TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to talk about the beauty in having a self. I don’t mean a physical self, a body. We all have that. I mean something special on the inside, something inside our mind, even inside our head. Some metaphysical thing inside of us that is us, that knows that we are alive, that knows that we know is there, that we can feel.
A lot of people, from what I observe, don’t have, or if it’s there, they’re not in touch with it. It’s gone or buried or pushed down or too dangerous for them to know. And I observe this in others because I was there myself. I even sometimes still, from time to time, have points where I go inside and I can’t find myself. I can’t feel myself. I don’t have a connection with me. Thankfully now, it’s not that often, but what I notice now is it’s there a lot, and it’s actually what makes my life worth living. This self that I have, it’s my center, it’s my best friend. It’s not a man or a woman or a name. I mean, I guess I could give it my name, Daniel, but really, it’s just this core feeling of truth. And I know that it’s there. I know that it’s true, and there’s no way I can prove it, and there’s no physical manifestation of it. But it’s such a relief when I go inside and I can find it. It gives me a comfort like nothing else, like no other person outside can give me.
Now, I’ll say this: I’ve had times where I’m in terrible, terrible pain. Something’s going on, something’s going wrong in my life, some rejection, some violation, some memory comes up, and I need to connect with some other self. Maybe I’ve lost myself, or my self is so fragmented or ripped apart or confused that I need to connect with another self. And that’s when I seek out a friend, perhaps. It could be anything. I think when I was a kid, it could even be an animal, a friend, a pet, something to reflect me back to myself. Maybe I could project me, but I think the best is to find another person with a deeply centered self, and I can get myself mirrored in that person in my time of pain or torment or isolation or agony. This other person, in a way, can loan me their self, and through that, maybe not even through their words, just through their eye contact or maybe just through their silence, I can go inside and in my terrible pain find me, return to me, put together the pieces of my fragmented sides of me, my split-off self. I can acknowledge things in me that are perhaps too painful to acknowledge alone.
Then there are other times, like years of my childhood, where there were no other people who had a self around me. Nobody to mirror me to me. No one who could hear me. My parents, who now that I reflect on it, didn’t even want me to have a self. Myself was too threatening to them for all sorts of different reasons. I think my having a self mirrored their deficiencies, their lack of a self back to them, mirrored their bad behavior and their confusion and their lostness and their unhealthiness back to them, and they hated it. And so they wanted me to push myself away. I think that’s so common in families that parents don’t want their kids to know themselves. I think if the kids knew themselves, they’d get away. And I think that’s what happened to me. By some magic of destiny, I did get a self in a family where people didn’t have a self. And the word that my told me was escape. Get out, get away, build yourself, protect yourself from these people. Get a better education, get something, save your money, save yourself, love yourself, be silent, don’t tell the truth about who you are to these people. They’re too dangerous. Bide your time, don’t be honest, keep yourself on the inside, but hide yourself from them.
I also tried alcohol and drugs in my younger years, but I realized that that didn’t help me build myself. It helped me survive in a way, helped me cope with the pain and rejection and horror of my history and my memories, but it didn’t help me integrate myself. I had to get away from that to have a self. Now, my self is so much stronger, but I also see how it still requires a lot of work for me to keep my relationship with myself. The world is crazy. The world is actually a lot like my family system. There’s a lot of power in convention. There’s a lot of power in so many people without a self banding together and calling themselves healthy and normal and correct and right and teaching their false lessons, their false ideas, their false pathways to what they call truth, but which isn’t truth.
So many messages I’ve gotten along the way and still do all the time, which is why I still have to protect myself. It’s kind of a miracle that I can come here and speak to this camera, and through this camera, through this recording, to an audience of people out in the world who get this, who wish to hear this, who can find value in this. Things that I often can’t say in my regular day-to-day life because I’m surrounded by too many normal people, average people, people who don’t have a self and say things like, “Go back to your parents, forgive them, love them. You have to be there for your mom and your dad. They’re getting old. They need you. They brought you into this life, and they love you.” And lies, lies, confusion. And people who say this often believe this, or maybe they don’t believe anything, and they hold on to it because it’s all they have.
I think a lot of times when people don’t have a self, they just grab on to the family system, grab on to their historical relationships that they don’t have to work for. They don’t have to assess. They don’t want to assess because if they assessed them, they would see that there’s nothing there. How many people there hate their partners, hate their wives and husbands, and hate their so-called friends and hate their parents and even hate their children? I hear this all the time, and yet that’s all they have. And that’s what they’re also telling me that I need. And I don’t need that. In fact, it’s the opposite of what I need. It’s what hurts me, what I don’t want, which strips me away from myself.
