TRANSCRIPT
Over the years, I have had many people reach out to me and suggest that I start a community. Not an online community even, but a real physical meet-in-person community based on the ideas of healing from childhood trauma, even on doing self-therapy. I am very resistant to starting a community, although I acknowledge that a community would be wonderful. It would be great to be a part of a community; I just don’t want to start one. And I’d like to share my reasons why.
The main reason is that actually, I think it was 15, 16 years ago, a friend of mine and I actually did start a community. It was all about doing self-therapy and healing from childhood trauma. We created a 12-step process in healing from childhood trauma. We actually turned that into a book, which we wrote called From Trauma to Enlightenment: Doing Self-Therapy in 12 Steps. We also had an opening and a closing. We met once a week for, I believe, it was an hour and a half. We found a place, a hospital, that allowed us to meet there. We paid them a little bit of rent for a meeting room. We had all sorts of different principles that went into how to run these meetings. We had someone who opened the meeting. We had a speaker every week from within the group. We had group sharing time. We had a meeting closing. We had meeting sayings, basically concepts that were good for self-therapy, self-healing. It seemed like a great idea, and we did it for a year and a half. So I think we met, well, 75 times or so.
The problem was it wasn’t that satisfying in a way. There were more problems than it was worth. So I’d like to talk about some of those problems because they really came into my mind. And I think it wasn’t just this group that would have had these problems. I think, from what I’ve seen a lot with doing self-therapy, healing from childhood trauma, I think any sort of non-professional group would have some of these problems.
One was that it was a peer support group. This wasn’t a group with leaders who knew more than everyone else and who were being paid to be there, especially professional leaders. This was a non-professional group. So yes, although my friend and I were leaders in a sense, in that we founded the group, started it, created the principles, we weren’t leaders in terms of telling other people how to live their lives. And one of the big problems was that a lot of people wanted us to do that. In a way, they treated us like therapists, and the whole point was, no, you not only can be your own therapist, but you have to be your own therapist.
Interestingly, one of the tools that we had—not one of the steps for healing from childhood trauma, but one of the tools that we used for healing from childhood trauma—was going to therapy. Because we acknowledge sometimes going to therapy can be very helpful for some people. But I wasn’t there to be anybody’s therapist, and I was very clear, having at that point worked as a therapist myself, the difference between what being a therapist was and being a therapist wasn’t. I certainly, in my free time, for free, in a peer support group, the last thing I wanted to be was anyone’s therapist. I didn’t want to ask them therapeutic questions. I didn’t want to hold their toes to the fire, as it were, like a therapist. And yet, a lot of people wanted that.
Also, what I found is that a lot of people found doing self-therapy to be not just very stressful, but too stressful. I think a lot of people found that it was too loose and free of an environment. I think also a lot of people came there just to dump their feelings but not to self-reflect. Also, a lot of people came there, and they didn’t share about having any greater self-therapeutic process, meaning they would just come, talk about whatever they were going through, dump feelings, cry, be angry, but not really self-reflect on much of what they were going through. And when they shared about their process during the week, it sounded like they did nothing. They weren’t following any of the tools of self-therapy. And I could understand why, in a way, because it was really hard. And I think for some people, it was nice to just have a place where they could go and freely share about horrible things that happened to them and how they were feeling as the result of it. But for me, that wasn’t the kind of community that I particularly wanted to be a part of.
And why did I start this group, this community? Well, from what I remember—and this is what sticks with me now—I started it for two reasons. One is that I wanted to create a community where other people could do self-therapy in a communal environment, in relation to other people, to be inspired by other people and to, in turn, inspire others. And that was part of my personal motivation, is that I felt like I was doing so much of my healing process in privacy. Hardly anybody knew about anything I was doing. So what I wanted to do is I wanted to have more allies. I wanted to be inspired by other people, and what I found is there, it’s pretty hard to find that.
Also, when I said a lot of people came and just dumped emotions, another thing is a lot of people came and acted out, meaning they were replicating their unresolved history of childhood trauma in this group. People would sometimes fight with each other. They would criticize each other, crosstalk each other, or even play therapists with each other in a way that went against the group’s principles. And it reminded me of, in a way, why I didn’t like being a pre-k teacher—a pre-kindergarten teacher—with three, four, and five-year-olds in the New York City public school system. Because so many of the kids were so troubled, so traumatized, so screwed up in their family homes that when they came to school, they would act that out. Such that I noticed so many of the teachers, myself included, spent a lot of the best of our energy practicing discipline in the class. And who wants to do that? That’s not fun. That’s why I did it for one, you know, one year, less than a year. I started midway through the year and did it for a while and said, this is not a career for me.
Well, in the self-therapy group, I definitely did not want to be a disciplinarian and say, “Oh no, these are not the rules of the group.” A lot of people were bucking the rules of the group, and it was unpleasant for me. And so one might say, “Oh, you just didn’t have strong enough principles in the group.” But it’s like, no, we did have strong enough principles. It’s just that I didn’t want to be an enforcer of principles. That wasn’t what I saw as my role in the group. I wanted people in the group who automatically understood that. And the problem was basically almost nobody did get that.
And so that’s the part for me starting a community. I’ve also started—I had an online forum on my website, I think from 2005 to about 2008 or nine. A lot of people came, did a lot of posting. There was a lot of interaction. Some of it was really interesting. I met, well, a couple of people who became good friends through that group. That was wonderful. But a lot of people came and really acted out. There was a lot of rage. There was a lot of conflict. And this is a big problem with groups that actually are inviting in people who have been not just traumatized, but sometimes very traumatized. There can be a lot of people with a lot of anger, a lot of vulnerability, a lot of hurt. And sometimes, get enough of those people together, people can really trigger each other, really act out with each other. And sometimes acting out, spewing, putting out one’s anger and rage on people who may bear no relation to having caused one’s rage is more comfortable than doing deeper healing. And it’s very hard to moderate a group like that where it’s like, as soon as you tell people, “No, that’s not okay. You can’t behave that way,” people can turn their rage onto you. That happens in actually all sorts of peer support groups when people start in a leadership role.
Setting limits on other people’s behavior, people’s bad behavior, or really bad behavior. Sometimes those people can really despise the leaders. Those leaders can be, in a way, stand-ins for one’s historical traumatizers.
A lot of times when people aren’t too aware of their own acting out behavior, it can feel really good to divert, distract, project even one’s unresolved feelings at one’s traumatizers on someone who might be quite innocent and might be quite healthy in a way.
So all these things for me go into, like, I’m a little gun shy. I don’t want to start a group again so quickly. So I think about that, and yet I think, I think someday there will naturally and spontaneously be more self-therapeutic communities springing up around the world. I think we just may be in an early time for it.
I think sometime, some future date, 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years in the future of humanity, when people are much more aware of trauma, when people are much more aware of the violations that happened, especially in their own families of origin from their parents, when this is more commonly known, when a lot more people are feeling this way, when there’s a lot more mass grieving going on. I’ve talked about that in another video about mass grieving.
When this happens, I think more of these communities will spring up. There will be more people fighting for boundaries. There won’t be one leader or two leaders in a group, but everyone, lots more people will be leaders. It’ll make it easier to disperse the energy of that it requires to be a leader of a group, a leader of ideas, more common values, more common principles required for healing.
And I think at that point, more communities will spring up. It’ll be easier for people to have communities, communities where it’s safe to share, safe to trust, where people won’t have to sacrifice themselves too much to be perhaps a temporary leader of a group. That’s what I look forward to.
But I think right now for me, it’s just not something that I personally, in my own self-therapeutic process, can handle all that much. And I don’t see too many other people that have it within themselves to do it much now either.