TRANSCRIPT
I have long intuitively been drawn to the subject of wildness. Even the word wildness, it’s part of my website too, wildtruth.net. I’ve wanted to make a video about wildness for a while. I had trouble formulating exactly why I love that subject. I even tried to write a book on it a few years ago, and I think I wrote a whole draft, but I never felt like I got to the essence of it.
This morning, I was thinking about it, and I think I found a big clue for myself: why I love wildness so much. Two reasons, actually. The first is that from all of my experience of studying my childhood and studying my parents, especially studying, well, the person whose job it was to love me the most, and the person who I thought loved me the most, my mom, I’ve come to the realization that my mom didn’t want to create me or have me so that I could grow up to be free and independent. That is wild. She wanted a pet. She wanted a domesticated creature who would be there for her, who would love her, who would focus its attention on her. And I specifically use that word: its, not his attention, not my attention. I was an it. I was an object there to please her, like a pet. My wild spirit side, well, it threatened her. She didn’t like it. She tried to break it down. She pathologized it in all sorts of different ways, traumatizing ways, ways that literally clipped parts of me off, well, so that I would shut myself down and be softer.
I think right away from the moment I was born, she had me circumcised. My genitals would be circumcised. It’s like this is a mark of domestication. You are not as you were created to be. We will make you fit into some mold of social acceptance for her sake, certainly not for my sake. I didn’t want that. But that was just one example along the way. I was thinking about it just when I started as a young adult and certainly into my 20s, striving and struggling to be independent, to be myself, to take distance from her. It was like I had broken the rules. I wasn’t allowed to go and be free, and being free was something that my soul cried out for.
And that brings me to the second part of wildness. Some reason I knew I was just so attracted to wildness is that starting as a young boy, I loved the wilderness. I loved being alone in the wilderness, out in the forest. I grew up in Upstate New York, and I was allowed to go off into the forest from a young age. There was something about it that called to my soul. It was a place where I could be free, where I could be safe—safe being the true me I always was. I knew I was there was some resonance I had with the wilderness, with the animals of nature, the plants of nature, the trees of nature, the wind. And that never changed for me, that special feeling of being alive in this living world without humans in it.
And when I think of wildness, also why I am so drawn to wildness, why I called my website Wild Truth, what was it about my website that was wild? What allowed me to go to this wild truth? To me, the wild truth is the truth of the true self, the inherent birthright of every baby, every baby human being. And what I have come to see is that it is a normal, not a good thing, but a normal thing, a normal human phenomenon for families the world over, parents the world over, cultures the world over, religions the world over, to take that wildness of the child and do what my parents did: shear off its wild, crazy edges, shear off its radical sides, shear off its connection with itself. Don’t let this child know who it really is. Block it, traumatize it. And traumatizing it is the way of what happens in the world. This is what families do, even what they are supposed to do according to society and religion. You’re supposed to beat that child, beat the wildness out of them. Wildness is considered bad. You are supposed to break that horse, break its wildness, and make it domesticated. Make it fit in, make it normal, make it acceptable, make it ready to go to school where it can sit in a desk all day and learn all this information that may or may not be true and regurgitate this information when it is told to do it.
Teach this little creature to speak only when spoken to, to not ask too many questions, to not be very curious, to not have too many feelings. When the child feels pain, pain, and feels sadness and feels rage about being stripped away from who they really are, not being allowed to be who they really are, being punished and humiliated and deprived, even physically attacked and hit for being violated for being natural and true, the child is not allowed to have his or her true feelings. That wild reaction, this wild truth, is not allowed, is punished. The child experiences more rejection for having a reaction to having his or her true self rejected.
And to me, the wild truth is the healing process, the process of healing from trauma, healing from the traumas that stripped the child of their wildness. It’s the process of coming back to the truth of who we really are. And then there’s the question: are all people naturally inherently wild? I would say that all people have the potential to be wild. All people are certainly born with that potential to develop consciousness around their inner bright shining core of wildness. So many children are stripped of their conscious connection with their wildness so early on through trauma that they become emotionally dead. They become so split off, disassociated, or in the psychology world, they have the defense of dissociation. So they are really, really disconnected, not associated with the truth of what is in them.
