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I know that there is no context to my questions, I just want to hear your thoughts on these questions at face value. Question 1. If you listen to Jordan Peterson or know the Bible, you know about Cain vs Abel story. My fundamental question is, what system do you have in place to not become Cain? (Cain = becoming angry/bitter at God/being) Question 2. Carl Jung's concept of The Shadow is very interesting to me. How would one differentiate The Shadow versus just rage/anger. Now Jordan Peterson once said that you have to respect the shadow, what are the practical ways to do that?

So this popped up in my fb-feed. What's your take on it? http://alanalouisemay.com/blog/2016/1/9/the-world-needs-angry-women

I learned a lesson regarding how one should not confront child abusers when in a public space. My experience is to not engage with the abuser but to simply ask the abuser politely (of course) to not abuse the child, and end it there! The response to this confrontation is the focus of this single post. Here is a copy of an email I sent to Michaels (the art and craft store) regarding a confrontation I had with another customer which resulted in being bullied by an employee of Michaels. On a positive note, this experience has given me a deeper understanding of my anger and how it is the root cause of most of my problems. I'm not implying that the abusers get off "scott-free" but that I'm taking actions to correct problems and therefore the ripple effects. I recently purchased Anger and Forgiveness by Raymond Lloyd Richmond, Ph.D., a sample of the contents can be viewed @ http://www.guidetopsychology.com/af3.htm which also appears to explain how my nail biting, hair playing, pacing, and other habits formed may be connected to anger through OCD. Of course, Stef made me aware of this idea regarding anger in pod-cast http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/2444/freedomain-radio-call-in-show-august-4th-2013 @ ~2:19:23 in which he says, "The anger against your abusers is perfectly healthy. The danger of the anger is that it can draw you back into wanting to fix, rage against, act against your abusers." Mapping my history with anger is my self-appointed homework for the next 2 weeks before going over this with my therapist. This is my key and I'm excited to have it and cleanup what is behind the door(s).

I'm a male, 21 years old. Living in Sweden where I grew up with my mom and dad, older brother who is mentally and physically handicapped (dyskinetic cerebral palsy + mental disability I do not know the name for), and younger sister. At 13-14 I cut myself, and at 15 I started doing drugs. Things were all right as far as my earliest memories go, maybe that's because there aren't that many of them. The ones of my brother are happy and with parts of our extended family around helping out. My brother can not talk with words, he does not have that kind of control over his muscles. He does communicate though, like an infant. Crying when upset, making sounds to hint at something, blinking for yes and almost pronouncing a "no" when he means "no". As I grew past him I never realized the situation, my parents never talked about it. It was 100% normal until I started being away from my family and hanging out in friends houses without wheelchairs at around age 7-8. That's when I first noticed things were off in our family. I never had trouble with kids teasing me or him for it, but I would be scared having girls over when it came to that. My friends got to know who he was but they never got close. He was mostly in another room if we were playing in our house. They never/very rarely asked about him. If there was an option to play at someone elses house, I would fight for that. When my brother was around 14 years old and I was about 10, he started having problems with his hips and back. There were many surgeries and trips to hospitals in different cities for many years. We never talked about it. We went there, said comforting things to my brother like "it's going to be better soon" "you can go home soon" etc. He understands these things to an extent... After 10 minutes he'll be asking "when can I go home?". Very annoying for parents who does not want to talk about anything. My parents never asked me or my sister about our experiences of any of this. My brother stopped eating around this time. My parents would mix "regular food" into a mush like the ones for babies because chewing was hard, but even this got too hard for my brother to eat. So naturally, my mother got mad. It escalates quickly and soon she is full on yelling at his face, he's crying and there me and my sister are sitting across the table, watching. So is dad. In these intense moments of action he's passive. My brother has gotten nutrition through gavage ever since (I'm not sure if that's the right word. Food through feeding tube in stomach to bypass the throat). Then he stopped sleeping. So now my mothers screaming would not end after dinner, it would carry on into most of the nights when I was around 13-19 years old, until I moved out. I asked my sister earlier today how the nights are now, she said "he still wakes up, but I guess mom is less mad". She would scream so loud, and so would he. "You have to sleep, don't you understand?! I'm tired of this, it's *enough*!". The worst thing she ever said was "if you don't shut up I'll throw you out of this window". That stuck with me, you could say. Then the next morning, she and dad is acting like nothing has happened, smiling and ready for the day. My brother was happy too, but he can't really help it. I thought I was going insane, I obviously couldn't process reality. There's lots more, but I guess that is enough. I've been to counseling for a few months, once every 2 weeks which is not enough for me I feel. I've told my parents all of this, how I feel they abused all of us. But they do not get it. Just today I told my mother that I do not want to come to the birthday dinner, because I'm afraid I will burst into tears. She replies with the usual "but I've said I'm sorry already! What do you want me to do? It's in the past... I can't go back in time, and change what is done! I'm sorry!". I've invited them to a meeting with my counsler in 2 weeks, looking forward to that. I work as a personal assistant for my brother, have done for 2 years. He didn't have anyone else at the "daycare" he went to after school. My parents report good times in school, and when he left at age 19 for something called "day center" (roughly translated) he was miserable. He cried every morning, he did not want to go. He would cry until he puked. Right, I forgot to mention he would average vomiting something like 2-3 times a day for the later half of his life. I have a lot of gross memories of him and vomit running down his chest, me and my sister panicking yelling for mom or dad to help... He's 26 now and I believe it's getting better on that aspect. To be honest I think it's my communication with him that has made this improvment (among other things, like going out for wheelchair dances and hanging out at a café for handicapped people). He is always looking forward to going there with me, he has lots of friends who want to be with him, I help him communicate through translating his body language to others, and he has only puked 3-4 times during my 2 years working with him. I have to start the day with going home to him, and he still lives with my parents. Then we take a taxi to the Day Center, when the day is done we take a taxi back and my parents take over the role of "personal assistant". This makes me very sad. I don't want them to take care of him, and I don't want to meet them every day. I don't know why I made this post. I originally called it "feeling guilt over not going to dads birthday dinner" but it turned out a lot bigger than that. Don't think I have a question for anyone to answer, I just wanted to express how I feel and maybe have someone listen.

