TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to explore the subject of acting out. Acting out behavior that is, by societal standards, by the standards of schools and parents, sometimes even the mental health field and the dictionary, children or even adults expressing unwanted behavior, pathological behavior, something that we want people to stop doing. Don’t act out anger.
And I look at acting out very differently. Actually, I look at acting out very much through the lens of what those words actually mean. Acting out, when people, when children act out, actually what they are doing is they are acting like going to acting school, like being on stage. Like Shakespeare said, “All the world’s a stage,” and we are just players, or we are all just actors on this stage of life. That’s what people are doing. That’s what children are doing when they are acting out. They are acting out some theatrical drama.
And what they are acting out is they’re acting out the drama that is the drama of their unresolved childhood traumas. They may be acting out one specific trauma or a lot of them, and they’re acting them out on the world, and they’re using other people as other actors in their theatrical production. And this is all unconscious.
And what kind of things am I talking about? Well, let’s say for the easiest one, the child who bullies other children. He’s nasty, and he picks on other kids, and he bullies them, even maybe beats them up, and is very harmful and is teasing and mean. And they say, and the teacher says, “Stop acting out,” and the parents say, “Stop acting out,” and the therapist says, “You got to stop acting out, or we’re going to put this kid on psychiatric drugs to calm him down.” We need to quell this behavior. We need to give him cognitive behavioral treatment to teach him better models for regulating his feelings, etc., etc., etc. And we’re going to cut out this bad behavior, and there will be punishments if he does this, and he will be excluded in this way.
And it doesn’t get in at all to what is he acting out by bullying other children. And what I see, it’s so obvious. All you sometimes have to do is just look a little bit into this child’s world at home or even in school too, but often it’s going on right at home. The child is being bullied. Someone is using their power manipulatively in a harmful way against this child. Nobody really cares. Nobody’s listening to this child. No one’s listening to what he is really going through on an emotional level, and he’s not able to look at it because no one has ever modeled empathy for him. So he doesn’t have empathy for his own self. He, I’m saying, could be anybody.
And so all that’s left for him in order to express his feelings, to express all the pain that he’s going through, to show the world what he is experiencing, is to play out the very dynamics that he has experienced, these traumatic dynamics that he cannot speak about, that he cannot feel, that he cannot even know. That being the basic definition of trauma: the unspeakable, the unknowable, the unfeeling. He has to push it all down, and so it has leaked out. And the creative part of his mind that actually desperately wants to heal what he has gone through has now created this drama externally. He has found people to bully, and they become a representation of him in his theater drama, the bullied child. And he now becomes the representation of the aggressor. He, in psychological terms, identifies with the aggressor and aggresses against this victim who is him. And he bullies this child, and he is acting out his unconscious drama of what has happened to him.
And the reason I make this video at all is because when I look at that dictionary definition of someone acting out as expressing unwanted behavior, unwanted anger, it’s like what a missed opportunity that they don’t even look at what this child is expressing. That child, yes, he’s doing something that takes another child as a victim. That is not good. That’s not okay. Certainly, his victim needs to be protected. But this child who is acting out this drama needs someone to have compassion for him. And if nobody has compassion for him, then he’s screwed. He’s just going to do more and worse in his life.
And maybe they’ll be able to quell his behavior by putting boundaries and limits on him and punishment and cognitive behavioral therapy and medicine, and that pushes his feelings down. But it’s going to come out worse in some other way because if those dynamics are not resolved, if his basic history of trauma is not resolved, he is going to take other victims elsewhere. He’ll either become self-destructive, he’ll take drugs, he’ll do other bad things to himself, he’ll hate himself, or maybe someday he’ll have children and he’ll act out his dynamics on them when there’s nobody to stop him because he has full power and full liberty to act out his dynamics on them.
I remember once hearing, I think it’s the most brilliant thing that Alice Miller said. Alice Miller, the psychologist, highly recommended to read her despite some of her flaws. She said about Hitler, if Hitler had only had sons of his own onto whom he could have played out his history of abuse from his father, if he had had sons to abuse, he wouldn’t have needed to play out that dynamic on Europe. He wouldn’t have needed to take in millions of victims of Jewish people and other people because he could have done what most people do. They create a family of their own, and they act out their unresolved, literally act out their own unresolved issues on their children. And society gives them that liberty to do that because essentially parents own children according to the norms of our society.
So I think about that this hypothetical boy that I’m talking about who bullies other children because unconsciously he is trying to heal his history of being bullied, his traumas, by playing it out on the stage of life. So to take a step back, what I see is all acting out behavior that a person does is an opportunity to see what has been done to him. It’s an opportunity to see a person’s history. The way people behave, especially the ugly and nasty and negative things that they do, the way that they behave dysfunctionally toward the world and toward themselves, this tells the story of their childhood. This tells the truth that they themselves aren’t even aware of. This tells the truth of what happened to them. This tells the truth of their parents. This often tells the truth of their parents’ history.
