TRANSCRIPT
I come here to defend rebellious teenagers. Rebellious teenagers, oh, they’re so often put down by their parents and society. They’re out of control, they’re evil, they’re a bad seed. They do everything wrong, they have no respect whatsoever. They don’t honor us and how well we have treated them. They go against everything we stand for. They are trying to make a mockery of us. They have become awful people. They even might be evil. Well, I defend the rebellious teenagers.
I don’t often, well, or always at least, defend their actions. Sometimes their actions can be, uh, self-destructive or destructive toward others or maybe not the healthiest. But metaphorically, what they are showing through their behavior, sometimes even directly, not even metaphorically, is how badly they were treated, how they were not loved properly, how they were traumatized in their families of origin. Often, they’re showing the pure and absolute limitations of their parents.
When they rebel, they say, “I am alive! I have passion!” I also am preparing myself to go into this crazy thing called adulthood, which you, my parents, didn’t properly prepare me for. Also, often when I see teenagers who don’t rebel, they scare me the most. It’s like, wait a second, a lot of times the ones who don’t rebel at all have been crushed the most. They’re dying or dead inside. They’ve been pushed down so hard that they actually have lost their connection with themselves. The rebellious ones are at least fighting against something. Maybe they’re not fighting in the best way or the healthiest way, but at least they’re showing some life force, some passion that says, “Oh my God, I cannot be like these people who raised me. It’s going to kill me unless I change.”
Yet when I think of teenagers who are rebelling and are doing things that aren’t healthy, and yet underneath it, I can see where the passion comes from and the need to rebel. It’s like, how do you separate the beauty in the rebellion from sometimes the unhealthiness in the action? I think that’s about looking deeper into the family system, looking into the history, and often looking directly at the deadness of the parents.
I think if the parents had done a little bit more rebellion, or a lot more rebellion, and really made sense of the rebellion, really figured out what they were rebelling against, figuring out what had happened to them and become healthier, their children wouldn’t be needing to do this. A lot of times what would have happened is they would have become better parents. They would have been able to love their children in much more healthy ways and not crush their children so much.
Another thing is, I think if parents, when they were teenagers themselves or young adults, had rebelled more and had honored the rebellion and really studied the rebellion, learned how to get some perspective on themselves, figured out why they were rebelling, and figured out the real health in their rebellion and made sense of their own historical traumas in their families of origin, they probably wouldn’t have had children in the first place.
So a lot of times, I think what the parents do, because a lot of parents did rebel themselves when they were teenagers, is they shut down their rebellion. They ended up siding with their parents, siding with their screwed-up parents, siding with their screwed-up societies, pushing down their traumas, and then having children and repeating everything that was done to them. They do unto their children what was done to them and that which they really are not that aware of. Sometimes they make a slight improvement over their own parents. Sometimes they make a slight opposite of an improvement. But fundamentally, I think most people don’t really learn that much from their own history of rebellion. They don’t see what its roots were, what it was really trying to accomplish.
And so when they have children of their own, they also do the same. They can’t look at it in a deep way, in a broad way, because they can’t look at their own selves in a deep way and a broad way. All they know how to do is try to shut down their children, blame their children, pathologize their children, even psychiatry their children. “Oh, we need to send this child to therapy. We need to give him or her a diagnosis. We need to give him or her a therapist, a psychiatrist, medications. We need to give him or her all this, this, and special rules and boundaries, and this and this and this to crush the rebellion.” We will crush the rebellion because we want to stay in power. We want our way to be the way. We want ourselves to be the leaders of this system. We want our point of view to prevail. We want our religion to prevail. We want our perspective and our relationship to be the one that is the ideal one. And these young people, who don’t know anything, who are immature, we will crush them.
Much better, I think, when a teenager is rebelling for the parents to say, “Why? What happened to them? What did I do wrong? What mistakes have I made that are leading them to rebel in the ways that they are rebelling? Why would they need to rebel if I had loved them so well? Why would they need to rebel against me? Why wouldn’t they treat me as a fountain of wisdom?”
Now, again, not to say that teenage rebellion is necessarily always healthy, because a lot of times it’s not. All you have to see is teenagers who are going out and having inappropriate sex and doing lots of inappropriate things that can get themselves hurt and doing dangerous things and trying drugs that can mess up their mind and screwing up their schoolwork. So they don’t necessarily have the best opportunity to move forward in their lives. But underneath it, what needs to be honored in spite of all that, what needs to be seen in spite of all that, is the passion. And often, it’s the most rebellious. If they can just figure out how to connect with their passion in a healthier way, those are the people who are the leaders of our world. Those are the people who have the potential to have the most insight, to break out of the lies, to break out of the insanity of the family, to break out of the [ __ ] that the teachers teach, to break out of the [ __ ] that society says is reality, and to see actually reality for what it is. And why wouldn’t someone want to rebel against reality? The world has gone crazy. We’re destroying everything. What will the future be? What is the future for these teenagers? And don’t think they don’t know it. They know it, if not quite consciously, then at least intuitively, that they’re in for a very, very rough road.
No surprise that it’s the late teenage years into the early 20s where so many people go psychotic because it’s overwhelming. It’s too much to know, too much to feel, especially if you’re not prepared for it emotionally. It takes a lot of strength and a lot of maturity to make that transition to independent adulthood, especially if your eyes are open. If your eyes are closed, I think sometimes you can get by more by being a functional adult because you can block out the horror of the world, block out the horror of your history, block out the horror of your ugly, fake, traumatizing parents, and instead just follow the party line. Do what is told that you are supposed to do. Do your schoolwork, do your SATs, go to college, do your job, don’t think, make your money, save your money, put it in the bank, pay your bills. Do, do, do this, do this, do this. Don’t be creative, don’t think outside the box. And if you do start thinking outside the box, well, guess what? No surprise that you’re going to rebel because you’re going to need to rebel.
But this is why that rebellion has to be converted into something healthy. If you want to rebel, I think, think in a healthy way. I think of myself, the rebellion that I do by telling the truth. But again, don’t use drugs. I think the sex is dangerous. These are ways to avoid the deeper truth of healing that we need.
And instead to honor the passion and to rebel with one’s eyes by looking within and transforming our inner self through healing our childhood traumas, through grieving the horrible things that happened to us. Because guess what? That is a rebellion because that goes directly against the…
Parents, and I think this is the key. And this is where I’m going to end this little talk: to really look at the truth of one’s childhood traumas. To look at the truth of the feelings that one was not allowed to feel as a child. To know the truth of one’s parents’ limitations. To be able to see their flaws—that’s the real rebellion. That’s the really scary rebellion.
The using drugs and the acting out sexually and the acting out dangerously that a lot of teenagers do, and using foul language and things like that, and having bad ideas and dressing in unpleasant, societally unacceptable ways—that’s a lot more comfortable to parents and society than it is for young people to look within and on a deep emotional level to tell the truth.