I think of so many people who tell me that they don’t have friends, and when I talk to them, they sometimes can’t stop themselves from giving me bad advice on what I need to do with my life. I can understand why they don’t have friends because their attitude toward me actually isn’t friendly. It’s conventional. It might encapsulate a lot of conventional wisdom, but I know it’s hurtful to me, and I have to not accept it. And if I see value in it, a lot of times I tell them, “No, that’s not good for me. That will hurt me.” And a lot of times I see they’re so entrenched in their lack of a self that I realize it’s not even safe for me to say that. So I’m polite, and I gently, as gently as I can, pull away. I don’t want to engage, don’t want conflict and drama.
I also think a lot of these people who don’t have a self, probably most of them, if they met a person who was just like them out in the world, a stranger who was just like them, they would hate that person because that person would reflect how much they don’t even like their own selves. And how sad to not like one’s self, to not like the truth of who one is in the world, one’s behavior, one’s attitude. And it’s so common.
I’ll say this: when I have a self on the inside, when I can feel myself and close my eyes and look within and be with myself, I love myself. Myself is the basis of my understanding of what love is, of what attraction to truth is, and goodness is truth. I think having a self, seeing the self on the inside with one’s inner eyes, looking within, knowing the self, that is the core of knowing truth. I think that’s where truth starts. I think there’s no way to prove truth just like there’s no way to…
Prove a self yet I’ll say this: out in the world, when I watch people, when I listen to people, I can often feel who has a self, often pretty quickly, even without sharing a common language. There’s just something that people who have a self, a true self, it radiates through them.
Children, children have a self. They may not have language yet at all. They may not have words or a sense of adult consciousness at all, but there’s some self that they’re created with. And yes, trauma rips the self away and pushes the self down and fragments it and splits it off and makes them hate themselves. But if they’re less traumatized, or traumatized very little, or if they’re so young that their trauma hasn’t fully crushed them yet, or if they’re by some chance of evolutionary nature just so strong that their self can’t be totally ripped away and crushed, that self radiates.
I think that’s why children are so inherently beautiful. And I think it’s when people really hate their own selves. Adults hate their own selves and have split off themselves and are so dissociated from their own selves. Even children dissociated from their own self, that’s why they hate children, hate babies, because those babies reflect what they don’t have. They’re jealous, but they don’t want to admit it. Who wants to be jealous of a child? I think, though, a lot of parents even are jealous of their children.
I think of my father. He was so jealous of me, jealous that he was giving attention to me, whereas desperately on the inside he wanted attention paid to him. All the things that his parents had never given him, he resented me for it. It was his responsibility to give it to me, and every time he gave me something, gave myself something, gave myself some nurturance, some love—love being the food for the self—he despised me for it. And it was very confusing for me. How could it not be confusing to have a parent who loves you and hates you at the same time?
So common. No wonder so many people are so confused, why our species is so confused and, writ large, is destroying the planet. Oh, I think people without a self, people who don’t have a very strong self, have no business having children. They might have lots of money and lots of time to give to their children and lots of resources and privilege and who knows what else, but they’re missing the basic ingredient of what children need, of what humans need. And that’s what I find out in the world.
I certainly found it a lot as a therapist when I was a therapist, and I find it when I’m not a therapist, that people who don’t have a self are desperately hungry to be seen and loved by others. And for those of us who have a self or have a stronger self, we’ve got a gift to give people. And people want this gift so desperately. But I’ll speak for myself: that can be lonely a lot. It can be lonely to have a self and be in a world where so many people want what this self has to offer, want the ability. They want my ability to listen to them, hear them, mirror them, reflect them, honor them, care about them, be compassionate toward them, and yet often they don’t have it to give in return.
That’s why they’re not necessarily able to be friends back. They can accept friendship, but they don’t have it to return, often for a long, long, long time. I have seen people who have a fragmented self put their selves back together. I have seen people who have a very dissociated, split-off, denied, buried self bring this self up, exhume this self from the depths of their unconscious. What a painful process! I’ve gone through this process. I still am going through this process. More and more, my self grows stronger and more present in me.
But the healing process, the process of healing from psychological trauma, the grieving process, it’s hell. Absolutely hell. Anyone who says it’s not hell hasn’t done it. The rewards are wonderful. The rewards are the gift of life, the gift of life to one’s self, to one’s body, to one’s face, and to others. And so that’s what inspires me to come here today.