This goes on on a mass societal level with all of us. This shows what we are doing as a very destructive acting out species, what we’re doing to nature, what we’re doing to each other with wars. But it also just shows what goes on in each little individual family unit the world over. Acting out rage, abuse, neglect, weird sexual things. It goes, I mean, perfect example of sex. People act out their sexual traumas all the time, or sometimes they act out traumas that might not even be so sexual in the sexual realm. You sometimes hear, “Oh, my child is acting out sexually. My daughter is having sex with all these people, and she’s 12,” or “she’s 13. I don’t know what to do. My son is acting out sexually, X, Y, in this way.” We don’t know why he’s doing it.
Why is he? We, how do not, not actually, they don’t say we don’t know why he’s doing it. Rarely do they say that. Mostly they say, “How do we stop it? How do we put a stop to this acting out behavior of our son, our daughter, or adults even?” How does society say we need to stop this behavior? And often it does need to stop, especially if it’s really taking other people as victims. But on a deeper level, when people are acting out sexually, they’re acting out their own histories. Sometimes, often, they’re acting out their history of having been sexually abused. I think of my mom, the perverse things that happened to her in her childhood. She acted them out on the theater of life in her relationship with me. She was unconsciously trying to learn what had happened to her, trying to gain mastery over what had happened to her by taking me as a victim.
The sad thing about acting out so commonly, so often, is people don’t…
Learn from it. They just kind of feel kind of good in a way by acting out, but they don’t feel good about it, and it kills their relationships with others. I mean, I don’t have a relationship with my mom in large part because of what she acted out with me and what she never took responsibility for. Because she never changed, she never learned about her acting out behavior. She never learned what she was really acting out, and she couldn’t therefore take responsibility for what she had done to me in this theater that she created when I was powerless.
But I learned about it. And I think about my time as a therapist or my time just out in the world in general. When people come and tell me these painful things that they do repetitively, it’s like, why do they keep repeating these things? They ask, and it’s like, I don’t want to give them some silly cognitive behavioral, you know, answer or “you have major depression that you’re acting out through these sexual behaviors.” Forget that! Forget that! No, no, no. Let’s look at your history. Let’s look at what happened to you. Let’s look at your relationship with your parents, your siblings, people at school, anyone else. Let’s look at your history of neglect.
Sometimes people, sometimes probably most of the time, people act out their unmet emotional needs in their romantic and sexual relationships. They act out their history of not being loved by looking for love again and again and again, compulsively from people who often are unavailable to give this love. That is an acting out. I think of people who are constantly in a new relationship; they cannot be single. Well, actually, I think of my parents in that way because they divorced, boom, right away, new relationships. Always new relationships. They were in new relationships before they met each other, new relationships right up to the time they met each other. They were even cheating with each other. Always needed to have someone there to meet their unmet emotional needs from childhood. They were acting that out in the sphere of sex and romance, and it was tinged with their histories of sexual abuse and misuse from childhood.
But what I found is it can be very liberating for people to reconceptualize their behavior that previously was just considered bad and unwanted, and instead conceptualize it from the perspective of this is a drama that you are unconsciously playing out. Yes, you are hurting people, and that’s not good, but you are playing out this drama so that you can learn. You can learn from what you are doing about what happened to you, what’s buried in your unconscious, and you can gain from this experience. You can start your healing process because of this.
And what’s interesting is this also happens literally in the theater. I think of people who create movies and plays or writing in books, in the theater of literature, where they write the same story, the same emotional dynamics over and over and over again. Yes, supposedly they’re creating these stories, these movies for an external audience, and sometimes they are rewarded for their work, but really on an unconscious level, they’re trying to tell themselves something. They are trying to show themselves what happened to themselves.
I think about people who create horror stories, stories of terror and horror and violence. It’s like you can’t tell me that’s not related to what unconsciously is buried in their lives, in their psyche. This is the story of what happened to them as children. People who tell perverse stories and romance stories, this is the story of their childhood or of what they wished their childhood could have been. This is a chance for people to learn.
So that’s my takeaway. My takeaway overall is when people act out, when people do these dysfunctional, troubling, confusing, unwanted, violent, angry, sometimes perverse things, they’re trying to show themselves something. And hopefully, they can learn from this. Maybe they can find someone else who can help them make sense of this so they can learn about their history, learn about what happened to them, and hopefully grieve it so they don’t need to act it out forever.