Hey, I just made a short new video on the topic of projected anger: what is it, why people have it, and what to do about it.

Originally posted on Medium! Enjoy! As long as we stay around corrupt, abusive, and nasty people who overtly attack us, implicitly humiliate us through clever language tricks, or invalidate us subliminally through a sudden but brief look of contempt that immediately follows earnest proclamations that attempt to convince us they “understand where we’re coming from”, our entire emotional apparatus will remain compromised. So long as we remain in the presence of toxic people, our emotions will remain toxic through overstimulation; guilt becomes toxic shame, humiliation becomes chronic irritation, fear becomes hypervigilance and paranoia, while anger festers into murderous rage. Let’s have a more detailed look at anger as an example. Emotions are just another kind of information; information in the form of energy and the information that is being communicated through anger is that, not only has there been a violation or a transgression against you, but also that something needs to change, hence the energy which is designed to propel you into action. For instance, if you feel angry after being insulted by a bully, your anger is saying “get away from this person” or “remove yourself from the interaction”. But what happens when we cannot remove ourselves from the interaction? What happens if we are children, have no control over our environment and can’t escape because the bullies in our lives are our parents? Or, what happens even when we can control our environment and leave, but for whatever reason mistakenly believe that we can’t? Well, it is likely then that the anger will turn into rage. The difference between anger and rage is that while anger carries the message, “take control of your behavior and change things by leaving the dysfunctional environment”, rage says, “since we can’t remove ourselves from the environment let’s change things by controlling the other person” or, more simply put, by fighting back. This is why rage is often coupled with violent impulses to inflict physical or psychological damage on the other person. Again, it is designed to propel us into taking action that will change something. But what if we can neither fight nor flee from an abuser, as is almost always the case for children? What happens when we can’t run or when any attempt to fight results in greater harm for us? What happens when feeling these emotions become dangerous for us? The answer is that we end up feeling nothing. We become depressed. We enter the ‘freeze’ response similar to what we would enter into in the presence of a grizzly bear, a beast that we can neither fight nor run from; we play dead. Now, to be clear, it is terribly tragic for a child to ever have to enter into this response as a result of being raised by hostile parents, but at the same time it is totally healthy and necessary for preventing the child from further harm. It is unnecessary when this occurs for an adult who does indeed have the choice to get abusive people out of his life. Once we escape the corrupt and commit ourselves to healing, we slowly but surely can heal our emotional apparatus. And once we are safe to feel again, we gain access to our emotions like anger and grow confidence in our ability to process reality and self trust that our emotions accurately reflect reality. Eventually, people’s sneaky and crazy making attempts to undermine us and blame us for our feelings becomes extremely obvious and pathetic. We become our own proof.

