TRANSCRIPT
The way in which I would like to approach the subject of dementia here is the connection between dementia and unresolved childhood trauma. I’d like to say up front that I don’t know that all dementia is inherently connected to unresolved childhood trauma. I wouldn’t by any means call myself an extreme expert in any way on dementia, but I do have a lot of experience with dementia—knowing people who have had dementia, watching people get older and fall into dementia, living with people with dementia, and also having two of my grandfathers get old and fall into really hardcore dementia and eventually dying very demented.
So what I have seen is that so many people in their life make a lifestyle, have a pattern of living, of denying what happened to them, forgetting their childhood traumas from a very, very early age. And one of those people who made a lifestyle, who was actually very good at it and denying what happened to him, denying the bad things that happened to him in his own family of origin, was me. I had parents who did all sorts of violations of me. We had a family system that had all sorts of problems. My parents had all sorts of personal problems. They had interpersonal problems. They fought screaming matches. My mom had terrible boundaries with me emotionally and sexually. My dad was verbally abusive, nasty, abandoning, even violent with me sometimes.
And my way of dealing with it was the same way my parents dealt with their own childhood traumas. I was taught by them, on pain of rejection and abandonment from them, which is a further trauma, to deny what happened, to forget about it, to pretend that didn’t happen, to say, “oh this is a family secret, this is something we don’t talk about outside the family.” But actually what I realize is we don’t talk about it inside the family, and most especially we don’t even think about it in our own mind. We just block it out, forget it, and move on. This was my childhood training.
I saw that with so many other people, like basically all my friends, people in school. Nobody talked about all the horrible things that were going on in their lives—things that I later often figured out, sometimes things that I observed in my friends’ families, in my relatives’ families. But nobody talked about it. Well, what happened as I grew up? Forgetting, just forgetting everything.
Now this is very interesting in the subject of dementia. How do you say “I forgot” in Italian? The way to say it in Italian is “odimente.” It’s like that is how you say “I forgot.” And that was very interesting to me in thinking about dementia. Dementia is just forgetting, and I think often it’s societally approved forgetting. It’s like a good thing in society to forget. It certainly was a good thing in my family, according to my parents and my grandparents, to forget, to block it out.
I remember many years later I went to my grandparents and I told them some of the horrible things that have been happening in my family system with my parents. And both of my grandparents, oh, they denied it. “Don’t talk about this, forget about that, move on.” My grandmother and my grandfather said, “oh just let it go, it wasn’t that bad,” or “that’s not what happened.” And then I realized actually later the things that my mother had done to me were just replications of what her own parents, my grandparents, had done to her. So when they were telling me to forget what my mother had done to me, they had also taught my mother, told my mother, forced my mother to forget what they’d done to her.
Forgetting was the way of the family system. It was the way of my town. It was the way of my culture. It was the way of religion: forgive and forget, move on, let it go, don’t blame, don’t be harsh, don’t be negative. Or if you’re going to blame, blame other people. Put your anger outward, express it outward, find people to project your anger onto. But don’t blame your parents. Don’t remember what happened to you as a child.
Well, one thing for me, and why I really don’t think I’m going to get dementia, I have no fear of it, even though both my grandfathers had it, died of it, shriveled up inside emotionally, even physically. The reason I don’t think I’m going to get dementia is because I have made a lifestyle, through pain, through hell, through family rejection, societal rejection in a lot of ways, I’ve made a lifestyle of remembering, of bringing up my traumas, looking at them, exploring what happened to me, exploring what I did bad as the result of what happened to me.
If I’d been a good boy in my family system, what I would have done is get married, have children, and do exactly to my children and probably to my wife exactly what my parents did to me and exactly what my grandparents did to them. That was how to be a good boy. That was how to be a good normal person in society, and nobody would criticize me except maybe my children if they got real, if they had enough strength to break out of the denial that I foisted on them, of the traumas that I foisted on them, and they were able to get to know themselves and love themselves enough to look and say, “no, that is not okay.” If they were able to have boundaries, if they were able to not forget. And that’s what happened to me. I started not forgetting. I started remembering. I started bringing—I started making a lifestyle of remembering, and to me that was the preventative for me not getting dementia.
Well, of course, we’ll have to fast forward 20, 30, 40, 50 years into the future and see if it holds true, but I think it will. And I believe this may be true across the boards. I don’t know to what degree, but I believe it’s true in a big way. The more you remember, the less likely you are to get dementia. The more flexible you are, the more you’re connected to who you are, the less you have to bury yourself, the less likely it is that you’re gonna shut down.
And I think what happened with my grandfathers, the people I knew most intimately across my life, I knew their histories, I knew the history of their parents. What I saw with them, and I think it’s true for a lot of the other people I’ve seen with dementia, even therapy clients of mine who started going into dementia, that they made a lifestyle of forgetting. And that lifestyle caught up with them, and it sunk into them. And even though it allowed them to live in a bubble of comfort for a lot of years and a lot of decades, and they made a life out of being happy on forgetting, out of being dissociated and being comfortable in their dissociation, eventually it caught up with them. Eventually, the karma of forgetting caught up with them.
