TRANSCRIPT
Quick healing of all of our traumas is a ridiculous notion. Over the years, over the decades, I have heard a number of people, oftentimes therapists, sometimes researchers, sometimes just other regular folks out in the world saying, “Oh, you can heal all your traumas quickly. You can try this therapeutic method, EMDR or tapping or EFT or this or you can try this new drug, MDMA or ayahuasca or iboga or this one or this one. And it will help you work your traumas out, punch your traumas out. You can move on with your life.” And perhaps with some individual traumas, it’s possible that these things can help resolve something. I have heard, yes, a number of people talk about having individual traumas heal in some relatively quick way. Also, when I was a therapist, I saw people come in with some individual trauma. They were able to talk about it with me. Sometimes over a mere matter of days or even weeks, they could get some large degree of some individual trauma resolved and they could go back to their regular life.
But that’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the lifetime of traumas that we suffer in this existence. Starting when we grew up in families that couldn’t see the truth of us. Harmed us in very, very deep and basic ways from the time perhaps when we were babies or maybe even before we were born, in the womb. Raised us in an environment where we couldn’t be ourselves. Where we were invaded and betrayed and harmed and violated. Tormented and tortured even perhaps. Where we had terrible upwelling reactions and feelings that were our body trying to fight back and set boundaries and heal. And where our boundaries were disregarded again, where our feelings were disregarded again, where our reactions to our traumas were met with more traumas, where we were pushed down. Where our personalities were warped and squelched. Parts of us perhaps even destroyed. Maybe not for all time, maybe not in the best of all worlds destroyed, but functionally and fundamentally destroyed such that we lost touch with whole sides of ourselves, became split-off beings that didn’t connect with whole sides of us.
Many people so deeply lost their connections with themselves that they became like wandering zombies in this existence. Called normal, called good functional people, called good workers, called good students. Called good friends, good relationship material, good partners. And yet these people were not connected with the core of truth that was their birthright, that was the right of their existence. And when I think of that, that being the norm, that being normal regular people being so shut down and broken and split-off and lost, functionally zombies. And I think of therapists saying, “I can help you heal your traumas quickly. I can do this, that, this therapeutic technique or this drug or this situation or this something or this number of words or this amount of empathy and I can help you work it out in two sessions or five sessions or hypnosis or whatever it is, whatever magical bullet that I can give you.” And I think, “Who are these people?”
And so I have studied these people who say this. I think of so many of them. Therapists. I worked at therapy clinics when I was a therapist with a number of them and I got a chance to observe these people. And what I found is these people, time and again and again and again, were very lost and very screwed-up people. Yeah, they had a therapy license. Yes, they went to some training programs and they did some classes and they did thises and thats and they read some Freud and they read some Milton Erickson and they read this one and they read that one and they took some training class and they got this certificate and they learned how to punch out some traumas. And perhaps in their own life they did resolve a few traumas. Mostly what I found with these people by observing them, by talking to them, even hanging out a lot with them sometimes, is they had resolved some of their surface traumas. But by and large they were surface people. And they had fooled themselves. Or to use that therapeutic language, they had deluded themselves into thinking that they were healed. They had healed it all because this is all they knew of themselves.
And what about all this? Well, they didn’t look at this. And then when they were telling me and telling other therapists and telling their clients that they could help them heal all of their traumas, they were only referring to this. This surface layer of traumas. And maybe they could, you know, help some people heal some things. But it never worked for me. It always felt wrong. Some of them even tried some of their techniques with me. For free, they wanted to share, they wanted to proselytize their grand ideas. “Let me try EMDR with you. Let me try EFT with you. Let me show you how it works. Let me teach you. Let me help you boom punch out your traumas. Get them out of your system. Clear them from your psyche so you can finally be free, Daniel, and move on.” >> [laughter] >> These little ridiculous techniques. Some of them were vaguely interesting, pencils moving around and things like that, but no.
I’ve even tried some of the drugs, the ayahuasca and this and that, to see what it was like and they were interesting and I learned a few things about myself. Also learned what a terrible risk they can be for some people who are deeply unprocessed and have their traumas bubbling up from near the surface and those drugs can go down and loosen the traumas and literally explode into the person’s consciousness. Leading to breakdown and psychosis and I’ve heard stories of suicide as the result of taking these healing drugs. “Oh, they’re safe. They don’t have the side effects of all the psychiatric drugs. They’ll open you up.” Well, yeah, that’s the problem. Sometimes they really will open people up much, much, much deeper than the surface people who are promoting them.
