TRANSCRIPT
Over the years, on this YouTube channel, I have gotten a lot of pushback from people when I talk about how sick family systems are. When I say that parents are like cult leaders and the family system is like a cult. One of the basic criticisms I get is, “Oh, you are just universalizing a small subset of troubled parents. You are universalizing a small subset of traumatizing families. There are a lot of happy families out there and you’re not acknowledging them.” And so, I want to challenge that notion now. I think the happy family is a myth in many ways and I’m going to describe why I say that.
For starters, I have observed a lot of families the world over. Lived with a lot of different families, observed them from the inside, from the outside, listened to many, many people talk about their family histories and this is the data that I have collected and how I crunch this data comes from a lot of different angles. One angle is that a lot of families that people see as happy well aren’t that happy because the people who are on the outside observing them aren’t seeing what’s really going on on the inside. I think of my own family in childhood. Lots and lots of people, even some of my friends, thought my family system was a very happy family. But, they didn’t see my mom’s alcoholism. They didn’t see her sexual insanity. They didn’t see my dad’s brutality toward me. They didn’t see the rage and the fighting. Nobody knew. My dad’s secretaries at work didn’t know. My mom’s colleagues at work didn’t know when she would skip work because she was drunk or hungover or using drugs or whatever. They just thought she had a migraine headache because that’s what my dad would call and oh, so-and-so, my wife’s got a migraine, she can’t make it to work today. And she even had a neurologist who prescribed her pills for migraines. But, really she was hungover and screwed up and drugged out or whatever she was. So, my happy family, for all those people who said we were a happy family, well, it really wasn’t so happy on the inside. So, that’s one way that a happy family can actually not be happy.
Another way, I’ve heard people say, “Oh, yes, I came from a very, very happy family.” And they’re a child in this family. “Oh, yes, it’s a very happy family.” But they have blocked out what happened because it was too painful. This is a human ability to split off from our most painful things, especially when those painful things come as the result of the people who wield almost absolute power over us, our parents. When our parents brutalize us and we’re very, very young children often the only option we have to stay alive and to retain whatever little pipeline of love is coming from them the only way we can keep that pipeline of love coming is to split ourself off from the ugly stuff that’s also coming. To idealize them, to say they were good, they loved me, I had a great childhood, I feel fine. But, really all that painful stuff is buried and along with all those painful feelings, all that post-traumatic feeling part and parcel of that is the memory of it.
Perfect example, little boys being circumcised. I was circumcised. Tip of my penis was cut off without anesthesia in the early 1970s when I was born on this island that I’m on right now in New York City. And I didn’t even know it until I was a late teenager because nobody even told me that it had happened because it had happened to everyone. That was a horribly painful and traumatizing experience that came with both of my parents’ consent. They both allowed doctors to do this to me the day I was born and I have no memory of it whatsoever. And I didn’t even know it happened. I can tell you this, that day, that moment, for probably many hours afterward, I was not happy. My childhood, my beginning on this earth was not a happy one.
Now, another thing that I have seen is often the people who do the defining about the happiness of the family are the parents. And the parents themselves not only don’t want to see themselves in an unhealthy or troubled light but can’t bear to because it’s too painful. Too painful to see that they have created a family that’s screwed up, that had created a family that is traumatizing, neglectful, betraying, that there are all sorts of conflicts and all sorts of things that are not healthy or not appropriate for the children whose lives they have created. Also, extremely, extremely painful for parents to see that in one way or another or sometimes in many different ways, sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly, they have replicated the traumas of their own childhoods on their own children. Horrifying to look at. Horrifying to feel. Much, much more pleasant and easy just to deny it. And denial is a very, very real thing, especially with parents. To just straight-up deny that they are screwing up their kids and creating a very unhappy childhood for their children.
And when their children misbehave and act out and do screwed-up things and express their rage and misery and frustration and hurt and pain the parents just say, “Well, that’s what normal childhood is. Oh, you know, that’s how children are.” And most parents will line up along with them and say, “Yeah, that’s just what childhood is. It’s very hard to be a parent. Children are screwed up and they do all sorts of crazy and wild stuff and it’s just normal. That’s how it is.” Much easier to say that, to normalize post-traumatic behavior, than it is to say, “No, you actually are really behaving as a parent in a very inappropriate, unhealthy manner. You are unconsciously replicating your own split-off childhood traumas on your children. You are creating a very unhealthy, unhappy, miserable environment in so many different ways for your children. And while it’s not a 100% imperfect, screwed-up childhood you’re creating for them because there are certain ways, of course, that you, like every parent, is doing some things right. Otherwise, your children would just straight-out die. In some ways, you are still royally messing up.
But, what I’ve observed is that most all parents, to some degree, cannot hear this. It’s too painful to have the light of truth shined in their face, to look in the mirror and really see how bad of a job they are actually doing. So, they deny it and they push away people who shine this mirror onto them. Instead, they surround themselves with people who say, “Oh, you’re a good enough mother. You’re a good enough father. Oh, children are resilient, they’ll be fine. Oh, every childhood is screwed up. Every parent has their problems. All mothers and fathers and parents, they all fight and they all have to do things that make mistakes and they all screw up their kids in some ways. Don’t worry, it doesn’t go against having a happy childhood. You have a happy family.” And I see this again and again and again in families that are considered to be happy.
But, I can hear people in the back of my mind, even potentially YouTube commenters, saying “You don’t know those people. There are people who are really happy. They’re not traumatized below the surface. They’re not keeping all this stuff buried.” And my reply is, “Mm, I don’t agree. That’s not what I’ve observed in humanity.” There are some people, yes who can seem to be very happy and live decades seeming to be very happy. But that’s because the wall between their conscious happiness and what’s really going on below the surface is deeply thick and deeply impermeable. They have successfully dissociated. But, are there exceptions to this? Are there potentially really, truly happy families out there? Well, I’ll tell you what a really, in the deepest sense of the word happiness, I’ll tell you what a really happy family would be. It would be parents, two parents surrounded by a community, perhaps more family, perhaps friends who are all not traumatized, who have all healed all of their traumas, living in a society that is also not traumatized. None of this, none of the trauma would be infiltrating the lives of their children. But primarily two non-traumatized parents. And guess what? A sad, sad secret is it doesn’t exist because when parents have some degree of trauma, it infiltrates the lives of their children. And the purity of the children, the pure spirit of the child gets harmed, gets damaged. And so, that’s my answer.