TRANSCRIPT
Back when I was a teenager, I really did not like my body. Often, I didn’t like to look in a mirror because I didn’t like what I saw. I didn’t like the way my hair was; it looked weird to me. It wasn’t doing what I wanted. I couldn’t get the right haircut. I didn’t like the shape of my nose. I hated it. Often, I wished it would look different. I hated that I was too skinny. I felt I was just like that 98-pound weakling that I used to read about in magazines. I was too short. I didn’t have enough body hair. I hated that about myself. And what I was was embarrassed. I was ashamed of myself. I felt deficient. I felt like there was really something wrong with me, something lacking.
And what I saw when I looked at other people around me is, again and again and again and again, I found models of people in my real life—in school and friends and in my family—who had all the things that I wanted. They had bodies that were better than mine. Sometimes they had bodies that even were perfect, and mine was just not good enough. And also on television, I certainly saw no lack of examples of people who had these ideal bodies, who were perfect, who looked the right way, who were better looking than I was. And it was very, very painful for me. Really, I had a very negative relationship with my body in a lot of ways.
And what is ironic is looking back at pictures of myself from the time, I think, “Daniel, you were beautiful.” I really didn’t even realize it. It’s like my body was great in so many ways. And the irony being, all these years later, God, I wish I had some of the things now that I had back then. Now, too much body hair or my hair, which I hated so much back then, now it’s falling out. It’s like, “Oh my God, I’m going bald.” I would now kill for the hair that I had back then. But what I kill for it? I say that ironically because now, all these years later, when my body isn’t half as good as it was back then—not half as strong, not half as fast, doesn’t work as well, it’s creaky, I have sore knees and this and that, and my feet don’t work as well, and I don’t heal as well—now, ironically, I love my body so much more. And I really have a much more respectful, caring relationship with my body. In a way, my body is my temple.
And I wonder what happened. I reflect on it. What happened to make that transition for me to loving my body so much more, even though my body isn’t as good as what it was back then? And when I think about it, when I reflect on it, really, I think the big problem for me back then in hating my body was that my body was a place where I could externalize my feelings onto—my feelings about my inner self, my emotional relationship with myself, my existential relationship with myself. I could not be so aware of how I felt about myself on the inside, so I projected it onto my body. My body was the screen where I could feel more clearly what was really going on on the inside. I was more dissociated from how I really felt emotionally, and I played out a lot of my internal dynamics externally in my relationship with my body.
When I was a teenager into my 20s, I was so much more confused. I was so much more traumatized. I had so many things that had happened to me that were bad, that were stuck inside me, that I hadn’t been able to process. Often, that I wasn’t even aware of—emotionally terrible things that happened to me, even some physically bad things that had happened to me. And I did not have an environment that I was living in that allowed me to process these horrible things. I was not living in an environment that was allowing me to heal from my traumas, heal from my internal sense of pain and suffering and confusion of overwhelm. And a big part of it was the environment that I was living in. The two basic environments being my home and my school life were the places that actually were traumatizing.
I was being traumatized in my family, so no big surprise that I couldn’t really heal in my family. The two people who primarily were traumatizing me were the two people who should have been the ones who were helping me work out my traumas, and they were the two primary people who were denying it. So I really was not in a position to use my home life as a place to grow and heal from some of these basic emotional conflicts I was going through. And the exact same thing, to a slightly lesser degree, was happening in school. School was a traumatizing place. The so-called authority figures, who were really authoritarian figures, my teachers were nasty. They weren’t compassionate. They weren’t emotionally insightful. They were not often respectful to me. I think after the age of 10, I didn’t have any teachers who I really liked. And even more importantly, after the age of 10, I don’t think I had any teachers who even liked me, let alone loved me. It was an alienating, hostile environment from the adults, and so many of the other kids in school were nasty. It was traumatizing. It was an unpleasant environment.
And so what happened is I was in a world that didn’t really love me—not really at home and not really at school. And I’m not saying about my body at all. I’m talking about myself on the inside, the emotional self of who I really was. I wasn’t being loved. I wasn’t being respected. And it was incredibly confusing for me, and I didn’t know how to get out of it. And part of how I dealt with it was I pushed down my feelings. I pushed down my memories, and I split them off. I did not identify with my own internal painful emotional struggles because I wanted to push them out of my consciousness. My basic coping strategy—and I think this is true for so many human beings—was to dissociate, was to not be aware of what was going on on the inside. And one basic easy way that I manifested all those conflicts that were still there inside of me, even though I wasn’t aware of it, was to put it on my body and to hate myself. And so I did. I didn’t like myself. I wanted to change the way I looked. Getting haircuts was a horrible thing. Anytime I had to go get a haircut, it was like, “Oh my God.” It was so anxiety-producing. Sometimes I would cry after I got a haircut because it looked a little bit wrong. If it was too short, it was horrible.
