TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of societal acceptance versus societal rejection. This came to the forefront of my consciousness in the last 24 hours when last night I was having a conversation with an old friend of mine who recently had a baby. His partner had a baby, and he was telling me that when he goes out walking in the street of the city he lives in with his baby, he said, “People are so wonderful to me.” He said, “I love it. People are so friendly. They’re so kind. Everybody’s coming over and wanting to ask me questions. They give me compliments.” He said, “Sometimes some of the very people, when I didn’t have a baby, who were threatening to me, who could behave in a hostile manner, even be very aggressive toward me, now they’re just so polite and kind and complementary.” He said, “Wow, it’s like having a baby. It’s like having a little love magnet attached to me. I just get so much love from the world.”
Societal acceptance. Then I compare it to how I’m feeling. I’ve been sitting for many, many days, over a week now, making video after video that critiques society, critiques parents and their subtle but sometimes extreme, even though subtle, below the radar ways of traumatizing their children. How children get screwed up in normal family systems. How to heal from trauma. How to break from traumatizing parents. How to set limits against a world that doesn’t respect truth. How much the world is profoundly in denial, starting with the way the world views the family system.
And how do I feel as the results of this? Woo! So much anxiety, pain, fear. I don’t want to overuse the word. I don’t want to make a mountain out of a molehill, but I feel despair. Also, really, I really do feel that feeling of despair. A feeling—what is despair? A feeling of pain and sadness mixed with anxiety. A feeling sort of of overwhelm.
Societal rejection. Society doesn’t want to hear these things. Society doesn’t want to be critiqued in an accurate way. Society doesn’t want to have a mirror shown on it. Society—and when I say society, I mean a massive conglomeration of family systems, millions and billions of family systems. The family system being controlled, being ruled by the parents—two parents, sometimes one parent. That’s who I’m critiquing. I’m critiquing the family systems of the world. I’m saying, “You’re doing it wrong. Look at how screwed up the world is. Look what a mess we’ve made of this world as our species, and look what you are doing to children.”
I say to my parents, my parents being an example. I used to make the greater point, “Look what you did to me. Look how much suffering I had to go through because of your denial, because of your lack of having healed your traumas. The traumas which you replicated on me. Look at how much pain I had to go through, how much I had to get stunted to live within your system, and how much hell and alienation I had to go through in order to do any degree of healing from this, and how much you hated me for looking at what really happened, for growing, for becoming a real person, becoming honest.”
This wasn’t what I was supposed to do. This wasn’t what I was raised to do. This wasn’t what I was allowed to do. And fundamentally, I’m a normal person, meaning what happened to me is normal in our world. This is normal. My parents are normal people. They’re socially accepted people, socially loved people, socially successful people. People who the world says, “These are good people.”
Now, yes, publicly I, Daniel Mackler, have called out my parents for what they did, but I didn’t call them out to specifically harm them. It probably has been a bit embarrassing for them, though. They’re both retired and old and living in places where they probably don’t have to see anybody who even knows about any of these videos. At least I hope. I don’t wish personal harm against them, but I use them as an example of just the normal people of the world.
Even of my friend, my buddy, my old acquaintance who I talked to last night. Is he so different from them? No. Let’s be honest. I talk with him. I hear what’s really going on inside his family system with his partner and with the child, and I might as well be talking to my parents. It’s a curiosity for me to see that this is happening again and again and again—a generation, two generations later—and it goes on all over the world. I see this everywhere.
And he’s finding out the little secret that my parents found out when they became parents, and my dad found out when he became a father, when he had me and walked around the street with me in New York City, in a similar neighborhood to where I’m living now. He told me this. He said, “Everybody loved me.” Not me—him, because that’s who he cared about. He said, “Everybody was complimenting him on what a great dad he was and what a beautiful kid he was and what a beautiful family he had and what a beautiful partnership he had with my mother. There were two beautiful looking people, etc., etc.”
My mom was cheating on him at work with her boss. She hated him. He was trying to control her and put her in a little box where he could make her his, and she was trying to control him and put him in a little box and make him hers. And this was the war that they had, well, until I was 21 and they split up, divorced. He was having affairs by then, and she was a miserable person with substance abuse. But all normal. Normal.
Now we live in a society where partners can cheat, and it’s not even called cheating. There are all sorts of other words for it—ethical non-monogamy, having an open relationship, etc., etc., etc. And when these people have kids in their ethical non-monogamous relationships and their open relationships, they are complemented.
And I think about the times when I have been with friends of mine years back, even recently, when these friends have young children and babies, and they say, “Oh, hold my baby for a moment,” and I hold their baby or I play with their young child when we’re at the playground, and they go off to the bathroom for a minute, and I give them a respite from being the primary caretaker. And all these people come over to me because it’s happened so many times, starting from the first time I did it 20 years ago or whenever it was. People would come over to me, “What a great dad you are,” because they thought I was the father of this child. “What a wonderful thing you’re doing.”
And all I was doing was just playing with a child, just being there with a child. “What a great person you are.” And it’s like, it felt good. It felt wonderful to get all that positive feedback, even though I wasn’t a father, even though I was just maybe sitting there for five or ten minutes with this little child who wasn’t even mine—a five or ten minute investment. And on the surface, that was enough to get so many kudos.
And when I make these videos, when I really put my heart and soul into these videos and take a deep breath and work so hard to make these videos really honest and put a real investment in them—something that can really contribute to the world—these videos being my babies, my babies who I will nurture by being as honest as I can, regardless of how I’m feeling, regardless of whether I say, “Oh my God, this is just gonna get you rejected more,” I do it anyway.
