TRANSCRIPT
Sometimes I feel stuck. I can’t see that I am growing. The signs of my growth, my psychological development, my increased connection with my true self are not so obvious. And that’s not easy. It can be confusing. It can make me look at myself and say, “Am I living my life the right way? Am I doing what I’m supposed to be doing on this journey through existence on my one chance to live? Am I really using my life to the best of my ability?”
Many years ago, 15, 20 years ago, I had a lot of bursting experiences of grieving, deep, deep grieving experiences, overt breaking from my family system, overt leaps in consciousness where I could see things about my past, see things about the sickness of my parents, the ways in which they had harmed me, the ways in which I had been harmed that were loud, mode things that were very obvious. I knew I was growing and fast. I didn’t feel stuck. I felt terrible a lot. I felt despairing a lot. I felt energized a lot, but not stuck.
And now this begs the question, and this is really what I’ve come here to talk about. Am I stuck? I’ve actually been making a lot of videos lately. A lot of them I’ll probably never put on YouTube. A lot of them I just go back and watch for my own self. But one thing I’ve seen while I’m making these videos and watching them too is a little clue that I find very interesting and it’s something new about me. It’s not big and loud. It’s not the loud grieving, the deep crying, the wild intense realizations and revelations about my history and myself. What I have felt and what I have seen mirrored to me when I watch these videos of myself and I’m doing it right now. So, if you want to rewind a few seconds, you can see it. It’s these new small subtle facial expressions of thought that I didn’t have before. Pauses that are different. And this is my clue or one of because I have other clues too and I’m going to talk about them too. But this has been my first big clue that something has changed in me.
I think part of the big reason I have felt stuck is because I’m comparing my life now to my life 10, 15, 20 years ago, 25 years ago when the big revelations were happening. And I don’t see that bigness now. I’m doing it again. Small expressions of feeling in my face. It’s something is settling in me and it’s small and it’s quieter and it’s new and I take a certain excitement in this. It’s like I never had this before. It’s like the best I can use as an analogy is looking through a microscope and 15, 20 years ago I was doing coarse adjustments, the big adjustments where the microscope was going way up and down and now I’m doing fine adjustments, tweaking, but not that I’m even really so consciously doing these tweaking. It’s like something has settled in me that’s still working out.
It’s like maybe what happened to me 10, 15, 20 years ago, the loud big things that changed in my life, the big volcanic explosions of consciousness that made me know that everything in my existence was changing, everything in my perspective was changing, and huge revelations and huge insights and huge amounts of productive writing and thought and talking was coming out of me as the result of this massive changes in my relationships with others. Now, it’s like the volcanic ash that’s exploded decades later is filtering down and finding a new sense of truth, perhaps a new settled way of being.
But the other thing I noticed is I still am processing. I’m processing a lot. I’m still processing my history with my family. I’m processing the hell that I went through in breaking from them, breaking from my parents, breaking from my extended family, breaking from my whole family system that got implanted in my head, in a way vomiting them out, studying the vomit, looking what was inside of me, looking at who I had become as the result of having spent decades being so intimately close to them and grieving that, grieving the person they made me into, grieving my own self-hatred, my history of rejecting myself, rejecting others, being a bad friend, being a bad friend to myself, being just like my parents, feeling grateful that I never had kids ’cause I would have passed it all on to them, especially if I’d had them early on before I really did a lot of waking up.
Also being grateful that I didn’t have kids because, well, I see more and more now how crazy, crazy, crazy and sad the world is and that I don’t have to take the responsibility for having brought people into this, new people into this. It’s hard enough to bring a new self, a new Daniel, a new true person into this world every day to go out into the world. I find it harder and harder to go out and interface with the world as a new real, more connected, more congealed true self. In a way, interfacing with the world for me was easier decades ago when I was less connected because I was more like them, them being the average people of the world. I was more conventional. Now I’m not. It’s more painful to interact with average people. Now I have to travel further psychologically within myself away from myself to be able to interface in a normal acceptable way with average people than I used to have to do.
