All right, so this is a roll-up show, a greatest hit show.
I get this question a lot, and I got it recently in particular about the leave behinds, right?
Let's say that you've had a bad family and various things escalate, you have the conversation with your parents, it goes badly, and you decide to defoo.
Foo, of course, being family of origin, defooing is like a divorce, or at least a trial separation, as a result of sort of relentlessly bad behavior.
And the defu is not primarily, of course, about your parents, and it's not primarily about the past.
The defu is primarily about the future, right?
I love economics, as you know, fairly well trained in it and well-read in it.
And of course, with economics, the big issue is not the visible benefits, but the hidden costs.
That's the big thing with economics, right?
If the government spends $5 million to create 100 jobs, you say, ooh, there's 100 jobs.
Economics is about the things you don't see or can't see, which is all of the jobs that are not created because the government took those $5 million from businesses and taxpayers and so on.
So the D-foo as a whole is not to do with your parents and it's not to do with the past.
If you have a crazy, dysfunctional, abusive, and perhaps even, I've certainly talked to people with this challenge, an outright evil family, then the defu is not fundamentally about the past.
It's not fundamentally about your parents.
It's about who can't come into your life if your parents are still in your life.
Who are your abusive parents blocking from coming into your life?
That's what really matters.
That's what really matters.
I can tell you this without a shadow of a doubt, although my wife has never met my mother.
If my mother and others were still in my life, my wife would never have married me.
In fact, it's incomprehensible that we even would have dated.
So one of the toughest things in the world is to see yourself from the outside in.
And it really is.
Like we're all fascinated by our own little brain cages and we're all the main characters and I get all of that.
But it's really, really important to view yourself critically from the outside in.
You know, if you like to sing, record it, play it back, see how it sounds, right?
All these sorts of things.
So to see yourself from the outside in is really, really important.
What you're used to, other people are not used to.
If you have, you know, tense or, you know, strange family gatherings, then you're kind of used to that.
That's kind of natural or normalized for you.
And it's not natural or normalized to other people.
If you have a father who drinks too much at social gatherings, you're kind of used to it.
But someone comes into your life and that person is not used to it.
If you are crabby or grumpy or irritable on a regular basis, you're kind of used to it and everyone in your life is kind of used to it.
However, of course, other people in your life are not at all used to it.
So looking at yourself from the outside in, one of the great big, deep and dark challenges of life.
What is it like to come into your life with no history of your life?
What is it like to come into your life with people who have normalized nothing about your life?
If your mother, and I knew a woman like this once, I was over, it broke my heart.
I was over at her house and her mother was there, and her mother was snapping at her to clean out the toaster.
You can't put toast in with the toaster.
You've got to clean out the crumbs on the bottom.
And then the girl was the woman was trying to clean out the toaster and she was doing everything wrong.
And this was a household, I shouldn't laugh at it.
This was a household where I, oh yeah, they said, oh, there's some coffee dripping down the side of your coffee cup.
So I grabbed some paper towels and wiped my coffee cup and put the paper towel in the garbage and turned around and everybody was shocked, appalled.
And this was a family who'd moved to Canada from the United States.
There was a store in America called Wegmans, I think it was.
And these were her paper towels from Wegmans.
And she had great sentimental attachment to these towels from the greatest store in the world in America.
And apparently people weren't supposed to be using the paper towels from the Wegmans store.
Like, honestly, just crazy stuff.
And honestly, I almost laughed.
It's like, so you have paper towels that you're not supposed to use.
So, oh, you've got some drips on the edge of your coffee cup and you grab a paper towel to wipe them up.
And that's a bad thing.
Like, in the same way that the woman who was trying to clean out the toaster was doing everything wrong and spilling crumbs.
And, you know, it's just this constant nagging critique.
And of course, the woman was used to it.
That was her life.
Oh, that's just my mother.
And of course, I was looking, I mean, I was looking at her and looking at her mother and being like, ooh, so if this relationship were to go well, then I could enjoy maybe another 30 years with this cantankerous nag of a mother.
She could be my mother-in-law.
And the father who sat there saying nothing, chewing on his pipe.
And he always talked about how he liked farm fresh eggs, not just fresh eggs.
Farm fresh eggs.
So good.
Right.
And these could be my in-laws, right?
If it worked out, right?
So she was used to it.
And I was not at all used to it.
And I did not want it.
So what is it like from the outside in?
Do people want to join you, your social circle, your family, right?
As a man, you may want to date an individual, but any reasonably wise woman dates not any individual.
