TRANSCRIPT
Over the last few years, quite a few people have commented on this YouTube channel asking if maybe I don’t have a responsibility to try to help my parents heal, to love my parents so that they will grow and have a more fulfilling life. And I would like to tell a story that shares why I don’t feel any responsibility to help my parents heal and grow.
It happened when I was 21 years old. I was coming home from Thanksgiving from college to visit my mom and dad. They were separated; they separated only a few months before they were headed for divorce. I drove up from Philadelphia to New York City to visit my mom for one night, and then the next day I had to drive 350 miles west to visit my dad. So I was just going to spend one night with my mom to say happy Thanksgiving and then visit my dad.
Well, I arrived at my mom’s apartment in New York City, and I rang the buzzer, and she didn’t answer. That was strange. She knew I was coming. I arrived exactly when I said I would. It was like seven o’clock at night. I rang and rang and rang, but I didn’t have a key, so I couldn’t get in. I didn’t know what to do. I was sitting on the street, confused, a little scared. What happened to my mom?
Well, I rang the superintendent of her building. He let me in. He let me borrow the spare key. I went upstairs, and I opened the door, and I went inside, and I discovered that my mom was drunk. She was drunk in the bed; she was passed out. She was mumbling to herself, and then she sat up. “Oh, Daniel wants to see.” She was so drunk, and it wasn’t the first time that it had happened. My mom, I knew, was an alcoholic. She didn’t acknowledge it, but I did because you couldn’t deny it. I should say I couldn’t deny it. She did the craziest things. I saw the craziest things throughout my teen years, especially getting home from school. She’d be drunk; she’d lie about it. She’d have half her clothes off; she didn’t care. Well, she’d hide alcohol. She always would deny it. This was an ongoing issue.
But at 21, I was becoming independent. I was becoming more mature. I was becoming more intellectually sophisticated. I had more insight, yet I was still very embedded in my family system. All those confused childhood dynamics were still very alive in me, and there was a part of me that really didn’t have my true self at all. I felt that it was my job and my responsibility, probably like several people have questioned in the comments on these YouTube videos, that it was my responsibility to help my mom wake up and to help her heal and grow and gain insight into herself.
So I made her a cup of coffee, and I sat down next to her bed, and I brought a chair in, and she sat up, and I fed her coffee, and I talked with her, and I told her I loved her, and we talked and talked and talked for an hour. Slowly, she sobered up, and she admitted that she’d been drinking. Wow, I was making real progress! I really felt that she’s admitting she’s drinking. This is rare. She’d only done that like two or three times in my whole life. Usually, she lied; she would hide bottles, things like that.
As she sobered up more, I told her about how it made me feel and how painful it was, and we cried together. And she was like, “I’m so sorry.” And she started talking more about why she was drinking, some of the painful things that happened in her life, how painful it was that my father had left. This was real breakthrough kind of material. I felt great! I feel like I was helping my mother heal. Unconsciously, what I was really thinking is there was still the little boy part of me that thinks I’m going to get my mother back. I’m going to get my mother to love me again. But also, there was a part of me, I think, that really did genuinely love my mother, even in spite of how much I can’t stand my mom for all the horrible things she did to me, how much she twisted my life and really screwed it up in some ways. My mom was my first love. My mother was my first love in my life, and I still love my mom, and I still wish she would heal.
Well, nine o’clock at night, two hours later, we’re still talking. Ten o’clock, eleven o’clock at night, it’s getting late. I’m getting a little sleepy, but I’m like, you know, I’m not gonna miss this opportunity. My mom is opening up, and I think she really may get it this time. I was having hope. My God, my mom could get it! She could wake up; she could become a great person. She had the capacity to be a great person. She had a lot of good qualities.
Well, as she became more and more sober, eleven thirty, midnight, she’s really being sober now, and she’s talking like a sober person. She’s talking about how she feels when she drinks and how it makes her feel good and how it helps her pain go away and how she knows she has to deal with her pain and she knows she has to really learn to look at it and process it and not hide from it and run away from it, and how grateful she is that I’m sitting with her and listening to her and caring about her, and how much it gives her inspiration to keep growing and how I inspire her through the role modeling of my life, through my life and the respect and the ear that I give her.