I'm pissed. I'm feeling something I haven't felt in a looong time. I'm really angry at my parents, and I'm happy that I'm this mad. I was listening to http://www.fdrpodcasts.com/#/766/maternal-suffocationand I just had this amazing awakening moment. I just felt all the rage from the listener towards his parents and it made me remind myself of all the rage I felt during my teens. I thought about suicide for a year. I counted every minute in school. I felt like shit for not studying stupid subjects. I was bullied. I was pressured by everyone to get a girlfriend. I felt like a big failure with no future. I was put in the worst school in the city under the pretext that it would teach me life. I felt my life threatened among kids whose parents have been in jail. There were cases of rape in the bathrooms. If a kid from 5th grade asked me for my money I had to give it to him even though I was 4 years older, because if I didn't and escalated, his family and friends would be waiting for me outside. I was put in this situation by the people who are supposed to take care of me. The people I should be able to trust. Writing this made me feel really sad and even angrier! All this inside a 16 year old mind, who had no one to share it with. I could never ever trust my parents with this. I would never share it with them. They made fun of me when I talked about this girl I liked when I was about 6. My parents and grandmother, at the table, laughing at me for liking this girl. Mocking me... BAH IM SO PISSED!! So with this all inside my mind I got super pissed at them but I repressed it... until now. All this time I've been trying to get work done and be productive only to find myself procrastinating. It was like my brain was saying "There are more important stuff for you to deal with!". And I ignored it and played videogames. And then I felt like shit because I was being really unproductive, so i go work and the cycle continues... Today I figured out what my feelings were trying to tell me. Why I couldn't work for more than 30 minutes without going back to videogames. Why I wasted over 7000 hours playing fucking video games!!!! I'm so fucking pissed I wasted ALL THAT TIME. I could be living alone far from this hellhole getting a good salary. I denied job offers because I would feel depressed when i thought of working. Maybe because I had all this rage built up inside of me! I repressed all that I felt towards my parents and didn't face it! I hid behind videogames to waste time purposefully! I probably thought that work would be videogames 2.0 to repress my feelings towards my parents, since at leaste while playing I can listen to podcasts and think about my life. I'm starting to feel less anger and it's probably because I'm disconnecting emotionally... I'm super scared of letting this general feeling go away, and go back to where I was. I am afraid of continuing to live a unproductive life, feeling inferior when other people ask me what i've been up to.. "Oh you know just played 100h of league of legends, what about you?" I'm feeling sad and scared now and stopped feeling anger. All this time growing up i've had little to none emotional support and useful life lessons. I've never trusted my parents advice (thank god) and was going in a really bad direction until I found FDR. Thank you Stef Mike and Stoyan for doing this. You are literally saving lives. Thank you so so much. I wanted to share this with all of you and if anyone can help me out I'd be very very grateful..

I am celebrating one year of sobriety, and have put together an audio journal about addiction. This is the most difficult presentation I have put together so far. I had to carefully explore my parental inner-voices. It is a reconstruction of three different sessions recorded over the past week. I could not have explored this topic so closely without first deFOOing from my toxic family. Toward the end, I reflect on a strategy for changing the Twelve Step Program to remove god and the abdication of the self from the equation, which makes it a more humanizing process. Thank you for listening, and I appreciate the input as always! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptkhFWbmUI4 I want to recommend any of Nathaniel Brandon's works on self-esteem and Jay Earley's IFS books, as these are the primary resources that I use for self-exploration and therapy. Shout out to Elliot Hulse of Strength Camp for providing a physical manifestation of self-esteem that I can model, and Stefan Molyneux and the Philosophy Crew at Free Domain Radio for being major influences on me recognizing and acknowledging my destructive addiction. This has been a collaborative effort to be certain.

