TRANSCRIPT
I’ve been thinking lately about the subject of family values, and I came up with a list of seven family values that I hate. Let me start with the first one. That is family secrets. Families hold this value so commonly, so normally in our society to be something that is sacrosanct. Do not tell the dirty secrets of your family. Don’t tell the disturbed things that hide behind closed doors. Don’t tell about the dirty things and the nasty things that your parents do. Don’t talk about their fighting. Don’t talk about their addictions. Don’t talk about their weaknesses. Children are taught this. Sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, sometimes by people outside the family system. Don’t talk bad about your parents. And this cripples children. This prevents children from being able to look at their family system, at their parents, and ultimately even at their own selves in a true and honest light. And because of this, it makes it very hard to grow emotionally. It makes it very hard for the child to self-reflect, to look in the mirror and see himself or herself in an honest light. And this is devastating to a child. And yet, most people don’t even realize this because all of society more or less says this is the right way to do things.
And this leads into a second family value that I hate. And that is that children are expected to forgive their parents when their parents do bad things, when their parents make mistakes, when their parents harm them, traumatize them, expose them to inappropriate things. And what do I mean by forgiveness? What I mean by this is that children are supposed to let their parents off the hook for their bad behavior without having changed. So, in essence, parents are given a carte blanche to repeat their bad behavior, and the children, well, are just expected to turn the other cheek, be good little children, let it happen again and again. And what does it do to a child when they forgive the parent, the primary person who’s supposed to teach them about love? When they forgive them for doing things that are very unloving? It teaches the child a very distorted idea about what love is, about what relationships are supposed to be. It sets the child up to accept abuse again and again and not stick up for themselves, not stick up for the self of the child, not fight for the self of the child. Instead, the message being sent to the child is that your parents count and you don’t. Other people count before you. Your self is not something to be valued in this world.
And for the young child, especially, for any child, but especially for young children, their family system is their world. So, when the basic model for the child is to value abusers over their own selves or to value the abusive or partially abusive behavior of others over the healthiness of themselves, over the healing of the traumas that they have experienced, the child grows up with a very distorted message about how to behave. And often, what’s so sad is it sets the child up with a deep, deep desire someday to get even with somebody because when they have to forgive someone who doesn’t deserve to be forgiven, that child has to bury a lot of rage. And what’s sad is they often grow up to act that rage out on somebody else, some innocent. And more often than not, if they have children, that innocent becomes their own child who they raise with these same family values. And this is how the world’s sickness gets perpetuated.
Now, a third family value that I hate is disturbed traditions being upheld as important, as valuable. Dishonest perceptions of reality that the child is taught are true and healthy. Strange religious ideas. Strange religious histories. Bizarre ideas about magical things that happen that the children are expected to believe and hold as true. Often ideas that the parents and the greater society beyond the parents say to the child, “You have a choice whether or not you can accept this or not. You are It’s okay if you have an open mind about accepting this tradition or this religious idea or this weird bizarre idea that your family might hold. You’re allowed to choose it or not. You have free will.” But it’s a lie because the child really doesn’t have free will. What child is really allowed at three or four or five or six years old to use his or her own intuition to reject the religion or the basic strange traditional untrue often traditional ideas of their parents? They can’t do it. They’ll be rejected by their parents. And what happens to the child if the parents emotionally reject him or her? It’s devastating for the child. For that reason, there is massive pressure on the child to go along with whatever weird ideas his or her parents have in order to be accepted, in order to keep the love from the parents flowing toward the child.
Now, the next family value that I hate is using inheritance as a manipulative tool. What do I mean by that? Well, am I against the idea of inheritance at all? That parents when they die will give their belongings, their property, their money to their children? I don’t know that I am against that entirely, but what I am against is how commonly families, parents use inheritance to manipulate their child to be in denial, to force the child in one way or another to conform to the distorted ideas of the parents, to get in line and to not criticize the parents, to not confront the parents, to not break from the parents. Basically, to be good little servants, good little slaves even. If you want to get rewarded in this life from the things that I may have earned or I may have been given from my parents, you have to not think for yourself, not become an individual, not become independent. And definitely don’t point out my flaws. And the reward you will get if you are good, if you are shut down, if you stay traumatized, if you do not heal, is that I probably will give you some percentage of the wealth and property that I have amassed in this life.
And so often, parents, well, they pit their children, if they have more than one child, against each other. They say, “Oh, you are the child who has behaved better. You are the child who has been more shut down and more followed me and more of a good boy or a good girl. You are the child who has grown up less and has put on blinkers more and has not looked inside yourself and has not called me out and has not called out my family secrets. You are the child who has forgiven me more and blotted out the memories of the bad things that I do. So, I will reward you and I will reject you.” And maybe with very traumatized people, that is very traumatized parents, the idea that inheritance is legal at all is too tempting not to use in this manipulative way. So, maybe in that way I am against inheritance entirely. I don’t know that I have a better solution. I don’t know how if I have some great idea for what should happen with people’s money when they die. I really don’t know. I remember once reading the book Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’ book The Communist Manifesto. And one of the things that they said in there was that in a communist society inheritance should be banned. I remember reading that and thinking, “What an interesting idea. I’d never heard that before.” But their idea was that when parents die, their money and their property should just go back to the state. Well, maybe that’s even worse. I don’t know.
