TRANSCRIPT
Why is it so painful to talk about childhood trauma? Yesterday, I recorded a video about having been abused by a nanny when I was a very little boy and also simultaneously being abused by my parents. Oh, I had such stress after I recorded that video, and throughout the day I was stressed out. During the night, I slept really kind of stressfully also, and I woke up today and I thought, “Oh, why do I do this? Why would I share those kind of things?”
And then I realized, you know, I should record a video about this. So I realized it’s a real phenomenon. It’s so difficult to talk about childhood trauma, and I think there’s a lot of reasons for it. I think one of the main reasons why it’s so tough to talk about this stuff is that when we talk about childhood trauma, especially early childhood trauma, it’s very hard to avoid at some level pointing the finger at our parents. Because even if they didn’t do the stuff, whatever bad happened directly to us, they did it indirectly because they were responsible for protecting us.
And so why is it hard to talk about our parents doing bad things to us? Well, I think of something ironically that my dad told me when I was a kid. He said, “Never ever, ever speak badly about other people’s parents.” And I said, “Why?” He goes, “Just don’t do it, because if you speak badly about other people’s parents, they will not like you, even if you’re right.” He said, “They won’t like you.” And to me, that became an interesting lesson.
Well, look, here I am all these years later speaking about childhood trauma, speaking about my parents in a bad way. And I realized, well, why do people not like hearing bad things about their parents? Well, underneath everything else, I think when we have any degree of unresolved stuff from our childhoods, we’re still attached to our parents. We still want our parents to love us, and here we are criticizing them.
Well, back when I was a very little kid, there was no room for me to talk about the bad stuff they were doing to me. There was no room to talk about the trauma that I was suffering directly at their hands and indirectly because of them. Because if I talked about it, they couldn’t accept it. They would reject it. And if they rejected my point of view, they would reject me, and that was like death.
So for a little kid to talk about the really bad things his parents are doing to him, it’s like being killed. It’s like dying because we need our parents to survive. We need their love. We need their caring. We need their nurturance. And if they don’t give it to us, we literally will die. So it becomes like a little bit of a cult system, a cult where you can’t talk about the people who are in charge. You can’t speak badly about them or they will reject you. And being rejected by the cult is, whoo, it’s a fate worse than death.
So very, very, very tough to talk about childhood trauma for that reason. Another reason: what if people don’t believe me? A lot of people are very, very caught up in idealizing their parents and idealizing parents in general. I’ve gotten so many comments on my videos and my writings and things that I’ve said where people say, “You can’t blame parents. That’s wrong. You’re gonna make the parents feel bad,” even when the parents are clearly wrong.
So we have a society, a world of psychology, of people that says, “Don’t criticize parents. You can’t call parents out,” in part because so many people are parents, and in part because everybody else, including the people who are parents, pretty much are very, very, very attached to keeping that idealized view of their parents. So if I criticize parents, indirectly I’m criticizing all parents because a lot of what I’m saying really isn’t that specific to me. It’s very, very common childhood trauma at the hands of parents.
So basically, I’m letting the cat out of the bag when I talk about childhood trauma. I’m doing something that’s extremely unpopular in many cases, and many families. In my family, it was an unwritten law that you’re not allowed to do this. This is against the rules. So very, very, very hard. Can face social criticism, social ostracism. And who wants that? Who wants to be rejected by their own society, by many cases even their own friends? I certainly don’t want to.
Here’s another one: what are my motives for talking about this stuff? What are my motives for critiquing my parents? What are my motives for talking about my childhood trauma? Am I trying to get revenge on them? Interestingly, the answer to that is no. I don’t even want my parents to see this. I hope they’d never do. It’s like I don’t really want anything to do with them, to be honest. I’d rather just do it to share a positive message for other people, a message that other people can hear.
You know, it’s okay to talk about this stuff. It’s okay to be open about it. It’s okay to say, “Yeah, you know, our parents did some really screwed up things, and it really screwed us up. It really affected us very, very negatively.” But again, super hard to talk about it in public in any way. Even in private, it’s really hard to talk about it.
Here’s an interesting case: I was a therapist for a long time. I worked with a lot of clients who suffered from quite a lot of childhood trauma. And one thing that I noticed is that until I had a really, really strong bond with clients—and that sometimes took months or even years to build—it often wasn’t safe for my clients to talk about the horrible things they went through in their very early childhood, especially at the hands of their parents.
I learned it early on. Some people would come in and they’d tell terrible things that their parents did to them in the first session, in part because I asked. And then what happened is it would be overwhelming to them. It would be way too much. So much of this old pain would come up, and it was so, like, ah, anxiety-producing that they wouldn’t come back. And I realized, ooh, much better to be gentle about it.
So what I started doing over time as a therapist when I would ask about childhood trauma was to say, “Did you suffer difficult things in your childhood? Did very painful things happen to you? But please don’t go into specifics.” Because often when people start going into specifics, that’s when the real anxiety comes up.
I think when people talk about it in more general terms, “Yeah, I went through really hard stuff. There was difficult stuff in my family. Yes, I suffered sexual abuse,” that kind of thing. But without going into details, it can kind of keep it at bay a little bit. It can keep a lot of the emotions down.
So I think that—and that brings up another thing—that just talking about this stuff at all is painful because there’s so much intense and painful emotions surrounding it. Now I’m thinking, as a therapist, if it was even difficult for clients in a private, confidential, basically anonymous one-on-one setting to talk about this stuff, how much more difficult to talk about it when you can be viewed by anyone? You can be viewed by strangers. YouTube is basically the exact opposite of privacy and confidentiality.
So again, why am I doing this? Well, I’m doing this because I have found a really great value in sharing these ideas publicly. It actually really can help people. I can reach people, and to me, that’s really important. It was the exact reason that I went into being a therapist. But in a way, I can reach so many more people this way, and that is so gratifying, especially to know that some of these painful, horrible, unpleasant, nasty, betraying experiences that I went through as a very little child can actually prove valuable to other people. That, to me, gives my life a lot of value.