TRANSCRIPT
From what I’ve observed in my life, in my personal life, in my professional life as a therapist, in my personal life again, in the 10 years since I stopped being a therapist, there are two ways that people change. Two ways that really change the character, even the personality of a person. And those two ways are trauma and grieving.
And what’s interesting about these two things, trauma versus grieving, is they’re basically the opposite of each other. They’re antonyms in a way. One undoes the other, and it goes in both directions.
So let me start by trauma. How does trauma change a person? If we start with a person, an imaginary person, a fantasy person as it were, even a fantasy child who has a whole self, who has a whole self on the inside that is connected with their consciousness. They have a natural, spontaneous ability to fight for themselves, to know who they are, to know what they like, to know what they don’t like, to know how they’re feeling, to know when they’re being violated, to know when they’re happy, sad, to have interest, to have talent, to have natural spontaneous creativity, natural spontaneous expressions of their self.
And then this child, this imaginary person, this person who to some degree is everybody that I’ve ever seen in the world, experiences violations. Experiences sometimes crushing violations. Violations of the body, violations of the emotions, violations fundamentally of that sense of self. Their self is penetrated, attacked, criticized, shut down, broken.
And what happens to that person? That self is naturally the first thing that happens is they rebel against it. They want to expel the violator, get rid of the invader, defend their boundaries. But what happens when those violations continue regardless? And the person learns through the most painful experience of life, through overwhelming emotion, that nothing he or she can do will stop this violation. That his or her reactions, his or her feelings, his or her protestations do nothing to stop the violation. The violation is going to continue.
Often this starts right within the family system with the child’s parents, where the child’s parents do not accept certain sides of this person’s self. In some cases, in the most extreme cases, perhaps the parents don’t accept the child’s whole self. What happens to the child when he or she learns that it is actually disadvantageous to have a full self? Disadvantageous to have his or her full range of feelings? That it actually makes it worse to have a full self when a person is being violated? To have a self, to have reactions, to have boundaries actually just makes the violations worse, the attacks worse.
The person learns to shut down. The person learns to distance himself or herself from his or her feelings. This is a basic survival technique that the human organism has. Animals have it too, actually. It’s a sense of learned helplessness that it’s better to be helpless. It’s better to be powerless. It’s better not to fight back against this trauma because then the trauma, the attack, the violation will be lessened.
And so what happens is the person splits off parts of him or herself, pushes them down, buries them into this part of the mind called the unconscious, where they can sort of be psychologically hypnotized in a permanent, long-term, ongoing way. Take memories, put them out of consciousness, take feelings, break them, split them off, snip them off, put them away, try to throw them away, and into the garbage pail of the unconscious they go.
And this person develops a false self, a personality that fills in the gaps, fills in the vacuum of what was taken away, the real truth that was stripped away. And this child goes through life with a false personality or a partially false personality, a persona. And this changes him or her. This profoundly changes his or her personality, his or her character, his or her outlook on life, his or her relationships with others, his or her interactions, his or her feelings, creativity, thoughts, motivations, sense of hope, lack of sense of hope.
And this is extreme when it happens at a very, very young age. Often people don’t even see it. Parents often have no empathy for it. Parents actually like it a lot of times when children get traumatized, when children get shut down. It’s like breaking a horse. It’s considered a good thing. It’s considered advantageous in society. Sometimes it’s considered religiously appropriate. School likes it better a lot of times when children are somewhat or sometimes very traumatized. Take the spirit away. This person has too much spirit. They’re too bothersome.
So the school, the children’s parents, other people, friends, other adults in the world, society can like the child better when they develop this persona. Oh, this is healthy. This child is a better person now. This child is more normal. They fit in. They bother us less. They don’t ask so many troublesome questions. They don’t kick up in the adults how confused and traumatized and lost and screwed up the adults are.
Also, deep inside everybody’s soul, everybody wants to not be traumatized. Everybody wants to be their full real self. But what trauma does is it blocks this. It puts a wall down with electricity in it. So every time the person has a spontaneous urge to be their real true self, they touch this electric wall and they go back down.
And when a child is too real and interacts with people who are too shut down and traumatized, it inspires those other people. Because being real and being true is actually catching. It’s a healthy thing. It spreads around the world. It’s like a healthy virus. And what happens is it inspires other people to be real, and those other people start to be real and they hit that wall of electricity and they don’t like it. It makes them uncomfortable.
And so what they do is they do the repetition compulsion. They have a compulsion to repeat what happened to them, and so they shut down the person who is threatening them.
And so now I’ll get into the other way that people change. In a way, it’s the mirror image of being traumatized. It’s the opposite. It’s the undoing of trauma, and that is grieving.