I have a work friend that whenever he gets angry... he starts lying... I am trying to back out of the friendship because I don't think this will end well for me. He is a cool guy to talk to but I don't know when this behavior of his will bite me in the but. please advize...

I think stef says something like anger is suppose to propel you into action. I had trouble connecting with my anger in regards to how my parents raised me. (neglect, fear of the world) Recently I had an experience when I was talking to my manager about a possible change in my schedule because of a possible second job. She acted passive aggressive and avoided me asking her. On my break I got angry because I had told her before you leave I want to talk to you about something important please don't leave. She said something like "its always something bad when people say that to me" and laughed. She said it in a casual funny way. On my break I got really angry and told my shift manager to tell her that I'm going to call her. Once he told her she called me and i got to talk to her and I solved my problem. More recently I had anxiety about going to a programming meet-up. I had fear that i wasn't good enough, (it is mostly wealthy, white, smart older men) . Even though the meet up is for all people who are into iOS programming or want to learn. I'm more than qualified to go. I know that if i want to be successful i have to learn from others. Success can't be achieved in isolation. I talked to some of my FDR friends and to my sister about this problem. What eventually happened is that my fear went away once my anger kicked in. Why the fuck am I scared of going to a casual meet-up with other fellow programmers ? I understood intellectually that my parents put this shit in my head. I still doubted myself, my inner mother would deny all this. But i think after sharing this with allot of people around me that support me, it help to validate my anger. I know some people might say you shouldn't need others to help you validate your anger but i disagree you need a support group to validate your feelings because without that you are susceptible to your inner parents.

My newest video. In it, James Hetfield from "Metallica" talks about his painful childhood, his relationship with his abusive parents, and how it influenced his music. I included my comments and observations in a form of hard-burned closed captions. Apologies for poor audio quality. These were the best clips I could find, and sound filters didn't help improve it, either. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6XD1MPzF_A

I posted Steph's video about Robin Williams and my cousin posted a "::jerking off::" motion in my comments. I feel so angry that being Anarcho-Capitalist means friends and family refuse to debate and would rather attack my character than discuss or defend the opposite positions. The implications mean I lose more and more of my old circle but then I realize I never had friends to begin with and I feel sadness and anger that I had ever had loyalty to people when they end up just having a lack of compassion like my mother is with me. I have anxiety because during the holidays I will see my cousin and I don't want to see my family now.

Hi everyone, I don't participate in this forum nearly as much as i should considering how much i really do enjoy reading threads when i have an off minute so hopefully i don't miss any important details. also in advance i'd like to apologize for the jumbled way i write, i'm really not a writing type person. At the moment i'm in High school as a junior and a lot of my friends, who are seniors, just graduated today. My issue is most of my friends are only a few months older than me and are able to graduate at 17 while i'll be graduating at 18. One of my friends specifically i'm envious of, me and him both picked up a job at the same time as webmasters for a mail-order company(same company), we've both spent a lot of time trying to make money before we were employed with this job, with various bitcoin fountains and web design sites, which i know now that he's out of high school he'll be starting up again with his extra time. nearly All my friends have graduated and i'm going to be going on to senior year of high school taking only 1 necessary credit with the rest being filled with programming classes that i'd much rather learn on my own or take online, for the most part i'm just going to be sitting around with very little work due to the nature of programming classes with my school. My issue though is the fallout i experienced when i got home from school today, I've been feeling angry about this all day but it really came to a head once i walked through the door. when my mom asked me what was wrong I ended up going into a full scale shouting rant. my issue isn't so much with the time in school it's the amount of my youth will be stuck here in high school doing literately nothing. I was wondering if anyone here on the forum might have any advice in regards to my feelings of being completely held back or what i could do about high school next year. if you have any questions please feel free to ask, and sorry about my writing again.

