TRANSCRIPT
No one ever gets criticized for saying they had a good childhood. Now, what I’ve observed is that the goodness or badness of people’s childhood happens to be on a spectrum. Some people certainly have better childhoods than others, and some have worse childhoods than others. Some have extremely worse childhoods than others, but everyone has some sort of problems in their childhood, some sort of traumas, neglects. They have parents with limitations. They’ve experienced things that were emotionally overwhelming that they had to bury and block and deny.
This is why everyone has some sort of psychological defenses. It’s defenses against the pain and anger and sadness of what is buried within them. And part and parts of this defense against what’s buried within them is to say, “Well, it didn’t really happen,” or “It didn’t really hurt me,” or in the most extreme, “I had a good childhood,” and no one criticizes them for it.
I think of my time as a therapist. When people would come in, they would have all sorts of emotional problems, and I would ask them about their childhood, just part of the intake process. And not infrequently, people would say, “I had a really good childhood.” And right away, it was like, “Oh, okay.” Early on, I didn’t think so much about it because I wasn’t as psychologically aware as I became over time, listening to people again and again, all day long.
But as time went on in my career as a therapist, and certainly also once I quit being a therapist quite a number of years ago, and in my time out in the world, I’ve come to take it as a truism that people’s emotional problems have roots in what happened to them as children. People’s things that get labeled as mental illnesses and mental problems and psychiatric diagnosis are rooted in their childhood experiences, often multiple layers of negative, harmful childhood experiences, traumas upon traumas, with all sorts of different facets.
And what has amazed me is that when people say their childhood was good, in spite of the evidence to the contrary, just based on their adult problems, it’s a huge disconnect. And that’s what I felt as a therapist, and that’s what I see now also as a major impediment to people healing. How can people heal the root of the problem when they don’t even see that there was a problem?
Yet there are major advantages in the world and in society for saying, “Well, I had a good childhood,” because nobody criticizes them. First and foremost, is what I’ve seen again and again is when people say, “I had a good childhood,” their parents are happy with them. And it’s not necessarily that their parents love them more; rather, their parents hate them less.
Because what I’ve seen is when people start to say, “You know, my childhood wasn’t so good. My parents didn’t treat me so well. They had a lot of areas of inconsistencies, a lot of flaws, a lot of emotional abandonment, sometimes even overt abuse and violence and things like that.” Well, not always, but most of the time, parents don’t want to hear it. They don’t like being called out for their bad behavior. They’re like most people in the world in relationship with others. People don’t like being called out. They don’t like having their denial pierced.
So when children, grown children, don’t call their parents out and instead join forces with their parents in denial, when the children, when the grown children don’t empathize with the feelings of the child who they once were and who is still buried within them, well, they side with the abusive parents, or better said, with the abusive sides of their parents.
But it goes in the bigger picture too. I see it a lot in a group of people. When there’s ten people who all say, “Oh, I had a good childhood,” and everyone’s saying, “Oh, good, cool, yeah, you’re just like us,” and then there’s one person who says, “Yeah, my parents were pretty abusive,” or “had some good sides but were, you know, abusive in this way or that way,” people get uncomfortable. It’s like, “Oh, that person, there’s a red flag. They’re dangerous. What’s next? What are they going to say? Oh, I think they have problems. Oh, they’re bitter. Oh, they can’t let go. Oh, they don’t know how to forgive.”
And there’s all sorts of different societal ways to pathologize people who actually want to study the truth of what happened to them, who want to uncover the emotional history of their childhood. And what my life experience has proven to me, my life experience in my relationship with myself and observing thousands and thousands and thousands of others, is that if people don’t uncover the emotional truth of their childhood, the emotional truth of what happened to them, the emotional truth of their childhood relationships, especially their relationships with their parents, they’re going to be stuck. They can’t grow. They can’t heal. And they can’t develop as people.
And in a way, what easier way to block all growth, block all development, block all self-knowledge and self-awareness and self-reflection than just to say, “Well, I had a good childhood. My parents loved me. It was really nice, and everything was good.” It sounds so reasonable and healthy and normal, yet from what I’ve observed largely, and sometimes enormously, it’s just simply false.
And then I also reflect that I have had the strange experience again and again of watching people grow up, knowing people when they were children, and getting a chance to watch them move through life into adulthood and seeing what actually went on in their childhoods. Watching them relate to their parents, watching them relate to their siblings, seeing the pain they suffered, seeing the torment on their faces, seeing their tears dry up and get squelched, and the bitterness in their face all get buried because there was no one to care about them, no one to love them, no one to see them and honor them, certainly not in any protracted, long-term, consistent way.
And watching these very people grow up and later say they had a good childhood, and they really don’t know. That’s what’s so interesting and even confusing, is that they forget. And I think forgetting is another basic defense mechanism: just bury it so deep in the memory that it becomes inaccessible.