She dates a family, a friend group, a community.
So it's a fundamental test of solipsism.
It's a fundamental test of, you know, selfishness or minor narcissism or something like that.
What is it like to try to join your life?
What are the people in your life like to others?
Are they innet positive?
Because of course, you know, if you're going to, if you're some guy, you're going to date some woman and you are still hanging out with your dysfunctional family of origin, which you never chose, and who had total power over you when you were growing up.
If you are asking someone to join your family, how does your family look to them when they have no history with your family?
And they're going to evaluate your family based upon how your family treats this new person, but even more fundamentally, how they have treated you in the past and how they are treating you now.
So I remember saying to this woman that I was dating, your mother is really unpleasant to you.
And your father says nothing.
She got really uncomfortable.
And look, I understand that.
I sympathize with that.
I get it.
It's a verboten conversation.
It's like, but I don't care.
I mean, principles are principles.
Screw it.
So she was like, well, I can deal with it.
I can this, I can that.
And I'm like, but I like you.
How am I supposed to like her if she treats you this way?
Oh, and I'm not asking you to like her, blah, blah.
It's like, yeah, but if things work out, she's going to be in her life.
She's going to be like a grandmother to our kids.
Like, how does this, how is this going to work?
Well, what do you want me to do?
Like, and I get all of that.
And yeah, I ended up not seeing that woman for too long after that because I just couldn't get there, right?
And shouldn't get there because it's not really about me, right?
It's about the kids, right?
Is this going to be a good grandmother?
Is my mother-in-law going to be a good grandmother to my children?
And if the answer is no, then you should move on, right?
If that's going to be a permanent relationship.
And I, you know, I fundamentally don't grasp sacrificing the chosen future for the unchosen past, right?
You see what I mean?
Like, I didn't choose my mother, but I can choose my wife.
So why would I sacrifice the quality of the wife that I can choose for the sake of a set of family relationships I did not choose?
My mother chose my father.
I didn't.
My father chose my mother.
I didn't.
I am not responsible for these people's choices.
And I'll be goddamned if I will sacrifice the quality of the woman I can marry for the lack of quality in who my parents chose.
I didn't choose any of that.
I didn't choose any of that.
So if you have desultory, negative, abusive, destructive, harmful, toxic, manipulative, false, whatever relationships with your family of origin, it's not who's there that's your primary consideration if you wish to be wise and virtuous.
Your primary consideration is not who's there, but who ain't there.
Who's not there?
And who's not there are the quality people who do not want to spend the next 50 years or 30 years or 20 years managing dysfunctional people who are going to harm the person that they love.
If I love a woman and her family treats her badly, I do not like her family.
You know, if I'm at the bar with my wife and some guy is verbally abusive towards her, that guy and I are going to have a very serious and significant problem.
I am not going to like him.
I'm going to intensely dislike him for putting down or harming the woman I love.
You cannot love someone and also have a positive opinion of people who harm the person you love.
Won't do it.
I mean, you can't do it.
You can fake it.
You can pretend it you can ignore it, but you can't actually do it.
I mean, you cannot work out at all.
And you can buy a t-shirt with a picture of abs on it, but you can't actually have abs.
You can buy a muscle shirt, but it does not come with muscles unless you actually work out.
So you can fake it, you can pretend it, you can lie about it, but you can't actually have it.
And of course, the number of people out there who claim to love someone and also claim to love abusive or negative or destructive parents that harm the person that they claim to love, and they're fine with it and like it, and it's good.
It's bizarre.
It's bizarre to me.
I love my dog.
I also love someone who beats my dog.
No, you're going to have to pick a lane there, bro.
You can't love someone and love the people who do them harm as well.
So defooing is about your husband, your wife, future husband, future wife, your future children.
It's not about your parents.
It's not about the past.
It's about the future.
All philosophy is about the future because you can't change the past.
We don't have free will in the past.
We have free will in the future.
So, that having been said, we now shift a teeny tiny smidge in the discussion towards the leave-behinds, the casualties.
You leave a dysfunctional family where you've had the conversations, you've gone to therapy, and it just gets worse, and you are like, well, this is really, it's really sad.
And it is really one of the worst things to happen other than the worst thing to happen, which is to stay in a dysfunctional environment forever and ever.
Amen.
Have your parents win.
And then you can only have trashy people around you.
Like if you only have abusive people around you or you have abusive people in your life, good people don't want to be there.
Would you want to join and invest in a company where they said, well, we hire a bunch of relatives who don't show up to work and some of them steal from the company.