I also remember, oh, I hated my feet because what happened is my feet grew before the rest of my body did. I’ve had the same shoe size since I think I was 15 years old, and I was a foot shorter than I am now when I was 15. So I had these really proportionally big feet. Oh, I hated them. They were so embarrassing. I felt like a duck. But what could I do? I couldn’t wear shoes that were smaller because they pinched my toes. So I just suffered, and I felt like I looked shaped funny, and I looked weird, and I hated myself.
So how did I make this transition to loving my body more, respecting it for the temple that it is, respecting it for the wonderful thing that it is—this thing that allows me to do all these wonderful things like walk and run and climb and travel? How did I learn to love my body? Well, for me, it wasn’t so much that I had people pummel into me, “Oh, you’ve got a great body, and you’re beautiful,” and etc., etc., etc. Because sometimes people did say that to me, “Oh, your body’s fine. You look great,” etc. But what I found is that didn’t really help. All that didn’t make any difference. The real work for me was actually quite apart from my body. It was doing the work on the inside. It was learning to love myself on the inside, and that relates to more of what I talk about in this YouTube channel and on my website all the time, which was healing my traumas, bringing up those feelings.
Not being so dissociated. Reconnecting with my life experience. Learning to have compassion for myself. Learning to identify the truth of what actually happened to me. Not my truth, but the truth. Learning how to identify who are the people who did horrible things to me. What did they actually do to me? And how did I feel? And how did I react to it? And what were my real feelings that I buried? And how do I feel now?
Having my anger, having my sadness. Being allowed to not have to be friends with people who harmed me. Not have to be close to my family who harmed me unless I really deep down in my heart want to. And if I don’t want to, I don’t have to. People who cause me harm, I don’t have to forgive them. I have to learn to love myself and learn to respect myself.
A big part of respecting myself on the inside is respecting those feelings. Respecting the long and often very painful transition and process of healing those traumas. Of going through all that grieving. Grieving being the massive transitional process of coming out of trauma and reintegrating, rebecoming a self and becoming a self that’s even stronger than it was before.
It’s like a bone that got broken and now it’s getting put back together. Except when the bone gets put back together, it’s even stronger than it ever was. Because now that bone fits myself. That spine that holds me together as a self on the inside has more life experience and knows how to protect itself and doesn’t have to dissociate in the same way that it did way back when.
Yeah, maybe if horrible things happen to me, my initial reaction would be—and still maybe, and still sometimes is—to dissociate a bit. But I don’t stay as dissociated for as long as I used to, which were the years once upon a time. Now it’s like, no, I come back to my feelings much, much, much more quickly when horrible things happen to me. I sometimes have my feelings immediately, and I never lose my feelings. I used to lose my feelings so quickly once upon a time.
I think of this example. Mmm, not often, but I used to think of it often when I was really healing from it. But now I remember it as an example, and it comes back to my mind once in a while. It’s of my dad emotionally and physically attacking me, saying horrible, horrible things and insulting things too. Cutting me down when I was a teenager and trying to break my will and humiliate me and shame me. And he did all those things. And sometimes would physically attack me and slap me and things like that. It didn’t happen a lot, the physical stuff, but it did happen enough that it really had a horrible effect on me.
And when I think about that, my reaction way back then, immediately when he treated me that way, was to forgive him and to say, “Dad, I know you didn’t mean that deep in your heart, and I love you anyways.” And I’m a bad person. I did bad things, Dad, and I’m so sorry. And I’m sorry that I elicited those reactions in you. And I never felt my feelings about how it felt to be humiliated and cut down and to be shamed and to be beaten even.
And when I think about it now, all these years of hindsight, and even when I was processing at 5, 10, 20 years after the experience of what he did to me, I realized actually I didn’t even really do anything to deserve that. Tiny minor things. And what it was is he was acting out his own unresolved childhood traumas, his internalized unresolved sense of shame, his unresolved sense of rage and fear and humiliation. And he was putting it on me by attacking me and breaking me. He was doing to me what had been done to him.
And actually what I was doing was so minor to elicit that in him that actually I wasn’t responsible at all. And plus, I was just a child. I didn’t deserve any of that. And even to make matters worse, not only was I a child, I was his child. I was the child that he had chosen to bring into the world, to love and to nurture. And instead, he was using me as an object to act out his unprocessed unresolved traumas of his own. And that was a terrible thing that he did.
And yes, well, in one way, with a lot of distance and a lot of time, I can have real compassion for him. In another way, I have compassion for me. And that’s what I’ve gained over and over and over again in my life, is having real compassion for me. For the really unfair and unjust things that I went through.
And as the result of going through this process of processing all my unresolved feelings and anger and sadness and all that, and all that loss and all that crying, I’ve gone through so much crying, grieving in my transitional process of healing that what’s happened is I’ve come to love myself and to love that little boy that I was. To love the young man that I was, the teenager that I was, and the man that I’ve become. And to really feel like, wow, I see great value in myself, and I feel the great value in myself. And I’m so much more likely to protect myself and to not forgive people who cause me harm, especially people who caused me harm for no reason of anything that I’ve really done.
And what’s happened as the result of all this process is I also have loved my body. I love who I am.