TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to speak about the horror of isolation, of not being connected to other people. Maybe not physically connected, not emotionally connected, not having our feelings and thoughts respected or seen. I have many examples of this, and I’d like to go over a few.
The first one that comes to my mind is people I have talked to who have been in prison. The most horrible torture that they’ve spoken about many, many times is being put in solitary confinement. Also, in mental hospitals, being split off from all other people, put in a room, locked in isolation, having no one to talk with, no one to see, no one to listen to, no one to interact with. No one to see them, no one to hear them, no one to hear their cries or their pain or their loneliness or their sadness or their frustration. It’s torture, and yet it happens so commonly in prison. People being isolated, even people in the middle of lots of other people, having no friends, having no one to connect with. Really a psychological horror. The exact opposite of rehabilitation. The exact opposite of a healing experience. A terrible punishment which makes people less healthy in many cases, can make them go absolutely crazy. Which is why it’s so interesting that this happens in mental hospitals so often. People getting put in isolation, oh, for their own protection, oh, so they can calm down. And yet, it’s actually a psychological horror that can rip them apart at the seams and make them go more crazy.
Which begs the basic idea of why they got put in that mental hospital in the first place. If they’re having social issues, if they’re having problems with ancient historical stuff coming up, having problems relating to other people or fitting in in the world or fitting in in their own life, getting put in a place which further isolates them, sometimes to an extreme.
Now, a second example. I live in New York City. Right now, I’m in New York City, and in my neighborhood, there are a few different disbursement centers for African immigrants, migrants, refugees. There’s so many Africans in my neighborhood, and I talk with them. Most of them are from French West Africa. I speak French, not perfectly, but I speak it well enough, and I talk with them.
One phenomenon I see is basically, in my mind, in my formulation, these refugees, these migrants, undocumented people fall into one of two categories. And the two categories are, first, the people who are there with friends or family or have made friends, often people from their own tribe. Someone who they can bond with, who they can talk with, who they can interact with. And this first category of people tend to be much more happy, tend to be much more well-adjusted. They say things like, “Yeah, you know, we’re just waiting until we get processed. We don’t know what’s going to happen. It’s very stressful. We’ve come through a very stressful experience, but it’s not so bad.” And they talk all at the same time, and they all want to talk to me together, and they talk with each other. Often they come from the same place, they know people in common. They are not isolated, or they’re isolated. They’re very isolated in this culture, which is totally different from theirs, but they’re much less isolated because they have each other. They have a little pocket, a little world where they can rely on each other, mirror each other, talk to each other, share feelings.
And then there’s the other category of some of these guys who are all alone, and they look like hell. They’re despondent. These are people going through the horror of almost complete isolation. Not only are they isolated in this world of America and New York, and it’s cold out, and it’s confusing, and they don’t know anything, and they don’t speak the language, but they don’t have a friend. They don’t have someone in their own personal life who is their salvation from isolation. And these people are cracking at the seams. I see some of them in the process of going crazy, literally. They’re just breaking apart because it’s too painful, it’s too horrible. It’s like they’re dying, basically, on a psychological level. And even like just walking around, just walking past a whole group of a hundred of them, I think it doesn’t even take a lot of sophistication to see who which category these people fall into. Who’s smiling, who isn’t, who looks like they want to just cry but can’t because no one could even hear their tears, and who looks like they’re kind of like, “Oh, just making the best of this kind of sucky situation.” So that’s another category, another group of people where I see isolation.
But then I want to talk about the third one that’s actually most personal for me in my own history, and I think relates most clearly to the subject of this YouTube channel in general. And that’s children who are isolated in their own families of origin. Children who are born healthy, born alive, have their feelings, have their full range of feelings, have their passion, have their creativity, and yet born into families that can’t mirror that, can’t see that, can’t accept that. Parents who themselves are traumatized, who are split off, who get threatened by the passion and the life force of this beautiful, perfect little being who they’ve created and who they can’t tolerate.
And that little child, that little child who to one degree or other was me, and to one degree or other was everybody, that child is born into a world where they, or whole parts of them, are isolated. And it is torture on this child. It is horror. The degree to which this child is emotionally isolated in his or her family system is the degree to which that child experiences horror and trauma. Horror being one of the basic ingredients of trauma. Something that’s just unthinkable, unknowable, unsayable, where the child’s feelings are not being mirrored back. The child’s not receiving love, and whole parts of his or her own personality are being rejected, are being hated, and, well, are being tortured.
And what happens to that child? That child has to shut down. That child has no choice in this incredibly isolating experience of babyhood in this world where whole sides of them are not being seen. That child needs to just die in those parts of themselves, needs to push those feelings down and bury them in order to cope, in order to survive. And I think that’s what all babies do. They figure out, they say, “Oh, these parts of me are not seen, not loved, are rejected and hated. These isolated parts of me, I must isolate within myself, take, push down, bury, split off, forget, dissociate, put under concrete, put under barbed wire, put under electricity, do my best to completely isolate in my own unconscious so I don’t have to feel the horror because the horror is too absolutely terrible.”
And the ways in which my parents can see me, can accept me, can love me, can accept me into their fold, those are the parts of me that will become me. Those are the parts of me that I will know and identify as myself. And these isolated, split-off, rejected, unloved, even hated, despised parts, those will be not me. Those will be forgotten parts. Yet the truth is these split-off, isolated, buried parts, they are me too. They are you. They are all of us. And this is why people get so messed up in their life, because they grow up as partial people. They grow up as people who are part conscious and part not conscious, part connected and integrated and accepted into the fold of the family, the fold of humanity, and part rejected and forgotten and buried. And no one lives a satisfying life as a partial person.
I think actually the degree to which we are satisfied in our lives, really satisfied, is the degree to which we have integrated. We are not isolated within ourselves. And this is why I’ve experienced it in my own personal life and seen it in others. The more we heal, the more we bring up our split-off sides, our traumatized sides, grieve them, bring them back into the fold of our self, learn to love ourselves and see ourselves, the more we love our life and have passion and have our life force and have our creativity and have a sense of meaning and purpose in this crazy thing we call existence, in this crazy, screwed-up world. My healing process has made me less isolated in myself, and also what’s happened…
I have attracted people to me who can see me more for my whole self, more than my parents ever could. So in my personal connections with others, in my friendships, and my whatever sort of relationships I have, I’m much less isolated. And I’ve seen this with others too.
But then there’s one other thing, and it’s an interesting connection between our childhood history, our babyhood history of becoming isolated, of becoming split off, of having to bury and split off these unwanted sides that are split off, isolated, buried, traumatized. Parents couldn’t love and couldn’t accept and couldn’t see, couldn’t honor.
That later in life, when we experience times like these—African refugees in my neighborhood, when they’re experiencing the torment of isolation, or when people in prison are experiencing the torment of isolation, or people in mental hospitals are experiencing the torment of isolation—that the feelings that we experience later in life, in these horrible experiences of isolation, we start feeling those buried and split off sides from our childhood. It starts to come up, and it starts to come up in a most horrible and ugly way.
And I think that’s why people lose their minds later in life in isolation, because that historical isolation no longer can be kept at bay. And yet it’s not coming up in a gentle healing process. It’s not coming up in a slow and loving and nurturing and held process of grieving. It’s coming up in torment and in torture, and it’s coming up in an out-of-control way.
And that’s why I feel so much for people, for adults, or anybody who is going through social isolation.