I once heard someone say the only way that people can change is through deep therapy. Well, I don’t really agree with that because so much therapy, so much of what’s called deep therapy, I see doesn’t really do this. Really, it’s an internal process. Maybe sometimes it does happen in therapy. I’ve seen it sometimes happen in therapy. In my own personal life, I’ve seen it happen more quite away from therapy, quite away from power figures who you have to pay money to, who more often than not are more screwed up than I ever was.
So what I have seen is grieving does the opposite of trauma. Grieving undoes trauma. Grieving actually cuts those electric wires and lets the true self come back out. Or maybe it doesn’t cut the electric wires. Maybe what it does is it gives the internal self such a strength that it can handle the incredible shock of breaking through the wall of trauma, the wall of silence, the wall of being disallowed to feel one’s feelings.
I guess I could start by speaking about my own experience of grieving, of doing the opposite of becoming traumatized, of becoming untraumatized. For me, it was first recognizing what the trauma was. A lot of times it was on an intuitive level, a lot of times consciously, because I was so traumatized by the very nature of my trauma, I wasn’t allowed to see how I was traumatized. I wasn’t allowed to know how I was traumatized, and I wasn’t allowed to identify my traumatizers. I wasn’t allowed to say or know or even think or sometimes even feel because I was so split off, so dissociated.
You did that to me. I didn’t remember. I didn’t know. But piece by piece, little by little, there were parts of me that did remember some things that did have certain feelings still. So it started with intuition. It started with me saying I don’t like those people. I don’t want to be around those people in this situation, in this circumstance. I started defining a personal life for myself, a private life, a private world where I could be me, where I could explore who am I, what’s going on inside of me, why am I so screwed up, why am I so unhappy.
And the more that I did that and had this boundary, little private world, the more myself slowly, slowly, slowly started to unfold. I call this pre-grieving. It wasn’t quite grieving yet, but it was setting the…
Stage so that I could grieve, so that I could begin to have a little bit of an expansive self. I didn’t have to be so closed, so hidden, so withdrawn. I didn’t have to be like a snail inside of my shell. Instead, my world could be a little bigger. Myself could grow. My persona could kind of split apart a little.
What started happening is that people started noticing that I was just a little different. The people who traumatized me, starting with my parents, but other adults, even other children, other relatives that I had, they had radar. They were watching me. They could smell that I was a little different. They could see something was a little different in my face, something was a little different in my eyes. Was it a rebellion? Was it that I had a little bit more insight, a little bit more perspective? Was I watching them? But it was something that they could feel, and they didn’t like it. And so they started to shut me down more, according to the very patterns by which they shut me down the first time around, when I was a little younger, the first and second and third time around often.
What happened is because I had that private world, I started analyzing what was going on. I started taking more distance from them, and the more distance I took, the more safety I felt to explore myself. And then little by little, the more I recalled, the more I felt, the more I had scenarios that I was able to bring to mind and see, wait a second, that was wrong. There was still some healthy part of me, and that healthy part of me became the real parent for my wounded little self that was shut down. I started fighting for myself and defending myself, not necessarily in relation to them, because they were still too powerful. They would still kill me all over again and crush me and shut me down and reject me and abandon me. But I started doing it in my own mind.
I started having a little world inside of myself, inside of my little private space, with some private boundaries that I didn’t even want to let anybody know I had because it was too dangerous and too scary. But in that little world, I started saying, wait a second, who am I? What’s really going on? And that was a major act of rebellion.
And then what happened because of that rebellion, because of that little war I was having against them, but in my private space, in my own mind, that war against what they had done to me, I started feeling more feelings. I started feeling that strange feeling that I wasn’t allowed so long ago, which was anger. Some might call it righteous anger. I just call it real anger, healthy anger, anger against what they’d done to me, what they were still doing to me. And that anger was the beginning of my grieving—anger and fury and also sadness. This deep strange feeling of sadness that felt like I don’t know how deep that goes. It was like a bottomless pit. Was there a bottom? I didn’t know.
But I started looking within, and then I started crying sometimes for little things that happened, sometimes for metaphorical things, sometimes for things that happened on television, sometimes because my father said nasty things to our family dog. And I identified more with the real self of my family dog than I identified with my own true self because my dog, in a way, was more allowed to be himself than I was. But then slowly it started turning toward me. I started identifying with me more—who I really was, how I really felt. And then in time, more and more, what really happened to me—not just the attacks that I experienced, but how I felt during those attacks, how horrible I felt and what happened to me, how I shut down, how I wasn’t allowed to have my reactions.
How I was attacked once for being myself, attacked for being exuberant, attacked for having a spirit, attacked for, in a child’s clumsy way, speaking my mind, asking real questions, making real healthy critiques sometimes of adults who were so screwed up they couldn’t even handle the critiques of a three-year-old. And so I was shut down and rejected, and I started to feel it. I started to feel that pain and that anguish and that sadness and that rage—rage, that dangerous thing that I was so not allowed to have. Rage, one of the building blocks, the cement and the bricks of boundaries—the boundaries that I wasn’t allowed.