And they say, “oh dementia can be seen in the brain.” When they do autopsies of people’s brains, people with Alzheimer’s, you know, they have all these certain plaques and their brain shrivels up. Well, there is a mind-body connection, and I think if you make a lifestyle of forgetting, of not using your brain, of not using whole parts of your brain in your mind, I think it does express itself in the brain. I wouldn’t be surprised.
But why does the world not say this? Well, I’ve recently taken a bunch of continuing ed classes on the subject of Alzheimer’s and dementia, and they don’t talk about this there. They say, “oh well what causes dementia? Well, it’s genetic, there’s a genetic component, there’s a family component, it’s a brain disease, we don’t know why people get it, we have no idea.” They don’t talk about unresolved childhood trauma. Sometimes they give mention to ancestral trauma, oh historical trauma five generations ago. But I think that’s convenient. I think the mental health system, I think the medical system, a lot of times likes to look at things that happened, oh, 200 years ago—that’s maybe what caused dementia—but not the childhood that you experienced, not the horrible things your parents did to you.
Another thing is I think that a lot of people who get dementia—this is just a gut feeling of mine, watching my own grandfathers and extrapolating from there and being sensitive to other people who have it—I think a lot of people who have dementia have done a lot of terrible things in their lives.
Think for a lot of people, it’s convenient to forget that too. Now, the terrible things that they’ve done in their lives is directly connected to the terrible things that happen to them. Because that’s how people are when they do terrible things. Underneath it, it’s a replication of the terrible things that were done to them. Unfortunately, from what I’ve seen, that’s how the human psyche works. You can trace it right back if you really have the courage and the strength and capacity to look.
But my grandfathers, they were terrible people in a lot of ways. They were terrible to my parents when they were children. They were both bastards in a lot. They were nasty people. They weren’t loving; they were rejecting. And I’m talking even to me, but also out in the world. Sinister people. They both had affairs. They were nasty husbands. They were rude; they were abusive. My mom’s dad was a pervert, straight up. Did he ever acknowledge that? Did he acknowledge all his affairs, the devastation emotionally that he caused his family, that he caused his wife? No, he blocked it out.
I remember once he was about 80 years old, and this is before he started going into more extreme dementia, but right at the beginning. Remember, I brought it up with him one time. I asked him about an affair he was still having. I said, “Why do you do this? You know the horrible pain you’ve caused.” Oh, he got furious! It was like a rage that I’d never seen in him. I’d heard it from my mom decades before. He was an enraged man, but now, 80 years old, that man wanted to kill me. Fire came into his eyes. Rage threw me out of his house. Probably would have killed me if he could have. Emotionally, certainly wanted to. But it was like defending horrible behavior, forgetting that he was even doing it, justifying it to himself through his denial that it was okay.
And I think that’s also something that people develop as a lifestyle, so much so that they forget that they’re even doing it. They forget that it’s bad. They’ve lost their morals; they’ve lost their ethics. And to forget about that, it sinks into the body. It sinks into the mind. And I do believe it expresses itself in the brain.
And you look at all these people in these Alzheimer’s homes. I remember my dad’s dad, the last time I saw him, he was in an Alzheimer’s home, strapped in a chair. He’d peed all over himself. Neither my dad nor his brother wanted anything to do with my grandfather anymore. And they said, “He doesn’t even remember us. He doesn’t even remember who we are.” The last time I went and visited him, my grandfather had no idea who I was. No idea that I was his relative. He didn’t know who he was. He didn’t even speak English anymore. He spoke the language of his childhood. I’d only known him speaking English. Suddenly, he didn’t even speak English.
I played guitar for him, and he kind of hummed along with music. I had knew some songs from his child. He liked that; he kind of hummed along. But when it was done, he didn’t even know what was going on. And it was like tragic, but in a strange way, I think he was kind of more comfortable being this way than he would have been had he remembered.
I saw this with my mom’s dad when he checked out. There was a part of him that kind of liked it. He became a little kid again. He liked people doing all his cooking and cleaning for him, taking care of him, making the structure in his life, putting on movies that he could watch. He didn’t have to take any responsibility at all. And I think in a way, he loved it because I think in a way, he never wanted to take responsibility. There was a real convenience in this forgetting how to be an adult, forgetting how to have personal strength and agency.
But then I think also with my grandfathers, I think they both at some unconscious level wanted to get dementia. In a way, they’d had dementia their whole lives, but they’d just been able to control it enough. They’d been able to remember some things and forget all the things that they wanted to forget. But eventually, all that forgetting leaked into the rest of their life, and it really, really messed them up.