yes.
But I, again, I'm happy to hear the case and you know, maybe people will listen to this
and be, oh my God, how can you, whatever, right?
But I just, I can't see how it's possible to recreate for your, whoever you're telling
to the 13 years of experience with this that you've had.
Thank you.
you So then I just don't really need to bring it up at all ever.
If you have closure, if you have closure with it, what value is there in bringing it up?
If it's not a big deal to you, Then saying is going to make it a big deal to her, which doesn't match your experience at all.
Okay. Okay, I understand.
You are free.
You are free to close your mouth.
You don't have to tell everyone everything.
That's not the definition of honesty.
That's the definition of not having any boundaries, which, of course, you were raised to not have boundaries, right?
You couldn't have any boundaries. You couldn't have any distance or anything like that.
I don't think that's the definition of honesty.
I think that's the definition of no boundaries.
Oh. How does one have healthy boundaries?
Well...
Well, that's obviously a very big question, but you are not an open book to be thumbed through by everyone and their dog, everyone on the planet, right?
And there's things which you can keep private.
I mean, and in particular things which will shock other people, which no longer shock you.
So even me bringing this up now in this call-in was kind of unnecessary and kind of...
No, I think it was very necessary because you needed to find out whether this fell into the category of honesty.
Like, I think when you meet someone, you want to be honest about the present.
You want to be honest about who you are.
And you want to be honest about your goals and ideals for the future.
I think all of that's great.
But do you want to go and dig up every problematic thing that you ever...
Like, okay, so when I was a kid, I shoplifted a couple of things, right?
Now, imagine I meet the woman of my dreams.
I mean, I already have. But let's imagine I'm in the process of meeting the woman of my dreams, right?
And she says, oh, tell me a little bit about yourself.
And I say, oh, I'm a thief.
I steal things. Now, is that technically true?
Yes, I stole some things when I was a kid.
I mean, most people have, you know, I don't know, when I was a kid, I'd sneak a quarter or two out of my mom's purse to go play a video game or whatever, right?
I didn't grow up with all your privileges of having them in the house, right?
So, no, if I said, oh, and once or twice in my life, I've gotten drunk, right?
So, if I meet the girl of my dreams and I say, and she says, oh, tell me a little bit about yourself.
You say, oh, I'm a thief and a drunkard.
I have stolen and I've gotten drunk.
Now, is that true?
No. I mean, you can say it's technically true in that it is a factual statement, but it's not true because these things don't define me.
Like, if you meet the girl of your dreams and she says, oh, tell me a little bit about yourself, and you say, I liked assaulting children.
That would give her an impression of you that would not be accurate, right?
Yeah, because when I assaulted children...
You were a child, and you were digressed against, and you were in a violent situation, right?
Right. Wow.
So I could very easily carry this thing to my grave and not tell anybody about it, and it wouldn't be wrong in any way.
There would be nothing immoral about that.
So the thing is, if it defines you to someone else, but it doesn't define you to yourself, then telling them about it is actually kind of deceptive.
In the same way that if I said, oh, I got drunk and stole things.
I mean, if I say that, whoever I'm talking to, do they think that's an important and vivid element of my life?
Yes! Because it's the first thing I'm telling them.
So that must be a big deal.
And if I say, oh man, I'm a thief, and a drunkard, and then she says, oh my gosh, what did you steal?
And I said, well, I stole a candy bar when I was 11.
And she's like, what?
This doesn't make it, like, why are you telling me that you're a thief?
Oh, and, and, I took some quarters out of my mom's purse when I wanted to play a video game when I was 12.
I'm a thief. You understand, that would be kind of bizarre, wouldn't it?
Yeah, absolutely. Ah, I'm a drunkard.
When did you last get drunk?
I was 17.
It's like, dude, that was 40 years ago.
It would be bizarre for me to define myself by things long in the past that I don't do anymore, that I haven't done forever, that I have closure with, if that makes sense.
You understand, I'm defining myself in a way that is not me and puts myself in a light that is inaccurate.
Yeah. To my current life and my current circumstances and who I am now.
So could you say that...
Could it be said that if I feel guilt, like a certain amount of guilt about this coming up, could it be that I... Wait, what do you mean coming up?
I don't know what this means, coming up.
Not coming up now.
