TRANSCRIPT
Many times I have heard people who themselves say that they are more of a spiritual orientation say that children actually choose their parents. They choose their parents before they were born. They choose the family into which they will be born. They choose the good and the bad qualities of their parents to work out, let’s say, their past karma, things, issues from their past life.
And I’ve heard people describe this, mostly people who are parents describe this. And when they say this, what I really see is that they are rationalizing their own bad behavior as parents. They’re rationalizing their failures as parents with their children. Because if their children actually chose to be in this family, chose to have them as a parent, them with their good and bad quality, they were choosing these bad qualities of their parent, and therefore the parent cannot be held responsible.
But also when people say this, people who may be parents or maybe not be parents, they’re also letting their own parents off the hook. And it can be a lot easier in life to let one’s own parents off the hook. If you don’t let your parents off the hook for the bad things that they did to you, if you don’t forgive them, if you actually start looking inside and saying what really did they do that was bad to me and what effect did it have on me, this opens the door to a lot of pain. Actually, what I was going to say that’s even more true is to a hell of a lot of pain. It’s horrible to start actually looking at what your parents really did to you and how it affected you. I know it was hell for me, and to varying degrees, it is still hell for me.
It’s hell to realize I didn’t choose to be part of this family. In fact, quite the opposite. I didn’t like them in many ways, but I wasn’t allowed to not like them. I had to bury those feelings. My parents chose to create me. I bet if they could have had their druthers, if they could have had their choice, they would have had a less spirited and independent child. They would have had a child who forgot his needs, buried his feelings even more, was more crushed, didn’t have such a fighting spirit, and later grow up to say, “screw this, I’m not going to take this crap from this family and from you awful people. I’m going to break away and become independent.” Heaven forbid! They didn’t want a child who was going to grow up and make YouTube videos like this.
But I didn’t choose them. I did not choose to be part of that family. And I’ve actually had people look at me and say, “Daniel, you have to stop making those videos. You have to learn how to forgive your parents because it was your karma to be part of that family. You chose to be the child in that family system. You needed what they had to offer you, the good and the bad, to work out issues from your own past lives.” I’m like, “Nah, not true at all.” But then, then there’s one exception to this, and I’m going to take it in a totally different way. There still are times that people choose their parents.
And I actually don’t choose my parents. I choose not to have my parents anymore. I don’t want my parents to be my parents. Yes, historically they were my parents, but they don’t parent me anymore. They have no parenting to offer me. It’s been decades since they’ve had any parenting to offer me. In fact, all that’s left that they have to offer me is what they always offered me, which was like a magnet for their unmet needs. When I was a kid, probably 80 percent of my role in relationship to them was to try to meet their unresolved needs, and 20 is what they gave back to me to meet my actual legitimate childhood needs, which they had a responsibility to meet a hundred percent. So it was very conditional love that they gave me.
Well, when I became an adult, they really had nothing else to offer me. I was already more mature than they were by the time I was in my 20s, and I started figuring that out. I started realizing being around them just feels awful again and again and again. I feel lost and in pain and gross and sick and hungover after I hang out with them because all that was left was their need. And that is when I realized, you know, people do choose their parents, and they can choose not to have their parents anymore. And I realized I didn’t want to keep signing up to choose them. In fact, I want to not choose them. I want to choose other people to be parental figures in my life.
There certainly were no lack of people who were adults who were more mature than my parents, more respectful to me than my parents, and I chose to be around them. Not that they became my parents, as it were, but they became, in a way, like parental figures. People from whom I could learn things. Maybe people who I never even met. Some of these parental figures were adults in books. Maybe they were long since dead. Maybe they were even fictional characters. But I realized they were more parental figures for me. They were even more parents for me than my actual legitimate biological parents were for me.
And then eventually I started realizing and started choosing the ultimate parent for me, and that was the mature side of myself. The mature, healed, grown-up side or sides of myself that could be a parent for the still wounded, still confused, still screwed up and lost child-like parts of me. The stunted, wounded, traumatized parts of me. The parts of me that my parents failed so dramatically when I was a child. The parts of me that, well, were keeping me stuck and lost in my life.
And so I really then did have to make a choice. Do I want my actual biological parents to be my parents anymore or somebody else? And I started consistently choosing new parents, new people, and ultimately this new healthier side of me. And what I found, which was very, very interesting, was that when I stopped choosing to have that old historical relationship with my parents, when I stopped choosing to be in a relationship with my parents, they stopped pretending that they loved me. And they showed me much more honestly how they had always felt about me, which was they didn’t really like me. They resented me. They saw me as someone who was there in life to make them happy.
They believed, and this the family system believed it, and the society around me and around the family system encouraged this, that they owned me. That I had no choice in this matter. I couldn’t choose them, and if I didn’t choose them, they treated me horribly. They rejected me. They broke me down. And this started happening more and more and more as I got older. Now, when I was a little kid, yes, it happened to a degree when I said, “don’t treat me that way, don’t talk to me that way, don’t make me do these things that I don’t want to, don’t harm me, don’t neglect me.” They shot down my feelings. They let me know very early on they were not deeply and profoundly on my side.
And so I stopped fighting with them. I started letting them have their way because I really didn’t have a choice. I wasn’t choosing this. I certainly didn’t choose to come into this family. I didn’t choose to have them treat me this way. But it became more obvious to me as I became more conscious as a teenager. And this went on and on and on, certainly into my late teen years, into my early 20s. And certainly by the end of my 20s, I’m like, “these people are really sick, and I don’t choose them.” So that’s what I realized as I became an adult more and more as I fought for my independence, not just psychological and emotional independence, but financial independence, work independence.
As I became someone who became able to make it out in the world on my own outside of the family system, I didn’t need anything material from my parents. When I started developing—also, this was of key importance—when I started developing my own social life, friends who were healthier, and I needed my parents, my family system less, then I realized less and less I had any need to choose them.
Proved to me that all the way along, I never chose them at all. And I certainly didn’t choose them in any spiritual way before I even existed as a human being.