Healing traumas. Really healing traumas. Into the depth of our core. A lifetime’s worth of work. I recently went back and read 36 years of my journaling. Read it all. Took me a long, long time to read it. >> [sighs] >> Seeing how my life’s work has been healing these traumas. Going into the truth of who my family system is, what they did to me. Making sense of it, feeling those feelings over decades, even just reading about the pain that I went through for so, so, so, so long. Breaking away from my entire family system. That alone took decades of process just to get away from them, to extricate myself from the tendrils of their insanity, of their manipulations, of their pulling me back in.
Part of the process of me being traumatized, and I see this as a universal in the world with basically everybody, is part of what happened by living so close with them and as a little baby and as a little child being under their control, is they warped me to become like them. I became like them. And part of my healing my traumas was to acknowledge to myself on paper, in my own consciousness, with a mirror, looking at myself and seeing, “Oh my god, I became like them.” They implanted themselves in me just like my grandparents implanted themselves in my parents. Breaking the cycle for me was breaking away from my parents, getting away from them, and also looking at myself and studying. It’s so tragic, how ugly I became. I have an ugly history. That’s part of the healing from trauma process, to look at it, to study it, to see why I became this way. Why did this core of a beautiful person become so ugly in my young life, so lost and so confused and very, very painful to look at this and to see it. Actually, most specifically, how painful to feel it. To grieve it, to cry. I cried so many times reading my journals, reading my history, but also writing it. Crying as I wrote, crying as I typed, crying as I felt and as I remembered. In my teen years, in my 20s, all through my 20s, in my 30s, in my 40s, into my 50s now. Crying and crying and crying and balancing this against practitioners, professional practitioners, researchers who say, “You can heal with this drug. You can heal with this technique and process in a day or a week or a month.” And I laugh at them and I say I have worked as hard as anyone I know to heal my traumas.
How traumatized am I compared to others? More in some ways, less in other ways, average in some ways. If I am a valid case study of the norm to some degree, I would have to say that at best for anyone, it’s a lifetime process to heal. Also, part of this healing from trauma process is to create a world around us that nurtures this healing. I couldn’t be around those people who told me, “Oh, you can heal in one session or five sessions or 10 sessions of a therapy technique or a drug.” Because those people were as toxic as my family system, because they were just as in denial. They had no clue of the depth of themselves and as the result of that could not see the depth of me. They were dangerous to me. They didn’t honor the truth of my healing process. They couldn’t see how much work I had done. They couldn’t see how much strength I had. They couldn’t see how harmed I was, because they had no idea of how harmed they were.
So, part of this lifetime of healing process has been surrounding myself with a healing environment. I wanted to say surrounding myself with other healing people, but that’s not easy. Even to find one or two is tough. So, that’s another thing for me. Surrounding myself with peace and quiet. With silence a lot of the time. With a safe place for me to be alone with my feelings, where they will not be invaded by others. And also in the silence of being with myself, being with my thoughts and my feelings, being with my journal where I can see it down on paper. To see what hateful things come up from within me and to see, “Ah, that’s not me. That’s what my family system, my parents being the primary agents of my family system, implanted in me to make me like them, to crush me so I will stay with them forever, be with them forever, be normal, be dead emotionally, just like they stayed with their parents and their parents stayed with their parents ad nauseam for a hundred generations back, probably.
So, here I am on this life path of healing, continuing the process, still partially traumatized, but getting into younger and younger ages inside myself and freeing the true spirit of me, the joy of me, the ability to see myself, to see truth within me, to see who I was always meant to be, to see my birthright of the core of my true self. And also, by extension, to see this in others. And when I say see this in others, what I mean is to see the universality of my own experience. And by extension, to see the ridiculousness of these people who are promoting these quick and easy cures. Here’s the truth. There is no quick and easy cure. It’s a long and painful process. It’s a life shift. It’s a lifetime’s worth of work.
I believe from my own experience, I believe bordering on I know, >> [laughter] >> that the world, some small percentage of the world is really getting healthier, is waking up, some small percentage. I’ve traveled a lot. I’ve been around a lot. I’ve talked to a ton of people. The consciousness of some percentage of the world is growing. These are the healthier people. A lot of people are not. That’s a fact. The world is getting sicker in lots of ways. That’s a fact. But I believe that for those of us who have the good fortune to find others who are on the healing process, if only through video, if only through the internet, we can get some support and through this grow and heal from our traumas and grieve our traumas and get some mirroring from others, get some support so that we can heal a little bit more easily, a little bit more quickly, with a little bit more hope. And that’s why I come here to share this with you.