TRANSCRIPT
16 years ago, when I was 37 years old, I took an enormous risk. I sat down in front of my camera with a microphone on, this same microphone in fact, and I started speaking my mind with the intention of editing videos to put on YouTube, this YouTube channel. And it was terrifying.
I was in the process of quitting being a therapist, and I was ending my 10 and 1/2 year career of being a therapist. I was going off into the world free. I had a grant. I’d been given some money by an organization to make some films. I did end up making the films, but I knew that that was time limited. I was also giving up my apartment, my home, and I was going to be a wandering person. And I knew when those films ended, when you know, the grant ran out, I was going to be someone who didn’t have a plan, didn’t have a formulated life that fit into society. And part of me really wanted that.
I knew I didn’t want to be a therapist anymore at that point. I can link to some videos I made about why I quit being a therapist, why I was so critical of the mental health field. I mean, I had loved being a therapist, but my time in the field was done. And I knew it was really done because when I quit, and I’d given my clients a lot of notice, a lot of ample time to be prepared, I also removed myself from all of the insurance panels I was on. So, I knew it would be very, very difficult to go back ever to being a therapist.
But that risk I took to start speaking my mind, because that’s deeply, most deeply what I wanted to do. I wanted to share the things I had been learning about life, about psychology, about family systems. And these were illegal things, not illegal against the laws of the government, but the laws of the family system, the laws of conventional living, the laws, the psychological laws of, well, society, society’s religion. I was going against it all because I knew it. I knew what I was saying was true. And I also knew that I’d never been allowed to speak about it.
With some of my clients, some of my clients who were open to it, who had insight, who were talking about it themselves, I could discuss this. With others, I couldn’t. But out in the world, almost never. I had almost no friends I could talk about this with. I had no therapy colleagues I could talk about this with. Most of them were more lost than the average people of the world. They were just more functional, but on the inside, more lost, more confused.
And I was also done with my family system. I’d tried talking about some of these ideas with my family system, the very people who from the very beginning had betrayed me, shut me down, traumatized me. And why had I even tried talking about it with them? Well, I think I’d tried talking about it with them to wake them up so they would love me.
>> [sighs] >> So they would finally be there for me, admit their wrongs, so we could reclaim our connection. It never worked, not remotely.
I saw their responses to my honesty: fury, rage, despising of me, just exactly how they treated me when I was a little boy and I had resisted their attempts to crush me, shut me down, psychologically, emotionally kill me. And I think after going through this process in my 30s, trying to wake my family up, trying to confront my parents, trying to get them to see the error of their ways, acknowledge the truth of what had happened, what they had done to me. After trying all that and failing so miserably, I started to figure out that this was a society-wide problem.
Now I would go so far, having traveled the world so broadly, I would say it’s a worldwide problem. It’s all society problem. But even then, I knew this was a mass problem. This was a problem that wasn’t just related to me and a few therapy clients. This was what happened to children in family systems. They get shut down. The parents themselves have been shut down in their own childhoods. They pass it on to their children. They’re all in denial about it. And if the children get shut down enough, they become in denial of it, and then they become just like their parents. And somehow, somehow I escaped that.
I mean, some parts of me escaped it. Some parts of me didn’t. Some parts of me really got crushed and shut down. And I think that’s why I was so angry, because it seemed so terribly unfair. It was terribly unfair that I had to fight for myself so hard and go through so much pain and rejection all over again to try to reclaim my honest and healthy birthright, my true self.
And so I realized as I was killing my therapy career, killing my conventional life, getting ready to leave my home and go wander the world in a semi-homeless fashion, that some part of me had nothing to lose. And so I was going to speak my mind.
And there was one other thing also. When I made those early videos back in 2009, I think I started making them public around early 2010 because I did a lot of editing back then, trying to make them perfect so they would be more acceptable. There was part of me that was afraid when I quit being a therapist, gave up my apartment, went wandering into the unknown of life, that I might die. And what broke my heart, just aside from the fact of me not wanting to lose my life and die, but what broke my heart was the idea that I might die and all my unspoken ideas would just die with me. And that’s when some deep part of me said, “You must speak.”
I already had a YouTube channel back then. Didn’t have very many videos. I was using my YouTube channel then to promote my early documentary films. I made one in 2007 and 8, and I had trailers of that film on there. I had a few other videos around the subject of healing from psychosis and skin of schizophrenia without medication. That was the focus of my channel. But I thought, “Use my channel for something bigger, something more meaningful to me, more personal in my life.” And
>> [sighs] >> out of fear of dying in silence, dying with my voice never being heard, I started making those videos.
And I haven’t gone back and watched them. They’re still on my channel. I can link to a couple here in the description box. Or you can just go back and click on my oldest videos and go back to 2009, 2010. You can see a lot of them.
>> [sighs] >> I don’t think they were as good as these that I’m putting up now. I say that, maybe they were better. Maybe they were more honest. I think I was more angry then.
>> [snorts] >> And I think part of it was that I was a more angry person, that I had more unresolved anger. But I think also I needed that anger to push out the ideas. The anger gave me some sort of channel to express the forbidden, the unexpressible.
