TRANSCRIPT
Over the years, I’ve had quite a few people ask me, how can we determine how healthy someone else is? Or even, how can we determine how healthy we ourselves are? Is there some objective way to figure out how healthy a person is?
One person, quite a few years ago, even asked me, could you potentially devise an emotional healthiness test, kind of like a personality test, that determines how healthy someone is? It even comes up with a number, let’s say somewhere between zero to a hundred. Well, I actually tried many years ago. I wrote a whole test, all these questions, and you had to fill things in and all this about how to determine how healthy a person is, how emotionally mature they are. What I ultimately determined is, although a person could take this test, it would involve a lot of writing. There would be no way to objectively grade this test because it would always be influenced by the degree of healthiness or lack of healthiness of the person who was grading the test. So, I scrapped the test. I said it’s not objective, it’s subjective.
So, what do I mean by all this? Well, let me give a few examples. One thing in our world, often in our very confused, screwed up, troubled modern world, is that people are often determined to be healthy by their surface characteristics. Are they happy? Are they financially successful? Are they working a job that makes good money? Are they married? Do they have children? Do they seem to sleep well at night? All sorts of things like this.
What I have seen often is that people who demonstrate these externally seemingly healthy qualities often are not very healthy at all. Often, they’re fake, they’re artificial. They’re sometimes people who are just, because of their lack of healthiness, very able to fit in or plug into this very screwed up world and survive. Although they seem to be happy, they seem to always have a very chipper and good mood, they might be very unhappy, very disillusioned, maybe very screwed up, or even very enraged just below the surface. They can be blocking a lot of their troubles, their traumas, their conflicts, their pain, such that if something opens up in them, or they’re so rigid and inflexible in their life that if they have some misfortune that befalls them, their happiness can just go away. Some people who are happy for 30 or 40 years, it can go away, and all this misery can come up, and a whole different side of them can come out, such that the people who knew them the best say, I didn’t even know who this person was, who I lived with, or I was married to, or who my parent was. I had no idea they were that way. This was a whole hidden part of their personality.
Also, then there’s the idea of success in society as a gauge for healthiness. Well, often, people who are really able to plug into this very confused, screwed up society are themselves very confused and screwed up. Often, people who can work at the highest level in society have the least ethics. And to me, when people have the least ethics, that shows how screwed up they are, how split off they are from themselves. So, even though they can look healthy, powerful, important, people can listen to them, respect them, they can wear the right clothes, have the right haircut, speak with the right confidence in their voice, actually, they’re very, very troubled people who might actually be much, much less healthy than someone who looks like they’re a failure in society.
So, what would be an example of someone who is a seeming failure in society who’s actually much healthier than someone who might be right up there at the top? Well, I think of people who are going through a profound grieving process. Sometimes society can look at them as very troubled, very confused, very lost, very screwed up. Whereas actually, just because they might not be able to function so well in society because they’re dealing with such upwelling pain, sadness, they are actually integrating. They’re actually coming very, very close to being who they are. They are in the process of reclaiming their true selves, and that is actually very, very healthy.
And then I think of people who are not as healthy as people who are grieving, but who are depressed, who are feeling a lot of their sadness. They’re feeling their buried pain, but they’re stuck. They’re confused. They don’t know what their life’s path is. They know they’re not connected to their mission, and they’re suffering for it. They hurt. They know something’s wrong in their life. Well, what I found by talking to these people again and again and again is actually often they are much healthier than the people who are succeeding so well in society. They’re so much healthier than the people who are in a dissociated state of happiness. They’re actually further ahead on the healing path, the healing path being one of the primary ingredients of what makes up a healthy person.
So, they are ahead because they know that something is not working in the world. They know that something is not working in them. Often, society and the agents of society, like the mental health system, psychiatry, wants to take people who are confused, who have inner angst, who are lost in their life, who are depressed, and give them labels like major depression and all sorts of different anxiety problems, and even put them on psychiatric drugs to take all their existential confusion, their pain, their sadness, their frustration, and push it down and make them dissociated, block their feelings even more, such that they become normal. That’s often the goal of the mental health system, not to help people grieve, not to help people really heal and become healthier. Instead, to make them into zombies who don’t trouble people.
