TRANSCRIPT
Yesterday, I was having a conversation with an old, old friend of mine, and he was telling me something about himself and his present life. I gave him a little feedback about his life, just something that I noticed that I thought was so good and so positive. I said, “You know, you really actually are very good at this, this thing, this quality you had inside yourself.” He just stopped, and in a tone of voice in which I heard real surprise and appreciation, he said, “Thank you, wow.” It was like it was totally unexpected what I said to him, this positive feedback. There really wasn’t even positive; it was just an objective observation that I had—totally something he wasn’t fishing for. But what surprised me was how surprised he was. It started a chain reaction in my head, thinking about all sorts of things, and it brought up the subject for me about often how hard it is in this negating modern world to know who we really are. How often the world doesn’t give us feedback—not even positive, negative feedback, but any sort of objective mirroring feedback about often our very good qualities, about how good and strong we actually are. I was thinking about it with myself. Like, I actually don’t often in my regular day-to-day life have a lot of people who mirror me, who mirror my good qualities. They just don’t do it. Now, some of my friends do; my closest friends do. Just probably in part why I like being around them, because they’re people not only who can see me for who I really am, but also have a willingness, a generosity of spirit to be able to say it. Well, what I began thinking about after that was how in the world could I, Daniel, little boy Daniel, coming out of my family of origin, have possibly known who I really was? In my family, so often my good qualities, some of my best qualities, were not—basically nobody objectively told me, “This is a good quality that you have, and this is a very good thing that you are doing.” Now, that’s not to say I wasn’t mirrored in some ways, because in some ways I was. I remember my parents in some ways, “Oh, Daniel’s so smart, and he’s so curious, and he has all these different interests,” etc., etc. Those are areas where I actually did have confidence, and I did know myself. I knew that about me. But in other areas, I didn’t know it. Other areas, there were really positive, stronger sides of myself—stronger, maybe even way more important strong sides of me, healthy sides of me—that were not only not mirrored; they were unmarred, or I was shown a broken mirror. I was told, “That’s a bad quality you have.” I was outspoken as a kid. I was someone—also, especially—I hated hypocrisy as a child, and I spoke out against it. What I got as a result of that was rejection. I certainly got it from my parents so often, in so many ways, because they were so hypocritical. It threatened them; it made them uncomfortable. So that natural, healthy side of me that refused to live with the cognitive dissonance of hypocrisy—well, it threatened them. It made them look at themselves. They didn’t want to be mirrored for who they were; they hated that. They didn’t want to grow in so many different ways, and so they rejected me. They put me down; they told me there was something wrong with me. So in so many different ways, as a child, I grew up with a pathological sense of self. I grew up with an attitude toward me that I was sick in so many different ways, that I had all these fucked-up sides of me. What I came to realize later in life, as an adult, was a lot of the things that I thought were really screwed up, sick, pathological about me were actually some of my best qualities. What a confusing way to grow up! Again, absolutely no wonder that I didn’t know who I really was. I actually internalized so many of these external beliefs about me. I really thought I was a lot more screwed up than I was. Ironically, some of my coping mechanisms, some of the ways in which I coped with dealing in a screwed-up family system, a screwed-up outside environment, screwed-up schools, screwed-up teachers, was that I developed coping strategies that were actually unhealthy. They helped me to survive in that way. Thank God for them; they got me through this torturous time of childhood. But in the bigger picture of having healthier relationships, a healthier relationship with me, they were screwed up. What’s really screwed up is the world often applauded these unhealthy coping strategies that I had, these unhealthy sides of me. The world told me, “This is good; this is healthy.” When I shut down, when I was submissive, when I was so quick to forgive my abusive parents, they told me, “Oh, you’re so mature; you’re just like an adult. You really understand how to turn the other cheek.” It was like, no, in the bigger picture. Imagine if my parents had said it. If my mom had been perverse and confusing and abusive and rejecting of me, or if my dad had been physically—when he was—when they did this, when my mom was like that, when my dad physically attacked me and humiliated me and put me down, when I was just submissive and I said, “I love you anyways; I know you didn’t mean it.” If my parents had not said to me, “Oh, Daniel, you know you’re so mature; you know you’re such a forgiving, kind, empathic person,” which is what they told me, which made me think, “Oh, this strategy of being submissive and loving these abusive people, I thought it was a good thing.” I thought it was a good way to deal with the world, not realizing later, no, in the long run, this is going to ruin my life. This is not a way to build healthy, mature interactive relationships with other people. It’s a dysfunctional way to survive as an adult, but as a child, I didn’t know that. So imagine if my parents, as a thought experiment, had said, “Daniel, you’re forgiving us for abusing you; you’re loving us anyways. No, you had also have to fight for yourself. That’s not a good way to deal with it. You have to learn how to set boundaries with us and tell us, ‘No, you can’t treat me that way.'” Imagine if I’d been told that. Nobody told me that. All I got was positive reinforcement for having these really weird, negative coping strategies. I got that so often, and as a result, I entered my adulthood in a very confused way. I really didn’t know who I was. Slowly, in tiny little ways, sometimes people would give me feedback, mirroring about who I really was. Often, it was like people giving me feedback about my negative behavior. I eventually broke out of the cognitive dissonance and started saying, “You know, some of these ways I’m dealing with the world—rolling over when people treat me badly, or even being bullying in some ways, being like my parents toward other people, because that’s all I knew in power dynamics.” I started hearing, “That’s not a good way to be.” Somehow, I started internalizing that and realizing this criticism of me from the outside world is the kind of feedback that will help me learn to grow and become a better person. I started doing it, but for a long time, especially with my best qualities, my healthy qualities, I didn’t get a lot of positive feedback, and it was very hard to know who I was and to know in the real light of day who is this person called me. It’s a process that I’m still on now. I have a lot of different ways of mirroring myself, of literally looking at myself in an emotional mirror, looking myself emotionally in the eyes and saying, “Who am I? How can I assess my behavior for its healthiness and unhealthiness?” Journaling has been incredibly helpful. All these different meditative, self-therapeutic techniques, having good friends who I really trust. I tried therapy; I didn’t find that to be particularly good. I found my therapists and, in general, the therapy field was a lot more like my family of origin and their confused ways of mirroring. Hmm. But I found self-therapy to be very useful. Other different things that I’ve tried finding out who…
I am learning about myself, being in all sorts of different situations, observing my behavior, relationship to other people’s behavior, also seeing how I’ve changed over time and assessing that. Seeing do I like the directions I’m going in, looking at the outcomes of my behavior, all sorts of different ways of studying me and figuring out who I am.
