TRANSCRIPT
When is it safe to speak out? When is it safe to speak out against the people who have harmed you, traumatized you? When is it safe to speak out against people who you see harming and traumatizing others? When is it safe to speak out against parents who abuse their children? When is it safe to speak out against people who harm their partners, who harm others, who harm animals? When is it safe to speak out against patterns of lies, of abuse, of disrespect, of disrespect against nature itself? When is it safe to speak out against fantasy, illusion, self-destruction in others?
This is a question I often ask. I ask myself this all the time. Every time I sit in front of this camera, wherever I am, and press record, it’s like, when is it safe for me? How far can I go? How honest can I be about the truths that I see, especially the truths that rub a lot of people the wrong way? Rub my family system the wrong way? Rub my culture the wrong way? Rub people in my past, my past teachers, people I see all around me, the mental health profession that I used to be a part of? When is it safe for me to open my mouth and speak the truth? Not just the truth that I see, my truth with a lowercase t, but the truth when I’m very confident, when I’m connected to who I really am, when I’m connected to nature and the world around me? I know truth is truth because what I see is the more healed we are from our traumas, the more we really can be connected to real truth, real reality with a capital R, objective reality, and we can speak about it.
But when is it safe? Well, certainly for me as a child, it was almost never safe. It was dangerous to speak the truth, to speak the truth about my feelings, to call out my parents for their bad behavior, their lies, their manipulations, their dishonesty. Not just in their relationship with me, their dishonesty with each other, their dishonesty in their work, their hypocrisy. They would reject me when I spoke out. It was not safe.
And it started becoming safe for me when I started becoming an independent entity. Really, in my 20s, I feel it became much more safe for me to speak out. But it was still dangerous because in a lot of ways, I was still dependent on my parents for money. Certainly until I was 22, when I finished college, they were paying for my life by and large. But even more so, I still wanted them to love me. They were my primary connections in the world. Even into my mid-20s, even when I was financially independent, broken away, hitchhiking on the other side of the planet, I still would have said my mom is the person in the world who I have the closest, most intimate relationship. Kind of sad and scary to say that, but because of that, I wasn’t safe to speak out against her, the horrible things she did to me.
So I still, to a large degree, was compartmentalizing a lot of the truth that I knew, the ugly, sad, painful truth of trauma, of disrespect, of abandonment from her. But it became more safe the more independent I became. And I became independent in part by going out and working in the world and really being able to stand on my own two feet and to know that I never had to call home and say, “Mom, I don’t have enough money.” I haven’t done that in decades now. So that was part of it.
But I know a lot of people who are completely financially independent from their families but still are not safe to speak out because their family is the channel where they get their emotional connection with the world from. Basically, they did not, on an emotional level, individuate. They did not separate from their parents and become an individual psychological or emotional entity. They didn’t heal their traumas. They didn’t resolve their traumas. And for a long time, that was true for me. It was a gradual process of breaking away on the inside. And a big part of it was to realize how much I had internalized the traumas of my parents such that in my psyche, I became like my parents in a lot of ways. That’s one of the most horrible consequences of trauma, one of the most unfair and unjust consequences of trauma. And it happens in big ways, and it happens in little ways. That to some degree or other, everybody who is harmed, emotionally scarred, and traumatized internalizes their traumatizers. It becomes part of their own psyche.
And for me to become safe to speak out, to be honest, to be true and real in a more public way, to have my voice, I had to also work that out within me. And that was so much of my grieving process. That was not just a simple act of vomiting out the parts of them, their bad sides that had become internalized in me because it wasn’t so simple. It wasn’t like a bad meal that I could throw up or crap out with diarrhea. It was actually all embedded in me, more like a cancer through my organs. And the healing process was much more protracted. And it wasn’t like I could just take a pill and kill all the cancer. It was like embedded in my cells in a way, in no religious sense at all. I had to become born again. Nothing to do with God or religion whatsoever. And the born again was really starting over again and knowing who I am, studying myself at a core level, and slowly grieving those false, internalized, sick parts of me out of my system.
