It's time to rip the cover off what really works to ditch addiction, depression, anger, anxiety, and all other kinds of human suffering. No, not sobriety. We're talking the F-word here: Freedom. We'll share, straight from the trenches, what we have learned from leaving our own addictions behind, and coaching hundreds of others to do the same—and since it's such a heavy topic, we might as well have a good time while we're at it. [00:27.9]
Bob: And welcome back! Let's take a dive today into an old Hebrew Jewish tradition, and then turn the corner into looking at society today. Shall we? We're going to talk about having a scapegoat society and by the end of this, I want you to be able to identify within yourself. Everything I'm doing right is to give you a way to see past all the stuff that's keeping you stuck, keeping you feeling miserable, or keeping you in compulsive behaviors or keeping you in a place where life is just not that exciting. And so here we are, if we go back in time, back to the time of Moses and the Israelites, they leave Egypt according to the Bible, the old Testament, and they go through the wilderness and they're given a law and they're given all of these different things to do. And at one point in time, in the year, one day of the year, Yom Kippur, the day of atonement, there is a scapegoat and the priest, the high priest and obviously if you're Jewish and you're listening to this and you know more about this, send me more information. I'm always curious to learn stuff. I'm doing my best to make sure that it's accurate. [01:40.8]
But there's a scapegoat and the high priest he would go and he would basically pass all the sins of all the people onto this goat and it would be let out, I think, into the wilderness. Meaning the scapegoat is this idea that we're gonna, we're gonna make this one thing, the carrier of all the blame and all the shame and all the guilt and all the wrongs of the people so that the people can be free of it. And in, so doing, you know, Christians are looking that as a precursor and a preamble to see that's what Jesus did, he took all the sins of the world upon himself. He became the scapegoat at the feast of Passover, right? He became the one that took all of, and I think Yom Kippur is a different day of the year, but he took all of the sins of the people of the world past, present, and future. And then he went out into the wilderness and he suffered for all of those things, right. He bore the, the punishment for everything that everybody else did. [02:36.9]
Now, this is an idea that's been around for thousands of years. I'm sure that it's in other, other religious traditions. It's not just in Judaism and Christianity, the idea of a scapegoat or someone to blame the fall guy, if you've heard modern thrillers and spy movies and whatnot. The guy that we're going to pin everything on this happens in political movies and, and sadly, I think a lot of our mentality around the world has been shaped by movies. Not necessarily intentionally by the movie industry, maybe sometimes intentionally as conspiracy theorists would have you. And, and there may be a lot that's going on in terms of the mentality of the people. But overall, you know, think about the movies today, you know, when I was growing up, I think we talked about this at one point in time, it was like fairytales and the, the guy, the good guy gets the girl and all that other stuff. And I grew up believing that and it didn't work out the way that I thought it would. Sorry, guys, I did get a girl and she is freaking amazing, but it did not play out the way that I thought it was going to play out, me going and rescuing the damsel in distress. There was no distress in that woman, she is her own woman by all means. [03:45.0]
And me proving that I was capable enough just to rescue her, had nothing to do with it because I couldn't rescue her from anything. In fact, I put her through distress for a number of years because of how I was inside myself. So that's what I grew up with. The kids these days have got all the Marvel movies and everything else that's showing up where it's super hero talk, where it's like impending doom and doomsday. And we need special people that are going to basically lose nearly everything, trying to fight off the bad guy and barely make it by the skin of their teeth and only survive long enough for another band gotta show up. And so there's a lot of doomsday and things are coming and all of that stuff. And so our mentality has been shaped by this and we, we idolize these celebrities and these people, and we take in all of the messages conscious and unconscious that they're sending, and we have this mentality, right? [04:34.7]
So the idea of a scapegoat, someone that we're going to pin things on, I mean, who gets blamed for everything that happens in the US? The current United States President. Who gets blamed for it? Oh, the party that the president's a part of. Who gets blamed for tax issues? The IRS. Who gets blamed for faulty customer products, right? The person who sold it, even if they didn't know that the manufacturer had just had a defect in it or something like that, or Amazon, you know, the shipping went wrong. And so Amazon gets blamed for the shipping when maybe ups was the carrier and you know, who gets blamed for all these things? We have a mentality in our society of a scapegoat, and it's been around for thousands of years. Is this a healthy thing? Now I know a lot of people want to argue that it is a healthy thing if they're looking at it from a religious standpoint, to say that look as humans, we are flawed as beings, we need help from a divine source. We need someone to take all the brunt of the pain of our punished and the punishment of our sins upon them, because we don't have the capacity to do it on our own. We need a scapegoat because if we don't have escape goat, we're hosed. [05:42.5]
