TRANSCRIPT
I learned a strange thing back when I was a therapist. Something that none of my therapy teachers ever taught me, none of my therapists ever taught me, none of the psychology books I read ever taught me. But I learned it from watching my clients, watching a lot of clients, spending a lot of time with people who were trying to heal and trying to grow. What it was that I learned was the value of internal motivation.
One of the ways I learned it was, well first, what I learned was the wrong thing. Oh, that there are severe mental illnesses, there are severe diagnoses, there are people with severe problems, and then there are people with milder problems. And the milder problems people, they can grow more, they can heal more. And the people with more severe problems, they need a higher level of care, they need more medications, they have a biological illness, they have a genetic illness.
What I learned from watching a lot of people across this broad range of supposed severity of their problems, severity of their diagnosis, was that this scale of severity wasn’t actually accurate in providing a prognosis for how much people really could heal and would heal. Because what I saw is, first, there were people who had very supposedly mild diagnoses who were referred to me. People who didn’t have particularly severe problems according to the diagnostic categories of psychiatry and psychology, and yet they were so stuck and they couldn’t heal and wouldn’t. And no matter what I could offer them or would offer them, it’s just like, or other therapists had offered them, they just stayed stuck for a long time in these issues.
Some did heal with these lower, less severe diagnoses, but some didn’t. And yet it was the same thing with the people with the very, very severe problems. Some didn’t heal, but some did. And what I started to realize over time by seeing lots of individual people is that individual people defied what they were supposed to do. And the big difference was, and I started becoming very sensitive to it when I would meet people out in the world or in therapy, or even when I looked at myself, looked at my family system, looked at anyone, read books, is the severity of someone’s problems wasn’t the indicator of how well they were going to heal or grow or learn about themselves or recover from their traumas or change. It was something else, and it was their motivation.
Some passion within them, a passion that I couldn’t give them. I could encourage it, I could try to give them a space to respect it and honor it, but it came from them. Some force, some engine inside of an individual person, such that I saw people diagnosed with schizophrenia sometimes for years, this diagnosis, decad. And yet they had this passion, this motivation to look at themselves, to change, to grow, to fight against everything, to not be on the medications which deadened them, to hate the medications. Some people loved it, but some people hated it. And in spite of whatever severe supposed problems they had in voice hearing and delusions and whatever and bizarre behavior, it’s like they had something in them, some core that said, “I will grow, I will change, I will be different from this, I will find my way out of it.”
And some people with lesser problems also had that. Lesser problems, some people with the milder diagnoses also had this deep, passionate motivation, and they changed and they grew. And it was amazing to me. And sometimes the growth and change happened pretty fast in ways that, like, it wasn’t supposed to happen. There wasn’t any indication I could see in the literature or from other therapists that such things could happen, that psychoses could change quickly with people’s personal motivation, their personal force.
And yet there were other people I was like, “Yeah, I see this out in the world all over the place.” And I’m not just talking about the therapy world, but there was like something that was deflated within them, something that was so hurt and wounded that they couldn’t fight for themselves.
I was recently traveling. I was living in the mountains of Western Uganda. I made friends with a local doctor. He had a little doctor practice and a little pharmacy, and he was kind and very smart, very creative. Had to be, because he didn’t have a lot of the things that doctors have in our modern world. And we were sitting on this hill where he lived and worked, and there was a very old woman. She was probably 80, very old there, even old in our society. And she had a stick, and she was walking slowly up this hill with this tough look on her face. And whereas a person who was in better shape would walk past us and up this hill and in five or ten minutes be gone, it took her 45 minutes to get past us.
And he said to me with such respect in his voice, “She is a stubborn old woman.” And I thought of that word stubborn and how it’s used in such a negative sense in our society. “Oh, so and so is stubborn. They can’t see reality, they can’t accept reality, they can’t look at themselves, they’re always doing the wrong thing, they’re stubborn. They can’t accept truth, they can’t accept teaching, they’re not humble.” And I loved it, the way he affixed the word stubborn to her in a positive way. Stubborn that she fights for herself. She will climb this hill, she will go where she is going. She’s not going to sit home, bedbound and stuck.
I know so many people in the world, and I’ve seen them in Africa, seen them all over America, all over Europe and the Western world, who maybe more healthy than this old woman was. And she was limping and using that stick and fighting. And it’s like so many people just give up, lie in bed all day, let themselves be fed, and don’t fight to expand their mind and don’t stay productive in some way, don’t become role models for human potential. And that woman to me was a role model for human potential.
I don’t know what her inner world was like past what I observed, but I saw that stubbornness too, and I admired her for it. And I identified with it because I am stubborn in that way. Stubborn meaning a motivation to grow and fight and be true and be independent against all odds.
