TRANSCRIPT
I’d like to share the things in my life for which I am most grateful. There are three things, three basic things that I consider now here at age 52.
The first, when I look back over the course of my existence, is that I am very, very grateful that I broke away from my parents, from my family system. That I got out, that I escaped, that somehow I figured out how to be a self in the world who loved myself, who wasn’t relying on my parents, who didn’t have a relationship with them anymore. That I got away from those hurtful people who wanted to keep me small and broken and traumatized. The people who traumatized me from the very beginning yet told me that I wasn’t traumatized. Who taught me how to forgive them for what they did to me yet really didn’t ever acknowledge they’d done. Who made me into a screwed-up person.
And so when I say I’m grateful that I got away from them, I’m actually still getting away from them at some level. Because what I really mean is that I’m still growing, I’m still healing myself, I’m still developing myself on the inside, getting to know myself better, love myself better, bring up the parts of me from very early in my life that are still buried, and bringing them up and integrating them into self-love, self-knowledge, self-awareness. And so I put a lot of things under this category of breaking away from my family, but really what it means is I chose the truth of me, the healthiness of me, over the sickness of them.
Then the second one, the second thing for which I’m so grateful in my life is that I’ve gotten to see so much of the world. So much of our planet, planet Earth. So many countries, so many continents, so many different climates and lands and cultures and people, ethnicities, languages. Learned a lot of languages, made friends in so many different cultures, so many different religions, backgrounds, styles. And I’m grateful to this because to me this is knowledge about our planet as a whole, humanity as a whole. It’s given me a perspective on life, a confidence to be able to realize that the things going on in my head don’t just apply to me, don’t just apply to my culture, my little part of the world, but have a universality to them.
I think I felt this. I always felt there was something universal, and I think there, I know it, there’s something universal about having a self, some connection with truth. Once you get a self on the inside and really know yourself and know that you know yourself, you do connect to the universal. But when I was younger, before I’d gotten out into the world, before I’d left my little part of the planet, I wasn’t really sure. I felt it, but intellectually I didn’t know because I didn’t have enough life experience.
And I’ll also say this: there were a lot of people telling me, “You’re wrong, you don’t know truth, you’re in denial, your family’s right, your parents are right, your culture is right, convention is right, your teachers are right, your professors are right, and you’re wrong. You’re arrogant, you’re grandiose.” And something in me contradicted that, contradicted them. But I was young and inexperienced. And what I’ve found is that by getting out in the world, really getting out in the world, seeing so much of our planet, speaking with so many people, living with so many people, living with families all over the world, I’ve gotten a chance to bounce my inner ideas, my observations of myself in the world off so many people.
And observe the basis of science, the basis of connecting with truth in a scientific way is observing, collecting data. So when I have gotten out into the world, I have collected data. And I’m very grateful, first, that I had the opportunity to do that, the privilege to do that, but also that I had the courage to do it. It’s terrifying to get out into the world in so many ways. It’s terrifying. I was talking with a young person yesterday and I was saying, “You saved money, get a passport. You’re an American citizen, you have the opportunity to get a passport and go and travel the world.” Oh, it’s terrifying. I’m like, “Yes, it is terrifying. It’s really scary to leave the comfort of our little existence, the little nest of our existence.” But once we begin this adventure of getting out into the world, the benefits, the payoffs are so great that in my experience, I found that I need to do it again. If there’s the opportunity to learn more out in the world, to collect more data from another angle that gives me more insight into truth, into the truth that I know, into the truth that I see, I want it.
And yes, it’s scary. And actually, I think these three things that I’m going to talk about, these three things that I’m grateful for, they all interconnect. Because I think also getting away from my family took a lot of courage. Courage meaning I took action in spite of the fear, the terror even. And even getting out into the world, taking the action in spite of the fear of traveling, which I started before I really even fully broke away from my family. That courage that it took to get out into the world gave me more courage to break away from my family. And the courage it took to break away from my family and the gifts that I got as the result of that gave me more courage to go and see the world more, to become confident that I actually do have more of a universal or a global at least perspective. So I’m grateful for that. I feel this is something that really has given my life a lot more value.
Then there’s the third thing that I’m grateful for, and that is that I have spoken publicly. I was raised to be silent. I was raised to be quiet. I learned by painful and hard experience that the truths I was learning on the inside about myself, about my family, these were dangerous truths. These were not to be spoken of. These were secrets. The truth of my family was a family secret. The truth I was finding inside myself, the self that I was growing to love when I was young, a boy, as a teenager, these were things that threatened my parents. They caused my parents to reject me and hate me more and more, to punish me, to despise me even, to attack me, to violate me.
And as I grew older, as I connected with a bigger world beyond my family, as I found other people who were actually less like my family and more like me, I started having that urge more and more to speak the truth. And I did it quietly at first, privately, one-on-one, one-on-two, in very small groups, in closed rooms with closed doors, with nobody listening, with confidentiality, and realizing there was value in this. And then some part of me started realizing, “Screw them, screw the people who screwed me up, screw my family. I want to speak the truth in a bigger way. I want to reach more people. I want to reach people using mediums like this, like video and writing that can reach people who I’ve never met.” And it was terrifying.