And that generally is the mentality of a lot of religion, especially Christianity and Judaism. Those I know better than most but a lot of them, or that way that we need saving and we need we're, we're in such dire straits that we need saving. We need someone else to mercifully relieve us of the pain of our own problems. And this is where I want you to consider a different possibility. What I want you to consider is that all of the religious traditions around this, and all of, all of the, the pain that people went through and everything else that they suffered might just have less to do with whether or not you need saving as to whether or not you think you need saving, just let that sit in for a second. [06:28.3]
I am not here to take away from any religion in any way, shape or form, right. I was raised in a very Christian home. My mom came from her family, came from the Jewish side of things. And so I am not here to take away from it. It's a beautiful way of living. And I've seen some tremendous people come out of it, like, and tremendous experiences with it. I served as a missionary for a period of time. Like I'm not trying to take away from it at all, but I want you to consider something. When we have someone who will come in and take the punishment for what we did and take the blame, it gives us permission to forgive ourselves. I don't see personally that a God figure is busy holding grudges and needing us to perform certain acts in order for us to be forgiven or that there is any punishment beyond the punishment that's already happened. Meaning you did something and there was an, there was a reaction to it, there was a result of it either immediately, or it happened over time indirectly because well, somebody extorted money. And eventually the law came up, caught up with them and this, that, and the other happened, right? [07:27.2]
Versus I punched a wall and my fingers started bleeding immediate or not immediate, that is happening all the time. And there is, we don't need anything to save us from that because that's just what life is doing. Now we appreciate it for sure. But that has nothing to do with our internal wellbeing. And a lot of times the message of religion, I think gets distorted and people inadvertently take it in a negative way, even if they believe in religion still, like they still take it in a negative way because it feels like, Hey, look, there's this our powerful creator that somehow messed up when making humans and we're all sinners and we're all messed up and it's all our fault. And if we could've just been like Jesus, for instance, or if we could have just been like some other Saint or Sage, then we wouldn't have been having this problems. And we need someone to come and save us because we're schmucks. And if so, we just gotta do what he's telling us, and if we don't do what he's saying, he's going to be an absentee father. He's only going to give us answers in Yes, No or maybe, maybe. On occasion, he might give us signs, but most of the time he's sitting there waiting for us to just do what he's told us to do, and to be like Jesus. Instead of being like the things we were created as, and if we don't do it and we're going to get kicked out of the family forever and go to someplace called hell or outer darkness, or she old or some other place. [08:37.1]
And that message comes across kind of in a very negative light. And it says basically that as a human, because you were born as human, you have no control over this. You are just messed up, you are flawed as a being, this is something that's inside of all 12 step programs. You are like inherently flawed, and it's because of those flaws that you have all these problems. Now, from my viewpoint, from all of the hundreds of people, I've worked with talk to looked at probably thousands of people over the years, in some way, shape or form, whether we're presenting to them or anything else, they're not flawed as people, they're beautiful, their mind and body are working the way that they're designed. They just haven't figured out how to run them any more than you wouldn't call it toddler some flawed beam, because they don't know how to drive a truck yet. They just haven't learned a skill, but that has nothing to do with their intrinsic value or any flaws in their character at all, and so there's nothing wrong with you. [09:30.0]
It's just that, well, there are certain skills to learn, but the problem is that when something goes the way we don't want it to in life, almost always, we take it to mean there's something wrong with us and so immediately blame shows up. Now, so this was a while ago, it was snowing outside and my son, my oldest, we asked him to go shovel the back porch area where we had been walking to and from the driveway, right. I mean the garage. And he's like, I already did it and we're like, no, you didn't. And he gets in this Hough and immediately he's defensive, like it's in denial first. Denial is the first step. No, I don't need to do I already did it like, and then immediately from there when we're like, no, it needs to be done again, go do it. Immediately he goes to pointing to other people to deflecting and he's like, well, how come Saya doesn't get to do it? Or how come Noah doesn't get to do it? Or how come they don't. I do it more than they do. And immediately it's this like, look, they're the ones to blame, they're the ones that are getting, getting away with it. The reason that this thing isn't happening is because they're not pulling their weight. [10:31.7]
