TRANSCRIPT
I think society has an ideal that people be addicts, that people have addictions. And I don’t just mean my society, my American society. I think it’s true the whole world over. I think the ideal for the world is that people be addicted, that people not really see what’s going on on the inside, not really see the truth of what’s going on outside of them. Instead, they cover it over, they smooth it over, they smile it all up with addictions. And often, I really mean addictions in the plural because I think most people have a number of addictions. And I think unfortunately, the word addiction gets really limited and pinpointed onto bad people. Oh, addictions to nasty illegal drugs that kill you, fentanyl and heroin and cocaine, or nasty, nasty addictions like, oh, people going to prostitution. You have a bad sex addiction. I think a lot of times, most times, the addictions are to things that are very societally accepted. And I think this is what people want to have themselves. They want everyone around them to have. I think governments want people to have this. I think people, governments want their citizens to be addicted and have their eyes closed and not know. I think parents want their children to be addicted so that their children will not turn their focus to how screwed up and sick their parents were. I think people want their friends to be addicted. I think people want their partners to be addicted. I think, I think really addictions are the norm.
And what am I talking about with addiction? I’ve talked about this in other videos, and I may be repeating myself, but I really think this is worth repeating. Addictions, things that really stop us from looking primarily within and knowing who we really are, what’s really going on on the core of our inner selves, knowing our inner truth, being connected to our true inner feelings, our pain, our unresolved traumas, our rage, our sadness, our sorrow. Oh God, our sorrow, our sorrow for how we weren’t loved properly, how we were rejected for our true selves a thousand times, a million times along the way. The sorrow and anger and betrayal about the truth of who our parents really were. I think most people are so blocked and blind to knowing who their parents were, they’ll do anything to keep the lie alive. Oh, I had a good childhood, my parents loved me, it was great. I think of how many people say that. I think it’s the norm. Most people said, oh, I had a really good childhood, and no one ever criticizes someone for saying they had a good childhood. I’ve known a lot of people who say, oh yes, I had a good childhood, where actually I witnessed their childhood. Sometimes I was an adult and witnessed their childhood when they were children, or I was a child next to them and I saw what happened, and it wasn’t a good childhood. There was pain, there was rejection, there was violation, there was harm, there was loneliness, sorrow, sadness, bullying, cruelty, anger. And they forget it, they block it out, they don’t want to know. They cover it over with a million different addictions.
And what of the most common societally accepted addictions? Well, number one, I think is romance. People, oh, they fall in love. They fall in love with their partners, their partners fall in love with them. But I don’t think it’s really love. Really, it’s not love at all. So often, sometimes there’s a little bit of early kindness in it, but a lot of times it’s a combination of manipulating the other people through really kind behavior. But really what the person feels when they are in love, oh, I’m so in love with this person, is they are falling deeply into the fantasy that this other person will love them. This other person is their idealized parent that they never had, and that this person will rescue them from all the pain of their childhood, all the pain of their blocked traumas, all the pain of all the things that they never got from their cruel parents, who they may not even recognize honestly as having been cruel. And if people fall in love, my God, it feels so good. I’ve been in love myself, and it can be a wonderful feeling. Oh my God, here is this ideal fantasy person who can protect me from all my pain, all my trauma. This person is going to put a cork right in the bottle of all my pain, and I won’t have to feel any of it. And the societal ideal is if the person who I fall in love with, the person who I have this fantasy of rescue about, parental rescue, that this person will also fall in love with me. And then we will be in love with each other. We will both project this fantasy that the other person will save me. And a lot of couples, the couples that last a long, long time, they keep this addiction of being in love, this addiction of parental rescue alive forever, for decades. The ideal is to keep it alive for life.
And then they do another addiction. So often they have children. When people have children, so often, especially in this crazy, very screwed up, ecologically messed up, overpopulated world, when people have children, it’s an addiction. They have the addiction that this child is something that will take so much of their mental attention, so much of their time, so much of their labor, so much of their energy, so much of their thoughts, so much of their emotions, so many of their fantasies. People also fall in love with their children all the time. They look at their child as this thing, this object, this creature who is someday going to save them, or maybe even now is going to save them. And I use that word “it” very consciously and very carefully because that child is not a person to them. That child is an object. It’s the object of their addiction. And I hear parents even say this. It’s kind of gross when I hear it, but mostly it’s moms who say this about their little children. I’m in love with my child. I am in love with my child. I have literally heard that said. Sometimes they even write it publicly, and people give them credit. Oh, how wonderful, how beautiful that you have such a great bond with your child. But really what they are saying when they say they are in love with their child, and the more sophisticated ones don’t say this, instead they just say, I unconditionally love my child. But really it’s the same thing most of the time. What they’re really saying is this child distracts me from everything deep and painful and unresolved that’s going on in my own life. I am a deeply unfulfilled and unhappy and miserable and frightened and traumatized human being, and this little child with all its neediness and energy and looking at me with all this positive regard and giving me all this mirroring and positive feedback that little babies inherently give to whoever pays positive attention to them, this little being is totally helping me avoid my inner world. I am addicted to this little being, this creature, this object, this thing. And it’s true for most parents, and I think that’s why most people have children, to avoid their inner selves and to avoid their own history and also to avoid the knowledge of how much their own parents really didn’t love them properly because their own parents were addicted to them.
