Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool

All Episodes

Previous Next

Jan. 20, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:15:01

1562 Interview with Therapist Daniel Mackler - Freedomain Radio

A very interesting interview with practicing therapist Daniel Mackler.

Large

Audio Only |

Scroll

Time	Text
	Hi everybody, this is Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
	I have on the line Daniel Mackler, a therapist who has a very high quality, in my opinion, series of videos on YouTube and who has kindly agreed to have a chat with myself and you wonderful listeners about his approaches to therapy and to healing and to personal growth.
	So thank you so much, Daniel, for taking the time to have a chat with us and if you could just start out by giving Your chief vital statistics, the ways that people can view your videos and have a look at your website?
	Sure. Well, nice to be on Free Domain Radio.
	I have a lot of respect for you and for what you do.
	How to find me?
	Well, my website is www.iraresoul.com, and I have a YouTube channel, which is, I guess it's DMackler58, but if you Google Daniel Mackler, I will come up.
	And I speak on YouTube on a variety of subjects, mostly about psychology, but about other things, too.
	And I try to speak from my heart and say what I really believe, and what I find is Generally, a lot of the points that I express are not very well represented out in the world and certainly not very well represented in the psychology field.
	Right. And one of the things that struck me, Daniel, when I was watching your videos is that you have a very interesting combination that to me only comes as a result of a lot of work on self-actualization.
	You have a very wonderful combination of gentleness and assertiveness.
	And I think that's really great because, of course, Those two characteristics are often not combined in the same personality.
	So where you have gentleness, you will often have a kind of frightfulness or a sort of fearfulness.
	Oh, and I have that in me.
	Oh, I know. I know we all do.
	And where you have assertiveness, you will often have a kind of cold aggression.
	But you really combine, I think, the best of both worlds in terms of gentleness and assertiveness.
	And I thought that that was very well understood.
	I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about your approach to forgiveness, which is very different from a lot of what people have read in the self-help movement.
	Wow. Oh, well, first, I'm just going to comment on the insight that you showed there, because I never quite thought of myself that way, but when you said it about the combination of gentleness and assertiveness, it makes sense.
	And I think those are two, in a way, two extremes of my personality that you pointed out, that on one hand, I am a gentle soul on the inside, and I'm a warm person.
	I love being around kids.
	I've loved working with kids in the past, and generally, I like to get along with people.
	On the flip side, My process of self-discovery has radicalized me and has brought out a lot of anger that I never would have expected, but anger at the way things work in the world and the horrors that are being done to people, and especially the horrors that are being done to children.
	And that brings out a spontaneous rage in me that In a way, it's very contradictory to my gentleness.
	And so those two things, when you pointed out, it really did put a light bulb up in my head that it's true.
	And it's something that actually the funny thing is I struggle against both of those qualities because in a way they work against each other.
	And yet I know that if I just express rage and assertiveness, that it's a total turn-off and there's no warmth in the message.
	And yet if I express just warmth and get along with people, which I was trained as a child to be a master of, that I don't get my message across.
	So I just had to comment on that first.
	And you asked about forgiveness.
	I was raised to forgive.
	I was raised by parents who From the very beginning, expected me to forgive them for what they'd done to me.
	And this is before I even really knew what they did to me.
	So, in a way, forgiveness became a reflex on my part, and I became a master at it and learned to transfer that ability to forgive to my relationships with almost anyone.
	So people could do almost anything to me, and I could forgive them and would forgive them.
	And even worse than that is that...
	The worst things that they would do, I would forgive them even more quickly because that's what I had to do to survive in my family.
	It was a basic survival mechanism to get love.
	And what I discovered over time by observing people, and I've had the good fortune of being a therapist for the last ten years and worked with tons and tons of different people, And being a therapist has been a fantastic chance for me to observe humanity and observe the deeper levels of humanity's struggle, that I've seen that I wasn't alone in that paradigm of having to forgive to survive.
	And what I realized is that people forgive to be able to get along with other people, to make it in the world and to get loved.
	And the problem is that it's not real forgiveness.
	So what I watched is when I hear self-help gurus and hear philosophers and psychologists and religious leaders say, oh, forgiveness is important.
	It's vital. If you can't forgive, you can't move forward.
	What I realized is even using some of the same language, they were sending the same message across in very much the same way that my abusive parents were.
	And to me, it just intuitively rang false, because I knew for me that my growth depended not on forgiving, but on blaming.
	And I don't mean inappropriately blaming, and I think that's where blame becomes a dirty word.
	I mean really blaming in terms of laying the responsibility at the feet of the people who caused me the damage.
	And that's That's how I've grown.
