TRANSCRIPT
I spent several years in psychotherapy. And it’s been more than two decades since I’ve been in psychotherapy. But I recently went back and read all the journal writing that I did while I was in psychotherapy. It was so painful to read what I wrote.
And at the time, I don’t think I quite understood why I was writing so much, thousands and thousands of pages. But part of why I was writing so much was that I was baring my soul [snorts] to people who couldn’t hear me. Being so deeply honest and revealing and utterly transparent about my feelings and my history and my pain and my confusion, my traumas, the ways in which I was acting out my traumas. And it was exactly what I needed to do to heal.
I needed to open up. I needed to be honest. I needed to be real. And that was a holy process. It was a beautiful process, my opening up and being real. The problem was I was being real to very, very screwed up people. And at the time, I felt it. I sensed it. But I didn’t want to believe it. I wanted to believe that these supposedly mature people to whom I was baring my soul, baring my most painful and private information, these older people, they were all older than me. They all had licenses. They all had fancy offices. They all dressed well and had nice haircuts and played the part right and had the right voices and knew the right things to say and asked the right therapeutic questions.
But they were bullshitters. They were fakers. They were liars and I could feel it then. But more than two decades removed, reading my journals about it, I could see it as fact. Yes, I could feel it again, but now I had enough distance and I had enough strength [snorts] within myself now to be able to know it 100%. Back then I kind of knew it. But I also didn’t want to believe it and I didn’t have enough healthy support in my life to believe it.
I thought I was doing the right thing by going to psychotherapy. I was becoming a psychotherapist. I was a psychotherapist at that time. But I was young. I was in my 20s. Everybody, pretty much everybody was telling me if you want to be a good psychotherapist, you need to go to psychotherapy. You need to learn about this process by doing this process. And in a way they were right. But in a way they were so wrong.
And here’s how they were wrong, because all those people who were telling me that, they were screwed up themselves. A lot of them were psychotherapists who were screwed up. I look back on those people now who told me these things and what awful people. So many of them were so messed up and confused and arrogant and grandiose and they were going to psychotherapists who were screwed up.
I think of one person who kept telling me, “You need to go to psychotherapy. It’s the only way you can sort out your issues.” Yet two years after that, her psychotherapist had cancer and was dying and didn’t tell her and then died and still didn’t tell her and nobody told her and she kept going back and why is my therapist not answering her buzzer? The woman was dead and lied to her and was dying and left her hanging and left her totally emotionally distraught. This is someone who was telling me that I needed to go confess my deepest history to some screwed up person.
Now, what could they have told me? What could they have told me that would have helped me so much better? The irony of what they could have told me was what my heart was telling myself to do and which I was doing anyway, which was journal like mad, do self-therapy, if you want to call it self-psychotherapy. Analyze myself, study myself, confess to me. Look in the mirror. Confess. Confess in my mind. Confess my history. Confess what traumas had been done to me. Confess how I really felt about my parents, those primary people who so betrayed me again and again and again and couldn’t hear my confessions.
And I tried to confess to my parents when I was a child about how I really felt about them, about them betraying me and how they just rejected me more for it and harmed me more because it threatened them, because they were so screwed up, which was an exact dynamic that I played out in psychotherapy with psychotherapists who actually were very much like my parents.
I was doing the holy process of confessing to people who were not holy at all. Which is why I had to journal so much to save my life, to make sense of it, so I could hear myself, so I could validate my own feelings, so I could know that what I was feeling actually was right, that these people were very screwed up, that they had no business listening to my holy story, my holy feelings, the truth of what I went through, the truth of how I was feeling, the truth of my pain and anger and rage and confusion, the truth of my split-off feelings, which I was bringing up through my healing process.
So now, decades later, reading those painful, painful, painful journal entries, one after another after another, years of that stuff, years of those journal entries, some of those journal entries five, 10, 15, 20 pages long even. I had so much to say because I had so many feelings and I was getting such confusing feedback from these therapists.
Me telling my psychotherapists about having been betrayed by my parents as a kid, having had no one listen to me as a kid and the psychotherapist just going “Mhm. Mhm.” Silence. So much silence. Saying stupid and confusing things when they would speak.
One therapist, how long, almost two years I lay on a couch and she stared at the back of my head while I bared my soul to her and she hardly said anything. All I heard was the scratching of her pencil or her pen as she wrote on this notepad that I never saw. I never knew what she was writing. She wouldn’t tell me.
And I would go home after these sessions, write in my journal and write and write and write and type and type and type all the stuff and all my feelings and then I would come back and tell her what I was writing about and she would just scratch more. And then sometimes I would get angry at her and say, “Why are you not responding to me? Why aren’t you telling me what you’re thinking and feeling?”
