TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the value in breakdown. Having a breakdown, having perhaps everything that we hold to be true just crack away and fall apart. And what’s left sometimes can just seem to be our despair, confusion, lostness, pain, anxiety, misery, self-hatred, even terrible memories, ugly thoughts.
It’s happened to me several times. Sometimes in big ways, just terrible, terrible, terrible times. Sometimes in small ways. A lot of times in small ways, even recently, sometimes just going through days of just like everything that I know I’m holding and as true in my life is just sort of like mushy and confused and cracking apart. And yet I’m here to talk about the value in this.
I certainly know in the mental health system. I was a therapist for years. What they trained us to believe is breakdown is a bad thing. Breakdown is Humpty Dumpty cracking apart. And our job as clinicians, therapists, is to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And if Humpty can’t be put back together again quickly, if the problems are too severe, if they’re so-called biological problems, major depression and bipolar or psychosis, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, these fancy names that we apply to people’s problems, then, well, we need to send someone to a psychiatrist because they’re the real experts in biologically putting people back together, putting these chemicals designed by pharmaceutical companies into people to make up for their so-called chemical imbalances.
This humongous lie. Scientifically, it’s been proven that this is a lie. The diagnoses are all silly and they’re not scientific. And the medications are even worse. People don’t have chemical imbalances. They have historical problems. They have emotional problems, social problems. They have unresolved traumas.
And what I’ve learned, I’ve learned it as a therapist by watching others, but I learned it most poignantly by observing myself through my very painful life process, my healing process, my breaking away from my family of origin, my being kicked out of my family of origin. I’ve learned that the healing of my traumas, the upwelling of my traumas, the memories of what happened to me, the feelings that come back as I begin to integrate the truth of who I always was, the memories of my painful history.
The more this has happened, the more my false self, that self that I used to define who I was in my family, in my school system, in my society, this false person that I had to be to get loved by my parents, my very sick, false parents, normal parents, normal in this crazy false world. Parents who fit in with their families, fit in with their societies, had normal jobs, normal this, normal that, a normal relationship with each other. My parents hated each other. They literally romantically cheated on each other, sexually cheated on each other, were trying to always jockey for power, but they were normal. They were normal people. And I was normal as a false self when I fit into their system.
But my breakdown was a process of losing the skin that defined my false self. That false boundary that allowed me to fit into their disturbed and troubled world. The hologram of me. It’s kind of like that old metaphor of the caterpillar becoming a chrysalis before it becomes a butterfly. It turns and turns and turns, and a chemical reaction happens with its skin where its skin literally melts and dissolves and transforms into the chrysalis. And inside that chrysalis, all its internal organs and all its body parts morph and transform, form and dissolve chemically and slowly are remade into new body parts and new body organs of the butterfly.
That’s what was happening to me, and that’s what still is happening to me in the process of breakdown. It’s transformation. It’s hell. It’s hell. Anyone who says it isn’t hasn’t done it or is in denial or has forgotten.
I think of another story. Actually, this story inspired this video. I recently had a chance to go to California. I was housesitting for someone in San Francisco, and one day I went up to a beach. What was the name of the beach? I can’t remember. Rodeo Beach. That was the name of the beach. Or was it Rodeo Beach? Anyways, R O D O Beach. And it was a beach that has tons and tons of little beautiful pebbles all along it. And one out of every 100,000 of these pebbles, out of every maybe million, is a bright orange-red little pebble. That’s a semi-precious stone called a carnelian.
And I was studying where did these little carnelian come on the beach, and some are even bigger. I collected a few. Looking at them, they’re beautiful. They came from a major storm more than 50 years ago in the year 1970. There was a major storm, and it ripped a channel of water from the mountains down through this beach, and it ripped a huge channel deep into the rock and it exposed a vein of carnelian, of raw rough carnelian, and it ripped it out and it tumbled it all. And what’s left 50-some years later is these tiny little pebbles of carnelian.
The storm was a disaster. It ripped apart the beach. The beach had a breakdown, but something beautiful was exposed because of this breakdown. And that’s the truth of me and my breakdowns. That’s the truth of us and our breakdowns, the truth in the ideal sense.
Because in our crazy modern world, our crazy world of lies, where the guiding light of the mental health system and the guiding light in the family system and the guiding light in the educational system and all the religious systems is not the nurturance of the true self. It’s not the respect for the beautiful carnelian gemstone within us, the core of us. Instead, it’s putting Humpty Dumpty back together again. It’s about being fake. It’s about being normal. It’s about being functional here and now. It’s about closing down the feelings.
Take anti-depressants. You are feeling sad. You are feeling despair. That is bad. You are not supposed to feel these things. You are supposed to push them down with medications that make you split off from yourself and feel dissociated. Heaven forbid you are feeling crazy thoughts. Your thoughts have gone nuts. You’re feeling crazy feelings of rage and anger and you don’t know how to direct them. And maybe they’re coming out symbolically in ways that are not considered socially appropriate.
Oh, the mental health system says, your family says you need an antipsychotic. You are psychotic. You are manic. You are nuts. Take medication. Push those feelings down. Make yourself normal. Normality is the goal. Well, I don’t agree.
Is it so simple that I don’t agree across the boards? I mean, I live in New York. I go outside. I see people in the process of breakdown all the time, screaming and ranting. Homeless people sleeping out on the street. And are they finding the gold, the beautiful value inside their true self as the result of their breakdowns? No, they don’t have support. They don’t have nurturance. They don’t even have a safe place to live and sleep and get food. They don’t have good allies and companions. They don’t have people who can guide them and mirror them and say, “Yes, you are supposed to be feeling horrible. You are in a horrible situation.”
