TRANSCRIPT
Something that I’ve learned through my adult process these last 25 or so years of being an adult is that our flaws, my flaws, can actually give me a greater capacity for having compassion for others. I’m gonna use a few examples from my personal life to show about this process. I can think of a few right off the top of my head. Maybe I’ll think of more as this video goes on.
The first one is something I’ve never talked about. I have this problem called vitiligo. I don’t know what you would call it—partial albinism or loss of pigmentation in parts of my body. It’s been spreading. I’ve had it for about nine years now. I don’t know if you can see it in the camera. Let’s see if you can see it in my hand. Does it show up? The problem is it shows up best when I have a really strong tan because what happens is there’s spots that have no pigmentation, and I really look like I’m definitely a two-toned creature. I have it under my eyes. It’s been spreading. I have it on my knees. I have it on my feet. I have it on my hips. I have it on my elbows. Also, my elbows are like totally white, and when I’m tan, I have this like brown tan that goes right up to my elbows, and I have these big white patches.
Well, what I’ve found is it’s annoying to have this for me, and I have to make sure I put on sunblock because I can get really bad sunburns very quickly in the sun. If I get too many of those, I’ll end up probably getting skin cancer. But what I found is that it has given me compassion for other people who have vitiligo, especially people who have it a lot worse than me.
Now, I travel a lot. I’ve gone to Africa a couple of times and just came back from India recently. When people who have very dark skin have vitiligo, it really stands out, especially when they have it on their faces. I see sometimes people, and they’re like really shocking to look at when you see like, you know, whole parts of their face are white mixed with whole parts of their face that are very, very black or very patchy. It’s kind of intense.
And I feel like the first thing I do when I see people in the house, I say, “Look!” Because sometimes people have commented, “Why do you have that?” They don’t want me to touch them, or “You’re gonna get me sick. Do you have a disease or something? Is that like an infection that’s catching?” And I’ll explain, “No, no, it’s not catching. It’s just an autoimmune problem.” But sometimes, especially in other countries where I don’t speak the language, or if people don’t trust me, even if they do speak English, they’re like, “Well, why do we believe you? Do you have a sexually transmitted disease or something?” I’m like, “No, it’s just autoimmune. I don’t even know why I have it.”
But what I find is when I do like this, I’ll show my hands to people in other countries when they have really bad vitiligo. Even in New York City, I’ll do it on the subway. Often when I see someone with vitiligo, especially someone who’s black or someone who is Indian, very dark-skinned, I go, “Look!” and I’ll show them my hands. Oh, you see them melt. They’re like, they give me a big smile. Sometimes they’ll give me a hug. We’ll hold hands like this, and it’s like I’ll say, “How is it for you to have vitiligo?” and they’ll talk so openly. Sometimes at first they’ll be like a little guarded, and then when they realized that I have vitiligo, they just open up. I like wonder what would it be like to be them, and they want to talk. They want to share.
Sometimes they say, I heard one guy told me on the subway in New York, he said, “You know, when I first got vitiligo on my face, I didn’t go out of the house for two years because people would laugh at me. They’d look at me. Kids would point. I was so humiliated, and then I had to become strong.” He said, “I had to go out and hold my head up and hold my chin up in spite of the world.” And I hear that from so many people, and they’re so happy to connect. It’s like, wow, this vitiligo has actually allowed me to bond with people. So in a strange way, even though it’s something I don’t like, it’s kind of a deficit in some ways, in other ways it’s been a real positive. I feel like it’s allowed me to connect with more people and really have compassion for what other people are going through that’s much higher up on the scale of difficulty.
A second thing, and I’ve talked about a little bit about this in other videos, there’s another physical problem that I had but no longer have, and I felt it really gave me compassion for others, and that was having ulcerative colitis. My colon, my large intestine, wasn’t lame. I couldn’t control when I went to poo. Going to the bathroom, blood all the time, diarrhea. Sorry if this is too graphic, you can skip over this part if you want. I’ll try to not keep it on for too long.
Pooing myself, I pooed in my pants. That happened to me all the time. I had it for four or five years, something like that. It was horrible. I was afraid I was going to die. The doctors, I was losing weight. I lost more. I’m already a skinny guy. I lost way more weight. I was like a skeleton. I couldn’t eat all sorts of foods. It was scary to go outside and walk because I didn’t know where I’d find a bathroom. If I couldn’t find a bathroom quick enough, I’d poo on myself. It was awful. It was humiliating.