I mean, if at a moment I feel guilty about what I did, which honestly I don't even really think about it at all, except when I think about women that I'm going to date and do I have to tell them and stuff, which obviously I know now that I don't.
But could it be possible even that I might be defining myself to myself in this way, even though it doesn't really define me now?
Well, I mean, that's the important thing.
So, yeah, if it defines you for you, then you've got to work on it, right?
Like if you say, I am now defined 13 years later by deciding to get into this relationship, right?
Okay, then you have to work on that and say, okay, well, does what I did when I was 20, does it define me forever and ever?
Amen. No.
I mean, you're a Christian, right?
You know that you get forgiven for stuff, right?
If you have regrets, do they define you until the end of time?
I know that I'm forgiven in all this, but if you do something, even though you're forgiven or whatever, you still did it, right?
I'm sorry, do I not understand the concept of forgiveness?
I'm sorry, I'm not saying that you don't.
Okay, so let's say you did something that you regret, right?
I mean, you didn't do anything immoral, right?
You had a consensual relationship with an adult, right?
So, it wasn't like you, you're not like your grandfather, you didn't shoot a doctor, right?
Right. So you had a consensual relationship with an adult.
You look at it back now, and you see it maybe came out of loneliness or dysfunction or something like that, right?
So you have regrets about a decision you made when you were a highly traumatized and isolated young man who'd had a near-decade-long pornography addiction and couldn't talk to girls and had been beaten regularly and screamed at, and you were a highly traumatized young man, and you made, as you say, looking back now, a bad decision when you were 20, right?
Mm-hmm. 23, but yeah.
No, but didn't... Sorry, I thought it ended when you were 23.
Did I get that wrong? No, it started when I was 23.
It ended when I was 24. It was a year long.
Okay, sorry, sorry. I apologize for that.
Okay, so 23 to 24.
So you made a mistake, and again, it was not immoral.
You didn't violate UPP. You didn't do anything evil.
You had a consensual relationship with somebody, and then you ended up regretting it, which is, again...
I mean, not quite a decade ago, but a long time ago.
Certainly, it was almost a decade ago when you started.
Okay. So, you were a young man, and you were isolated, and you had this other addiction, and so on.
And you made a decision that you regretted.
You kept up for about a year, and it ended eight years ago.
Is that right? Yes.
I think so. Yeah, 24, 32.
Yeah, eight years. Okay.
So, it ended eight years ago.
And... Can you forgive yourself for the mistake you made when you were highly traumatized?
I think I can, but I don't...
How does that feel?
What does that look like to forgive yourself?
What does it look like to forgive yourself?
Yeah, what does that...
What does that mean? I mean, do I just say to myself, I forgive you and that's it?
I mean, what's the process of forgiving oneself?
What is that exactly?
Well, I think it's recognizing your motivation.
You weren't acting out of malevolence.
You were acting out of loneliness and desperation.
Is that right? That is correct.
I mean, to take a sort of ridiculous example, if you eat someone for fun, then, you know, you're kind of an evil cannibal, right?
But if you have to eat someone because you crashed in a plane in the mountains and you were stuck for a month alone, right, that's a different matter, right?
Yeah. I think I remember seeing that movie.
Yeah, yeah. Alive, I think it was called, right?
So, you acted out of desperation and isolation and you have regrets and I think you've worked, it sounds like you've worked to deal with some of that isolation and that desperation and you haven't repeated getting into a relationship that you regret out of desperation and isolation.
So, if you've dealt with the issues...
Obviously, it's a ridiculous thing to say, but forgiveness doesn't mean that it didn't happen, because it did happen.
You can't go back and erase time, right?
Right. I think I kind of did, though.
I think I kind of did. Because with these last two relationships that I've been in, the girl was giving me signs that she wasn't for me or signs that if I continue this relationship, it's not going to be good for me.
It's not going to end well if it continues.
And I just kept going on with these, stretching it out for as long as I could with both of these women.
I mean, it's not quite the same as eight years ago.
Sorry, but both of these women, you told about this relationship in your early 20s, right?
Yes, I did. Okay.
And so you're punishing yourself.
Oh... Right? You're punishing yourself by putting information forward that most women, you know, especially, as you say, in the Jamaican community, right, that most women will recoil from, right?
Right, right. Okay, so...
You're setting yourself up for another situation where you're going to make a decision out of desperation and loneliness, right?
