TRANSCRIPT
I’m sorry to say, but from what I have observed, some people might never change for the better. Some people might never get honest with themselves. They might never grow up. They might never get real. They might never become sincere. They might never stop lying or being in denial or being really disturbed, harming others.
Well, the first person in my life who I realized wasn’t going to change, wasn’t going to become healthier, was never going to gain insight and wisdom and perspective and psychological maturity was my dad. One of the first loves of my life, one of my first profound role models. I remember I was an early teenager. I think I was 13 or 14 years old. I was starting to become more intellectually and psychologically sophisticated myself, and my dad and I were butting heads. We were butting heads because he was threatened by my realness, by my life force, by my energy, and it made him uncomfortable. It challenged him. Sometimes I was challenging him. He was being nasty to me all about it, a lot, putting me down, humiliating me, even violating me. And I started fighting back.
One of the ways I started fighting back was to argue with him, to confront him, to even analyze him to his face. I was a kid. I didn’t really know how to do it. I didn’t know what I was doing. All I knew is I was fighting for my life, and I was also fighting to try to make my dad love me. Well, none of that worked, but that didn’t make me give up. So what I started doing was I started burying my anger, burying my resistance and my fighting nature toward him, and I started being loving toward him. Sad, kind of embarrassing, but I think it’s very common. I became kind of like a therapist to him.
So we would sit and we would have long discussions, and I would try to use my intellect, my very young intellect, up against a grown man, sophisticated educated man’s intellect, to try to help him get a new perspective. I also tried to learn who he was, to try to map his psyche in a way to understand why was he this way? Why was it so difficult for him to see things from a healthier perspective, from anyone else’s perspective, from my perspective? Why was it so hard for him to understand why my healthy life was healthy? Why was he so confused about it? Why did it trigger him so much?
Well, what I learned at a certain point was I would probably be better off changing the dimensions of a cement wall by banging my head into it than by trying to wake my dad up and help him gain perspective. I didn’t exactly understand why. I didn’t know why my dad was so stuck, but my dad was so stuck, so unable to make mental leaps, so unable to use analogies to understand, “Wait a second, he thinks it’s right to treat himself well. Why shouldn’t he treat me well too?” He just couldn’t see me as a person. Somehow there was some block in him, and the more I explored and the more I poked and prodded and pried, the more that I realized this guy was not going to change. No way. He was truly deeply stuck.
Well, since then I’ve realized that so many people out there are like that. Most people, perhaps, they just really are committed to not growing, to not changing, to not being able to look in the mirror at their own selves, to see who are they, what’s really going on in there, to have an accurate way to appraise their own behavior, to appraise their own motivations and thoughts. Those people really live in a huge amount of denial, delusion even. They really don’t know themselves well at all.
Part of that delusion, from what I’ve seen again and again in all sorts of different contexts, is so many people have no awareness of that. That is part of their denial and part of their delusion. They think they know themselves well. Most people, from what I’ve seen, if you ask them, they really think they know themselves well. Often they don’t even have a self, a real self. There is no real self there. There’s a false self, a persona. My dad was like that. Who is my dad’s real self? Well, this gets into why my dad was so stuck, and I believe it really extends to all these stuck people in the world.
People who really aren’t going to grow and change. Who my dad really was, was a very wounded little boy, a very lovely, lovely little boy who really was incredibly deserving of love. And so much of his personality was still four, five, six years old, just a little child who’d been profoundly violated, neglected, and abandoned, traumatized by this neglect, traumatized by this abandonment, really overwhelmingly, powerfully traumatized by the lack of love, lack of nurturance, lack of respect and honor that he received in his life. His parents were terrible.
What my dad went through when he was very young, four, five, six years old, stunted him. It burned him terribly. It really traumatized him. It was horrible, and he shut down. Although he developed other sides of himself, he learned how to function in the world as a sophisticated professional adult who made money, who married, who had kids, who bought houses, who had affairs, who did all sorts of adult things, took out mortgages, drove cars, used drugs, did other adult-ish things. He did a lot of adulting. Underneath it, what was really fueling his life and fueling the fundamentals of his personality was this wounded, wounded little boy.
