TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the subject of choosing a person, a safe person we can confide in. Confide our deepest feelings, our pain, our truth. Oh, the thoughts that we’re holding inside, the truth of our history, the truth of our families.
When I was young, I didn’t have anybody to confide in. I didn’t have anybody that I really trusted. I certainly couldn’t confide in my parents; they weren’t safe. And my friends that I had at the time, we didn’t have that kind of relationship. So I really didn’t know who I could talk with. And I made my mistakes. I chose the wrong people to confide in.
I think of the first really poignant experience of this. It sticks with me all these years later. It came when I was 12 years old. I was in sixth grade, and my grandmother had just died—my father’s mother. My family was in turmoil. My father was having, well, he was having a sort of breakdown over it. He’d been abused and neglected by his mother in terrible ways. He’d never processed it. He’d always hoped she would love him, and suddenly she died. Nothing was resolved. It was scary. It was sad. He wasn’t really talking about it in a normal way; he was just kind of freaking out. His body was starting to break down.
And I remember going to school, and one day in school, I must have looked vulnerable because there was a kid who was a nasty boy, and he was teasing me and teasing me and teasing me. I think he sensed my vulnerability, and he was picking at me. And finally, I just exploded. I started chasing him, and I wanted to beat him up. And right before I hit him, I remember it just hit me like something, like a realization that I had lost my mind, even though I was only 12. And I just broke down crying. I ran out of the room, and I ran into the school boys’ bathroom. I was really sobbing in the bathroom.
And suddenly, the bathroom door opened, and another boy walked in. It was a boy I’d known for maybe four years at that point. I’d never really liked him. He was a popular boy. He’d certainly never really liked me. I think I’d wanted him to like me because he was a leader, and he was well-respected, and he was taller and bigger, and I was sort of a little boy and not considered to be of much value. But he came, and he sat down next to me on this bench in the bathroom. I can’t remember if he put his arm around me or not, but in my memory, he did. And he said, “Dan, what’s going on? What’s going on with you?”
And he seemed so caring. In that moment, I felt I had found my person, my person in whom I could confide. And so I did. I confided about my grandmother dying, and my father having problems, and my family being strange. I confided all this stuff in him, and it was wonderful. It felt amazing. It was like unburdening my soul. And he listened, and he said, “Good, good. I understand. It’s good that you can talk. It’s good to let it out. Good for you, blah blah blah.” And I remember thinking that I had found a best friend. In fact, I knew I had found a best friend, and it was wonderful.
And you know, after 5 or 10 minutes, or however long it took to bear my soul to him, we walked back to the classroom, and life went on. And then I went home, and I remember feeling a lot better because it’s a wonderful feeling to confide in a good person.
And then I went back to school the next day, and I saw this boy, and he ignored me. And at lunchtime in the cafeteria, he went and sat with his friends. And I looked at him to see if I could join him, and he ignored me. So I went and kind of sat with the—I don’t even remember, nobody probably. I just sat alone. And I remember the whole rest of the day, he just ignored me. And I remember once or twice I tried to talk with him, and he was minimally polite, but there was no acknowledgement that I just shared my deepest painful secrets with him. And I don’t remember that we ever actually spoke again.
I think maybe a few years later we had some conversations, and we were in the same sport in school. And I remember he was more popular and a better athlete for a while, and he kind of looked down on me and maybe made a few comments, but never was friends with me again. And I remember, which is why I share this now, how I felt, especially that next day. But from then on, looking at that guy, he became a model for something in my life—a bad confessor, a false confessor, a dishonest person who had taken advantage of my vulnerability. And how I felt was terrible. I felt used and betrayed by him, and I felt humiliated, let down—kind of the same old story that I’d felt in my family as a kid. And here he was, just another replication of it.
But what I learned is some people can really take advantage of people who need to bear their soul. And I remember after that thinking, at some level, I need to be more careful about who I open up to. Now, that’s not to say I was perfect because I made that same mistake again. I think four years later, I was having another big problem in my family. My mother was very ill, and she was in the hospital, and my dad said she might die. As it happened, she didn’t die, but it was like all these terrible feelings came up, and I had nobody to talk about it with. So I confided it in a teacher, one of my teachers in school, who never really liked me that much, but she was sort of a motherly type. And I asked her if I could tell her something, and I cried and cried, and she listened. And afterward, it just went back to normal. I don’t think I ever spoke with her again, and she never followed up in any way, and she never really seemed to care about me at all.
