TRANSCRIPT
Are children responsible for their behavior? I think more specifically the question I’m asking is, are children responsible for their bad behavior? Their behavior that is harmful to others, abusive to others, violent to others? Or to what degree are they responsible?
Well, pretty much, I think the societal answer, the conventional societal answer in so many societies of the world, religions of the world even, is yes, they are responsible. They must be held accountable. But are they?
I think the first thing I come to when I start unpacking this question is, why do people do bad behavior? Why do children do bad behavior? And then I think, well, from what I’ve observed, starting in myself when I was a child and observing children for many, many, many years all over the world, is that children do harmful things to others and to themselves because they have been harmed.
I have another video about it somewhere called “Hurt People Hurt People.” People who have been harmed, harmed by people who have more power over them, primarily their parents. Well, if they don’t get a chance to heal from their harm, to know what has been done to them, to feel it, to feel their anger and sadness, and then to grieve it—things that most children, to a very, very large degree, are not allowed almost at all—well then they have to bury it. And that’s the definition of trauma.
When people are harmed, when they have things that emotionally overwhelm them and they can’t process it, they have no room in their lives, in their relationships, in their families, in their societies to process it. When there’s no one around who will see them and witness them and empathize with them, well then they’ve got one option left, and that is to bury it. Bury it under all sorts of different defenses: denial. Oh, I was not abused. I had a great childhood. My parents love me. It was wonderful, even if it really radically wasn’t, like it wasn’t for so, so, so many people.
And then, well, part and parcel of denial, so many people, well, they acted out on others. They take their own victims. They are enraged people just below the surface, and it seeps out in all sorts of other ways. They find victims—victims who are less powerful than they are, or more accurately put, more powerless than they are—and they harm them in all sorts of different ways. It can be through violence, through humiliating them, sexual misbehavior, taunting, tormenting, teasing, putting down, excluding, alienating—all the things that were done to them. Sadly, this is what harmed human beings do when they don’t have a chance to heal.
And some people say, “Oh, but I never harmed anyone else,” or “So and so never harmed anyone else.” You watch the people who were abused and who bury it and don’t harm others—they harm themselves. They deny themselves. They acted out on themselves. And who is responsible for this? Well, I would certainly say that children are not. The children—how can they be held responsible for being abused and having no one to love them and see them and help them heal and grieve? Their abusers are responsible. Their parents are responsible, even if their parent, often their parents, are their abusers. But even if their parents aren’t necessarily their abusers, if their parents aren’t giving them a healing context in which to grow and grieve and work through their traumas, well, I think their parents are then also responsible in that case.
Society certainly doesn’t agree, but what I see a lot is that, oh, the children are responsible. They must be punished. And what’s so, so sad is often the children are being abused by their parents. Their healing is being denied by their parents. The healing context is not being provided by their parents, and instead, their parents are punishing them for acting out through their bad behavior, their unresolved, denied abuse. And society pretty much says that’s okay. In fact, in a lot of cases, society says it’s important. It’s important that you discipline your children. It’s important that you punish your children. In fact, they even go so far as to say if you don’t discipline and punish your children, even sometimes through physical violence, then you’re a bad parent. You’re a negligent parent. You’re a lousy parent. You’re the one who shouldn’t be having children, when in fact it’s the parents themselves that have caused the problem in the first place.
But then it gets complicated because children grow up. One might say, yeah, it might be hard to blame a 2-year-old for acting out. Some people still do. Some people blame two-year-olds for their bad behaviors and spank them and hurt them and punish them and ground them and isolate them and alienate them and deprive them of things that they like in order to modify their behavior. But people generally tend to be more sympathetic toward angry, raging, acting out 2-year-olds and three-year-olds and four-year-olds and five-year-olds.
But what about when the child is 10, 12, 14, 16? Well then the law starts to come into it. This person should be charged as an adult for their bad behavior. I recently was reading about in the newspaper some 12 and 13-year-olds, a gang of 12 and 13-year-olds in my city, attacked a couple of adults and beat them up, and they’re being tried and they’re going to be put into the legal system and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and they will be held responsible. But no one asks—certainly the newspaper never asks—but I didn’t hear any of the discussion about it with people I heard talking about it, saying, “Why did they do such things? What is the context of their lives that even put them in a position to be out at 1:00 in the morning marauding as a gang?”
And emotionally, what put them in a position to do such things? I’ve spent time with 12 and 13-year-olds who are much, much, much less abused or hardly abused at all, and what I find is they’re just curious and loving and empathic and respectful. So who are holding these 12 and 13-year-old children’s parents responsible? Maybe they don’t even have parents. And who’s holding these non-parents responsible? And where are their parents? And why does not society speak up against that? And certainly the legal system puts no responsibility on parents for going and having more and more and more children who they are just abusing or outright abandoning.
But what I see is that children, as they grow older, society deems them more responsible. They say, “Oh, you learned right from wrong. You should now know right from wrong.” And by the time the children are 16, 18, 20, 22, now you are responsible. Now you are an adult. Now you will be held accountable for your bad and harmful and antisocial behavior. If it’s bad enough and you don’t have good enough legal representation, if you don’t have the money for it, you will go to jail. You will suffer hardcore punishment in the Department of Corrections.
Well, where’s the correction in that, really? It’s just isolating people, taking them out of whatever context they were in, sticking them into a world of other violent, angry, hurt people who are really scary and giving them no correction. In fact, giving them the opposite of correction so often. And I’ve heard the story so many times, and I’ve visited jails, taking people who are on the edge of maybe having some potential at looking at their bad behavior, their harmful, abusive behavior, and putting them in a context where there’s no safety to look at it.