And the same thing when most people, myself having gone through breakdowns, my first earliest breakdowns that I went through where I felt terrible and despair and horrible and rage and self-hatred and confusion and sadness, so much sadness. Nobody said to me, “Daniel, you are feeling your blocked feelings from your history. This is the stuff that was always buried in you. This is why you always felt that low-level despair. This is why you always deep down hated your parents because they did this to you. They created this hatred in you for yourself. They hated the true you. They always rejected you and they told you in a thousand different ways, verbally, through their actions, through pulling away from you, through abandoning you over and over again.
They told you, ‘We don’t like the true you. We don’t love the true you. We don’t support the true you. We don’t want the true you. The true you is not even you. You have to have all those feelings pushed down. And then we will accept you. Then we will love you. And we’ll sort of love you. We’ll sort of pay attention to you. But we will accept you. You will be like us and part of us because you will be, well, you’ll be just a mirror of who we are. False, shallow, dissociated, split-off holograms of people.
My mom took psych meds.
From before I was born. A lot when I was a kid. I don’t even know the half of what she took. My dad, I don’t think he took psych meds, but he was high on winning the contest, on being grandiose, on being a big shot, of having money and being a powerful important person in his world and dressing fancy and always looking fancy. That blocked him from feeling the despair that was going on deep inside of him.
He had a couple of breakdowns when I was a kid. He couldn’t work, at least one time, I remember, for several months. It was terrible. But he figured out how to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And he came back stronger and more grandiose and also with a look of terror in his eyes because he knew what was lurking under the surface and he didn’t want to go back there.
I saw that same look again decades later when I started confronting him about his abuse of me, his violence and viciousness toward me. When I called him out on it, I saw the terrified little child inside of him. I saw the twinkling in his eyes that connected with his memories. I wanted him to acknowledge the truth of what he’d done to me. But he couldn’t because then he would have joined me on the process of breakdown. And he couldn’t handle it. He wasn’t strong enough. He didn’t have enough support. He had no allies in his external life. Didn’t have enough ally within himself.
Me, I think my journaling saved me. Me being able to write and write and write and write and write as I went through my process of big breakdowns, big confusion, big lossness, not knowing how in the world I fit in in this crazy, insane culture I live in. Traveling to many other cultures and realizing, yeah, different cultures are different, but they’re all crazy. There is no escape. I can’t go to a different country and a different culture and suddenly be accepted. I have to make my own culture.
I have to collect the little pebbles of my true carnelian self and nurture them and develop them and breathe the magic love of self-acceptance and self-honesty and self-reflection onto them. Kindle them. Find more of my true self. Bring it together through grieving. Getting away from my family system.
If I hadn’t been able to pass through these breakdowns I went through, pass through them without blocking myself with psychiatric drugs and blocking myself with fake therapists. By the way, I tried fake therapists. Not a one was useful to me. They all were leading me in the wrong direction. Leading me back to the family system. Leading me back into falsity, not into the truth of me.
Oh, if I hadn’t been able to make it through those breakdowns again and again and again and built up resilience, built up strength, built up experience and knowledge, built up tools also to become stronger to know how to deal with it when I felt terrible, when I couldn’t function properly, when I couldn’t find ways to make money easily, when I couldn’t look normal and be normal and speak normal.
Oh, if I hadn’t figured out how to pass through the breakdowns and make it into breakthrough, I shudder to think about what would have happened to me. I’ve seen many people who haven’t made it through their breakdown. Sometimes they did everything they could to put off a breakdown again and again and again when they were smaller breakdowns, smaller breakdowns. So finally when a big one came, it like blew them apart like a tidal wave. And some people cracked under the pressure.
I’ve seen a lot of people have perfect normal lives on the surface. Everything was going great and they fit in great and then suddenly their first breakdown came probably because they’d ignored a thousand little ones. And then when the big one came, it’s like they ended up in a mental hospital. Their families put them in a mental hospital, didn’t give them the nurturing and the support that they desperately needed. The support that their families never gave them when they were young children at the very beginning. Never gave them the support all the way along and then they had the breakdown and then the family put them somewhere else. Let the psychiatrists and the therapists put them back together. Let them drug them and make them look normal again. Killed their process of breakdown. Turned them into broken false selves who now are drugged and extra super traumatized.
So the ideal, I think the ideal is to have smaller breakdowns, learning how to gain strength and resilience through our smaller breakdowns. So we can know how to handle the bigger ones. So that when the bigger ones come, the bigger breakdown being the loss of the false self in the biggest way of all and the upwelling feelings of trauma that we know how to deal with it. We know how to deal with the grieving process. We know how to have a relationship with our self when all around us is lost and failing.
Maybe we’ve even built up some external allies in the world who really love our true selves. Maybe we’ve learned how to be independent away from the people who originally traumatized us. I think sometimes when I come here and talk in other people the impression that I’m all the way healed, that I’ve come out the healing process, that I’m on the other side of it, that I’m fully healed. Oh, I’m not.
Yet I have come through a lot of breakdowns, have done so much healing, so many breakthroughs, so much increased strength and knowledge and experience and hard-won wisdom. And this does help me, but it’s not full protection. Still, some parts of me on the inside are still a hurt little child. Probably always will be in this crazy world that’s so against healing.
And that’s the other thing. No matter how much I as an individual heal with the allies I have around me, the small number of allies in this world, I slash we live in an insane world. Just look around. It’s like it’s so nuts. It’s so against healing. And so to heal, to hold it as an ideal, to heal, that is to have breakdowns and make sense of them, make meaning out of them, find our self, find more parts of ourself, find more pebbles of beautiful carnelian inside of ourselves and hold them in front of us as the true self, who we are. It’s hard. It’s possible. And it’s the only way that I know to go forward.