TRANSCRIPT
As I was sitting here contemplating pressing record on the video camera, what I watched going through my mind was all these fears. Fears that what I was going to say wasn’t going to be good enough and it wouldn’t make the point well enough, that it wouldn’t be up to my standards or up to anybody’s standards. And the irony is, the subject matter of the video that I wanted to record and that I’m going to talk about now is how difficult it is to grow up in an environment where we are not valued.
And I’m going to use myself as an example. I realized that this is a perfect example that I have, a perfect, a high standard example, because I know my life story so well. In a way, I’ve gained some perspective on it. And what I see is that I grew up in an environment with parents who demanded things of me that were impossible. They wanted me to be somebody that not only I wasn’t, but somebody that I never could be. They wanted me, in a way, to be the perfect parent for them. They wanted me to love them perfectly, care about them perfectly, put their needs first, their desires first. They wanted me to be the parents who they never had.
Both my parents had two parents each who failed them profoundly and dramatically, and they became adults looking for other people to fill in the gaps for where they weren’t loved. They looked to each other. My parents looked to each other in their partnership for exactly that, and they looked to me for that. They looked to everyone for that. But when they had real power over someone, me being the first child that they ever had, they had the power to try to mold me into that perfect parent. And this was so unconscious, but what it really meant was that they didn’t value me for me. They valued me only to the degree that I was able to match up to what they wanted me to be.
And the problem is, deep down in my soul, I didn’t want to be that. I hated that. I resented it. It made me furious. It made me sad. It made me feel betrayed. It made me feel abandoned. And those feelings of mine were correct, yet I wasn’t allowed to feel those feelings because those feelings directly went against what my parents valued. Those feelings made them value me less. So I pushed those feelings down. I tried to reject myself, and that was one of the big consequences of growing up in an environment where I, the true me, the real essence of who I was, wasn’t valued. That I had to reject myself.
I tried so hard to reject myself. I was recently going through a lot of notes I’d written about my childhood, hundreds of pages of them, in fact. And what I saw again and again and again is a little boy who became a big boy who became a young adult who was growing up in an environment where he wasn’t allowed to be himself. He wasn’t allowed to be honest. He wasn’t allowed to be true. And yet this was never told to him. What was told to me was, “Be yourself. Be honest. Be true. We love you for who you are.” My dad even said it many times, “I love you unconditionally.” I’ve talked about that in quite a few other videos, but it wasn’t true, and it was very confusing to me.
So I don’t like to curse so much in my videos, but I’m gonna do it here. It was a mind [ __ ] for me, a real mind [ __ ] where I was being given a message that was completely contrary to the actual reality of the deeper message that the same people were giving me. It was so confusing. So what I was really being told is, “We value you for you as long as you reject you for who you really are.” And this was so confusing to me. It was like, how was I supposed to grow up and develop and love myself? In fact, I was taught from the very earliest ages of my life that to be accepted and loved meant that I had to hate myself. I had to hate whole parts of me that didn’t coincide with who my parents wanted and thought they even needed me to be.
And so I grew up learning that it was bad to fight for myself, that it was bad to keep a connection with myself. That to have a stronger connection with myself meant that I would be rejected by the people whose job it was to love me the most. If that’s not confusing, then I don’t know what is. And also, it’s ugly because there were consequences to this in my life. How was I supposed to make true and honest friends when I wasn’t allowed to be true and honest? How was I supposed to be drawn to people who are true and honest when if I was close to them, I would start to become more true and honest, and then I’d go home to my much more powerful, important environment to me and be rejected for it?
So it’s like my parents wanted me and set me up for choosing fake friends, choosing people who weren’t honest. One thing that I saw again and again looking through these notes of my childhood, this autobiography of my childhood as it were, was that I had two options in my life. The first option was to do what my parents wanted me to do, and that was on an emotional, psychological level to die, on a level of authenticity to die, to push myself down and to not be real. The other option was to break away from them.
And what I saw reading these notes about my childhood was that I had one quality that I think made it inevitable that I was going to choose breaking away, and that was that I had spirit. I had fight inside myself. There was some part of me that in spite of this horrible environment in which I was growing up, I loved myself anyway. Some part of me was willing to sacrifice them in order to have this most important thing in my life, which was me.