And I edit them, and I do my best to put them up and make them public, share them with the world. And yes, there are some people who watch these videos who appreciate what I am sharing. And I think a lot of the people who like these videos, these are people who understand what societal rejection is, what it means to speak out against the norm, speak out against the cruelty and harm and hypocrisy of the norm. People who know what it’s like to be hated for being real, to be disliked and pushed away for being healthy. For people who know how the family system really is when it drops its mask, when you are not no longer as dissociated as they are, when you are feeling the…
Feelings of your trauma and saying, actually, I’m not only feeling these feelings, I’m accepting them as good for my growth. And I don’t feel good about you because you caused them. Well, I think people who have gone through that and who have stuck with those feelings and who realize that those feelings will save their life, and realize how hard it is to live in a family system and a greater society of millions of family systems when you are this way, I think people like that can understand much better where I’m coming from when I make this little comparison.
But oh gosh, sometimes I admit, not that I want kids. I mean, the kids that I want are my videos being useful to people, nurturing the human beings of the world who are real and growing. I don’t need to procreate and make more kids. That’s not a necessary thing that I need to do in the world the way that it is. But in my fantasy, it would sure be nice to be loved by society, to make easy money from society. I mean, these videos make it harder to make a living. It causes more struggle for me, just life’s little funny ironies. But then nobody ever promised that it would be easy.
All of my early experiences, even with starting to get real and becoming more honest, becoming more true to who I really was and really am, to my healing process, to being honest about what I went through, changing my behavior, becoming a better person, even very early on when this happened decades ago, I learned if you want to continue on this path, Daniel, it’s going to be a tough life. This is going to be the hard road. This is not the easy road.
And I hear parents, yes, oh, it’s so difficult to be a parent. And I know it’s true. I know it’s difficult to be a parent, especially if you’re going to be a better parent. There’s a lot of sacrifice in it. There’s a lot of frustration and difficulty. But you get societal acceptance in so many different ways.
I mean, I think about my recent travels around Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. I got asked constantly, do you have children? Especially when people found out that I was traveling at 49 years old, almost 50. Do you have children? Do you have grandchildren? Why not? Why not? I mean, whatever language they were asking me, and it was the same again and again. Why don’t you have children? And it was like uncomfortable. People wouldn’t even have cared if I had children and they were five years old back in America and I left them with my wife or girlfriend and I was traveling and having a great time. Just having the children would have made me part of the club, the club of normal people. You succeeded. You are a man. You’re a real man. You’re someone who has hope for the future generations.
It’s like, no, really, I would have gotten accepted because I was part of the cult that drank the Kool-Aid. I would have been someone who was playing the game and was never going to call out my parents, their parents, all parents, and them, and also even myself for the ways that I absorbed the trauma of my family and became a traumatizing person too. Because I didn’t escape my own analysis. I didn’t escape my own vision of what was screwed up in the world. And that’s probably also part of why it’s so painful, and I have despair sometimes after I make these videos, is because I’m talking about whole parts of myself and my history as well. And it’s not easy to call oneself out, call oneself out, call everybody out.
And so why do I do it? First of all, I do it because it’s the truth, absolute truth. I have found that again and again and again. This is what I’ve come up with, with the data I’ve collected. Data I’ve collected by studying myself, my own psyche, all the different parts of me, my history, my childhood, all of my friends’ childhoods. When I was a kid, everybody I watched growing up, everybody I listened to, the books I read definitely got cemented way more into place when I spent ten and a half years being a therapist and listening to people talk about their life histories, tracing what happened to them that made them the ways that they were, watching them heal, watching myself heal, watching what came up, just observing these patterns again and again. This is where I say what I’m talking about is true. This is reality, and that’s a huge part of why I talk about it.
And then there’s the other reason that I talk about it, because this is what helps. This is what will cure what ails us. This is what will cure what ails our species. This is what will cure what ails our species and its relationship with our greater planet, with nature. This is it. This is the cure, and I’m talking about it. And I think I’m just far ahead of the pack. I think the people who somehow stick with this channel, listen to this stuff, people who I talk to who get what I’m talking about, who’ve never even seen my channel, these ideas, because I think people know this. Many, many people know these ideas deep down. We are at the forefront. We are on the vanguard of figuring this out.
I think being in a very, very small minority, we, I, you, whoever figures this stuff out, takes the brunt of the hatred of society, the denial of society, the rejection of society. So many people don’t want to change. And why? Well, guess what? So much easier to be accepted than to feel rejection, hatred, despair, blame, the projections of society. Oh, society says we’re not sick, it’s you. And I know that even from my childhood, very early on when I shared my pain, my frustration, my anger at being traumatized with my parents, they blamed me. They were angry at me for talking about my reactions to being harmed by them. So this goes way back in my history, and this will probably go way, way into my future as long as society is heading in the unhealthy direction that it’s heading on.
But if society changes, if society wakes up and realizes really what’s going on, what the real core of the problem is, the problem within the family system writ large times a million, the traumatizing and rejection and abandonment, neglect of children, if society changes its ways, the whole makeup of society, the perspective of people change, and the majority come to realize that what I’m talking about is true and they accept it and they get on a healing path, then this dynamic I’m talking about will flip. And the people who are unconscious and walking around with their babies, so proud of how great of a thing that they’ve done by having sex and making a baby and being totally unprepared to raise a healthy child, to be a healthy parent, then society will not give them tons of societal approval.
And when people speak the truth and walk the healing path and live the healing path, society, masses of people will say, good for you. I know it’s hard. I’ve been there. And they will experience, they, we, me, we will feel societal acceptance. And I look forward to that day. Will it come in my lifetime? I’m not betting on it if I were a gambling guy. But wow, I can always hope.