Hey everyone, I'm going to jump right in. I'd like to give a little background first so you're on the same page. If anyone has time, I would really appreciate opinions on the conversation below. My name is Andrew. I'm 26, and I'm a long time listener of FDR (my first post on the boards). I just started some serious self-work due to a tipping point finally being reached in my family. About three weeks ago I told them that I wanted a break. I expressed my desire to have space in order to figure things out. Without going into the full history, there's some serious emotional abuse and neglect that I feel I've been subjected to. I haven't seen them or spoken to them for about three weeks now. I've confronted my Mom in the past about these concerns I have of my childhood. What I'm trying to do right now is write down every single detail I can remember about my past. I'm trying to put together a timeline of sorts containing all of the events and experiences I can remember of as a child. So a couple days ago I asked my Mom if I could pick up all of the childhood school papers / pictures she saved. I told her that it would really help me in this whole process during therapy. (I found an amazing one thank god). She told me that she would put together a box with everything and that I could pick it up today (Sunday the 19th). All day today I've been a nervous wreck. And to make a long story short I decided not to go over. I couldn't do it. I just can't see her face to face yet. I'm not ready. So the below conversation is what followed through text message. (I purposely left the typos in the conversation. I felt that it would help paint a more accurate picture of my Mom. Also the lost key conversation happened through email earlier in the day). Me: "I'm sorry mom I cant make it over tonight. I have the day off tomorrow...would you mind leaving the box in the backyard or garage? I could swing over during the day and pick it up." Mom: "Why can't you make it over" Me: "I don't know...I guess I'm scared to..." Mom: "We'll Andy that really hurts me I didn't know I scared you wow! I guess all I can say is when you get your courage back you can come over and get the stuff I put together for you this week. Come over tomorrow if you want after I get off work at 2:30 and pick it up I would like to talk. Love you mom" Mom: "Did you loose all your keys can you still drive your car.? Please reply thank you" Me: "Yeah I got all new keys made last week. I don't think im ready to talk face to face yet, im sorry. Would you mind leaving the box outside? I'd still like to look at the files if you don't mind." Mom: "I don't know what files your talking about I put together dates on a piece of paper dates where we lived and when we lived there. Also the box of your time at meadow lake school and pictures when you were little. I'm not putting them outside it's going to snow tomorrow if you can't see me after work then you can pick the stuff up when you can you can face I'm sorry you can't even see me I love you andy." Mom: "I just don't understand why your feeling this way towards me what did I do? For you to feel this way ." Me: "What about putting the stuff in the garage? You usually leave that unlocked right? I really really want to look at these things. I appreciate very much that you took the time to write down dates...it would help me a lot..." Me: "I don't know mom...that's what im trying to figure out in therapy right now." Mom: "Sorry Andy if you want the stuff tomorrow you can get it from me I want to see you . You don't have to stay and talk. You said you would come over today well I'm going to hold you to that." Me: "Ok. I'll pick up the stuff when I'm ready to talk face to face." Mom: "Ok I'm sorry you feel that way about me remember you have mail to pick up to when ever your ready to see me love mom:-*" I just can't believe that she's holding these things "hostage" in a way. I feel disgusted, completely neglected, and angry as hell. I'm starting to remember her doing this kind of thing to me when I was a kid. Ugh.