What I see for people, all these stuck people in the world, and sometimes I really think it’s the truth of our humanity writ large, although there are exceptions, although there are people who really can grow and change and do grow and change, most people, if they do grow and change at all, it’s just on the surface. It’s not real growth and change. The real growth and change for people, the people who really powerfully transform on a fundamental character level, are the people who can get into those traumas, who have the safety inside themselves, the self-love inside themselves to be able to allow themselves to feel that anguish, to feel the pain.
My dad blocked out what he went through. It was too overwhelming to him. He couldn’t go back and feel that again. I think he was afraid it would kill him because I think once upon a time, when he went through the horrible traumas of abandonment and neglect and other violations he went through when he was four, five, six years old, it did kill him. It killed his soul. Not permanently, but it killed it enough to bury it and push it down. He built a wall of cement and glass and barbed wire and electricity over all his feelings so it would never come out again.
I think somehow in his own psyche he made a decision somewhere along the way, very, very early on, that if he had the choice, he would never ever want to feel this horror again. It didn’t matter what damage he did to other people along the way as long as he didn’t have to feel it. He didn’t care.
So now I’d like to open it up and getting back to that bigger thought about so many people in the world being so stuck, realizing that my dad is actually not a really unique individual. He’s actually very, very common. His personality type is very common. Maybe he’s a little extreme because he was more talented, maybe more grandiose than others, but his stuckness was very usual in a way. I think it really speaks to our species as a whole, and it really then makes me question what is going to happen with our species.
It also helps me understand why our species writ large is so incredibly destructive, destructive toward each other. All these wars that we have, people, so much hatred, racism, sexism, homophobia, all this nasty stuff. Why do people violate their children so much? Why is there so much child abuse? Why is there so much sexual abuse in the world? Why is there so much rape? Why is there so much divorce? Why is there so much crime and violence? Why do so many parents just so easily—and I really mean that easily—abandon their children? Why does this happen? Why do people flock to cults so much? What if people flock to religions that have them deny themselves, deny reality?
What’s going on and what is going to change this? Well, this is my question. I think I understand more and more why the world is so screwed up and destroying nature, just destroying the planet for our own selves. We are incredibly self-destructive as a species, and my dad, self-destructive as a human being, so large. It’s true for our whole species. Very, very self-destructive, addictive, blind, and in denial as a species writ large.
We are traumatized. We have massive childhood trauma across the board, across cultures, religions, races, nations, and all that. It’s everywhere. I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve lived with so many people. Childhood trauma is the norm in our world. But what’s going to change it? And that’s more my open question.
I think my hope, my only real hope, part of the reason my channel is not particularly popular, is that it’s rare people who really have a capacity to look at childhood trauma, to look at their own childhood trauma, to really be able to feel their pain, to be depressed, and to realize that being depressed sometimes is better than being dissociated. It’s actually much healthier.
And then people who can take that depression and turn it into grieving. People who realize that grieving is of value, not a humiliation, not horrible, but actually undoes this trauma. From what I’ve observed in the world, pretty rare. And yet that’s where my hope comes in.
I don’t think there’s any other place to have hope except in people who are waking up to what happened to them and healing it, and devoting their lives to healing it, and realizing that the real fulfillment of life, the fulfillment of the true self, of the spirit, comes through healing these traumas. Yet it’s very uncommon.
And the rest of the world is stuck in denial, preferring to be stuck, preferring to be in addictions and dissociated, preferring to take advantage of others, to pass on one’s traumas instead of healing one’s traumas internally. That’s not sustainable. That’s going to kill us as a species.
And yet for the individuals who are waking up, healing their traumas, they’re learning how to live sustainably. And maybe somehow in the future, those sustainable people, those people who are healing their traumas, grieving their traumas, becoming more real, self-actualized, altruistic, creative, ethical, honest, those people someday will become the norm.
I don’t know how because people like my dad certainly would never cede their power to me. They’ll never love me for who I am. They’ll hate me for it. So how would people like my dad give way to people like me? I don’t know.
Maybe somehow evolution, world evolution, human evolution, animal evolution, the evolution of spirit and life and truth and consciousness has some tricks up its sleeve. Maybe somehow someday the world will shift and shine a light on the healing people who are more sustainable. I really don’t know.