TRANSCRIPT
I come here to speak in defense of bitterness, anger, pain. I come here to speak in defense of negativity, of sadness, of sorrow. So much of the world, so many leaders, so many psychotherapists and parents, they tell you, “Oh, you’re negative, that’s bad. Push away your negative feelings.” Spiritual leaders especially, so commonly, “Don’t be so negative. You have to focus on the positive, the positive.” And I don’t agree.
I remember first having my so-called negativity criticized by my dad when I was a little boy. I was angry. I was sad. I was upset. I was angry at him for having been such a rotten dad in so many ways and having neglected me in so many ways. And I was having a healthy reaction to that, to his treatment of me, and I was expressing it. And he hated it. He hated it especially when I expressed it toward him. But even when I didn’t express it toward him, he was very sensitive, very sensitive to my negative feelings because he knew, even if I was being negative toward other people, if I was being negative toward teachers or toward school or toward life or whatever, he knew that he was the cause of a lot of this negativity—he and my mom. And he knew that if I felt those feelings, all roads lead to Rome, and he was Rome. That eventually I was going to figure out that he was the cause, and it threatened the hell out of him.
And so he told me things like, “You’re so negative. You’re such a negative person.” One of his favorite words he gained for me—he learned this word somewhere along the way, and he started calling it to me when I was a late teenager, certainly into my 20s—is, “Daniel, you are a nihilist.” That was his favorite expression toward me for a long time. “You’re a nihilist. You don’t care about anything. Nothing means anything to you. You’re a completely negative person.” And it really hurt to hear that for a long, long time. It really hurt. It hurt as a teenager when he put down my negativity, my so-called negativity. But I remember as I grew older, I started figuring it out. Ah, he’s scared. He’s scared that I’m going to call him out.
And I’m a nihilist. When he called me a nihilist, I knew I wasn’t a nihilist. I knew I loved life. I knew I was on a search for truth. I knew I was on a search to reclaim some very hurt and abandoned and wounded part of me. And I needed to feel these feelings. And I realized when he was calling me a nihilist, what he really meant was that I didn’t like his [ __ ] anymore, and I didn’t accept his [ __ ] anymore, and that I realized that he was nothing, that his external self he projected to the world was fake. And that my so-called nihilism, my so-called negativity was an expression that I didn’t value his [ __ ] anymore. And it scared him because underneath the surface, he was a wounded child, except he was far, far, far more in denial of it than I was.
He was living through grandiosity, through some very dissociated positivity. He was still winning the contest and making a lot of money and looking fancy and dressing well and spending and talking big and thinking that he was this great man—his arrogant grandiose delusion. And I was breaking his delusion. My so-called negativity, my sadness, my hurt, my pain, even my self-questioning, even me saying, “I don’t think I’m really satisfied with my life.” Yes, I finished college. I went to a fancy college. I have a degree in biology, but I don’t care about biology as a subject. I don’t want to work in this fake field anymore. I don’t know what I want to do. I’m lost. I’m confused. That terrified him. He was overwhelmed by it because underneath it, I was shining a light through his facade and showing that he was empty inside.
And so when I come now and I say I defend bitterness, I defend negativity, I defend sorrow and anger and sadness, I defend the people who are confused and self-questioning. I realized what went on with my dad and me. This was a dynamic that’s very common in the world—that people who don’t look within, people who are incredibly deeply split off, they’re the ones often who are in power, and they’re the ones trying to crush other people and trying to make other people become like them, transform other people into becoming reflections of their own dissociated positivity. They’re scared of what would happen if they look within. They don’t realize how incredibly bitter and negative they are on the inside, but they are so split off from it, and so it’s boiling up within.
Another thing that I figured out along the way, using again my father as an example of this greater story, when my father would go at me, “You’re so negative. You’re a nihilist. You’re bitter. You’re this. You’re this.” I remembered figuring out, “Oh my God, I’ve never seen someone who’s more negative than him.” That look on his face, that tone in his voice, it was so bitter. He was negating my healing process, negating. He was negative. And I’ve seen that again and again when people criticize other people. “Don’t be negative. Don’t do this. You’re so bitter. You’re so angry. You’ve got to learn how to be positive.” It’s like they are expressing their own split-off unconscious negativity, and they’re directing it against people who are on a healing path.
Now, I don’t defend being negative against the wrong people. I don’t defend acting out negativity and bitterness against victims. It’s a tricky kind of thing because I was a victim of my dad’s rage, of my mom’s bitterness and depression and perversity. I don’t defend their negative treatment of me, of their projecting their negative split-off feelings onto me. I don’t defend making a victim of anyone. But what I know is to heal from trauma, that pain has to come up. That bitterness has to come up. That sorrow has to come up. That hurt has to come up. Those feelings of confusion and lostness have to come up. That self-questioning has to come up. There’s no other way to heal than to go through that process. But it has to be a process, and the key is to feel those so-called negative feelings.
One has to put them in a proper perspective. Yes, if one acts out this negativity, those negative feelings on other people in the world, that’s not healing. But even that we can learn from. I think about my teenage years where I was not the nicest guy a lot of the time. It’s like later I took a step back from it, and I saw like, “Oh, I was acting out what had been done to me.” And I could learn where that pain and that bitterness that I expressed onto others and onto myself came from. And I have found it very empowering to learn what’s inside of me and to honor all those feelings inside of me, but to hold myself, to love myself, to see that they’re coming from a wounded place—that it’s nobody’s responsibility to heal me, not even my parents. They have no responsibility to heal me. They failed me terribly. They had a responsibility to nurture and guide me, but now it’s my responsibility to heal myself.
And I have to own all of those so-called negative feelings. I have to see where they come from. They are the roadmap back into the traumas that I suffered, the neglects that I suffered, the abandonments, the conditional love, the torments, the tortures. And by honoring those feelings, not pushing them away or burying them or taking drugs to make them disappear, but instead looking at them, tracing them down to their roots, yes, I can find out what happened to me. I can figure out how to love myself better, how to honor myself more, how to hold my little hurt self that still lives within me in my own adult care, how to be a better adult, how to be a better parent for myself. And slowly, piece by piece, part by part, trauma by trauma, to heal, to love myself more, and heaven forbid, to become more positive.