TRANSCRIPT
Children naturally, inherently have a deeply embedded sense of fairness. Even children who act in very unfair ways to others often know what fairness is. And everybody, every child, desperately wants to be treated fairly. I think there’s just some inherent part in the makeup of human beings that knows what fairness is and loves fairness, loves justice, the truth of justice, the truth of fairness.
And yet, as I was sitting and contemplating making this video, I was thinking how unfair, profoundly unfair, the world often is. The world of the family system, the environment of the child, the child’s relationship with his or her parents, and the world in general. I mean, we see unfairness everywhere—in different nations, in different cultures, in different religions, in different eras, and certainly in nature. All you have to do is turn on nature shows on YouTube itself, and you can see so many incredible examples of unfairness.
I think of things I just saw as a child, long before there was the internet or YouTube, where I saw animals in nature that were treated so unfairly. Horrible things. I remember once seeing a baby duck, a mallard duck, that had its beak bitten off by a snapping turtle. And I remember I wanted to catch this duck, and this poor duck was terrified and just stayed in the middle of this pond to avoid being caught further. And a few days later, it just died. But I remember it screaming and screaming because it still had a voice box, but it had no beak. It couldn’t eat, and it was a horror. I just remember being well confronted with this idea so profoundly, only at seven, eight years old. It’s just like, this is the most unfair thing I’ve ever seen because other ducks don’t have to go through this. Yes, some die, many die, but this level of unfairness, the suffering, is horrible.
But children, some children, clearly suffer more, and there’s a terrible injustice in that and in terrible unfairness. And what do I make of this? Why do some children seem to have such a more—well, definitely do have a more horrible childhood than others? Why do some children get abused more? Why do some children get rejected more? Why do some children get abandoned more? Why do some children even get overtly killed by their parents? It’s terribly unfair and unjust. And where does this come from in humanity? Humanity, who has a deeply embedded sense of fairness and justice.
And I think the only answer I can come up with is trauma. Unresolved trauma. That when people have unresolved trauma, a little bit of unresolved trauma or a lot of unresolved trauma, it twists their sense of fairness. It twists their sense of justice. That often they lose some sense of fairness; they lose their perspective on where they are and who they are in relation to other people. And sometimes it makes people very selfish, to use that modern popular word. All this unresolved abuse can make some people very, very narcissistic. It can make them think about themselves first, second, and third at the expense of others. It makes them take advantage of other people, twists the sense of justice so they want special treatment, special fair treatment for themselves at the expense of others. So they can treat others very, very unfairly, really shift the balance of fairness in favor of themselves. And this is coming right from their unresolved traumas—all the ways in which they were abused and often neglected, all the ways in which they were not loved. They’re trying to rebalance the scales because they were never able to heal from it.
And I’m talking all across humanity, whether you want to use that word narcissistic or not. Whatever, we’re talking about people who were abused and neglected, who didn’t get a sense of deep self from which they could heal. They were not able to deeply engage in their grieving process. And what I’ve seen in myself and in many, many others is that when people begin the healing process, the process of acknowledging exactly what was done to them, owning their sense of self on the inside, owning the healthy sides of themselves and owning the abused and harmed sides, calling out the abusers, if only in their own mind, knowing exactly what happened and how it harmed them, really figuring out how damaged they really were—or in my case, how damaged I really was—it started rebalancing the scales in a way by making a really fair and just assessment of what happened to me.
I began to become able to make a really fair and just assessment of who I was. And this was very, very painful. There’s a reason why a lot of people don’t want to do it because it’s not very nice to look at. Sometimes it’s like a lot of what I saw about myself wasn’t very pretty. It was like, oh, I saw that I was a very wounded and damaged person, a limited person in a lot of ways. It really helped me explain to myself a lot of why some of my relationships were kind of messed up and why I was so confused. And also, well, why I was immature in a lot of ways—literally immature. I was not yet mature because I had not healed. I’d never had a chance to become a more mature, integrated, developed, healthy, fair, and just self. I was a very lost person.