And I remember feeling again less than the first time with that boy, but feeling again like, “Gosh, I chose someone who didn’t care.” And again, it happened when I went to therapy later on, and bearing my soul to these people whose job it was to listen to me and realizing I made a fool of myself in a way because they really didn’t care. They were doing their job, but their heart wasn’t in it, so they really weren’t doing their job.
And then I saw it when I became a therapist, when I was working in clinics for the first several years of my therapy career. And people would come; they would be assigned to me. My job was to do their intake for the first session. I wasn’t even going to be their therapist. My job was just to write down everything that they told me and ask a whole list of questions to get their life story—kind of an inappropriate scenario. It’s like, wait a second, if I’m going to get someone’s life story, this is the beginning of a relationship and a commitment. I should work with them. But no, the system was I would do their intake, and then a committee who didn’t even know them would assign them to a different therapist.
But these people would come, and it happened many, many times where I would ask them very personal questions about their history, their relationship with their parents, trauma history, all sorts of things like this. And they would bear their souls and cry, and I would see that look—like many of them even told me they’d never told this to anybody before. And then bang, it was done, and I’d send them to somebody else, and then they’d have to tell their story all over again to another complete stranger. And it was like, wait a second, this is a ripoff. And eventually, I started telling people, “Be very careful what you tell me because I probably won’t even be assigned to you. It’s going to be a committee that gives you just gives you your life story to somebody else.” So, you know, even though you’re supposed to tell me this…
Stuff you probably should be very, very careful about. So now I’ve shared all these, you know, thoughts about don’t share with this person and my experiences, negative experiences with sharing with people. But then I found in my life some people who I would even say helped to save my life because they were safe.
As it happened, they weren’t therapists, but they were friends. For starters, I think anybody who listens, therapist or not, at some level is a friend if they’re a really good listener. But the basic ingredient in someone who’s good to confide in is someone I think, number one, the most important thing is a compassionate person. Someone who really cares, not somebody who fakes it, not someone who pretends to care. Because there’s a lot of reasons, like why did this guy, when I was a kid and 12 years old, why did he do that? He got power. He got power from me being vulnerable to him. It made him feel important. It made him feel stronger in the power dynamic between us. He did it to take advantage of me, to drink my pain so he could feel stronger and know things about me.
And I’ve seen this with a lot of therapists, actually. They love the power of having someone be vulnerable in front of them, and they get to be the one who knows and thinks and listens and is invulnerable and gives answers and dispenses wisdom. But a good person who listens and hears people’s pain in their confessions is someone who’s already listened to their own pain within, who can relate. Because that’s the second thing. It’s not just caring about someone; it’s also having the capacity to understand, the capacity to put this other person’s pain in some context.
I think it also really helps if someone else has been through similar things and has made sense of them and has some wisdom about it. I think of some of the things that I’ve confided in people, really painful things from my history, and the incredible value I’ve gotten to confide in someone who gets it, who can see more than I can see. Because sometimes when I’m desperate—and I’ve seen this for other people—when people are desperate inside, they’ll just share sometimes with anyone because they need to get it out. But in that desperation, they also have a limited perspective on their own self and on their feelings, and things can get very distorted and confused.
Feelings can get distorted. Ancient childhood traumas can really distort someone’s view of what they’ve even gone through and what their experience is. The person might know their feelings but might not have them in any context. So to have someone who is outside of that and yet cares and wants the best for you, or when I confide in someone, wants the best for me, who knows my goodness, knows your goodness, knows their own goodness, can see the pain of a wounded child and see how that child was wounded, perhaps how that wounded child in all of us was replicating our wounds in the world.
I remember actually confiding later in a friend, a real caring, mature friend, about the experience of telling that boy in sixth grade when I was 12 about, you know, this painful stuff in my family and how he’d taken advantage of me. And I remember having to confide in someone else and really having someone, oh my God, and then telling him, referring his own stories back to me of what he’d been through and the wonderful value in that. Having someone who not only could relate to it but could show me through his own experience that he knew what it was like, that I felt much less alone.
And so as I wrap up this video, I speak in favor of confessing, of finding someone who’s safe, but finding someone who deserves my confession, deserves our confession. Someone who has earned it, not someone who smells vulnerability and goes in for the kill. And not someone who has chosen a profession where other people will confide in them because that person who chooses this profession feels so insecure that they need other people to be more insecure to bolster their sense of maturity and security. So many therapists do that.
I speak in favor of letting someone prove to themselves over time that they have insight, that they have understanding, that they are respectful, that they are a caring person, that they have feelings, that they have life experience, that they really have wisdom, that they are loyal. And once the person has earned that confidence, then we are safe to confide in them.