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I had another thread on Self Knowledge similar to this but maybe the philosophy board can help me out with this one. I was conversing with someone who is very anti-porn and after considering FDR's perspective, he gave an argument that I can't seem to rebut on why it is immoral to consume porn. The argument goes like this: Harming children (or anyone) is morally wrong (considering it's not self-defense). Consider the fact that IT IS POSSIBLE that there is a child, young adult, or likewise out there that is emotionally needy or unstable. This child COULD go onto the internet and seek out ways to combat his anxiety and emotional emptiness. Porn is one of the most common methods of pain erasure. If you go onto a porn site and click a video, that video has a counter for views and most likely has ads that support the site financially. By doing this, you potentially give money to the site allowing it to stay up that much longer, expand that much bigger, and increase that particular video's popularity to the point where it's more likely to show up on searches. Now considering all this, your actions COULD have led to this kid or person finding this video and becoming aroused/addicted to this new form of pain management which has a chance of consuming their lives due to their lack of innate self-knowledge. Therefor, porn consumption is wrong due to the possibility of it doing harm to others. You will never know whether or not clicking on that porn video will have that butterfly effect, therefor not clicking in the first place is the only moral option. This argument seems to make logical sense but the total condemnation of porn based on what could potentially happen to someone somewhere that you'd have no idea about just seems a little self-attacky for me. I can't put my finger on why though. Thoughts?

This is the kind of publicity that we need.

I hope this will be useful to you, it’s an example of applying the principles I'm learning from Nathaniel Branden and Alice Miller and Marshall Rosenberg: I bought a used phone last week and after fixing some parts I realized it was locked and I didn't know how to get past that. The next day while preparing lunch and thinking about this problem I felt like a flushing inside my whole body, intense fear, I almost fainted, I guess from blood getting sucked into the spleen in anticipation for a life-threatening blow. Facing the thought that I had made “a mistake" in not thinking ahead enough when making this purchase was overwhelming. Using Alice Miller's idea that this exaggerated fear is likely a reaction to events in my childhood, I thought of how I grew up being very careful not to get caught doing anything I might get in trouble for, and the link became clear. If as a child I had spent money on a useless locked phone my dad would have been very angry with me because I wouldn’t have been a son he could have been proud of, which I guess unconsciously triggered in him the fear he felt from his childhood when he needed to be a perfect son otherwise his dad would be angry, etc. in a repetition going back from parent to child possibly many generations. As a child I wasn't aware of being afraid, probably because allowing myself to feel this intense fear would have hampered me in doing whatever I needed to do to not get caught. As a result I learned to repress this fear along with most of the events associated with it. Until I read Alice Miller's books and articles (alice-miller.com) and until I tried to imagine myself as a child whenever I experienced one of these strong and puzzling reactions, I was surprised to not be able to remember how afraid I felt in the few instances I did remember being threathened or hit. Now the repression is lifting and the fear is gradually coming back. The next step was to do something about the fear. Realizing that the adult I am now wasn’t in immediate danger standing there in the kitchen brought some relief, but not enough. The fear had been replaced by feeling helpless and lonely, I still didn’t know how to get the phone to work and stop the thoughts of “I am no good”. I longed for comforting arms, someone to understand what I was feeling, who would support me through it. Again this brought me back to my first years, how I didn’t get this comfort and support, and how my reaction had been to put all of it out of my mind because these experiences of abandonment had been too painful (mostly my father getting angry at me and yelling and hitting, whereas I looked up to him for protection and