TRANSCRIPT
Most people marry in order to divorce themselves. Time and again, I have seen people in whom I have hope that they might wake up. Or they’ve already started to wake up, and my hope is that they’re going to wake up further. And what I mean by wake up is not wake up to the external world. I mean wake up to the internal world. Wake up to the truth of what their history really is. To really know what happened to them when they were a child, especially when they were a young child. And as the result of that, know who they became. Understand the context of the crucible of their childhood so they can see the ways in which it molded and often deformed their personalities. A horrible thing to figure out and an extremely painful thing to explore and learn about and make sense of. Yet the only way to be true. The only way to really be able to see oneself in context. To be able to look in the mirror and have an accurate appraisal of one’s self. A beautiful thing. An ugly, ugly thing to go through that bears beautiful fruit.
And I’ll admit that I have some selfish motives in wanting people to go through that. For a few different reasons. One I can think of right away is that if they become more true, if they are able to know themselves better and know what they went through and suffer through the pain again of making sense of their horrible histories, they can become an ally to me because they will be bigger people. They will be real and much more healthy people who can see the truth of me, too, in a context. And also they can have empathy for what I have gone through and am going through. And I’m not just talking about empathy for what I went through as a child, but empathy for what I have gone through as an adult and am going through as an adult on this process of making sense of my history and exhuming the pain and bringing it all up and digging it all up and sorting through it and suffering through it and grieving.
But then part of my motivation, and perhaps an even bigger part than a selfish part, is just a part of wanting to see them mine the best out of their existence. I want to see people grow. I want to see our world heal. Not just one person or two people or people I know, but all people, people I’ve never met, everybody. This is my only hope for humanity that people can do this. Yet it’s hard. It goes against society. It goes against the family system, and thus people choose their exit strategies off the highway of life. And so many people, from what I have seen, get married to some external person to block their internal seeking process, to block looking within. They use their relationship with a partner to plug up the gaps of their inward looking vision. They use a relationship, a marriage, a romance to deny their history. To replicate their history often. Instead of working it out through looking at it and exhuming it and bringing it up and grieving it, they act it out in their relationship with a partner.
And they don’t just divorce themselves and divorce themselves from their healing process by getting married to another. Often they do the next step, which is having children. Bringing more people into this world, more innocent powerless beings onto whom they replicate their history now from the power position. When they were children, they were in the less powerful position, being molded and twisted and traumatized and violated and deformed by someone else who had power, sometimes absolute power over them. Now they flipped the roles, and for them, for those who don’t want to heal or have given up on the healing process and don’t want to look and don’t want to see and don’t want to remember, they can find a lot of pleasure in having power over another. They can become the cult leader who’s no longer the cult follower. They can become the cult leader over their child. In their joining with a partner who is also sometimes to a great degree, sometimes to a lesser degree, on board with this exact same idea.
Sometimes these relationships don’t work out. Sometimes people are playing things out that doesn’t exactly coincide. And so they divorce, and often they start again. But I think of watching people. Sometimes people that I’ve loved very much and had a lot of hope for. Sometimes people who were allies to one degree or another on my growth process, on my healing process. And I’ve watched them disappear into relationships and then seal the deal with an engagement to marry. And seal the deal with a wedding ceremony that allows them to say all these things that effectively are locking themselves away relationally and familially. Sometimes even legally. From growing anymore. So many times I’ve seen it. People, they get married. They have children. They follow the family pattern. They join society’s norms, society’s sick norms, and that is the end of their growth processes.
Yet from the perspective of the family system, from the perspective of society, from the perspective of religions and laws and norms, that’s where their growth process is beginning because now officially, formally, legally, societally, familially they are adults, but it’s a lie. They’re not adults. They’re pseudo adults. They’re holograms of adults. They look like adults, but they’re not adults. They’re locking their healing process in place. I’ve also seen it not so often, but from time to time, that people who have married, who have swelched their healing process, whose healing processes have been on ice sometimes for decades, can have something happen deep inside of them that can restart their healing process. And I’ve seen it destroy their marriages.
Suddenly they’re waking up, and in this confined legal, constricted, societally acceptable marriage, they start to grow. And their partner doesn’t like it. Their partner feels betrayed. Their partner says, “Why are you doing this? What are you doing? You’re ruining our marriage. You’re ruining everything we’ve built. You’re ruining our family.” What they’re really saying, the partner who’s not growing, is saying is, “You’re terrifying me. Why are you doing this? Who is this person I’m with? I don’t want to know you. I didn’t agree to marry this person who’s studying themselves. I don’t want to think about this. I don’t want to think about any of this. The whole reason I got together with you was to not think about this. And now you’re doing things that are betraying our relational contract.” And the person who’s growing in many ways is betraying this relational contract by growing, by studying themselves, by healing.