Every little part that came out of me came out with a lot of tears, a lot of sadness, sometimes shame, anger, guilt, especially when I had replicated those traumas on others. I thank God I never had children because that might have made it too difficult for me to heal. But the more I healed, the more that my voice returned, the more I became safe to speak out, the more I actually became an emotionally independent and unique individual, someone who really became a true self in the world, someone who wasn’t just a replication of the people who harmed me and the people who harmed them and the people who harmed them, going all the way back.
I think this is the fundamental thing of human evolution: for people to grieve their traumas and to become real individuals. You want to talk about breaking the cycle of trauma? I’ve heard many people say, “Oh, I didn’t do to my children what my parents did to me. I broke the cycle.” But then often I see their children, and I see their children are still pretty screwed up. A lot of times, people don’t directly traumatize their children the ways in which they were traumatized. Instead, they traumatize them in metaphorical ways, analogous ways, sometimes that they don’t even, or often ways that they don’t even see or know, such that they don’t feel bad about traumatizing their children because they don’t think it’s what was done to them. They don’t even see it as trauma.
So often when people don’t fundamentally empathize at a basic level with the people over whom they wield power, which is so common, they can traumatize them not even knowing that it’s trauma. They can believe they’re actually helping this person develop and prepare for the world in a way that’s for their own good, when in reality, it’s the exact opposite.
So what is for someone’s own good? For someone’s own good is to nurture their relationship with their true self, to nurture their independence, to nurture the safety that that person has to be able to be their true self, to have their own feelings, all their feelings, all their reactions, the healthiest parts of them, and to speak out, to be an honest person, to be an inspired, honest, real, altruistic human being on this earth. And that’s hard. I think very few people have the ability to nurture other people in that way very much because they have not yet, to any large degree, embodied that in themselves.
And so when is it safe to speak? It’s safe to speak when we become strong enough to have real boundaries that other people might reject us, and it doesn’t affect us that much because we’re not particularly dependent on them financially or emotionally.
For me, it really has been a two-part process: healing myself internally so that I have become stronger in myself.
I know myself and healing myself externally so that I can function in this crazy, screwed up, messed up, traumatizing world. Being able to work and make money, it has not been easy. It’s been a constantly confusing process. I’ve had some good fortune, some education that’s made it easier, but I have also stepped off the trail of life so many times and still do.
I’m very careful with how I spend my money. I know a lot of people who are so financially strapped, and yet they earn much more than I do. It’s because they spend so much. I’m a minimalist in terms of my spending. Any money that I get, however I get it, and I do work. I do all sorts of different things, still sometimes to the point of helping people clean their apartments for money, all sorts of pet sitting for money. I make a little bit of money, be very careful, spend on where I live, spend on food, spend a little bit on travel, and frankly, not much else. I live mostly with second-hand clothes.
I see people, they spend more just on their clothes than I spend for my entire budget for my life. For me, being very thrifty in my spending, being careful about where I work, trying to not work for people who will harm me, such that I have to turn down jobs sometimes, whole careers in which I can make a lot more money, or work jobs that nurture my soul, or work jobs that maybe are pretty humble that a lot of people don’t want to work, but give me the freedom and independence to not have my psyche invaded, has been very important for me. I’ve lived a pretty creative existence in that way.
I also want to say how grateful I am to every single person who has given me a donation for this YouTube channel. Everyone who’s a Patreon on my Patreon page, who’s even given me anything, it’s like I am incredibly grateful about that because that’s another way in which I retain my independence to actually feel safe enough to speak my mind here. I’ve gained a lot by having this YouTube channel. I’ve reached a lot of people. That makes me feel great. Actually being useful in the world is something that for me, and I think for a lot of other people, is a prime ingredient for having self-esteem.
However, speaking my mind here publicly in front of a camera, then sticking it up on YouTube for the world to consume publicly, there have been a lot of costs. I’ve had a lot of rejection because of this. Certainly, my family system has not liked it, to say the least. I have been disinherited by my dad over things that I’ve said here, things that I’ve written on my website professionally. It’s been awkward.