guidance, and my mother who could barely protect us children from him and found it difficult to comfort me when I needed it). This next realization, that once more it was unmet needs from the past that were affecting the present and causing these feelings, brought some more relief and I was able to go through the rest of the day without being so hard on myself when thinking of what to do with this telephone. Looking online for information on the effects of abandonment and how to recover from them, I found http://abandonment.net/articles where I read that fear of abandonment is really the primal fear and it is part of being human, and so the problem isn’t so much having this fear, as how we handle it (although people who live through extreme abandonment such as losing a parent during early childhood can be affected much more than most and it can be much more difficult for them to train to reassure themselves). Laying sleepless at 5am the next night thinking through all this, things then fell into place (most of these past 3 years I've spent doing self-work, this didn't come to me easily). Here was the idea I had been missing in order to better understand Nathaniel Branden’s statement “Nobody is coming to save you” and Marshall Rosenberg’s “It’s our responsibility to meet our own needs”. I had been thinking that I needed someone else to get reassurance from, as a child I had expected this from my mother and because she hadn’t been able to give me this past my first year I think, from around 7 I turned to looking for reassurance from girlfriends. It hadn’t occurred to me that I might be able to comfort and reassure myself. I am now training to give myself the security I need and so far it seems to be working, I am feeling more energy and more calm, less worrying and less confusion. So this is an example of how this process has been progressing for me, making sense of my past and understanding my needs and beginning to take steps to meet them. If you have any suggestions or comments I’m interested in hearing them. I want to express my gratitude to Nathaniel Branden and Alice Miller and Carl Rogers and Marshall Rosenberg, whose work helped me understand the importance of feelings and emotions (otherwise I wouldn’t have recognized it was fear and helpessness and loneliness that I felt, as I couldn’t recognize or admit to these feelings in myself, before), and how to think in terms of meeting universal human needs instead of thinking in terms of morally right and morally wrong, and to learn what self-esteem is and how to develop it. I am also grateful to Wes Bertrand for introducing me to this body of knowledge and for helping me make sense of it. And I also have immense gratitude for the friend who showed interest in helping me explore my childhood and reconnect with my feelings, instead of only having an intellectual understanding of them, and thus to unlock my empathy. (That’s why I had and I think most people today have very little empathy, because of this unconscious repression defense and not because we are “sociopaths” who have no capacity for empathy). Other friends have helped me as well, such as LovePrevails and Lens here on FDR. And recently I’ve been lucky to be able to trade with a student therapist who trains on me as a test client while I get an hour of support each week for free, which I’m very happy for because I would have trouble paying for that much therapy right now. A big Thank You to all! To give you an idea of how big a change this has been for me: before having children I spent a decade reading psychology and self-help books, and the best I could find were Virgina Satir’s books, which helped me some but didn’t help me understand the mechanisms at play. I did go to therapy as well, but the 2 therapists I saw apparently didn’t understand this either. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to come across all these important ideas and these high-empathy people in recent years, which in pre-internet times were even more difficult to chance upon, I would have kept on repressing all these feelings and memories, and upon seeing that the phone was blocked I would likely have found someone else to blame and got angry at them, such as my ex-wife, thinking it was her fault for having burdened me with trivialities that had thrown off my concentration and brought about this “mistake”. Or I would have gotten angry at my children. I used to go to any length to escape recognizing my part in any mishap, because I had this overwhelming fear that I was trying hard to not become aware of.

