amos

Hello my friends Thank you all a lot for your kind words and your understanding. I have just sent the email. I dont exactely know what i feel... I feel a bit nervous / scared, probably from some angry reaction on their part, and some doubt that i have made a horrible mistake. But i also feel a lot of excitement and energy, as if i just got out from under a huge load and was just looking around myself. I feel kind of free and energized to do whatever i want. @barn Thank you for your encouragement and for your sympathy. Rahel and i also think that i have outgrown my parents and that they do not display any sign of truly changing or showing more curiosity for my experience / feelings. I do also think that i have made good progress in becoming more assertive. Thank you also for pointing out, that i can and should embrace all my parts, also my anger. This is something that i also have been working on in the last year. @wyattstorch Thank you also for your encouragement. I do not know what reaction i expect from them, i hope they will respect my wish and not contact me for as long as i wish. The point you make that i cant act to gain / keep a negative is a good one. The thing i wish to gain is freedom. Freedom in my thinking, feeling, and acting. And this freedom is hindered by me staying in contact with my parents if they refuse to see me as a full human being with equally valid feelings and desires. Also i am sorry to hear that you are going through a similar situation. I wish you much strength and courage to go the path that is best for your own personal happiness. @Tyler H Thank you for your sympathy. Your question is directly to the point. I really feel like there is noting more that i could say to them. Also pointing out that it is their choices that play a key role in how our relationship has developped is very helpful to see things in the right perspective.

Hello Everybody So, it has been a long time since my last post in May. For some reason i feel a lot of resistance to getting involved in the fdr community, even though a part of me really wants to. But that's a question that i plan to work on for my self soon. After the start of June i have not seen or talked to my parents until 5 weeks ago. I met them 5 weeks ago and one week ago. They came to my apartment to talk twice. After the meeting 5 weeks ago i cried a lot, and i was very proud of myself. I RTR'd the whole time and always said how i felt in the moment at the beginning of every sentence. The meeting ended with my dad getting angry and saying that i basically demand of him that he repent his "sin" of wanting to pass the jewish tradition on to me and that he does not feel he wants to or can do that. And i got angry and said that he basically demands from me that i ignore the fact that he had the most sensitive part of my body cut off and forced me to do things i didnt want to do for 20 years and that i just go over and have a pleasant family dinner with them, which i cant and dont want to do. Last weeks meeting was far more difficult for me and i think i was more dissociated before during and after the meeting. My dad basically apologized to me for not being able to comunicate better when i was around 22-ish and decided that i no longer wanted to join the family to synagogue on every holiday. (for appeasment i said i would come only on the important holidays even though i didnt want to go at all.) My dad then basically didnt talk to me or look at me for over two weeks until i asked him if he was angry at me which he then denied... So for this he apologized last week, for not being able to communicate better. But the whole meeting had a quite sour flavour to it since basically he was so sad and upset that i ended up having a lot of understanding for how difficult this must be for him, instead of him having understanding for me. Also he did not apologize for forcing me to join synagogue, he only apologized for not being able to communicate better when i finally decided to no longer join each time. Since last weekend i feel i fell back into some older habits of mine which also lead to me hurting Rahel (my girlfriend) yesterday morning with a very depreciative glance, which hurt her and our relationship a lot. I feel that after almost two years of me trying to talk to my parents there has been still no indication of them changing in a positive direction. And after this last incident i feel that my efforts are not only not productive but also dangerous to my future happiness and my relationships to Rahel and others. So thinking about all this i decided this morning that it is time to separate from them for trial and see how i feel after doing so. Also i had a dream this night, which indicated to me that i should do exactely that. I also talked about this with Rahel and she understands and supports my decision fully. I would very much appreciate it if you could read through my defoo letter below and give me a brief feedback on it. Thank you a lot! **************************************************** Hi Mom, Hi Adi (my dad’s name) Since our last conversation, I have increasingly fallen back into old patterns. This harms me in my personal development and in my relationship with Rahel. I would therefore like to take a break from contact with you in the near future so that I can better understand and organize my feelings. Please do not contact me during this time, I will contact you again as soon as I wish. Best regards Amos

Thank you, both of you for your kind responses. And you are totally correct with your assumption. I do not have a history of assertiveness at all. Rather to the contrary. Infact Rahel has also said something similar to what you now said, though not as precisely formulated. They seem to think it is just a phase, "amos is just beeing a bit difficult" so they dig in deep and wait for the storm to be over. I Find your advice to openly talk about this very usefull and i think i will try this next time. I have had a talk with adrian (my dad) 2 days ago and i did fall back into a lot of childhood habits. It took me a day to realize the many small put downs and suttle insults that i just absorbed without consciously noticing. I am now quite angry when i think back on that. So thanks again for the advice and i will let you know what came out of it. Also Rahel and i have decided that from now on we go to these kind of conversations together, so that i have a friend by my side to give me some security.

