Overcome What We Learn at a Very Young Age

I once met with a seventy-year-old man whose marriage had been distant and miserable for fifty years. He was addicted to porn and regularly went to “sensual” massage parlors. He worked with computers and had no friends. He couldn’t look me in the eye and admitted that he had never felt connected to anyone in his life.

In the process of talking about his childhood, he said that his first memory was when he was three years old. He remembered walking over to his father, who dismissed him with a wave of his hand and said, “Go away.”

We learn who we are and what the world is like at a very young age, and without a significant change in life education, those beliefs remain the same.

My friend spent the rest of his life hearing people tell him to “go away,” whether they did or not—and mostly they did. So he felt isolated and utterly unable to connect with other people. Nobody ever taught him a different way to live, so he repeated his experience from age three for another 67 years. Most of us live in much the same way.