Because you're driving these women away with this old information, which means you're going to get involved with someone else because of desperation and loneliness, and then you're going to have another thing that you're going to have to forgive yourself for.
Forgiveness is designed to have you stop repeating this stuff.
Yeah. Oh! Nine years ago, I entered into a relationship that's going to shock and appall you.
Oh, where are you going? Oh, gosh, I guess I'm lonely and isolated again.
Okay, I'll go find someone else.
Nine years ago, I got involved in a relationship that will shock and appall you.
Oh, where are you going? Oh, gosh, I guess I'm lonely again.
Right? Oh, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, I see it. You're punishing yourself for a decision you can't change.
So I just need to let it go.
Well, I mean, that's one of these statements that's easier said than done, right?
Of course. It's easier said than done.
But the first thing you need to do is stop repeating the behavior.
That's for sure. You absolutely need to stop repeating the behavior.
And not repeating the behavior means stop doing things that for sure are going to end up with you isolated and desperate, right?
Because aren't you, you know, I mean, you said you wanted to You want to have a family, you want to get married and kids and all that, and this is not going to be, this approach is not going to be doing it for you, right?
No, not at all. So, yeah, I would say that forgiving yourself is just saying, I know I did why I did what I did.
I know why I did what I did.
And I also know that it won't happen again.
Because forgiveness, like, if you've done everything you can to avoid reproducing a situation that you don't like or want, I mean, what else can you ask for?
What else can you do? You can't erase time.
You can't change the past.
So if you have learned as much as you can learn from it, And you haven't reproduced the thing you regret?
What else can you do?
I mean, if you're a Christian, what does God require of you to be forgiven?
Right? If you've done something wrong, He requires that you admit that you did something wrong and that you work for restitution if possible.
And you commit to not doing it again.
And, you know, after a certain amount of time and not doing it again, you're forgiven, you're washed clean, you're born again.
It's like it never happened.
I mean, I'm no theologian, but is that not something close to what happens?
Yes. Don't you get to be washed clean of sin?
Yeah, it's true. I mean, there are some people that believe that you have to, like, punish yourself in a lot of ways, too.
Okay, so let's say those people are absolutely right.
Right? Let's say those people are—I don't think they are, but let's say that they're absolutely right.
Yeah, let's say that they're 100% right.
Okay, you've been in penance now for eight years.
Aren't you, Dan? Yeah.
I mean, even when I spoke to my priest and I told him about that, he said—or I told him about this thing that I'm telling you about—he said that, yeah, well, you just need to forget about these things because we're going to baptize you now.
It's all going to be forgiven. And I guess I didn't fully listen to his—not listen to, but I didn't fully, I guess, internalize his words.
That day. You didn't fully internalize his words?
Well, not internal. I don't know what the right word would be.
I mean, you're going to be spending the rest of your life in self-immolating confession mode.
Yeah. Oh, you know what other bad thing I did?
Like, where are you going?
Well, I don't want to go off topic, but something I've noticed is that people will sometimes confess things to me.
Like, I've had people that I work with will be, like, on a construction site, like, just working together, me and him, and he'll start telling me about, like, the time he, like, for example, convinced a girl to have an abortion or things like this, you know, like, when we're just sitting privately.
I've had people, like, kind of many times, like, start telling me about all the bad stuff.
No, but that's the boundary thing.
Right? That's because they detect that you have no boundaries.
Oh, no. Yes!
Oh, no, that's not good.
If someone starts telling you this kind of stuff and you don't want to hear it, you're like, whoa, whoa, whoa.
Just working a job here, man.
Yesterday I was at work and there was a group of us in a room working and this guy's like, I'm about to go home and beat the shit out of my son because he did something in school today.
And I'm like, man, I don't want to hear that.
Why are you telling us all this stuff, you know?
Yeah, but now you have told me, don't do it.
Yeah, yeah. Right.
Yeah, and that's probably what I should have said.
Like, hey, you know, I don't want to hear about how you're going to go beat the crap out of your kids.
We're working here, you know?
But now you have.
Don't do it. Yeah.
Because that's probably what he was telling you for, was to you to tell him not to.
Oh, man. So I have really bad boundaries.
Well, no, it's not that you have really bad...
See, that's another self-attack.
Yeah, sorry. Okay, do you speak Japanese?