And then what happened to me is I started to get stronger. I started to say, “No, I’m not gonna be humiliated by this. I didn’t ask for this. I didn’t cause it. I can’t control it. I don’t know how to cure it, so I’m just going to accept it, and I’m gonna love myself in spite of it, even if I take up poo on myself once in a while.” And unfortunately, it was more than once in a while.
Well, to get back to the subject of this video of my flaws allowing me to have compassion for others, I started noticing and becoming much more sensitive to people who had physical problems that made life more difficult, made life humiliating, made it difficult to go outside. People who had physical disabilities that were stigmatized in all sorts of different ways. One thing was especially when I was talking to older people. What I found is when I would talk about my colitis, because I started talking about it openly once I lost my shame—and my shame really did go away eventually—I learned how to love myself without having to feel like there’s something wrong with me. It was just like a physical flaw, but it had nothing to do with my character.
When I started talking about it openly, what I started to find, I couldn’t believe the number of people who would share their own stories that they said they’ve never shared this or they rarely shared it in any way with anybody. Sometimes they maybe share it with their partner or someone in their family, but not publicly. People would tell me all sorts of stories about pooing on themselves in public and their humiliation and their shame, and I would just laugh and go, “Oh my god, totally! Really been there, been there and done it, done that, done that so many times. Oh my god!”
People would tell me about like how they couldn’t control their bladders and they would pee on themselves. People told me stories of pooing in their own beds. People told me stories of peeing the bed. I couldn’t believe the number of people who told me these stories, and especially older people. So common! I had never known that. I had no idea until I had some sort of comparable problem and was open about it and sharing about it. I didn’t even know so many elderly people went through these kind of problems on a regular basis. I’d never met anybody who had this problem who wore Depends, you know, adult diapers. I ended up never wearing them as it were, but I met so many people who told me.
Me: I wore Depends. They would take down a little bit of their pants. Women and men, they would show me that they were Depends because they pawed and peed on themselves. And I was like, oh, it gave me so much more compassion for what so many people go through on a regular basis. And it was like that was a totally unexpected side effect of having this very unpleasant problem that I had, which, as I shared about in a different video, incidentally, against all that my doctors told me. And they told me again and again, I got well. They told me I couldn’t get well. They told me I’d had it for life. They told me nothing I could do could really help it except for take their pills.
Well, I eventually got off all their pills, and I’m gonna tell you in a quick, quick nutshell how I got well. I got well by quitting being a therapist, getting away from my family system who was still abusive and had terrible boundaries in me, and getting off into the world and being free. I’d saved a little bit of money, and I found different ways to make money. A lot less money than being a therapist, but I found ways of earning a living that weren’t so stressful. And what a lot of my stress went down, and I had a much more sense of freedom, and I started having more fun. My colon relaxed, the inflammation went away, I stopped putting blood, and I stopped pooing on myself.
Now, very interestingly, I’m sorry this is a little off the subject, so I’ll keep it down to 30 seconds. A very strange thing happened in the summer of 2010 when my colitis went away. You know what happened? When my colitis went away, and I think what it was was there was a huge amount of energy trapped in my large intestine. They say the intestine, the gut, is like our second brain. A lot of those neurotransmitters that are in our brain are also in our gut. Well, I think some people, because of the stress they go through, develop what’s called mental illness. Their brain, their minds go a little wild and out of control. My gut was doing that. My mind stayed fine through it all. It was my gut that was out of control.
And when I removed a lot of the stressors from my life, my gut relaxed. But you know what happened? That energy in my gut just exploded, and it came out all through my extremities. That’s what I think happened. It came out through my hands, it came out through my face, my chin, it came out through my elbows, my feet, and my hips. And that’s what my vitiligo is. I really think so because my vitiligo came the exact same summer that my colitis went away, and my vitiligo came out almost instantaneously. I didn’t even notice that I had it until one, Evelyn, what the hell is wrong with me? And it was like right when my colitis went away.
So I think those two supposedly autoimmune disorders are actually connected, but that’s neither here nor there. I just wanted to say that because I think it’s worth noting.