	So I don't even necessarily have to use the word like blaming, because in a way that's a trigger word.
	I could just say, holding the people who did me wrong responsible.
	And I think that's a right as a human being.
	Every human being has the right to hold the people who caused him or her damage responsible.
	And especially children have a right to do this.
	The problem is children... In our world have the least rights of any people because they're so inherently powerless and they so desperately need others who are powerful to take care of them to survive.
	So my philosophy goes directly against what most children are taught and it goes against it at some very primal levels and it's terrifying for people to consider what it would be like not to forgive their parents, not to forgive the people who caused them damage.
	And I think how a lot of people make it in the world and become quote-unquote adults is that they They do do a lot of blame, but they displace their blame onto people who really didn't cause them the damage.
	So instead of blaming their parents and blaming the primary figures in their life who corrupted them, they blame society.
	They blame people of other races, people of other sexual orientations.
	They blame teachers.
	They blame other secondary figures.
	They blame siblings. Siblings are a great person to blame for parental damage because siblings often are similar to parents But you don't need a sibling as much to get your basic love needs met.
	So I don't know if that's making sense of what I'm saying, but how does that striking?
	No, I think I think it's great.
	I certainly can supply a smidgen or two of empirical evidence to support your theories and I take a very similar approach to To forgiveness, which is that forgiveness is not willed, it is earned.
	And if we forgive without restitution, without understanding on the part of the person who's wronged us, we're simply writing a blank check for them to continue and repeat that behavior because the onus for solving the relationship problem always falls upon the victim to wave the magic wand of forgiveness and make everything all right.
	And the reality is the victim does not have that power.
	I mean, you can pretend that you have that power, but you really don't.
	And so in a sense, you're never going to get, quote, better service at a restaurant if you pay them no matter how bad the meal is.
	And so you have to have the option to not reciprocate in a relationship which you feel is damaging.
	And the commandment for forgiveness seems to me to come directly from the aggressive and guilty conscience of the abuser rather than the self-interest of the victim.
	Yep, I think that was very nicely said.
	And I guess what I would add to that is that first, forgiveness is not an action.
	So I think that's how I put it.
	That's how I rephrase what you say.
	Forgiveness is not an action.
	Forgiveness is a consequence of other actions.
	And the other actions that allow forgiveness to really happen Those other actions, that's healing, grieving, mourning the loss, working through it, feeling the rage, feeling the pain.
	And if you don't go through that entire process, you really can't forgive.
	So people who think, oh, I can snap my fingers and forgive, or I can follow what the Dalai Lama says and I can just let go and forgive and move on, it's like they can't.
	They can fake themselves into thinking they're doing it, and they can look pretty good at it, and they can make the whole world happy.
	But if you scratch below the surface, they didn't resolve anything, and they're just as enraged as they ever were.
	And what I see the most sad thing is I think I'm going to go.
	They usually do it through a metaphor, so it doesn't look similar.
	The dynamics are actually exactly the same.
	The dynamics that they perpetrate on their child are the same.
	They just don't realize they're doing it because it looks different on the surface.
	Right. And I've been talking to a number of the researchers in the field around the biology of brain development and, of course, the effects of trauma on brain development.
	And it really is to me quite astounding the degree to which people will avoid the basic topic of parenting.
	People will talk about North Korea, and they'll talk about concentration camps, and they'll talk about child soldiers in foreign countries.
	And of course, all of these are terrible, terrible situations.
	And this is certainly not to say that all parents are abusive, far from it.
	But statistically, the greatest likelihood is that if a child is going to be exposed to a toxic substance, It's not going to be lead in a toy from China.
	It's not going to be fluoride in the water.
	It's going to be his or her own parents in parenting style.
	And yet, when I try to bring that topic up, that if we're looking at the negative consequences of abuse, the first place we always need to look, which is not to say the only place, and it's not to say the universal place, but the first place that we would look is the parents.
	And what I find is that people really shy away from that topic.
	And I thought that your explanation Or possible.
	Your theory as to why this might be the case, Daniel, it was really interesting that most people who are mental health practitioners have not achieved the level of growth, at least certainly not prior to having children, that would have prevented them from reenacting some of the problems they experience with children on their own children, which means that the forgiveness commandment is more, in a sense, a blank check that they want from their own kids rather than a principal.
	Yes. Yes.
	And it is also interesting because some people...
	Before they have children actually have done a massive amount of growth and work and have resolved a lot of the traumas that were perpetrated on them when they were children.
	So actually they become much better parents than their parents ever were.
