TRANSCRIPT
When I was a child, I was raised by my mother with an expectation that I be perfect, that I had to be perfect. The saddest thing in some ways is that she said that I was perfect. And that set up a standard for me that who I was on the inside didn’t really count. It was just what I expressed on the outside and that it lived up to her expectation. It set me up in life for something extremely difficult. This feeling that I wasn’t acceptable unless I was perfect according to someone else’s outside standards.
The reason I think about that now, now at age 53, is because some part of that still lives in me. And this morning when I woke up with the idea that I had some time to record a video, my first thought was, “No way you can do it today because I didn’t sleep enough last night. My brain isn’t good enough. I’m a little bit mushy in the head. I can’t concentrate as well as I might otherwise be able to do such that then if I slept better and was more concentrated, I could live closer to that expectation of perfection which somehow still lives inside of me.” Yet, I’ve broken away from my mother. I’ve gotten away from my father. I have terribly huge distance from them. I have no relationship with them anymore, but yet some part of them still lives inside of my head despite all my healing.
And I think that says something too, that healing from childhood trauma, it’s not a perfect process. It’s a messy, confusing process. It’s funny also earlier I said the word terribly and I was thinking, “Ah, I didn’t like that word exactly. Ah, it didn’t come out quite right. I would have chosen a better word had I had better sleep.” Maybe I’ll never use this video. Maybe this video will never go public. These are the thoughts that go through my mind in my state of tiredness, my state of imperfection. I wonder if other people can relate to this.
I mean, it certainly seems to be the message in the greater world in general that you have to put your best foot forward. You have to be great and amazing. You have to be perfect according to all these societal standards to be acceptable. And if you are imperfect, if you’re not perfectly abled, if you’re not perfectly this or that or look the right way or have the right age or have the right education or the right family background or the right money or the right clothes, well then you are not valued as highly as a human being on the inside.
And then I think of another terrible and sad thing, a result of childhood trauma. To take this video into the deep dive that a lot of people, maybe everyone to one degree or other who has been traumatized. People who have been traumatized. Another thing everybody, everybody has to one degree or other. But it brings out sad and harmful things in everybody. Causes people to be less compassionate, less empathic, less loving than they otherwise might be.
Now, here’s the funny thing. I think the core of us, the true self of each of us is perfect. This is why I have hope for humanity because as long as humans live, as long as our species survives, it will be made up of individual people who are perfect at their core. But the traumas have made them imperfect.
Now, was I perfect as a little boy? I was perfect to the degree that I was connected with the truth of me. And I think that’s what’s interesting and so confusing is that part of why my mother loved me is because she saw my real perfection, but she was also looking at me through her own distorted lenses of unresolved trauma of her own, from her childhood, from her early years, from her parents, from her adolescence, from her early adulthood. She was mixed up and screwed up and couldn’t look at me for who I really was. And parts of her hated certain perfect parts of me. The parts of me that said, “No.” The parts of me that said, “Unacceptable. You can’t treat me that way. You can’t abandon me just because you want to. Because you want to go to work and have sex with your boss behind my dad’s back and forget that I exist.” These are things that she did and I rebelled against her. I hated her for abandoning me when I was a baby. I hated her when she just arbitrarily stopped breastfeeding me when I was just a few months old because she didn’t want the responsibility anymore.
So many things sending me to a nursery school where I was physically abused and me complaining about it to her and she didn’t care. I rebelled and rejected her in some ways for it and she, well, she didn’t care that much. She even thought it was kind of funny that I was fighting back, but she loved me less for it. Well, I got screwed up, really screwed up. Became wounded and harmed and imperfect.
And well, I think of my time as a therapist just sitting and listening to people talk about things they had done in their lives, things that they didn’t like about themselves, really screwed up and harmed parts of them sometimes that I could relate to. And thinking and learning over and over again from all this data that I collected that trauma makes people really imperfect, takes them away from themselves, causes them to do all sorts of harmful things to their own selves, to others, to their own children even. I mean, my parents again are perfect examples of this. The reason they were so unhealthy with me was because of what had been done to them, which they couldn’t look at, which they passed on to me, which they hated me for doubly when I started trying to work it out.
Now, I hear some people say, “Oh, you should have compassion for them.” Well, no. I think I know it’s key to the healing process to not fall into the trap of having compassion for your traumatizers. Having compassion for traumatized people who do harmful things, that’s okay. As long as they didn’t do those things to you, didn’t personally screw you up. I think it can be okay to have compassion for all beings in their state of imperfection.
But to have too much empathy for my parents in my case, and I see this in the case of other people who are traumatized, is very, very dangerous because it replays the very scenario that I was raised in: to have compassion for my parents before I had compassion for myself. To think about their feelings and their needs, their unresolved needs, especially before I thought about my own needs. My parents required that of me. I couldn’t love myself until I loved them first. And they didn’t love me until I loved them first. Very, very conditional love. That’s how I was raised. And for that reason, I can’t have compassion for their imperfections. I can have understanding for their imperfections. In fact, it’s very curious to me intellectually, emotionally even. Why did they do these things to me? Why were they so screwed up? Such insufficient parents? Why were they so traumatizing to me?
But the key for me in healing, in returning to my deep perfection, the deep perfection of my spirit, my core of truth, is to first have compassion for me. My buried feelings, my grief process, the truth of my memories. My parents never liked the truth of my memories. It made them uncomfortable. They denied it. That’s a big part of why I had to get away from them. All their denial of my healing process.
I also think about this sometimes. I think, “Daniel, can’t you just make some videos where you don’t talk about your parents, where you don’t talk about the horror of traumatizing parents in general?” And then I stop and say, “Well, if I don’t talk about that and don’t talk about them, then what’s the point of these videos?” This is the depth of my videos. This is the value of what I talk about. This is what makes me sick about listening to so many mental health professionals talk about healing and growth and better mental health, even healing from trauma. And yet, they’re not calling out parents. They haven’t called out their own parents for what their parents did to them. They don’t get to the root of the issue. It’s like a wart on the bottom of your foot. If you remove the top and cover it…
Over, it keeps growing. You got to get the core out. It has to be removed. And the core goes back to the very, very depth of our childhood. The emotional depth of our childhood, the wrong things that were done to us and the neglects that happened, the right things that were not done.
And so I come back to it again and again and again today in my imperfect state.