Now, I want to get into emotional flaws that I had, emotional problems that I had that gave me compassion for others. And I have two that I want to share. One is in my early 20s, going through a period where I was so lost, so confused, and so hopeless. I had no idea what I was doing. The whole path that I’ve been living for—to become a biologist, to become an academic, to become important in this sort of dissociated way that my childhood raised me to be—to become someone who had a good fancy career that I could brag about, that would make my parents proud. A career in which I wouldn’t speak about what was really going on emotionally with me on the inside, but instead talk about science and talk about external things and facts and figures and numbers and become a professor at a fancy college.
This was what my trajectory was leading me toward, and this is what I thought I wanted for a long time until I started connecting with my deeper inner self and listening to the little voice that I’d been pushing away for so long. And I started getting underneath my traumas and underneath my dissociation, and I started living for who I really was instead. And suddenly everything that I’ve been living for went to hell.
Feelings came up, and old sadness came up, and grieving came up, and ancient anger came up that I’d never been allowed to feel at my parents and other traumatizers. And this whole other self and this whole other life that I’d always wanted to live but never had been allowed to live suddenly came out. And my whole external life just suddenly did not make sense anymore. And I had no career. I did manage to finish college, but I traveled a lot. But then I just crashed and burned externally. I didn’t know where I fit in. I had no idea what I needed to do for work or wanted to do. I lost motivation. I became depressed for a while, and for a little while there, I even thought about killing myself.
I just thought none of this means anything. I felt like I had no place in society. I didn’t fit in, and it lasted a while, that depression and those occasional little spikes of even feeling suicidal, like I wished I’d just rather be dead than alive. That was something that was the first time in my life I’d really felt that, that feeling like I just didn’t want to live anymore. And it was horrifying because I’m like someone who I thought I loved myself deeply, and yet I was feeling feelings that were so contradictory to that.
Well, I eventually did come out of it. I eventually did start working. I did start finding a community of people who were respectful to me, who could love me. I started getting away from my traumatizers, my parents even more. And I eventually did become a therapist, a recenter, a dyri grounded. I learned how to love myself, take care of myself, be there for me. I started getting out much more on a path of working, saving money again, of being functional as an adult in society. That was very, very important for me—feeling good about myself was feeling like even though society screwed up and [ __ ] up and horrible in so many different ways, I needed to figure out how to become an adult in this world and not be this hurt needy that some part of me wanted to regress into as a sort of post-traumatic reaction.
So once I figured that out and I felt ready to become a therapist, I went for it because I wanted to be useful to other people. And what I discovered when I became a therapist and I listened to people, I started hearing so many people having parallel experiences, or at least somewhat parallel experiences, and sometimes a hell of a lot worse than what I went through of that time in my life when I was severely depressed, even suicidal.
And I said it realizing that time in my life, that awful time that I hated and I would have done anything, I would have paid money for, I would have done anything to get out of it. I suddenly started saying that time in my life was incredibly valuable. That was my best internship into becoming a therapist. Not only because I knew how it felt to be there and to hate myself and to feel life was hopeless and awful, but also I figured out how to get out of it.
And even though how I got out of it doesn’t necessarily apply to every single person, a lot of the lessons I learned for getting out of it, or at least getting out of it some of the way, were very, very useful to other people. And I was like, whoa, that horrible time in my life, that so-called flaw, was actually really an incredible strength. And I was so amazed. And it was like, ah, this is a real lesson for me that real hardship I went through, the hardships that we go through, the hardships that I went through can actually be incredibly useful at being helpful to other people and having compassion for them, being able to empathize with them, relate to them, have some little grounding and looking at what is it like to be them. How does it—how might it feel to…
Be them, what might their feelings be like? Not that I know for sure. I’m never 100% sure how someone’s feeling, but at least I can approximate it a lot better because I have some comparable experience. And what I found when I bounced it off people is people said, “Yes, right, exactly! That is how I feel.” So often I heard people say that.
And what I found is even though it’s a therapist, my supervisor said, “Oh, you’re not supposed to share your experience.” And sometimes I didn’t because I believed them. Sometimes I did. Sometimes people asked me, “Have you ever felt this way? Do you relate to what I’m saying at all?” Especially if they asked, I would often tell them. I would tell them, “Yeah, I’ve been through my own version of Hell in different ways.” I know what it’s like to hate myself. I know what it’s like to want to die. I know what it’s like to have feelings, impulses. Sometimes I want to take my own life. And I would be honest. And people often, when I would do that, would share so much more. And they’d say, “I trust you so much more now.”