	And yet my observation is that still doesn't stop them from partially acting out some of their damage.
	And this is a cornerstone of my point of view that If there's any part of us that's unresolved, if there's any part of us that remains traumatized, we will act that out on our children.
	And that's been my observation.
	And that, unfortunately, I don't know how to find empirical evidence for.
	But my observations consistently Show that.
	And that's where I come up with my seemingly extreme point of view.
	It's seemingly extreme, but in conventional society it is extreme about why people shouldn't have children until they've resolved all of their issues.
	Because even if there's a small part of them that hasn't resolved some of their issues, that's the part they're going to act out on their children.
	And even if it's not extreme, it will be there.
	And to me, a little bit of abuse is still inappropriate and wrong.
	And unfortunately, That sets me apart from Most people, and certainly most mental health practitioners, that they can like certain parts of my point of view very much, but when it comes to this one, usually it's a sticking point.
	What I find generally is that people just ignore it.
	Or like you said, it becomes a taboo subject.
	Talking about bad parenting is generally a taboo subject at all.
	Blaming parents is definitely risky, but when you get to the extreme of what I've come to over time, it becomes taboo squared.
	It's very difficult.
	It's stressful, actually, to be What I feel like in society in many ways, and certainly in the mental health field, when it comes to my deeper point of view, I've become an alien and a mutant.
	And generally, people don't like mutants.
	Mutants generally die out, except evolutionarily, it's mutations upon which our evolution is based.
	So I feel like, and again, one could label me grandiose and say, oh, he's just being grandiose, saying he's so special.
	But what I find is that My ideas have the potential to be incredibly useful to humanity on a large scale.
	It's just that very few people take them seriously because they're so painful because of what the consequences of embodying my point of view represent.
	And I'll say that the first person that I see that has a very hard time accepting my point of view is myself.
	It's like I've tried so hard to discount my own point of view because who the hell wants to look at this?
	And yet My observations keep bringing me back to this point of view.
	And my observations, not just of other people, but of my primary subject, which is myself.
	And looking inside myself, I keep coming to these answers over and over again.
	And these are answers that I definitely did not want to find.
	And that's part of why I give myself a bit more scientific credibility than I might otherwise give myself, because I wasn't looking for this...
	This particular answer and this particular theory, this is actually what I really wanted was to get along with my family, to be a happy guy who loved my parents and got along with my sibling and got married and had kids and live a happy life.
	That's really what I always dreamed for myself and it was actually very painful for me to discover that All of my observations were leading me in the exact opposite direction and that I felt my internal, if you want to use the word, I want to use the word salvation, my internal salvation as a person, my sense of feeling wholesome and alive in the world was really based on me being honest with myself about what I was finding and also facing and being willing to face the consequences of the horrors that I was discovering inside myself and also discovering In other people around me and realizing what was going on in me was actually pretty universal.
	Which is why I became so assertive, because I realized...
	I mean, again, this is...
	One could say this is opinion, and I would say it's my opinion, but I also personally believe that it's truth that these things that I was finding inside myself and observing in humanity, this was reality.
	And it was an ugly reality to discover, and it was not...
	It was one that I put a lot of energy into trying to deny at great cost to myself.
	Right. And it is really the essence of maturity, in my opinion, to throw away cultural biases and work with the actual evidence, to work with the facts.
	That's the basis of science.
	That is the basis of maturity to discard inherited prejudices around, you know, forgiveness or the innate or automatic virtue of the family.
	Or, of course, the other one, which is that if you break with your family, it is automatically a negative disaster that you will regret and it will destroy you and so on.
	And philosophy, I think, comes to the aid of these theories very well.
	Just to take one brief example about forgiveness, philosophy discards or destroys the idea of the virtue of forgiveness in about 20 seconds, because if the victim can simply will better behavior in the moment relatively easily, or even if it's quite tough, if the victim can will better behavior, or even if it's quite tough, if the victim can will better behavior, then the victimizer can also
	And thus there should be nothing to forgive because the principle of willing better behavior relatively easily becomes universal and thus applies as consistently to the abuser as it does to the victim.
	And therefore there should be nothing to, but if the victimizer cannot change his or her behavior because of embedded Hamina Hamina, then neither can the victim himself or herself change her behavior and.
	And so philosophy just destroys this sort of stuff relatively quickly.
	But I think combined with the power of self-knowledge, I think it becomes quite a potent force for change.
	Oh, wow. Yeah, I agree with you.
	And also, I think that the big problem with being a victimized person, and I believe we're all victimized people, it just depends on to which degree.
	And I also think that most people don't realize the degree to which they're victimized.