I talked about this friend of mine in a different video who died, died of drugs, I believe, homeless, an absolutely rotten childhood. And yet when I spoke with him in adulthood, he said he had a good childhood. And I think of so many of my other childhood friends who I knew along the way. Horrible things happened to them: horrible neglect, horrible abandonment, humiliation, and physical violence and torment from their parents, lack of love, being put down repeatedly. And they grew up and have lives that actually reflect what happened to them, and yet they don’t know it.
And on the surface, they gloss it over with a shiny patina that said, “I had a good childhood.” And sometimes even their husbands and wives and partners and friends have no clue what their childhood was like and just accept their flossy, glossy words that say, “I had a good childhood.” And sometimes these people become close to their parents later in life, and, “Oh, my mom always loved me so much, and now I’m really there for her.” And their partners and wives and husbands say, “What a good guy,” or “What a good woman I’m in a relationship with because they’re so there for their parents. What a good person.”
And they even say, “Oh, you know, they had a good childhood, and now they’re giving back to their parents.” And yet I think, “But it’s not true.” And I think aside from all other reasons, aside from emotional healing, aside from my time as a therapist, aside from what it takes to heal and what it takes to grow, a big part of what motivates me to make this video and out in the world, when I’m not sitting behind a camera, to even ask this question and to be rankled, to be bothered when people say they have a good childhood when there’s all evidence to the contrary, is simply that it’s not true.
And what I think, what I feel, what I know in life is you can’t build a real life. You can’t build a real self. You can’t build real relationships with other people, especially deep and intimate relationships. You can’t guide children. You can’t be a good parent if you’re not a true person. People who are not true people don’t spread truth. Their love is tainted. Their love is limited. They may not have much love.
At all, but what they do pass on is what’s beneath the surface. They pass on their abuses. They pass on their limitations. They pass on their abandonments from childhood, their wounds. They pass it on to their children. They pass on their fears. They pass on their denial. They pass on their hurt and their bitterness and their rage. And because they’re so dishonest with themselves, they can’t give empathy when these very things are expressed in others. This very pain is expressed in others.
So often I see the parents who say that they had a good childhood giving a rotten childhood to their own flesh and blood children, yet denying it and saying, “Oh my children have a great childhood.” And yet their children are miserable, and the lines of misery are written on their faces. And the children go to bed unhappy and unseen and unknown. And the children split off from themselves and are angry and bitter and don’t have good friendships and feel unfulfilled and confused and lost and emotionally disconnected. And secretly, and sometimes not so secretly, act out all their pain and their problems.
And their parents can’t take any responsibility for it because the parents had a good childhood. “You’re having a good childhood too, so there’s no reason for you to be feeling all these rotten ways that you say you’re feeling. It’s actually your fault that you’re feeling bad.” And heaven forbid I or anyone else come in and say, “Well actually parent, you’re not right. You didn’t have a good childhood, and you’re passing it along to your children.” Then the parents get angry at me or any other truth speaker. Or heaven forbid the child says it: “You are abusing me.” Then the parent feels affronted. “You’re blaming me for something that’s not my fault. You’re a liar. You’re wrong. You’re a screwed up kid.”
And then these children, or these children who become adults, end up in therapy in a psychology field that also is as profoundly in denial as the parents. And the psychology field not only doesn’t really want to look deeply into people’s childhoods, but doesn’t want to empathize with the wounds of childhood. And instead, by and large, sides with the parents and gives the children psychiatric diagnoses with fancy Greek names and a bunch of letters attached to them in codes, 24612 and this and this and diagnostic codes that supposedly are not related to childhood trauma and are instead related to genetic problems and biological problems and chemical imbalances.
The fraud of science. Science that doesn’t really want to ask questions about what really happened to children. Science, by definition, the search for truth, which in the hands of people in denial, scientists in denial, becomes instead a quest to block, to deny, to refract, to defend abusers with all these diagnoses and labels. And then instead of helping people look at what happened to them, give them a context where they can be loved for who they really are, help them really study themselves, help them build a new family based on love and respect and empathy and truth, instead, well, let’s give them pills. And let’s give them some different technique which will help them work out the surface of their problem, just on the surface.
Let’s give them CBT and DBT and this one and that one and this one and lots of codes and fancy sounding stuff that doesn’t get to the heart of what the issue is and isn’t intended to get to the heart. Because when people say, “I didn’t have a good childhood,” the heart gets opened. Then truthful questions can be asked, open questions can be asked, questions that have answers that, well, don’t protect the family, don’t protect society, don’t protect school and siblings and religion and politicians and leaders. Questions instead that have answers that lead to anger, injustice, frustration, sadness, bitterness, and then tears of grieving. Grieving the only way to heal from a childhood that wasn’t so good.
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