TRANSCRIPT
I think if there is one thing that keeps our world stuck, that keeps our world from growing and really changing in a way that I believe it desperately needs to do, it’s that individual people cannot figure out how to break out of their troubled family systems, their troubled family patterns. They don’t have role models who have done this. They don’t have a community that will hold them if they break out of their family systems. They are so dependent on their family systems, on their parents. Often, even when these people have become adults, they’re still dependent emotionally, psychologically, relationally on their parents. And this prevents them from being able to look inside themselves and see who they really are. In a way, it blocks them from being able to look at the truth of their history. By being so dependent on their parents, they can’t look at their parents’ flaws. They can’t be open about it in their own relationship with themselves, in their mind, in their meditative processes, if they even have one, let alone public about it, talking about it openly.
And for a good reason. I speak as someone who I’ve broken out of my family. I mean literally out of my physical family, away from my parents for decades. But in my own mind and my own psyche, I have expelled most of my parents. The bad sides of them, the good parts of them I kept. I incorporated. I used those to grow. But the bad sides, the traumatized sides, the hypocritical sides, the harming sides, the dishonest sides of them that I took into me to survive when I was a child, I’ve gotten rid of it. And I think I’m a very fortunate but unusual person in that way. And that motivates me to make these videos, to write about it, to be so public about my history, my transformative process, about what I’ve become, in order to share, to give the world an example of something different.
And I think there are other different people out there. Actually, I know that there are a lot of other people out there who have done very similar things to what I’ve done, but who won’t share about it. Publicly, too scary, too risky in various ways. They’re still connected to those historical systems and still dependent on them, or they still have certain parts of their parents embedded in themselves in probably a bigger way than I have embedded in me. And they’re scared. They’re scared of the consequences of being public, of being so open and honest. And again, I say, oh, I get it. I would never ever pressure anyone to be public about this stuff because the consequences are immense.
And I mean the negative consequences. The, well, the scapegoating, the cruelty of the family system, the rejection. In my case, all these things: disinheritance, the lies, the manipulations to come back, the social ostracism, the pathologizing, being labeled as pathological for my healthy behavior. That’s what I mean by pathologizing. These are all normal standard things that happen to someone when they break out of the family system. And especially if they break out of the family system and are public about it. Because breaking out of the family system fundamentally is to declare war against that system. That system does not want people to break out or escape or become real.
From what I have observed, the family system is something that says, do not grow beyond our boundaries. Do not become more honest than we are capable of being honest with ourselves. Do not become healthier than we are. Because if you become healthier than we are, you shine a light on our unhealthiness. And for people who don’t want to grow, this being the norm of the world by and large, from what I’ve observed, when people don’t want to grow, they get threatened by people who challenge them, especially their own offspring who challenge them. Because who knows better about what really goes on in the family system than the children of the family system? Who really knows better about the true personality of parents than their own children?
And speaking from my own personal experience and having observed this in so many people, when the child of the family system speaks about the truth of the pathology, the sickness, the unhealthy behavior of the parents, the parents take that as a betrayal. A terrible, terrible betrayal. How dare you speak about my honest and true and sick qualities? Your job is to keep silent, to keep these family secrets. Your job is to protect me. I brought you into this world. I created your life. I fed you. I gave you clothes. I changed your diapers. I gave you whatever minimum amount of love was required to allow you to survive. And because of that, your job is to protect my sickness, even from myself.
I think of when I was very young and I started calling out my parents on their unhealthy and sick behavior. They didn’t like it. This is within the family system. This is in my relationship with them, not even public at all. Just saying, don’t treat me that way. I don’t like that. That’s wrong. What you are doing, that’s sick. What you are doing, that hurts me. Right away, that caused problems. They wanted me to accept their sick behavior at all costs, to feed them only a fake, twisted, positivized mirror of who they were.
So I have personally seen the consequences of speaking out and continuing to speak out, to become healthier and healthier, to become a more real and vulnerable and humble person, to call myself out. Also, my family system didn’t even like that. I remember early on when I started figuring out some of my own sick behaviors, some of the ways in which I was immature and unhealthy and troubled. And I remember before I even figured out that it was deeply connected to how sick my parents were and how sickly they had treated me, I remember going to my dad and talking to him about some of my troubled behavior, confusing things that I’d done and unhealthy things. And he’s like, let it go. Forget about it. Bury it. Don’t talk about this, Daniel. Don’t be public. It’s only going to bring nastiness and horrible negativity into your life. Don’t admit it. Don’t admit anything.
And I realized later that he was telling me the strategy for his existence. He was telling me the strategy for my mother’s existence, for my grandparents’ existence, all my aunts and uncles. This is how they lived. My teachers, my friends’ parents. He was teaching me how to be a normal person. I was going to say a normal American. Might as well say a normal human being. This is the way of the world. Don’t admit our flaws. Don’t admit our sicknesses. Don’t admit our vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Don’t admit our bad behaviors. Lie, deny, defend.