When I was very young, I could only do this minimally because I needed them too much. That is an inevitable consequence of being a very young child. You need your parents a lot. This is part of being a higher mammal. We don’t become independent on just a physiological or a biological level in two weeks or two months or two years. It was like, yeah, I had some rebellion when I was little. I wanted to be real always, but they shut it down because they had the power to do it. Because there were too many things I needed from them, very, very basic things that I needed from them in order to keep developing. So I had to put my rebellion, as it were, on hold, my rebellion against their rejection of me.
But as I got older, I did start breaking away in small ways. I started having friendships out in my neighborhood that my parents didn’t even know about. They didn’t even know what was going on in my friendships with my friends, the realness that was happening. I didn’t want necessarily to bring these friends home. I wanted to stay away from my home a lot. I had a private life of imagination just in relationship to my own self that was separate from them that they didn’t know about. So basically what it was, was I was breaking away to the little bit that I could.
And as time went on, that little bit grew more and more and more, such that by the time I was a teenager, I had a lot more of a private life. And by the way, this wasn’t fun. Yes, it was good to have a private life, but it was hell because my parents were very sensitive to this. They were very sensitive to the little object who they owned, that little object being me. They wanted to control. They still want to control me, and I haven’t even talked to them in over 10 years. They would still love to control me and manipulate me and twist me. They hate my videos. My dad has occasionally sent me emails saying how much he despises this YouTube channel. “Take it down. It’s horrible. Blah blah blah.” He doesn’t say it’s lies. I mean, he implies that it’s lies, but he would never say it because he knows that.
It’s true, but they hate me now, and it hurts me at some level still. Imagine when they really had power over me, and I was living with them, and looking at them, and seeing them. They were actually the primary people in my life. I believed I loved my mother. I believe I loved my mother more than I loved anyone else in the world back when I was a kid, a teenager, even in my early 20s. That is how deluded I was about who I was and about how I really felt. I had that feeling to survive. I still needed things from her, the least being when I was a kid: money, food, things like this. But also that sense of intimacy and love.
It’s like I’ve heard that statement: the number one predictor of what an adult’s religion is, is what the religion of his childhood was. And all these different religions that are so contradictory to each other, you think people would choose a religion based on what they think in a rational way. The truth is, it’s like no, they picked the religion by and large of what their parents were, what their parents’ values were. People believe, well, the truth and the denial of their parents. I certainly did it. Even though I was breaking away, and my really deeper breaking away was an inevitability, I realize now I still believed a lot of their lies. I believed a lot of their denial. I believed a lot of their [ __ ] because it was painful not to. I didn’t want them to reject me. And pardon, also because at some level, this is the saddest part, and I’ve talked about this before too, I internalized their values. I internalized their terrible values. There were good ones; there were some good ones, but there were some really bad ones, and I internalized this. This became a part of me. It became a part of my character.
This is one of the big consequences and terrible consequences I saw of growing up in an environment where I wasn’t valued. I didn’t value myself in many ways. I didn’t value truth. I didn’t value honesty. I couldn’t value the truth and honesty of other people in a lot of different ways. And this has been the legacy of my childhood that swept me into adulthood. This is why my early adulthood in my 20s was largely very confusing and messed up. I did a lot of really stupid and painful things. I did a lot of self-hating things, self-abnegating things, self-rejecting things. Reading the story of myself, it’s like I did a lot of things that I wasn’t proud of, hurt a lot of people, and hurt myself a lot. And it was very confusing because when I was doing a lot of these things, my parents supported me. They said this was good, a lot of this.
And also part of the consequence of growing up in an environment where I was so not valued, or the parts of me that were sick were valued highly, was that my parents liked me being disturbed. They wanted me to be disturbed. The more disturbed I was, the less I could break away, the less I could be functional, the less I would love myself and realize how much they didn’t love me. I couldn’t have perspective on them. This has been the struggle, the challenge of my adult life: to work this stuff out, to figure this stuff out, to look inside myself, to look in the mirror inside my mind, inside my heart, to look at my actions, to look at my history, to journal about my behavior, to journal about my dreams, to remember my traumas, to look at my own bad stupid behavior and to say, where did this come from?