The first thing that they need to reclaim that wildness is to feel all their post-traumatic feelings. And that is why I made my website all about healing from trauma. That’s why I made this YouTube channel all about healing from trauma. If you don’t heal from the traumas, you can never return to your wildness. And it’s been a 30-year dedication for me to return to my wildness. I would say I’ve done pretty well. I’ve become a lot more wild. But it’s hard in this domesticated world where wild people are considered dangerous. They’re considered suspect. They’re considered renegade. People don’t necessarily trust them. They don’t trust them in domesticated places a lot. I know this for myself because to survive in our crazy world, to function in our crazy world—crazy being domesticated, shut down, split off, disassociated, disconnected, in denial—norm, I have had to at one level kind of fake it, and at another level, well, kind of partially shut down just to again survive it.
It’s really a very unpleasant process to function in this so shut down, domesticated world. It’s like, hmm, I think of wolves. Wolves in America, wolves in Europe and in Asia, a lot of times if they’re outside of some sort of protected national park, they’re just shot on sight. They’re dangerous. We don’t like them. You know what the difference is between a wolf and a dog? I heard someone say this once, and I thought it was brilliant. The difference between a wolf and a dog: a wolf can feed itself. That’s how I see myself—a sort of wild creature who is independent. I have learned how to feed myself. I think that’s a huge part of becoming an independent adult, a real independent adult, not an emotionally dependent child who puts on an adult facade. That’s what most adults are. I had to figure that out over a long period of time, that my parents, when I was a child, these people who I thought were mature, functional adults, I thought they were the pinnacle of psychological sophistication. I had to figure out by the time I was an adult, actually, they’re just broken little children, unconsciously split off, broken little children who are functioning in adult bodies. That’s what I was raised to be.
My mom loved the idea of me becoming a PhD in biology, getting a doctorate in biology, and becoming normal and shut down and being a broken little kind of nerdy person who goes through life doing little experiments and teaching classes on biology.
Teaching the scientific method but not applying any of that science to my inner self. Not really collecting the truth of the data about what is going on inside of me on an emotional level. Learning about my history, really studying the truth of my history, studying what really happened to me by collecting data about it, making hypotheses, being willing to challenge my preconceived idea about the healthiness of my parents. That threatened the hell out of my mom.
I ended up getting a PhD in self-knowledge, a PhD in truth. Woohoo! She did not like that at all. And heaven forbid when I became a psychotherapist and I started making a living at that job, helping other people do that. She didn’t like it. She didn’t support it at all. She wanted me to be a broken little domesticated college professor somewhere in a little laboratory, doing nothing, not being useful to anyone, and not challenging her. The pet that she created me to be was not supposed to run away from home and break away from her.
I had a lot of pets when I was a kid. Some of them were domesticated animals: cats, dogs, parakeets. But some of them were not domesticated animals: snapping turtles and hermit crabs, lizards. I had a pet woodchuck for a while, a wounded woodchuck. A rabbit my cat had caught, a baby rabbit once, and well, I helped nurture it back to health. I loved this rabbit and gave it a name, but it was a wild cottontail rabbit, and I freed it eventually, and it went back into the wild.
Some of the animals died before they ever were freed. I set my snapping turtles free when they grew a little bit bigger. Now I wonder, was that a good idea? Had they become too domesticated? Had they been deprived of the knowledge of how to find food for themselves? Did they go back into the stream from which they came and die? I don’t know. I wish them the best. It’s quite possible some of them are still alive now. If they lived, snapping turtles live decades and decades and decades.
I wonder about this whole idea of pets in general. It’s a little questionable because I often, well certainly living in New York City, I see people mistreat their pets all the time. The dogs who stay inside all day while their owners are at work, and the dogs can’t pee, and they just whine and whine and cry because they want to get outside and they want to socialize with other dogs. Instead, they’re inside, bored out of their minds, waiting for their owner to come home. And well, often their owners don’t empathize with them that well.
I’ve also seen dogs, domesticated dogs, who are abandoned by their owners and form packs and become feral. And cats that are set, well, are abandoned by their owners and become feral, living out in the wild. And the cats seem to do better. They very quickly adapt to becoming feral. I think probably humans are a little bit more like dogs. We’re a bit more domesticated, and the transition back to our wildness is harder, but it’s not impossible.
And with that, I think I’d like to wrap this up, and I would like to do it with this final thought: that the most profound way to return to our wildness is to return to our psychological wildness by healing our traumas and manifesting our true selves as adults.