TRANSCRIPT
Self-reflection is not for the faint of heart. A friend of mine recently came up with that phrase. I was in a conversation with her, and we were talking about self-reflection, about looking within, about how painful it is. And she just said, “Yeah, self-reflection is not for the faint of heart.” I thought, what a perfect video. And it’s so true. To look within, to really look within, to really find out what’s inside, not easy. Actually radical, actually rare.
To look within, to really get to know ourselves, to really make great success and make great strides at knowing ourselves, not easy. I’ve made a career of listening to others self-reflect, listening to them sharing what they find inside and walking alongside them as they looked inside. That was my ten years as a therapist. But since then, out in the world, it’s not a financial career anymore. I’m not making money from this really, but I do hear people doing it a lot, and I love to help people do it.
But what I find is for a lot of people, it’s kind of borderline too difficult. They’re too embedded in their family systems, their cultural systems, their religious systems, their educational systems, their career systems to look inside. It is too dangerous. It’s like what happens to them when they start to look inside. I think some people, if they look inside too much, they can go crazy. It’s like, “Oh my God, everyone has been lying to me forever.” Being honest can be like a death sentence in the family system, even in the cultural and religious systems of our world.
To look inside, to really begin to think original thoughts about truth, about who we really are, about what our histories really are, about who our parents really are, about who our grandparents really are, not the lies that we’re forced to believe in our childhoods. I mean, I grew up believing because my parents told me. Literally, I believed my family was perfect. Sounds kind of crazy and silly and grand, but that’s what my mother literally taught me. She said, “We are the perfect family.” And I was a child. She was my primary adult role model in life, my primary human role model in life, and I believed her because I needed to believe her. Children need to believe their parents. My survival depended on believing her.
No wonder people can believe so many crazy things that their parents teach them about everything—about how humans relate to each other, about sex roles, about sexuality, about the weirdest ideas sometimes that people have that are so far from truth. And yet people believe it because that’s what their parents teach them, and that’s what the greater society teaches them.
Well, when I started self-reflecting, when I started looking within—and by the way, I only did it… well, I was going to say I only did it because I was desperate, because I was in such pain, because I hated my life. I was in this so-called perfect family, perfect society, perfect country, this, that, and yet I was miserable and unhappy. That’s part of why I looked within. And I think also part of why I looked within was just because I had some spark of something different, something in me I think was destined, no matter what, to look within. I think I give myself the credit as a child at some level, just being a courageous little boy willing to look in, at some level look in and hold on to the truth.
Oh, and it made my life much more miserable. It made me love myself because it made me know myself. It made me have a self. To look within was to connect with the real me, not to live like the hologram that everybody around me was living with and calling that self and calling that strong and calling that smart and intelligent and ethical, but they were fake. And at some level, I knew that. The more I looked within, the more I connected with me, the more I could see the hypocrisy in others, starting with my family.
I could see how the things that they said didn’t actually line up. Things were not connecting in their logic about life. I also saw their behavior, and I’m talking about my parents, but also my teachers, my friend’s parents, my professors when I went to college, the people that I met, my bosses at work. I saw so much dishonesty. I thought even with the other kids who were the most normal, who were the most popular, who were fitting in the most, I saw hypocrisy all over.
I think now when I reflect on it at age 51, I can see more and more why they weren’t self-reflecting. Because the more that they—all these people that I’m talking about—the more that they achieved societal and family success and popularity, the more difficult it became for them to look within and self-reflect. It’s like the gulf between who they thought they were and who they really were was getting wider and wider as they were getting older. And so I would say for them, self-reflecting became even more intense. They had to have even more courage to do it.
The problem was those who didn’t start early, generally the ones who had less courage. And I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m being so moralistic. You don’t have courage, you’re a coward. But I think it’s true. I think of my parents when I looked back on it. When I learned the word cowardly and I applied it to them, I realized, yeah, they were cowardly. They were living in their fear. Their behavior lined up with their fear. When their fear told them, “Don’t do it or there will be consequences,” they didn’t do it because it was too scary. So I realized a fundamental truth: they were cowards.
And I think it’s very common in the world that people are cowards. It’s so scary to be strong, to look within. It’s so scary to stand up. I have met people, not infrequently, my parents included, who from time to time would have little bursts of honesty, especially if they found a really kind, open-minded listener to whom they could share these true internal things. Someone who, when they shared these things with, wouldn’t in any way cause them harm in their life. Basically, they could let some of their truth out, and it would have no consequence on their life. They could let these bits of truth out, these little tiny moments of self-reflection, and then they could just go back to column A and go on with their life, almost as if they had never shared such things.
I wonder, like the Catholic religion, there’s this ancient historical thing that fewer and fewer people seem to do nowadays. Catholics who I know, but that’s called confession, where someone would go to a priest and open their mouth and just let it all out, let all their little tiny moments of self-reflection out, have someone mirror it, and then, okay, they’d get to do, you know, okay, the priest says, “Now do a few Hail Marys, say this, this, and this,” and no other consequences, and you’re forgiven, and go on with your life. And then the person will, let’s just say hypothetically, go right back to column A and continue living their life as always.
Well, that’s what my parents did with me from time to time when I was a young teenager, younger even, certainly into my 20s. When I became a more sophisticated listener, they would bear their souls to me and tell me all sorts of things that they were holding inside, and then just go right on doing all those same very things, but no change at all, no continued self-reflection, no discipline of looking at their reflections, even putting their reflections down on paper and saying, “Oh, this is what is inside me. What is the next logical step? What do I have to do to live in sync with the truth of these self-reflections?” Or heaven forbid, what do these disturbing things I’m finding about myself inside say about my character? What do they say about my traumas that are inside of me? What do they say about what I have done to others in the world? What do they say about my parents? What do they say about my history, my ancestry? What do they say about my society?
My parents didn’t go there. Most people don’t go there. It’s rare to go there. Going there, going to that next level of self-reflection, reflecting on the reflections, that’s really for the faint of heart.
I conclude this video with what I say to those of you who have the strength to look within. To continue looking within no matter what. I admire you. You are my allies in the world. I am your ally in the world.
I make these videos for you to inspire you, to encourage you, and probably also as a self-reflection to remind myself of what I have done in my life, with my life, and what I’m still doing in my life as I go into my future.
Oh, it’s hard. It changes everything to self-reflect. The consequences can be very ugly. My parents hated my ongoing self-reflection because I outed them. I was doing the reflections about them that they weren’t doing about themselves in any ongoing way.
And oh, I set myself outside of the family system, outside of my culture, outside of the educational system, outside of my profession even as a therapist. And yet I persevered. I fought for myself. I fought for a little bit of turf in my world where I could live and survive and use my newfound self-reflective strengths and capacities to be useful to others.
It’s been a hard journey, but for me overall, aside from the ugly pains and bumps and rejections, worth it.
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