TRANSCRIPT
Being high functioning in society is a poor indicator of someone’s connection with truth. That is their emotional healthiness, their emotional maturity. Put another way, one’s success, in my opinion, can only be measured internally. Who someone is internally. External success doesn’t really say that much about someone at all.
Now, that’s not to say that it might not be easier to be successful in society. It might not be easier to be high functioning. I believe it is. I mean, certainly if you’re high functioning and successful, you have more money. More money often is or equates to a more comfortable life, more padding in this existence, more options for food and health care and where you live and your free time.
So it’s not that I would eschew success in society and eschew being high functioning, but it’s not really what I’ve chased after in my life, and my life shows it because I’m not in any overt way successful in terms of financially, that is.
I remember back when I was a therapist, and I’m going back 20 years now. Just me saying I’m a therapist to people. I’d go to some party, and someone would ask, “What do you do?” And I’d say, “I’m a psychotherapist.” And oh, really? Wow. They’d be so impressed and give me such respect and such kudos. And I remember thinking, “That’s stupid.” Like, just because I said, “I’m a psychotherapist,” you respect me? I haven’t changed that much as a person.
Let’s say in the five years before that when I wasn’t a psychotherapist, I was fundamentally the same person and yet not being given that much credit or respect. I hadn’t achieved that title in life. But then the thing that was even more important to me was I said I was a psychotherapist, and they respected me. But they had no idea if I was any good at being a psychotherapist.
And in my opinion, most people who called themselves psychotherapists who were psychotherapists were rather terrible people. Immature and power-hungry and out for the money and loved being able to control their clients. Didn’t have a great healing gift. Also had figured out the scam that if you have a fancy office and put your degrees on the wall and dress well and look pensive and thoughtful and give some positive feedback and know how to do some narcissistic gratification of the client, you could be very, very successful.
In fact, looking back on my time as a therapist and looking back on all the therapists I’ve known along the way, I think it’s actually a lot easier to be a successful psychotherapist if you’re not very emotionally healthy. The reason being we live in a world, a society, all the societies of the world perhaps to some degree that don’t value honesty. They value putting Humpty Dumpty back together again.
Getting someone to be functional is the goal of psychotherapy, not to know themselves. And for a psychotherapist who holds it in high value for people to know themselves, and then yes, I believed in helping people function better to the degree that they wanted to, but more so I wanted people to help people know themselves. That’s something that I held more important in my own life than anything.
Knowing the truth of myself, being constant with the truth of myself, and all else that I might do or accomplish or be out in the world was going to come from that. And for me, that came from healing my childhood traumas. Casting off the lies that had been forced on me in my family system, in my school system, in my society, but primarily in my family system from my parents. Breaking away from them was something key for me to know myself.
I didn’t get help to do this in psychotherapy. In fact, my experience with multiple psychotherapists before I became a therapist and during my time as a therapist was that they weren’t interested in this value of mine. They had done it themselves. They were more interested in symptom checklists and fixing me.
Sorry, it sounds like there’s an ambulance going by outside. Sometimes this happens when I’m recording videos, and I take it as a sort of interesting metaphor in some way or other. Fix the problem quick. Put it back together. Put the staunch the bleeding. And that’s what I think a lot of psychotherapists are trying to do. Make people look normal again. Help their relationships function again. Help them forgive their traumatizers so they can go back to their families and fit in. Help them put on a fancier face in society. Push down the anxiety. Push down the sadness. Push down the memories. Take pills to help the memories and the feelings and the anxiety go away. Not learn how to sleep in a healthy way, but take pills to go to sleep. I saw certainly a lot of that as a therapist.
The goal of therapists again in general, the goal of the psychiatric field in general, is to help people function at a higher level. No real mention of truth. That’s not a goal or a value of psychotherapy or society. Yes, there might be some lone random individuals in that world who really value those things, but my experience is I haven’t met many.
And then outside of the psychotherapy world, perhaps it’s even worse. It’s like how do people make a lot of money? Most of the people I know who have made a lot of money to some degree or other have done it at the expense of others. Capitalizing on others’ weaknesses. Capitalizing on others’ vulnerabilities. Capitalizing on others’ very, very hard work, doing it through investing types of methods where they win but someone else doesn’t win. Is that a good thing? Is that a sign of maturity and healthiness, equality within? I don’t really think so.
And then there’s another thing I’ve seen in our world. When people become high function, when they’re considered successes in the world, something happens to their mind. I’ve seen it again and again with people, especially people I grew up with who were just average people or maybe even people who had a lot of problems and had low self-esteem, but had some talent that they were able to capitalize on. And they figured out how to become successful in the adult world, successful in society.
