TRANSCRIPT
It’s such a privilege to be able to make these videos. When I was younger, for so many years, one of the things that the traumas of my childhood, the conflicts in my family system, the domination of my parents, of life, of society in general, disallowed me from is having a voice. And I have one now. A voice that comes to me naturally, spontaneously, easily. A consequence of the life experience that I’ve gained so far, especially the life experience of taking a step outside of my family of origin, healing my traumas—so many of them—doing so much grieving to really end up in a new place where I have a new perspective, where I actually have something to share. And I have a medium, video right here, through which I can share it.
I really have an incredible sense of gratitude. And it also brings up another thing for me: the gratitude I have that I can use my life, my life experience, some of these painful life experiences that I’ve had, to be useful to other people. I found that again and again. I certainly learned it as a therapist, and that’s part of the reason I became a therapist, because my life experience was teaching that even before I became a therapist. That for me, there really, in many ways, was no greater value I felt in my existence than being able to be useful to others, to help people grow, to maybe have some little bit of insight that I could offer someone else that could help make their life more valuable, more healing, help them move forward just a little bit or maybe a lot.
And so when I sit down here and I turn on this camera and I put on this little microphone, I think to myself, “I love this. I’m so glad that I’m able to do this, that I’m able to talk to people, find some people out in the world who can derive some value out of this, make some value.” I read people’s comments. I read all the comments. Unfortunately, I don’t have the time a lot of times, or sometimes I don’t even have a computer to be able to answer them in any sort of reasonable way. Sometimes there are just too many. But I take them to heart. I learn from them. I’ve actually learned a lot from these comments. I learned about other people’s life experience. I sometimes even find that they’re some of the critical voices against me. People say things, they critique certain things I say, and I realize that they’re right sometimes. I’ve learned things about myself through the internet by putting out my ideas. It’s sort of like a sounding board.
Sometimes I like to think of what I’m doing as sharing consequences of my healing process, consequences of my life experience. But I think it’s in certain cases, or sometimes a lot more, maybe that I realize I’m just sharing my process. And a process that can be kind of clumsy sometimes—turning on a camera and just talking extemporaneously, without a script, without an outline, just saying what comes to my mind. Well, maybe that’s part of me being a role model, maybe to other people, but also to myself—that it’s okay to just try things, to be clumsy, to make mistakes, and that that can be valuable to other people.
But to come back to it again, this idea of how grateful I am. I noticed when I just sat down and I went to press the button to start recording, I was going to talk about something completely different, and I was flooded by a feeling of thank you. Thank you to life. Thank you to my healing process. Thank you to my audience for watching this. Thank you to the good fortune that I’ve had to be able to turn on a camera and talk and record it, and being able to edit it afterward. It helps me give my life value, and maybe the same to some other people out there.