TRANSCRIPT
If a magical genie appeared in front of me and said, “Daniel, you can have one wish,” what would you wish for? This is what I would wish for: I would wish that every single person in the entire world, starting right now, would have their psychological defenses weaken and they could begin to grieve. They could begin to feel all the post-traumatic emotions that they have held blocked inside, blocked down in their unconscious, deep below the surface, beyond the sight of themselves, beyond the sight of their loved ones, beyond the sight of the parents who caused them the primary harm.
If people could feel the longing and the desperation that they felt because of the abandonments, the thousands of little abandonments, and sometimes the many big abandonments that they felt along the way, all the blocked feelings that they held about the violations they experienced. I am wishing right now for a terrible, even insane thing. I am wishing for something that, to be honest, would I really wish for such a thing? But let me just go with the fantasy that I am wishing for it because some part of me deep down is wishing for this. I think this is the only thing that can save our species from the cataclysm that we are headed for, that we have been headed for, that generations and generations and generations of humans have been headed for. The consequence of not dealing with trauma from not just our parents’ generation, but from our grandparents’ generation and their grandparents’ generation, probably since time immemorial.
We live in a society, in worlds, and in families, and in cultures, and in religions where burying the trauma and denying the trauma and defending against the existence of the trauma and defending our traumatizer and holding them up as heroes and ideals, that is the way to be. That is the way to be a good person and a strong person and a functional member of society. And in my wish, well, the truth would undo all of that, explode it, rip it apart, dissolve it. It’s one of those wishes that would wreak, initially at least, crazy awful consequences on humanity. Devastating things. Societies would probably grind to a halt. People wouldn’t be able to function, wouldn’t be able to go to work. If people couldn’t defend against their buried, split-off, unresolved feelings, it would just—everything that we know to be true would not be true. People wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere. They wouldn’t be able to actually steer the car. They wouldn’t be able to eat, probably. It would just be so… I think what would happen immediately is people would band together for support. That would be the beautiful side because ultimately it would be so beautiful if this happened, so amazing beyond anything that people, most people, 99.9% of people could remotely even consider because they have no experience, even in a little way, grieving.
Even the mental health system would be totally dysfunctional. It would be swept away. All these psych drugs that people give to block grieving—oh, you have this diagnosis, which really is just unresolved grieving coming out in strange ways: your depression, your psychosis, your schizophrenia, your bipolar—take these meds, push down the feelings. Well, if the feelings came up, forget all these meds. Get away from them. Don’t prescribe them. This is poison. This is exactly what you don’t need. People need to be seen. People need to be mirrored. People need to honor each other’s experiences. People need to talk. They need to talk about what happened to them. They need to actually say, “This person did this to me. This person whose job it was to love me failed me. They violated me. They did awful things to me. They didn’t see me again and again. They rejected me when I tried to speak about what they had done to me. They rejected me again and again, and I had to shut down and emotionally die inside to survive, to survive in the family with them, to get any crumb of love and acceptance. I had to be a dead person, and I can’t do that anymore.”
And what would it also be like when people called out their traumatizer and their traumatizer also grieved and said, “Yes, yes, I did do those things to you. I was traumatized. I’m totally up for what I had done to me, and now I’m grieving, and I’m blaming my traumatizer who may long since be dead. And you’re right, you have a right to feel these feelings, and I so feel terrible, and I so apologize, and I so wished I’d been healthier. I so wished I’d been a good parent for you, a good friend to you, a good role model to you, and I wasn’t. And now I shall be.” A world of deep grieving. I made a video about this at one point. Imagine a deep grieving experience of the whole world writ large. And I imagine it again. It’s the only, only, only hope I have. Is it possible? Is my wish possible? Well, I don’t think that’s how the human psyche works, that a magic genie could come down and dissolve people’s defenses. Well, people’s defenses are very, very strong, very strong. I’ve seen that again and again and again.
I think of my time as a psychotherapist. The biggest, most difficult force that I faced as a psychotherapist was people’s defenses. They’re like terror and fear and strength at keeping those traumas down because those traumas were terrifying. They knew it. Those traumas would ruin their lives, their kind of false lives. If they came up, they would be rejected by their parents. I think of what happened to me when my emotions related to my traumas came up, when my grieving started coming up, when my healthiness started to come up. My family turned their back on me. They despised me. They hated me. Well, I was going to say more than they had ever hated me before, but I think they hated the little boy I once was. And I think that’s true for probably all families to one degree or other. They hate the healthiness of their children. They hate the righteousness of their little children, the deep sense of justice in their little children when their children scream and cry and say, “I hate you for treating me this way. I hate you for rejecting me. I hate you for not paying attention to me and loving me properly. I hate you for turning your back on me when I cry and grieve. I hate you for not holding me.” And then the children swallow all that grief and push it down because they know it’ll get them nowhere, or almost nowhere. Yes, I know that well. I think everybody knows that well, deep, deep down.