I think I’ve gotten more limber now, more flexible at just being able to be honest. It’s still scary. I still have lots of reactions after I make these videos. For instance, I know I’m not going to sleep well tonight because I’ve been so honest. But I don’t go through the same terror that I went through back then when I made those videos. I almost had to work myself up into a semi-frenzy to be able to speak that level of truth back then, to say it directly, to speak against the family system, to call the family system a cult, to call parents, average parents, cult leaders in their own private little cult, to say that average parents are traumatizing to their children when the world says they’re not, where the world only looks at the extremely most abusive 1% of parents as the traumatizing parents, and the rest are the good parents, the good enough parents, the parents that raised their children well.
I knew it wasn’t true. I knew it was a lie. I knew my whole psychology field was lying about it, was in denial of it. I knew that my parents were actually pretty much normal people. People thought they were normal.
>> [sighs] >>
And I knew it was a lie. And so I made those videos. I don’t remember how many they were. Maybe 10, 15 videos, something like that. I made them public. It was terrifying to make them public. I knew my life would never be the same after I made those videos public, and it was [clears throat] true.
It was an avenue I opened up in my life when I walked down that path that I could never go back. I could never go back to being >> [sighs] >> someone who other people thought was normal. I outed myself as being unusual. I outed myself for my real thoughts, and I knew I was doing it. And I don’t regret it. >> [clears throat] >> It’s been hard. It’s definitely been hard. It’s like I set myself outside of society in a lot of different ways. But the truth was I was always outside of society anyways. I’d always been different, even since I was a little boy. It’s just that for so many years and decades, I’d been pretending. In a lot of ways, publicly at least, because I didn’t want to lose the perks of being normal.
And after I spoke my mind publicly on YouTube, it was a lot harder to pretend. >> [sighs] >> Anyone could Google me and find these things and see my words and see my face and often be shocked that this person who they knew, who they were not able to recognize as being so different, really was so different, had all these hidden things that were now being spoken about.
I had a number of people come to me back then because of those videos, also because of the website I had created where I was also honest in writing. People said, “You should probably take that down. You’re killing any future possibility for your career, etc., etc.” And in a way, they were right, but in a way really they were wrong because their motivation wasn’t to protect my career really. Their motivation was to, well, not have to face the reality of these truths which they couldn’t acknowledge, weren’t ready to acknowledge. Those truths scared them.
Not one of them though said, “Daniel, you should take those videos down because you’re wrong. You’re not speaking the truth. You are incorrect.” They all just came from the angle, “You are going to hurt yourself by saying this.” I wonder what would have happened if they had said I was wrong. Heaven forbid. I would have argued with them, and then they would have had to stand behind their point of view. None of them ever wanted to discuss or debate the ideas. Very few people ever have, even if a lot of the ideas have scared them.
I recognize that a lot of the ideas that I said then and say now and have said all throughout the process of the last 16 years have scared a lot of people. I was going to say they’ve scared people away from me, even driven people away from me, but I would say more like the ideas I have shared have scared people about who they really are on the inside. Reminded them of what’s going on in there, if only unconsciously, because it’s too painful for so many people, most people, to look at consciously.
But it’s like a little rumbling. I think some of my ideas create a little rumbling in people about how unhappy they are, how dissatisfied they are with their lives, with their partners, with their jobs, with their whole existence, with the words that come out of their mouth, with the things that they do with their lives or the lack of things they do with their lives.
But I think mostly what people really get scared of is they get reminded, even only in some little inkling, of what happened to them in their childhood. And most people do not want to look at it. They don’t want to remember, and they don’t want to feel it. I have seen that over and over and over again all over the world in every culture.
“Put your childhood behind you. Forgive your parents. Let it go. They did the best they could. They tried as hard as they could. They really love you. They love you more than anybody ever has loved you or ever will. You have to stay close to them. You are obligated to be there for them. Any problems that you have in your life are because of you. You have to take responsibility. You have a mental illness. You have a diagnosable disorder. You have this disorder, that disorder. You need to do this and this, and you need this therapy and this pill and this whatever. Now, now the new thing, ‘Oh, you need this psychedelic drug to help you reconnect and reprogram yourself.’ And I say to all of it, ‘Not true.’
And so my mission, a somewhat ambivalent mission sometimes because it’s so painful, but a mission that continues to erupt from within me even right now, is a mission to say we owe it to ourselves to look at the truth of our childhood. We owe it to ourselves to claim our historical feelings which are still buried within us or might be coming up. We owe it to ourselves to see our buried feelings or our erupted feelings, our pain, our sadness, our anger, our despair even, not as mental illness of any sort, but mental health. A striving to reconnect, a striving to remember. A striving to reclaim our birthright.
And I share this message with others, but I also share it with myself all the time. Every day it’s such a fight to reclaim the truth of myself in this sick, crazy, in denial world that doesn’t want to do that. I love humanity, and I am disgusted with our species. How confusing is that? That’s the confusion that I live with. And that’s even how I felt about myself as a child. I loved myself so deeply, yet I was disgusted with my family. I was disgusted with the parts of me that were becoming like them. I was disgusted with my actions that replicated the actions of my parents. And yet some part of me knew I was destined for better than this.
And that’s what I hope for humanity also, and that’s why I make these videos, even if they may not be reaching millions of people. I mean, I’ve had a couple of videos randomly, I don’t often know why, reach more than a million people, but mostly thousands. But the numbers really aren’t what concern me. What concerns me is just like it was 16 years ago, taking the risk to speak my mind, saying it in front of a camera, making sure my microphone is turned on, being as honest as I can be, and just hoping that I reach someone out there who could use this message in a way that I once could have used this message at a time when I so desperately needed it, had no allies, and heard no one remotely saying anything like this.
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