Hello fellow freedom lovers, It seems like an eternity since I was last on this site. I don't know what the 'topic' really is for what I want to say, but I would like to share my recent experiences with some relatively like minded people. The world can be a lonely place for an anarchist. So, in October I got married. I am super happy about my relationship with my wife. She is the best. And she herself is not the problem. The problem is that I committed the cardinal sin of marrying a rival gang member. You see, my wife is American, and I am Scottish. Not the original West Side Story, but you get the idea. To cut a long story short, the visa process in the UK is now extremely convoluted, expensive, and deliberately confusing. After months of reading the forums, reading the small print reading the forms, we started to make our application. Then as far as I can tell, the UK Border Agency changed a few details and forms. So we made our application online for a marriage visa. This would allow my wife to come and stay in the UK for 6 months so that we could be married, and then once she was here we would apply for her temporary residence status for 2 years. In theory that would allow her to live and work in the UK as my spouse. So this was always known as a 'fiancee' visa. It is now known as a marriage Visa. We didn't know that there are two types of Marriage Visa. They are stamped as 'Marriage', or 'Marriage-Visitor'. So we filled out the paperwork, made our appointments, paid our £1000 ($1600 USD) appointment fee, to make the application in person. So, we went to a prison style detention centre in Glasgow. It is literally crawling with thug like security guards, and all of the immigration officers were behind bullet proof glass, for obvious reasons. The incompetence of the guards was the first omen that struck me. We went through the pat down and metal detector just like at an airport. Except this guard who searched my bag removed a leatherman multi tool/knife from my bag. I thought 'great, here we go'. But to my astonishement, the guard said, 'oh wow, thats a nice tool, etc, and started showing to the other guards, before handing it back to me on the other side of the gate 'Great Leatherman Pal'. Unbelievable. Anyway, we were shoved from window, to window to be interrogated by various thug-aucrats. Nobody really cared about our marriage certificate (We had a beautiful god-free marriage, but we were forced to at least have a city registrar do our ceremony in Edinburgh. It hurt deeply for me, to ask any kind of permission to marry. Let alone, only be allowed to marry in 'city approved locations'. But I had no choice but to play the statist game.) Instead, they were more interested in me proving my income is greater than the 'legal minimum required to sponsor a spouse as a resident'. This is a recent requirement in the UK. In any case, I was not worrried because our marriage was legitimate in the eyes of the state, and my income is double the minimum requirement even after tax. So I brought my contracts of employment, and salary statements for the past 18 months as proof. But that wasn't enough. I had to leave the immigration centre, and run around town for an hour to get bank statement s for the last 2 years, stamped as authentic by the bank. Of course my question was 'why didn't you tell us that requirement on the form or on the website?'. She looked at me, like I was an idiot. Her reply was 'How else do I know that your payslips actually mean you are recieving money?'. Anyway, after an epic run around town, and coming back through security, they sat us down and told us, that because our fiance visa had one little word extra on it, my wife had to leave the country. We replied, 'but the fiance visa no longer exists. This is a marriage visit visa. Now we're married, she's applying to stay'. Imagine a Big 'Game-Show sty;e noise of incorrectness'. They started trying to explain to us like we were idiot children that 'you got the same visitor visa that madonna got when she visited Scotland for her wedding, what you need is the other one'. Rage building. So, what do we do now? Well, you leave the country and apply again. Which form do we fill out? The same one you have in your hand now. Right. How long does that take? Oh, nobody knows. What? Yeah, 2 months, up to 8 months, no guarantees. OK. So we have no way to appeal this? Here's an email address where you can complain, but the error was yours, so it's unlikely you have a valid complaint. Excuse me? Yes. OK, but your website specifically says 'we cannot tell you which form to fill out'. So how were we supposed to know? I'm sorry, thats all I can tell you. (THIS WAS THE MOST GALLING BIT:) "If it's any consolation, the marriage visa used to be the easiest one to get until quite recently, but now they're cracking down on dole (welfare) cheats" Right. So I said, 'but my wife has £12k in her checking acct, I have £6k, and my salary more than double meets your requirements. You are telling me that she will be kidnapped and forced away from her husband for getting one word wrong on a form, that you guys invented. So she and I have no right to be together, and even a government sponsored marriage certificate means nothing any more. 