I wonder this. This is just speculation here, but let’s say I as a child had been raised with deep and consistent love and respect, not brutality, perversity, inconsistency, abandonment. Let’s say I’d been raised in a way that I was cherished and mirrored much more unconditionally. What would my transition into the world have been like? My transition into adulthood. I wonder if it would have been even more difficult than it was. And I wonder that sometimes in my travels throughout the world, I see families. I spend time with families that are much more loving and respectful and consistent with their children than my parents were. And I wonder how it will be for these children I observe now, children who are more nurtured and cherished and respected. I wonder how it will be for them to transition out of their families into the world. I fear for these children. I fear for all children. But I wonder how it will be for these children who have more of a sense of themselves, more self-respect, who more easily honor themselves because they were honored.
This is just speculative thought now getting away a little bit from the subject of am I stuck? How did I get onto this new subject? But then in a way also that original question am I stuck connects with this new part of me now that I’m talking about my fear for the children of the world. These are things I didn’t think about so much back when. So that’s another side of a testament to my new growth is that I have new ideas, new perspectives, new thoughts about the world, and sometimes thoughts about the world that were similar to what I thought 10, 15, 20 years ago, but more intense now, more ferocious, more strong, less likely to be thrown off the horse by the challenges of the sick, disturbed, conventional world.
I was thinking about one thing 20 years ago or so when I was coming up with the idea, an idea that no one else ever told me. It was an original idea that came from my mind that all parents to one degree or other are traumatizing and that the average family is very traumatizing and that the average human being out in the world is extremely traumatized. Now the conventional mental health system says 1% of people are very traumatized and some people have some trauma and most people are not very traumatized. But I was thinking 20 years ago, nah, I think most people are very traumatized. But 20 years ago, it was a very dangerous thought for me to think. And I kept coming up with challenges to my own ideas and trying to prove to myself that I was wrong. And a lot of inner torment that I went through to prove to myself that, well, maybe average people are healthier than I consider in my gut. Nowadays, I know I was right. I don’t challenge myself. I don’t have to repeat those challenges. I don’t have to attack myself in a way because I know how traumatized the world is. I’ve collected enough data. I don’t have to constantly repeat that over and over and over again. And this is another sign that I have settled in a deeper connection with truth inside of myself.
I think about this also 20 years ago when I was going through all this conflict inside of myself with my family and thinking about my place in the world and what was trauma and who am I and how do I grieve better and how do I get away from them and should I go back. I was a psychotherapist back then. I quit 15 years ago. I haven’t been a psychotherapist in that time. But I think if I were to go back to being a psychotherapist now, I speculate that I would be a lot better at it, more artistic at it, more strong at it because I have a stronger connection with my true self. But then I challenge myself. That’s why I laughed a little bit. I challenge myself and I think maybe I actually couldn’t handle being a psychotherapist now because perhaps too many of the people who came to me and paid me for psychotherapy would be like most people in the world so embedded in their family systems that they wouldn’t be able to handle interfacing with the deeper truths of me.
And out of compassion for them and kindness for them and respect for where they are, out of the need as a psychotherapist to be where they are, I would have to mirror them in their confusion and mirror a lot of ideas that they held that I didn’t believe. And it might be too difficult for me. It might be too torturous for me. It might require me to do the same thing that I talk about now that’s so hard for me to go and interface as a real honest person in the world now because I have to travel farther away from my real true self to interface more easily with the world. So maybe my way of sharing my therapeutic gift, as it were, my insights, my therapeutic insights, my human psychological insights now are more appropriate doing it through this video context that I’m doing it where I share these ideas, my own vulnerability, my insights, my hard-won thoughts through video rather than through one-on-one sessions with a few people a week.
Also, that’s another thing. Now I can reach so many more people now for free. And that does feel so good to me to know now that I have found a way, a time-tested way in which I can be useful to a lot of people where also I’m not promoting something that I don’t always believe in, which is psychotherapy. Instead, I promote something now that I believe in so much more strongly, which is self-healing, self-therapy, self-analysis, self-study, self-knowledge. I have a whole book that I wrote with a friend years ago on doing self-therapy. I can link to it in the description box, but I don’t even need to promote that because really what I have found through my own hard-won experience is that if we dig into ourselves, dig into our histories, dig into our feelings, if we can find a way to mirror the truth of ourselves through our own internal processes, even through our journaling, which saved my life and to some degree still does, we can grow. We can become unstuck in radical big ways and in radical smaller, quieter ways. And so I guess that’s the answer to my question.