Eventually after that came a sense of like acceptance, but in like total, like defeated acceptance, it was like fine, whatever. And then eventually as we continued sitting with him that dissipated, and then he was finally able to just simply go and shovel the sidewalk and it wasn't a big deal, at all. But the reality is most of us need a scapegoat because we believe that when something is happening the way we don't want it to happen, that it, we have the belief, the lie shown to us by thousands of years of cultural history, that if we pin it on someone else, then we might be able to escape the misery that we've created in our own self. It's like drinking poison and hoping the other person will die from it. It just doesn't work and yet, somehow we believe it. And so we've developed a scapegoat society where it's really easy to blame everyone. It's easy to blame police officers, it's easy to blame church leaders, it's easy to, I mean, think about it like church leaders who are impeccable and have done their things, no matter what church they're in and then there's some members in the authority of the church, like in the ministry of the troops that have done horrible things. And then we want to blame the church as a whole for it, instead of just the person for it, right? We want to blame people all over the place because it gives us some sense of shifting our own responsibility for paying attention. [11:47.5]
If you or someone you know is looking to drop the F-bomb of “Freedom” in their life, whether that's from past trauma, depression, anxiety, addiction, or any other host of emotional and personal struggles, but they just don't know how or wants some help doing it. Head on over to thefreedomspecialist.com/feelbetternow and check out some of the things we've got in store for you or book a call so we can look at your unique situation and get you the help that you're looking for. [12:15.5]
So there's this beautiful book by Gavin de Becker, it's called ‘The Gift of Fear’ and it's really tiny print and kind of a thick book, but they might have it on audible, I don't know. But he's a guy that was him, it was his job to go track down serial killers. And that meant he had to sit down and he had to predict what they were going to do. He had to think like a serial killer. In fact, he gives an incidence where he was in though; I think it was Ted Bundy. He went in and he had, he was in the cell room with Ted Bundy interviewing him. And when he was finished, he called for the guard and the guard didn't come right away. The guard had been called off somewhere else or was distracted or something and didn't come right away. And there was this awkward silence where he was looking across the table and Ted Bundy was looking at him with his like satisfied smirk on his face because he could see just how uncomfortable Gavin de Becker was. [13:06.8]
Now Gavin de Becker his, his job is to think like a serial killer and then to predict the next move so that they can then go and capture them. And it's not just serial killers, I'm sure he tracks down other people as well, but these are some high profile cases. And so he's talking in this book about this gift of physiological fear, where the body has a sense of knowledge that, Oh my gosh, life is going to end if we don't move. And so he interviews all these people that somehow managed to escape and almost always, they all, they all have this saying that they're saying, when they're interviewed on TV and stuff like, Oh, he was such a nice guy. We never saw it coming and they're avoiding it, right. And they're just like, it's he's to blame for the whole situation. He's to blame for the whole scenario. Like nobody could have seen it coming. And yet when he interviews these, these victims further, he notices that in the middle of the interviews, they're going, you know, you know, I had this weird feeling at this point in time and I noticed this thing and I noticed that, and the things that saved their life were things that they had already picked up on, but they were unwilling to accept that they had the capacity to predict what was going on. [14:12.4]
We are in high stakes predictions all the time folks. Driving down the road, you have to predict when the person's going to change lanes, when they're going to turn, when they're gonna slow down, when they're gonna speed up, is the pedestrian gonna run across? How about that dog? We're traveling at breakneck speeds and making high stakes predictions all the time for our lives, and we do it unconsciously. We do it very intuitively. And yet when it comes down to predicting these things, most humans don't want to believe that they're capable of thinking like a serial killer, that they might be capable of thinking like Satan or that they might be capable of thinking like Jesus, which means that we, you and I have responsibility for everything that goes on in our life. And by responsibility I mean the ability to respond to it. You may not have the capacity to do anything about the circumstances, but you do have the ability to respond in whatever way is within your capacity, always. So let's say your hands and arms are tied, you may not have the skills to get out of that, but you, you still have the ability to respond to that in panic or in calm acceptance, or in creative exploration or in any number of other ways, you always have the ability to respond. [15:15.7]
