TRANSCRIPT
It is hard to be brave. It is hard to be honest. It is hard to be true. It rubs people the wrong way so often. It scares people. It scares parents when you are honest with them about what you’re really feeling. What they have really done to you historically. So many parents, most people, they don’t want to hear it.
It’s brave to remember. It’s brave to connect with your feelings. It’s also very dangerous. I have to say that. That’s why it’s brave to do it. Because bravery, the word bravery entails some sort of danger. If there were no danger, there would be no bravery. If there was no danger, well, it would be easy then. It would just be something that everybody would do as a matter of course.
Real bravery, real emotional bravery. Having the courage to look within. To look in the mirror at who one has become honestly. Warts and all as the result of one’s history. It’s brave. It’s also rare. That’s what I’ve observed in this world interfacing with a lot of people. I live a pretty social existence a lot of the time. Other times I live a very introspective existence where I’m going into these ugly places and then I come out of it. And I go out in the world and interface with people and I find that real self-reflective time for people.
I’m not talking regular meditation because a lot of people who meditate, they’re not being deeply self-reflective about their history. They’re just dissociating. They’re splitting off from their feelings and their memories and using meditation to avoid meditating on the truth of what’s really going on in there. Real bravery not common in this world. Which is part of what makes real historical self-reflection so brave because you’re alone if you do it so often. It’s not easy to find allies. And so you have to be brave enough to be your own primary ally. And that’s not easy also because who’s raised that way really? Who’s really raised being taught how to be an ally for yourself?
Most people, everyone to some degree or other, is taught to not be an ally for yourself. To split off from yourself. To split off from the truth of who you are and how you feel and what you really need and what you really want and what you really think and what you know to be true. Those are all dangerous things in this world. And when I say in this world, I’m not talking about government and society at large and humanity, homo sapiens, or even schools, those ugly awful places of indoctrination.
The real place where I’m talking about being dangerous in this world is the young child’s first world, which is the primary family system. The world of the parents. The parents being the king and queen of the baby’s world. The gods of the baby’s world. That is how much power the parents have in the world of the utterly dependent needy baby who can’t take care of himself or herself, can’t feed himself or herself, can’t change his or her diapers, can’t do anything except for cry. And if people don’t listen to that crying, then the baby is stuck and has to learn how to swallow his cries. It’s brave to reclaim those tears. If those tears didn’t work when one was a baby. And for every baby to one degree or other, those tears don’t work.
I mean, if you’re lucky, you had parents who saw your whole range of tears, but they don’t. They see some of them, they hear some of them, they make sense of some of them, but only to the degree to which your parents are healthy. And if they really were that healthy, they wouldn’t have had children in the first place because look at the world. The world is freaking crazy. Parents don’t have children because they are brave. They have children because they are cowards. They are avoiding their feelings. They’re avoiding their history. Instead of looking at their history and dealing with it and feeling with it, feeling it and resolving it and healing it through grieving it, instead they close their eyes, they split it off, and they say, “Tag, you’re it.” They pass it on to their children and they act out their unresolved power dynamics with their own abusive parents with their children to the degree to which the parents are unhealthy.
It’s not brave to have children. It’s brave to nourish the split off buried unhealed needy wounded pained violated traumatized child within you. That is brave. And I admire anybody who does this. And I’ll say this also. If you really want to heal, if you really want to nurture yourself and give yourself the best chance to grow and love yourself and be there for yourself and fight for yourself and become a healed and healthy and full person. If you want to give yourself the best chance, bravery is one component. Definitely you need bravery, but it’s not the only component.
I’ve seen people who are brave as hell and end up self-destructing as the result of their bravery if it’s not combined with other qualities. It’s like bread. Yes. Wheat is or other things, but wheat or some other grain or some sort of carbohydrate is a primary component of bread, but it needs other ingredients also. So what other ingredients go into making the bread of a healthy life? Yes, bravery. You need to be brave. You can’t do it if you’re not brave. But you need to be strategic also.
I’ve seen that that strategy, smartness. Not sticking your neck out bravely against people who will only cut your throat again like they did when you were a child, but maybe will destroy you even worse now that you are an adult. I’ve seen some very brave people who go headlong into confrontation with their parents again and again and again and smash their head into the wall metaphorically so many times that they get a metaphorical concussion, end up getting diagnosed with mental illnesses, end up in jail, end up in mental hospitals, end up rejected, out on the street, hated, end up so miserable and depressed that they kill themselves, end up with drug addictions because the pain becomes too overwhelming. People who were very brave but didn’t have other qualities.
So yes, I don’t want to just riff on bravery and also not talk about how to be smart, how to prepare, how to be strategic, how to fight for yourself in an intelligent way. Bravery isn’t all about confronting parents. Bravery isn’t all about confronting past traumatizers and abusers. Bravery isn’t about always speaking out publicly. I hope I’m not being the worst role model here by speaking so publicly on the internet about this. Because I know in my own history and I would encourage other people to follow this too.
For years, for decades, so much of my most all even of my internal healing process was private. That was part of a strategy for me to do my healing within. Don’t let other people know. They will ruin me. They will kill me. Now I’m stronger. I’m older. They can’t hurt me as much. How can they hurt me? I’m already broken away. I’ve become independent. I figured out how to get career after career where I can make enough money to survive. I can live independently. Not fancy, not with a lot of money. I’m poor by conventional American standards. But have enough that I can live independently from my family.
When I see people or when I remember myself when I wasn’t on my feet enough in my careers, when I wasn’t on my feet enough financially to get away from my parents, that was a time to be private, to be brave in my private world, in my journal. It was very brave even of me then just to tell the truth on paper for me to read. I was breaking family secrets on paper, a major step forward in my healing process. And it still is. I still have a very private life in spite of how much I am public here.
And why am I public here? And by the way, not to toot my own horn, but it’s scary as hell to make some of this stuff public because I still have a lot of embedded fears from my family. And the greater society that’s made up of thousands and millions of family systems that are essentially just like my parents who tell me I’m crazy and I’m wrong. How dare you speak against families and cultures and religions. But I do it anyway to hopefully give some support to some people out there who may not have any other support. And so I come here in my riff on bravery saying to you go for it.