The other sad thing is a lot of people, most people who have children, this falling in love with their child and the parent, their own parents who fell in love with them, well, like a lot of romantic relationships, well, it kind of dries up over time. Things go wrong, people change, their addictions, they fall out of love with their child, they reject their child, they take advantage of their child in other ways. They abuse their child violently sometimes or through neglect and profound rejection when this child does not behave in the way that they want as the object of their addiction. When this child isn’t just like the perfect blank screen of returned unconditional love, so they start rejecting this child and trying to mold this child into something that will be there for them, and it doesn’t work a lot of the time. Heaven forbid the child grows up to become someone who’s a very rebellious teenager, or even younger. The child has the terrible twos and the terrible threes, and the child starts becoming difficult, and the parent starts…
Hating the child and not being in love with that child. And then what they do, what so many parents do, well, I think I’ll just have a new child and start over again. And maybe the next one will be better.
So I’ve heard one of my friends say the number one opiates of the masses, the number one addictions of the masses, are romance and children. Sex and children too. But then there are all sorts of other drugs that people use. Religion, that’s a big one. I see that a lot. People falling into religion as an addiction, believing in some savior. And if I can only believe in this savior, this savior who loves me, this savior who maybe is only a mythological creature, who makes me feel good, who loves me. A mythological creature who may have been alive or may not have been alive a thousand or two thousand or three thousand years ago, but who loves me and who loves me more than anyone ever loved me. This savior who is the unconditionally loving parent. It’s an addiction. People are addicted to that.
And they behave even like the worst drug addicts. If you challenge them on this addiction, they can become angry. They can become hostile. You hate religion! You hate my religion! You are a heathen! You’re a bad person! You are a vile person! You are evil for going against my religion.
And then it’s even funny. Some people have different religions where they basically have the same fundamental belief of some external savior, but the religions don’t overlap with each other. So that they hate each other, even though they believe in religions of peace and love and salvation. Because the other person’s religion is different, it challenges the fundamental addictive nature of their religion.
And then I could just go down the list of other addictions that people, maybe who are not religious, or maybe who are not in romantic relationships, or maybe don’t even have children, use to block the fundamental truth within them. Work. People who are just workaholics, who work, work, work, work, work. And all their mental energy and all their feelings and all their thoughts go into work, whatever their work might be, their vocation or maybe their avocation or their passion.
There are also artists who are just addicted to their art, compulsively producing and producing and producing art that doesn’t get to the core of who they are at all. And actually, that was never the purpose of their art. The purpose of their art was the opposite, to get them away from who they are, away from their feelings, so they can dissociate, disassociate, separate themselves from their inner selves.
Food, drugs, alcohol, pets. I see a lot of people addicted to their pets. Their pet becomes this child, this surrogate child for them, this thing that loves them unconditionally. And all their energy and also sometimes even all of their money and all their time and all their thoughts and the structure of their life is around their pet. That’s another big addiction I see, especially in rich countries of the world.
But then there’s one other thing I think about addictions, and I think I’ll close with this. I think sometimes addictions are not just intended to block people, maybe myself even at times, to block us from looking at the painful truth of our own still wounded child within us, the rejected child from our family system years or decades ago.
I think sometimes the addictions, maybe all the time too simultaneously, are intended to block us from the pain of the horror that we humans have perpetrated on this planet. The horror of what we’ve done to our ecology, the horror of the toxicity we humans have wrought on the world, the horror of the future that’s coming for all of us, the horror of the pain that we humans are doing to each other.
And I think if people weren’t so blinded by their addictions, they would so much more easily see this and be horrified by it. So that’s what I think all these addictions, all these societally accepted, societally forced addictions, also are intended. I think for many people, they even feel they’re even needed so we don’t have to feel the truth within us and the truth of the horror of the world.
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