TRANSCRIPT
What does a little child do when they cannot trust their parents? When I was a little boy riding in our car, I remember my mother telling me that her arms were stronger than any seatbelt. She used to let me sit in the front with her on her lap. Actually, she kind of pressured me to do it a lot. What she would do is she would hold her arms around me and she’d say, “My arms are stronger than any seatbelt. Nothing can stop you from being broken free from my arms.” The problem is, I didn’t trust her.
The reason I didn’t trust her is because before that even happened, when I was about 2 or 3 years old, I was sitting in my mom’s lap in the front seat of the car. My grandmother was driving, and we were going along. My mom had her arms around me, stronger than any seatbelt, and my grandmother slid off the road, crashed. We went into a ditch, and as soon as we hit that ditch, my mom’s arms opened up because she wasn’t stronger than any seatbelt. My face went forward and smashed into the dashboard right here, and I still have a scar from it right below my nose, above my upper lip. Yet my mom continued to want me to sit in her lap after that, and she continued to say that her arms were stronger than any seatbelt. I didn’t believe her.
So how did I deal with that? In the bigger picture, how did I deal with the fact that my mother clearly was not trustworthy at some primary level? Well, the way I dealt with it is the way I think a lot of very young children deal with it. They trust their parents anyway. What they do is what I did. I took that one part of my mother’s obviously untrustworthy behavior and I put it into a little category that was called separate from the rest of how I feel about my mom. Because I needed to trust my mom, but in that one area, it was like, no, she really had broken my trust. Yet I couldn’t reject her entirely, even though that kind of behavior on her part, that dishonest behavior, dishonest in the face of obvious rejection by reality, it stayed. It was really, really actually true in a lot of different areas of her personality, but I needed her. I needed her love.
The other thing that I realized is that by resisting my mother, by showing my distrust of her, she didn’t like me. She rejected me. She really took issue with it. If I didn’t want to sit in her lap, if I didn’t want to believe her that her arms were stronger than any seatbelt, even though there had already been visible, clear, bloody proof that she was wrong. The funny thing also is, as I got bigger and older, it was harder for her to protect me with her arms. And yet the sad thing is, I think I still did get in her lap a lot. I still have a lot of memories of sitting in her lap in the front seat with her arms around me and so wanting to believe that she was trustworthy.
So I really think it’s true. Little children, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, still can believe that their parents are good, trustworthy, healthy, mature, and honest when they’re not. But it stayed in my head somewhere deep down. I buried it, I think, for a long time, but it stayed somewhere in a little pocket that my mom, well, she’s not all that she says she is. And as time went on, I gained more and more and more experience of seeing all these different ways in which my mother just wasn’t honest. Basically, that she would betray me with what she said or what she did. And it was confusing to me. It was painful for me. It created a kind of existential crisis in me because I still wanted to believe my mom. I wanted to love my mom and hold her up as someone who was a great mom, a great human being, a great defender of me, even though she wasn’t. Even though sometimes she was the exact opposite. Even though fundamentally, at some more objective level, based on reality, in some ways she was my worst enemy. And that’s so confusing. How can I have the person who created me, gave birth to me, nurtured me, fed me from her body, turn around and also be the person who is my worst enemy, who lies to me, who creates a picture of reality that’s not realistic, in a way was setting me up to be troubled, confused, lost? And if I’d really followed the path of what she was setting me up for, I might have actually lost my mind.
And when I think about it, in some ways I did lose my mind as a very little child. I lost my mind because in some ways I lost myself. I couldn’t keep my full conscious relationship with me. I couldn’t develop that. I couldn’t nurture it and also maintain a loving, trusting relationship with my mother at the same time. And when I was very young, I prioritized her over me because I thought and I felt it and I knew it at some level. If I don’t have her, I will die. If I don’t have my relationship with her, I am really, really screwed in life. I can do without my full conscious connection with me. I can even abandon me in all sorts of different ways, but I cannot abandon her. I am too dependent on her. And I think that’s so true of children in general.
Yet as I got older, that became less and less true. I didn’t need to be so dependent on her. I didn’t want to be so dependent on her. I also started seeing what was going to happen to me if I stayed too dependent on her. I was going to be in big trouble. I wasn’t gonna make it as a teenager. I wasn’t going to make it as an adult. I wasn’t gonna fit in socially. I wasn’t gonna be able to get a job, a career, a life. I wasn’t gonna be able to have friends. I wasn’t gonna be able to have a girlfriend. All these different things I wasn’t going to be able to get if I maintained a closer relationship with my mom because she was so dishonest.
Also, my mom really, really wanted me to be dependent on her. And I think sometimes she actually wanted me to be crazy by wanting me to believe her lies. She wanted to screw me up. She wanted to make me broken so I would, in a way, stay stuck on her. And it’s not just that she lied about how strong she was with her arms. “My arms are stronger than any seatbelt.” She did actually quite a lot of things that really were straight-up dishonest, conscious, I think conscious at least, manipulations of me to make me confused, to make me have a more troubled version of reality in my life.
I think of one thing that she used to do. She used to play this game that she had magical powers. She would tell me, “Daniel, I just have this intuitive ability to sense where certain things are hidden. I just know it.” And I don’t know why. I’d say, “Like what?” She goes, “Well, you know you like this piece of cinnamon gum. There was a certain type of cinnamon gum I liked a lot.” I’d say, “Yeah.” She goes, “Sometimes I can just feel where a piece of cinnamon gum is. I don’t even know why I know where it is, but I just know where it is.” I’d say, “Where? Where is it?” And she goes, “There.” And then she would walk over, and I was like 6, 7 years old, maybe even eight years old, and she would lift something, and there would be a piece of that cinnamon gum. And I’d be like, “How did she know that?” And I’d say, “How did you know that?” She goes, “I don’t know. It’s just a feeling I have, a gift that I have. I can just feel things.” Actually, what it was is she had actually put it there before. She had hidden it, and she was pretending that she had this sort of intuitive sense of knowing this for knowledge, but it was a lie. And she absolutely would never, ever admit that she had hidden it there before.