'I'm sorry, that's the rules', was the predictable reply. My wife was in tears, and I was shaking at this point. Rather than take someone hostage with my trusty Leatherman, as I apparently DID have the right to do, we dragged our Non-Aggressive arses off out the door. It was at this point my wife told me, that whilst I was running between banks trying to get evidence for my 'Application-Not-To-Be-Kidnapped' form, that a South African (White) woman was sitting in the window next to us explaining 'why she had been arrested so many times whilst she was here on a student visa'. Literally, her response was 'It wasnt my fault, they just came into my house and set me up. My wife was shaking and crying and saying 'I don't understand? If they government gives out welfare, but they don't want me to take welfare, then WHY DONT THEY JUST 'NOT GIVE ME WELFARE'? Exactly. And here is kind of my tralking point in this post. This was as clear an epiffany as I have ever had. They create all these bullshit departments, so that when they do something bad that causes you pain, they can call it 'Immigration'. When they do something you like, that gives you relief when you're in another form of pain, they call it 'The National Health Service', or 'Welfare', or 'Free Shit'. Just like Zeus blames Thor when it rains, or whatever. You get all these little subdivisions of government departments, to obfuscate the concept of 'Government / Governance by force'. Just like the bible bashers say, well I like this little bit of the bible, but ignore the rest of it, so I cannot question the concept. And none of it made any sense. My wife literally had her dream job, lined up and waiting for her in Edinburgh, managing a bridal store. There is some tax-paying economic value they are missing out on right now, because of their retarded policy. Anyway, I work offshore in North Sea Oil. This all happened on the Thursday of that week. I was due to go back to Sea on the Monday. My wife had to book a flight home for the sunday night. I had to strip down our apartment, and move everything into my folks house for storage. At the same time all weekend I had to look into a green card application for me to go the US now, since it is the only way my wife and I can both continue to work and earn money. She had abstained from working for over 12 months, so she could be with me in the UK. The stress of moving out of my apartment, and preparing to go back to Sea, in the middle of a North Sea winter, was so much for me, I had my first panic attack. I went to hospital, in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. A prestigious looking building, until you get inside the emergency room of this Socialised healthcare hell-hole, and find bloody bandages under your seat in the waiting room, the hallways FULL of people in beds with no ward to go to, folk in wheelchairs pissing and shitting all over the floor, and the sound beeps turning to solid tones all around you. Truly, a bad fucking weekend for us. Get one word wrong on a form, and god help you. Anyway, my free market god-send of an employer is very kindly now paying for my flights to the US every month. I have the lofty privilege of 'Visitng' my wife, for up to three months at a time now, under the US Visa Waiver Program. Last week I sent in my application for a Green Card, and my wife has kindly spent half of her savings setting us up in a lovely apartment in Charleston. So now, I'm living without the right to 'work' in the same land as my wife. This obviously adds all kind of risks and stresses to our plans on having a baby at the moment. (Yes, Charleston, SC. My father btw is an Alex Jones fan, and even after knowing that I'd been hospitalised the night before with a strong panic attack, spent our last few hours together as we gutted my Scottish apartment, telling me exactly how, if I make it through the airport without being irradiated in the US, then I'm just gonna get Nuked in Charleston. Way to show some empathy Dad ) The upside of all of this trauma, is simply this: My wife officially posted on FB 'I'm now an Anarchist'. So that is my story. Here is my question. To what extent do our 'statist priestly class', use the ideals/tricks of polytheism, to manipulate our emotional attachments to government? And how does epistomology help us deal with this trauma, of threats of violence inflicted upon us at every turn in modern society? I think seeing violence and tax farming for what it truly is, has really helped salvage the first year of my marriage, and helped reassure my wife that we are not 'deserving' of such treatment. Knowing for sure, that injustice has been done to us, and what caused it all, was very little to do with our own actions, has truly, truly helped our emotional survival. Does Philosophy help you survive?