First of all, what did I do? Where did this come from? Why was I this way? Where are the roots of this inside of me? What is the hidden need behind this? Because what I found again and again and again and again is that when I traced my bad behavior to its roots, the roots were unmet needs, real deep true needs that I had inside of myself. And so my job as an adult has been to learn how to love myself. Yes, I came into adulthood with the expectation that other people would meet these unmet needs of mine, that it was even the job of other people. It would be the job of a girlfriend to be the other half for me in a way, to be the parent figure for me.
I had what I talked about in another video, and a video that I really liked. I recently went back and watched it. I had a lot of parental rescue fantasy. I projected my idealized parents onto other people, and I expected them to rescue me. This is a big part of why I’m so glad I didn’t have children, because I would have projected this onto them. And this is normal in our world. I think this is, I see it, I observe this not just by anecdote but by data, thousands and thousands of anecdotes. This is normal. This is what parents do. When they have unmet needs and they have power over their child to one degree or other, and usually it’s a big degree, they project their unresolved parental needs onto their children, and they expect their children to meet their needs. They bend their children, and they have the power to do this because this is the power of a parent.
Well, I’m glad I didn’t have children, but God, I projected this onto a lot of other people in my life. And like my parents, it’s like I had cunning, I had manipulativeness, I had strategy for doing it, and it was unconscious. And you know what? It didn’t make me feel good. And the reason that I can say that is because I was healthy enough to realize it. I’m like, this is not the kind of relationship I want. I said this many times with girlfriends in my life. I realized if I keep going further in this relationship with this girlfriend, or even with some friends, I’m just going to end up replicating my parents’ relationship with each other and replicating my parents’ relationship with me. And that is not okay. That was my internal conversation with myself.
I wasn’t valuing these people properly. By being raised in an environment where I wasn’t valued properly, I couldn’t value other people. I couldn’t value my relationships with them. I wasn’t generous. Loving altruism wasn’t really such a strong part of my life. So I embarked on my healing process once I became conscious of these dynamics: journaling, dream analysis, meditating inside of myself, taking distance from unhealthy people. A profoundly important part of my life was looking at the feelings that came up for me when I took distance from my parents, from my greater family system, how guilty I felt, realizing that this guilt was something that they had implanted in me. It was like a fishing hook that they’d stuck in me, and as soon as I pulled away, I’d start feeling that, and it would start ripping me back into their system.
Well, I started taking out the fishing hooks, and they hated me for it. They despised me for breaking away and becoming healthier. I’ve noticed that it’s a very, very interesting thing that I’ve noticed in my life, and I didn’t really begin to notice it until I became an adult. Because I believed their sick narrative when I was a child, what I realized as an adult, a very simple lesson, is the healthier I became on a deeper emotional level, the less they liked me, the less they valued me, the more they hated me. And how confusing is that? But the more I started gaining perspective on it, becoming conscious, becoming mature, the more I realized, ah, this is an indicator not just of who they are and who they were, but what the whole environment in which they raised me was. It was a sick environment that was negating of me.
And so my job as an adult, the hard work that I’ve put in for, well, 30 years now of being an adult, has been to love myself, has been to heal, has been to work out these traumas. It’s a fundamental trauma to not be loved properly by one’s family, to not be valued for the true self that one really is by one’s family, to work out this fundamental trauma with all its thousands of little arms, because it played out in all areas of my life, all spheres of my existence and my personality. So loving myself more.
Healing my traumas. Grieving. Lots and lots and lots of grieving. Grieving the losses of years of my life. The losses of all the relationships that I had that might have otherwise been much healthier. Grieving the loss of not just my parents, because I lost them. That was good in a lot of ways, but I also lost the fantasy of, well, who they might have been. Lost a lot of perks. Lost inheritances. Lost grandparents who rejected me for rejecting my parents, who had been rejected by my grandparents.
But, and then seeing how much I’ve gained. The more that I gained, the more that it fueled my journey to keep gaining. The more I got myself, the more I realized I love myself. And this is more precious than anything my parents gave me. Any money they could have given me. Any perk, home, land, anything like that. Loving myself brought me the most important thing in my life.
And that’s what motivates me to come here and share this with you.