And then she would become defensive and get angry at me. “Well, what do you want me to say?” And I’d say, “I want you to be transparent with me in return. I want to at least know who I’m dealing with.” Sometimes she would let out little bits of smidgens of what she was feeling, but mostly not. Mostly it was just more silence.
And on her part as a business model, and not just her, because there were two therapists before who were men and they were the same. They both followed the same business model, which was largely silence. And it was a good business model because if she had really revealed how she was feeling, what she was really thinking about me, I would have left.
I would say, “Oh my god, this person is crazy. This person is terrible for me. This person is poison. This person has a poisoned private life. This person has poisoned romantic relationships. This person is very confused. This person doesn’t know me. This person doesn’t like me very much. This person is threatened by my honesty. This person is inappropriate for me to be confessing to. This person is less healthy than me.” But she didn’t say that. The two therapists before her didn’t say that. They kept silent.
And in their silence, it was harder for me to sort out how I felt about them because some part of me was so desperate for a loving parental figure of the variety that I’d never had. Someone who would care about me and see me and guide me and nurture me and love me properly. And some desperate part of me was in a fantasy that perhaps these therapists who had these fancy degrees and these fancy titles and these fancy offices who accepted my money and cashed my checks and took my cash and billed for my sessions to insurance companies that were medically valid and gave me diagnoses that seemed.
Like they knew what they were talking about. I fantasized that they could help me and would help me. And in their silence, my fantasies became more real. And yet deep in my heart, I knew they weren’t.
So this is just me. How universal is this story that I am talking about using myself as an example? I think it’s very universal. I think it’s a lot more universal than a lot of people realize. I think a lot of therapists deny this. Oh, this is just his story. He’s just one case. He just had bad therapists. He didn’t make good choices. He, he, he was unlucky with his choice of therapists. Oh, there’s so many great psychotherapists out there. He just happened to have the wrong one.
Well, I don’t agree ’cause I’ve met so, so, so, so many psychotherapists on my healing journey. So, so few were healthy. Some had little areas of healthiness. Some were able to work with people who were more troubled than they were in some ways and in so doing were able to be a step ahead. But when dealing with people with other issues—issues that were often too close to home—sometimes people who were going too deep for them to handle, they were bad. And I think that’s very, very, very common in the psychotherapy field.
How about beyond the psychotherapy field? ‘Cause I titled this video about not all confessors are themselves holy. Well, unfortunately, I think in this world most people are very screwed up. Most people haven’t done a lot of work really sorting out their basic childhood issues. Haven’t sorted out their dynamics of their relationship with their parents. Haven’t gone that deeply into themselves or haven’t made that much progress sorting out how much like their own parents they became and often still are. Very, very confusing, painful stuff. Especially confusing and painful stuff and difficult stuff to sort out in a world that’s as troubled as ours.
Something I’ve learned along the way on my healing process is that when you get into this deep stuff, trying to sort out how your parents traumatized you and screwed you up and really implanted a lot of very unhealthy dynamics and patterns inside of you, the world is not very supportive of this. The world, by and large—and I’m talking 99.9%—tends to side with your parents. Forgive them. They didn’t know what they were doing. They did the best they could. They tried as good as they can. Oh, if you’re so mature, you should bury the hatchet and forgive them and let it go. Move on. Oh, stop. Stop gazing at your navel. Oh, you’re one of those people who can never let things go. You have to learn how to move on and let go. Let go and let God. That seems to pretty much be the motto of the conventional world. That’s the motto of normal people.
And how in the world can people who do well in that motto, in that model, be good confessors for someone who’s going deep in a healing process? They can’t do it. And yet if we wish to heal, we still need to confess. And so if we have no one to confess to, the best we can do—and this is true in most cases—is to be our own confessor. Listen to ourselves. Trust ourselves. Journal for ourselves. When we meditate, when we go inside and listen, listen to the voice within us. The deepest voice that tells us the truth. And find a way to honor it.
And it’s very, very hard to do when we have come from family systems that live in a society of overlapping family systems that are just like ours that tell us, “Don’t trust yourself. Don’t listen to yourself. You’re bad. You’re wrong. You’re sick.” It takes a lot of fighting to go against that history. And the self-therapy process says that we must listen to that voice within us. We must figure out how to listen to that voice within us.
And when I go back and I read all those years of journals, thousands of pages of journaling, I see that I was desperately trying to do it against the tide. Against my family system who was trying to call me back in and get me to push my feelings down and bury my voice and lose myself again. And my psychotherapists who never met my parents were still siding with them. No wonder. No wonder I hated them. And thank God, even though I don’t really believe in this God thing, thank God I got away from those psychotherapists.
And [snorts] when I got away, got away from those false confessors and began to rely on myself more, my healing process flourished.
> [music]