TRANSCRIPT
I would like to explore the concept of using myself as an example when I talk about different concepts in the world of therapy. This is often known as use of self, and I really make use of that a lot when I share in these YouTube videos. Back when I was a therapist, I did it a lot also.
The reason that I bring it up is that a few days ago, I read several comments by different people where they were criticizing my use of self. It’s one of the dangers of use of self. The way in which they were criticized, I mean, what they were saying is, “You talk about your screwed up childhood and your screwed up relationship with your parents so much, it’s obvious you have done so little healing. You’re so stuck and focused on always talking about your relationship with your parents.” That’s one of the dangers of using self, is that I can be misunderstood.
What I see, what I’m very conscious of, in fact, is when I’m sharing about my relationship, my historical relationship especially with my parents, I’m talking about stuff that I’ve long since processed. It’s largely closed in my life. I’m not terribly emotional about it. Sometimes when I share about it, I can have some feelings, especially to bring a little color to the picture, to make it more interesting, to bring some life into it. But really, it’s like the main reason I’m sharing about myself is that I feel it’s much more respectful to use myself as an example than to use others.
Because that’s the interesting thing, and it’s kind of sad in a way, is that a lot of the examples I have are of other people. Examples which would actually well highlight the concepts I’m talking about would actually be much better than my own example. One reason being sometimes a lot of these examples I have of other people are more extreme, and sometimes extreme examples are more interesting and highlight the point better.
Another thing is when I talk about someone else, sometimes it’s easier not just to have perspective on someone else’s situation, but to be able to talk about it in a clear, rounder way. It’s not at all infiltrated by any of my own, well, messes or insecurities. Also, it’s very hard. I don’t want to make myself look bad when I talk about some of these examples, especially when I can anticipate that some people will not quite understand and will criticize me. So these are dangers in the use of self as an example.
Also, I’ve had it happen in personal relationships sometimes, or even as a therapist. I’m thinking, which is definitely a kind of personal relationship, but it’s a personal professional relationship where someone could be sharing a problem that they’re going through, and I want to use myself as an example of someone who has worked through some area of that to highlight some concepts that might be useful to them. I share my own experience, and they can turn and say, “Well, why are you telling me about your life? I’m not here to be your therapist.” I’ve even had friends say that. “Well, this is my time to talk. This isn’t your time to process your material.” And I’m like, “No, no, I’m not actually processing anything. I’m just giving an example of something.” But sometimes people can be very sensitive.
I think some people can be very sensitive to hearing a therapist talk about their personal life. It can be much easier for them to hear about someone else’s life if they’re going to hear an example of healing. For example, I’ve known some therapists who use their own personal life experience but make it into the third person, talk about it as if they were talking about someone else, and that can make it easier sometimes for clients to hear things.
On the flip side, I never liked much, at least to talk with clients, “Oh, and say, oh, I have another client who has gone through X, Y, or Z,” because then it sounds like I’m just someone who’s so quick to basically break the confidentiality of other clients. And so use of self doesn’t really break any confidentiality. Nobody gets violated with it. But I think about this, and I also think in terms of not breaking anybody’s confidentiality when I talk about my own life experience.
Let’s just use the example again of my historical relationship with my parents. Am I breaking their confidentiality when I use myself? And I think no, because I think when parents have a child, that child is allowed to say whatever they want about their relationship with their parents. That is part of the inherent right of the child. I think actually the world mixes that up a lot. I think a lot of parents, I see it nowadays, certainly on the internet, parents are very open talking about their children publicly for the general public, putting up pictures, sometimes embarrassing pictures of their children, embarrassing videos of their children, telling embarrassing stories.
I know throughout my childhood, my parents did that all the time. They told many, many embarrassing, embarrassing stories about me, or they had pictures in our photo albums of me when I was a little kid naked, and they would show it to everybody. It was like I didn’t like that. At a certain point, I was like, “I don’t want those pictures shared. I don’t want those embarrassing, sometimes even sexual stories about me told to your friends or told to strangers.” It’s like, what about my private life?
And then I realized as time went on, actually, there were all sorts of family secrets that I was expected, on pain of rejection, not to share about my parents. Alcohol use, drug use, embarrassing sexual things, sexual violations that they did, terrible fights that they had, lies that I caught them in, manipulations that they were doing, cheating, things like this. I wasn’t allowed to share that. Oh, I had to protect their confidentiality. I was so strongly brought up to respect their confidentiality that in a way, I wasn’t allowed to use myself as a healing example.
So according to the rules of the family system, by me practicing the use of self here on these YouTube videos, I’m breaking family laws and rules. Oh, I’ve been punished for it. I’ve been rejected by my family for it, and long since rejected for this kind of stuff. When I started looking at my history and even talking about it with my parents, saying, “Wait a second, you violated me in XYZ way,” they really didn’t like that. Even though I wasn’t telling anybody outside the family system what was going on in my head, just bringing it up with them was breaking historical rules.
So it’s like not only was the use of self a danger in my family system, having a self was a danger. And I sometimes wonder if people get threatened even here on YouTube. Some people, people who are more troubled, angry, or people who themselves were not allowed to have much of a self, can be angry when someone else threatens, when someone else expresses having had a self, expresses breaking away from the family system. So that’s a danger in use of self.
But overall still, I feel so grateful that I have a self to use and that I can use it for an example to be useful to others and that I don’t have to violate anybody else’s confidentiality by talking about my own life as an example of healing.