My life, the life I have now, the life of speaking what I have learned, speaking against the sickness of my family system, the sickness of my parents, the sickness of most parents, all parents perhaps, the sickness of society that honors them, the religions that honor them. This is not who I was raised to be, to even think the thoughts, the rudiments of the thoughts that I am sharing now. This was against the rules in my family, this was against the rules in my greater family system, against the rules of my parents. They were not proud of this. My teachers were not proud of this. My hometown was not proud of this. The religions that were all around this world, they were not proud of me for doing this. Everybody was like, “Don’t do this, just be a good boy.” My mother wanted me to get a PhD in biology, and she was so proud. And I even heard her talk about it with her friends. “Oh yes, Daniel is studying biology. He’ll probably get a PhD and become a professor of biology.” And I wanted to do that, the good boy part of me. And I guess if I’d been more normal and shut down and less motivated, less honest, had less stubbornness, probably would have done that, could have done it. But no, that was not my calling, to pigeonhole myself into some area of societally acceptable irrelevancy.
I became a traveler. I became a journaler. I became someone who wrote songs about truth. Eventually, I became a psychotherapist. Woo! That threatened my family. On the surface, they were proud. “Daniel is becoming a psychotherapist.” But that look in their eyes that said, “What is happening inside of him? What has he figured out about us? What, heaven forbid, will he write about us and say about us?”
And yet I wanted to fit in. When I was a child, I didn’t want to be stubborn. I didn’t want to be motivated to out the sickness and lies of my family system. I wanted to believe the lies. I wanted to be…
Normal, I wanted to be an average shutdown person who could find an average shutdown girlfriend. And if I did, like my parents, and split up with this average shutdown girlfriend, who maybe I’d marry and who’d become my wife, I could find a new replacement part easily because I was fancy and this and that. And maybe I would have had my PhD in biology and da da da da da, and do what my parents did and marry and be average and create more average and promote average and average being dead, psychologically dead, acceptable to the norm, acceptable to the hometown, acceptable to the leaders, acceptable to society.
I think of a woman I talked to many years ago. She wasn’t a therapy client of mine, so I break no confidentiality, but she told me the story of her healing from psychosis, healing from what society and psychology called schizophrenia. And she even said, she said, “I was schizophrenic and I healed.” And she told me her story. I’ve heard so many stories of healing, but she said it. She said it was interesting. She said, “I said, what helped you heal? What was the main quality you had?” And she says, “Two qualities.” She goes, “stubbornness and spite.” And I said, “spite? Tell me about that.” She goes, “All those therapists who told me to take meds and tried to put me in the hospital when I said things that made them uncomfortable and made society uncomfortable, who said I would need to be on medications for life, told me I was disabled for life, that I needed to go on government disability and stay on it for life and take my pills and take higher doses, etc., etc. I had spite against them. I was stubborn against them. I knew deep in my soul that this was not me.” And I said, “So you had a connection with your soul? You had some connection with the truth within you in spite of whatever you were going through?” And she said, “Yes.” And I think my spite kept it alive.
Spite, such a negative word in our society, even worse than stubbornness. Spiteful people, people you need to stay away from. “Oh, they’re bitter, they’re nasty, they don’t listen to truth, they’re dangerous, poisonous people.” And that poison might rub off on you like poison ivy. Yet it saved her life. I saw what she became. She became an amazing person. She became someone I respect and admire. She became someone who honored my motivation to become more true, to heal from trauma more and more, to uncover more of the truth within me, the beautiful truth that was always there, and the still buried traumas that came from my parents.
I don’t make my parents proud. Or let me revise that, the 99.9% of my parents’ psyches that live on the surface of convention and fit into the world and have been normal for their decades and eight decades plus of life. I don’t make them proud; I scare them. But there’s some little kernel of buried truth in everyone, unexplored in my parents, unwatered, unfed, disconnected from the truth of their consciousness, not connected to motivation from within. Their engine has been quieted, their carburetor has been turned off, their fuel supply has been cut off, 99.9%. But the 0.1%, I think, even my—this sounds crazy—but even my traumatizing parents, who I’ve called out and call out in my journal and call out in my psyche for the harm they caused me, that truth within them, it’s proud of me for what I have done, for how I am stubborn against them. Yet they’re so unconscious and so disconnected.
I tried to wake them up. I tried to motivate them to grow and heal and look at truth and be connected with truth and love the truth within me, love the truth within themselves. It failed. It failed. It failed. It just came back to harm me. I had to get away from them, finally realize I cannot wake them up. I will never wake them up. If I try to go back, they will just destroy me far worse than I will ever help them.
This woman who recovered from her psychosis, from her schizophrenia, she had to get away from her therapist eventually. She said her healing threatened her therapist. The healthier she became, the more her therapist became threatened because what this therapist was observing in this healing woman went against everything she stood for. She went against the doctor’s orders. And I see that in life so much, and that’s why I appreciated that doctor that I was sitting with in Uganda when he said with admiration, “Look at that woman’s stubbornness.” He admired her for it. He didn’t hate her for it. He didn’t say, “I’m a doctor; she should be sitting in bed and being spoon-fed mush.” No, he’s like, “Good, fight for herself.” And I respect that. And I take that as a metaphor for healing. I respect those who fight in a healthy way for the best of themselves, for the truth of themselves, and by extension, the truth of all of us.
[Music]