TRANSCRIPT
Yesterday, I felt very disconnected from the message of this YouTube channel. The message of this channel being connecting with our history of childhood trauma, feeling our historical feelings, seeing the value in connecting or reconnecting with those ancient historical feelings, and working to grieve them, to feel them, to make sense of where we came from and how that still affects us in our present life. Well, I felt so disconnected from that yesterday.
And my little story that I’d like to tell now, I think really highlights what happened and why it happened. The way I felt disconnected was that in the afternoon, I was going to edit a few videos that I had already shot. I was going to just watch through them, see how I felt about them, see if there’s anything that needed to be cut. Were they good enough to pass my test to want to put on this channel? Were they not good enough?
And part of how I watch those videos when I edit them is I have myself in a certain mindset. I open myself up to the message that I am trying to get across. Well, I couldn’t do it. I just could not connect. I was watching this like, “What is this? This is ugh, this makes no sense to me. This seems so irrelevant and stupid even.” And there was a reason for it. And that is because for about two and a half hours before that, I had watched two documentaries.
The first documentary that I watched was on a horrible prison in Africa. It’s on YouTube. It was a video about a prison in Madagascar, and it was so awful and atrocious and painful and terrible. And obviously for the people who are already there, traumatizing. And it was just like ugh, it was disturbing. But I wanted to see it. It’s like I wanted to gather information about the world.
Well, the second documentary I watched was on a most horrible mental hospital. It was like, yeah, I was really giving it to myself. I watched the documentary “The Tita Cut Follies.” I’ve heard about it for years. It’s been banned. It was banned for a long time. Well, it’s on the internet now. It’s on YouTube, so I watched it. And it was like a double blow, boom boom, and it was like awful. And the way that they treated people, it was terrible, humiliating. The inmates, literally inmates, it was a mental hospital for the criminally insane.
And I was also especially interested because I had had a client at one point when I was a therapist who had been incarcerated there. Someone that I worked with in my private therapy practice, he came and saw me alone, and he told me about how horrible that place was. Well, I saw this documentary shot in 1967. It was awful.
Well, afterward, I was like, “Okay, now I’m going to do my work.” And I opened up my computer’s editing software and I started looking, and I was like, “What is this stuff? This guy, me, talking about historical childhood trauma?” It was like I literally could not emotionally connect with it. Intellectually, yes, I could follow what my arguments were, but on an emotional level, it literally made no sense to me.
And this is what was really interesting to me. What I realized was that by watching these documentaries, these horrors that other people lived through, I dissociated. I disconnected from my deeper emotions. I blocked my emotions. And I’m not usually in a dissociated place. Certainly when I make these videos, like right now at this moment, I’m not dissociated. I have a deeper connection with my historical feelings, with my present feelings. My consciousness is much more connected with my feelings, and I’m more integrated.
Well, when I watched these videos, I got overwhelmed by the horror of it. It was just absolutely too much horror. In one way, I could say I distracted myself from how I’m feeling, but in another way, it was just like, no, it’s like my body, my mind just said, “Whoop, shut down, go away.” And it’s like I went back to how I often felt as a child. I was dissociated a lot as a child. Life was just too painful and overwhelming. I wasn’t living in a situation that was as horrible as that mental hospital or that prison, but in another way, I was. I was an inmate in my family system.
The prison guards, the people who ran the mental hospital were my parents. I mean, even some of the conversations I heard between the psychiatric inmates and the psychiatrist and the staff, it reminded me of my relationship with my parents. I got double talked out of my ideas. I got manipulated to behave a certain way. There was always an underlying level of conditional love where if I didn’t behave exactly right, I would be mocked, I would be rejected, and I shut down as a kid.
And I think by watching these documentaries, remembering how, or feeling as a child how I, there was no escape for me. I couldn’t get out of my family, and these prisoners in these two environments couldn’t get out either. There was no real way forward for a lot of them. This was like a life sentence, and that’s how I felt as a child.
That’s why, and this brings me to the next thought. Well, aside from the fact that I just couldn’t edit yesterday, I just couldn’t do it. I was like, “Daniel, today ain’t the day to edit.” But then it made me think, what if someone who is normally in a more dissociated state watches my videos? How would they react to it? What would this seem like to them? That I think probably most of them would just not watch it.
Also makes me think of what if I’d gotten this message when I was in a much more dissociated place in my life where, let’s say, I could intellectually follow some of my arguments, but I was more dissociated? I probably would have hated my message. I would have said something like, “This guy’s weird. This guy is very self-indulgent.” And then I realized sometimes I do get those messages from people on this channel. I’ve gotten it on my website for years. People, or even when I was a therapist, sometimes I would try to talk about this stuff with people, “Oh no, no, I’m not interested in that. That’s so self-indulgent.”
And I think it tells a lot about the psychology, about the psychological state of the person who is hearing this message, myself being that person yesterday. And then it brings me to the final point I’d like to make in this video, and that is what an incredible privilege it is to not most of the time be in that dissociated state for myself, for others, to be open to connecting with this message.
Basically, I thought about it yesterday. It hit me very strongly. It’s like what a privilege to be able to have access to think about these things, to have a psychological platform from which I can think about my history of childhood trauma, where I have the mental space to do that, where I have the connection with my feelings to be able to do that, to want to do that.
People in those environments, those horrible environments, this awful prison and this terrible mental hospital, how could they possibly be in a position to access those feelings? The people who run that place, how could they feel that? It’s like the point of those places is not about healing at all. I think in a way, the prison was more honest. They’re not pretending that it’s a healing environment.
That mental hospital, that’s probably why I have spent so much time in a way critiquing psychiatry, critiquing the mental health system, critiquing mental hospitals, is because they play the game of manipulation and double talk, lying, saying, “We’re here to help you,” while they’re actually doing things that are very anti-healing.
But more so, I think about just the privilege of being able to do that work and how sometimes people who don’t have that privilege, who are more shut down like I was yesterday, can be repulsed by someone who has that privilege. And how as a child in my family system, when I tried to feel my feelings, when I tried to reconnect with the truth of my history, when I tried to confront my parents, even hold them responsible for the ways in which they were radically sometimes mistreating me, when I tried to be more my true self and really be centered in myself, how I was mocked for that.
Down for that, shut down. And it’s like, I think the real reason was is that it threatened them. And I think I was threatened by that message yesterday. It overwhelmed me. It’s like when I watched those two videos, it’s like something in me got scared and sad and horrified. And so I shut down.
And so to reconnect with those feelings, to have the privilege to reconnect with those feelings, for me to listen to someone who was in a more privileged position to be able to have those feelings and talk about what they meant, that was scary to me unconsciously. Because that meant that I had to go down before I was ready and bring those feelings up. And I was too much. It was like, no, no, I can’t do this.
And so what I had to do is go take a walk, have dinner, chill out, relax, listen to some relaxing classical music, and then go to sleep and wake up the next day and then realize I’m back.