TRANSCRIPT
I have come to talk about resiliency. Getting back on the horse after you have been thrown off, about feeling that terrible feeling of despair, that everything has failed, that you have failed. And yet some part of you deep down saying, “Maybe I did fail in some ways, but I’m going to try again. I’m going to give it a shot again.”
And the reason I’m thinking about this idea of resiliency, about getting back on the horse, is two days ago, well, two days ago, I came here sitting here in front of this camera and I recorded some great videos. One was especially excellent. I was so proud of it. It was, by my standards, just about perfect. It was about 15 minutes long. It was about feeling and expressing and dealing with the consequences of appropriate anger. I loved it.
And afterward, I took the little memory card from my camera and I got it onto my computer and I started listening to it [laughter] and I realized I forgot to attach the sound. I had the microphone on, but I didn’t plug it into the camera. So, I have this excellent video where that’s the video and I died inside. I was [screaming] the horse threw me off. Well, more realistically, I threw myself off the horse.
There’s a lot of steps that I need to do to make these videos, right? The main step being getting myself centered. And I wasn’t entirely centered. And the irony being with that video about expressing appropriate anger. I had had an encounter where I had expressed some anger in a very gentle appropriate way to maintain a proper boundary. And I was having some reactions to it from my historical family of origin. That place where I wasn’t allowed to be angry, feel angry, express anger.
Even when I was being violated, especially when I was being violated from my parents, there were terrible consequences when I would feel anger. Feel that feeling that is the basic ingredient with defending boundaries. And so two days ago, I was still feeling some residue from having just in the last few days expressed some anger to maintain a boundary in a relationship. Doing it fine. No con negative consequences really in the relationship with my friend who I expressed some anger with, some appropriate anger.
But I inside my head was thrown off a little bit historically and I realized that. I realized it pretty quickly. I’m like, ah this is historical material. This is some leftover terror that I have from so for decades not being allowed to be angry, feel angry. Having no anger was a survival technique for me as a child. It was a necessity. And so I was having some reaction. And because of that, I wasn’t entirely centered and I didn’t plug in the little thing that allows me to collect the proper sound. And I ruined a video.
Oh, I felt terrible about it. I just felt so rotten. Like, I screwed up. And it took me a couple of days to sort of come back into myself again. Sorry if I’m making myself sound very weak, but I actually think not. I think because I’m speaking about such deep things, sharing in such a personal and vulnerable way about, well, the truth of me, the truth of how crushed I was as a child in my normal family, my certainly society acceptable, accepted family.
I’m taking a risk. I’m really stepping outside of the bounds of cultural norm normally. I’ve been rejected by my family long since for having spoken the truth so many times for becoming an honest person, for becoming resilient enough in myself to come back to me, to fight for me, which is the basic ingredient of resiliency. And yet it’s still hard. I think it always will be hard. I think there’s some part of me that would just like to quit. I think that’s the easy way out.
I think that’s kind of what I had to do as a child to survive in my family. I think that was the basic option, the safest, healthiest option for me as a child. Quit myself, dissociate from myself, stop trying to defend myself, stop trying to feel my feelings. Don’t get back on the horse. It was my parents who were ripping me off the horse and throwing me on the ground, saying, “You can’t be you. You can’t feel your feelings. You can’t have a proper self. Your proper self will not be acknowledged and the quicker you accept this reality, the more comfortable and easy your life will be. We will love you if you are not resilient, if you don’t bounce back into yourself, if you stay away from horses entirely.”
So that was the basic option they presented me. The other option was just to die and I didn’t want to die. So I hibernated. Myself went into hibernation. And I think now when I experience failures like that failure a couple of days ago with making the video on anger, when I failed making that video on anger. [sighs] It’s like a recapitulation of the whole process. It’s sort of some part of me was like you did something great. You did something perfect. It didn’t work.
Part of me wants to just give up again, just be comfortable and forget about it and stop making these videos which are so difficult and painful anyway. Especially painful to share them with the world knowing that there will be people who hate me and criticize me, etc., etc.
I think of another story of resiliency. There was, it was in a book that I read somewhere, a religious story. It was about a monk. I believe he was a monk somewhere in Europe, maybe in France. And I’m not a religious guy, but as it happens, this story was about religion.
So what happened was he was translating the Bible. I believe he was translating the Bible from the Vulgate Bible, the New Testament and the Old Testament from Latin into English. It was an early English translation of the Bible. Probably you can look it up and find it somewhere. But he did this translation. I think he’d worked on it for 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, something like that.
And he had to figure out how to get this translation of the Bible, maybe one of the first translations, if not the first translation of the Bible into English. He had to figure out how to get it from France into England. This is maybe the year 1400, something like this. And there were all sorts of rules about how it was illegal to translate the Bible into English, but he was sneaking it in his baggage.