No, you don't speak Japanese because you didn't grow up learning Japanese.
Right? So I don't speak Japanese either.
So you were attacked for having boundaries as a kid.
Right. Right.
I mean, your physical boundaries were violated with physical violence.
Your emotional boundaries were violated with verbal abuse.
So you were attacked and punished And got kind of halfway to death threats, because that's what we all experienced it like as a kid, for having boundaries.
So, of course, you don't have boundaries because you wanted to live and not die and not be assaulted or maybe get a brain injury or fall down the stairs and break your leg or whatever, right?
So you don't have boundaries because boundaries would probably have gotten you severely attacked, maimed, and or possibly killed.
So, yeah. I mean, we tend not to do things we'll get killed for, or maimed for, or attacked for, or ostracized for, or abandoned for, which is the death sentence to a kid, right?
So it's not like you have bad boundaries.
It's like you were punished.
It's one thing to not grow up learning Japanese.
It's another thing that even if your parents even catch you thinking about Japanese, they'll beat the crap out of you.
It's like, well, then you're sure not going to learn Japanese.
Does that make sense? Yes, of course.
I kind of interrupted you.
Do a little bit there, but I was going to ask, what do I do to work on my boundaries?
Boy, you've given me all the tough questions at the end.
So to work on boundaries, you have to get in touch with your feelings, right?
So feelings and boundaries are kind of the same thing.
So what did you feel when the guy said, I'm going to home and beat my kid?
I felt like I was getting beaten.
I remember when I was getting beaten as a kid, yeah, and I started, you know, yeah, I just didn't really like it yet.
So you didn't like it? No, I should have told them, hey, you know.
Well, or if somebody says, yeah, if somebody's saying to you, hey, man, I got to tell you about this time when I convinced my girlfriend to kill her kid, right?
No, no, no, no, no.
No, thanks. Not my thing.
I don't want to know. Yeah, because I guess hearing stuff like that is probably not good for you, right?
Well, you're trying to work your way from the morals inwards, and boundaries are not about, fundamentally, they're not about morals, right?
They're about what you like and don't like.
I mean, one boundary is somebody says, hey man, eat these Brussels sprouts, and you don't like Brussels sprouts, and you say, I don't want to eat the Brussels sprouts.
That's boundaries. If somebody wants to tell you something about their life that you don't want to hear, you say, I don't want to hear it.
You see, boundaries are just honesty.
Because it's funny, you're so concerned with honesty, but you won't be honest about what you do and don't want to hear from people.
Somebody starts telling you something you don't want to hear, you say...
No, I don't want to hear that.
No, I don't want to hear that. Because that's honest.
You don't want to hear it. I don't want to hear that you're going to go beat your kid.
That's honest, isn't it? Yeah.
So, boundaries is just about honesty.
Now, if you're married to some woman and she says, hey, man, I'm having some pretty violent impulses towards our kid and I feel kind of disturbed about it, you'd want to know that because you'd want to help her on that, right?
You'd want to help her out with that, right?
Yeah. So in that situation, you'd be like, yeah, tell me more.
I want to know more, right?
So boundaries are just honesty.
Someone's telling you something you don't want to hear.
You say, whoa, don't want to hear.
Don't want to hear. And if somebody is telling you something that you do want to hear, you know, tell me more, right?
Be honest about what you feel.
But a work colleague should not be telling you about his abortion.
Thank you.
That's not a business relationship, and you're not friends, right?
No. Right.
So that's not it's not even remotely appropriate to talk about that.
I mean if I was, I don't know, meeting with some investor about investing in something I
was doing with and I said, Oh, yeah, let me tell you about this time when...
I was like, that's not a venue.
That's not a thing. Yeah, it's construction, so it's kind of blue-collar and, you know, people...
No, I mean, I've worked my blue-collar jobs in my life, so yeah, it's not appropriate to a workplace, and it's not appropriate to somebody who's not your friend.
Yeah, not at all. Yeah, I don't know what that was all about, but I guess you're right.
It was about him dumping his trauma on you.
Yeah. Tell me if I'm wrong.
I'm happy to hear that I'm wrong, but it's about him trying to normalize
Some terrible thing that he did by dumping it on you No, you're not wrong you're not wrong about that
And so when you get...
When you get...