Well, we stayed up until one o’clock talking and talking, and I did a lot of listening. Was this training for me to become a therapist? I think so in some ways, listening training. But it was also not good training because there was a lot of misplaced boundaries in this, which I’ll get into in a little bit. Well, I kept listening. Long therapy session, one o’clock in the morning, six hours it’s been going on already. Well, we stayed up until two o’clock, getting really sleepy now. Three o’clock, I think I finally went to bed around three thirty in the morning. I went in the other room and slept on the couch. My mom went to sleep; she was totally sober by then.
Well, three thirty, I slept about three hours. I knew I had to get up early because I had a seven, eight-hour drive ahead of me. Woke up at six thirty, seven in the morning. I slept about three and a half hours, and not good sleep, not restful sleep. It was too intense talking about this. It was too intense, the pain of seeing my mom drunk, hearing her talk about her childhood traumas, hearing her talk about her horrible father, her mother who never took care of her, her father who violated her in all sorts of disgusting and perverse ways, her mother who let it go on and did nothing, horrible boyfriends my mother had, had terrible painful things she’d gone through in her life, the pain of losing my dad, the pain of losing work, the pain of losing friends. It really stirred me up; it was very painful.
Well, I woke up in the morning. My mom woke up with me. We ate breakfast and then hugged goodbye. I went down, got in my car, and you know what I felt? I felt proud of myself that I had helped my mom. I felt proud of myself that I had been there for her, that I loved my mom. And unconsciously, underneath it, I felt a sense of security and safety, like I had done in a way what I was trained to do. I was trained to put my mom first and to love her to the best of my ability so that she would eventually be a mom for me. She would care for me. All that love would boomerang back. That was the hope, sort of like trickle-down economics: give money to the rich, and some will trickle down to the poor.
I thought about this as I drove upstate, as I drove up through Pennsylvania and then up through central New York. Well, the real highlight of the story and the reason that I tell it is about four or five hours into the drive, I was exhausted, and I was yawning.
I was too stupid and immature and tired to realize that my job was to pull over and take a nap. And I didn’t because I was so gung-ho on getting up there when I said I would be there to meet my dad. Also because I wanted to make him happy and be on time. Well, I didn’t pull over and take a nap, and what happened is I was driving along, my eyes were fluttering, just sort of in my own world, still reflecting on my conversation with my mom, even sometimes crying a little bit. I closed my eyes for a second and opened them, and then closed my eyes for two seconds and opened them, and going 65 miles an hour. Thankfully, not too many cars around because I closed my eyes, and I suddenly found myself having this lovely dream about having a mom who loved me. Yeah, it was kind of bumpy. Our life was bumpy, and her history was bumpy, and my pain was bumpy. And I opened my eyes, and I was not on the road. I was actually off in the grass, going 65 miles an hour off the side of the highway, and cars jumping all over the place. I fell asleep at the wheel, and thank God I had the wherewithal. Good luck, I think. I think we get a few examples of good luck, a few chances for good luck in our lives that stop us from killing ourselves or killing somebody else. And I pulled back on the road and caught—there was a car probably 300 feet behind me, honking and honking because they’d seen me almost murder myself. And I was able to pull off onto the side of the road, onto the other shoulder, and stop. And I was shaking, and I was like, I just committed the ultimate driving sin of stupidity. I fell asleep at the wheel. And for like 20 minutes, I was shaking, and my adrenaline came down. And then I drove a little ways, and the car actually was okay. Surprised I didn’t kill my car. And I pulled into a rest area, and I slept for like half an hour and woke up, and I was still like, oh my God. And the funny thing is, I was so embarrassed I never told anyone. I ended up driving the whole rest of the way. I met my dad, never told him what I did, never told my mom that I’d fallen asleep at the wheel. Probably because I was afraid they would judge me, probably judge me correctly. And then I proceeded to forget about this, put it into that part of my brain, that repository, the basement where I put all the things that I’d forgotten, all my bad behavior and stupid things that I did. Forgot about it for a long time until one day, five years, ten years later, fifteen years later, I remembered it. And I started putting the pieces together. And then I realized, wait a second, I fell asleep at the wheel because I stayed up all night. And I stayed up all night because I was trying to save my mom. Direct connection. I was trying to save my mom so that she would love me. That really was my unconscious motivation. Yeah, at some level, I could justify it, trying to save her because I