TRANSCRIPT
Never fault someone for errors of exuberance. I remember the first time I heard that statement. I loved it. I took that to my heart. It was such a relief to hear it because I have made a lot of errors of exuberance in my life. Exuberance being having high energy, high passion, being very excited and excitable, coming from a very positive and cheerful place. In many ways, that was the story of certain aspects of my childhood.
To have this exuberance, I still have it actually. I mean, yes, now I talk about a lot of critical stuff, breaking from the family system and healing from trauma and calling trauma for what it is. But I think in some ways I do it with an exuberant spirit, or at least I try to, if I can open the sea and really be myself.
But I think about some of those errors of exuberance in my life and how I was taught in my childhood so many times to be ashamed of my exuberance, to be ashamed of my expressions of joy and passion and thrill. And how somehow I learned that lesson that my joyousness, my exuberance was a flaw, that there was something wrong with it, unnatural, that I was supposed to be neutral and dead. That the people who were more neutral and dead were more acceptable to the world, more acceptable to my parents. And they were. They were more acceptable to my teachers, to the school system, to the university system. Exuberance, joyous passion, it didn’t really fit in our world.
I think of a story. I must have been around 8 years old, and I remember asking my mom a strange question, but a logical question. I said, “What happens if you and dad die? Where will I go? Who will take me?” And my mom said that her older sister would take me in, would adopt me basically. And I remember thinking about it. I had basically no relationship with my mom’s older sister. She was very tight, cold, and had never been particularly warm to me in any way. But I remember thinking about it. I thought, “Oh my God, she is my next in line.” This woman who I don’t even know very well, and I spent a lot of time with her. I’d met her; she just didn’t really care much about me. But I thought she’s the next in line to be my mom. And I thought about it a lot, and I remember in a way sort of loving her for taking that role, agreeing to take that role if my parents died. And I remember thinking of her as a second mom from far away because she lived a few hundred miles away.
Well, then we drove to a summer house that we had, and where my aunt, who was next in line to be my mom, also had a summer house. And we drove there, and I was so excited to see her because now I knew the truth that she would be my mom if my mom wasn’t. And I remember seeing her and just feeling so much warmth and joy toward her. I was just a little boy of eight, and there she was. We got out of the car, and I ran probably 50 feet, and I ran and I jumped into her arms exuberantly. And she was so not that kind of person, not physical, not loving, not caring, that she froze up. And I literally knocked her over. She fell over backwards. Thankfully, she didn’t get hurt; she caught herself, and I rolled to the side. And she looked at me like, “Oh,” like I was this dirty, disgusting, horrible thing for having jumped into her arms exuberantly. And I died inside. I felt so horrible about myself and so ashamed. And nobody comforted me. I think my mother went over to her, “Are you all right? Are you all right?” They cared more about her. I was just sort of inconsequential.
And I was more careful with my exuberance around other people after that. I mean, it didn’t go away entirely, but it was one of many things that happened, life lessons that taught me you have to be careful with your joy, with your passionate energy. The world doesn’t like it. The world is frozen and dead and can’t handle it. But inevitably, some part of me thought badly of myself, thought that there was something even crazy about me, out of control. And I remember hearing that, I think even from my mother’s sister’s family, “Daniel’s out of control. He has problems. He’s pathological in some way.” I remember hearing from someone else on that side of the family, “Daniel needs to take a Valium.” A Valium, a benzodiazepine to kill my spirit? No thanks.
Actually, I think it helped me in a way though to hear that “Daniel needs to take a Valium” because even though I didn’t know what Valium was when I was 8, 9, 10, 11 years old, I knew that it was something bad. It was something spirit-killing. And later, many years later, 20 years later, when I became a psychotherapist and I heard psychiatrists say, “Oh, that client needs a benzo. They need Valium. They need Xanax. They need Klonopin,” I remember thinking, “Do they, or do they need someone to respect their passion and truth? Someone to honor their anxiety as coming from a place that it’s like a steam valve that wants to leak out deeper truth? The truth of their history, the truth of their abuse?”
Do people really need psychiatric drugs? Do people need to be muted more, or do people need to open up and let their joy out behind the trauma? Is the joy behind the abuse and the brokenness and the squelched down feelings? Is the exuberance? And what I have found over the decades now, now that I’m in my 50s, is that the more I have healed my traumas, the more I have gotten away from my traumatizer, the more I have become my own parent, learned to love myself, learned to honor myself, grieve the horrible things that happened to me, the more I have done this, the more my true spirit has come out. The less I am ashamed of my exuberance, and I am more exuberant than ever.
It’s still hard though. I still have moments where I’m ashamed of my exuberance. The world is full of dead people, emotionally dead, emotionally shut down people who consider their denial of their history to be healthy. And they surround themselves with other people who are in denial, who are emotionally dead, who are emotionally frozen, like my aunt, like my mother, like my father, like my family system, like my teachers, like most of the bosses I’ve ever had in my work life. And yes, I have to be careful how I express my exuberance because these people everywhere still will pathologize it. And I still am vulnerable, despite all the strength and knowledge and self-knowledge and self-love that I’ve built up. I still have to be careful because they will shame me, they will pathologize me, they will criticize it. And some part of me, some part of me is still hurt by it. Some part of me still considers it an error of exuberance as opposed to they have the error of not having healed. They have the error of being dead inside and locking away their exuberance and blaming anyone else who has it, labeling them in some negative way.
And yet I go on in life. I fight for myself when I make a so-called error of exuberance, and I’m able to sort it out and realize who is blaming me for having made an error and how healthy I often am. And I return to loving myself. I go forward through life stronger, more committed to the truth of me, more committed to the passionate truth of myself that I have now and that I always did.
[Music]