TRANSCRIPT
In a lot of my videos, I talk about the subject of human rights. Our human rights as people, the human rights we had as children, not to be violated, not to be disrespected, to be nurtured, to be cared about, to be loved. But in this video, I’d like to take it from a different angle, to try out a subject that’s in a way converse to the subject of human rights. Now, I’d like to talk about the subject of human responsibility.
And when I talk about human responsibility, I think about what the job of the adult within us is, the job of the parent that we have inside of us. And the primary thing that I think is we have the responsibility to help ourselves heal, to help ourselves look inside ourselves and bring up all the painful buried feelings that we have as the result of the traumas we suffered when our human rights were violated. And to make sense of those feelings, to look at the suffering that’s been buried inside of us and bring it to the surface, and to begin to convert it into grieving. To take the step into being at the helm of our own healing process.
I think from what I’ve seen in my life that is very difficult. It’s very difficult for everyone. But I think of myself when I first became an adult. Even though I wasn’t very good at it, I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t have role models for healing. I was clumsy. I made tons of mistakes on my healing process, lots of errors, lots of confusion, lots of trial and error. There was some part of me, some little voice inside me that knew if I am going to ever really love myself, I have to figure this out. I have to make sense of what happened to me. In fact, I didn’t even have the words for it. I didn’t even know that’s what it really was. All I knew is that there was something inside me that wasn’t right, and I had to figure out how to fix it.
And at some level, I didn’t consciously know this is my adult responsibility, this is my human responsibility, but I knew I had to do it. And that is what was going on. And in that long, clumsy process of looking inside myself and opening it up and analyzing myself, studying myself, journaling, writing in my dreams, talking with basically everybody I knew, including my family of origin, about what was going on inside of me and who I was, I started coming up with a clearer picture of what my responsibility was, of what I’m talking about now. This idea that I have to bring out the consequences of my unresolved childhood trauma, all those post-traumatic feelings, and I have to figure out how to make sense of them.
This brings up another side of my adult responsibilities. Something that nobody told me when I was in my early 20s and I was starting this process is that I also have to build an external life, not just an internal life, but an external life that will allow me to do this healing process. And this is a big part of my human responsibility. It was then, and it still is now. I have to figure out safe people to be around. I also have to figure out how to take the responsibility to get the sick and unhealthy people out of my life, to have better boundaries with them. And that’s also what I realized as I grew older and older.
Yes, it was nice to build a career. Yes, it was nice to have work that made money. It was nice to be useful to people. But my real, real primary responsibility in life was to do this inside work, to heal myself totally as an inside process. Yes, other people could help me, and other people certainly did help me. Having friends who cared about me, who respected me, who listened to me, who gave me good feedback, who also were doing similar parallel healing processes in their own life and therefore inspired me, these people were vitally important. I had to go out into the world and find them, and I had to take a lot of risks of exposing lots and lots of sides of myself in order to find such people.
And when I did find such people, I had a responsibility to build a relationship with them. And what I also found is a lot of this human responsibility that I had to build this healing life for myself, healing relationships in the world, healing relationships with myself, it was hard, but it was also fun. The payoffs were amazing. So really meeting my responsibilities gave me incredible self-esteem. It made me feel really valuable as a person. In fact, I knew I was valuable as a person, unlike what my childhood taught me about myself. My childhood, my history of violation, my screwed-up family system, my screwed-up role models that I had in my parents, in my parents’ friends, in my teachers, they taught me that I didn’t really count, that I wasn’t really worth that much. Sometimes it taught me that my healthiest qualities were unhealthy.
And I had a responsibility, once I became an adult, to really change that, to change my whole perspective on the world. And slowly, I have been doing this. And now I’d like to ask the question, by taking a bit of a step back: Is this everybody’s responsibility? Is this human responsibility really a universal thing? And I really think that it is. And I think a lot of people get really uncomfortable with this idea that actually we have a responsibility to grow. We have a responsibility to face and heal our painful past. We have a responsibility to learn how to love ourselves.
I think part of why people don’t like it a lot of times is because sometimes life is easier if we take the position of a child, that we don’t have responsibilities. We don’t have to take a stand. Because another thing that I’ve seen again and again is when we do step up and take responsibility, it’s painful because we have to face how much we were betrayed. All these feelings come up when we start to take responsibility, when we realize nobody’s gonna do it for us. They broke it, but we have to fix it. It’s a horrible feeling, and it’s really, really not fair. It’s terribly unfair. And yet at the same time, it’s part of the privilege of being an adult and not remaining psychologically in the position of a child, which I myself have done.
Oh, I want the world to save me, and then not taking a stand as an adult, not being a good friend, not being a good boyfriend, not being a good healthy citizen of our planet, not being a productive member of our society who actually has an ability to take the healthiness in me and give back to others. And that’s another thing. And I think I’ll close with this: the human responsibility that I have to be altruistic, to be a giving person, to me, that’s not something you can just snap your fingers and do.
I’ve seen people who are very, very emotionally shut down and hurt and who want to bypass the whole healing process and yet want to be giving and yet want to be altruistic. And the problem is it doesn’t work very well because for what I’ve seen, for me to meet my responsibilities, to be a good citizen of the world, to be giving, to be altruistic, to be kind, to be loving, this all comes as a consequence of me healing on the inside of me, learning to undo what happened to me, undo the violations of my human rights by healing my traumas, by grieving, and by learning to love myself. And the more that I love myself, the more that I have a surplus of love that spills over, and then it’s very easy for me in a way to meet my responsibility to be giving to others.