And if my genie could make this come true and all those feelings of people could come up and all the defenses would go away and people stopped playing out all their unresolved trauma through traumatizing others and continuing to traumatize themselves and deny and deny and traumatize the world and exploit and do all the things that traumatized people do, if people felt those feelings and could relate to the truth within them and the truth of their history, oh, we would know a world of real love where people, first of all, would be able to love themselves. Because when that channel opens up, when the grief happens, when the truth of those feelings come up, people can love themselves. It was the only way I ever learned to love myself, to learn the truth of what love even was. I had such a screwed-up concept of what love was before I had ever grieved love. I used to think love was falling in love and finding someone who could finally love me. Totally backward. Falling in love was really just the fantasy of finding a new ideal, perfect parent who could love the whole of me, give me a safe place to grieve. That wasn’t really love. That was wanting to find a new proper, healthy parent. But I didn’t even love myself. How could I love anyone else? Well, when I really started to grieve and I really started to connect with the truth of the buried little beautiful person I had always been but had so, in so many ways, long since been disconnected from, when I really found that deep love for myself—and by the way, when I felt it, I knew it. I was like, “This is real love. This is truth. This is the truth of who I always was and who I want to be.”
Become when I felt that love more and more, I had a surplus of love that I could really give others. I could give my friends. I could be a much more loving friend. Where it killed my fantasy of looking for this idealized woman who I could fall in love with and who could love me, I could fake it and call that love. Well, that fantasy evaporated.
Imagine a world where people weren’t desperately seeking parental love objects in other people, just making other people objects to love them. But instead, could really love others. Where everybody could do it. Just imagine this world. Woo! Everything would change so much.
First of all, we’d stop wars. We’d stop traumatizing others. People would stop traumatizing their children. Most people immediately would stop making new children because they would realize they’re too screwed up to do it. They have to heal themselves first. They have to really learn to have a deep and consistent love for their own selves and for their now living fellows before they just go ahead and arbitrarily create new lives.
They would become parents for themselves, and we could parent each other. We could parent those younger than us. We could parent those older than us. Would people go commit crimes? No! Why would we want to commit crimes on other people? Jails would empty. People would actually correct their own behavior. They wouldn’t need this fake Department of Corrections that we call our prison system to lock people away and traumatize them more, to further traumatize the most traumatized who go around replicating their traumas on others in ways called crimes.
Instead, they would feel the deep pain and sorrow and rage in its proper proportion toward the people who had traumatized them and not act out through sideways, unresolved traumas on victims. Instead, they could heal it, and they could become productive members of a new society who loved themselves and don’t hate themselves.
Criminals hate themselves. When people commit crimes and violations against others, they despise themselves for it. It might feel good for a moment to get away with some nasty little thing that people do, even when they bully other people. It might feel good in a sick sort of way for a moment, but it makes people hate themselves. Bullies despise themselves. Criminals who violate others despise themselves. Lousy parents despise themselves.
In this new world that I envision, people, oh, they would love. They would love themselves, and by extension, they would love others. They would witness others, and we would love our world. We wouldn’t keep exploiting our world and exploiting animals and poisoning the Earth with our chemicals and poisoning the oceans. I mean, what’s the world going to be like if we keep going in the direction we’re going in? It’s going to go in the ugly way that it already is going, and it’s going to be awful.
I mean, will there be a living world for us to call our planet home in one or two more generations? I really question it. And in this world that I envision, the hell, the hell that would happen if people felt their feelings, it would change. I think we would start loving our planet home in a way that it’s never been loved.
The other thing is, I was thinking if people, lots of people, everybody started feeling their buried feelings, would people go crazy all over the place and commit suicide all over the place? I think that’s why people commit suicide a lot of times. Feelings are coming up, and there’s no one to love them or see them or hold them or nurture them or be there for them. Would there be mass suicides? You know, actually, I think not.
Because if everybody was going through grieving, the people who had the most pain and, in a way, the deepest sorrow, the kind of stuff that makes people want to kill themselves, they wouldn’t kill themselves because everybody would see them and love them and hold them and say, “Yes, you are going through real proper healing. You’re going through real proper grieving. You don’t need to negate your life through suicide because now you have a real family who loves you.” And I’m not talking their biological family. You have a society of humans around you who love you.
And racism and sexism and all these awful ways that people play out hating the other, other, other. Everyone is the other, and everyone is the enemy. This would all end. We would be a human family all in this healing process together. Oh, I love this vision.
[Music]