TRANSCRIPT
Someone recently wrote me this: “Hey Daniel, I think it would be an interesting idea for a video if you explored the idea of changing one’s name to distance oneself from one’s traumatizers.” I’ve thought about this a lot over the years, over the decades, and I haven’t done it. As you can see, I’m using my real name, my born name. But for two years on the internet, I did actually use a pseudonym. I used the name Truth Traveler. Ironically, I did it because of a suggestion of my father, who’s a lawyer, who said, “Daniel, the things you’re saying are going to get you in trouble. You’re a therapist.” This was many years ago when I was a therapist. Your clients can sue you for what you were saying, or other people can sue you for what you were saying.
And I got really scared because I was new at putting out my raw, honest ideas on the internet, and I was afraid of such things. I was afraid of a lot of backlash. I was already feeling a lot of stress about being so publicly honest about deep and unconventional, even taboo ideas. So I listened to my father, and I changed my name on the internet for two years. What I found is that it actually was a relief. However, I also realized there were a lot of advantages in just being able to use my born name, to not have to hide behind a pseudonym. So I changed my name on the internet back to my real name, to Daniel Mackler, and I’ve been using it ever since.
I’ve thought about it over time, thought about it a lot in different ways, the advantages and disadvantages of using my real name. Well, one thing I realized later was my father’s reason for suggesting that I changed my name on the internet actually wasn’t his real reason. Deep down, his real reason was that he was terrified about what I was saying for his own sake, not for my sake. He was embarrassed. He was ashamed. He knew that, well, I was beginning to call him out. Even though at first I wasn’t calling him out directly, I was talking about parents in general. He knew that everything I was saying applied to him, and he didn’t want to have to deal with any sort of public scrutiny, perhaps by his peers or by other people or people in my family system.
So he was pressuring me to shut down and to hide, and in a way, it worked for him for a while. He was very scared later when I put my real name up. But I’ve thought about this in a different way also, about being anonymous in the world. Because I’m someone who has been very, very public, perhaps to a fault, about my ideas, my point of view, my history, my relationship with my parents, even my own analysis of unhealthy sides of myself.
And then I think about times in my life which are actually a great relief when nobody knows who I am. I’m not a public figure; I’m just a regular anonymous average person out in the world. And that’s when I am traveling. I recently, some months ago, came back from five months of traveling in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. A lot of my time traveling, I was hitchhiking. I was living with people who I just met in all sorts of different contexts, often in their home. I was doing my best to speak Russian and other foreign languages, and mostly people really didn’t ask that much about my point of view. It never crossed their mind, and often I didn’t share that I had a YouTube channel, that I have a website, that I’m talking about childhood trauma. If they asked, I shared it. I never hide this, really, but a lot of times it just doesn’t come up.
And what I find, oh so often, it is such a relief to be anonymous. On the flip side, when I come home, like I’m home now, and making videos and talking honestly and publicly about such personal and often taboo stuff—breaking from parents, childhood trauma, standing up for oneself, having boundaries, being a real self, healing, grieving, being honest, talking about how profoundly screwed up the world is, how most people have no business having children—they just screw them up and bring them into a world that’s even more screwed up.
Well, I find by talking about this stuff, it is incredibly stressful, very difficult. It’s a big sacrifice. In a way, it’s a sacrifice to my peace of mind, to my relaxation, to my sleep, to my sense of comfort and well-being. Basically, if it wasn’t so profoundly important, if that’s how I didn’t feel it was so important for me to get these messages out there, to share this publicly, to use myself, my life, my experience as an example of a different perspective, a different point of view, I just wouldn’t do it because it’s too much.
So to get to this subject of changing one’s name to distance oneself from one’s traumatizers, I certainly can see the value in it. I know some people who have actually done it. They’ve taken a surname or even a first name that’s completely different from their parents’ surnames, so their parents sometimes can’t find them, or sometimes just to say, “I’m a different person,” to make a statement that says, “I am not connected to these people.”
I certainly can relate to that. Sometimes I think of my name, Mackler. It’s the same surname that my father has, my grandfather has. I can’t say I like the name Mackler very much. There’s a lot that I don’t like about it, and yet it’s the name I’ve had my whole life. And part of, I think, why I have kept it, aside from the fact that it’s kind of annoying and takes a lot of work to legally change one’s name, but part of why I’ve kept it is that it allows me to keep a continuity with the little boy who I was, the little hurt boy.
