TRANSCRIPT
I see Stockholm Syndrome as being the norm for children in their families of origin. Stockholm Syndrome being where people who are kidnapped or held hostage end up not hating the people who are kidnapping them, not hating their kidnappers, not hating the people who are holding them hostage, but instead loving them, identifying with them, fighting for them, defending them. The idea came out in the early 70s, I believe, where there was a bank robbery and somebody robbed a bank and held a few people, maybe five or six people, in Sweden, in Stockholm, Sweden. They held them hostage, and I think he got a friend actually to come and also be their captor.
What happened is eventually the hostages were freed. It took a few days, maybe like a week, but in a very short period of time, they arrested their captors and they brought them to jail and they put them on trial. But what happened is the hostages actually defended the bank robbers, and they fought for them, and they didn’t want them to get in trouble, and they really still strongly identified with their captors.
What a strange, counterintuitive concept! Well, it’s not exactly a new concept though. There’s a very closely related concept that was created, was identified, one might say, by a Hungarian psychiatrist named Sandor Ferenczi. Very interesting guy, worth reading about. And I would also say very worth reading about the Wikipedia page on Stockholm Syndrome. It’s actually fascinating.
This guy, Sandor Ferenczi, back in 1933, came up with the concept called identification with the aggressor. It’s considered a defense mechanism, and the idea is that people who have had really bad things happen to them, people who have been traumatized, especially children, end up not hating the people who traumatized them a lot of times, but end up identifying with them, defending them, thinking they are good, even thinking that the abuse was not a bad thing or outright denying it, and then becoming like the people who did horrible things to them, becoming like their traumatizers.
Well, I want to talk about what sparked me to make this video. Now, there was a comment on one of my YouTube videos where, in that video, I analyzed borderline personality disorder being a result of trauma, often childhood trauma, a consequence of childhood trauma. This person came on and he commented, or she, I can’t remember, and said, “Okay, it’s interesting what you say.” I’m paraphrasing, and I’m gonna paraphrase the part that really jumps out.
And they said, “But yeah, but what about the fact that it’s known that 20% of people who have been diagnosed with borderline personality disorder themselves say that they were not traumatized as children? They were not abused as children. They did not experience child abuse. How do you defend your point of view in light of that?”
Well, I actually do believe that statistic. And part of it, if I worked with a lot of people in therapy who exhibited all sorts of behaviors that seem to be post-traumatic behaviors, like was this diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, but they said they weren’t abused as children. And does that mean that they weren’t abused as children?
Well, when they had a chance to be in a safe place where they weren’t being judged, when they were being listened to, when they had a safe place to tell their story, to put the pieces of their story together, what I found is over time, a lot of those people started saying, “Oh my God, I was abused.” They started having memories. It started coming back, often in their dreams at first, or they would say, “You know, I started feeling feelings like disgust against my mom, and I didn’t know why, because I loved my mom. She was such a great mom. She never did anything bad to me.”
And then what I saw is people over time who said, “Oh my God, I had split it off. I had blocked it out, and now it’s coming back to me.” And another thing that I saw is people who said, “Oh no, I wasn’t abused,” but then they would tell me stories of how they were abused. They just didn’t identify it as abuse.
Or sometimes people would bring their parents into therapy, and I would look at the person who was their parent. How the parent talked to me, I would hear how the parent talked to that person, and I would think, “That doesn’t jive at all with how the person spoke about their parent.” They spoke about their parent as this wonderful, loving person, and here I’m witnessing this person who doesn’t emanate love, who doesn’t emanate respect.
Or another thing is sometimes people brought their siblings into therapy, and I would talk to their siblings, and their siblings would tell me horrible stories about things that happened to this person who was my client. And I’m realizing, “Whoa, they have such incredibly different narratives.”
I think people often so strongly defend their parents, defend their parents against having done horrible things to them themselves. And why did they do that? Because once upon a time, their life, literally their sense of self, literally their very survival depended on defending their parents, on siding with their parents against them. And so therefore, they didn’t think they were abused. They had Stockholm Syndrome. They fought for their parents. They defended their parents.
And so, so, so common. And then it comes down to me. That’s my story also. When I was a kid, when I was a teenager, I didn’t think I was abused. I thought my parents were my best defenders in the world. I thought my mom was my best friend. I thought she loved me more than anyone in the world. I was one of those kids who said, “My mom loves me better than anybody loves me in the world.” I really believed it.
I even believed it was strange into my 20s when I was starting to realize how she’d abused me. I knew some of the horrible things she did, and yet in spite of all that, I still felt she loved me better than anyone had ever loved me. I was still able to blot out, split off the actual consequences of how I felt from some of the things she did to me.
And as time went on, I realized how many of the things she did to me that were so awful, perverse, strange, violating, undercutting, manipulative, dishonest. And my dad too, physically abusive, perverse, strange, dishonest, cruel, humiliating. And yet I gave them a pass. I defended them for a long, long time.
And my sense of self, my sense of who I was, was built on believing, but more than believing, knowing that they were good, that they loved me, that they were great parents. I’m embarrassed to say I believed I had a perfect family because I had a whole part of myself that was like a boat with a hole in it. It was leaking water. Water was coming in, and there was a whole part of my personality that was just taking the water and throwing it back out immediately.
All is an unconscious process. I was a person who was full of holes. My self-awareness was full of holes. My self-knowledge was full of holes. My sense of self, me, I was full of holes, and I really, I really didn’t know it. I thought my parents were much better than they were.
And as time went on and I started making sense of my story, I realized I needed to be that way to survive in my family. And part of how I learned that lesson so clearly, and I’m still learning that lesson, is by being honest about what happened to me, talking with my parents about what they’d done, stuff that I was sure that happened.
