TRANSCRIPT
No one can save you except for yourself. Painful words to share. Not easy to say it, but at the same time, for me and my own life and for what I observe in others, what a wonderful thing to say because what it means to me is that we have the capacity to save ourselves. We. What is we? We meaning me, inside myself, inside of all of us. There is a core of truth, some part of us that is inherently healthy and inviolate, that is perfect, that is connected with truth, that knows truth, that is full of love and that deeply, deeply loves ourself and that has a reflex toward loving ourself and wants to fight for ourself and fight for the best of us and fight for our healing and our growth. To fight for our grieving, that wants to help us resolve our traumas, wants to help us dig our way out from all the lies that got pushed on top of us, that wants to dig out of our unconscious, dig out of the family secrets under which we were buried. That wants to know the truth and live with the truth and be [clears throat] the truth, that wants to reject the lies of our parents and perhaps reject our parents entirely for having not fostered our growth processes much at all.
In my experience, almost nobody was very useful to me on my healing path. Almost nobody. There were a few people who did help me a lot through great ideas. People that I may not have even met, people through books who wrote about ideas that inspired me, that reminded me, that gave me a mirror that reminded me that I could do it, that I could figure this out, that at least I could try. There were also a few people along the way who gave me some direct interpersonal mirroring, who said to me, “Wow, you’re figuring it out. Wow, you can do it. Wow, you are right. Wow, your parents suck. They were crazy. They were horrible. They are horrible. They are trying to destroy you. Yes, you have a right to get away from them.” But all of these external people who I knew directly or knew indirectly have paled in comparison as healing figures to the deepest, truest part of me. And that’s my vote of confidence in myself. And I see this as universal. I’m not just speaking about me here, I’m speaking about everybody. Everybody has this capacity. But it is harder for some people. Some people have been traumatized more. They come from more screwed up family systems than I came from, and I came from a pretty darn screwed up one. But some people definitely have it worse. They come from cultures that make it more difficult to break away from the family, more difficult to confront parents, more difficult to take a step outside of the family system and to be an individual who calls out the lies that are all around them. Some cultures even make it criminal to speak out against parents. I’ve heard these stories. I’ve seen it. I’ve been to some of these cultures.
So yes, it is harder for some people, but this does not change the inherent fact of what I’m saying, that ultimately the only one who can save us. The strongest healing force in all of our lives is the core truth in us. We may not be able to do it very loudly or publicly. We might get in a lot of trouble if we let the world know what we’re really thinking. The family system and the society around us and even the laws of the government of the land might be able to destroy us, unlike what’s going on with me here because here I’m able to make a video about it and put it on the internet without getting destroyed, at least right now at this time. Maybe in the future, who knows? Maybe things will change. Maybe things will go more extreme in the direction of protecting the family system in this culture and with our laws such that these will be removed and these ideas will be scrubbed out of existence and I’ll get in trouble more than I’m already terrified by sharing these ideas here and now.
But still, I think about myself when I was younger, when I was much more embedded in my family system, meaning when I was much more deluded by the idea that my parents were my greatest allies, that they really loved me, that they really nurtured the best of me, that they really wanted to help me grow. That’s what I mean by having been more embedded in the family system. When I was more embedded in the family system, it was much, much harder to connect with the deeper truth of me. I was much more infantile then, even though I was an adult. I was in my 20s when I was much more embedded in the family system, and at that point in my life, >> [sighs] >> I didn’t have such a strong connection with the deepest, truest, healthiest part of me because it was more buried. It was more buried under all this unconscious, repressed, post-traumatic feelings. And at that point in my life, I was much more susceptible to looking to external people to save me. It was then that I began voluntarily going to psychotherapy thinking, “Hmm, maybe this therapist, this mature, older adult person, a man, a woman, I tried both, sitting in some fancy office, dressed well, looking the part with a license and a degree and a fancy office with beautiful woodwork and paneling and you know, hand on the chin and pencil on the paper, that this person could help me sort it out and save me.” What I didn’t realize is these therapists, in their deep psychological makeup, were actually much more like my parents than they were like me. Yet I was trying to use these external people to save me from my parents. They were a fool’s savior. They weren’t going to save me at all. What they were going to do and what they did was they were going to tell me they could try to save me. They would gladly take my money forever, listen to me, and seemingly nurture me and use a nurturing tone, but they were not giving me good feedback, not giving me healthy feedback, and in their deep message, they were trying to remake me in their own image, meaning they were trying to make me become, well, more like my own parents. And eventually I had to get away from them and do the work by myself. That work, that painful work with no guru, with no external guide. My guide was internal. Very, very confusing because my internal self was a mess. I wasn’t allowed to have a deeply internal self in my family system. So now I’m suddenly expected to do it. Very long and confusing process, primarily through journaling, primarily through writing and writing and writing about how I was feeling and trying to make sense of it and reading my journal entries and writing more and then reading about them and thinking about them and analyzing what I wrote and writing more and writing down my dreams, looking what came out of my unconscious, seeing if I could see patterns in my dreams. I saw a lot of disturbed patterns in my dreams. Doing lots and lots of reading, trying to listen to anybody who sounded like they knew what they were talking about and running down a lot of blind alleys. Yes, I followed to a degree a lot of different people who seemed to be mature and wise. In fact, anybody who said they were mature and wise, I gave them a listen. I opened my heart and really tried to see could this be helpful to me? And that included different philosophers and different religions and different, uh, psychology experts. Very many different schools of psychology. I was open to anything because I really wasn’t so connected with me in a consistent way and I wasn’t so sure of what might help me.