We'd really like you to invest.
What would you say?
No.
I'm not investing in a company where half the people are paid, don't even bother showing up to work, and the other half of them who are paid are stealing from the company.
I'm not joining that.
I'm not investing in that.
No, thank you.
I think I will save my money for a non-lazy/slash thieving situation.
Well, it's the same thing, even more so, with families and marriage and dating and parenthood.
If you have trashy people in your life, you can only get more trashy people in your life.
You cannot get quality people in your life.
You cannot get quality people in your life if you have non-quality people in your life.
You can't get benevolent people into your life if you allow abusers in your life.
Now, listen, whether you stay with the abusers or not, obviously that's totally up to you.
Not my most recommended situation.
Totally up to you.
I'm just telling you the cost.
I'm telling you the cost.
The number of women that I dated where their families were messed up and I was like, peace out, not doing it, was a lot.
Now, my fault, my issue, my problem, that's on me, just to be clear.
But, nope.
Nope, nope, nope.
So, what about the leave behinds?
You leave behind a toxic family because you want to have quality people in your life.
If you want a top-tier sports player on your team, your team can't be composed of people who suck at the sport because top-tier players want to play with top-tier players.
Quality people want quality people.
So, trashy people surround you like a fiery alligator moat with spikes and blow darts, spoiling alligators, random bits of fire.
So, just so you know, dysfunctional people surround you in an impregnable wall.
And I tell you this, man, the moment I got trashy people out of my life, high-quality people came in.
Like almost to the month.
And again, I know that that's my results do not guarantee your results, but it was certainly more than a coincidence.
And I will say this: that since I got the trashy people out of my life, not one trashy person has come in since.
And it's been like well over 20 years.
So it's just one of these iron rules of life.
So the results may vary, but that's certainly, and that's the pattern that I've seen.
And I've done thousands of these calls, of course, over the years, and it's always the same thing.
You cannot have higher quality relationships than your lowest quality relationship.
I mean, if you create a bunch of fictional characters to bid on a house, the one who makes the highest bid will be the one who gets the house.
All of the lower bids will be ignored.
And in the same way, if you allow trashy people into your life, destructive, unself-aware, acting out, abusive, negative, gaslighting, you know, the usual garbage, if you allow them into your life, quality people will not come.
They will not come.
I got the trash out of my life, and in came the golden light of love.
And it's true, man, 100%.
And it has stayed there for well over 20 years.
And that golden light of love protects you from other trashy people because the golden light of love and of functionality and of health drives the trashy people away because they can't stand that stuff.
It's honestly, it's sunlight to a vampire.
They cannot stand that stuff.
So the leave behinds.
You escape a bad family.
There are siblings, nieces, maybe aunts, maybe uncles, although they're more responsible.
But there are people who are leave behind.
And I get this question at least once or twice a month.
What do I do with the leave-behinds?
My brother who's younger than me by 10 years, my nephews, my nieces, my bubba, right?
What do I do?
What do I do?
It's sad.
Yeah.
Well, there's nothing you can do.
And it costs you everything to try.
So let's say you've got a nephew.
Your nephew is 16.
And let's say you've been out of the family for a while, whatever, let's say five years.
And your nephew who's 16 calls you up and says, hey, you know, long time, no talk.
I miss you.
We spent a lot of great time together when I was younger.
It would be nice if.
Can we meet up?
Can we, right?
And look, I understand it's nice, it's tempting, it's thoughtful, and so on, right?
But the question is: can you be honest?
Can you be honest?
So let's say, I don't know, let's just pick a scenario.
Let's say that you left the family because the parents, your parents were abusive, and your siblings supported it and attacked and blamed you for bringing up the truth about prior abuse.
Let's say that's the scenario, right?
That your siblings sided with unrepentant child abusers, and that's why you left and didn't.
And maybe you said this to the siblings.
Look, you're going to have to make a choice here.
Our parents are abusive.
You were all there.
You've heard it.
I've talked about it.
And if you choose them, I'm out.
Like, I can't be in a relationship with you if you choose abusers over me.
And let's say the parents, sorry, let's say the siblings, your siblings did choose the abusress, and then you're out, right?
So then your niece, sorry, your nephew, your nephew comes and says, oh, let's hang out or whatever.
And it's very tempting.
And maybe you spent a lot of time with him when he was younger.
And what are you going to do?
Well, you get together with your nephew.
You've got to play these things out, right?
Immediate stimuli is important.