In fact, every cell of your body is always responding to everything going on in the universe. Women's bodies are in sync with the moon and the tides of the earth. And so our men's bodies, right? The blood in your system, epileptics know this really well, right? Because seizures seem to increase and so also do labor when there's a full moon around, or when there's some major astronomical event. We're in sync, Our, our circadian rhythms are in sync with the sun and what's going on there. And the seasons of the year and our bodies store fat based on what we're eating and not eating our bodies are always responding. But sometimes we don't want to admit that we have the ability to respond. It's so much easier to blame someone else to find a scapegoat, to have them be responsible, to have them be the one that's banished into the wilderness, rather than doing the work that it takes to look at and see, dude, I have been responding to life in a way that doesn't work very well. [16:12.1]
It's time for me to train myself to respond differently. That's a little bit more effort than just allowing things to coast, and so naturally anybody's going to want to choose a scapegoat. But let me tell you my friend, every time you choose a scapegoat, every time you blame someone else, you actually rob yourself of power to do anything about your life. And now we come full circle to addictive substances and addiction. Think about this in the beginning, addiction just meant you had some moral failing, meaning you weren't controlling your own self. And then in the late 1800’s, it starts to become seen as a disease, meaning something outside of your control that is controlling you. And then now it became even further stretch, to substances themselves that are creating the disease that are then controlling you. So how can you possibly be to blame? It's just something that's controlling you and you can manage it as best you can, but you can avoid all responsibility for it. [17:07.5]
I don't say this lightly at all, but I will tell you straight up that there are no such things as addictive substances on the planet. They don't exist. There are substances. All of them that you ingest or take into your body, your body has to deal with and detox from. So if they're poisonous, there will be a period of time that your body has to deal with that substance, but you won't develop a chemical dependency just based on the chemical or based on the constituency of that thing. What will happen and what there are and what does exist on the planet are substances that make a person feel a certain way. And if you're living your life below that line, well, you'll naturally want to keep going back there because it feels better. If you're living your life above that line, then you're not necessarily going to be urging to go back there all the time because your life is awesome as it is. If something negative happens to you, you don't want to go back. If you get food poisoning, you don't sit there going like, Oh man, I'm addicted to it. Even if it's your favorite food, when you get food poisoned by it, your desire for that food disappears really quickly because it's a negative experience. [18:10.6]
When you have a positive experience, something your desire for it goes up. So there are all kinds of substances that have more and less powerful effect on the human physiology and chemistry. And that's it!! And if they make you feel better than you normally do, you'll naturally want more of it. If they make you feel worse than you normally do, you'll naturally want less of it. That's just the way it goes, okay. And so, but what we, we we've done in society is we've said, Oh, that's addictive. And what that means is I want to blame that for my behavior. And you know what people do it all the time, and it's okay. In fact, they blame Satan for a lot of things and I tell you, Satan gets far too much credit for what people are doing of their own free will and choice. Everybody I've ever worked with they come in and many, many of them that are very religious will tell me that Satan is working really hard on him and tempting them and doing all these things. And yet when we look down at the bottom of it, what's really going on is that they've got some thought processes that they created, that they've been carrying around. And that as soon as we shift those, then all of a sudden Satan stops working hard on them. [19:18.4]
Now think through that for a second, if Satan really wanted you to have a negative effect on life, if he really wanted to take you down, would he stop working on you or work on you less diligently? The better off you were? Would he only attack the weak, like some sort of lioness on the edge of the analog field? Or would he be trying to take everyone out? And the stronger you got, the more, the harder he'd be working on you. If you're really kind of holding to this narrative, that there is some God figure out there that is, and there's a Satan that's trying to undermine God's plan, wouldn't it stand to reason that he would be trying to be undermined it, undermine the strongest individuals and not the weakest. And yet what happens is once we start to handle this mental and physical stuff, then all of a sudden people find that they're not being tempted as much, and they're not being worked on as much. How is that a thing? It's because whether or not Satan is out there tempting people, I'm not here to argue that at all, okay. I'm not saying there is not a being out there at all. [20:14.9]