I had such a clear memory. I knew it. I talked to other people who remembered it. I got validation. It wasn’t just inside my head. And I talked about it with my parents. Sometimes I was even at first gentle, “Why did you do that?” And I saw their reactions. Later, when I started confronting them, I saw their reactions even more strongly: denial, blaming me, attacking me, criticizing me, cutting me down, or just absolutely thinking that never happened, absolutely denying my reality.
And realizing, “Oh my God, those were the same parents who I had once upon a time who didn’t let me have my feelings, didn’t let me have my reactions.” I had no chance as a child to have awareness, consciousness, and feelings about what had happened to me. I had to side with them. I had to be on their side. I had to fight for.
Them, I had to say whatever they did was right. And of what they did was so obviously wrong, I had to block it out. I had to deny it, and I had to forget it.
And what I learned in this process of coming back to myself, of healing my traumas, of remembering what happened to me, of getting my feelings back, of becoming untrimmed, of grieving, of loving myself again, of becoming a human being again, a full integrated human being, throughout this process I realized this is a human capacity. Stockholm Syndrome is a human capacity. It’s a normal human capacity that every baby is born with. Every baby is born with the capacity to be flexible enough to identify with their aggressors.
So now I’ll come back to my original thesis that this is the norm in family systems. What I’ve seen now, you could say it’s speculation, and to some degree it is speculation because I don’t know every single family in the whole wide world. Maybe there are parents out there who buckle against this norm, who break it. Maybe there are parents out there who are fully healthy and fully healed and non-traumatized and don’t do this to their children, and their children don’t have to identify with them in a negative way, and that children can fully have themselves.
However, I have never seen that. I’ve never heard about it. I’ve heard people tell me that there are such families out there, and I’ve often asked them, please tell me more about these families. Tell me more about these people. And the more they tell me, and the more I hear about it, and especially when I live with these families and I see what goes on inside of them, I don’t agree. That is not the data that I have collected.
I, in my experience, have never seen such a family that does not do this to their child. To some degree, everybody I’ve ever seen passes my tests to some degree for being someone who has some degree of Stockholm Syndrome from their childhood family of origin.
And how about me? Do I still have it? Well, what I would say is yes, I’m still traumatized to some degree. I still, at some unconscious level, still identify with my aggressors, still identify with my primary traumatizers, still feel bad for them, still feel like I want to defend them against even what they did to me. And the primary way I do it is by still being somewhat dissociated. I’m not fully healed yet.
And how do I know that? Well, I still see consequences of unresolved trauma in my life. I still see areas in which I’m dissociated. One very simple one is preparing to come to make this video today. I still have so much anxiety sharing about the conclusions I’ve come to from all this data that I’ve collected. Even though I’ve collected this data, and so rationally, especially in my private moments with myself, when I’m not speaking to a camera, when I’m not speaking in front of anyone, I know it. I’m so clear on what this truth is, what this reality is. And yet, to share it publicly, I get so stressed out. I get so terrified.
I get so terrified about being shot down and told I’m stupid and wrong, and you know that I’m lying and that I’m making it up, and that I’m unfairly blaming people who never did anything to me, and I’m unscientific, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So much stress, so much anxiety to share my conclusions. I think because their original conclusions, and they’re true. I think actually if I were sharing conclusions that were much more defensive off of the family system, that actually identified more with the aggressor, spoke basically, put a sugar coating over the family system or put a sugar coating about how great my parents were, I think I’d have a lot less anxiety about making these videos.
And by the way, what’s gonna happen to me after I stop making this video, after I press stop on the record button? Well, what’s going to happen to me is almost guaranteed tonight I’m gonna sleep like garbage. I’m gonna be stressed out. I’m gonna wake up in the middle of the night and say, “No way, Daniel, you cannot make this video public.” And that part of me, that terror that speaks against me, that’s the part of me that still has Stockholm Syndrome. It still wants to defend my parents. It still wants to say, “Oh, they did the best they could,” and “What they did was great,” and “They loved me so much,” and “They didn’t do that,” and that I’m the bad one, and that I’m extrapolating.
But in this moment right now, when I’m taking the leap into speaking publicly about it, and that’s not what happened. What I’m speaking about is my story. It’s the truth about my story. It’s not my truth, it’s the truth. And really, I think it’s the truth of our whole wide world. And I think it’s the whole truth of our traumatized species. So many children growing up to identify with the aggressors of their parents, having Stockholm Syndrome basically to one degree or other, some less than others for sure. Some people are definitely less traumatized than others, there’s no doubt about that. But everybody, to one degree or another, was a hostage to the traumatized parts of their parents in their childhood.
And also incidentally, I think this unresolved trauma is what makes it so easy for people when they get into these horrible situations, when they are kidnapped or held hostage or being abused as adults. That’s what makes it so easy for them to replicate exactly what happened to them in their childhood as adults on other traumatizers. People still have this unresolved childhood part that makes it so easy for them to still have Stockholm Syndrome, to go right back into that because so much of their personality is still there, and it’s still a survival tactic for them. There’s still some part of them that finds it very easy to be flexible and to identify with an aggressor, still easy to fight for the goodness in their captors.
And so I’ll also speculate one other thing. If someone did fully resolve all of their traumas of childhood, had no more Stockholm Syndrome, had no more identification with their aggressors, I don’t think they would be susceptible to identifying with their hostage and hostage takers anymore. They wouldn’t be. They wouldn’t be susceptible to it anymore. And you know what? I wonder what would happen if they did get held hostage. Well, maybe they might have a whole other set of things that they could do to work it out to be healthy in that situation.
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