	It's very preferable to deny how victimized one is, because if you deny it, then you don't have to feel horrible all the time.
	But that part and parcel of being a victimized person is actually swallowing up the psychology and the mentality and the perspective and even the personality of the victimizer.
	So in a way, it's an evil of the abuse process is that the abused people actually in many ways become just like the abuser and their personalities start to overlap with them and their psychology overlaps.
	And if you forgive If you forgive the abuser and the victim forgives the abuser, then that's why the victim gives himself carte blanche to actually act out exactly what the abuser does because psychologically he has become like the abuser and the only way to grow and change is to confront the abuser Whether it's in one's own mind or in the flesh,
	to confront the abuser and to not forgive him, but that allows one to confront oneself for the parts of oneself that actually are very similar and are disturbed.
	And that's, for me personally in my own process, that's been the hardest thing, is that to recognize just how flawed I am and to realize that My point of view is just that.
	It's a point of view. Yes, it overlaps with the truth, but I am aware consciously and intellectually that where I remain traumatized, and part of me does remain traumatized, that where I remain traumatized, my point of view remains flawed.
	And thus, speaking from a scientific perspective, I have to acknowledge that I'm not perfect.
	My theories are not perfect, and therefore, Like, doing this interview today, I was a bit nervous because I watched a bunch of your videos, and I saw some of them directly challenge some of the things that I say.
	And what I find is, I think it's a strength on my part, but it also makes life pretty terrifying, is who the hell wants to be challenged about things that are deep-seated?
	Like, I watched your video on global warming, and I'm like, God, I take global warming as a fact.
	Okay, global warming's a fact.
	Man has caused it. The world's a mess.
	But, you know, you presented your point of view, and you presented a man who was quite an expert on being a global warming skeptic.
	Wouldn't it be easy to just stop watching that video versus to sit there and watch the whole hour and 11 minutes of it, which is what I did, and listen to it and think, okay, Daniel, challenge yourself.
	Because for me, my whole growth has been based on listening to my inner voice and trusting it, but also at the same time being open-minded and recognizing that because I remain a traumatized person, I shouldn't have too much confidence.
	You follow what I'm saying? Yeah, no, absolutely.
	I think I really do. That humility in the face of facts, and, I mean, global warming may be true or may be false, it's just a, it's not, I've never said that I can close the case against it, I've just said that these are some arguments against it for sure.
	Oh yeah, no, I thought you handled that subject very respectfully.
	You didn't beat me over the head with it.
	No. Which made it a lot easier for me to be humble and actually take in the message that you were saying.
	And the takeaway message for me was that I have to go do my own research.
	I have to be more humble and I have to go learn more and collect more data because I've jumped to a conclusion that is not necessarily based on fact and that I don't want to live my life that way.
	And that's how I've been for a long time.
	Even when it's uncomfortable, I'm trying to be open-minded.
	And I felt that that's been to my advantage to let me move forward in a quicker way because I'm not as stuck in dogma.
	I may not come across as confident or as assertive as I might otherwise be.
	And I... I'm more vulnerable, but at the same time, it's that vulnerability that allows me to grow.
	And so, I prize that in myself.
	And I prize that in other people, too, when they have an open mind and they're humble.
	And they're willing to take in arguments that make them feel uncomfortable and even make them look stupid sometimes.
	Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is back to the Socratic principle that certainty comes from insecurity.
	That any certainty that comes without insecurity beforehand is just invalid prejudice.
	That you need to be unsure, unsteady, uncertain in order to pursue knowledge and to have the self-doubt and self-criticism to discard counterfactual evidence.
	So even if that is simply prior prejudice.
	I was also quite struck, and if I looked at your videos correctly, you haven't done sort of confronting your parents part two as yet.
	Oh, I think I did. Maybe it didn't come up.
	Or maybe it's only a one-part video.
	I can't remember. I did them the summer of 2009.
	So I actually haven't watched them in a few months myself.
	All right. But I thought that you had a very interesting theory as to why people have children.
	And I think that is a very...
	It's always been a big question for me, and I won't go into my own theories because Lord knows people hear me talk enough.
	And I saw on your website that you do have a child, right?
	One child. Yeah, I just, I mean, I sort of took the advice prior to meeting you that you have given others.
	I, you know, started on self-work in my mid-teens, and 25 years later I had a daughter, and this is after, you know, years of therapy and journaling and all of that kind of stuff.
	And I am the parent that I want to be.
	I am exactly the parent that I want to be and I think the parent who is best for my daughter.
	But I took my time because, and I'm not saying this was a big conscious plan, but I certainly was in no way shape or form wanted children in my 20s or early 30s because I just knew that I had a lot of work to do on myself.
	And I wanted to have a child because I think the world is such a beautiful and wonderful and exciting place.
	That to share that with someone new is just a delightful thing.