Hello Guys This will be a very long post... I want to share with you my journey with FDR so far: I discovered Stefs podcasts on youtube about three or four years ago (I am now 27). I was watching a lot of political and atheist debates at the time. I think it could have been the video “19 tough questions for Libertarians”. Anyways I started to watch more and more of his videos and just loved the stuff. The NAP videos, the property rights, it all fit together and that was great, since in what I have heard before, there was always somewhere a hidden contradiction. The next big milestone I think was the argument from morality and the UPB book. My interest started to shift towards ethics. (It had come from atheism over politics, society / economics, libertarianism / freedom). So I started really digging into the idea of rational scientific ethics, which I still find extremely fascinating and important. I am also currently working on a book of my own trying to improve UPB. I want to share it with you some day, but so far it is still not ready. Also the RTR book was a real eyeopener for me. I think around 2 years ago I read it and also introduced it into my relationship with Rahel, my girlfriend. It had a truly wonderful effect on our relationship and allowed us to come closer and closer to each other ever since. Then in November 2015 I saw the truth about circumcision video. It hit me like a hammer blow to the head! I have seen the video in the recommended videos on youtube for probably 2 months before I finally watched it. I think I was afraid of it. But I also wanted to see what Stef had to say about it, since it also pertains to me. I grew up Jewish, so I was circumcised just after birth. I was very shocked and confused and I went to Rahel and asked her to watch the video with me. She also was shocked and said that she had never thought about it, (Circumcision is not common in Europe), but that for sure we would never do this to our future kids. The following month I was very shocked and disoriented, and I could barely think of anything else. I just could not grasp it that I was the victim of a human rights violation and that my parents were the perpetrators. In January 2016 I wrote them a letter that I handed to my mom when she came to visit the town where I now lived. I was stomach-turningly nervous and so was Rahel, when we went to meet her. (She came with me to assist me in this difficult task.) In the letter I told my parents that I have come to realize that circumcision was wrong, that I want to talk about it with them and that I expect an apology from them. I also put the link to the video in there. They have been very uncooperative in finding dates to talk about it. In the past 1.5 years we have maybe had 5 conversations about it, always initiated by me calling multiple times and insisting on it. It is now also just one year that I started going to therapy. It was very hard for me to start going to therapy. I talked a lot about trying it to Rahel, but I never actually went and did it. In fact she started to go to therapy before I did because of exam anxiety. I supported her going to therapy very much, but I myself kept merely talking about it. At some point she kind of kicked my ass to just go and do it, which was a very good thing. She finished therapy after roughly a year, I am still in therapy and probably will be for some time to come. I think I am now at the point where my emotions start to come back to life. I am still often dissociated, but sometimes I feel a lot of sadness or anger. It has happened twice in the past 4 weeks that I really broke down crying and sobbing. Also just two weeks ago I felt for the first time real anger towards my parents for an extended period of time. It was not just like a flair up that I immediately suppressed back to zero, but it lasted for around two days. The reason for this was that my mom has written me to invite me to a dinner at my grandparents birthday. I called her and said that I dont want to go there and act all happy as if everything was fine, but that I first want to sort out the things that we still have not sorted out. I also said that Rahel has offered to act as an arbitrator between us, since she felt (correctly) that we were not getting anywhere. So my mom said that she would talk it over with my dad and that we could maybe meet the following weekend (14 days ago). Then the next day she sent me a text that we could not meet on the weekend, because my dad was planning to go on a skiing trip the week after and these conversations make him feel unstable. (That btw was their reason why we could not continue the conversation for the past 7 weeks). So I felt that I got really angry. And the anger stayed with me. I called her the next evening and wanted to say that I was angry, but I could not bring myself to say the words. But I was so loaded, that she perfectly heard it out of my voice anyways. She then tried to calm me by making one concession after the other, until she offered that we could meet just the two of us on the up coming weekend (14 days ago). So we met to talk together. She had asked again that she still does not understand exactly what I want from them. So I said again (probably for the third time) that I want to be able to have a real relationship with them. I want to be able to share thoughts and feelings that are important to me and I would also like that they would share more important memories, thoughts and feelings with me. And that being able to have a real relationship requires that they respect me as a fully fledged human being, which means for one, that they do not have the right to cut of an important body part of mine. And then it started again with the evading and fogging and so on and I felt that I got angry again. I said that this is a prime example of what I am talking about, since I am explicitly stating a feeling and a desire of mine and now I am again in a position that I have to justify myself instead of being heard and understood. She said that she and my dad would be willing to come to a psychologist of my choosing with me, of which I was positively surprised. But at the end of our conversation I felt very strongly that there is no point to it. I felt that we would just go through the motions but nothing would come out of it. It was a weird feeling, it felt like a cold kind of certainty. I am not sure what will come next but this feeling has not changed since then. I feel like the guy that has always tried to find the hidden door in the wall of a castle, and has suddenly realized that there is no door, just a wall. So now I am standing in front of the wall kind of dumbstruck and sort of starting to look around and trying to regain my orientation. It is a really weird but also kind of a good feeling. I also feel like I have a ton of sadness inside me which I sometimes feel, but mostly I am dissociated from it. Even though I often feel a lot of sadness and sometimes anger, I generally feel much better and happier than I ever did in the past 15 years. I am happy that I start to have feelings, even though it is kind of unfamiliar and a bit curious. I am happy that I feel my confidence rise and that I can start to stand in for myself. I am happy that I have such a wonderful relationship and a wonderful vision for my future family (unschooling, peaceful parenting, attachment parenting). I am happy that I have a good compass (ethics) to navigate by through the difficulties of life. Philosophy is a stony road and I sure have many stones still before me, but I feel that I am on the right road and that makes me feel positive and happy.

