TRANSCRIPT
The goal of life is not to be happy. This contradicts a lot of the messages I have heard throughout my life. Certainly, as a child, I was told the goal of life is to be happy. If you want to make friends, you have to be happy. If you want to succeed at school, succeed in your own family system, you have to be happy. If you want people to like you, you have to be happy. You have to put on a happy face, push down those bad feelings, come on, let the sorrow go away.
Well, if the goal of life is to be happy, then my maternal grandmother should have been the ideal human being because, by and large, she lived a pretty happy life. And yet, I look at her and I think she’s like the exact opposite of a role model for who I want to become in my life. I realized that a long time ago because her happiness was actually just a little thin layer of what the world saw on the surface. Because actually, she had pushed down all her unhappiness, pushed down all her anger, pushed down all her rage and sadness and sorrow and frustration, pushed down her feelings of betrayal, pushed down the misery that she felt because of her unhappy marriage.
I mean, she had actually succeeded at figuring out how to be happy in a miserably unhappy marriage with a husband who was constantly cheating on her, who didn’t want to be around her a lot of the time, watching her kids grow up and have all sorts of dysfunctional problems because of the ways in which she had participated in failing them when they were younger, when she was their mother.
Also, part of how she maintained her happiness was by using alcohol. Alcohol kept her happy when her sadness started to bubble up in ways that she could not consciously control. By pushing down, by going into denial over, and by dissociating, she drank alcohol—just enough alcohol to keep her mood happy. And what I think is that society liked that. Society gave her approval for that because she kept everybody comfortable.
So this idea of happiness as a goal, a purpose of life, I’ve really turned against that idea. I really don’t like it, in large part because I realize many of the people, most of the people who see happiness as a goal, haven’t really dealt with a lot of the horrible things that happened to them and also haven’t necessarily dealt with the horrible things that they have done to others. Because sometimes, not dealing with what happened to one can allow a person a certain liberty to replicate it on other people and feel guiltless, blameless even.
Well, what I found for me is that at a certain point, I realized I could never be satisfied with myself. I could never really love myself and have any real deep sense of self-esteem until I had processed what I went through. In fact, how could I even really have a self to have self-esteem about if I didn’t even know my own history? I don’t even know what happened to myself in my childhood. Therefore, how can I have a self? I figured that out along the way.
So what I started to do is become an archaeologist for my own history. I started exhuming my past, going into my past and studying what is the history of myself. What really happened to myself? How was my self formed? What was the original self that I had hypothetically, and what happened to it along the way? The more that I did this, the more that I felt all those blocked feelings that I’d never been allowed as a child. And the more that I felt those feelings, the more I realized these are the feelings that are going to create all the colors that go into making a full self. This will bring me to a process someday of integration—a long, confusing, messy process. But I had to feel all those feelings in relation to the bad, terrible things that had been done to me, the things that caused me to shut down all the non-happy sides of myself.
And so for a long, long time, in a lot of different parts of my personality, in a lot of different areas, spheres of my life, I wasn’t happy. I felt a lot of anger. I felt a lot of sadness. I felt a lot of grief. I felt a lot of confusion. I felt a lot of jealousy—jealous of people who hadn’t gone through what I’d gone through. I felt a lot of rage sometimes at people who had done terrible things to me, even unfortunately at people who did things that were just maybe one percent of a reflection in my modern life of things that had happened to me long ago. It was very confusing to bring up these feelings.
And I say “was” because in a lot of ways, I’m not in that place of processing so much of this now. I think by and large, I’ve processed most of it to the degree that I know of. I mean, how much can we really know of what happened to us when we were very young, when we were babies, when we were infants, when we have parents who are like my parents who won’t tell anything, won’t say what happened, weren’t even aware consciously necessarily of the terrible things that they were doing? Because they didn’t even relate to me necessarily as a human being. I was more of an object. Doing bad things to me wasn’t even considered bad in their mind because it’s like doing bad things to a wall or a piece of paper or a chair. It’s like this thing doesn’t really have feelings. So in a way, they weren’t logging up the terrible things that happened to me in my history that profoundly affected me.
Well, so for that reason, I can’t say I’m fully healed. In fact, I’m pretty confident that I’m not. But I know that I’ve done a lot of healing, and I certainly know that through the process of healing a lot of the childhood traumas that I went through and the process of doing so much of that healing for so many years, a lot of that time I wasn’t happy. I was very unhappy, in fact. I mean, feeling historical rage and sadness and grief, that kind of is directly contrary to happiness. And that’s when it really came to my mind, especially most loudly, that happiness is not a goal.
I even heard some religions, big religious leaders, “oh happiness is so important,” and I looked at those people then, and what I realized then more than ever is those people were just dissociated. They were just blocked. They were in a sort of spiritual bliss. It was like some of them had so mastered their inner psychological defenses that they, unlike my grandmother, didn’t even need alcohol to keep their feelings at bay. I even think some of the people who are masters of meditation, “oh I can just sit for hours in an uncomfortably physically awkward position and not even think any thoughts.” I heard that as a sort of goal—to be in a place where you don’t even think anything, your mind can be totally blank. And it’s like that was never my experience. I certainly tried it because there was a part of me, especially when I was going through some of the worst times of healing my traumas and when I was a child, when I was trying to push down those traumas, that I just wanted to be happy.
