TRANSCRIPT
Most parents care a lot less about their children than they think they do. They think they love their children. They tell the world, “Oh, I love my child more than life itself,” etc., etc. “My child is the most important thing to me in the world. My baby is my life.” They love me; they give my life meaning, etc., etc. But I’ve learned to see through that.
Start with my own parents. Many, many, many parents. And there’s one certain type of scenario that I’ve seen many times that highlights my thesis about how most parents care about their children much less than they themselves even realize. It’s that when the child starts to confront the parent for the parent’s own flaws, when the child starts becoming an independent self with independent feelings, when the child starts having reactions to the parent’s negative treatment of the child, I’ve seen so many parents, maybe even commonly most parents in this situation, not love their child so much.
I think of my mother. Perfect example. I remember her saying many times when I was a child, “Daniel, I love you more than life itself. I would give my life for you.” I remember her telling me that when I was four, five, six years old. And even then, not feeling good when she said it because I knew at some healthy unconscious level, maybe even partly conscious, that it wasn’t true. But later, I really saw it most obviously to be true when I started calling her out for some of her disgusting, violating, traumatizing behavior toward me.
When I started saying, “You can’t do that. You can’t be perverse with me anymore. You can’t be overtly disrespectful toward me anymore,” I realized that when I was healthy in my relationship with her, she actually hated me, totally rejected me, put me down, tried to break me down. She wasn’t going to give her life for me. Actually, she wouldn’t even get honest for me, let alone give her life for me.
So actually, if I can replay what she said all those years before when she said, “I would give my life for you, Daniel,” actually what she really meant was, “I would give my life for my false projected image that I put onto you that has nothing to do with who you really are.” And in fact, I will only love you if you accept this false projected image that I’ve put onto you. If you accept that as yourself, if you deny your true self, then I will love you and will sacrifice my life for you. But if you become a real self, if you have real feelings, if you have real reactions to the ways in which I treat you really badly and disrespectfully, then I won’t love you. Not only will I not give my life for you, I will even hope that you will die.
Because I remember feeling that. I figured it out late 20s into my 30s when I started realizing I need to confront this person. And I started really confronting her for her awful behavior. It was a weird feeling that I got by looking in her eyes. She never said it, but I had a deep level of subliminal communication with my mom. And I realized I think she would be happier if I killed myself than if I confronted her. I think she even wants me to kill myself because if I killed myself, then she could control the narrative of our relationship and my life.
If I killed myself, she would have said, “Oh, Daniel, he was a wonderful loving person, but he was afflicted by mental illness, and it took over his life, and he has died. And poor me, I have lost my beloved son.” But as long as I was alive and confronting her and saying, “You were a very deficient person. You were screwed up. You never should have had children. You’re awful,” she couldn’t call me those things because I was telling the truth. And my truth spoke louder than her [ __ ].
And she’s just one example because I’ve seen this many, many times with parents. Sometimes it’s as simple as the parent loves the child when they’re a baby, and the baby just is so absolutely dependent on the parent that the baby doesn’t even have very much of a self. But as the baby starts to develop their own feelings and their own self and their own independence, the parent doesn’t like that baby anymore. And sort of, “Oh, they’re a toddler. I don’t like toddlers. I only like babies.” I’ve even heard some parents brag about that. “Oh, I don’t like the children when they get to be over two or three. I only like babies.” So what do they do? They have another baby, who is this kind of unformed needy creature who they can feel they love unconditionally, but they really don’t care about that person at all.
I’ve said it before in these videos, but I’ll say it again. I think a lot of parents look at children, their own children, less as people and more as livestock on a farm. They look at their child as a horse that’s there to do a job or a cow that is there to do a job, to give something to them. And that when that horse or that cow no longer functions in its role on the farm, then they really don’t care about it anymore. And that child’s job on the farm of the family is to give the parent attention, to give them positive feedback, to worship them, to love them, to sometimes accept their abuse, to accept their projections, to accept their split-off post-traumatic negative feelings that no one else in their right mind would accept because no one else is that vulnerable and needy as their own children. Often, maybe mostly, that is the child’s job.
Also, another job that’s so common of children in the family is they are there to give the parents something to do. They’re there to give the parents structure. They’re there to give the parents status even. “Oh, I’m a parent,” and there’s a lot of perks in society for being a parent. They’re there to fill the void of the parent’s emptiness. Many parents have children for this very reason. They’re so wounded and lost inside and so in denial of it that they desperately need to have a relationship with a completely vulnerable other who they can completely control. And in this world of human relationships that we have, nobody controls another person more than a parent controls a very young child. Total control to the point of ownership. And that can be very pleasing to a parent who’s very lost and very disturbed and very disconnected to his or her own healing process. And that becomes the job of the child.
And when the child doesn’t, the baby even, doesn’t behave according to what the parent has created them for, the parent can very clearly show the child that is not acceptable. And the children, the babies even, are so geared toward figuring out how to get any sort of love from their parents. They’re so dependent. They’re so vulnerable in this life. I mean, there is no more vulnerable creature in the animal kingdom, vulnerable for such a long period of time than the human infant. Years and years of profound dependency. And because of that, young human beings, babies, young children, toddlers use all of their sophistication, all of their intelligence, all of their flexibility to figure out how do I get this parent to love me.
The more troubled and traumatized a parent is, the more screwed up and confused and lost and empty a parent is—and every parent is to one degree or another—but the more they are, the more screwed up the child has to make him or herself in order to be what that parent needs. And this is all unconscious, and nobody talks about it, and it’s all denied. And what’s interesting is the parents often mostly know this the least of anyone. Often other people can see bits and pieces of this dynamic, but they don’t speak about it because it goes against the rules of the family system. And it goes against the rules of society, and it breaks the sanctity of the family system, which is there in every culture in the world.
So the parents don’t see it. They don’t see how little often they actually really care about their children, or they don’t see the limitations of their caring. They don’t know it. And later, when the child becomes more independent and starts to break out of the family system, starts to speak…
Back and confront and refuse to accept trauma and refuse to accept conditional love and refuse to accept hypocrisy or even just starts to point it out. Well then the parent shows their true colors. The Mask comes off and the parent says, “I hate you. Get out of this house. You’re an ungrateful person and I don’t love you anymore.” I’ve heard many, many, many parents even say this: “I used to love that child but I don’t love them anymore.” That child became taken over by some evil force, evil spirit. They even have the devil in them. They were a bad seed and when that seed bloomed, I don’t like them anymore. Or something that my parents said, both my parents said later on, “We miss the old Daniel. We don’t like the new Daniel anymore.” The new Daniel was the true me that had always been there on the inside, and the old Daniel that they loved so much was the compliant, broken, in denial, emotionally shut down, split off, traumatized Daniel who didn’t have a voice and couldn’t fight back and hated myself. They cared about the me that hated myself. They didn’t like the real me who I am sharing with you much more right now.