As it happened, pretty much almost all of those gurus and leaders and philosophers and religions, I just got rid of them. Some parts of some of them I kept because what I found is pretty much most wisdom and most philosophy has some value in it, but mostly the value was pretty small compared to the harm the ideas had. What I found is most of the philosophies and religions and gurus and leaders and, uh, wise thinkers were basically still pretty traumatized, pretty screwed up, and pretty much following the family system. So then now as I start to wrap up this video, I’d like to talk about one final thing that’s in some ways most personal. And that’s that now I myself am one of these people who consider myself rather wise about ideas of psychology and healing and philosophy such that I have the audacity, I guess it would be called, to come here and talk about it publicly and share about it. And what happens sometimes is that people look at me as someone who might be able to save them. And so what would my advice be to such people who think I could save them? Well, I go back to my original idea. I can’t save you. You can save yourself. You have to trust yourself. You have to look within. Figure out somehow, some way to get through all the traumatic feelings and open up the memories and look into it and find the truth of you because it’s deep down there and it’s buried, it’s buried in everybody. And the more we heal, the less buried it becomes.
But am I worth listening to? Am I worth considering for my ideas, for the potential truth and potential falsity in my ideas? Well, I would say so. I would say there’s a lot of value in what I am sharing. But does it universally apply to everyone at every given moment? Absolutely not. The other thing is different people are at different places, and I myself am at different places at different moments. So I get scared by the idea that people, anybody at any given time and any given place in their life might take something that I say potentially out of context and apply it to themselves and say that this is what they need to do now in order to heal. And it might not be true. One of the basic things that scares me the most is I talk a lot about the value in breaking away from one’s parents. I’ve written a book about it, Breaking From Your Parents. It’s something that has progressively helped to save my life over the decades, allowed me to get away from the people who harmed me, get away from the people who would continue to harm me, get away from the people who wished to block me from my deepest connection from myself and would wish to keep me blocked from my deepest connection with myself because my deepest self threatened them deeply. Yet when I talk about that, does that mean that anyone at any given time should break away from their family? Well, heaven forbid. So many people are so deeply embedded in their family system that breaking away is not a reality immediately. Maybe someday, maybe someday in the future confronting parents would be good for such people, but maybe it’s not right now. Maybe people aren’t financially independent enough. Maybe they’re not emotionally independent enough. Maybe they’re not old enough to break away. Maybe it’s too dangerous in their culture, in their land, in their society, in their religion to break away. Maybe there’s a lot of initial groundwork that needs to be done first before any breaking away is possible or could potentially be helpful. And if it’s done too soon, it could prove to be very harmful for someone’s growth process.
Now, I just use this as an example to talk about don’t, please, don’t just take me as a savior who says and take what I say out of context. And what is the context? The context for healing has to come from an inner relationship with the self. And I believe anybody at any time can find some way to connect with some kernel of themself. So that self, that deepest inner self can be their guide toward independence, >> [snorts] >> toward healing, toward grieving of traumas, toward making better decisions to love one’s self better so that one might grow, might break away from harmful influences, might be able to make better decisions to have a healthier life in one’s future.