TRANSCRIPT
They say that a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, to that end, I would like to play out a little fantasy. Imagine if each of us had a video of the most important and traumatizing moments from our early lives, maybe from even when we were in the womb. The things that never went into the actual narrative in what we remember and what we were told about ourselves. The things that really set us up to have the problems that we have in our lives now, later as adults.
I imagine us being able to look at the video screen, watching the dynamics in which we were psychologically tortured, emotionally tortured. Dynamics in which we were screamed at, perhaps violated, maybe even sexually abused, physically abused, gaslighted, manipulated, hurt, put down, rejected. Times in which we witnessed horrible things, witnessed our parents perhaps fighting or our parents manipulating each other. Times in which we were put into the hands or under the care of people who didn’t deserve it at all. Times in which we were emotionally or psychologically abandoned.
Imagine if there was actual video proof of this. Now, I admit I wished when I was a therapist that I had such videos for my clients. I wish I could show this to them and say, “See, this is what happened to you.” But I didn’t have that. Often it was just speculation. We didn’t know what happened. We were trying to put the pieces together. But fundamentally, this idea came about in my relationship with myself. I’d love to know what had happened to me. I had clues all over the place, but sometimes clues that didn’t always add up. Things that I wasn’t so sure of, dynamics that didn’t really make sense. And what it left me with is a state of unsureness, of confusion, of why am I the way that I am?
I think this happened. It put me in a position of being a Sherlock Holmes about my life, a detective just trying to put together these pieces to go back to people in my history—my parents, my aunts, uncles, grandparents, friends of my parents, godparents, teachers, things like that—and ask them what they saw, ask them what they witnessed, what they remembered. The problem was so many of these people said they didn’t remember or had fuzzy memories or didn’t want to talk about it or didn’t give me the feeling that they were really honest. They wanted to protect my parents, or my parents wanted to protect their own self. They wanted to protect their denial. My grandparents wanted to protect my parents because they knew that if they spoke more of the truth, my parents would reject them.
This is the power of the family system. It’s like an octopus that squirts out ink all over the place when it feels threatened, so that no one can really know what’s going on behind the scenes, what really were the emotional dynamics. And so often, I was left with confusion. I was left with more questions. I was left with frustration or left with feelings of guilt that they had implanted in me. How dare you ask this? What are you searching this out for? What are you trying to get at? Why are you so blaming? Why don’t you just forgive? Why can’t you just move on?
So this fantasy came to me. Ah, listen, video! God, I wish I just had proof. I wish I just had knowledge. I wish I just had clear, clear video proof that maybe even two seconds of video would be worth ten thousand words of talk. But then I realized I had other things, and I realized other people have other things. So basically what I’m saying is this video proof, all is not lost.
And then there’s one other thing before I even get to what we do have to figure out what our narrative is, what ways we can come up with proof. I realized one other thing, that sometimes, often for many people, I think for myself even, that video proof literally might have been too overwhelming for me. It might have actually blown my circuits emotionally. With people, when people get memories, when people are told things by other people about what actually happened to them, actual proof of what happened, people who were there, who saw the trauma happen, who saw the rejections and the violations, who bring it up and say, “You know, actually, I need to tell you what I witnessed twenty years ago, thirty years ago,” often the people who hear this, maybe even people who are wanting to put together their history, wanting to hear the proof, when they hear, they don’t want to hear it. It’s too much for them. They’re not capable yet of hearing it. It literally is emotionally overwhelming. They get flooded with all sorts of feelings and negative feelings—rage, sadness, anger, hurt, betrayal, longing, pain, pain, pain. It’s just too much.
So really, actually, this is why my fantasy of this video is just a fantasy, because I think most people probably wouldn’t even want to watch it. After about ten seconds, it would actually be the worst horror movie they have ever seen in their lives. And actually, this brings up another thought for me, that when people watch horror movies, I think actually what they are doing is they are metaphorically watching this hypothetical fantasy video. They are actually watching the history of their horror, the history of their own personal trauma played out through actors, played out through a script, played out through fiction, distance on television.
But really, why are people drawn to this? Why are people drawn to watching violence on TV, watching perversity, watching manipulation in horror? Why do people love crime shows so much? I really think they actually are watching the history of their own life, the history of their own unconscious unresolved emotional narrative. And they’re watching it from a distance, and they’re getting pleasure when the criminals get caught. And the criminal gets caught by the police and put in jail and put to death and beat up. They like that. That’s the sense of justice that they wished for once upon a time in their own life that they never got.
But if they really saw it directly, if they really connected to their own story without metaphor, without symbolism, it would be too hard. The consequences in their life would be too overwhelming. If people really knew—and I firmly believe this—if people really knew what their parents actually did to them, and when I say people, I mean people in general, I really think it’s most people. If most people really were able to see the true emotional failures of their own parents, I think it would cause an absolute disruption in family systems all over the world. I think it would cause an absolute cataclysm in every society on this planet.
I think there would be profound, profound feelings of rejection and betrayal and abandonment from so many people toward their parents. It would be overwhelming. And I wouldn’t be surprised for quite a while if there was a reaction of just complete denial: “That video is not true. That’s not what happened. Someone manipulated this. This is out of context. That is not what happened.” Or people would simply turn it off. They would not want to know because it would be too much.