There's nothing wrong with it, but you've got to play things out, right?
Like the hot girl who has serious substance abuse problems.
Yeah, maybe it would be exciting to go to bed with her, but let's play it out.
Let's do the long run scenario.
What's the long run scenario?
So you meet with your nephew or your niece, right?
And the question is going to come up explicitly or implicitly: what happened?
Why were you gone for so long?
What do you say?
Well, your grandparents are abusive, and your parents sided with the grandparents against me.
I'm trying to be the truth teller.
I'm trying to improve things.
I tried to have honest conversations about the history of abuse, and they sided with the abusers, and they've allowed abusive people into your life, sadly, and they have cast out the good guys and embraced the bad guys, or however you would put it, right?
That would be honest.
And then what?
Well, then they go back after the lunch or brunch or whatever, and they start asking questions of the parents.
Well, you know, uncle or auntie so-and-so said this and that and the other.
And then what happens?
Well, bad things, right?
Bad, I mean, the parents don't want this honesty coming into the relationship because it lowers their status in the eyes of their children and more importantly for them, in the eyes of themselves.
And of course, you know, a lot of people live in a pretty fluid, bullshit-laced reality where they can talk themselves into just about anything or out of just about anything.
So even though things may have been clear at one point, after people lean against each other like dawn drunkards, they reinforce each other's bullshit.
And you can see this happening with the left-wing conspiracy theories all the time.
Like there's a whole list kept by Scott Adams of Democrat hoaxes.
They genuinely believe it because the media tells them, they tell each other and they reinforce the narrative.
And so they have talked themselves out of basic absolute reality.
And they do not believe that what happened happened.
And they believe what didn't happen actually happened.
Right?
That's what they believe.
And they maybe even could pass a lie detector test.
They are demoralized.
They are gone.
It doesn't matter.
The facts, the truth, the reality are gone, and they will not be recoverable.
Because anytime the people begin to express doubts, say, about this concocted, fantastical fictional history that they bought into, the moment they have any doubts, other people will just reinforce the lies and they will sink happily back like a pig into shit into the bottomless buckets of bullshit that they wallow in.
You cannot reach them.
You cannot.
I mean, you and I, I assume, we have a reality processing algorithm where if we're wrong, we have doubt, then we'll seek out facts.
But when people have doubts, maybe this is a religious thing, but when people have doubts, most people have doubts, they seek out reassurance.
They don't seek out facts.
They don't weigh themselves.
They just bully someone into saying, you look great.
I don't think you've put on any weight.
Maybe you've lost some, right?
So your leave-behinds go back with these nuggets of truth and facts, and then all hell breaks loose.
All hell.
I won't tell you my own personal experiences with this because that would be revealing a little bit too much.
But let me just tell you, it's pretty freaking brutal.
If you drop some truth nuggets and then your little emissaries from history go back with these truth nuggets into the lair of lies and it's thermonuclear, man.
It's thermonuclear.
I've heard of people that have been threatened with having the cops called on them if they see the kids again.
Even more extreme things.
So it's thermonuclear.
Course, the parents of the Leave Behinds have had years to build up the propaganda about what a bad person you are and how you just for no reason and selfish and right.
And when people have been castigated as really immoral in a family structure, challenging that family structure challenges the entire family structure.
If good people have been called evil and evil people have been called good, bringing moral clarity to the family threatens to destroy the entire family and the psychology and identity and very being of the members of that family, which is why they fight to the death almost to retain their illusions, right?
It's a brutal process.
So that's the price you're going to pay.
You won't be able to maintain the relationships if you tell the truth, guaranteed.
Because let's say that you left the family, I don't know, half a decade or whatever before.
Well, people have had half a decade or more to call you up and say, hey, man, you know, I think it was like last night or the night before, like, I woke from a dream of ours.
It was like three in the morning.
And I just, you know what?
Out of nowhere, I just felt really terrible about what happened, about what I said, the lies I told, the fact that I did side with these people against you and, you know, cast you out into the wilderness.
I'm really, I feel beyond terrible at this.
And obviously, I need to go and see some therapy.
So I won't give you the whole speech because I don't want to necessarily weep at the moment, but none of that has happened.
And when people cast you out, they don't doubt themselves anymore.
All they do is reinforce their own delusions until they become certain in their endless errors.
They become absolutely certain in their endless errors.
And they're gone.
They're gone.
They're no longer in reality.
They've retreated into a form of socially reinforced bullshit psychosis that is impenetrable.
This is called, Yuri Besmanov refers to this as demoralization.
