TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore a little bit the idea of people who actually don’t want to know their history. They don’t want to know the history of their own traumas. They don’t, most easily, don’t want to remember the bad things that they did. But what’s even more confusing for me is people who don’t even want to know what happened to them that was bad. Now, I get it because remembering what happened to one, the bad things that happened, especially in one’s childhood, is very, very painful. But for me, it’s been the key to escape from the prison of my childhood, to escape from the prison of the screwed-up person that my childhood made me into. To realize what happened to me, what made me screwed up, to realize what my parents did to me, especially my parents, but even other adults in my life, the ways in which they neglected me, failed me, traumatized me, caused me to shut down, caused me to act out in unhealthy ways, gave me terrible role modeling such that I grew up to be an older child and even a young adult who was very confused and did a lot of screwed-up stuff, self-hating stuff at the least. So what I think about for me is something that I think probably made me different from a lot of people who I have seen out in the world, a lot of adults who I’ve seen who don’t want to know their history, because I desperately wanted to know it. Somehow, it’s like I was asking myself the question, “Why am I screwed up?” I knew I was screwed up, and I wanted to know why. I didn’t want pat explanations. I didn’t want, “Oh, this diagnosis, the psychiatric diagnosis: you are depressed, you are OCD, you have generalized anxiety disorder.” That did nothing for me. That didn’t tell me anything about myself. That, in fact, just made me feel worse. That made me feel stigmatized and pathologized, separated from being a human being. I wanted to know what happened to me, and I was on a desperate quest to figure out what my real history was, what my real feelings were, to reclaim my memories. And oh, it was an incredibly painful process to remember these things, to realize, oh, my memories of my parents that I had before I remembered the bad things, my memories were idealized. I remembered them in a sort of fantasy way, with a glow of raspberries and cream. I remembered only the good things. And what I’ve realized by looking at so many people in this profound age of denial is that is considered the healthy way to be: to just remember idealized portraits of their parents. Oh, they were wonderful people, they were good people. Don’t even bring up the bad things. Don’t bring up any of the bad things that they did or bad things that, you know, they had as personality qualities. That’s considered, in politics, that’s considered disrespectful of the memory of your parents or even in relationship with them to talk about those things. I remember talking about my parents about things that I remembered that they had done to me and watching their reactions, how much they hated me, how much they despised me for recalling bad, bad, bad things that they did to me, traumatizing inappropriate things. Even watching my parents have a very, very difficult time talking about the bad things that had happened to them in their childhood, things for which they were not even responsible. But remembering their own traumatic history and watching them push it all away and realizing over time, ah, if they remember the traumatic things that happened to them, it at some level connected them with the things that they had done to me, the things that they had replicated from their own childhoods onto me. And it helped me understand more and more why they wanted to block it out. And yet, at the same time, it’s still confusing. It’s like, why didn’t they want to heal? Why didn’t they want to know themselves better? Why did they want to live these shut down, dissociated, in denial lives, lives of just partial people? I’ve seen so many profound examples of that as I’ve gone through my adult life. I’ve heard many, many, many stories of people telling me, “Oh, I had a whole ritual where I burned my entire life history of having written down a journal.” They literally burned their history of their own existence. “I don’t want to look at that anymore. I’ve moved past that. Now I’ve learned how to forgive, and there’s too much anger in there, too much sadness, or even too much trauma. It’s too painful. It’s time to move on. I have now grown up. I’ve become an adult.” And I think you’ve become an adult. No, you’ve become a pseudo-adult who never connected with your history. You took your history and you burned it. You forgot about it. And in a way, it really was a rite of passage when they burned their journal. It was a rite of passage into a much more permanent state of denial. I’ve heard stories of people who’ve shredded their journals. I’ve heard a couple of times, I’ve heard stories of people when their parents died, they inherited their parents’ journals, and they started looking through it, and it was a lot of ugly stuff that they didn’t know. That’s the kind of stuff for me I would have killed for. I want to know this. I want to know who my parents are, the little bits and pieces I got from my parents’ history about not just what they did to me, but who they were, what their thoughts were, what their painful traumatic histories were. That was like gold for me. That was the gold that I could invest in myself to grow and develop and ultimately to grieve. Knowing my history was the ultimate investment for me in growing. And yet, I’ve seen people who inherited their dead parents’ journals, and they destroyed them. I’ve seen this two, maybe three times. I’ve heard this. I’ve even seen the journals, piles of them sometimes, and they’ve taken them to a shredder and literally destroyed them. “I don’t want to know this history.” They’ve killed their own connection with their history because it was too painful, perhaps also because it incriminated them. Because that’s another thing that I realized: the more that I looked at my history, the more it led me to have to look at myself. And it’s painful to look at my own ugly history, my own dysfunctional behavior patterns, my own bad things, the cruel, nasty, unpleasant things that I did to others, even if only I was a child. But I still find it distasteful. Well, the other thing is I think about this in relationship to some of the children that I grew up with back when I was a child. And I remember things from their childhoods, and later as an adult, I talked about what I asked them, “What do you remember about my childhood?” And sometimes they remember things. And I said, “Do you want me to share what I remember about your childhood?” And often what they said is, “No, I don’t want to know.” And some of them even said, “I want to remember my parents in a good way. I want to remember the good things about my childhood. I don’t want to think about the bad things.” And what I’ve seen consistently is the people who gave that as an answer, that “No, I don’t want to remember,” those were the people who did not become manifested integrated adults, not even close. Those were the people also who became the worst parents because what could they really give to their children in terms of role modeling of how to become a healthy adult? They hadn’t figured it out themselves. They didn’t want to. I’ve also seen this with a lot of people, people whose siblings remember terrible, terrible things that happened to those people, and they didn’t want to know. They said, “Don’t tell me. Forget about it. Please, let’s never talk about this again.” I’ve seen this with other people in my life who I knew when I was a little older, and I saw their childhoods, and I saw the terrible things that happened, and I remembered it, and they blocked it out. And later I said, “Well, now you’re an adult. Do you want me to share what I remember?” Because I so desperately wanted adults from back when I was a child to tell me what they remembered. None of those adults would tell me anything. Most of them didn’t even remember. They blotted it out. They would only tell me.
Idealized portraits of my parents. They were defending my parents even decades later. My godparents would tell me nothing. They would give me no information.
So I wanted to turn around and be an adult who at least offered people who I saw when they were children. I offered them the chance to remember, to know, to have someone who was more sophisticated and had a better memory, a better ability to remember certain details.
And what I saw, most people didn’t want to know. “I don’t want to know. It’s too painful. It’s too awful. I don’t want to lose my connection with my parents.” Subliminally, that’s what they were saying, because I saw this again and again.
By remembering for me, by remembering what my parents did, all of my parents’ allies—that is, my entire family system—they rejected me for it.
So I really, again, I can understand why people want to forget, block it out, burn their journals, burn their parents’ journals, shred their history, forget it all. But at another level, I can’t understand, because for me, knowing, remembering, recalling, putting the pieces, putting the puzzle of my history together—that’s been my salvation, and that’s been my hope.