TRANSCRIPT
I’ve heard a lot of people out in the world say that they are unhappy, unsatisfied with their lives, and that their goal is to feel better, to feel good. But I challenge that. Most people, from what I see, average people, normal people out in the world, when they said they wanted to feel good and feel better, actually I think really didn’t want to feel good and feel better. What they really wanted to do was to feel less. They didn’t want to feel so much so often.
I think feelings were not what they liked. They felt lousy, they felt hurt, they felt angry, they felt sad, they felt rejected, they felt frustrated, they felt confused, and they hated those feelings. They wanted to push those feelings down. They wanted to make those feelings go away. And well, the world of psychology, the world of psychiatry, the world of romance, the world of drugs and alcohol, the world of religion, so often helps these people to feel less, to make these feelings go down, to make these feelings be buried. Certainly, psychiatric drugs so often do exactly that. That is their intended goal—to help people feel less.
People who are struggling in torment and pain and anger and sadness and too much happiness, even like it’s called mania, take the feelings and push it down. I think of my dad. When I was a kid, when I was a teenager, he was seething with frustration and anger and rage, all coming from his childhood of trauma and neglect and unresolved pain and neediness. The stuff that his parents never did for him, didn’t love him properly or see him or care about him, and his modern life wasn’t fulfilling him. He was full of tension and anger, and here I was, this alive boy full of creativity and passion and life, and hoping for my dad, needing my dad to really care about me and love me. And my dad hated me for it. He was jealous of me and competitive with me, and he would discharge his anger onto me in the form of rage, screaming at me and humiliating me and saying horrible things and even hitting me sometimes. And that made him feel good. It made him feel good is how he would describe it. But really, what I would say now is it made him feel less. He discharged all these feelings, and because I needed him to love me, he was the only dad I had, I almost immediately forgave him.
I understand, Dad, because I knew that forgiving my dad and letting him off the hook and not holding him accountable or responsible, well, that made him feel okay and made him feel accepted, and it kept him loving me. So in a strange, sad, now painful way for me to realize, it kept our relationship glued together. But he felt less as the result of that, and he felt good.
I think of heroin addicts. I mean, all that seething pain and torment that they are in emotionally because of all the terrible things that happened to them when they were children and all the terrible ways in which their honest, healthy childhood needs were not met by their deficient parents, and all the ways in which they were invaded and violated in their lives. And well, all those feelings are coming up and bubbling up and seething. This is part of the healing process, by the way—to feel those feelings, to feel more, to feel in a better way, to feel in a more good way. One needs to resolve these feelings, to bring them up, to look at them, to know what they are, to trace them, to see where they came from, to make sense of one’s history. That is the healing process, ultimately—to grieve them.
But when I see people who are drug addicts, heroin addicts, alcohol addicts, marijuana addicts, you name it, whatever it is, their drug takes all those feelings and pushes it down, soothes the feelings, makes the feelings go away. And the person says, “Ah, I now feel better.” But they don’t feel better; they feel nothing. Now they have become dissociated. They have split off, disassociated from their feelings. And that process of disassociating from their feelings, well, gets euphemistically in society labeled and in psychology labeled “feeling better.” But it’s not feeling better; it’s feeling less. It’s feeling nothing, feeling blank. The numbness can well be a real comfort compared to the torment of bringing up trauma. The bringing up trauma, the suffering, being a healthier stage than disassociation. Being dissociated is the most primitive stage; it’s the most stuck stage. It’s the stage where people cannot grow, cannot heal, cannot do anything to resolve their traumas. It’s where the traumas are so pushed down that they’re completely split off. Those painful, awful feelings of suffering are the next level up. That is where there’s something to work with. There’s some direction that can be gone in, in a healing direction.
