How A Strong Father Figure Can Change Your LIFE - Jordan Peterson Motivation

[Music] what kind of relationship do you have with your father your real father it's often ambivalent right because there is an element of him that encouraged you hopefully because without the encouragement of your father man the world is a dismal place it's very difficult to be a courageous person unless you have your father in in body and spirit behind you it's very demoralizing like it really kills people not to have their mother they just don't recover from that but and and i think people can recover from a fragmented father relationship but it's the next worst thing you know because if your father rejects you or doesn't form a relationship with you it's as if the spirit of civilization has left you outside the walls as of little worth it's very difficult for people to recover from that so the father should be an encouraging force but can be a tyrannical and crushing force and so that's very that's a very difficult thing to get right partly because if you're my son then i should impose the highest standards of behavior on you and i should always be judging what you're doing i should be judging it with with the aim of making the best in you come forward but but getting that balance exactly right is very difficult and so it's easy for a father to swing too much into judgment let's say and then of course mothers can play this role too to swing too far into the domain of judgment and to be too harsh and to the degree that the father has his own pathologies he's going to do that imperfectly you know he might be someone who's who's the father who devours his son because he's jealous of the new possibility the new potential that the struggle for for uh attention and love from the mother or from the other children in the family there's all sorts of things that can go terribly wrong [Music] so that's the father as wise king and that's another symbol that's been lost i would say to a massive degree in modern universities because all we're taught is to tear that down and and to not even notice that it manifests itself everywhere especially in the universities which are like they're as close to an ideal environment as you could as human beings have ever been able to create it's as simple as that and if you can't be grateful for for the structure of the university with all its imperfections then then you're completely blind to this element of the archetype and that's the opposite of it that's the sun that devours the king that devours his own son that's a tyrant you know that's like the mother who's too overprotective it's the male version of that and the mother that's too overprotective says i'll never let anything happen to you it's like well maybe you actually want to have something happen to you you know it's a bit of an all-inclusive statement it's like no i'm going to make you strong so any number of things can happen to you and when you're when you need some care i'll be there but otherwise like out into the world with you that's the right attitude and for the father it's like get your bloody act together but i'm on your side it's because not because i want to destroy you or demean you or push you down in the dominance hierarchy but because i want the best in you to emerge and so you need standards it's like what are you doing wasting your life there's way more than that to you get your act together and bring it out my father's a tough character and he's relatively low in agreeableness especially politeness and although moderate and compassion and he's a pretty harsh taskmaster demanding in terms of his standards and so he was difficult to please and that's both a blessing and a curse you know because the curse is that he's not pleased but the blessing is that he thinks you can do better and so you know it's really hard to say when someone's on your side it's not obvious exactly what that means it's like well they are they on the side of who you are or are they on the side of who you could be and a lot of what is necessary paternal encouragement i would say you know speaking somewhat stereotypically is being on the side of who you could be and i thought this through quite carefully as a clinician because one of the clinical psychologists who had a major impact i would say on me intellectually and practically was carl rogers and rogers preached let's say this doctrine of unconditional positive regard and he's been criticized for that because if you actually listen to rogers even in his interactions with clients it was pretty obvious that his positive regard wasn't unconditional and the problem with unconditional positive regard is well you know you're actually not okay the way you are and right and who thinks they are you know all of us are perfectly if we have any sense cognizant of our imperfections we also hope we're not all we could be because you know especially if you're suffering miserably because of your ignorance and your willful blindness and all and your malevolence you think god i hope there's more to me than this and you really do hope that and then to have someone who's on the side of the part of you that could yet be better that's really something and i told my clients all the time when they came in for therapy when i made such things explicit that you know we were in a partnership to bolster the part of them that was aiming up that was aiming at the good and it was useful for people to partition themselves to some degree into that part that was aiming up and that could be trusted and relied upon as an aid to further growth in that part that was you know bitter and resentful and angry and sometimes homicidal and sometimes worse than homicidal and that was clearly aiming down in every possible way and i wanted to be on the side of the you know the better angels of our nature let's say and i would say my father was definitely that and so that was painful in some ways because it was difficult to please him and he he applied the same standards to himself and and paid a certain cost for that but i did know fundamentally that he had my back and i mean really fundamentally and i i knew that that was not all that common because many of my friends growing up especially the group of friends i had before almost all of them dropped out of school so that would have been junior high they had very contentious relationships with their father that weren't predicated fundamentally on something like a mutual respect and that was very hard on them and i suspect also very hard on their fathers and my father when my friends used to come over he cast a dim light on the bunch of juvenile delinquents that i hung around with in junior high and perhaps for good reason but they respected him and they also knew that he was on my side and so my father gave me an abiding and then the other thing i should say about him is he spent a tremendous amount of time with me when i was very young say before i was five or six he taught me to read he did that every night for months and i remember that very vividly and instilled in me a love of books and a fluency in reading he believed that i could do [Music] what i set my mind to [Music] and he really believed that and to have someone that believed that of you that's something man and you know it was something that i wanted to offer to my clinical clients you know because i did believe that there was more to them than the suffering person that was sitting there and that you know with joint diligent effort we could sift our way through the chaff and find the wheat and that things could be better and one of the lovely things about practicing as a clinician was that that was that almost inevitably happened sometimes really radically and then of course later it started started to happen on a broader scale and i was seeing that happen in the lives of maybe thousands of people and so [Music] the kids who lack fathers i mean first of all they can find that to some degree in their friends and that's often what fatherless boys do in particular they they go into gangs and they generate the missing masculinity in the game well that's not so good because like what the hell do they know well they don't know anything right they're just stupid kids and they're like 15 years old and their testosterone is pumping and they're trying to get the hell away from their mother which is what they're supposed to do and and they're not in the right position to exercise any authority over themselves so that's that's not good they can find it in education they can find it in books they can find it in movies they can find it in sports heroes and so forth because the image of the father is fragmented and distributed among the community but it's very very difficult to not have a father and you know one of the things that we're doing in our society which i think is i think it's absolutely appalling is that we're making the case that all families are equal it's like sorry no wrong then there's no empirical data supporting that proposition by the way it's much better for kids to have two parents now who those parents are that's a whole different issue okay and if i could just uh one more thing of how would you ask that question to let's see a daughter who was raised on a father because she would obviously have different ways of finding those fragments of her missing father than like a boy would instead because obviously they're raised differently at least they should have been well i think it's the same issue you know i mean i think that another danger that emerges and this is freud's of course famous observation is that you know if if there's mom and child or father and child that relationship can get a little closer than it should and then the lines get blurry and mixed and i'm not saying that that happens to everyone obviously but but it's still a danger that that's inherent in the situation they're thrust together too tightly without sufficient resources and so the responsibility has to be distributed more and like i really do think that it's the sign of the degeneration of the society when that when when single parenthood becomes anything approximating the norm it's not a good idea and the part of the reason i believe that and i think this has to do with the um overwhelming selfishness of of modern life is that marriage isn't for the people who are married it's for the children obviously and like if you can't handle that grow the hell up sir no i mean seriously yeah seriously once you once you once you have kids it is not about you period now that doesn't mean it isn't about you at all but that just seems so self-evident to me i can't believe that anybody would even would even question it oh it's been a question oh yes well i'm certainly aware of that yes it's questioned it's almost illegal to question it now you know to to or illegal to make the set of propositions that i'm making so that's the best i can do yeah that's excellent thank you [Applause] [Music] you

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Id: 2stdO7IvnFE

Length: 11min 34sec (694 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 16 2021