I've thought about talking about this for a long time, and I'm still thinking. I feel a lot of anger towards my biological father. So much that I despise the fact I even use the would father to describe him. There was a lot of domestic violence, verbal abuse, and mental insanity in our household growing up. He wasn't completely to blame for all of it, but that doesn't mean he isn't responsible for the evil he did. He used to hit my brother a lot, he sexually assaulted me when I was 11, and mutilated my beloved pet. Combine that with abandoning me when I was deathly ill, maybe now you have an idea as to why I'm angry. I was in therapy for this from age 11 to 13. It helped me at the time but didn't resolve my feelings of hostility. I haven't spoken or seen him in 9 years. I recently moved back to my hometown where he resides somewhere. My brother and him are close. My brother recently told me his side of the story. He says he sexually assaulted me because he didn't know how to cope with me growing up. He has expressed over and over again how terribly sorry he is for what he did. So much so that my brother says it eats him alive inside. I've been trying to get to the root of all of this for some time but time and time again I hit a brick wall. Is it possible to forgive him? Could this be the reason why I have never felt emotional intimacy in relationships? Is this the reason why I don't trust men (in relationships)? I would like your complete and honest opinion. Thank you for your time.

Hello Freedomainers, I have recently contacted Stefan, through the Sunday Show, during a trip with my family to the country of origin. The question that I was struggling with was how to resolve the problem with my father that has been going on for my whole life, my lack of choice. The problem of screaming and threatening to get the outcome he deemed as best case for my life. So I had very little choice and whenever I had preferences that did not agree with his views I would get punished physically or verbally, to "correct" my behaviour. Here is the link to the Sunday Call in Show recording from Stefan's page: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvOIodsjO-k I guess after finishing the podcast and after listening to Stefan's argument for how I should approach the situation, I felt quite anxious about implementing it and also doubtful that it would not work. So I pondered on it and after a while, when I returned to United States, alone with my father, the conversation started but not by me. I was constantly verbally threatened and humiliated about why I choose not to continue my Computer Science Degree which I had completed almost an Associate's Degree worth of material, some non transferable since my poor grades. My father had invested about $4000 plus money for transport and books to it and the rest I paid with loans about $6000. I don't recall making the most informed decision about my major, nor about going to college. As soon as I left high school my father had requested me to take some summer courses at the community college where we lived. At the time I had no working permit since my parents had not yet overcome that barrier due to my father constantly moving from job to job and not being able to find any sponsor for the Green Card application. The fear of having the same retaliation, over me preferring not to go to college, from my father would bring much verbal abuse and I would be thrown out of the house if I disobeyed. (these threats would be casually dropped at dinner parties and as a rule that I had heard numerous other times in other situations). I thus kept my grades a secret and kept up a facade of truth about my grades and school work. I would also be constantly lectured about habits that I had picked up such as staying up to late and not having good study practices. I was scared of being thrown out of the house and not have any protection due to my inability to work. This continued until my mother acquired her Green Card and thus the family. Maybe a year after that I bumped into Stefan's youtube page, and I started with self-knowledge. I have made the decision that going to school now and having to pay another $50,000 for the rest of the Computer Science degree which I do not find that I can place my passion into as I have been doing with philosophy and psychology. During my decision process my parents requested an official transcript from my school and I gave in and wrote the application, and they discovered about my failing grades. Back to after I returned to America, the verbal abuse continued, and my father demanded to give him reasons why going to college is a good thing and why finishing something that you started is a good thing and that what I was doing, by not continuing, was a bad thing. This happened almost 2 weeks straight, the conversations initiated by him full of verbal humiliation, threats and manipulation, If I did not comply to what he wanted. Every time I would state that it was my choice and I did not want to go and that I needed help with resolving some of the problems that he had caused in my childhood. After my mother and brother arrived to United States two weeks after we had I began to stop talking about it and also left the house in order to avoid not being yelled at after numerously telling him that yelling and and the verbal humiliation is destructive to be and brings a lot of fear. Then the manipulations. If I would continue to leave (leave the conversation) I would have to pay him to stay there and if I would leave I should not come back. I got progressively more angry and I did something regrettable. My father came into my room and he started as always to tell me what I was doing wrong and why I could not clean my room in a timely fashion. I told him I did not want to talk to him, and he kept screaming and I told him to go scream at other people to see if they would listen. At that point I was in a fight or flight state. He brought up that in his house he gets to scream as he wants and if I am crazy and need to see a psychologist to go do that, something that I mentioned to him about me needing some psychological help to resolve some of the problems he and my mother have caused. My anger took the best of me and I pounded on my desk, and screamed “Get Out!”I obviously cannot handle being around either my father and even my mother. I have a younger brother that is going through almost the same situation that I was going through when I was younger but in a way probably more because my parents have no choice but to be with him; I was sent to my grandparents for my younger age and I had very little exposure to my father or my mother as oppose to my brother. There is no community or family help that they are a part of here in the isolation that they choose in United States.I have had a few friends tell me I could stay at their houses or on campus with them, but I am just recently starting a job in the area.I do not know how I should handle myself, and what should I do in case of my father always verbally abusing me, until I can get out of the house. I have even had threats upon my property. I fear for my sanity. What I had exposed was rage directed at him and frankly I just got out of there and stopped shortly after that happened. I feel like the rage, even as Stefan pointed, even if it is directed at the right people, it is still continuing the cycle that my parents put me through. And that also angers me and frightens me. And what about my brother, what if I leave I usually was there for protection at times and for his support? I know there are social workers that I could call but I’m just scared of where he would end up or if that will only provoke my father even more. Lengthy, but you guys decide on my communication effectiveness.