Those boundaries. Then what happens is when a woman comes to you and says, tell me about your past relationships, what do you say if you don't want to talk about them?
I just say I don't want to talk about it?
Well, you say, yeah. Look, I would tell you if there was something relevant, but I haven't – I mean, I've been in a couple of short relationships.
I was in one slightly longer one in my early 20s, but, like, it's water under the bridge.
You know, I want to talk about you.
I want to talk about any potential future we have together.
I mean, you don't just sort of clam up, right?
But, you know, like, I don't want to talk about – Past relationships.
You know, like, if there's something hanging over you, I don't know, if you're in the middle of some custody battle with a mass murderer or something, then yeah, I kind of want to know about your relationships, but I don't want to know about your past relationships because I'm here to try and build a future together.
And the last thing I want to do is start looking, oh, you dated this guy, oh my gosh, you dated this guy, let me see a picture, let me see a picture of him naked, you know, more penises, the better, right?
I mean, that's not a thing that you do when you meet someone new, right?
Actually, the last girl I dated, on the second date, she showed me a picture of her ex-boyfriend naked that she had taken.
Well, see, now that's somebody with no boundaries, and that's someone to get the hell away from.
Yeah. Right?
Because that's an insane thing to do.
Why on earth? What was the justification for doing that?
I don't know. She was scrolling through her phone to show me pictures of her family and stuff.
And she said, I'm going to scroll past those because they're kind of raunchy.
And I said, well, what's raunchy? And I kind of asked her to see it in a way.
I didn't know it was going to be that.
I didn't know, but I was just curious.
What does raunchy mean? Let's see what that is for you.
I'm just curious. So I kind of egged her on, and then she showed me that.
And I was like, oh, jeez.
I think, like, I said to her, my eyes, are my eyes red right now?
Because I think they're burning from what I just saw.
Like, it was that bad. I did not want to see that at all.
Right. And so, I don't know if she's keeping that in the spank bank or something like that.
But, yeah, that would be like, no, I don't want to.
Like, if you've got, I don't know, if you've got nude pictures of your ex-boyfriend on your phone, I'm just going to use your phone to dial an Uber and get the hell out.
Yeah. Yeah.
But I just dealt with it, right?
Because... I didn't have boundaries, I guess.
So, yeah.
Well, how did you feel looking at a naked picture of this woman's ex-boyfriend?
Terrible. I didn't like it at all.
Okay, so why are you lying to people?
I'm just brushing it off.
Did you not hear, thou shalt not bear false witness?
Has that been changed since I was last in church?
And I think I know when that habit came up for me, because when I was going through my childhood earlier, after my dad said he was going to hit me anymore, if I didn't get in any fights with anybody else, I quickly decided that the quickest way to avoid getting in a fight with somebody is to not express my displeasure about any experiences, any personal experiences that I have with anybody, so as to avoid conflict.
Yeah, like that kid on the bus who was making fun of you in front of everyone else, and you just said, take it, right?
So yeah, you're punished for having boundaries.
And of course, you tried to set up a boundary when you were very little, and you got beat on by the kid.
Oh no, the kid spat at you, the Hispanic kid spat at you, right?
And you went, as you did rightly, you went to the teacher, you went to the daycare teacher, and you said, hey, you know, this terrible thing's happened, and I really do need you to deal with it.
And they're like, nope. So, I mean, who helped you with boundaries?
Nobody, right? What did being honest do for you?
It just got you all punished. So, yeah, you got...
I mean, this is the real-time relationships thing.
It's like, you know, hey, man, I don't...
I don't...
I don't like that you have pictures of your ex-boyfriend on your phone.
Oh, what are you, some kind of prude?
Hey, I'm not telling you you're wrong.
I'm just telling you I don't like it.
I don't like that you would still have that.
Right? Like, the woman who's like, she's in the apartment, you're waiting outside for four hours, right?
Why are you waiting for four hours?
You don't wait for four hours?
if somebody doesn't show up for a date, they're inside, they're not answering the phone, you leave.
Don't you? No, you're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right. Because you didn't want to stay.
And then you call her like...
You call her like there's something that can be explained.
We had a date. You're in the apartment.
You're not answering my calls.
I'm waiting. Like, there's no answer for that, right?
There's no explanation for that, right?
But you know that, right?
And I didn't like it.