Oh, maybe there are some prison psychologists. Well, I’ve known some prison psychologists—horrible people for the most part. Psychologists who couldn’t make it on the outside and instead work with a captive population who are forced to come to see them. The kind of therapists who would be the lowest on my list to want to visit. Now granted, I’ve met some people who work in prisons who are lovely, but I’ve met a lot who kind of aren’t.
But then there’s the interesting question: what about adults who are 25, 30, 35, and they’re still doing these harmful, abusive things? Should they be held responsible? Well, I certainly can see how it’s easier to argue that they should be held responsible. Yet what I also see again and again and again, what I witness, what I observe from collecting the data by just listening to people talk, is that 35-year-old people who do abusive, harmful things to others are motivated by the exact same things as 2-year-olds. They’re also motivated by unresolved.
Trauma, unresolved violence that they experienced when they were powerless, when they were victims, when they had no options to get out of it. Nobody listened to them, and no one cared. And it got pushed down, it got buried so deeply they never got a chance to heal. They never were able to be in a healing context, or if they got some little modum of a healing context, it was so small and so minimal that it really didn’t do much to relieve their deep buried anguish.
So are they responsible for this? It’s confusing. But what I see is when adults harm others, people who are physically adults, who have gone through puberty and are out in the world and are legal adults, over 18, over 20, over 30, over 40, their bad behavior is still the sign of how much they remain wounded, unhealed, traumatized children. And when I look at them in that light, from that perspective, which is just one light and one perspective, I can’t blame them. I can say they got the short end of the stick in life, and they’re confused and lost and full of bitterness and rage—all the things that a child trauma victim experiences.
And these adults, though they look like adults, they’re actually still children. Yet are they not responsible? What I can say, speaking for myself primarily, but also through witnessing the healing process of others, is it’s pretty hard to take responsibility when we’re very shut down. But as we begin to heal, as we begin to get more of our self back, as our consciousness develops, as the connection between the truth of who we always were—the beautiful inherent self that was within all of us—when that becomes more connected with our conscious mind, and it can happen in children too, this connection, but it’s certainly, well, in my case, it happened more as I became an adult and certainly more now.
The more we become conscious and aware and connected with the goodness within us, the more we can take responsibility for the parts of us that are still wounded. And in fact, I don’t know any other way to take responsibility. I think people who have a broken connection between their consciousness and the deep inherent goodness of their birthright, their child self, when that connection is broken, I think they just can’t take responsibility. And who can take responsibility for them if they’re raised in a context where there is no love, no witnessing, no time, no nurturance, no reflection, no empathy?
I’ll say this: this video has been on my list of videos to make for quite a long time. And actually, this is not the first iteration I have attempted at this video. I think this is probably the fourth or fifth time I’ve tried to make this video. And the reason is I always hit these stumbling blocks where I’m like, I don’t know the answer to these questions. And maybe that’s something that’s just good to put out there directly, to acknowledge that—who is responsible?
Well, I’ll say this: I think in general, society doesn’t care much about trauma. Society doesn’t care much about psychology. I went to a college that was a liberal arts college where all these different disciplines were studied, and they’re all supposed to be integrated with each other, but that’s a fact. I think most people don’t care about psychology. Even most psychologists, most people who study psychology, don’t even get to this material at all.
But a healthier society—maybe this is how I will answer this question, sort of in a fantasy, an ideal of a healthier society that I might envision—a healthier society would be an emotionally mature society. A society where the leaders had a more conscious mind that was connected with the truth of the goodness of their child within and developed it and resolved their traumas. And they would set up a whole system, a legal system, an educational system, help nurture family systems that would help people take responsibility, help love people, and nurture people, and care about people, and witness people.
So that, first of all, they wouldn’t need to act out their traumas so much. Second of all, they wouldn’t need to be traumatized so much in the first place. But if they were acting out, they would help them have a context that would help them heal, really heal, really grieve, really look at what they’ve done. And I guarantee this: all these criminals out there, these adults who are stuck in prison in the United States—what, a million people stuck in horrible, awful, violent danger prisons? If they really were given a healing context, what we would see is a mass explosion of grieving because they’d want to take responsibility. They’d want—everybody wants to love themselves.
And what is connecting with the truth of the beauty within all of us? That’s what we all want. That’s what everybody wants. That’s what people seek in their partners. They can’t get it from themselves, so they want someone who will love them. They’re looking for parental replacements. They’re looking for the parents they never had. They find it in their addictions. They find it in everything in their life. They find it—they try to get it from their children. They want their children to love them. That’s why so many people, the people who have the least ability to raise children in a healthy way, are having the most children often and wanting their children to love them.
Well, in my vision of a healthier society, we would have a world that would take responsibility for our whole species. And in so doing, do away with punishment. Yes, I can see protecting the innocent from the hurt and the violent. I can see doing some removal of society from people who are going around and committing harm. I think of myself getting mugged a few years ago, getting violently attacked and having my money stolen and thinking I was going to die. Those guys who did it, well, I think it’s not the worst thing in the world to at least for a time remove them, but not to just stick them in some horrible jail where they become more self-hating and more violent and more destructive, but instead provide them an environment where they can feel what was done to them.
And then there’s the other funny thing I thought of this many, many years ago: if you really want to see someone suffer for the bad things that they do, give them a chance to grieve their traumas. Then they will know suffering. But once they get through the suffering, then they will get to the grieving, and then they can transform into people who don’t cause harm to others.
And then when I return to the question, are children responsible for their behavior? In my vision of a different world, I could think—I could imagine a world where children aren’t causing harm to others, where children are full of the love and empathy that is their birthright. When they can have good friends who they don’t harm, they can have siblings who they don’t harm, they can grow up to become teenagers and adults who are loving and caring and empathic and don’t harm others. And in that case, they can so much more easily take responsibility for their behavior.