TRANSCRIPT
I’ve often said that people should wait to have children until they’ve resolved all of their childhood traumas so that they won’t pass on their traumas to their children. One of the main criticisms I’ve gotten for that is that if everybody waited until they resolved their childhood traumas to have children, our human species would go extinct.
And I’ve thought about that a lot, and I decided to make a video on it. So let’s say that people did agree with me. Let’s say the whole world did agree and decided that they weren’t going to have children until they’d resolved all their traumas. Would our species go extinct?
The first thing is that the people who say our species would go extinct assume that people can’t heal their traumas, that people can’t really resolve all of their childhood traumas. And sadly, from what I’ve observed in the world, most people, given how the world is, don’t seem to be able to resolve their traumas. It’s extremely difficult. I’ve certainly resolved a lot, but there’s still a lot that I haven’t resolved. A lot of the stuff goes really, really deep into me. So that means that even I, who supposedly have done all this healing work, I wouldn’t even be appropriate to have children. And as it stands now, no, I don’t think it would be appropriate.
But the basic thing that I see is that part of why it’s so hard to heal childhood traumas is because so few people are really doing it. So pretty much everybody who’s trying to heal their traumas is doing it in virtual isolation. But even more than virtual isolation, they’re doing it against the flow of the world. They’re doing it against the flow of society. It really rubs society the wrong way when people do really start to resolve their childhood traumas. When people start to really look at what happened to them in their childhoods, when people really do speak out about what happened to them at the hands of their parents.
We live in a world where it’s very, very taboo to criticize parents, except in the most extreme cases of really, really extreme child abuse. Even then, sometimes it can be difficult for people to talk about it. A lot of people don’t even want to believe that parents do bad things, and especially normal average parents that do sort of average normal traumatic things to their children that really, really screw them up. Well, this is what makes up the world. This is what makes up society. So for people who really try to heal nowadays, it’s so difficult.
So now to go back to my hypothetical that everybody agreed, you know, it’s a bad idea to have kids until we’ve all resolved our traumas. Well, what would happen then? So let me just start with an added little caveat on the hypothetical. Let’s say the whole world decided, you know, we’re all just gonna wait, let’s say twenty years before we have kids and see how much as a world we can resolve our traumas. And what I think then is we would be looking at a completely different environment for healing.
Because what would happen then is that lots of people would be healing, and what would happen is that healing would become the norm, not denial of healing. And so it would be OK for people to talk about what they went through. And more so than that, it would be okay for people to acknowledge what they went through to themselves. They would be able to feel it a lot better because it’s very, very, very hard to heal when people are saying don’t do it. But what if people were saying yes, this is the healthy way to go, this is the appropriate way to live, this is the way to free one’s soul, to free one’s creativity, to free one’s real self?
And what I believe is that if people weren’t healing in isolation, they would heal so much more easily and so much faster. And then healing would become the new norm. Working out traumas would become the new norm. Actually, honestly critiquing the people who traumatized us would become the new norm. We wouldn’t live in such a parent-protecting culture. Instead, we would live in a culture where we look honestly at people. We don’t have to protect them. We can look honestly at who we really are, what really happened to us, and what the result of what really happened to us is.
And I think what would happen in this world is that, yeah, then we would see people who would become really, really healthy in a way that’s never even been seen before. Because I think even for myself, for all this work I’ve done, basically almost entirely in isolation, I’ve made a lot of progress. How much farther could I go if I really had tons and tons and tons of allies? If I could walk out in the morning and talk to the people in the grocery store and they were also doing healing of trauma? If I could ride on the subway and I could talk to the people around me and they were all talking about healing trauma? If I could hang out with all my different friends and no matter what environment we were hanging out in or where we were, we could talk about what we went through and we wouldn’t be criticized or judged for it, as there is now?
I have very, very few people in my life that I can even talk about this with at all. And when I do talk about it, it’s pretty much in private. Lots of people don’t want to talk about it in any other setting other than in private. So I imagine, yeah, it would be a completely different world if everybody was doing this. And no, the species wouldn’t go extinct. The irony is that because we are such a traumatized species, because we’re so impacted with trauma that people aren’t dealing with, aren’t looking at, aren’t facing, or healing from in any way, we’re killing ourselves. We’re ruining our world. Look, we’re ruining our ecology. There’s all this war, economic destruction, horrible things happening to people all over the place, tons and tons of trauma. The oceans are getting polluted. This isn’t happening because people are not traumatized. This is happening because people are traumatized, because they’re really screwed up. We’re not living in sync with our world, and we’re not living in sync with each other, and we’re certainly not living in sync with our children.
Meanwhile, there’s one other key point that I want to mention. That if we, as a species, to a degree, let’s just wait 20 years before anyone has kids, what would happen is so much pain would erupt from humanity. And a big part of the reason is that people use children as an addiction. They are addicted to having children because it helps them keep their pain down. They can act out a lot of their unresolved traumas in their relationship with their own children because a lot of their traumas happened in their relationship with their parents. So it’s a vicious cycle that goes on and on. People were traumatized in their relationship with their parents, and they pass it along in their relationships with their children by traumatizing them.
So if people actually stopped having children and stopped participating in that addiction, what would happen is what happens when anyone stops any addiction: all that unresolved stuff is going to come up, and it’s going to come much more into consciousness. And yeah, probably a certain number of people are going to really lose their minds if they denied themselves that opportunity to act out that trauma in that way. But then a lot of people would begin to heal from it.
The other thing is when people really start to lose their minds and all that crazy stuff comes out, it’s at least out there, and they have an option to deal with it. So yeah, I think all of that massive eruption of feelings would result in a profound cataclysm of societal change toward the direction ultimately of healing trauma and also toward the direction of people becoming much, much, much better parents when that time came for them to more appropriately have children.
[Music]