And I think, “Well, did you put it there? Did you hide it?”
There, she’s saying, “No, no, it’s just I can feel it.” I said, “We’ll do it again, do it again. If you’re so good at that, tell me where’s another piece of gum hidden?” And she’d say, “Well, I don’t know. I can’t really read it well.” And then she’d say, “Oh, well maybe, maybe there is one. Hold on, I think I can see it in my mind’s eye.” And then she’d take me, and I started, maybe she does know. And then she lists something, and there would be another when they’re hidden behind a plant or something like that. And I’d be like, “Oh my God, she really does know it! She has magical powers!” And I started believing in magic. Little did I know, she was anticipating that I wasn’t gonna believe her, so she’d actually hidden two pieces of gum in preparation for that. And then I would say, “Tell me whether another one was. Tell me another.” And then she said, “No, I just can’t read anymore,” because she actually hadn’t hidden anymore. There were no more hidden pieces of gum. But it screwed me up. It really screwed me up. It gave me a twisted sense of what reality was. And as I got older and I started thinking about it, I started thinking, “She lied to me. She lied to me.” And I went to her when I was 9, 10, 11, 12 years old later, and I say, “Whatever was the truth with that piece of gum? You hid that gum, right? There really isn’t such a thing as magic like that, right?” And she says, “No, no, I really did know that I didn’t hide any.” But she would deny it because maybe she didn’t want to look stupid, or maybe she just wanted to twist my sense of what reality was. Very, very manipulative in that way. And there were a lot of different things that she did like that, and it really gave me a confused footing in reality in all sorts of different ways. And it was painful. It made it hard for me to function in the world as a normal person. It also made it harder for me to discern what reality is. It’s not surprising that as I get older, I found I really like science. I really like the idea of scientific inquiry. I like the idea of using my own innate curiosity in a systematic way. I’m not surprised that I went off to college and I studied for years of biology. I liked trying to use my analytical skills to figure out what reality really is and not just to go on faith. Because my mother, in a way, was a cult leader in my family system. And to get the love from her that I so needed and so wanted, I had to leave her. And I didn’t want to do that anymore. I instead wanted to believe reality. I wanted to believe in truth. Fast-forward, when I look at my life in a little bit of perspective, what I’ve done with this twenty, thirty years of my adult life, I’ve really devoted my adult life to rooting out what is the truth of whatever it is that I’m trying to look at, whatever it is that I’m trying to study. And I would say the real place that I started most intensely to root out what the truth was, was the truth inside of myself. Who am I? How honest really am I? What are my blind spots? Where is my denial? How do I have denial? How do I keep my denial in place? How do I keep my blind spots in place? What things have I done in my life that weren’t honest? Why wasn’t I honest? What were the situations that set me up to not be honest? What were the circumstances that caused me to lie? Not just lie to others, but lie to myself. In what ways was I dissociated? And also really to figure out my history and what ways have they lied to me? How has that affected me? How am I now, as an adult, still beholden to the cult that is my mother, the cult that is my father? My father, he always defended my mom. He never called her out. He knew that she was a liar in so many different ways, but he wasn’t gonna say it because he didn’t want to upset the applecart of my family system. That was part of the relational contract between my parents. They would defend each other even when the other one was wrong. My mom defended my dad too. She defended his lies, his bad behavior all over the place. That was another way in which she lied. However, that’s not what I wanted in my life. And so I’ve made a life devotion out of doing my best to try to be honest, to turn my analytical skills inward and to figure out what’s going on in this old brain of mine. In what ways really am I healthy, and in what ways am I sick? But I also want to talk about that side. In what ways am I healthy? Because when I was a child, I also wasn’t really being allowed in my family system to fully nurture my good qualities. My good qualities a lot of times were considered dangerous in my family system. They were considered heretical. They were considered the kind of things that would get me rejected. They didn’t often get approval. And because of that, I had a hard time knowing who I even was or how to assess my own self. I didn’t know how honest I was. I didn’t even know all the while that I had these analytical skills. I didn’t know that I had the ability to discern reality. I didn’t know that consciously. That is instead what I was doing was I was just doing it all over the place. I didn’t really know that I was that curious. I didn’t know that I was really an independent thinker. I didn’t really know that I was original. I thought there was a lot of problems with me. I thought I was rebellious. I thought I was bad. I thought I was a contrary kind of person. But as I grew older, I started looking at these qualities in more perspective and saying, “You know, I’m actually better than I thought I was.” And I honored this. I honor my ability to discern reality better than pretty much anybody else’s that I knew. I’m actually smarter than I thought I was. I’m not so stupid, and I’m not so socially screwed up. And it felt good to say that in my private relationship with myself. What I learned is my family system didn’t like a lot of these good qualities that I had, and they certainly didn’t like it when I spoke openly about it. I realized, ooh, they consider me arrogant if I speak openly about what I think about myself on the inside. They considered me holier-than-thou. I remember my dad once called me, “Oh, you know what you are? You’re the high priest of psychology. You think you’re so insightful!” It was because I was calling him out on his sick and denial behavior. Back when I used to call out my parents, at a certain point, I realized there’s no point in calling them out. It doesn’t change them at all. They don’t want to know. They don’t want to know who they are. They want to live in the comfort of their own denial. That’s not pretty much what I did. I had to do, if I wanted to become more independent, if I wanted to love myself more, I had to get away from them. And in a way, that has become my salvation.