I wouldn’t share with everyone. It doesn’t mean that I was there to vomit out all my personal experiences. And I’ve heard stories of therapists, and I had them, who just want to talk about themselves all the time. I was very cautious about doing that. And that’s another thing. My experience, my bad experiences in therapy, my negative experiences in therapy were very, very helpful for me in becoming a therapist because I related to what I don’t want to do to other people and with other people.
So that’s another one. That’s a little surprise one that I just thought of now. The last thing that I was thinking about, the last thing that I went through that was very difficult, the last thing that I would consider like sort of a flaw in my life or a big hardship in my life that I found in the long run to be incredibly useful. I wouldn’t wish it on anybody else, but I think a lot of people do go through it. So me having gone through it gives me, I think, a lot more insight into it and compassion for others.
Ability to relate to others, empathize with others, is having a long and varied history of childhood trauma, of having been traumatized in lots of different ways. Trauma meaning having had a lot of things, I experienced a lot of things that were bad, things that happened to me, violations of myself—physical, sexual, emotional things that happened to me. Things that created a horribly huge emotional reaction in me that I wasn’t allowed to feel, that I couldn’t process. But I had nobody to talk about with that. I couldn’t heal from and that I had to dissociate from in order to survive.
I had to split off parts of myself. I had to lose whole parts of my emotional self, my psychological self. I had to split off even from memories of what happened to me in order to survive, in order to be able to go on and live my life, to keep my physical body going and not just shut down and crumble because I was not allowed to grieve. It wasn’t safe for me. I wasn’t loved enough. I didn’t have enough of a nurturing structure in my life, and especially in my family system, to be able to hold my grieving process. Especially because in my family system, they were often the ones who were doing it to me.
So I went through that. I went through that for a lot of years, a lot of cycles, a lot, a lot of repeated things happening over and over again in my family system and outside of my family system—in school, in my neighborhood, things like that that were very harmful to me.
And when I grew up, and especially when I grew up and really started processing it, taking distance from those systems, finding better people, finding new systems to be around, new friends, and most importantly, a new relationship with me—a new, stronger, loving relationship, more compassionate relationship with myself—when I started turning around that traumatic cycle and instead doing a healing cycle on myself, figuring out how to love myself, figuring out how to grieve, let my body feel all of its feelings, really sobbing, deep grieving. Also intellectually processing what actually happened to me, what is the logic of my situation, finding out, going back to family members, interviewing tons and tons of people trying to—who were there when I was a kid—listening to all their stories, trying to process it, trying to make sense of what actually did happen to me.
Because sometimes my memories were confused as a child. Like I said, I wasn’t even allowed to remember often what happened to me because remembering was too dangerous. It threatened my family system. My own healthy post-traumatic reactions threatened them. So I dissociated from memories. And all of that, while bringing it back, making sense of it, going through that healing process, healing, becoming a more self-actualized adult, having compassion for the child I once was, having compassion for my situation. Even I’ll admit it, having compassion for my parents for what they did to me because I learned what they did to me came right out of their own screwed-up traumatic childhoods.
Helping that help me learn about the intergenerational cycle of trauma, but not forgiving them for their bad behavior. Their bad behavior still harmed me. And realizing my job was to heal myself first at all cost—compassion for wounded me before I have compassion for my traumatizers. Yes, not a bad thing to have compassion for my traumatizers, but no way to have it before I have healed what they have done to me. That was another lesson that I learned.
And all these lessons in my experience have added up to me being able to be much more compassionate for and useful to other people who have gone through similar things or somewhat similar things or metaphorically similar things. So what I found is having gone through that horrible stuff as I went that I went through as a kid, having been shut down, screwed up, confused, self-hating, even acting out, doing harmful things to other people even sometimes—all of this has added up to me having the life experience to know how did I get hurt and how did I react because I was hurt? How did I hate myself? How did I act out toward others? And how do I heal from this? What is a good, healthy model for healing? What are steps to take in healing? How can I heal?
Nothing in my life, no book learning, nothing comparatively has helped me be more useful to people and have a heart that actually wants to help other people more than having gone through it myself. So although I would never wish childhood trauma on anybody else, I would never wish that anyone goes through the horrible things that I went through or that people go through all the time as children—much worse than what I went through—the fact that I went through it and the fact that I figured out the process of how to come out of it and still am working through that process of coming out of it has allowed me, I feel, to have an incredibly rich and useful life as a healing person on this planet.