I got very emotional during the second call, as soon as the second caller did (who was talking about moral responsibility and how he tormented his sister). I started to feel defensive and angry when Stef attempted to uncover the caller's reason for tormenting his sister in the moment. One thought that came into my head was "That's not important, just blame the parents" - a particularly disturbing thought because I realize that that is likely exactly how his parents likely justified their abuse of him (though they are obviously far more culpable for torturing him as adults), and is one of the first excuses my dad made for his sadistic behavior towards me as a child (he was quick to deflect his abuse towards me with how his parents treated him). Also, a feeling of horror came over me as Stef empathized with his sister - it brought to mind all the images I have in my mind of me making my sister cry and yell, and all the times I mocked her and filled her so full of rage, she couldn't bear it and ran into her room, locked the door, and made gutteral sounds as a desperate attempt to get me to leave her alone - memories which I've tried in vain to disassociate from myself. I started crying when listening to the podcast and felt immense sadness and anger. I haven't even finished listening to the call, but I think for me the reason for seeking out and starting conflicts with her where I could cause her pain was obviously that I enjoyed causing suffering in others and was becoming a full-on sadist. As I'm typing this I'm getting even more angry at my parents and I want to yell at the top of my lungs "YOU TURNED ME INTO A SADISTIC MONSTER!" It is starting to make sense to me why I was so depressed from 11th grade onward - I no longer had anyone to unload my rage onto - I no longer had a helpless little sister and my brother became bigger than me (he is 2 years younger and she is 5 years younger) - I was one of the smallest kids at school. So I had a brain wired for sadism in an environment which I had no power in - which explains why I became so withdrawn and anti-social and fearful of strangers. My brain was telling me that the world was a win-lose environment, I was now in the lose category - the victim category, and so my actions reflected that of a victim. It seems (based on Stef's actions during the call, and during the call with the guy who put other kids in the hospital) that in order to heal from having inflicted harm on others, you must give yourself responsibility for the damage you've caused others, no matter how old you were, and no matter what was modeled for you which led to that behavior being seen as an feasible option. This is hard for me to accept emotionally, though obviously that has no bearing on the validity of that idea. I suspect that my father and mother are both full-blown sadists, though neither of them were ever diagnosed (though my mom has been taking medication for schizophrenia for a long time). I suspect that if I had been big and strong (I'm fully grown now and 5'8, 125lbs), I would have been a vicious and dangerous bully physically, like the second caller in "Shame-Based DNA Death," so it's hard for me to really look at myself as any different from him as I chose the means of sadism which I could get away with (verbal abuse, not just towards my sister, but towards a couple of easy targets at school) just as he chose the means of sadism which he could get away with. There have been plenty of times since I found out about this show (which was about 6 years ago) when I almost wished that I didn't have a conscience because it has been so unbelievably painful to uncover and explore the truth about my history and there have been so many times along the way when I've been unable or unwilling to face the truth about the things I've done and the things which have been done to me - thoughts came up of "How could this be true? How could my parents have been so evil? How could it have really been that bad? How could I have done that?" Even though I've done a lot of self-work through journaling and therapy so far, It seems like every time I explore an incident from my past, 10 more come to the surface and I push them away to a later date (I know this is not technically true, but I do feel overwhelmed by how much bullshit I have to slog through just to achieve a reasonable level of happiness, or at least not fearing punishment from others on a daily basis). I know that I've done a lot of work so far and made a lot of progress from when I started therapy, but I can't rid myself of the thought that I need to work even harder and give myself less leeway to spend time on other things. It's the same thing in therapy - every session I feel that I have to push important things to the side for the sake of time for the things which I perceive to be even more important (which has its benefits but obviously drawbacks as well). I only have a couple of memories of my dad playing with me when I was a child, the other memories consist of him ignoring me, mocking me, and denying me the attention I needed from him and hitting me with on the bare-ass with wooden spoons, metal spatchulas, and a plastic pasta-stirring spoon with spikes. My mom hit me with the same items, frequently sicked my dad on me because he could hit harder, and though she was not neglectful in the sense that she spent a lot of time with me in early childhood (stay-at-home mom who homeschooled me), I can see very clearly now that she was trying to turn me into her subservient little pet and only gave me affection for doing what she wanted me to do and the threat of punishment was ALWAYS there if I openly expressed disagreement or argued with her, whether that punishment was physical (hitting, washing my mouth out with soap, making me eat too much hot sauce) or withdrawal of affection. She was unable to cope with reality by the time I was 9, and she now lives in a group home across the country, heavily medicated past the point of having humanity - she may as well be dead in my opinion. My parents heavily indoctrinated me with fundamentalist Christianity and punished me very frequently for supposed immorality, so according to the argument Stef made in this podcast as I interpreted it, they hold a very high degree of moral responsibility for what they did to me and how it affected me (please feel free to correct me if I misunderstood or misinterpreted Stef). Hopefully it is clear to anyone reading this why it is so emotionally hard for me to take responsibility for the way I treated my sister for YEARS, I'm talking 6 or 7 years of making her life hell, even though I logically accept it to a certain extent (I think my parents are even more to blame than I am). I felt angry when Stef said he couldn't understand why other children in abusive environments don't stick up for each other. The first thought that came to mind was, "Because you (meaning me) didn't side with your sister over your abusers, you are/were evil or at least morally inferior to Stef - who faced lots of abuse and neglect and was a good enough person to not hurt others when he knew how much he hated being hurt." On the other hand, I also have the thought that "If I was morally inferior, it was the fault of my parents, and my childhood must have been worse and/or at least I must have had some genetic predisposition towards sadism which Stef did not have." I later had the thought that "Comparing how good of a person you are to how good of a person Stef is is not productive or useful - how you deal with your wrongdoings moving forward is the only thing that matters." I'm a bit lost on how to reconcile these thoughts into some kind of emotional clarity, and I also suspect the caller may have been dealing with the same types of thoughts. Though, now that I've kept listening to the podcast, I can see that the alternative to me taking my anger out on my sister was probably worse - likely killing my parents or going on a shooting spree (something I've had a fantasy about doing several times in my life), or killing myself. That gives me some comfort, but it doesn't change the fact that I did those things and have to live with those memories which is still horrible. I apologize for the wayward nature of this post, but I fear that if I don't write this now, it will be a LONG time before these thoughts return to my mind and desperately want some discussion with rational and empathetic people about what I've written here.

