TRANSCRIPT
Recently, I made a video called “Sociopaths Can Heal,” and it’s all based on this idea that people with this diagnosis of antisocial personality disorder, the criminal personality, can heal if they get in touch with their traumas. The traumas that caused them to have this sort of distorted personality. If you buy this diagnosis of sociopathy, of antisocial personality disorder, of psychopathy even, well, I’d like to do a part two of that video.
The way I would like to analyze this now, the way I’d like to tackle this subject, is the idea that in a way, our species as a whole, humanity, is a kind of a sociopath. If you can look at the 7 billion of us as one combined unit. And what do I mean by that? Why is humanity as a whole sort of like a sociopath? If you could diagnose the whole species, well, I look at it and I think we’re a species that violates the planet so easily. We’re destroying our own environment, irrevocably changing it so much so that it’s harming ourselves, harming future generations. We’re making the world so much less livable for future generations.
Also, we’re harming the planet in terms of other species. We’re overtaking their rights to also live in a planet where they can live freely, find food, find water, have clean air, have an environment that’s safe to them. It’s like humanity at some level, the way that it is now, it’s just so full of violation. Even in terms of looking at natural law, we are violators of natural law. We’re criminals in terms of natural law, in terms of harming the world the way we just are ravaging our planet.
Yeah, once upon a time, there was this idea: go forth and tame the wilderness, go forth, be fruitful and multiply. But we’ve taken that to such an extreme, such a destructive extreme, that in a way, I can only say we are kind of like sociopaths as a species. One could also say, yeah, I mean, I hear this, people flop around the idea: yeah, we’re like a virus or we’re like a cancer. But in terms of a psychiatric diagnosis, I really think in a way, sociopath does fit.
Now, why do I bring this up in terms of that last video I made, that sociopaths can heal? Whoa, no way! I got a lot of pushback by people saying sociopaths can’t heal or sociopaths can heal, but psychopaths can’t heal. Antisocial personality disorder can’t be cured. Certainly, a lot of mental health professionals would say no, you can’t cure it. Maybe you can help people learn to adjust a little bit better, but a lot of these people, they need to be put in prisons. They need to be kept out of society. And maybe that’s true in some cases, or they need to be put in long-term psychiatric facilities, etc., etc.
But there’s a very hopeless attitude towards sociopaths, an attitude like they’re just bad people. We need to remove them from society. We need to remove them from the world. Some people even say kill them, get rid of them. And from the perspective of someone who may have been traumatized by a sociopath, well, maybe that’s a very legitimate feeling in terms of healing from one’s own traumas to say, no, I do not wish to have any empathy for somebody who harmed me. So I can understand that.
But in general, I’m really glad that I made that video, “Sociopaths Can Heal,” if only because that is my observation that sociopaths can heal. And the way they can heal, if they do it, perhaps not so common, but I saw it sometimes, is people who begin to heal their own traumas, who begin to look at their past, who begin to look into their history and say, why did I become someone who found it so easy to violate other people’s rights? Why did I become someone who lost empathy for others, who harmed others, who has such a path of destruction in my life? Why did my life become so destructive? Why is my personality so destructive toward others, even toward myself?
When I saw people who were able to engage in that process, especially engage in that process in a very sincere way, I saw people who could change. And I don’t care what their diagnosis was. Even this most extreme personality disorder, associate sociopaths, they could change. And really, the key was when they started to reclaim their feelings about what had been done to them, the traumas that they had suffered. When they started remembering, bringing up, exhuming their feelings of pain, of abandonment, of loneliness, of loss, of harm, of rage, of sadness, and not acting it out on others, not unconsciously acting it out in the way that so-called sociopaths do.
Because what they’re doing is acting out their own resolved traumas unconsciously on other people, taking what was done to them directly or metaphorically and wreaking it on the world, wreaking it on the people with whom they share relationships in some way, wreaking it on their wives, husbands, children, friends, relatives, anybody, wreaking it on strangers even. But when people begin to connect with what was done to them, something changes. They start to have empathy for themselves. They start to cry. I’ve seen this when people start to cry and grieve, they change.
And slowly, sometimes actually not so slowly, but usually slowly from what I’ve seen, that empathy begins to extend toward others. It starts with themselves. They have empathy for the little child, the little hurt, wounded, abandoned, rejected, abused child that they were. And then they start to see others in the way that they can see their hurt child. And they can see the pained person in the other. When they start to cause harm on others, they actually feel empathy, and they don’t want to cause harm toward others. And that’s the beginning of the unraveling of this antisocial personality disorder, this thing called sociopath or psychopath. The unraveling of it is the beginning of empathy toward others, the beginning of saying, oh, I can see in others the parts of myself that were harmed that I’ve so long pushed away and denied.
But what about humanity as a whole being a sociopath? The reason I’m so happy I made that video is because by me knowing and saying and putting it out there that sociopaths can heal, that also says to me that humanity can heal. And in the exact same way, when humanity as a whole, on individual levels, on each of the seven billion individuals, do this, but as a whole, when humanity heals its collective trauma, its collective childhood trauma, when humanity begins to exhume its unresolved pain, its unresolved sadness, rage, unhappiness in each person’s own individual self-reflective relationship with him or herself, humanity will no longer be able to do what it’s doing.
Humanity will no longer be able to go on having tons and tons of children so mindlessly, so rejectingly, so abandoningly, causing such harm on their children, causing such harm on the natural world, causing such harm to animals, to plants, to forests, to the sea, to the air, to the earth. It just won’t work anymore. When people have resolved their traumas, they won’t be able to trash this planet in the way that we’re doing now, so self-destructively for the planet, for our fellow species, and for our own selves, and for our future children.