TRANSCRIPT
The first time it came to my mind that society values the wrong things, I was in high school. I was in a public New York State high school. That was an educational institution. And I realized that my school valued athletic ability over academic ability. That every morning the announcer in our school over the loudspeaker, over the whole school, would list, would speak about the athletic achievements of each different sport, the star players of each sport. And that was considered the highest ideal in school. And the people who were the best students, the academically best, were not lauded or noted at all. And that was just the first time I noted that, wait, priorities are really screwed up here. And that’s not even what I’m really coming here to talk about because what I’m talking about, what happened, what I figured out in high school, is just a metaphor for what I’m going to talk about now. And that is how society doesn’t really appreciate or value, let alone laud, emotional healthiness, emotional growth. Exceptional emotional connection and emotional ability.
If you turn on the television in the news, who are the biggest, most best paid people in the world? The cutting-edge businessmen who are conniving and manipulative and harmful toward others and capitalistic. They are the winners. They are the best. Those people are not remotely the healthiest, most giving, nurturing, altruistic people. Also, athletes, the greatest athletes, the most cunning, strongest, highest jumpers and hardest hitters and biggest throwers and biggest muscular guys and fastest runners. Nothing to do with their inner self. In fact, often directly against what goes on in their inner self. Being wonderfully altruistic, being a real team player, sometimes that works to the advantage of an athlete, but often it’s the real individual fighters who are the best. The ones with the killer instinct, the one that wants to crush their competitors, the people who want to win at the expense of someone else losing. Those are who society appreciates. And often always maybe. I think this reflects the values of society.
And what is society? Society is an extended conglomeration of overlapping family systems. And these are the values of the family system. Power. Parents have power over children. Parents create the children and then they have power over them and they exploit them. They manipulate them often. That’s considered a healthy, acceptable family value. They don’t overtly say this because if you say this, it makes the parents look bad. But really, on an emotional level, that is what is going on. And that is how most children, to one degree or often a very large degree, are being raised. This is what they are taught is acceptable. And most children do not grow up to become very rich business people. They don’t grow up to be exceptional athletes. The ways that they grow up to have power and to have cunning and to take advantage and capitalize on others is through having children. They can be that much better and stronger and more powerful and more in control than their child. And that is how they become exceptional in a relationship. That is how they become exceptional in that power dynamic.
But the real exceptional value of becoming honest and growing and healing, often what I see is that is devalued. That is considered negative even. And no surprise because to heal in our world, to heal traumas, to heal the basic traumas that are imparted in the family system from the parents to the children, the traumas of basic emotional neglect, basic emotional violation. And then by extension, physical violations and sexual violations, etc., etc. But that core of basic emotional neglect that fundamentally traumatizes and therefore warps the personality of the child. For the child to heal this and become emotionally healthy, they have to go against the values of the family system. They have to go against the values therefore of society. And so they’re not lauded.
Many times when I’ve seen people, when I’ve met them out in the world, who are much more emotionally healthy than the norm. When they are exceptionally emotionally healthy even, often they don’t even realize it because they’ve never gotten positive feedback. They’re like some of the smart kids in school who have learned to hide and shy away from it and even be ashamed of their gifts. No one has ever told them often, you’re amazing. You’re connected. You have a really strong connection with your true self. You are special. Sometimes they’re even taught by society, by their very families, that because of their gifts, because of their exceptional qualities, they’re mentally ill, they’re crazy. You have oppositional defiant disorder. You can’t pay attention to the things that you need to pay attention to. You have ADHD or you’re, you’ve got something really sad about you all the time.
Well, of course the person’s sad because they’re breaking away from the first loves of their life and from the nexus of the environment in which they are raised. They feel really lousy about this. It’s very painful to be rejected. And to realize it and to feel it and to realize the depth of the horror that one has come from. It’s normal to feel sad. And guess what? Some of these people are labeled depressed. You have a major depressive disorder. You need to take pills. Your feelings, your healthy feelings that are on the path to honor your exceptional abilities and your exceptional true self, this is considered pathological in society. You have a problem. And when, oh, you sometimes want to just push down all those feelings again and maybe it’ll work this time. And then you feel a magic sometimes when you’ve pushed down all your feelings. Oh, now you’re bipolar because you’re all over the place and sometimes you’re manic and sometimes you’re depressed. And now you need to take another med. And you need to take a mood stabilizer now to balance you out so you’ll become normal.
It’s like no. Yes, people can have real problems that spin them out of control. But if we lived in a world that really honored this most important exceptional quality of that deep passion to heal, people wouldn’t need to take pills for these problems. They would be seen in a healthy way and they wouldn’t have to go crazy in a way to cope with the horror of how hard it is to grow. And the list can go on and on. I’ve seen people who have exceptional emotional abilities, exceptional potential. But when they start putting the pieces of their potential together and realizing what it actually means and what the consequences of this knowledge will be in their families, in our society, in our world that hates truth, they go crazy and they lose their minds sometimes. And they’re called schizophrenic and they’re called schizoaffective and they’re called schizo this and crazy that and whatever and psychotic and blah blah blah blah blah because it’s just too painful sometimes to process the horror in our proper context.
And then there’s other people who it’s just so painful to be exceptional in this devalued way, this most important way in society, that they take drugs, recreational drugs, alcohol, things like this. Disappear into other addictions or extreme distractions to push down their feelings, to keep themselves feeling normal. In a world where they will only often experience hatred and negative feedback for their best qualities. And so what do we do with this? What do we do with this knowledge of what exceptional really is? It’s not athletic ability. Athletic ability is kind of nice. Who wouldn’t want it to some degree or other? And high intelligence, intellectual academic intelligence, it’s nice. But that’s not really where it’s at. It’s not really what our world needs. More people who can understand nuclear physics and therefore create more atomic bombs and spaceships that go nowhere. Our world needs people who are healed. Desperately needs it. Healed and can provide a model to the people around them who have a surplus enough to share what they have learned. So they can love in a truly unconditional way where they don’t have to love in the normal family way with conditions, with manipulation, with harm, with poison injected into this love. To quell the true growth process of children. Instead can provide a model for healing and growth and being exceptional in a most exceptional way.
Oh, I hope for more people who have strength to do this because that’s what it takes now, a lot of strength, a lot of courage, a lot of bravery. I see it in others and I fight for it also in myself.