But all of their immature, troubled, traumatized sides, they didn’t fix it all. They never dealt with it. What I’ve seen with such people again and again and again is their external success allows them to become a vehicle by which they can deny what’s going on on the inside. They live through this patina of having made it in the world. They’re very proud of having made it, but sometimes, often, they don’t have any connection with their weak little immature sides. It’s still in there. It’s still just below the surface, seething.
Sometimes it pops out in their relationships with their partners or with their children or in their addictions. But, well, their goal often is to keep it pushed down. And sometimes these very people can go around dispensing wisdom and advice on life and how to be a mature person, which really shows me that they have used their success to lose themselves.
And some of these people, sometimes I have seen it starting out as very wounded, pained, hurt people with low self-esteem, finding some channel to become very successful in society through their work. Yet something goes wrong, and they lose it, and all the external success and the high functioning go away. And what’s left is that deeply pained, wounded person underneath it. The person that was always there and their true self in a way. Well, not their true self; their true self is under that, some beautiful true part of themselves, but the truth of how messed up they are comes out.
And it’s a very dangerous time in such people’s lives, a very vulnerable time. Some people I have seen, a rare few, take this horrible pain and low functioning and vulnerability and confusion and start to make sense of it. Use it to explore themselves and to build up a new real self. Healing traumas, valuing truth, valuing their memories, valuing their feelings, honesty, journaling, even really getting to know who they are and grieving. Grieving what they went through, learning even about how damaging sometimes their success was, how far it took them away from their healing process.
But I’ve also seen other people when they have failed in society, when their success has been ripped away and all that’s left is the wounded, painful self that was always there beneath the surface. Some of these people I’ve seen, it’s too much. They kill themselves. It’s just absolutely overwhelming.
Lose their minds. The reality of what happened, of what was always there, is just too much to process, and it blows their circuits. They can even become psychotic and end up in mental institutions. Different things like this can happen, or deeply become addicted to some drug that’s just there to numb their pain, help them forget, blot it all out.
Yet I think of myself having, in a way, succeeded as a psychotherapist. Also, I made films after I was a psychotherapist, and they were successful, filmed, you know, screened all over the world, translated into lots of languages, had an effect over quite a number of lives.
I remember one time, this is going back 12, 13, 14 years, a friend of mine in Sweden who had seen my films, who had promoted them, shared them around, told me, she said, “Daniel,” she goes, “If you never do anything else again in your life, just remember you have succeeded.” And I remember, in a way, being pleased to hear this and, in a way, thinking to myself, I’m just getting started.
And it’s not about succeeding in the world and in the eyes of others. I’m on a healing path within. And now it’s 10, 12 years later. I’m not successful externally like I was back then. Not making so much money as I was back then, not having a high functioning normal life like I did back then, but I’ve grown more. I have healed more. I am more me.
I don’t necessarily see it every day, but then certain circumstances will happen that were similar to something that happened 15 years ago or 20 or 30 or 40 years ago in my life, and I’ll see how differently I react, how I have a different perspective on it, how I have a different relationship with myself on the inside, in terms of how I relate to others, how I see the world, how I function in this world, and I see that I have grown. I have changed, and to me, that is a much better measure of my success than anything, well, that others can so obviously see.
And then I think of that subject, that phrase, high functioning. High functioning in a very sick society. I think it helped me in a way that I functioned so well as a therapist for many years and made it as a filmmaker back when because it helped me see the flaw in the whole system. It was like I rose to the top in a certain way and realized this isn’t it. This isn’t what I really care about. This isn’t my goal. There’s something else, and that something else is inside. That’s really what I care about much, much more.
And that having succeeded externally is what I realize I really want to focus on. And what I see so often is the people who succeed in the world and make all the money and are the high functioning, quote, important people, often they become addicted to that high functioning because they are living through that gloss of success, that patina of success, in lie of having a connection with who they really are.
So, in a way, they’re going to be lucky if their high functioning fails. Yeah, some it might be horrible, but maybe if it fails slowly, if they have some sort of support network that can help catch them, that they somehow find some real allies in some way in the world who can see the truth of them. If their externals all fail, if they have a strong enough core on the inside to love themselves when the world no longer cares about them, sees them, loves them, knows them, respects them, speaks well of them, honors them.
I think, in a way, you kind of have to fail to really connect with the truth within and grow. I failed in my family system with my parents because I didn’t live up to their expectations. I had to do it to get away from them to connect with the truth of me. That was the greatest crime of my family system: the internal connection with me. And that’s where my life has taken me on this deep inward path. And part of the big value I get out of that, just aside from having more of a self, is that I have something to share.