TRANSCRIPT
I think from what I observe that most parents, when they say they love their children, they really don’t love their children that much. And I think that’s because most people don’t really know what love really even means. What a strange thing to say! And I think it begs the question of what love really is.
I think most parents, when they say they love their children, what they’re really saying is they feel desperately attached to their children. And that attachment is based mostly on need, not nurture. So what I think is real mature love, the ideal type of love that a parent would really feel toward the child, is about nurture. And you could say, “Look how much these parents nurture their children.” And you’re saying they don’t love their children? And I say, “Yeah, I think on the surface they’re nurturing the child, but underneath it there’s still a dynamic that really is motivating the parents most profoundly—a dynamic of need. They are feeding off the child. They are getting from the child. They’re projecting how much the child loves them. And then as the result of that, they are giving attention and love to that child. And they have no clue about that dynamic.” Was this confusing what I just said?
Basically, what I’m saying is most parents, I think, are very, very selfish people. And even though they think they love their child, they don’t. And what’s really going on underneath the surface is that these parents were not loved much at all by their own parents. And they are just replicating this dynamic. And they are profoundly and often blissfully unaware of how much they were not loved. They’re profoundly in denial of how many of their own childhood and babyhood needs were not met. They have no clue how they really felt when they themselves were young children and were babies. They don’t know how much they were traumatized. They don’t know how much they still are traumatized. And as the result of that, they’re fundamentally blocked from being able to feel empathy for their children.
I know I’ve said this many times in many different ways, in many different videos and in many of my writings, but I feel it bears repeating because it is so important. This is the fundamental root of what makes our world so screwed up. It’s just this. This is what prevents people from living up to their potential. It’s what prevents parents from being able to do a fundamentally good job at being parents. Because if you can’t deeply love your children, if you can’t deeply empathize with the needs of your children, empathize with their pain, you cannot help but traumatize them.
Someone recently wrote me that he couldn’t understand why I said that 99 percent of people are traumatized. He thought it was much, much, much less than that. And I feel like when I said 99 percent of people are traumatized—traumatized from their childhoods in the ways that I’m talking about—I feel like I’m still just being polite. I feel like it’s a hundred percent of people. Everybody is traumatized. Every single family system I’ve ever observed—and I’ve observed so many—I’m talking family systems with young children and with babies. The babies are getting their needs neglected, and they are suffering for it.
And the more that I have healed my own childhood traumas, my early childhood traumas especially, the more I can empathize with these children. And the more that I see the parents don’t. And if I talk about this dynamic openly, especially if I say, “Wait a second, you are neglecting the needs of your child,” I’ve seen it again and again because I’ve tried it. The parents get angry. They become hostile. They become rejecting of me. “Out! Get out! Go away! You are an alien! You are disrupting my family’s system!” For that reason, I’ve become very careful, very hesitant when it comes to directly criticizing parents because they have the power to push anybody out of their system who is confronting unhealthy dynamics within that system. That is the so-called right of the parent. The parent is the power figure. They are the king or the queen, or the king and the queen, the emperors of this society known as the family system. Every government allows this to be true. And people who criticize this, well, they are heretics. They go against the religion of the family system.
And so instead, I come here to talk about this. And I think this is the psychology of the future. This is the only real psychology of the future. So much of the psychology field nowadays is about neuroscience and finding neuroscientific correlates of what’s going on in different parts of people’s lives and what part of the brain is connected to emotions. And this is just like so much of modern science—a profound distraction from the really simple, painful, ugly, taboo stuff that’s going on inside of each of us and inside of every family system.
And what shocks me is that so often people who even get a lot of this dynamic conceptually, theoretically, don’t get it in their own personal life. I think people can very easily be in denial of how screwed up they are, how traumatized they still are. Many people have worked out a lot of their traumas, but traumas go really deep. And I think it’s—I think I know—I see it, how difficult it is to get into these really early childhood traumas. I even hear some people say, “Oh, I’ve resolved my babyhood traumas. I have resolved my birth traumas. I have relived going through the birth canal.” And then I look at these people and I think they’re kind of ridiculous. These are often people who have no clue practically, even theoretically, what healing from trauma even is. And here they say that they have deeply resolved all of their wounds. And I just think it’s so easy to be a parent in denial and so comfortable in our society because our society gives a profound amount of positive feedback to parents who do even a marginally good job of being parents.
Basically, there is a very, very low bar in our society. I’m talking about Western society, also Eastern society. I’ve traveled a lot. I see the bar as very, very low. Maybe it’s a little bit higher in some places, but I’ve never seen any society, any culture where the bar is particularly high at all for being a really good parent. Basically, if you really don’t love your children that much and they are being neglected in all sorts of different ways, you can still get away with being considered an extremely good parent and get a lot of perks for this.
And so I come here to talk about it, to call out the psychology field, to call out society, and most specifically to call out parents who can’t love their children. They’re fundamentally blocked from being able to deeply love their children because they never figured out how to love themselves. Until people get into the deepest, deepest depths—the hell of the trauma that they went through, break away from their parents, call out their parents for what their parents did to them and didn’t do for them—there’s no hope for healing. And I just so rarely see almost anyone, and even more so, almost anyone who becomes a parent, even making marginal progress on this path. And so for them, what hope really is there?
And yet I know there’s hope. I see how far I have come, and I have come almost entirely in social isolation. So my hope is that as time goes on, as more people wake up and begin to empathize more with themselves, as they go deeper and deeper into themselves resolving their traumas, and as more and more people do this and come together and collectively form communities where they can support each other, and that they don’t have children while they are going through this process, that over time more and more people will heal and become a new type of person who empathizes deeply with themselves, empathizes much more deeply with babies. And if they ever do have children, they will become much more healthy, empathic parents who raise healthier children who themselves can grow up to love themselves more. And if they ever have children, love their children—really love their children—in terms of being able to nurture their children more with no expectation of receiving anything in return.
[Music]