TRANSCRIPT
Speaker: Neglect of a child is abuse. Neglect of a child causes trauma. These are not conventional ideas. This goes against the norms of the family system, the norms of society’s conventions. This goes against the conventional point of view of the psychology field. Whole parts of the psychology field actually encourage neglect. Let your child learn how to fall asleep on his or her own, even though she cries. Let him cry or him or herself to sleep. You can’t defend your kids. You can’t give your children too much. If you give them too much love and affection, they will become narcissistic, etc., etc., etc.
But what I see, and I have seen again and again, is when parents neglect their children, especially when they neglect a baby, when they neglect their own baby, that traumatizes the child. And people, adults, parents, society are so out of touch with this. And it’s very simple. The reason why is very, very simple. They never got in touch with how much they themselves were neglected when they were children. And for a good reason, because it’s so painful to uncover the trauma that they went through.
Even sometimes the overt trauma of being literally physically or sexually abused in a direct, overt way. People can deny that. “Oh, I wasn’t abused. It was for my own good,” or they just block it out entirely. But then the more subtle things, especially when people are a baby, when we’re babies, and they’ve forgotten about it, they’ve buried it so deeply, it’s not in any sort of conscious memory. Because what kind of conscious memories from an adult perspective do babies even register?
People literally block out what happened to them, but they hold it inside themselves. And then they replicate it on their children. They deny what their children are feeling because they never felt it in themselves. They have no empathy for their children because they have no empathy fundamentally for the child who they once were and the little wounded child who they still are and who still controls the puppet strings of their supposedly adult life.
I’m going off a lot. I’m ranting. How do I say this more intellectually and simply? People who were neglected when they were children, who suffered terrible trauma from the neglect, from sobbing themselves to sleep like babies so commonly and normally do, babies who are not comforted. I see it on the streets of New York City all the time. When people never got in touch with what they went through, when they never grieved what they went through, when they never felt the torment that they went through because they buried it, when they split it off, when all of that lives inside of them, they become adults who do this to others and feel okay with it.
They feel justified. They literally lack empathy for children. They lack empathy for their own children. They’re dead inside. They’re closed off. And they will always be dead inside and closed off until they feel what they went through, until they go through it and grieve it. It’s shocking to me how people cannot feel empathy for their own children, for the wounds that they are causing their children, the damage that they are directly doing to their children.
How they cannot feel bad about it. They cannot feel sad about it. I mean, take it to the next level. People who literally are spanking their children and hitting their child, and they don’t feel bad about it. They’re causing torture to their child physically, and they don’t feel bad. But the emotional neglect, that is also a form of torture. And I think it’s the most common and pervasive form of torture against children. A torture that twists the child’s mind.
I’ve seen this. I’ve seen it so many times. And the child grows up twisted and tormented and then acts it out against other children, acts it out in rage, acts it out in self-hatred, grows up and becomes an addict, grows up and becomes, oh, someone who gets labeled a sociopath or someone else, someone who grows up to become depressed and self-hating, someone who grows up to become someone who is neglected in their own interpersonal relationships with others, gets abused in their romantic relationships, gets treated horribly on their jobs by bosses, and doesn’t know how to defend themselves, doesn’t live up to their potential educationally, relationally, emotionally, becomes stunted and lost.
And yet it’s so easy, if you can see it, to trace it right back to their childhood neglect. They learned a lesson very early on that their parents don’t love them, can’t love them, won’t love them. And no matter how much they protest against it and scream and cry more, the message being, “Love me, hold me, take care of me, show me that you care,” they learn that their parents are dead and were dead and always will be dead, and nothing they do will change anything.
And so, in a strange way, from the child’s perspective as they grow older, why should they try to get their parents to love them anymore? Why not act out their rage and sadness? Why not get other people to try to love them? Anybody is going to be better than their dead cold parents. Why not use drugs that make them feel good now? Because their lesson they’ve learned in life is nothing else is going to make them feel good. They don’t have any other coping mechanisms to learn how to make themselves feel good.
And often, I’ve seen this most painfully, they can’t grieve, which will really allow them to feel good and to cure the root problem. Because grieving means having to acknowledge what their parents did to them, and they can’t afford to do that. Because some part of them, some secret little part of them, is still desperately dependent on their parents and hoping their parents will love them. They’re still that little crying child, even if they’re not crying anymore. They’re still wanting the approval of their parents.
And if they start to look at what really happened and open up their rage against their parents directly so that they can then feel the sadness and the abandonment and the betrayals that they experienced in their normal families, their lovely families, their beautiful families, their healthy families, their socially acceptable conventional families, if they feel that, their parents will reject them, their societies will reject them, their siblings will reject them, their grandparents will reject them. People will scapegoat them. They will call them crazy. They will call them entitled. They will call them narcissistic.
And they will also notice all the bad things that these children have done before grieving and say, “You’re sick. You did all this. Look what a troubled person you are.” They will be rejected. They will be disinherited. I speak from personal experience about many of these things. I’ve seen this with so many other people. This is the way of the troubled family system and troubled parents.
When parents are able to neglect their little babies, their crying, pained, wounded, screaming little children, when they are able to neglect them, everything after that is easy. It’s easy to reject an adult. It’s easy to reject a teenager. It’s a lot easier to reject those people than to reject a crying baby.
So where has this rant taken me? I can’t help but open it up to the bigger picture. This is the illness of our species. This is the collective wound of our species. This is the collective shadow side of our species. This is the denial of our species. This little problem that I’m talking about in the little hidden healthy family, this is everywhere. This is normal. This is not my culture. This is all cultures.
I see this everywhere. This is part of what motivates me to travel around the world and see all these different cultures of the world that I have seen, families that I have lived with. What I’m talking about, the more I see, the more I become confident to say it. What I’m talking about, this fundamental root of basic, basic emotional neglect of babies, little children, this is normal.
And writ large, this is the sickness of our species. This is the sickness of what our species is wreaking on the next generation, wreaking on nature, wreaking on other cultures. And until each of us learns how to grieve the wounds of our childhood, the wounds that most people say never even happen, don’t even know about, have blocked out, because it’s so fundamental, so basic, so ancient, when we connect with the tears of the babies we once were and the little crying baby who is still inside each of us, that sob that just wants to come out, times a thousand within each.
Of us, times eight billion for each person until this comes out. What hope do we have? I don’t see any hope. I really don’t see hope for our species.
Political shifting, it’s like a game of chess, but it’s all shifting deck chairs on the Titanic. The Titanic is going down. It doesn’t matter where the different chairs are. It doesn’t matter which side you’re on. If you’re on this ship, it’s going down.
The hope is healing the core. Healing. And when people heal, and when they heal more, and to the degree to which each person heals, that is the degree to which they will not foist this neglect, this torture, this abuse, this trauma on their children, if they have children.
And if they don’t have children, like I haven’t had children, instead I can devote more of my energy to healing the child who I do have, who is me. And then I can use the knowledge I gain, the more I heal, to have more empathy, to see more, to collect more honest data, honest cultural data, intercultural data, familial data, psychological data, and share it here with the world.
[Music]