TRANSCRIPT
The norm defines anything that veers away from its curve of normalcy as mentally ill. So if someone is very, very mentally disturbed, even more than the norm is, because I consider the norm to be very sick, very mentally sick. But if you veer away from the norm in terms of being more seriously mentally disturbed, the normal define you as mentally ill.
But the fascinating thing about the norm is actually, if you veer away from the norm in a very healthy direction, in a legitimately healthy direction, you’ve worked out more of your traumas. You see reality in a much more clear and honest way than the norm does. The norm will also define you as mentally ill because the norm doesn’t differentiate between being extremely mentally healthy and extremely mentally ill. They just see it all as extremely mentally ill because their only criteria for healthiness is defining it against their own standard of convention.
I didn’t know that actually before I started this website. Until I started just getting all over the years, it’s been hundreds of emails of people saying the same things over and over again and the same criticisms. At first, I used to reply to the people and try to have dialogue with them, and it never went anywhere because what I found again and again is the people really projecting a lot of stuff onto me. A lot of people projected their own unconscious unresolved rage at their parents and hurt that they felt about what their parents had done to them. They projected that onto me.
At first, it was just very disturbing to me, causing me a lot of stress actually. I would say in some ways it still does. I never liked getting those emails, but at the same time, in a strange way, it’s sort of a backhanded compliment. It’s like what I wrote triggered something very, very deep in them.
Connecting with their true self opens up a whole world of implications. It starts a massive ball rolling in their life that is actually not easy, and I can understand that. For instance, if they start connecting with their true self, they have to start feeling some of their feelings. They have to start coming out of their dissociated state, and that’s something that a lot of people find completely intolerable.
I sometimes wonder if people sometimes are so damaged that if they came out of their dissociation too quickly, it might literally just kill them. I think Alice Miller has said that at various points, and I’ve appreciated that. Also, as a therapist, I’ve watched people. Sometimes people want to come out of their dissociated state very quickly, and they’ll tell way too much information about their past way too quickly, and it just completely overwhelms them.
So now I’ve learned: tell your story very, very slowly. Don’t tell me too much. Also, in email, sometimes people have emailed me about my website, and they want to tell me their entire story when they don’t even know who I am. They’ll tell me the most painful things about their history—histories of violence and molestation and rapes and terrible things, that horrible physical abuse that’s happened—and they don’t even know who I am. And sometimes they don’t even give their names, and it’s like, it’s uncomfortable to get because for me, it’s like I appreciate that they desperately want to tell someone who feels safe, but at the same time, it’s like I’m not really the person to tell because they don’t have a relationship with me.
But if I were a cult leader and my website were a cult, I would encourage people to tell your story. Tell everything! I’d set up a forum where I would encourage people to tell the most painful things that happen to them because when people start telling me that kind of stuff, actually, in a way, they are treating me like a cult leader because they don’t know who I am. They’re projecting stuff onto me. They haven’t developed a relationship with me. They don’t really know the core, or maybe they sense the core of me, but they have an experience that interpersonally, and they just desperately want some new parental figure to love them and make it all go away. And that’s what a cult leader would propose to do and would encourage people to reveal everything as quickly as possible.
I don’t want people to do that. I don’t want people projecting that kind of stuff onto me. That’s another thing cult leaders love: it when someone projects everything onto them and also projects them as this idealized godlike being, which is not me at all. It’s like I have my gifts and I have my talents, but I can’t save anybody, especially via email.
Now another thing is how much money do I derive from my website? If I was really being cultish, I would find ways to make a lot of money at it. And I would say, interestingly, mostly my website has turned off potential patients, and I knew that going into it. So if I was really trying to start a cult, I would use a whole different sort of language, and I would be much more seductive in the way I was presenting my ideas. Instead, I’m just presenting them as I believe them, with the idea that the right people will read it and will get something out of it. And that’s really been my goal: to find allies, not followers.