Now, another family value that I hate, and it kind of connects in some ways with the last one, is the idea that it is good when parents have lots and lots of children. I know in some ways in some parts of the world that is changing and perhaps already has radically changed, but in a lot of places in the world and certainly in certain subsections of my own society in the United States, it’s considered a great thing to have lots of kids. I see it on the news even nowadays. Oh, family has 12 kids. Wow, what amazing people they are. They give so much and they sacrifice so much to the lives of their children. They are upholders of family values. They are models of good families. And now I say, “Not true at all.”
And why do I say that? Why do I see that it’s as a very sick family value? Well, the basic reason is just within the family, when parents have lots of children, sometimes when they even have two children, they don’t have enough emotional energy to give to their children, to sufficiently nurture them, nourish them emotionally, to raise them properly. The more children they have, the more they neglect their children emotionally. Yeah, they can put food on the table and they can give the children clothes and shoes and sometimes enough money for education and things like that. But they don’t have enough time for them. Don’t have enough energy to really devote themselves to having a deep and connected and loving and nourishing relationship with that child for that child’s own good. And sometimes I wonder if that’s why they have so many children in the first place, as a distraction, so they don’t have to focus too much on a real relationship with anyone child, because they really don’t have a real relationship with themselves. And the idea of having to look their child in the eye and develop a real relationship with that child is terrifying. Uh, but I even see that with a lot of people who have one child. Having a real relationship, really connecting at a deep level with that one child is scary. They’re not even able to do that with their own partners.
But then there’s so many other reasons why having lots and lots of kids is so disturbing. In this world of overpopulation, in this world of overconsumption, in this world where humanity, humanity as a whole, our species has stepped way over the line for what the world’s ecological carrying capacity is. We’re screwing up the planet in a devastating, devastating way, poisoning the planet, poisoning the land and the rivers and the lakes and the oceans, the air, taking away so much space for other beings to grow and evolve. And so when people call this a good family value, I say, “Ah, no dice. Not good.”
Now, another family value that I hate, and I’m getting close to the end here, is this idea that children should have gratitude for their parents. Thank you, Mom and Dad, for giving me life. Thank you for sacrificing to me. My job in this world is to make you happy. I love you, Mommy and Daddy. It’s this strange family value idea that children love their parents. Well, children don’t love their parents. Children accept love from their parents. And it’s if it seems that children love their parents, or if the parents are deluded into believing that their children, especially their young children, love them, they have it backwards. The only reason children seem to be so loving to their parents is that they give a lot of attention to them in order to maximize the attention the parents give to them. The truth is, children have no real reason, no healthy reason to be grateful to their parents. They don’t have any reason to be grat- having gratitude toward their parents or to thank their parents. Children don’t owe their parents anything. Actually, the reality is parents owe the child everything. It’s parents who do the owing, not the children.
I’ve heard some people say, some religions say, some mystical ideas and philosophies say that children actually choose their parents before they’re born. What a silly and ridiculous idea. There’s not a thing out in the ether called little children’s souls waiting to decide where they are born and choosing their parents. That is totally backwards. Actually, what’s going on in reality is parents, through their actions, through their choices, make a woman pregnant. The woman gets pregnant and gives birth to the child. And they therefore, through their actions, have a responsibility to nurture the child. Nurture the child’s body and the child’s true self. Help that child emotionally develop to become a self-loving, independent, wild, and free being who can go off into the world and do good in this crazy planet. It’s not the child’s responsibility to emotionally nurture the parents, to make the parents happy, to love the parents, to fill an emotional gap in the parents’ lives, to distract the parents from their own buried misery. It’s not the job of the child to give the parents purpose or focus.
And so now, I am going to speak about the final family value that I hate. And that is the idea of parents in their own relationship with each other trying to maintain a peaceful household at all costs. And what I mean by this is when one parent sees another parent doing things that are disturbing and inappropriate toward a child, traumatizing toward the child, but in the better interests, they say, of maintaining peace in the household, that parent zips the lip and is quiet and doesn’t fight for the child. Instead, defends his or her partner’s bad behavior, acting-out behavior, rage, sexualization of the child, jealousy of the child, cruelty to the child, meanness toward the child. And they say things like, “Oh, children are resilient. They’ll get over with it.” Or it’s okay. But really what they mean when they say children are resilient is they mean it’s a lot easier to bend the will of a child than it is to confront a parent and say, “You have to change.” Basically, what this means is it’s a lot easier to bend the will of the person who is lower in the power hierarchy in the family than it is to confront the person who has more power. And sadly, that is the way of the world. And what I mean by the world is the world, meaning the society, meaning underneath it the average family system.