TRANSCRIPT
The basic way that I do self-therapy is by journaling. I write in my journal every day. And I write down exactly what I’m feeling. I write down what I’m going through. I write down my experiences, usually of the previous day, but sometimes of 10, 20, 30 years past in my life. And I analyze them. I try to make sense of what I’m going through. I try to make sense of my present feelings and my present experiences in light of my past experiences. I try to connect my past to my present. But it’s also a way of being incredibly honest with myself.
I first started writing in my journal when I was 17 years old. And I went there because I felt so alone. I was desperate. I didn’t really have anybody that I trusted to share my internal world with. My family wasn’t safe. I didn’t have any friends that I could be so intimate with, and I most certainly didn’t trust therapists. I had gone to a psychologist once when I was 13 against my will. And it was a horrible experience. I felt totally pressured into it. I felt alienated. And I felt that I was being bullied and threatened. So I turned to myself and I started writing in my journal. And it was terrifying. I was so afraid that someone in my family would see it and discover my inner world. And I couldn’t bear that thought.
So what I did is I took my journal. It’s a black journal that I had, a big black journal. And I drilled a hole in it with a drill press and I put a combination lock on it. That allowed me to feel safe right away. I started finding myself able to write about what I was feeling, and it was limited at first. I could maybe write a page or two at most, maybe a paragraph just about my feelings. It was terrifying to know that this internal world was going on. I had this belief back at that time that I was fully healed. And so writing in my journal, writing honestly about what I was going through, strongly contradicted that. And it created a lot of cognitive dissonance where I had to acknowledge that there were sides of me that were very unhealed. And that was frightening, but it was also liberating because it gave me a sense of hope.
Now, it’s not so terrifying to write about my feelings. But on the other hand, when I get into really fresh feelings that are new, that are hard to acknowledge, the split-off and dissociated sides of myself, it actually is terrifying still. It’s sometimes embarrassing. And I have this feeling sometimes that someone’s looking over my shoulder and reading it. And in a way, what I’ve discovered is that someone is looking over my shoulder and reading it. It’s all the voices in my head that were implanted by my parents and my ancestors. All the voices that said, “You shouldn’t do this. This is wrong. You’re sick. You’re betraying the whole family system by writing about this stuff, by even thinking it.” Your job, Daniel, is to split it off and keep it split off and think that you’re fine and think that we’re all fine and don’t look at this stuff.
There is massive betrayal in writing in my journal, but it’s been giving me my liberation steadily for the past 20 years. So, I write in it every day now. Pretty much I remember my dreams every night. I shouldn’t say I remember my dreams. I remember some of my dreams. I think we actually all dream a lot more than we remember. I know people who say, “Oh, I don’t dream at all.” And what I’ve come to realize is, “Yes, they dream. They dream just like everyone else, but they’re just so split off from themselves that they don’t remember their dreams at all.” And I can understand why, because becoming unsplit off, becoming reconnected with yourself is a terrifying process. And it’s more than getting a cup of cold water thrown in your face. It’s actually like sticking your finger in an electric socket. It’s terrifying and it overwhelms the business-as-usual sort of life that most of us live. It’s such a vulnerability-inducing process. Sometimes it’s embarrassing.
My dreams aren’t always pleasant. I don’t do things that are very nice in my dreams sometimes. And things happen to me in my dreams sometimes that are ugly or weird or strange. There’s terror. There’s violence. There’s sexual acting out. There’s paranoia. And I think these things are part of most of us. These unpleasant, ugly sides of human reality. What they are is our split-off trauma. And most people totally underestimate how traumatized they are. Most people, I think, underestimate how traumatized they are to such a degree that they don’t even realize that they’re traumatized at all. They think they’re fine. And it’s just not the case. I think most people are incredibly traumatized.
Now, of course, in our society, the conception of a traumatized person is someone who’s gone through the most utterly, unbelievably horrible experiences. For instance, someone whose, you know, family was murdered in Rwanda or someone who was raped or someone who was terribly sexually abused as a child or violently beaten up or mugged many times. These are the traumatized people. But in reality, yes, these are the traumatized people, but these are the top extreme 1% of traumatized people. The other 99% of humanity remains incredibly traumatized. It’s easy to underestimate how traumatized people are. They seem so healthy. But the reality is the norm is so incredibly unhealthy that if you look at life from the perspective of the norm, it all seems okay because it’s normal.
One thing that I’ve experienced as the result of my self-therapeutic process is that more and more I side with the child within me. I don’t look at life from the perspective of the norm. And especially I don’t look at life from the perspective of the norm being healthy. I look at life through the eyes of the child that I was and the needs of that little child and also from the massive neglect that that little child suffered. Now I know many people still who knew me when I was a child, who knew my parents and knew my family, and can’t understand when I say I was traumatized. It doesn’t make sense to them because it seemed like I had such a nice, wonderful, beautiful childhood. Loving mother, loving father, two-parent household, stability, parents with enough money to pay for all the things I needed, a good school, got good grades, had nice friends. But that’s the surface view. From the view of the emotional needs of my inner child, there was massive deprivation. There was massive wounding. I wasn’t really getting my deep emotional needs met, and that was traumatizing to me.
And what I’ve come to realize in looking at the world and looking at other people from the perspective of the child’s needs that I am not alone in.