I didn't like it. No, you didn't like it.
And so you were calling her because you were angry at her and you wanted to engage with somebody who was that rude.
And that callous.
And my guess is that her boyfriend was actually in her bedroom,
which is why she didn't answer the phone or come out.
If that's true, that hurts even more.
Well, it's the most likely explanation, because otherwise she would have just come out and said, I've got a headache, or I feel unwell, or I'm sorry but I can't, or whatever it is, right?
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So, and, you know, so, yeah, you managed to dodge a woman who was real keen to get back together with some drug dealing boyfriend.
Oh, no. What a terrible thing you've missed out on.
Yeah. So, yeah.
See, once you have boundaries...
Then you don't need to exercise them that much, because people are always sniffing to see if you have boundaries, and if you actually do have boundaries, they'll just keep moving.
They won't even try to violate them, because they'll know they can't, and so they'll just move on to somebody else who doesn't have boundaries.
Like, the good thing about having boundaries is it doesn't turn into a lifelong battle of trying to exercise boundaries.
Like, it doesn't work that way. Once you have boundaries, then you don't need to exercise them, because The boundary violators can sniff that and they just keep moving.
They just move on. They don't get involved in your business.
Okay, well, I know we don't have time for you to explain to me and give me a lesson on boundaries and stuff, but do you know any books I can read?
No, just honesty. That's all it is.
Just focus on the honesty.
Just focus on the honesty.
Somebody asks you about your old relationships and say, you know, what's the most honest thing you can say?
I don't want to talk about them.
This is a long time ago.
It's not relevant to my life at the moment, and I want to look forward to the future.
I want to get to know you. And then if she's like, well, I have to know about your past relationships, I'm like, well, you don't.
You don't. No, no, no.
And if she gets all kinds of weird, then it's like, okay, this is not someone who listens.
They don't have boundaries. Because if you say you don't want to talk about something, other people should respect that, right?
Now, it doesn't mean they have to keep dating you or anything, but if you say, I don't want to talk about it, I mean, you can ask once or twice, but if somebody doesn't want to talk about something...
And you just keep insisting, and you escalate, and you have to tell me about it.
It's like, okay, then, yeah, you're not respecting my boundaries, so we can't have this conversation.
I've told you I don't want to talk about it.
I told you it's not important. It's not relevant.
If there was something important and relevant, I'd tell you.
But there's nothing important or relevant.
I don't want to talk about it.
And I give you the same thing.
Like, if you have past relationships, if they're not important and relevant, I don't want to hear about them either.
That's totally fine with me. No, no, no, I have to hear about you.
It's like, okay, like, I'm not having this conversation because you're not listening to what I'm saying, which is I don't want to hear about it.
You know, that's the equivalent of, and to some degree, it's the equivalent of if a woman says, I don't want to have sex, and you're like, no, no, no, we have to have, like, that would be rude, right?
That would be terrible.
That would be an awful thing to do.
So, yeah, respecting boundaries is really important.
If somebody doesn't want to talk about something, it's perfectly within their right to not talk about it.
Now, that doesn't mean you've got to date them, right?
If the woman says, I just got out of prison, and you say, oh, what happened?
And she says, I don't want to talk about it.
Hey, she's free to not talk about it, and you're free to not date her, right?
Because she just got out of prison, and you don't know why.
But yeah, just respect people's preferences that way, and be honest about what you don't like, and what you do like.
Does that make sense? Yes, 100%.
Good, good, good. All right.
All righty, righty. Listen, I really, really appreciate the call.
Really, quite a wild ride of a life you've had, my friend.
And I appreciate the honesty and the openness.
And I think you get this boundary thing down and this honesty thing down, and you'd be amazed at who shows up in your life and how healthy they tend to be.
Because unhealthy people will always try and walk over your boundaries, right?
And if they can, then the relationship is kind of doomed over time.
So I'm sure it will work out once you have the boundaries.
It will help a lot to end up with healthier people in your life, if that makes sense.
Yes, absolutely. All right, can you post it about how it's going?
Sure. How do you want to do this?
Through Skype or email?
No, you can just send me an email.
Call in at freedomain.com.
Just let me know how things are going because I always like to know what happens after the calls.
Okay, sure. All right.
Well, thanks, man. I appreciate it.
Have yourself a great evening and thanks for your time today.
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