I am sorry to hear about your childhood, your dad abandoning you, your mom "not remembering" (what a convenient excuse, i know this one from my mom)... It just makes me sad to read stories like this. I too struggle with the wish to step up when i hear a child being treated badly, but i am not ready yet. When ever i hear or see such a situation i just become really sad and feel so helpless. I wish to act to make the world a better place but i am still paralized when i observe a situation where i could actually act. Sometimes i wonder if there is anything that one can do in those situations? Because as long as the child has to live with the parents, it needs the protective mechanisms, that's exactely why these mechanisms exist in the first place... I dont know if this helps, but my take on self attacking egostates is that they were at a time very important to protect you. Because if you self attack before your mom / dad notices the "bad" behaviour, you can correct it and avoid being attacked by them. And when you attack yourself, you can manage the severity of the attack and it is therefore much less dangerous. So those egostates want to protect you. Mabe you can make a deal with them such that they can use their talents in the new situation that you live in now to help you in another way.

Collectivism is a subset of hypocrisy, because in all collectivist ideas there are rules that apply to 'all', except to the rulers / priests / politicians / etc. So hypocrisy includes collectivism and is thus the more mighty concept. Since ethical rules are always formulated universally, i too think that hypocrisy is the root of all evil.

Hi FDR Community I just came across podcast 99. I dont only listen in chronological order, so ive heared a couple of hundred podcasts probably. The question is: "is it moral to take back money from a state program?" Stef argues, that if you have been forced to pay into the state and you can get some money back, then do it. Else the money is just going to go to some socialist. For example if you can get a tax refund, sure take it. if you wanna go somewhere you use public roads. your university is subsidized etc.. Of course i aggree that there is nothing wrong with taking some money back or trying to get robbed (taxed) less. He also argues, that the act of robbery is wrong, but once a big pile of robbed money is lying at the center of society and everyone is grabbing at it, it is in a state of nature. I see the argunemt and i tend to aggree, however where is the line? because if we want to make the argument from morality we have to live by our values. not just talk about them but live them! imagine the following example: i live on a social program all my life and take back massive ammounts of money from the state and use my time to podcast about how taxation is theft. Probably everybody would rightly call me a hypocrit. because my actions dont match my words. So even though i dont advocate taxation and dont vote to increase taxation and dont give my consent to other people beeing robbed, im still just a parasite that feeds of the money that gets extracted from working men through violence. I cant formulate for myself a good rule that consistently works to separate actions like going to school or using public roads or taking tax cuts from actions like living on social programs or work directly for the government or taking farm subsidies of business subsidies... Any one have a good suggestion?

That was actually in 2014. They wanted to have a 20% gold backing for the currency. Sadly i didnt have much of a clue about anything economic back then so i voted against it. Now i am just in the process of freeing me from the illusion of voting completely, so i guess it doesnt matter anyway but the propaganda against the initiative was strong. Of course, wouldnt be in the interest of the gangsters ripping of the public.

Hi Fellows Sorry TheRobin, i can't yet write you a pm, i think it's because i am still a newbie but please write me, would be cool to meet up some time. i live in Winterthur. @luxfelix: nice. i found fdr over youtube, i progresed from hitchens and dawkins to milton friedman and tom sowel, to ron paul and all the other libertarians and then finally to molyneux. phhh, the attitude towards migrants ranges over the full spectrum, though we have quite a few green/red lefties here who love to save the world with other peoples money.. but i think they are also just the ones that are the most vocal about it, since its the politically correct mainstream position at the moment. there are also quite a few ppl who dont like the whole refugees industry. but they get branded as far right.

Hi Felix Thanks for your kind reply. I live close to zurich, in the northern part of switzerland. Where do you come from? Greetings Amos

Hi my fellow fdr listeners I am new to the fdr community, though i have watched many videos allready. Are there any other fdr members from switzerland? I am curious to see who is around and possibly get to know each other. Best regards Amos