TRANSCRIPT
Everybody is lovable. I was thinking about that idea this morning, that everybody is inherently lovable. Everybody is someone who has at least some part of them, some core part of them, that others are able to love and that they can love within themselves.
In our world, I think people don’t believe this. I think a lot of people don’t believe they’re lovable at all. They were certainly taught that in their early lives, in their families. They were taught that they are hateable, that they are rejectable, that they are worth abandoning, that they are worthless, that their words and their thoughts don’t really count, that they’re not interesting, that they’re not special, that they’re not gifted. And I don’t agree with that. I don’t agree with that from having observed so many children. Children are the most obviously inherently lovable people.
Yes, some children can become very difficult and full of problems, sometimes very early on. But when you see children young enough, they’re so obviously lovable. And if you can see through their problematic behavior as they get older, they’re still exceptionally lovable. And this goes for adults too.
I was thinking recently about some criminal or other, some person who had been convicted of a crime. Actually, I think in the case I was reading about, they weren’t even convicted; they were just arrested. So everyone assumed that they were guilty. And people were saying this person needs to go to jail for the rest of their life. And then all these people, one after another, were saying that this person who just committed a financial crime, stole money, and did fraud and things like that, I hope he gets raped in jail. And I think he better bring his soap on a string, meaning if he bends over, people are going to rape him. And I hope he gets raped a hundred times in jail. And I hope they put him in a cell with Bubba.
And these weren’t even people who were harmed by this guy. These were just random people out in the world, mostly men writing this, but some women too, who are saying that the appropriate punishment for this person who committed fraud is to be brutally raped in prison. What has become of our world when people think this is appropriate? Probably normal people out there in the world, the normal people we see every day, who are writing that some person who made a mistake in their life should be raped by strangers in jail and that this is good somehow.
When I was a therapist, like when I was a therapist, I worked with a few men who had been raped in jail. Men sometimes who did some pretty bad things in their lives that got them ended up in prison. They got raped in jail, gang raped even. And it was not good. It was not helpful to them. It didn’t help them look at what they had done to others and say, “Oh, that’s why I shouldn’t have done this.” It just traumatized them worse.
And what I saw again and again with people, and these guys who had been raped in jail, is the things that they did that were bad, the things that I’ve done in my life that were bad, the most painful things that I did in my life, I did them and others did them because of the bad things that were done to us. Hurt people hurt people. Traumatized people commit trauma on other people. And then people are going around saying that these traumatized people who unconsciously replicated their traumas on others should face a punishment of being further traumatized by other traumatized people. It’s like this is sick. This is sick.
This is the history of our world too, of torturing the tortured by the tortured to somehow help prevent future torture. And we wonder why our world has gone crazy and is going more crazy. What about the idea that everybody is lovable? Every person who has committed crimes against others is lovable. That I am lovable for the bad things that I did. And when I can step out of myself and think that my parents who traumatized me were lovable, are lovable, and are traumatized, that doesn’t mean that it’s my job for one second to go around forgiving my parents. No, because as a person who received trauma from another person, it’s not my job to fix or heal or love my traumatizer.
I know that from personal experience. I spent my childhood trying to fix and heal and love my parents so they wouldn’t continue to traumatize me. It was my survival as a child to love them. I had no choice. I needed to love them because I couldn’t confront them. I couldn’t feel my anger and sadness and rage at them. But that doesn’t mean now that I’m an adult it’s my job to suddenly turn around and try to fix my parents. Let them try to fix themselves. My job was and is to heal myself, to grieve my wounds, to get away from my traumatizers, but not to replicate my anger at my parents onto others, onto criminals, onto people who harmed others and say they should get raped in jail. No, to have the insight to realize that loving people, listening to them, helping them, that is what helps people be cured of the bad things they did.
I remember a long time ago I figured out that in a way, if you want to say punishment is even a relevant concept at all, punishment of criminals, then the punishment for criminals, strangely enough, is actually what they went through long ago when they were children that set them up to commit those crimes in the first place. Every criminal has already suffered his or her own punishment. Punishment is no longer relevant. Yes, perhaps removing people from society, removing people sometimes from being able to compulsively commit the same crimes that they have caused, perhaps many times, maybe someone who committed financial fraud and has done no healing should no longer be allowed to be in a position of managing others’ money. I can understand that. But to think that they should be raped? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Everyone is lovable. And from what I’ve learned in my relationship with myself and from what I have learned in my relationship with others, when I was a therapist and since then, is that to listen to people, to listen caringly and non-judgmentally about their lives is loving. To give people, myself included in my relationship with myself, a safe place to study my history, to know my feelings, to have my feelings, to have my so-called negative emotions, to allow other people to feel their so-called negative emotions, their anger and rage and sadness, their feelings of having been abandoned and betrayed, a place to have their tears and to have their voice, to get their voice back.
You want to stop people from committing crimes on others? Let them go through their own healing process. You really want to have someone experience real torture? It’s not about being raped in jail where they’re being punished for their crimes. It’s about going through their own history. You really want to experience torture? Go through what you and I went through when we were children. Feel those feelings. I dissociated from the horrible things that I went through. I dissociated from my feelings of childhood trauma when I went through my healing process again in my 20s and in my 30s and into my 40s, even now in my early 50s, going through those feelings again. That is torment. It’s not punishment, but it is torment.
And if you deny people the chance to feel the horrible pain they went through as a child, deny them a safe and loving space, a real safe and loving confidential space to feel those feelings, to go through all the feelings they went through that they weren’t allowed as a child, that’s torment. Healing is torment. It’s not about traumatizing people further.
So when I say that all people are lovable, it means that all people deserve an opportunity to heal, not to be put to death for their crime. So many people, oh, capital punishment, we need to remove them from society, kill them, remove them, kill them, hang them, shoot them, stick them with needles and drugs that remove their life. No, give them a chance to heal. Give them a chance to tell their stories. Give them a chance to become role models for showing why tortured people torture other people. Let them change their lives. Let them become beacons of life, the beacons of light, the beacons of life that every young child is and every tormented, horribly pained, wounded.
A person who horribly pained and wounded others can become. That is the real consequence of loving others. Really loving them deeply is that they learn how to love themselves. Their lights learn how to shine, and they can turn around and love others.
That’s what I believe is the future of humanity. If we ever are to heal as a species and become a loving species, that can then turn around and learn how to love our planet.