The grieving really, really came to the forefront of my life when I would sometimes just at random moments, just be alone in that private space that I built, and I would sob and sob and sob. And sometimes I didn’t know why, but all I knew is that this was saving my life. This felt so good. And when I said it’s saving my life, and I knew it was saving my life, my intuition told me this is not the crying I felt of despair and of helplessness and of powerlessness—the crying I did when I was once being traumatized and humiliated and broken down and changed for the worse, changed away from myself. This was crying that was like rejuvenating, refilling. It was wondrous. It was magical.
No one had to tell me it was this. No one had to tell me from a psychology book or a therapist or a professional or some fancy important adult. No one had to tell me, “Daniel, you are now grieving. This will change your personality for the better.” Because I knew it. I felt it. I could feel that I was coming back, and I loved it. And I loved myself. And somehow I knew intuitively, 100%, I knew that I was on the right path in my life, and this is what I wanted more of. And whatever was leading me and allowing me to do this thing called grieving was what I wanted more of.
And so I started fighting for myself. At first, it was sort of a guerrilla warfare. I wasn’t allowed to be out in public about it. I couldn’t fight openly because they still were more powerful than me. And so my guerrilla war was to learn, where am I powerful? How can I fight for myself? How can I fight for myself quietly, sometimes so they don’t even know I’m doing it? I needed to build up my strength in ways that they wouldn’t undo because now, now that I was becoming a more real self and becoming stronger—I think of this happening as a teenager, certainly into my 20s—they hated it. They hated me. And it was because I was doing what I wanted to do all those years before, decades before. I wanted to become the full me. I wanted to embody my personality.
And what happened? The more I grieved, the more I sobbed, the more I had my anger and sadness and anguish, the more I had my memories, the more I actually was able to put together the pieces of who are my friends and who are my allies. Or sometimes, in the more complex way, let’s just take my parents as an example because they were my primary enemies. They were also my primary loves. So how could I balance this? How could I get the most love from them while having the most boundaries against the sides of them that hated me, that despised me and wanted to break me down and change me for the worse yet again?
Well, I started becoming more independent. It was a big part of my grieving process. I started striving for complete independence. I wasn’t there by any means. I had to learn more and more how to meet my own emotional needs, not play them out through romance, not play them out by parental rescue fantasy with a romantic partner or directly with my parents. Oh, mom and dad, save me, give me, please love me. I tried it a lot. I tried to get them to love me, but it didn’t work. It was too late. They had broken me. But I had to fix me, and to fix me was grieving. This grieving process has been ongoing for decades in my life—this grieving process of bringing back the parts of me that were lost and reintegrating them by whatever means necessary, by taking massive distance from my family of origin.
Yeah, I wrote a book called Breaking from Your Parents. That was a primary part of my salvation.
It wasn’t all, it wasn’t the whole part, but it set the stage for me to really grieve more. How could I remember what they had done to me if I was so close with them? Still, even if I was a little bit close with them, they knew what I was doing, and they hated me for it. They hated the me that was much more real and honest. They hated the ways in which I was changing, and they knew that I was changing.
Let me see if I can remember some of the quotes they told me. “We miss the old Daniel. The old Daniel was so gentle and so kind and so wonderful. This new Daniel, what happened? Where is the old Daniel? This new Daniel is not so compassionate. This new Daniel is kind of rough and nasty and is rejecting. Doesn’t care about us. Doesn’t love us anymore.” When I heard this, the little part of me that still wanted my parents to love me and still wanted their approval, the part of me that they had bent and broken through trauma, felt hurt, felt scared, even felt a little bit of self-loathing.
But there was this new part of me, and they were right. There was a new Daniel. The new Daniel was developing, was becoming mature, was becoming myself. The persona was getting stripped away, and the real exuberant self who had always been there was coming back. What they were saying was proof that it was really happening. It was external indication that I really had changed, that I was growing.
The funny thing was, I was becoming me. I was developing more into me. And then what was happening is the real me that was there, that true self, was really developing into something bigger and something new. I was evolving. So that’s what I would say: grieving opened the door for me to return to myself so that I could evolve. Trauma took my evolution, squelched it, and made me devolve, made me break down and become something fake and unreal, artificial in some ways, even non-existent. I was sort of a non-person.
The more I became traumatized and the more that I grieved, I returned to being a self. It’s like in some ways I had to pick up where I left off. The parts of me that were traumatized at five years old had to start again at five and then become six, seven, eight, nine, ten. Which is why grieving is such a messy and scary process. Why a lot of times people, even people we’re close to, don’t like seeing a grieving process. Often the world likes people better shut down rather than being a sobbing five-year-old.
But I grew, and I grew quickly. Well, as quickly as I possibly could. And here I am, still growing. But I wouldn’t say the fundamentals of my personality are changing really so much because the fundamentals of my personality, by my process of grieving, are now in line. I am me. I’m developing me, but my character has returned.