TRANSCRIPT
An interesting thing that I’ve noticed again and again is that many things, especially that adults call traumas in their life, traumas that they experience in adulthood, are actually just reactivations of historical traumas. So basically, what I’ve seen is when people are children, when people are babies, they go through all sorts of horrible things. I made a whole other video about this. I think it’s called “Eight Different Types of Traumas.” But babies, very young children, experience lots of these. Pretty much every child I’ve ever observed is experiencing some degree of these. The basic one being certain degrees of abandonment by their parents, betrayal by their parents.
And often, because the child is in such a powerless position in their family system, especially in relationship to their parents, that their parents, their siblings, other people in the family don’t necessarily even notice this. It’s very normal in our world for people not to have that much empathy for children and for babies. I mean, historically, many different cultures, this culture even, didn’t even consider babies to be people. They didn’t have feelings. Their feelings didn’t matter.
I think about myself having been circumcised as a child. Tip of my penis cut off by a doctor the day I was born without any anesthesia. Whoa, who cares? Okay, he cries a little bit, he’ll get over it, he’ll move on. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t have feelings, he won’t remember it. And it’s like such a misunderstanding of the psychology of a baby to say this. And my parents said this was okay. My parents put me in the hands of these doctors who did this horrible thing to me. And that was just one example.
I was going to say one small example in the bigger picture of how my parents treated me emotionally. All sorts of other ways. Maybe it was a small example, but the reason I hesitate to say it really was a small example is that I really don’t know. Because I, in a way, don’t have a memory of what happened. Not a conscious memory at least, in so far as how adults remember things in pictures and in words and well, with an ability to describe what happened verbally.
But children do remember things. Babies do remember things. They remember things in a different way. It gets locked actually into their character. It gets locked into their psyche. It gets locked into their behavior patterns, their feelings. So what happens to them, what happened to all of us, we do remember in the cells of our body. I think even in our brains, in our guts, this is all remembered and it influences who we become.
So when I look at people, I look at people as, especially I’m talking adults, when I look at adults, I look at adults. And when I look at myself too, I look at them as people who carry a template for unresolved traumas from their early childhoods. This is normal. This is how it works. This is how I view people based on my experience of a lot of data over a lot of time. And not just therapy clients, but people in general, out in the world, friends I knew even from when I was a child who have had the good fortune to be able to watch grow up into adults.
And what I have observed is that most people really are pretty out of touch with what happened to them as children, especially as babies. Some people even know certain knowledge about what happened to them when they were very young, really bad horrible things that happened to them, but they discount it. Yeah, that didn’t really make much of a difference to me. Or they know it and it just doesn’t, it kind of filters out of their consciousness. They know some really terrible thing or things happened, but what I see is that leaves them unaware of how vulnerable they still remain.
And I see people who go through their whole lives vulnerable to experiences, adult experiences that kick up their historical traumas. And the more people are out of touch with what happened to them when they were children, the more that their adult experiences, their adult negative experiences get amplified, such that they can’t really put it in the context of how this relates to their unresolved issues.
So what I mean by that, if something bad happens to an adult, something objectively unpleasant, but for someone who has a lot of historical unresolved traumas, especially on historical unresolved traumas that are somehow metaphorically connected to these bad adult experiences, the person who has more of these unresolved experiences is going to experience this bad adult thing in a much, much more magnified way and be much more likely to call it trauma and not recognize that what the real trauma actually is.
And this is just a reactivation of the historical trauma, such that someone else who didn’t have as many traumas or traumas that necessarily related to an adult experience such as this would look at that experience and say, “That’s not a trauma, that’s nothing. That’s just a bad thing that may have happened that, you know, all of us go through. Move on, get over it.”
But the issue is for the person who has these historical unresolved traumas that as long as they haven’t dealt with those historical unresolved traumas of meaning, exhume them, feel them, grieve them, process them, work through them, put them in context, it’s basically impossible to be able to just move on from this adult experience.
And I think a lot of what gets called trauma in adults really is just, ding, a little reflection, a little mirroring of what happened long ago. And not all, there of course are exceptions to this. Some really terrible things that happened to adults that may not necessarily reflect what happened to them when they were younger, things that would objectively be called on their own standing trauma.
But I certainly have seen again and again that people with more unresolved trauma from early childhood are much more vulnerable and susceptible to bad things in adulthood, not only being perceived as traumas but actually being traumatic. Because that is the other thing, unresolved traumas from early childhood, especially a lot of unresolved traumas from early childhood, really do set the stage for adults becoming much more vulnerable to trauma later in their life.
Also being much more comfortable with unhealthy interactional behavior patterns, such that people who have a lot of unresolved traumas, especially around the intimate relationships they experienced when they were children, can end up growing up to be adults who at one level consider these unhealthy behavior patterns normal. Because once upon a time, as screwed up as they were, those behavior patterns were actually normal.
But also out of a desire to try to resolve those unhealthy behavior patterns. So I think a lot of people, from what I’ve seen, tend to make bad relational decisions, have a lot of unhealthy behavior patterns very much related to, parallel to, even directly connected to what happened to them when they were younger in an unconscious desire to process those historical patterns.
So in a way, the traumas, not all, but a lot of times the traumas that adults experience, especially if they repeatedly experience certain things that they consider to be traumatic in relationship with other people, are a real clue and sometimes the best clue of all to what happened once upon a time. It’s like unconsciously when people repeat unhealthy behavior patterns, they’re sending themselves a message: “Look, come look at what happened once upon a time.”
And I think often the more that people cannot connect with their early childhood traumas, their betrayals, the abandonments they experienced, sometimes the louder that they need to play out these modern troubled adult relationships.
And what I’ve also seen on the flip side is that as people begin to resolve their early historical traumas more and more, or even just start to get a perspective on what happened, get a perspective on the basic unhealthy constellations in which they were raised, those constellations which screwed them up, the less likely they are to play out these adult dynamics, these unhealthy adult dynamics that can be traumatic or perceived as traumatic because they don’t need to do it as much.
And this goes for me also. I’ve seen this in my life and I’ve seen this for a lot of other people that the more we heal our childhood traumas, the more healthy and strong we become as adults. The more easy it becomes to not only avoid traumatizing situations but to be able to handle the unpleasant experiences of life in, well, a stronger manner, a more functional manner, a manner which in a way can…
Have better boundaries and prevent us from being violated. Of course, not across the boards. I find that, you know, occasionally I can still experience some pretty bad things. But I just noticed the healthier I’ve become in my life, the less that life traumatizes me.