My dad had a whole career based on lying, denying, and defending. He was a criminal defense attorney. He told me when I was a little boy, he said, Daniel, he said, I’ve defended thousands of criminals. He said, except in a very small number of cases, one or two, three cases out of thousands, he said, they’re all guilty. And he said it kind of with a smile on his face, like he was getting away with it. And he was getting away with it. He was getting paid a lot of money to lie on behalf of people who had done bad things. He had all sorts of ways of rationalizing and justifying it. The criminal defense or the whole legal system is corrupt and bad. He was right, it is corrupt and bad. Jails are horrible places. But he wasn’t defending people because of the corruption of the legal system. He was defending people because this is how he lived his whole life, his personal life.
When I started calling him out on his sick behavior, it had nothing to do with the legal system. I was calling him out on his sick behavior because he had traumatized me. And he used those exact same methods of defense that he used in his profession to defend himself and to pathologize me. He cross-examined me. And it was very interesting to see him doing it with me, to see him manipulating and diverting and lying and scapegoating me and dropping little dishonest bombs to try to discredit me, to try to make me doubt myself, talking about me with other members of the family so they would side with him. It was like in his mind the whole world was a court case to defend himself against his own bad behavior.
Defend his parents. He idealized his parents in so many different ways. My mother did the same thing. So when I come back to this subject of the main thing that’s going to keep our world stuck, I use my personal example of my family system as a case study to show this. Because my family system is fundamentally normal. We’re different in some ways, but fundamentally we are normal. We’re part of the norm. We’re pretty conventional.
My parents’ histories and defense mechanisms and dishonesties, they’re pretty normal. I’ve seen so many people now that are fundamentally the same. If I had been raised in their family system and I had spoken out the way I started to do, if I started to get healthy, so many different parents, cultures, all this, they would have treated me the same way that my parents did. And I’ve seen many other people who start to speak out and get crushed, or the parents try to crush them in the same way that my parents tried to crush me. My parents so far have failed. Yet I don’t want to say that I’ve come out unscathed. It’s hard to speak the truth for me. I still question myself a lot. It’s still very painful. It’s very, very stressful to speak out honestly and publicly.
I do it as a public service. I do it as a sense of obligation. Making these videos, speaking so honestly, I don’t do it to rip apart my parents. I really don’t care about my parents at this point. I don’t think about them all that much. But as a case study, they’re fascinating for me, and they’re a perfect example for me to share on video with the public because I know the dynamics so intimately. I know how useful this can be to other people who are going through it.
I believe I’ve talked about this example that I’m going to use in other videos. I’ve certainly written about it, and I’ve read about it. The idea of crabs in a barrel. I think so much of humanity is like that. The crabs in a barrel. You put a bunch of crabs in a barrel, and they become like the family system. And if one crab tries to get out, all the other crabs grab it and pull it back down. So it’s very hard for any crab to escape this barrel or this bucket. It just keeps pulling down any of the people who try to be honest back into the family system.
Yet if some crabs don’t escape, then none will be inspired to do it. Maybe crabs won’t even know that they can get out, that there’s a big world of freedom out there. So I think of myself that having largely gotten out, I want to be an example of someone who got out to show other people that it’s possible. Not to sugarcoat it and say, “oh it’s easy and it’s going to feel great and there’s going to be no negative consequences.” Oh, I’m quite the opposite. It will be hell to get out. It will be very painful. It’ll take a long, long time. It’s a deeply internal process to be able to break out of these ways of being and thinking.
I think what I’ve observed in myself and others is that the family system puts its imprint on all of us much more than we even realize. Even if we don’t like our parents and we realize they traumatized us in many ways, we are much more like them than we realize. And it takes a long, long time to transform ourselves. But if we can do it, if we can find a way to love ourselves in spite of all the hell of breaking out of the family system and the rejection and the horror that goes along with getting out, we can transform. We can become something different, and we can become someone who helps other people get out.
So we can become the crab that reaches from the top and pulls the other crabs out of the bucket or the barrel. We can provide inspiration and hope that it is possible. But for me, in my case, I feel again, yes, I can provide inspiration and hope to the degree that I have embodied that inspiration and hope. But I can also share about all the details of how horrible it is and how scary it is and how it’s a long, slow, gradual process. And it hasn’t gotten easier in some ways, but in some ways it has gotten easier.
Because the main thing I’ve seen is the more I’ve gotten out, well, the more I have a wonderful relationship with myself, and I become a great ally for myself. And also, I get those radars out there to find other allies, other people who mirror my good qualities and support me on my journey to become more free. And those people out there who I find, who see me, who love me for me, and that part of me that sees myself, the true me, and loves me for the real me, this becomes my new family system. And this becomes the template for the hope for the future of our species, of our world. This is what I live for.
[Music]