TRANSCRIPT
Many, many times in my life, I have tried to convince people of the correctness of my point of view. It could be my point of view about healing from childhood trauma, which is what I talk about largely on this YouTube channel, but lots of other ideas. What I have found is that mostly trying to convince people doesn’t work very well.
So what I find now in my adult life, now late 40s, is that I don’t try to convince people of almost anything ever, especially if they really vehemently don’t agree with me or I realized beforehand that we see things very differently. Mostly what I think is I know what I know. I know what I stand for. I know what I believe. I know what my point of view is. I like to challenge it. I like to consider possibilities of where I might be wrong and how I might be wrong and if I might be wrong. I like to hear arguments against what I believe and what I stand for. I like to challenge the logic of what I consider to be true, what I have come to believe to be true.
But I also realize by watching a lot of people that a lot of people don’t really do that very much. Also, I changed a lot in my life. Certainly, my point of view from when I was a teenager into my early 20s radically changed into what my point of view is now. I think about this idea of healing from childhood trauma. I didn’t even know anything about that when I was younger. I really was much more caught up in my childhood trauma, in the consequences of my childhood trauma. I was much more in denial. I was much more shut down. I was much more emotionally dissociated. My feelings were gone. My feelings were buried. I lived more in an illusion. I really believed my parents were very healthy. I believed my family system was very healthy, very loving. I was very lost, very confused. I was very self-hating but didn’t even realize that. I didn’t even think I had problems.
Yeah, sometimes my problems would bubble up and I would look at it, and it terrified me. So I would push those feelings down, push that awareness down. And yet I changed. I dramatically changed. And through that process of changing, I learned about how a person changes. I learned about why a person changes. The reason that I changed was not that anybody was trying to convince me to change. In fact, along the way, a couple people did really criticize me. I think some of my behavior bothered them, and they called me out on it. They tried to convince me of where I was wrong, and largely, oh, I just blocked it out. I pushed it, pushed it away. I didn’t want to hear it.
Really, what got me to change, what motivated me to change, was failing in my life, suffering, realizing that what I was doing didn’t work, feeling so unhappy, losing the contest, watching my parents divorce, watching my family system crash and burn before my eyes, feeling so lonely, realizing that I couldn’t get a girlfriend, and realizing eventually that the reason I couldn’t get a girlfriend was that the patterns of my relationship historically with my parents, especially my mom, screwed me up too much. I was playing that out, and I was too messed up. I had to acknowledge that failure really woke me up.
And so I’ve realized that about other people too. Like trying to convince them intellectually of where they’re wrong, where their point of view is wrong, where their perspective is wrong, doesn’t really do much. Because as long as people are comfortable, as long as they are padded in their dissociation, as long as they have walls around them to keep their pain, their history, their memories, their self-awareness at bay, pushed down, locked down, locked away, as long as they’re not looking at their history, as long as they feel like their life is working, often, as long as their addictions, whatever their addictions are, are keeping their feelings at bay, keeping their history down, keeping their self-awareness out of consciousness, they don’t want to look at themselves. They’re not open to looking at the logic of how they might be off.
I even thought about that as a therapist. I learned that lesson most loudly probably as a therapist, that trying to convince people that they need to change, what they need to do, what might help them, it didn’t really work very much. It’s like there’s even that old saying, which is I think largely true: people need to hit a bottom before they’re willing to consider changing. And it really was true with me. I needed to crack. I needed to crash and burn.
And so when I share my message here, I’m not trying to convince people in a way. What I think I’m trying to do is elucidate what people at some level already know. The audience that I share my message with is an audience that already at some level knows this and can make use of it. But sometimes I recognize, because I read the comments, I read all the comments on this channel, I see that there are people sometimes who are not my intended audience, and they hear this message, and it really rubs them the wrong way. They’re not open to these ideas. They’re not in that place at all, and it can infuriate them. And it’s like, oh, I sometimes wish they just wouldn’t listen to these videos.
And that’s another thing. Another reason I don’t try so hard to convince people who are not particularly open to what I have to share is that it does stress me out more. It causes me a sort of useless kind of pain that actually takes away from my ability to be more useful to people who are more open to what I have to offer. And also, the more stressed out and in pain I become from engaging with people who don’t like what I have to say, the more it takes me away from being able to be there for myself, to be my own best ally on my healing process as I gain more insight to help myself grow and become a more integrated person.