I go back in my life to the year 2009. Now that’s 15 years ago. I’m 52 now, so I guess I was 37 then when I first had the idea that I wanted to start speaking the truths that I had found on the internet through video. It was a terrifying idea. I think I actually had that idea for a while. YouTube came out, oh, a couple of years before that, but immediately I saw its value. I realized this is a beautiful thing, this is an amazing thing. There was very little about healing from childhood trauma, breaking away from the family, being honest, finding the truth of ourselves back in the early years of YouTube. And I realized this scarcity of information, this is calling me to do it. But I also had so many of the voices in my head, the voices of my parents that were still there saying, “Don’t do it, you’re bad, you’re crazy, you will be rejected. I was a therapist then. Oh, you’ll lose your therapy license, you will be sued, you will be hated, you will be rejected, you’ll lose all your therapy clients. People will think…”
You’re nuts. The greater family system, your relatives, your grandparents are going to hate you. Even my parents were going to hate me, and oh, they did. And people in your childhood and your teachers will see this. Your parents’ friends will see this. Everybody’s going to say you’re nuts. These were the voices in my head.
And some part of me looked within and listened within and listened to myself and said, “Daniel, all these things that are going to happen, all these things that you’re terrified of, they probably will happen. But so what? Because the value of doing it anyways will be greater.” Yeah, it’s going to be terrifying. Yeah, you’re going to be rejected. But you’re going to find value in your experience in a much, much greater way.
You might be able to be useful to somebody. Maybe just one person, one stranger who you’ve never met. You might reach that one person. And that was my mantra when I made my first round of really honest videos back in 2009. Terrifying, sitting in front of a camera, nervous and not sure what I was going to say, and giving a lot of long introductions and being very formal and trying my best to talk about childhood trauma.
And then editing these videos and putting in lots of extra background footage and being afraid to just speak directly and speak true and speak with passion and speak with my hands. And yet I did it anyway, using the mantra, “Maybe this will help one person, or maybe two, or maybe five.” And I did it. I made the videos. I edited them. It took me months and months and months.
Now pretty much I just talk, transfer them over to my video editing software, put a beginning on, put an end on, and export them. Maybe put a photo or two here or there, but not much else. But back then, a lot of work to help me assuage my own terror. All the voices of all the horrible things. I was perfectionistic. I had to make it perfect or else, oh, it’s going to be even worse.
Now I’m less perfectionistic. Still have my fears, but do my best. But man, I put those videos out there. I remember pressing “release, release, release,” make the videos public. It was so scary. And yeah, there was a lot of rejection. There were a lot of people from my old life, my family system, and my childhood world, and people saying, “Why do you do this? You’re shaming your parents. You’re shaming yourself. You’re bringing shame upon yourself. You’re silly. You’re wrong. You’ve got mental illness. You’re this and that. You’re angry. You’re anxious. You’re blah blah blah blah blah.”
But then I found it was useful to people. And as time went on, what I realized was there were a lot of people out there who were hungry for these messages. And so I continued to do it. And you know what? It’s still scary. I can’t say I’m scared right now as I’m speaking, but this I guarantee: when it comes time for me to get ready to make this video public, I will be scared again. I’m always nervous. I’m always nervous. Am I going to be judged in some way or other? I’m still vulnerable.
And I know that because the true me is here. I am representing the true me, the true me that got away from my family system, that has seen so much of the world, and now speaks with so much more confidence. And there’s vulnerability in that because I know how unusual I am now. And I was never allowed to say that. I was never allowed to be different.
I was taught as a kid that being different is strange, weird, and bad. The goal for my childhood in my family system, in my school system, in my neighborhood was to be normal. I always wanted to be normal. Have the normal look, the normal haircut, be a normal height, be a normal this, be a normal that, look with the normal clothes. And now I realize I’m not normal. I may look kind of normal sometimes, but on the inside, I’m not normal.
And you know what? I don’t like normal. I pretty much don’t like normal people. I don’t respect them very much. They don’t do things that help me. They haven’t helped me on my growth and healing process from the traumas of my life. Normal people actually have gotten in my way. They’ve tried to block me at every step of the way, and they still do.
Because you know what? Normal people are really sick. Normal people are 99% of the world. They’re common. They’re average. They haven’t really taken great risks to become individuals. They’re still stuck in their family systems. They’re stuck in their addictions, their romantic relationships, they’re having kids, their drugs, their alcohol, their food, their games, their whatever it is that they’re addicted to, their money, their denial, their terror. They’re blocking themselves from looking within.
And so to do this, to speak the truth, I had to acknowledge within myself, through hard-won experience, that I’m rare. I’m an unusual person. And by speaking this truth and putting it on this public forum of YouTube or wherever else it gets seen, I might reach other rare people.
And so by doing this, by realizing, I read the comments. I see who watches my videos or whoever it is that writes things. And I realize it. Yeah, I realize there’s negative comments too. Some of my videos get hated by a lot of people. But I also realize that it helps people. It helps a lot of people speaking this truth. And this gives my life value because I realize my private painful experiences, my traumas, my healing from my traumas, my terrors, every risk I’ve taken, every stupid mistake I’ve ever made—and I’ve made a lot of them—and learned from them and analyzed them and journaled about them and realized why I made those mistakes.
I’ve learned from this. This has given me life experience. This has given me a lot more humility and an ability to be useful. And by sharing this, well, I magnify my usefulness. And I’m really grateful for that.
[Music]