But if they did know, if they really could take it, oh, it would change everything. Hmm. And I think most people actually are very, very comfortable not knowing. They don’t want their apple cart disrupted. They don’t want their family systems disrupted. They don’t want to lose their fully or partially idealized view of their parents. It’s much easier, I think, for most people to say, “My parents were great. My parents were lovely. My parents gave me so much. My mother was the greatest woman ever.” I hear this all the time: “My mom was the greatest person in my whole life. She loved me more than anyone.” Actually, sometimes maybe it’s true. These are people who were so profoundly unloved everywhere that the very deficient love that they got from their mother still was better than they got anywhere else.
But people often have no clue of how actually deficient their parents were at meeting their needs, and it would be too overwhelming to know. Because also what happens is if people really knew, if people really knew the ways in which they were violated, traumatized, failed in their families of origin, if they really were to see this video, the next step is they would have to look at themselves and say, “Oh my God, this is how screwed up I actually am. This is how…”
Traumatized, I actually am. And the next step is, oh my god, what have I done to other people over whom I wield power? I think actually this hypothetical video would be much easier to be watched by people who themselves have not had children of their own. The reason being, if people haven’t yet had children of their own, they haven’t often taken the next step in the cycle of playing out the dynamics that were done to them onto other people.
But even people who aren’t parents, it’s true for everybody. Everybody plays out their unresolved dynamics of unresolved trauma in their lives somewhere, on other people and on their own selves. And I would even go so far as to say primarily on their own selves. So that would be another consequence if people really were shown this video of this is really what happened to you. These are the awful emotional things, physical things, sexual things that you actually went through in your life.
If people saw this, whoo, it would bring up such pain about how they themselves have taken up the helm of the bad things that happened to them and played it out in their own lives by not getting loved enough and then turning around and not being able to love themselves enough. Not only that, of course, then the next step is to not love other people enough, but just to not have it, not have the patterns of self-love set in place because they weren’t loved enough.
Where do people’s addictions come from? Where do people’s harms of other people come from? Where do people’s confusion and traumas and mental illnesses—where do all these come from? It comes from a root of having not gotten enough in very, very profound ways.
But now I’m going to take a step back, and I think I’ll speak of myself as the primary example, as the case example of this. I never had that video. I never saw that video of what really happened to me. So what am I left with? What was I left with? Well then, it was a question of piecing together my story by whatever means necessary.
Thankfully, I had some photographs. Those photographs actually really, really helped. I could see expressions on my face. I could see certain dynamics going on between people in the photograph that actually really helped me. This was some sort of proof also to go back, to go back to the people in my past and to ask them. I needed to really be an investigator and to listen.
And what was the most difficult is the primary people who had the knowledge that I needed were also the primary people who had the highest motivation to hide and to disguise what happened. But then a very strange thing happened in my past. When I was 21 years old, right around the time actually that I was really beginning to put together the pieces of my history, my parents divorced. They broke up. All sorts of horrible things happened in their relationship with each other—affairs and substance abuse and all sorts of terrible things.
But my parents had a really ugly breakup and divorced. And for the first time in my life, my parents, who would almost always profoundly defended each other, suddenly weren’t defending each other. And they started saying all sorts of things from each other’s past to me because they wanted each of them wanted me on their side. And so what they did is they spilled the beans. They told all sorts of true things about the awful thing that the other parent had done.
And as horrible as it was, as confusing as it was, as painful as it was, disgusting, disturbing, even really ugly sometimes, in a strange way it was kind of like this hypothetical imaginary video. But that’s not all. The up thing I looked at my own behavior, and I think that may be the biggest key of all because a lot of people don’t have their parents to go back to. They don’t have people from their past to go back to. They don’t have grandparents who are alive. So where do they get information? Can they ever piece together their history?
And one of the key things I’ve seen that allow me to answer that question as yes is we can look at our own behavior as a manifestation of what happened to us. So when we look at our own strengths and especially when we don’t look at our own weaknesses, our flaws, our addictions, our confusion, our disturbing dreams, our disturbing behavior, our loneliness, our sadness, our self-destructive behavior, our fantasies, and our memories, when we put all these pieces together and when we crunch the data, a lot of times this does point back to what is our history, what happened to us, and what were our traumas.
What I’m talking about is the repetition compulsion that we at some level have a compulsion inside ourselves to repeat the bad things that happen to us. These dynamics actually live inside of us. They are a sort of video camera on our life, and we play this out in our life, in our history. We play this out in our relationships with other people. We play this out where we have power. We play this out in relationships where we don’t have power. We play this out in our fantasy, in our relationship with ourselves.
So when we really, really begin to study ourselves, to study our behavior, study our fantasy, study our history, our history of acting out, we can figure out what it is that we are acting out, what dynamics are we acting out, what are we manifesting. And this brings us right back to the source—the source of our early lives, our early dynamics, our early relational emotional dynamics. These are all clues that we can use.
I see this also as a therapist. I was a therapist. So many people came, and they wanted to know their history. And one of the things that I had, one of the best things I had, was let’s look at your own life and your own life, your own relationships. That is the blueprint of figuring out what happened to you once upon a time.
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