What I am saying is most of the stuff that we blame on Satan is stuff that we're doing ourselves and we just haven't realized it and taking responsibility for it. And the moment you take responsibility for it and stop creating the scapegoat is the moment your life has a whole brand new possibility of happiness and freedom and ease and joy that maybe you never considered was possible before. The same goes with addictive substances. If we're blaming the substance for it, then what's happening is we have lost our own power. We literally gave our power away to the thing. And because we think that it has power over us, it does. So chemical dependency does exist, but it's not because of the chemicals. It's literally because of our creation in our mind that that's what we need. And when dependency starts in these hospitals, I mean, think about it while they're in hospitals for crying out loud and not the most comfortable beds or surroundings, not as necessarily eating the greatest food. And then they're in pain after surgeries or operations and they're given opioids in order to help that. [21:14.0]
Of course, you're going to want some more of them because you learn in that really intense situation that this thing makes my pain go away. But that's not really the case, it does for a little bit shift up how your experience of what's going on, but it doesn't change anything about your injury. It just changes your perception of your injury periodically. And it does some other chemical things to your system that don't necessarily help it heal faster. And so it's a lie a little bit, but no wonder dependency shows up because it feels better than what's going on around you and so that's where the dependency comes from. The belief that's created inside of the patients that I need this, or I can't cope with life. That's where the dependency is, it's not because of the chemical. Now, if you're in, if you're using a lot of cocaine and heroin and things like that, and you're detoxing from it, your body will detox, especially if it's very poisonous to your system, you might have some really dire symptoms, but that's just natural. Your body's detoxing from it, from the moment it goes into your system. [22:08.3]
All of the highs you feel from drugs are your body trying to process what's going on and all the lows, same thing. And so we're not taking that away, but that's not withdrawal symptoms. Unless you want to say that people also suffer withdrawals from food between meals, because that sense of hunger is also the result of your body experiencing a different chemical state as a result of having had nutrition and then having lost nutrition. And the same thing could be said for sugars and everything else. So if you're going to say withdrawals exist, you have to say they exist for everything ever taken into the human system, including sunlight. And if you don't have enough sunlight, then you're going to go through withdrawals that way. Or you're going to say, look, simply there's our body interacting with our environment and we can choose what we want to do. So in a scapegoat society where everything is to blame where people outside of us are to blame, you will not find happiness and freedom and hope in my opinion, unless you step up and stop blaming anyone, including yourself, and simply look at the situation and start to take what the actions needed to change the situation, because, and I'm going to say something dumb like I learned in my philosophy classes, ‘The only thing that will change the situation is changing the situation.’ [23:14.4]
And I hope that you have the power to do that, but I'll tell you this straight up blaming that's one of the things we have to teach our clients, how to get rid of all the blame that they've carried for all the years. We teach them how to get rid of it so that they don't have to carry it anymore. And that they don't have to sit there and like try and process through all of it. They can just dump it all in one go, because all those decades of blame, think about how much energy that's taken for you to carry that both consciously and unconsciously and how much more life could you experience from this moment forward. If suddenly blaming people left your vocabulary and you just simply have the capacity to move forward with life, with hope and with creativity and ingenuity and all of the abilities that happiness brings. That's what I hope you learn and I hope all of us can move out of scapegoat society into a home of happiness. [24:01.8]
And that's it for todays “Alive and Free Podcast.” If you enjoyed this show and want some more freedom bombs landing in your ear buds, subscribe right now at wherever you get your podcasts from. And, while you're at it, give us a rating and a review. It'll help us keep delivering great stuff to you. Plus, it's just nice to be nice. [24:19.6]
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