http://news.yale.edu/2014/06/11/brain-retains-signs-childhood-trauma-and-warning-substance-abusers Brain retains signs of childhood trauma — and a warning for substance abusers By Bill Hathaway June 11, 2014 Brains of people mistreated in childhood have less brain volume in areas of the hippocampal complex shaded in yellow. These areas of the brain associated with emotion and memory processing may also put substance abusers at greater risk of relapse, a new Yale study shows. People abused as children show reduced brain volume in regions governing emotion, learning, and memory, deficits that make them more vulnerable to relapse — and relapses of greater severity — if they become substance abusers, a new study by Yale School of Medicine researchers shows. The study, published online June 11 in the journal JAMA Psychiatry, identifies potential biological markers that can identify addicts at high risk of relapse. “We can begin to think about ways to address the underlying pathology in substance abuse and explore use of exercise and some medications to stimulate new growth and connections in brain cells in these specific brain regions to help restore trauma-related brain atrophy,” said Rajita Sinha, the Foundations Fund Professor of Psychiatry, director of the Yale Stress Center, and senior author of the study. The Yale team studied 175 patients being treated for substance abuse and healthy controls, and conducted a brain scan on the participants. Members of both groups included individuals who had reported being abused as children. Those who had been abused showed reduction in brain-cell volume in the hippocampal complex, areas of the brain involved in emotion and memory processing and in regulating learning. Substance abusers with lower brain volumes specifically in these trauma-affected areas showed greater severity of addiction relapse than those with higher volume in these regions and those with low trauma histories. “As childhood trauma is highly common in substance abuse, addressing these trauma-related structural brain changes can help us develop better treatment plans to promote successful recovery from addiction,” Sinha said. Other authors of the study include Nicholas T. Van Dam of New York University, and Kenneth Rando, Marc N. Potenza, and Keri Tuit of Yale. The work was funded by the National Institutes of Health.

