TRANSCRIPT
The next stage up in evolution is grieving. That’s when you take the depression, take the misery, take the suffering, and take the horror, and make it purposeful. Actually do something useful with it. So the second stage of suffering and depression is purposeless misery. To take it for a purpose and do something with it is to begin to actually grieve. That’s to make sense of it, to understand where did this come from, why is it happening, why did I become this way? Who am I? Why am I feeling all this horror? Not just wallowing in misery. It’s like one is wallowing in a dirty diaper; one is cleaning yourself up.
How does somebody grieve? How does somebody do that? The work of self-therapy is actually learning how to grieve. And grieving is actually resolving traumas. Being dissociated is not dealing with your traumas at all. In splitting them off, suffering and depression is actually feeling the horror of your misery but not knowing what the hell to do with it. Then grieving is actually making use of it. It’s working through the loss, working through the pain, understanding what happened, learning to love yourself and love your core of truth in spite of the horror of what you’ve gone through. Learning that you’re not your traumas; you’re not the miserable things that you were taught in your childhood that you are now.
Some people could say, “Oh, my childhood never taught me that I have anything bad about me. I was just taught in my childhood that I’m a good, wonderful person.” Well, chances are if you really fully believe that and you haven’t done any grieving, chances are you’re still very dissociated. And I say that also from personal experience. Having at a point in my life been very, very dissociated, I came out of my family when I was 18 years old and went off to college pretty damn dissociated. And it burst open into misery and depression and has gone much more into grieving. I would still say a lot of me is still in a grieving phase, and I have been for a long time. I think I have a lot of grieving ahead of me.
But I think there’s different parts of our personalities that can be in different phases at different times. Part of me is still dissociated, part of me is still pretty depressed and suffering and miserable, and part of me is grieving. To talk a little bit more about grieving, really understanding what the losses are, what was lost. Because when you get traumatized as a child, you really do lose something, and parts of yourself can be stripped away. And sometimes you can’t always get it back. You definitely can’t have your childhood back; you can never be four years old again.
But I think part of it’s also grieving the fantasy of what you wanted. Grieving the fantasy that you had a good family, a perfect family. Grieving the fantasy that you were fully loved by your mother. That’s a painful fantasy to grieve. And in my experience in grieving myself and watching a lot of people grieve, it’s torment. It goes on for a long time. There’s a lot of tears, there’s a lot of anger. People often don’t think of anger as being part of grief, but I see it. Anger is very much part of the grieving stage.
Interestingly, one definition of depression and suffering, the second stage, is having your anger turned inward. So a lot of times, people who are hopeless and suffering and depressed, they just hate themselves. When they’re grieving, the anger starts actually being put onto the actual people who did the damage to you. And that’s the key: it’s not to act out the anger but to find out who really did the damage. And it’s not necessarily openly expressing the anger toward the people. Maybe the people who damaged you have been dead for 30 or 40 years; that’s quite possible. How do you get angry at people that are dead? Actually, it’s quite possible to get angry with people who are long since dead, to get angry at your parents who may be 80 years old now and they damaged you when they were 30. Very possible to get, and healthy actually, to get very angry at them. It’s just how you express it is the key.
And that’ll be a subject for another talk too: healthy ways to confront parents, confront traumatizers, confront anyone who did you harm. But part of the grieving is feeling the anger. And the key is to feel it and own it. Own that it’s there and know that it’s healthy and know that it’s appropriate not to act it out. In New York City, it’s not an uncommon thing to see people screaming at taxi drivers and yelling at bicyclists and yelling at other pedestrians and people having road rage, screaming and fighting over parking spots. They’re not grieving; they’re acting out their anger.
If they looked inside and saw what was really causing them to be angry, it would guarantee it’s not the cab driver driving up Fifth Avenue. It’s someone a long, long time ago who did them a lot of harm. And actually, by yelling at the cab driver and yelling at a bicyclist and yelling at another pedestrian, that’s a convenient way to let your traumatizers off the hook and to not have to really be angry at the person who deserves the anger.
Then there’s the most evolved stage, and that I call enlightenment. Some of the psychologists call it self-actualization. I could say it’s knowing yourself, really being true to yourself. Or a better definition was being fully connected to the core of truth that’s within us all. If a person’s conscious mind is connected to their core of truth in their heart, they are enlightened. And to me, also to be fully enlightened is to be fully 100% consciously connected with our core of truth within. And actually, I would define it as no longer having an unconscious mind. There’s no longer that unconscious process working in the background because there’s no longer any need for it.
I think the unconscious mind was created and developed as the result of trauma. It was too painful to consciously be aware of the horrors that were going on in one’s head. So what we had to do was create a separate part of our mind that was out of consciousness to be able to deal with all those horrors. And that conscious mind lives on until we resolve our traumas. So the ideal of humanity is to be fully conscious, to be fully enlightened, to have no more traumas within us, to fully know who we are within. Have I achieved that yet? No.
So why do I have the nerve then to say I believe it’s possible for someone to become fully enlightened? The reason is because part of me has attained it. Part of me has worked through these stages. Part of me has become much, much, much more enlightened, more conscious, more aware, and less traumatized than I ever was. And that whole process for every part of me that’s become enlightened, self-actualized, conscious, healthy has gone through those stages. It started with dissociation and has gone through to enlightenment.
I mean, with one exception. There are parts of me that were never traumatized, and those parts of me never had to go through the whole process. There were parts of me that were conscious from when I was very, very young because my parents and other people who were powerful in my life never damaged them. And the more that each of us starts off healthy and starts off conscious and aware, the easier of a life we have and the luckier we are. I think some people get a much better start than others. Some people start off so incredibly abused, neglected, wounded, and traumatized that there’s almost no consciousness at all. What do they have to start with? What do they have to hold on to?
But maybe even they could somehow work through all the stages of psychological development and become fully conscious. I don’t know. I think it’s certainly hard enough for any of us, even if we get a really good start, to work through these stages, especially in a society that’s so against grieving. And people don’t want to deal with it. They want to drive their cars, use their fossil fuel, and use up all the earth’s resources, have as many kids as they want, and not really care that this world may not be anything resembling a healthy place in 100 years.