They are gone from reality and they ain't coming back.
Particularly parents who have established much of their authority, as parents generally tend to do.
They've established much of their authority on being right and particularly with regards to being right relative to you and you're wrong and you're bad and the whole family's got together and they've trashed you and they've put you down and lied about you and so on.
Oh, she just went crazy.
I don't know what happened.
She got involved in some kind of cult and she just attacked us for no reason.
We've always loved her.
She just went nuts.
Like they've just really trashed you.
Well, then what are they going to do?
Undo that and say, oh, yeah, God, that was all a total lie.
Oh, yeah, no, you're the good guy.
We're the bad guys.
Yeah, that was all a total lie.
Not going to happen.
You are waiting for pigs to fly if you are waiting for people who've staked their authority on lies to start telling the actual truth.
Ain't going to happen.
Never going to happen.
I am getting kind of up there in years, brothers and sisters, and I have not known one person over the course of my entire life who has turned around after years of falsehood and proclaimed the truth.
Now, what's popped into my mind is there have been a few trolls over the years who've apologized and so on.
And that's fine, whatever.
That's nice.
And those aren't people in my life, though.
Those are people online.
Yeah, there are a few people online who've changed their mind about me over the years.
But given that I've had millions of people listen to my show, and I can think of maybe five, three to five people who've changed their mind to me over the years, it's functionally impossible.
You know, like it's functionally impossible to save for your retirement by playing the lottery, and it's functionally impossible to expect people to turn around.
And the other thing, too, is in general, I hear these people turn around and have conversations with these people who've turned around, and it never goes anywhere after that, and I never hear from them again.
So I don't know what happens after that.
It doesn't really matter.
But it doesn't have any substantial impact on my life.
And they certainly, they never repair as much damage as they've caused ever.
Never, ever, ever, because they can't.
Because if people have been online trash talking me for five or ten years, that's cost me a huge amount.
And it's cost the world a huge amount.
And they can't undo that.
They can't go back and contact everyone and say, oh, yeah, like it was totally wrong, right?
Because they don't even know who's seen the shit that they put out, right?
And they can't go back and have parents adopt peaceful parenting because they trashed me online and so on.
So they can't undo the damage.
So, you know, they feel bad.
They send an email or we have a conversation.
And yeah, but they can't undo the damage, right?
I'm sorry.
It's fine.
I get it.
I don't mind it.
But it's not something that has any particular credibility with me.
It's staggeringly rare.
They never stick around and they can't undo the damage.
Because if somebody was genuine about, you know, they trashed me online for years, they'd say, okay, what do I need to do for the next five years to increase or improve your reputation?
Let me know and I will do it.
I will make it a part-time job, just as if it's a part-time job to trash you for five years or 10 years.
I will now make it a part-time job to reform your reputation for five or ten years.
Okay, that would be at least something towards some sort of restitution.
But they never, no, nobody ever offers that, right?
And I'm never like, I never get a report from someone, yeah, I spent five or ten, like I used to spend five or ten hours a week trashing you for five years.
I now have spent five or ten, like, here's my report for the week.
I spent five or ten years correcting this error, fixing this, doing that, doing the other.
Nope.
It's always like, hey, sorry, man.
And off they go, right?
So it's not going to happen.
And you certainly shouldn't wait around for it to happen.
My father died.
Never apologized.
I told him everything.
He never apologized.
Well, your mother does appear to have some criminal tendencies, blah, Man, not my mother.
Your wife.
The woman you chose to have children with and then leave with her.
You couldn't stand her, but I, at the age of six months, I was supposed to be fine with her.
I can't handle her.
You got this, baby.
I can't lift this car.
I'm going to pin my kid under it at the age of six months.
I'm sure he's Cal El.
Sorry.
Not particularly funny, but it's all just so absurd.
So you can't tell them the truth or thermonuclear results occur and you're going to lose the relationship anyway.
So what's your other option?
Well, you go to lunch or brunch or dinner with your nephew or your niece after, say, five plus years.
I say, hey, what happened?
And you say, well, you know, sometimes people just drift apart.
Things happen, blah, blah, blah.
And so you lie.
You know the reason why you stopped seeing the family, but you won't tell them the truth.
And then what do you do?
Well, you're forced to lie out of fear of the consequences, which means you're right back to where you were as a child.
Right back to where you were as a child.
Being forced to lie for fear of negative consequences.
No, thank you.
I had enough of that when I was young.
Do not need when older.
My whole adulthood has been opposite of childhood is good.