I decided to make this topic to expose and try to deal with my traumas and I hope you could participate. Even if no one sees this topic i have at least expressed my thoughts and emotions. I have this issue around people, for some reason, that makes me very anxious whenever I try to talk about me, my thoughts and feelings and when I in fact do in fact express myself I feel very bad and anxious and I become fearfull of the other persons response. This problem makes me very reluctant to engage in social interactions as well as making me sound and act like a robot because I have to evade certain words, expressions and actions which is very stressing. Other horrible implications about this consists of reacting in a negative fashion when people respond to my thoughts (i don't always act on it because i know some people are trying to help for example i tend to get mentaly hostile to some things that Stefan says but the way he speaks disarms my defensive mechanisms) and the inability to differentiate between abusive responses and genuine spontaneous and healthy responses. Maybe it's just the kind of people i'm with....Any thoughts on this ?

I read an article a year two ago about a study that had been done that helped victims of child abuse overcome some of the emotional trauma from their abuse by writing about it. I guess I didn't think much of it at the time, or thought they were just talking about journaling or whatever. But reading it again recently I realized it might actually be pretty helpful. I recall some years ago trying to put together a story of my childhood to help me recall things that had happened and dramatic events traumatic events. I didn't get very far with the project partially because I type very slowly and partially because I couldn't emotionally connect with anything I was writing about. According to research that they have done at the University of Texas writing provides a means to externalize traumatic experience and make it less overwhelming. So this evening with the help of this article I wrote about some traumatic experiences from my childhood. One of being very scared by my father telling me about the boogie man when I was about three and then having a fever dream and seeing the boogie man's footprints on the ceiling. And another experience of being abandoned and lost at about the same age in a park when I was out walking with my parents. It really amazed me how much those experiences still triggered genuine emotions even though they happens nearly 30 years ago. I think that writing about the feelings that you had about traumatic events in your childhood and how you feel about them now can be immensely helpful. I'm now thinking that I will continue this project until I can get a firm grasp on much of the traumatic events that happened in my childhood. There's only so far that abstract understanding can get you. I've often wondered where Stef gets such clarity on the traumatic events of his childhood, and it's no doubts because he did a lot of therapy and journaling. I mean just this evening I've discovered that my father is a sadist or at least leans in that direction because he thinks it's a good idea or funny to tell a three-year-old about the boogie man who is going to come and get him. I have a daughter who is almost 3, and I would never tell her a malicious story of that kind. But beyond that I also realize that there are some things that will scare a child that's the parent cannot control. So for instance my wife brought home some live crabs and tried to cook them. Being inexperienced with live crabs she let them escape the pot and they ran all over the kitchen and scared my daughter when she saw them. My daughter was scared for weeks afterwards and had bad dreams about the crabs. Even now many months later she was very scared by a crab toy and we had to show her that it was just a toy and not scary. The points in telling that story is that my daughter was scared of the crabs but because she had caring and empathetic parents she has been able to deal with that, and we have not tried cooking more live crabs in the house so we are not re-inflict in any kind of scares on her. But with parents who delight in the idea of telling a child that a scary monster is coming to get them I had no one to help me process my fear or to help me feel safe. Anyhow that was a fairly long-winded way of saying that you should really look into writing about your traumatic experiences if you are having trouble processing them or if you want to gain some more self-knowledge.

I was posting on a recent thread about a user who has cuckold fantasies and it reminded me of a very disturbing memory which I have never shared with anyone. My parents sometimes had me, my younger brother, and my younger sister sometimes would bathe in the same tub. I was born in 1991, my younger brother in 1993, and my younger sister in 1996. I have memories of trying to get my little sister to kiss my penis in the bathtub. I called it my "little man" as a euphemism and I remember manipulating her into doing it, and that she never wanted to do it. If I remember correctly, I was 8 or 9, which would make her 3 or 4 and my brother 6 or 7. Even though I know that my parents are to blame for having us in the same bathtub, there is the shame of having to keep the secret (because I had no bond with either parent), the shame of imprinting my younger sister who I love with this inappropriate and humiliating sexual memory (she moved in with a friend, and we don't speak very often, and it will be very humiliating to bring up to her). My mom may as well be dead because she is on so many anti-depressants and anti-psychotics that she is like a zombie, and she was the one around the most for raising us (and lives out of state in a group home) - so I can never really gain closure by asking her why we were put in that situation. My dad's excuse was "We needed to save hot water," which is obvious bullshit because in 10 seconds I thought of the fact that our parents could have had us set timers for showers and I KNOW we had enough disposable income to pay for the heating of the water. But then he told me that his parents had him and his younger sister bathe in the same tub, and so it became obvious that he was just repeating what was done to him without examining whether or not it was necessary or healthy (the same way he beat and ignored me the way his father did to him). I haven't brought this up with my therapist yet, but there's just so much trauma I have to deal with from my past that this isn't necessarily that high on the list. That being said, it is important enough to me to reach out to this community for some insight and feedback on how to bring it up with my sister, who is now 17.

A quick new video on how and why do people become narcissistic.

My interview with Daniel Mackler (Aug 27, 2013). Topics we cover:1. 00:00 Intro; The Value of Self-Work2. 06:12 The Significance of Childhood Environment3. 12:58 What Is Child Abuse?4. 22:16 Nature vs. Nurture; "Mental Disorders"5. 35:05 The Harm of (Psych) Drugs6. 38:52 Factors and Tools for Healing7. 47:48 False vs. True Help; Advice for Helpers; Growth and Family; Outro