TRANSCRIPT
Living with people who don’t like you is awful. I travel a lot. I have been traveling a lot in my adulthood, and often in my travels, I travel very low budget and end up living with people who I meet along the way, living in their homes. People welcome me in. Mostly it goes great, but sometimes I live with people, or one or two people in a house, who just don’t like me.
Sometimes I’m kind of stuck there for a while for various reasons. Maybe I can’t get out. Maybe it could be financial. Lots of different reasons. I have an obligation to stay. But the thing I want to get at is that feeling of being in a living situation where I’m trapped with someone who doesn’t like me. I try to make the best of it, try to protect myself, but just that feeling of being in intimate space where someone is threatened by me, the goodness in me, the openness in me, the honesty of me, my happiness, even my exuberance, my creativity. It could be anything about me that they just don’t like.
I mean, it can make me feel awful about myself. I can have terrible dreams. I can not want to come and participate in social situations with some of the people I like. If this person I don’t like is there, I don’t eat as well. I don’t digest my food as well. But mostly I notice even in my own thoughts, I can start thinking negatively about myself. It’s like I would say at some level I absorb some of that negativity of the people who don’t like me, but that’s not exactly it.
When I reflect on it, and this is where I get into the deeper place in this video, because what I see is when I live with a person or people who don’t like me, when I’m in an unsafe living situation, it’s actually a replication of my childhood and my unresolved issues from my childhood. Unresolved memories, unresolved traumas from my childhood can get kicked up because I grew up in a world where I wasn’t really loved. I was hated in many ways by my parents.
My truth, my exuberance, my desire to speak the truth and be the truth and express the truth and feel the truth of me and speak about what I saw about all that was around me was very threatening to their existence. They were not living for those things. They were living for comfort. They were living for a false relationship with each other. They were living to have me as an object in their life that gave their existence some structure and certainly also a lot of positive regard from the outside world.
They were parents of a beautiful, smart little boy, and they got a lot of kudos from this. They got a lot of self-esteem from this. But me, the actual existence of me being a full true expressive self was very threatening to them. So they made it their mission, which is very easy for a parent to do, especially if it’s two parents working in tandem as my parents did, to shut me down, to not accept the full part of me, to hate whole sides of me.
And so I was living in a situation that was very dangerous to the truth of me, to the fullness of me, to the evolution and growth of me. I had to become warped and twisted and small to survive in this environment. Certain parts of me were allowed to live on in some ways, especially if I wasn’t too open about them. But other parts of me definitely went against the law of the family, the rules of the family, the cult of the family. Those were the parts of me that were bigger than my parents, more true than my parents.
And this is interesting actually because these were the parts of me that represented the parts that were shut down in my own parents from their own screwed up childhoods. And had the roles been reversed, had I been the one with power in this system and not my parents, I might have encouraged them to explore their childhoods and to grow and to acknowledge the traumas they’d been through, to criticize their own traumatizers, to grieve their traumas, to exhume their ancient buried feelings and rages and memories.
But that’s not how it was because my parents had the power. That’s the privilege of being parents. And I didn’t. I was vulnerable and powerless and needed whatever crumbs of love they would give me or might give me. And so I coped in this unloving environment as best I could, and I put my focus on the places where I was being loved, even in small, very conditional ways. And I shut down in the places that I wasn’t.
All that rejection, abandonment from both my mother and my father. I had to close my ears when they were screaming at each other and saying horrible things. And when they were being perverse with me, it’s like this whole system, all these very screwed up things that were going on were deeply embedded in me. And as an expression of me being able to be here and speak so honestly, I got out. This is the reflection of me getting out, being able to talk now openly.
I escaped at great pain. I had to break with my parents, or as my book that I wrote says, breaking from your parents. I broke from my parents. I got away. It was horrible. They felt I broke the law by breaking away from them. I did break the law of the family system. I broke the rules of the cult. The cult of my parents hated me for breaking away from them. Society sided with them. The greater family system sided with them. The religions of the world sided with them.
I didn’t even know what the religions of the world were. But having now traveled all over the world and lived with so many people of different religions and telling them the history of my life when it feels safe, I’ve learned religion after religion says, “Don’t break from your family. Stay with your family. Forgive your parents. Stay with them.” No surprise, religions are created so often by parents who support their own traumatizing parents.
And so when I now occasionally, thankfully not very often, live with people who don’t like me, it does kick up some of that ancient stuff that I haven’t totally worked through and haven’t totally grieved. It’s still terribly painful. But what’s interesting is I can spin it in a positive way, too. It’s a very small reminder of what I once suffered, and I can learn from it. I can see how it affects me now, even in my 50s, when it sometimes still happens, how painful it is, even though anytime I want pretty much when I’m living with people, I can snap my fingers and get out. I can leave.
Whereas once I couldn’t, and I can see that now. I can think, my God, I have everything in my power to get out and leave now. Sometimes I’m even older than the people who don’t like me and don’t make me feel safe. How really must it have been for me as a child? How must it be for other children who are still living in this situation where they are legally owned by their parents?
Oh, slavery doesn’t exist in our world anymore. Well, yes, even some adults do own other adults in other parts of the world, but parents of the world everywhere own their children. This is what they do. This is normal. “My children, they are my children. I own them. This is what they will do. I can control their fate. I can harm them. I can hit them.” Adults can’t go around hitting other adults legally. They get arrested. But if they feel in a bad mood, they can slap their kid around in almost every culture of the world. And they can get away with it. And it’s called good.
What does that do for the child? The child who’s not even allowed to hate their parents, who has to forgive their parents, who has to say according to the rules of the family, the rules of the culture, the rules of their religion, “They’re doing it for my own good. They’re doing it to raise me right. They’re doing it to teach me right from wrong.” These very wrong things that they’re doing to me are actually right.
Things get sucked into the mindset of their own traumatizers. Have Stockholm syndrome, you might say. What does this do to the child? But more so, thousands of children, millions of children, billions of children. This is the history of our planet. This is the history of our species.
And what does it look like writ large across the planet? It looks like this is why our world is such an absolute disaster, right? Unhealthy is called healthy. Healthy is called unhealthy. Wrong is called right. Good morals are actually bad morals. Speaking the truth is called rebelling against good people. Honoring the parents’ needs is actually rejecting one’s own self. Acting out unresolved post-traumatic issues against powerless others is considered acceptable.
So much destruction of the planet. Not thinking about the future is called living for comfort and living a healthy life. When I look at our disturbed and troubled world, planet cultures all over, all the different continents of the world, when I see all this destruction and these very basic key issues of what happens to the child in the sick family system, being at the root of it. And I see this being ignored, not talked about, this being some dirty thing that we don’t speak about. And if you do speak about it, you’re a problem. You are not liked. You make people uncomfortable. I make people uncomfortable.
When I see this, I get scared about humanity’s future. Yet I think the only hope for humanity, the only hope for the individual, the only hope for the individuals of the world at large, all of us, is to see this truth. To create safe places where we can be real, where we’re not hated for being real and being honest, but where we are loved and honored and treasured. It is rare now to find such places. As long as it remains rare, the world is in big trouble. Hopefully, it won’t be always.
[music]