And it’s almost like some part of me feels like if I change my name, then they strip me of more of my historical identity. I’m not saying this is completely correct or this is the only way, because I know people who say they’ve changed their surname and they found a whole new strong sense of self to live within as the result of that. And I can respect that for sure.
And that’s part of the thing that goes through my mind when I have thought about changing my name. Now, well, I’m 50 years old, and it feels like a little bit late to start changing my name. I’ve had a professional career now for more than 20 years using my name. Also, I’ve been a public figure using my name and my face. It’s basically too late. I’ve been too public already. There’s no going back. It’s like I made my decision, and now I have to live with it.
However, I wonder how would it have been different very, very early on if I had changed my name? Let’s say when I first started waking up and realizing, “Oh my God, I was really traumatized and harmed by my parents in this family system.” I don’t want to have their name. I want to be able to heal in private. Let’s say at 20 years old, I had gone and legally changed my name, gone in front of a judge and said, “My parents abused me. They misused me. I don’t want to have any name associated with them. I don’t want them to find me. I want to break relations with them.”
I wasn’t ready to do that at that time. I hadn’t even considered such things at that time. I didn’t even want to really break away from them, certainly not fully at that time. I was trying to set boundaries. It was clumsy. There were a lot of years, certainly more than a decade, of going back and forth, setting boundaries, taking distance from them, going back to them. But let’s say I just changed my name completely, started a new life. They could never have found me. No one in my childhood would have known who I was.
I think in a way there would have been a lot of freedom in that—freedom to just be away from them. They couldn’t harm me anymore. Also, the freedom to be public without having to face the backlash of my actual family system. But then again, I don’t know that that’s really true. And I think of several of the people I know who have legally changed…
Their name basically to hide, to take distance, to be protected from their families of origin. What I found is that none of those people that I can think of have actually been public, certainly not on the internet, about their story, using their story as an example of healing for others. Instead, when they have changed their name, it’s just been to get away, to distance themselves, to have more.
Basically, everyone I know who has changed his or her name, surname especially, went through probably more trauma than I did and just needed a huge amount of distance in order to be able to grow and heal and grieve without being pierced by the arrows of the family system.
Well, I don’t know what would have happened to me if I had changed my name. I really don’t think it was right for me. I think also by keeping my name and being open, especially open first with my family system directly about what they had done to me, talking with my parents about the various ways in which they had traumatized me through overt abuse, through neglect, through a combination of neglect and direct violation, through having a sort of conspiracy between my parents to not protect me. One could harm me, the other one would stay silent. Then the other one would harm me and the first one would stay silent.
I confronted them directly to their faces. There was no anonymity in that whatsoever. And I learned a lot through that experience, just like I learn a lot by being a public figure and talking so openly about these issues. One of the big things I learn is how people who are abusive, most people who are abusive, my parents, the world at large, that is so often so similar to them, that these people don’t want to change. They put a huge amount of effort into silencing someone who is telling the truth rather than looking at themselves.
And I have learned that again and again and again. I don’t know how well and how broadly and how effectively, and certainly how personally, I would have learned that lesson in the way that I needed to learn it had I changed my name. By being so public, I have made myself a target, and in a way that has furthered my growth. That’s caused me to become much stronger.
That’s not to say a lot of times I wouldn’t rather be anonymous. I notice this sometimes when I’m having conversations with people, friends or acquaintances, or other kind of conversations, even with strangers. Sometimes when I know there’s no camera running, when I know that the public at large, my family system, the public that represents my family system, will never see or hear what I’m saying, sometimes, well, I am even more open than I am here, much, much less censored. Sometimes I speak with more feelings, more directness, more color and detail in my story. And in a way, I really love that. There’s a freedom in that.
If I didn’t carry my actual name, I would probably be able to do that even more publicly because to a degree I am protecting certain people from my past when I speak here and now, even on the internet. Because I do carry a name that allows me to be known, allows other people to be known. If I had a completely different, oh, surname, gosh, what would I choose? I don’t even know what name I would choose. I think I would be able to speak more clearly and openly about my family history, and I think I would like that. But that happens not to be my fate.
So I have, for all sorts of various reasons, ended up living my life as a public figure with my real name, no protection, no guard. And this I think is how I’m gonna live out the final decades of my life.
[Music]