TRANSCRIPT
Why didn’t I break away from my family sooner? Why didn’t I break away from my parents sooner? Why did it take me so long to figure out that these people were awful for me, that these people had harmed me so terribly, and were never going to change?
I was recently reading, well, a draft of an autobiography that I wrote, not intended to be published, but just reading over the story of my life and seeing how long it took me to realize that I needed to get away from my parents, how harmful they were to me. And just reflecting on all those years that I spent going back to them and hoping they would change, and hoping they would love me, and hoping that they would finally see me for who I was and embrace me and acknowledge me and acknowledged what they’d done to me. And they never did. They never got it.
And yet, for the longest time, I couldn’t figure it out. And I saw this so clearly reading my writing. I’m talking about throughout my 20s and even into my 30s. Long after I’d been a therapist, I was still going back. And it’s like, you think I would have figured this out. And it was humbling to read this and sad. It was like, wait a second, like, G, like I had some part of me that was still hoping, lost in the fantasy of parental rescue, that finally they would get it.
And so I’ve had to ask myself in pain why it took me so long. And on the flip side, I can say, oh my God, thank God I finally figured it out, that I got it. Because all I see around me, almost everybody, are people who are even more traumatized by their parents than I am and never figure it out. Go their whole lives just forgiving their parents and letting go and moving on and pushing it down and splitting off from their feelings and living lives as partial people and having children onto whom they replicate the exact screwed-up dynamics of their childhood and having screwed-up relationships of exactly the type their parents modeled for them.
And so that’s the flip side. But still, why did it take me so long? And I think figuring out at a really deep core level that my parents were bad for me, bad for my development as an adult, I think that was the one answer. Certainly, as a child, that was the impossible answer. That was the final wrong answer. That was the answer that would have gotten me even more rejected than I already was. That was the one answer that was the ultimate answer to having them stop loving me.
I mean, my parents, like most people, were very conditionally loving. And I had to accept their bad behavior and their horror and their projections onto me and their weirdness and their terrible boundaries in order to be accepted into my family system, to get love, to get nurtured at all. So it’s this terrible paradox. In order to grow and mature and have support and to not be isolated, I had to stay connected with these people who were the primary people who were rejecting whole sides of me and forcing me to become isolated within myself and forcing me to be screwed up.
So I was in this terrible and untenable position that allowed me to survive my childhood, to cope with fundamentally the impossible. To survive the trauma that they foisted on me, I had to deny it. I literally had to. And I think this is so common with people. This is the history of childhood for the world around me in this generation and who knows how many generations back, all the way back, perhaps.
And so I was, quote unquote, released from my childhood into this thing called physiological adulthood, going away to university and going away to figure out how to make money on my own and pay taxes and do my own laundry and make my own food and find my own adult relationships. I was released from my family with a very screwed-up mentality about what healthiness was. And the mechanisms that I needed to survive in my family were the ones that I brought with me into my adult life, which is exactly why I felt so unhappy as an adult.
And actually, that unhappiness that I felt going into adulthood was really in my favor. I needed that unhappiness because that unhappiness was the indicator that something was wrong and that I needed to change and that I needed to grow. I think a lot of people who are very happy in their adulthood and their early adulthood are just the people who have pushed down their traumas so much more than I was able to. And their happiness is a reflection of how much more in denial and dissociation they are. Happiness for them is a very good coping mechanism with their miserable buried unconscious history.
And so I was unhappy, and I didn’t want to be unhappy. And I started figuring out that I need to look inside of myself. I need to grow. I need to change. I need to bring up all these horrible feelings. I need to look at my bad behavior. I need to look at my self-hatred. And I need to explore where did this come from and why do I feel this way and who caused this?
And so I started looking at my family history more and realizing, oh my God, these parents of mine, who I needed to idealize in order to survive, were not so ideal. Yet I was still very immature, immature really underneath it, being traumatized, screwed up, and lost and confused and split off. Whole parts of me hadn’t been allowed to develop, and so they were very immature, very immature parts of me. And I needed that immaturity to survive.
And so I didn’t know how to heal that. I didn’t even know that healing was a thing. I didn’t know anything about this. I didn’t know anything about trauma. I didn’t know I was traumatized. Nobody reflected that back to me. Certainly, my parents didn’t tell me.
And so when I started realizing a lot of things about the truth of my history and the truth of what was buried inside of me, I went back to my parents and I tried to get them to change. And because I was a bit more empowered now that I’d become an independent adult in my 20s, they humored me a little bit more. And they made more effort, a little bit more effort, to try to join forces with me and made it look like they were changing and growing and thinking more about their history. But they weren’t. They weren’t really doing it.
And the proof is in the pudding because now I’m in my 50s and my parents are in their 80s, and they never changed. Not fundamentally, not at all. They never really broke away from their parents. They never really looked at their history. They certainly never looked at their bad behavior, their bad behavior which was an indicator of what had been done to them. They could have used looking at their bad behavior. They could have used the opportunity I was providing them when I said, “You did this, this, and this.” They could have used that as an opportunity to do more healing, but they couldn’t handle it. They didn’t want to. They were locked into shutdown, confused, traumatized lives, shutdown, confused, traumatizing relationships.
And I was trying to change them. And also, periodically throughout my early years of adulthood, I was trying to shut down so I could be happier, so I could fit in more. But something in me was too healthy and kept fighting back. So it was a long process inside of me to try to grow, to try to see the truth in myself, to realize that I couldn’t shut down, I couldn’t accept being miserable, and to realize again and again and again that my parents were not allies on my healing path.
And also, the more I gained distance from them, the more I realized when I went back to them how screwed up they were, not only now but how screwed up they’d always been. Because their behavior toward me as an adult, adult Daniel, was a clear indicator of how they treated me as a child. So every time I went back, I got more data about who the people were who had had almost complete control over my life when I was a little baby and a little boy. And I needed that information, I think.
If I’d just broken away from them when I’d been 20 or 21 or 22, I would have deprived myself of the knowledge that I needed to know. Oh, this is who they really were when I was little, because I didn’t really know it then. And that gives me a little bit of empathy for why I kept going back again and again and again in my 20s and through my 30s.
By the end of my 30s, I’d broken away. By the end of my 30s, finally, it was like, okay, I got enough information. I’ve figured it out deep in myself that these people are not growing. These people are not changing. These people are not my allies. These people do not want me to grow and heal. These people actually want me to do the opposite.
These people like shut down Daniel. They don’t like alive, healthy, healing Daniel. They even said it, and I’ve said this in other videos. They said, “We don’t like this new person. What happened to the old Daniel? You have betrayed the old Daniel that we loved so much.” Well, the old Daniel they loved so much was just someone who was very lost and shut down and appeasing of their horrible behavior.
And so by reading my autobiography, that draft of it that I probably will never share in this lifetime, well, I felt those things and I saw all those years of going back and back and back and back. And I gained more empathy for myself. And also, I gained a lot more empathy for all these people out there who are struggling even more than I did and I do to get away from their traumatizing parents.