And I think part of the strength of my life, what in a way made healing the healing that I’ve done so much more of an inevitability than some other people that I saw, was that I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t be happy. I just wasn’t very good at dissociating. I tried. I tried so hard. I wanted to be normal. I wanted to fit in. I would have loved to have just clicked my fingers and been one of those happy, popular people in school from when I was a kid. But I couldn’t do it. And so I kept exploring myself and exploring my feelings.
Now, one challenge to this idea when I say happiness is not a goal of life, one challenge that I see could be, well, what about the idea that happiness could be an end goal of healing traumas? That once we’ve healed all our traumas, then maybe then we can be happy? So maybe happiness really is a goal after all. It’s an end result of healing all these horrible things that…
Happen to us? Maybe the blue skies on the other side of the hurricane of healing are blue skies of happiness. And maybe it’s true in a way, because I would say in a lot of ways I’m happier now. But then I also think, not really. Because one thing that I’ve gained from doing so much more healing of trauma is that I’ve gained so much more empathy. I’m much more compassionate, much more sensitive to what’s going on in the outside world.
And we live in such an incredibly traumatizing world that to be an empathic person, at least in my case, I’ve seen it with other people too who are more empathic and more compassionate, is to be a person who isn’t always happy. And often, I mean, let’s just say I’m taking a walk out in the streets of New York City, and I see a father yelling at his three-year-old daughter for doing nothing wrong except maybe falling down and getting her knee wet in the mud. And he’s yelling at her, and the mother is doing nothing and pretending she doesn’t see this because the mother knows that if she stops the father and says, “Listen, don’t yell at her, this little girl did nothing wrong,” the father would then turn on the mother and yell at her. And then they’ll have relationship conflicts. So the mother basically is going to sacrifice the child.
I see this whole dynamic, this dynamic and a thousand others like it in all sorts of different ways. And I want to say something, and sometimes I do. I say, “Leave her alone, she didn’t do anything.” Oh, and then the father goes, “I’ve had fathers want to fight with me. I’ve had mothers want to fight with me. I’ve had strangers come and say, ‘You mind your own business,’ and that kind of thing.” And it’s like, so I’ve often learned, especially as a guy, big tall younger guy, stay out of it. Sometimes I can’t stop myself, but even if I do stay out of it, I feel terrible. I feel sad. I don’t feel happy.
Let’s use my grandmother as an example. Part of the thing about my grandmother being so dissociated, so pickled, and so out of touch, you know, drinking more, is that she had less empathy. She had less compassion. She was more psychologically and emotionally blind. She didn’t even pick up when people were unhappy. She might have seen that scenario and said, “Oh, that father cares so much about his daughter, he’s trying to teach her the right way to be,” whereas the little daughter’s dying inside, becoming overwhelmed, and feels terrible. And probably has had this happen 20, 50, 100 times, and that adds up to the little girl being traumatized and frightened to live her life, feels betrayed. My grandmother didn’t know to notice this.
And I see this out in the streets of New York. So many people just walk by these traumatizing situations and feel nothing. I think of this happened to me a couple of years ago. I saw a guy beating up an old man on the street for fundamentally no reason at all. The old man had done nothing wrong. The young guy perceived that the old man had been looking at his girlfriend, but he started punching. He knocked out his teeth. There was a whole crowd just standing there watching. I got in the middle. It overwhelmed me. I ran and I stopped the guy from beating the other guy up. Everyone else just stood there. People just walked away. People seemed to feel nothing. It’s like people are dead inside. And these are people often I think who are happy.
And that’s the other thing. So I think it really comes down to this. Maybe the difference between the goal of all this healing trauma is, is it really happiness? I think the goal of healing all this trauma is to be an integrated, emotionally connected person. And I think when people say the goal of life, people so commonly in society, even religions, “Oh, the goal is to be happy,” what they’re really saying is the goal is to be dissociated. The goal is to be emotionally split off and emotionally shut down. It’s not to be happy. It’s to be blank and to be void.
And when someone is blank and void, even a little bit of just sort of comfort, maybe even comfortable to be blank, to be void, to be comfortable when they can have just a little bit of comfort and maybe put a little alcohol in it or some other addiction that they have, some other thing that distracts them enough to just feel kind of one percent okay, they can call that happiness and nobody complains.
So yes, I would say I’m a happier person now than I used to be, but I’m also a lot more quick to be empathic for the ugly things I see in the world. I’m a lot more quick to be angry when I feel violated. I’m a lot more quick to feel guilty when I do bad things. I’m a lot more quick to feel sorrow when I see things that are sad, when I experience things that are sad, when I have sad memories. I’m a lot more quick to fight for myself and defend my boundaries, which is actually often extremely uncomfortable. When I was younger, well, I didn’t defend my boundaries so quickly because I knew that the people who were violating me would reject me. So in that way, it’s like I was more dead. And I think a lot of times society equates psychological emotional deadness with happiness, and I so strongly reject that.