So you got to lie.
And then what you do by lying, and the same thing is true, of course, with the problem with kids of divorce, right?
You can't tell the truth.
Let's say that your wife had an affair and that's why you left her and the kids say, well, why aren't you and mommy together?
Let's say the kids don't know about the affair.
What are you going to say?
We just grew apart.
We just drifted apart.
Things happened.
Who knows, right?
Wrong energy, mismatch of blah, blah, blah, which is just making them completely paranoid.
Whereas if you say, well, mom had an affair, say, okay, well, then if mom had an affair, that's why you got divorced.
Then mom shouldn't have had the affair.
Then they know how to avoid getting divorced, which is, I don't know, don't have an affair.
But if you use this, and I understand why, you use this with your nephew niece or whatever.
Well, we just drifted apart or we had conflicts or we couldn't resolve them or we didn't see eye to eye or whatever, then you're not telling your kids the truth, which makes them paranoid about relationships.
Of course, right?
Of course.
And they're paranoid about relationships because, boy, you can be siblings for 30 years or 40 years.
And next thing you know, you just drift apart and people don't talk and you turn into an asshole and for no reason, no cause, right?
And it makes them paranoid about relationships.
Whereas if you tell them the truth and say, well, you know, the reason why I don't speak to your parents is that they sided with abusers against me.
Okay, well, then that's a good reason to not speak to people.
And therefore, it's no longer a giant mystery as to why you're not talking.
Mystery solved.
Why did granddad get lung cancer?
He smoked two packs a day for 40 years.
Okay, well, if I don't smoke, I'm probably okay then.
Yes, good.
I can relax.
As opposed to, I don't know, man, it's weird.
Maybe it's genetic.
It's mysterious.
You're going to be paranoid about getting lung cancer.
Give the causality and you avoid the anxiety.
But if you give the causality, you provoke the psychopathy.
I feel like I'm about to start rapping, but it's after Christmas.
So you can't tell the truth.
And if you lie, it's incredibly harmful to the children and to your own integrity.
And then by saying, well, I'm going to lie because I'm frightened of brutal people causing harm in my life.
So I'm going to lie to children or young people.
Then you're out of integrity.
You're lying.
You're harming children through your lies.
You're harming your own integrity by lying for what?
For the sake of blowback from nasty people who are going to harm you for telling the truth.
You can't have an honest relationship with the leave-behind.
Look, I'm sorry.
I wish you could.
But you can't.
You can't.
Now, maybe they get much older.
They're in their, I don't know, mid-late 20s.
They've gone to therapy.
They've dealt with things.
Okay, then if they contact you and, you know, let's say they've found some way to either improve their family or get away or something like that.
And you can tell the truth.
Okay, fine.
But that's not when they're young.
They can't do that when they're young.
And it's really harsh and harmful to ask them to do that.
Well, or you say, well, I'm going to tell you the truth about why I don't see your parents, but you can't ever tell them.
Then you're this, that person asking children to keep secrets, which is not great.
And then who knows, right?
In a moment of teenage angst or hostility, they might tell their parents anyway.
And the last thing I'll say is that, like, let's say you had good relationships with your nephews, nieces, whoever, right?
When they were little, like, you know, toddlers, babies, whatever, right?
Five, six, seven.
Well, let's say they come to you when they're 16 and you have really great memories of when they were five.
Well, they've had mean people working them over for the last 10 or 11 years.
They ain't the same anymore.
You know, it's like if you lend your brand shiny new car to 10 years to a bunch of drug runners, well, it ain't the same car anymore.
Sadly, it's just been all beaten up and misused.
So the sentimental memories that you have of the innocent kids, they're not the same, sadly, after 10 or 11 years at the hands of, you know, kind of selfish, mean, destructive people who lie to them and side with evildoers, like they've been broken, they've been corrupted.
I don't mean irredeemably, but that's where they're at.
So all the sentimentality isn't going to play out because they have been altered by the very family structure that you escaped.
They've been altered beyond repair.
Doesn't mean that they can never repair it, but I mean, they certainly can't get back to the innocence you remember from when they were very little.
They can fix themselves, right?
You can sew it up, but you still see the scar.
It can never be undone in that way.
It's a hardware issue, not a software issue.
So I hope that helps.
And I say this with great sorrow and sympathy, but what matters is the quality of people you have in your life going forward.
And that is entirely dependent upon the quality of people you allow in your life.
And you should reserve your life for the quality people you choose, not the trashy people that nature and circumstance chose for you.