And sometimes people I’ve talked to who are starting to grow in a relationship can feel very, very guilty. They can even agree at some level that they are betraying their partner by getting healthier. And sometimes they try to pull their partner up. Come on, get healthier alongside of me. Come to therapy with me. Let’s do couples therapy. Let’s study it. Be my partner on this life. Be my ally. And 1% of the time it kind of works. And 99% of the time it’s the death knell, the death call of the relationship. Often they split apart. They divorce. It’s over. They’re hated. They’re blamed. You have done something that’s betrayed the relationship.
And I’ve also seen it sometimes that the person who starts to grow and starts to wake up and starts to really evolve out of this relationship panics, freaks out, goes for a while or keeps growing and then eventually says, “I can’t do this anymore,” and comes back, and then the relationship goes back to what it was, being shut down. And they go back to instead of divorcing their partner, they divorce themselves. I’ve also seen it when people are full-grown adults plus decades biologically. They’ve been married for decades, and their children are now all grown up, and they start to wake up even then in their 60s or even 70s, and they start to exhume their childhoods and study it and look at what happened to them. And their own adult children say, “You are betraying the family system. Why are you talking about this stuff? Why are you telling me about awful things that you did to me? I don’t want to know about this. I don’t want to know about your horrible childhood. Too many years, too many decades too late. You, I hate you for bringing this stuff up.” That’s a little bit more confusing because their adult children didn’t ask to be born, didn’t ask to be screwed up by this parent who’s now having this wake-up process.
To some degree, I was that adult, that young adult in my early 20s. My mom got sober from drugs and alcohol and started having a bit of a wake-up process and started admitting all this stuff. My mother, who’d always been such a strategic, manipulative liar, was suddenly having little bursts of honesty come out. She was still to some degree strategic about it, and as the years went on, three, four, five years after she got sober, she reverted to being much more strategic again, much more of a liar again. But in those early years, she was very honest with me, and she lost her relationship with my dad. She was all alone, and she started finding herself and marrying the true self within her. Just started having a little bit of a dance of connection, a dance of romance with her true self within, and she started admitting awful things that she had done to me. Some of which I knew, some of which I didn’t really know. Nah, most of it I knew already, but some of it was interesting because it was so awful and so painful that I didn’t want to think about it. In some ways I had, and in some ways I hadn’t, but the stuff she admitted was terrible stuff about how she’d been awfully, disgustingly perverse and lying and how it really had twisted me. It really did screw up my relationship with my mother in a way. But in a way I was so grateful for it because I wanted to know.
I was already on a healing process, and I think that was the big thing. I wasn’t in any relationship. I wasn’t in any contracted relationship where I needed to be shut down in order to function in this adult relationship. I was all on my own, and I already to some degree knew that if I didn’t connect with the truth within me that I’d probably die. At the least, I would die emotionally and shrivel up and find no value in my existence and want to probably kill myself. And maybe I would have. So in a way, my mother with her little bursts of truth, her little admissions, it was fuel for me. It made me hate her more, and I needed to. That was fair because so many of the things that she shared with me were despicable and awful. I am grateful for that time that she did share. She took it all back later. She denied everything. Par for the course, sadly, with her.
But then there was another side that even when she was beginning to share stuff with me in early recovery, as she called it, early sobriety from drugs and alcohol, she found replacement addictions in her life that blocked over her healing process yet again. And I think that that’s what a marriage is, a romantic marriage is for many people. It’s another addiction. It’s another distraction from the healing process within. It’s a way to block grieving, block truth, block memories, block feelings, block healing. Replace it all with denial. But what I found by studying all the admissions she made was that each of them led to even uglier things that she couldn’t bear to admit. Criminal things, many of them, criminal by the laws of the land, but certainly criminal morally for what she did, whether it was illegal or not. Awful, awful, awful things. It really set me on a very difficult course of life.
And so then I’m going to bring this full circle as I wrap up this video and talk about romance in my own life. I’ve had some wonderful romances. I’ve had some wonderful love relationships, but the greatest one I’ve had is my love relationship. And I’m not talking a sex relationship. I’m talking a love relationship of nurturance and truth and honesty and support in my relationship with my true self, the core of me. That has been the real marriage of my life. That’s a marriage without divorce. That’s a marriage of real alliance and truth that I’ve found. Am I perfect? Is it a perfect relationship? No, it’s not. I’m a messy in some ways and confused in some ways and inconsistent in some ways. How could I not be considering the absolute devastating mess of grossness that I came from in my childhood family system with my parental models that were so distorted and rotten?
But I’ve come a long way in my decades of adulthood of marrying myself and having a better marriage, a more loving marriage, a more respectful marriage, having a real adventuresome marriage with myself, learning a lot about relationships. And finding that this does translate into my relationships with others. It’s been a long time since I’ve had romantic, sexual romances, more than 10 years. But friendships, yes. Friendships being the basis of any good romantic relationship, any good romance, any good marriage. So first, my friendship with myself, by extension, my friendships with others. And so I come here to use my model of myself, my history, my observations of my family system, so many people I’ve seen in the world, and primarily my relationship with myself as a model to share with you.