The next stage, of course, is grieving—to take all that suffering, to make sense of it bit by bit, by bit, to grieve it, to mourn it, to make real, real sense of it. Purposeful pain, purposeful suffering. Well, the addicts, when they’re seeking out their drug, the pain is purposeless. My dad, when he was full of torment, when he discharged his anger onto me, his pain, his torment that motivated him to be vicious toward me, it was purposeless pain. He couldn’t convert his pain into grieving. He didn’t have the emotional support in his relationship with my mom, who was also as screwed up as he was. He had a therapist or therapists who were awful and terrible. His friends were useless. His parents were as terrible as they always were. He had nothing and nobody, and most of all, he didn’t have himself. And so he wanted his feelings to go away. I was part of his addiction. I was one of his addictions. I was a place, a thing for him to displace his anger onto. And I think that’s so common in the world—people using all sorts of different tools. Society gives people all these tools and all these liberties. When they become powerful enough, people say, “Oh, you’re a parent now.” What they don’t say is, “You’re a parent now; you are so powerful, and we will stay out of your business that as long as you don’t physically torture your child past a certain point, you can basically do anything to your child.” And that child will, well, help you dissociate. That child will be part and parcel of one of your basic tools for dissociation. You won’t have that child to help you grow; you will have that child to help you stay stuck. They will be one of your primary addictions. So will your romantic relationships be one of your primary addictions for dissociation—to feel less, to feel nothing.
I think so many people, I’ve seen them, they say, “I feel such comfort when I am in a romantic relationship.” But the comfort isn’t feeling better, feeling more, having more awareness, a more awareness that really helps the person grow and grieve and heal and become a full and deep and true person. Instead, the romance helps the person split off more, and the sex too. Another thing—all these things are all addictive things. The sex, it makes the person feel as if they have won the contest of life. They’ve done nothing to grow and grieve and heal, but they feel intense pleasure. My dad felt intense pleasure when he was being vicious toward me. Strange, isn’t it? But that’s what he felt, just like when someone is having sex and winning the contest and having the orgasm and getting the partner. They can feel all this flush of intense pleasure, yet it’s totally disconnected from healing. Often, it’s the opposite of healing.
And so I come here and I critique this idea of feeling better. And then I think about me making these videos, sitting here and talking to a camera right now. Strangely, I feel relatively comfortable speaking. I feel relatively calm. I don’t think my blood pressure or my heart rate is up as I say these things. But tonight, when I get out of my hard work comfort zone to come here in front of a camera and to have the confidence to say these very dangerous and unconventional things that, well, in normal society get me rejected, long since got me rejected from my family—things that are as dangerous here in America as they are in Asia and Africa and Europe and South America. Dangerous things everywhere, dangerous in every religion in the world.
The way I have the confidence of knowing that I will reach some people who can follow what I’m saying and we’ll find it useful. I can do it. I can be centered in myself. But tonight, later tonight, when I’m dreaming, when I fall asleep in my bed, I’m going to feel uncomfortable and anxious, and I’m going to feel terrible. I’m going to feel a lot. I’m going to feel all that stress because I still live in a social world of sick people, sick ideas, sick psychology, sick religion, sick families. An idea of people saying feeling better when they really mean feeling nothing and feeling gone and dead and lost. A psychology world now that one of its treatment options is euthanasia. You can say, “Oh, I am in such terrible pain because of my genetic biological psychiatric diagnosis,” which really is trauma related, has nothing to do with genetics or fundamentally biological cause at all. No chemical imbalances. But psychology in some countries now can actually give you a prescription to be put to death. So then finally, I can feel better. No, you won’t feel better. You’ll finally have the game be over. Finally, your healing process will end. You won’t even be dissociated. You will be nothing. What a world we live in. And so what do I want? I want to feel it all. I want to feel the truth of who I am, who I am now as a man in my 50s. Feel what’s buried inside me still, the parts of me that I have not yet resolved or even touched on. The pain of my early childhood. I’ve healed a lot of it. I’ve brought a lot of it off. I’ve suffered a lot of it and walked holding my hand through that suffering process, through that grieving process, through that process of becoming aware, self-actualized in so many ways, which is why I have such a comfortable confidence to be able to come here and talk. But yet, there are parts of me that are still very lost, very shut down, very screwed up. I sadly know that. I acknowledge that. I see that. And it’s so easy to see because when I have those terrible dreams at night that I’m going to have tonight for speaking the truth, well, when I write about it and journal about it in the morning, when I write down my dreams, I’m going to trace it right back to parts of me that are still blocked off and buried. And as a result of making this video and hundreds of others, well, I feel more. I feel in a better way. And it doesn’t feel good by societal standards, but I know that these feelings, the painful ones, this is the grist for the mill. This is the grinding stuff that brings up the truth and gives me the opportunity to keep growing.