May 14, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
05:56
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| Could you list the costs and benefits of dealing with things in the moment as opposed to postponing them and coming up with, hey, here are the 10 things that pissed me off in the last week. | |
| Let's, you know, sit down and go over these. | |
| Right. | |
| So, we are generally not raised or trained to talk about our feelings in the moment. | |
| I mean, there's lots of exceptions to this. | |
| I'm not trying to paint with too broad a brush, but we are generally not In general, | |
| it is better to try and solve conflicts with honest vulnerability in the moment rather than Pile things up later because it's, you know, what we feel is quite complicated, right? | |
| So if you had a very aggressive mother, say you're a guy, you had a very aggressive mother growing up, then when a woman, like say a girlfriend or a female friend, if a woman gets angry at you, that's going to have echoes from the past, right? | |
| You're going to feel like you're sort of back with your mom, sort of finger wagging and getting mad at you and so on, which is unfair. | |
| So, the people who maybe harmed us in the past should not dominate our interactions in the present, because if you had a mean mom, or a mom with a mean streak, bringing that to your girlfriend is unfair, because then you're saying to your girlfriend, you're kind of like my mom, and that is taking the past and projecting it onto the present, or taking someone who did you wrong, where you had an involuntary relationship, but we don't choose who we get born to, we don't choose our parents. | |
| And you're taking an involuntary relationship and moving it into a voluntary relationship and you're taking someone who did you harm perhaps for years and taking it to someone who is just angry at you in the moment for some reason. | |
| And then what people do is they get triggered, right? | |
| So if you had a mean mom and then you've got a girlfriend who's angry at you, then you often are quite desperate to shut your girlfriend's anger down because it's kind of triggering you. | |
| Right? | |
| But the honest statement is not, well, you're being irrationally angry at me and that's wrong and unfair and bad and you're mean, right? | |
| Just because you want to shut her down because she's kind of reminding you of maybe your mean mom. | |
| The honest statement is to say, I'm upset at you being angry with me, right? | |
| That's the honest statement. | |
| I'm upset with you being angry with me. | |
| It's very hard to sit in that statement. | |
| It's very hard. | |
| It's easy once you get the hang of it. | |
| But it's very hard to sit in that and say, I'm upset because you're angry at me, without coming to some kind of conclusion. | |
| Most people can't sit with the honesty of their genuine experience. | |
| They have to come, or they desperately want to come, to some kind of conclusion, which is, I'm upset because you're mad at me, therefore, what? | |
| Therefore, You should stop being angry at me. | |
| Therefore, you're being unjust. | |
| Therefore, you're just like my mother. | |
| We want to come to a conclusion which gives us control over the other person rather than just giving the statement, which is the most honest statement, which is, I'm upset because you're mad at me. | |
| That doesn't mean you have to change. | |
| That doesn't mean you have to alter anything. | |
| That doesn't mean that you're being unfair or unjust or wrong or disrespectful or rude. | |
| I'm upset. | |
| I feel this. | |
| I feel unease. | |
| I feel... | |
| Nervous, I feel tense because you're angry at me without coming to a conclusion. | |
| Because a conclusion is the end of exploration and tends to shut down the conversation. | |
| And so saying the minimum that is valid, right? | |
| The minimum that is true and valid. | |
| The conclusions are very rarely valid, especially when we're triggered, right? | |
| And so, saying the bare minimum of what you know to be true, right? | |
| You got angry at me, you're angry at me, I'm upset about that. | |
| Staying with what is the most true gives you a chance to explore. | |
| And it's usually worth saying, and I don't know whether it's fair or right or good or bad, I'm just telling you my experience. | |
| Then you have a place where you can explore things, like what's the causality and so on, right? | |
| But the moment you come to a conclusion, and the conclusion is usually a morally judgmental conclusion, how dare you raise your voice at me? | |
| How dare you be angry at me? | |
| How dare you be upset with me? | |
| Well, that's a counterattack, so to speak, and that tends to escalate. | |
| And I think in relationships, especially with someone you really care about, what you want to do is explore and say, I wonder what the causality is, right? | |
| So, I'm upset that you're mad at me. | |
| I don't know why. | |
| I don't know if it's fair or not. | |
| I'm just telling you my experience. | |
| That's a place that tends to de-escalate, and that's a place that tends to have people be able to explore what's going on, which is usually quite complicated at the roots, and get to the heart of the matter. | |
| But the moment we kind of slam this portcullis down of moral judgment, it's almost like a guillotine. | |
| It ends the interaction and generally tends to escalate. | |
| I love that this is very productive advice because I have known, you know, not only have I done it myself, I've spoken with a lot of people who've said, Oh, this person does these things that upset me. | |
| Oh, how long has this been going on? | |
| Well, I've known them for probably six years, and that's just who they are. | |
| So a lot of times in relationships, we don't tell people how we feel in the moment. |
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