I remember once upon a time when I finished college and I was going to go to Europe after college, and people used that cliché, “oh you can go to try to find yourself.” Oh, so-and-so Daniel’s gonna try to find himself. And they said it in a kind of negative way, pejorative, like I was a silly child going to find myself. Perhaps they say it in a silly kind of way because a lot of people go out in the world to find themselves, and I think they don’t find themselves that well. Instead, they figure out how to themselves even more.
But I think my life process has been about finding who I really am even more now. Fundamentally, I think the big way, the biggest way I have really come to figure out how to know who I really am is to know where I really came from. To know my history, to know the history of my life, to learn about what the influences were that molded my personality and to try to make sense of that. To try to find other people who can help me make sense of what is my story.
Because what I’ve seen is a person who doesn’t know their story, or a person who is confused about their story, their life story, or a person who has a very distorted or dishonest life story is a person who really can’t know themselves very well. And I think from what I’ve observed, by watching people, by watching myself, by watching myself over time, by being a therapist—I was a therapist for a long time—so much of what I do is just listen to people tell their life story, listen to them talk about their childhoods.
So much of what I’ve come to through doing this is realizing that it’s a very normal thing in our world for people to come out of their childhood and have an incredibly distorted view of what their childhood really was. In large part, again, because to survive in people’s families, for children to survive in their families, they have to deny. They have to not know what’s really going on. It’s too painful, it’s too horrible. They can’t know the truth about their abusive parents.
And to some degree, from what I’ve seen, everybody has parents that didn’t treat them right in some ways, often in really extreme ways—emotional abandonment, emotional neglect—and then that gets into all the different ways parents were actively abusive, violating. This is what children, from what I’ve seen pretty much—and this is not just by being a therapist, but being out in the world—this is the story of childhood. So much of it is a story of trauma and abuse that has to be denied. Stories that have to be denied. Children who need to deny this to live in relationship to the people who are not treating them fairly and not treating them right.
And as the result of that, they don’t know their story and they don’t know themselves. And to be able to know their story and to be able to know themselves, they have to begin to look objectively at the people who didn’t treat them right, didn’t meet their needs in all sorts of different ways. What an absolutely confusing process.
And so what this brings me back to is that conversation I was having with this old friend of mine, where I gave him just a little bit of feedback about this good quality of his that really surprised him. Because at some level, some deep part of him, his true self knew it, but in his world, in his life, nobody’s really mirroring that. So even though he knew it deep down in himself, it was like it was an unconscious thing that he knew in relationship to himself. And when I said it, I said it out there. I put it out in the public sphere in our relationship. He heard it, and his unconscious went to conscious.
So I really do wonder that if people really were able to objectively see the good qualities of others more and know them for what they really were, if people heard real honest objective feedback about themselves—positive, but also negative—it would help people know who they are even better. Painful, especially the negative stuff. Painful, confusing. It can produce anger in people when they hear too much stuff about themselves that’s mirrored about their unhealthy qualities. Sometimes that takes a long time. Certainly took a long time for me, and it’s something that I’m still working on.
But for me, as an adult, 47 years old now, knowing more of who I am, being able to mirror myself in my relationship with myself more, and also simultaneously looking at my bad qualities, looking at my unhealthy qualities and making sense of my story, where they came from, and therefore being able to work it out, being able to change these bad qualities into good qualities—all of this has better and better and better allowed me to be able to know myself.
And what I can only speculate is, as I move forward on this confusing winding road of life, that’s actually becoming less confusing and maybe a little bit more straight and narrow, I’m able to better know myself. And I can speculate I will in the future be able to really better know who I am. And I think by extension, be able to be useful to other people at being able to better know themselves.