Because that’s another thing that I’ve seen. People who are depressed, or people who are healthier than depressed, who are really grieving what they went through, really feeling the loss and integrating their lost and split off sides, their lost and split off memories, their lost and split off feelings, those people challenge the artificiality. They challenge the fakeness. They pierce the surface of its happiness, of its success, of its functionality, and they remind the whole world that everybody is screwed up, and everybody is so messed up and traumatized and hurt.
And so, when I think about that question, how do you determine how healthy a person is? How do we in the mirror determine how healthy we are? It’s not easy because so many of the models of healthiness in society are actually incredibly unhealthy. So many people, when they look at their parents as the models of healthiness, were given terrible role models. And so, how do we figure it out? How do we develop a self-reflective relationship with ourselves to figure out who we really are and where we are on this healing process?
Well, for me, maybe that is kind of the answer: developing that self-reflective process where we develop a connection with our own inner self, and we really get to listen to ourselves. Because that’s what I found for myself, is that the more I’ve become able to listen to the true voice within me, the more my grieving process has opened me up, opened a channel up within me to know who I really am on the inside, in my depths, the true self of me. The more I’ve become connected with that true self, the more my ability to not just assess myself, but to assess external reality has improved. It’s become better, and it’s still improving. The more that I’m able to really self-reflect, have a self-know myself, the healthier I become. The more I’m able to figure out what is healthiness and what isn’t, the less I am faked out by people who are fake.
When I was a kid, I know I looked to so many people who now I would say these people are artificial, they’re troubled, they’re confused, they’re profoundly lost. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. Yet, when I was a kid, when I was much more dissociated, pushed down, unaware, blocked from my relationship with myself, I looked at those people as ideals, those people as healthy. I wanted to be them, or sometimes I wanted to be their friend. Or if they were pretty girls and they had this dissociated patina of fakeness, of normalcy, of functionality, I wanted to be in a relationship with them. Now I’m like, run, Dan! You’ll get away! This is not good for you. This is actually toxic.
Well, could this be reduced?
To a test, like an IQ test, could this be made objective? I still think it’s not really possible. Or if it were possible, most people wouldn’t consider it accurate in any way. Because again, who would be there to assess it? Who would be there to judge it?
I think in our world writ large, probably most especially in our mental health system, with its ideals of what health is and the diagnosis for what health isn’t, often I think it’s completely backward. Often what I’ve seen in the mental health field is people who get the diagnoses have more of a connection with themselves than the people who are giving them a diagnosis.
That’s part of the reason I often nowadays say I don’t know about going into the mental health field as a client. It’s very confusing. You might get a therapist who actually looks fancy, has a lot of money, has all these degrees, but on an emotional level, they may actually be much less healthy than you are.
I also found when I was a therapist myself that I didn’t fit in with my colleagues. Often my colleagues were very challenged by me. They were challenged by my assessments. And I think for me, most painfully, I heard the way that they talked about my clients.
When I talked to my clients about their relationship with their past therapists, I thought a lot of times their therapists, their past therapists, were sabotaging their healing processes in all sorts of different ways. In the exact same way that society writ large, family systems writ large, can sabotage the child, they can also sabotage the child’s reactions to the traumas that they are actually perpetrating on the child.
They’re not letting the child have his reactions, have his feelings. They cause these problems and then they deny him his reactions. Instead, they want to push it all down, and they call that healthy. They call that good parenting, good role modeling, good disciplining, good education. And then later they call it good mental health, good therapy, good psychiatry, good medications.
And so I question all that, and I come up with a very, very different model of what healthiness is. And as I walk forward in my path of becoming more healthy, I see more and more I become even more alienated from society, which is probably a big part of why it’s so hard to make these videos.