TRANSCRIPT
I often have people ask me for advice. They ask me for advice on problems they might be having, thoughts that they are thinking, things that they want to do with their life, existential questions, questions about philosophy, questions about religion, questions about politics, questions about their physical health, their mental health. But I don’t like to give advice. I often don’t feel comfortable giving advice. And I’d like to talk about the main reason that, in general, I just don’t like to give advice.
Actually, in a strange way, the way that I’m going to answer this question about why I don’t like to give advice is actually by giving some advice. So the advice I’d like to give now, the advice maybe to myself also as a reminder about why I don’t like to give advice very much, is that I think the best advice I can give to people—and I often do give to people—is to look within. To look within your own self to find yourself and to find the truth within yourself.
What I have seen is that everyone has the capacity to find the truth within themselves. And the irony is when people can find the truth within themselves, my advice, my opinions, my thoughts, my insights, whatever I might have or might not have, become irrelevant. Because people can give their own selves, their own maybe troubled or confused selves, the best advice at all if they can connect with the truth within themselves.
So that gets to the second part of this advice that I want to offer, this general advice, this general sense of thought about what can people do for themselves is to develop a relationship with one’s own inner self. And I know that’s not easy. I know that’s hard, actually. I know it’s hell, actually. I think of my life, my adult life, having been devoted to that mission—to nurture and develop a relationship with myself and to do it in a conscious way, to do it in a thoughtful, strategic way.
The main reason that I’ve put so much effort into that as an adult, developing a relationship with myself, aside from the fact that I feel it’s completely worth it, it’s like this is an investment that pays back the highest dividends by far, the reason is because it was disallowed me as a kid. This was something I was dissuaded from doing. This is something I was discouraged from doing. This is something that was even made illegal in a lot of ways. I was humiliated for it, teased for it, punished for it, abandoned and rejected for it. Having a full, deep, conscious connection with my true self, the real me on the inside, was something that was very threatening to my parents. They didn’t like it.
And so I entered my young adulthood. I entered my late teens, my early 20s, as a person who was very confused, very lost, mixed up in a lot of ways, really split off from a conscious connection with the deepest me on the inside. And it made it very hard for me to give myself really good advice. And I sought advice externally. And what I found over and over again is that most of the people I asked advice from were stupid. They were more disconnected from their own selves than I was, and I couldn’t get good guidance from people who were so mixed up.
For starters, this is so sad. Also, I went to my parents for advice. My parents often gave me very confused and screwed up advice in all sorts of areas—on what I want to do with my life, on having friends, on dating and romance, on money. And ultimately, what it came down to is I needed to filter out what was good advice and what wasn’t. And the more I was screwed up, the less I could do it.
So I started figuring out sometime along the way that the little bit of true self that survived my childhood, that survived with its head above the surface, that wasn’t buried in unconscious, that little bit of true self of mine was my bellwether. It was the part of me that I could really trust and rely on. It was the part of me that gave me the best advice. It was the part of me that said, “Daniel, journaling is painful as hell. It’s confusing and it’s awkward, but do it. This will save your life.” It was the part of me that said, “Daniel, be alone. Go out in nature. Be with yourself. Listen to the crickets, listen to the cicadas, listen to the birds singing and the whistling of the wind and the trees. This will give you better advice. This will bring you back to yourself.”
This was the part of me that said, “Daniel, you hate school. You hate your teachers. But do well anyways because this is an escape strategy for you. This will get you out of your horrible little town, your horrible little school system. This will give you more options.” And no one told me to do this. So maybe it’s weird that I’m saying this is the advice I have, but this is my experience, and this is the advice I give to people over and over again.
This was my whole goal as a therapist when I was a therapist for 10 years—to help people figure out whatever it was that I was doing for them and learning that they had the capacity to do that within themselves, without me, without a therapist, without a mental health professional.
Part of it also is to attract healthier people around oneself. So I’ve noticed the more I’ve developed a true relationship with myself, a conscious relationship, the healthier I’ve become, the more mature, sophisticated, insightful I’ve become, the more ethical I’ve become. The more that my friends reflect these qualities. And ironically and incidentally, the more that I can go to my friends for advice because I’ve seen that also when people get very confused and screwed up and split off from their true selves, often the people who are around them are not the best people to go to for advice because those people kind of reflect those qualities.
So when I think of other people asking me for advice and I listen to them, listen to their life situations, listen to the thorny problems that they present, often I see people who have a lot of work yet in front of them to develop a relationship with themselves, but also are surrounded by all sorts of people who are also very confused in painful situations, financially strapped situations, people who have a lot of problems, a lot of violations, a lot of boundary issues, sometimes people with children who have problems. And what do I say? A lot of times I don’t know what to say. A lot of times there is no easy answer.
Often by the time people reach out to me for advice, especially complex, serious advice, if there were an easy answer, they would have figured it out a long time ago. Someone would have told them because a lot of times the problems have been going on for a long, long while. But I still say, “Look within. Develop that relationship with yourself. Start digging yourself out of this problem, healing the traumas.” And how does one do that? Well, I guess little bits and pieces of that are throughout my YouTube channel and in the writings that I’ve done on my website. But like all things, each person is a unique being and has to figure out how to access that truth within him or her, how to let it be expressed in their own conscious mind, how to deal with all those horrible, painful feelings that inevitably come up when we start bringing up our traumas, looking at them.
Sometimes the most traumatized people from what I see out in the world are the people who are the most comfortable because their traumas are so split off, so buried, so pushed down. In a way, they’re living such absolutely artificial lives. They’re so absolutely disconnected from the truth within them that they have surrounded themselves by other people who are so like this that everybody’s so dissociated that they actually don’t feel much at all. They can be very comfortable in living a state of feelinglessness, mindlessness, even like being zombies or drones in their own life. Even though on the surface they might look like perfectly regular, normal people, actually I would say they probably are regular, normal people. And that can be very confusing. I think a lot of therapists are like that. People go to look for advice and give big money to fancy therapists who actually themselves are very, very…
Shut down and don’t even know it. Aren’t even conscious of it. Sometimes the most confident people are so confident because they’re so split off from themselves. They’re split off from their pain and their confusion.
Healing trauma is a very confusing process. It’s not easy. It brings up all sorts of mixed up feelings and rage and sadness and hatred and pain and anguish and loneliness. These are all the feelings of the child who was harmed in the family system by the people who were supposed to love him or her the most. If that’s not confusing, then I don’t know what is.
So what I’ve seen for myself, I’ve seen it with lots of other people. Healing trauma is incredibly confusing. Yet, in a way, there’s some part of it that if we work really hard to connect more with ourself, and the more we evolve, the more we do connect with ourself, it can become less confusing. Because we have a connection with ourselves, and ourselves know that even though it’s mixed up and confusing, when we return to that relationship with our deep true self on the inside, we can sort it out. We can figure it out.
So I guess what I’d like to close with is the idea that as people make progress at healing themselves, connecting with themselves, developing a relationship, an internal self-relation, self-reflective relationship in the mirror with their own selves, they can give themselves better advice. And that’s my hope ultimately, that everybody can do this, can ultimately be the best, best advice giver in their own life.
I think this is really what I’d like to close with: that if children are raised in a really honoring, respectful, loving, boundary-laden, healthy, mature environment, every single one of them will know everything that I’m saying intuitively and automatically. Because it will already be their life experience. Because this is what happens to children when they’re raised in that way. They learn to trust themselves and to listen to themselves.
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