I know a lot of people who were mental health professionals alongside me who said, “Daniel is crazy.” It was a lot easier to call me crazy than to actually look within themselves and see how disturbed or even maybe crazy they were. Being a truth teller has consequences. It has made it complicated with a lot of people, maybe who I even thought I could be friends with in some way, and then they realize who I really am, and they’re like, “Uh, uh, I cannot be friends with this person. This person threatens my denial.” Perhaps, and then I realized, well, I heard a saying once upon a time, even though I’m not a big God believer in any conventional sense, that is, I heard people say, “Rejection is God’s protection.”
Somehow that struck me as being a statement of truth in a way. It’s like when people reject me because I speak the truth, at some level, it’s like a sign that there was no friendship that could ever be. There was no intimacy that could really ever be because if they couldn’t see the truth in what I was saying, then they weren’t really safe for me, and they didn’t really want to grow. So what did they have to offer me?
Yes, sometimes it’s sad because people are not so black and white. Sometimes they had some really good things to offer, some really wonderful qualities, even though maybe a fundamental part of their personality was not very honest, and they were going to defend against that honesty. So I wasn’t really safe to be honest in front of them.
Well, another way that I’m careful and safe in terms of protecting myself from outside attacks is that in a way, this YouTube channel is a compartmentalized part of my personality. When I’m out in the world, I live with people in all sorts of environments. I hitchhike around the world. I meet all sorts of people, many people who pretty quickly let me know that they’re not the kind of people who would remotely be the audience for this YouTube channel. And you know what I do sometimes? I don’t tell them about this. I don’t share my ideas. I don’t care about my point of view on the family system. Why? Because they’ll just reject me.
And you know, sometimes I can have really good friendships in certain areas with these people. I don’t feel an obligation to share every single essence of my point of view, especially if someone’s just gonna outright reject it. So for me, this comes down to the question of discretion. That in my relationships with people out in the world, when I meet people, they have to earn my truth. They have to earn often how much I am going to share about my point of view. And if they show me that it’s not really worth it, it’s just going to make problems for me, maybe they’ll even harm me or cause me big problems, then I can always keep quiet.
If they really want to know, when they really want to ask, and they really want to prove to me that they’re sincere seekers of life and of truth, then I will share. And I often will take the risk of sharing more rather than less because you know what? I think it’s so valuable to share this truth, this truth that’s been so hard won for me. But I also do really feel it’s my right to have the boundaries to protect myself, to not get myself harmed unnecessarily, to get rejected unnecessarily just for the sake of speaking truth.
And I’ve certainly experienced that when I was in my early 20s. When I first started really discovering this truth within me, I thought the world’s gonna love it, and I shared it all the time. And the reaction from the world was so negative so often. I had to learn the hard way. You know, I don’t like being rejected constantly. I don’t like being completely lonely and isolated just because I’m learning about truth.
Now another thing is I had to learn to migrate more in my life, in my relationships, in my radar, in assessing people toward people who are healthier. That’s been another key part of being safe and feeling safe to speak the truth, is to find better companions, better allies, better friends. Not easy. I hear people ask me all the time, “How do you find better people? How do you even find a good therapist out in the world?” With that question, I often have no clue.
But how do I find better friends? How do I feel safe to really determine who is a healthier person, who is more mature, who is someone who will be more likely to connect with me? I listen. I listen to what comes out of people’s mouths. I listen to what they say, and I watch them. I watch their behavior. What I see is that when I really put in a lot of effort toward listening and watching, listening to the undercurrents of their tone, listening to how they treat people, especially how do they treat people, even animals, over whom they wield power. How do they treat children? How do they treat their own children? How do they talk to their children? Are they hypocrites? Do they say one thing and do another when no one’s watching?
What I find is that that gives me a big clue of how close I want to come to them. And often people reveal themselves enough to give me an indication, especially over time, when I’ve had a lot of practice doing this, to determine how much of myself, how much of the truth within me, how much of what I would even call truth I can reveal to them. And often just to be useful to them because what I find is if I share too much truth with them, it can overwhelm.
Them, but when I share as much as I feel, and often I correctly assess they are ready to hear and able to hear, people can be incredibly grateful. And so for me to really use discretion about how much of the truth that’s within me I share is really key to me being useful in the world, useful to others, and ultimately useful to myself on my own healing process.