And that when I started to make my fair and just assessment of myself, when I started to become a world unto myself in my own mind, when I started to really have a relationship with me, it’s like I wanted to know the truth. I wanted to make that fair and just assessment. In fact, it became a desperate urge for me. I needed to do it because I was looking at myself in a very fake way, artificial way before that. I was looking at myself through the eyes—the twisted eyes—of my fake and unjust family, my fake and unjust society, my world, all these friends I had, these schools and teachers, and all these people. They had a very twisted and unfair and unjust view of themselves, of everything, of my parents, and of me. And the more I looked at myself fairly and justly, the more I really had something to work with. I had some real clay that I could mold, and I could begin to grieve.
And as I grieved, I grieved what I had lost. And this was fair, this was just, and I knew that I was doing myself a really fair turn, a really just turn. And did I have a lot of anger at my abusers, primarily at my parents? Oh yes, I did. And I wanted to punish them in my relationship with them. I wanted them to own what they’d done and acknowledge it, and I tried to get them to do it, and it didn’t really work. Basically, they just became more angry at me, often more abusive toward me. I was older, so they couldn’t get away with it as much; they couldn’t harm me as much. But they definitely did not love me more when I called them out in my interpersonal tribunal with them. And pretty much almost nobody agreed with me. My family system didn’t agree with me. That’s when I realized the only tribunal I could have that was really fair and just was the tribunal I had in relationship to my core of true self—the part of me that was the child that deeply knew what justice and fairness was, and it always had known.
And so I developed my relationship with that part of me more and more and more, and I grew away from my family because I realized they considered me crazy for becoming healthier and becoming more honest. And what happened to me as the result of this? As I grieved more, grieved the loss of my actual parents, of the fantasy parents who I had always wanted, and of the other people in my life who I thought would save me too. I thought my university would save me, my professors would save me, a career would save me. And I realized so much of this was just smoke and mirrors. It was fake, it was lies. They were abusers also; they were just like my parents, and they sided with my parents, the unhealthy sides of my parents. And so I had to get away from all this, and I entered a world, an adult world, that was very confusing, that didn’t just accept me and hold me. It was very hard to find friends and allies.
Slowly, slowly I found other ones. But I realized the only friend and ally that I had for so long, the primary one I had, 99% of my friend and ally was that deeply true core of me, who I was developing and loving, and who was really feeding me with love.
And also, I’ve come to realize this over time: nature loved me because nature is fair. Maybe not in the short run. That little duck who got its beak bit off by a snapping turtle, maybe that wasn’t fair. But in the bigger picture, I raised many, many ducks. Many, many ducks, and they all eventually died. I got to see it because how many, how long did they live? Two, three years at the most. They lived out free and let them go in ponds. They were killed by raccoons and turtles, and some disappeared.
It’s like in a strange way, life is painful. In the real world, life isn’t fair, but it is fair the same. We all come to the same end. Even the mountains get ground down and become soft over time. They change, they lose their sharp edges. Those sharp edges die over the millennia, and I derive a kind of strength from that.
I derive a strength from realizing even this beloved planet that we live on, this planet Earth, which we are messing up in some ways, is bigger than us. It has the arc of a life too. How many more billions of years will it go on circling around the sun before it eventually ends? Before our sun, the sun which is the center of our solar system, runs out of energy, joins some other part of the universe?
It’s like in the biggest picture of all, there is a fairness. And I think the core of the truth of each of us, in me and in everyone, and in every child and in every creature, is the truth of the whole universe: that sense of fairness.
And in the ideal sense, when people are not traumatized, when they are less traumatized, when they are treated with love, when they figure out how to deeply learn to treat themselves with love, they become more fair beings, more just beings toward themselves and toward others.
And that is my hope for humanity. That as we heal more—and I pray—I mean, I see that some minority of people are doing this, but maybe someday the masses of humanity in some future era will do this more. It’s the only thing that really gives me great hope that humans as a species will become more aligned with the fairness of the universe, the fairness of nature, the fairness of our planet, and will not traumatize each other. And we will learn to live more in sync with the fairness and truth of the planet, learn to love and respect each person as the beautiful universe of truth that each individual is.
[Music]
You.