loved her and because she deserved it. But really, I was trying to do it so I would get a mom back. Me trying to save my mom came almost at the sacrifice of my own life, and also I could have killed somebody else. And for me, that’s a key. Now, this story is big. It’s kind of overt, it’s kind of loud, and it’s kind of ugly in a way. But I think the subtle lessons, the underlying lessons in this also hold true for me in the rest of my life. That again and again, I have learned that when I tried to help my parents heal, when I tried to be the therapist for my parents in a way, when I tried to get them to love themselves and know themselves better, my real motivation was so that they would turn it around and love me. But the bottom line was, for whatever my motives were, it never worked anyway. The irony is all that wonderful seven or eight hours or nine hours of doing therapy with my mom to try to help her grow up and love herself, it didn’t work anyway. Two weeks later, she was shitfaced drunk yet again, and she did it again and again and again, and went right back to square one. None of it made any difference. She completely forgot the conversation we had. All those great insights she had forgotten, put away. My mom was a master of denial. Decades and decades of denial. Her reflex was denial. Her reflex was forgetting, pushing it away, dissociating. So all that help that I gave her didn’t even do anything anyway. It didn’t mean anything ultimately. Yeah, she eventually one year did get sober, but then converted all that sobriety into different ways of having addiction, different ways of being in denial, using different substances, relationships, programs, groups, Alcoholics Anonymous, religion to push her feelings away, to push her memories away, to not heal, to not work out her traumas. And my dad was even more difficult. My dad was even more rigid. All the healing, all the energy, all the love, all the focus, all the insight, all the caring respect I gave my dad in order to help him grow and learn about himself, self-reflect and mature. I want to say it all amounted to nothing, but actually, it didn’t all amount to nothing. It all amounted to less than nothing because what happened again and again and again is the more I sacrificed myself to try to help my dad grow and gain insight and work out his traumas and become more mature, the more I lost myself. The more it boomeranged back and smacked me in the head, the more I hated myself. The other thing is when my dad felt pain about looking at his traumas, when I helped him look at himself and look at some of the bad behaviors also that he had done to me in order to help him realize that he had serious problems, horrible, violent, violating things he’d done to me, rejections, abandonments, physical abuse. When I even gently shared about that with him in order to help him wake up and realize he had real healing work to do, the consequence of that was that he felt pain because of what he did and because of his immaturity. The more that he felt pain, the more he hated me. And he twisted it around, “Daniel, you make me feel pain. And if I feel pain, that’s a bad thing. And if you make me feel pain, then you’re causing me pain. You’re a horrible person.” And he hated me for it. And I think in a more subtle way, my mom was a little bit more mature, but she despised me also for helping her wake up, for even pressuring her to wake up, for confronting her even gently. I think she despised me for asking her to wake up and remember and take responsibility. And part of her despising me was abandoning me and rejecting me more. So when I think about that question that people ask me, “Don’t you think you have a responsibility? Don’t you have some desire, Daniel, to give some of your healing energy to your parents, to love them, to nurture them?” Even my mom has sent that to me in an email so many times. “Daniel, you’re such a therapist for so many people. Back when I was a therapist, you helped so many people heal. You talk about healing. Don’t you think you can give me some of that healing?” My answer, sadly, is no, no, no, and no. It’s not my job to help my parents heal. And I think in general, maybe for all people, it is not the job of the child, even if the child is grown up, to help his or her parents heal. It is not the job of the traumatized to help the traumatizers heal. It is the job of the child to help the child heal. It is the job of the parent to help the child heal and grow. It is the job of the mature side of me to be the parent for the wounded child inside of myself. And when I start getting into the mindset that it is my job as a healing or more mature, more therapeutically oriented adult to try to help my…
Parents heal. I start undermining my own healing process, and in a way, it starts to kill me.
So for my parents, it’s not that I wish them ill. It’s not that I wish them bad. It’s not that I wish to gain revenge on them. It’s not that I wish to see harm come to them.
If I could have my big wish for them, I wish they would have the ability to look at themselves, to remember, to remember what they did, but primarily to remember what happened to them when they were children. To feel their feelings, to work out their traumas.
But unfortunately, I can’t be a part of their healing process.