And I think he was going through maybe Belgium or the Netherlands. I don’t remember the country, but he crossed the border and they caught him at the border. They found his Bible. They confiscated it and they destroyed it. And somehow he was able to get out. He made his way to England, but he had lost five, three, five, 10 years of work.
What did I lose? I lost a morning of work two days ago. Well, what did he do? He started over. And he did it again. I remember always thinking of that and thinking, how could he do that? How could he do just start over entirely? What resilience he must have had.
Now, my grandfather, here’s another story. I thought of my grandfather. I don’t like my grandfather. He’s dead now. I don’t respect him. Don’t respect his work. Certainly don’t respect the model he presented to my family system of selfishness and perversity and cruelty. But he was a psychologist and he wrote at least two books. One was published. I read it. I thought it was stupid on social interaction, human something blah blah blah, I don’t remember what it was called, stupid book, stupid psychology book.
But he wrote another one, a whole book. He had finished it and he had the manuscript in his house. There was a house fire and the house burned down and he lost his manuscript. He did not rewrite the book. He just gave up. It was never rewritten. It was never published. I don’t know what it said, and I’m guessing why.
I think the reason why he didn’t have the resilience to rewrite the book, recreate the book, is because he knew deep down that it was pretentious, that it wasn’t honest, that it wasn’t coming from the truth of his soul. The intention of the book was to further his grandiosity so he could be more important in the world. So he could take advantage of more people, make more money, be more fancy, [sighs] which makes me.
Think about my reason for making these videos. I think about it a lot. Why do I do this again and again and again? Hundreds and hundreds of videos that I’ve made, [clears throat] all variations on the same theme: healing from childhood trauma, becoming the true self, expressing the true self, manifesting truth as a model to share with the world, to hopefully inspire others, to help others. Maybe sometimes even just as a mirror for myself to remind me about the value of my life, the value of life in general.
So I compare myself to my grandfather. He didn’t get back on the horse. I don’t think he ever wrote anything again. He certainly was never supportive of any of my work, of my writing. He was still alive when I started making these YouTube videos. I don’t think he ever watched them. I don’t think he cared. I don’t think he was remotely interested. They didn’t serve his purpose in any way. They were the opposite. They were about ripping apart grandiosity.
And thus, I come back here. I get back on the horse. I try again. Yeah. I had to lick my wounds. I was hurt and upset and angry at myself and frustrated and sound like duh duh duh. And also what I did today is I did a little sound check. [laughter] My gosh, I sure hope this sound is working. But I did a sound check before this and did a little quick sound check and tested it and put it on my computer and listened. Yeah, the sound was okay. So hopefully this is okay. Rather horrible thought that it might not be, but here I am.
Thinking about the subject of resiliency. Thinking about—here’s [laughter] a funny thing, a humble moment. Is the word resiliency or is it resilience? I don’t know. Well, but I don’t think it really matters because that’s not the really important thing. The idea is the concept, the concept of not giving up on ourselves when life has failed us, when perhaps we have failed ourselves. When we make mistakes, mistakes are inevitable. I’ve made so many in my life. Not plugging in the sound was probably the least of them. A very, very small one. I have mistakes that I have great regrets about.
And yet, what should I give up my life and stop my journey because of stupid things I have done? It’s like, no. All the more reason to come back to me, to learn from my mistakes, to talk about them, admit them, be real, heal, grow more, [snorts] study why I’ve made my mistakes, analyze myself, know my history, analyze my parents, study their mistakes, study why they were not resilient, why they didn’t grow, why they didn’t fight for themselves, why were they more stuck in their family systems than I managed to be.
And that huge question: how did I get out? Why did I get out? Why was I so unusual? Why was I the only one in my entire extended family who got out? Why do I know so few people in this world who were or are resilient enough to fight their way out? Because it is a fight again and again and again and again to keep coming back to the self, to see the value in the self, to realize that the self, the true self, the true core of who we are is the most special thing that we have. The greatest gift that life has endowed us with, the thing that really makes us human, the model of honesty that we have within ourselves that we can share with others.
[sighs] And yet, how resilient we must be to keep that connection with our true self in a world that hates the true self, denies the true self, says that it doesn’t even exist, calls the false self true. Hm. I think of that expression, the human condition, meaning to be screwed up is to be normal. It’s the important way is to be screwed up. And you know, my family hating me, the more honest I became. And I’ve seen this with so many people. The more honest they become, the less they fit in with their families, the less their parents love them, the less they are given any approval, the more they don’t fit in in our crazy world, in our crazy cultures, in our crazy religions, and how some of us fight for our true selves anyways.
And so for you who do, I share this video with you. Oh, please say it worked.
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