	And I have found that to be exactly the case.
	I mean, it has allowed me to rediscover my delight in bubbles and squirrels and birds and things like that you wouldn't notice otherwise.
	But you have a theory about why people have children that I thought was very interesting.
	I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that.
	Sure. Now, here's the thing.
	I also brought up you having a child because, you know, I express it even more, I guess you could call it virulently, on my website that I basically think everybody's inappropriate to have children.
	And I knew you were going to interview me, and I liked the vibe that you gave off on your videos.
	And I was like, oh, God, this is actually the big anxiety for me doing this interview today was that I'm going to come across like a complete jerk because...
	Some of my theories go directly against some of the actions that you've taken.
	And so I hope that what I say comes across in a good spirit because I'm not out to attack any person.
	I'm out to express truth as best I can.
	Listen, I just wanted to point out that as an atheist and an anarchist and a rationalist philosopher, For me to be offended by somebody else's startling theories would be entirely hypocritical because if you come across like more of a jerk than I do, you will have really achieved something because that's normally how people react to me rather than others.
	So, you know, completely feel free to be as offensive as you absolutely want to be because I'm certainly always willing to reopen the question.
	Okay, great. Well, this can make it fun.
	Because actually, I find myself very open to being criticized.
	I actually enjoy it. I mean, I can't say that because I'm not a masochist.
	But at the same time, in the long run, I grow from it.
	And that is key for me.
	That some of my greatest growth in my life, and really taking new perspectives on myself, have come as the result of being harshly, harshly criticized.
	Sometimes correctly and sometimes incorrectly.
	And so, the fact that you even put it out there as a theory that you find it quite acceptable for me to be blunt and offensive, even, is great.
	I enjoy that. So, the question you ask is, what do I think the motive is for people having children?
	And I think the primary motive is for people having children, and I say this pretty universally, because I've never seen anyone when I've dug in deep enough that's contradicted this for me, and this is where I offend most parents, but I feel like, ergh, I say it anyway, that I think people have children out of desperate need, desperate personal need.
	And sometimes it's conscious, and sometimes primitive people are very open about saying it.
	They have all their reasons they want to have children.
	But sometimes when people get more sophisticated and more psychological, they use higher defenses to not have to acknowledge how needy they actually are.
	And the basic thing is, is that People, when they haven't resolved all of their traumas, especially their childhood traumas, they retain very wounded, childlike parts of them that are still very needy, because it's totally appropriate for children to have huge amounts of need.
	Of course, it's normal in our society to deny those children's needs and to not empathize with children, but because people are so needy inside where they remain traumatized, They try to find ways to get those needs met in their adult life.
	And it's pretty hard in a way to get the world to meet your needs when you're an adult because nobody really cares that much.
	Even a husband or a wife or a boyfriend or a girlfriend, best friends, they can do a little bit, but they can't meet those most primal needs.
	And I think people, when they have children, they really want that child to do it.
	And the amazing thing about a human child is that the human child is so desperately needy himself or herself and so incredibly powerless to the point that if he doesn't get loved, he will die, that that child is incredibly ripe for being molded and being made into anything basically the parent wants to make him or her into.
	And all this is on an unconscious level, which gets a little complicated.
	Can you blame someone for their unconscious motives?
	I say you definitely can.
	I mean, Hitler certainly wasn't killing six million Jews consciously.
	I mean, he did it consciously, but at the same time, what was really motivating him was his unconscious stuff.
	And I love it when Alice Miller talks about that in her book, For Your Own Good.
	She really gets into breaking down his unconscious motives.
	I thought it was brilliant. I think it's one of the most brilliant chapters I've ever read in any book of any time.
	And sorry, just to give you, again, a little bit of backup from my perspective, To me, a state of unconsciousness is like a state of drunkenness.
	It's true that your responsibility is diminished when you're drunk, but you're still responsible for being drunk.
	And if you remain in an unconscious state, it's true that your responsibility is diminished, but you have avoided the actions of the pursuit of self-knowledge and wisdom that have resulted in you remaining in an unconscious state, and you're responsible for what led you to that state of diminished responsibility like drunkenness.
	Yes, I agree. And then, of course, it gets into the whole question of then, well, what are the consequences?
	What should be appropriate consequences for someone who does something awful when they're in a drunken state or in an unconscious state?
	And our society now says the person must be punished.
	And I don't believe in that.
	I don't think that that's helpful.
	I think the person then has a greater obligation to heal.
	And punishment tends to do the exact opposite.
	Now, of course, if someone could define...
	Healing is a form of punishment, then maybe that would work.
	It certainly feels that way at times.
	Yeah, but it has to be one that comes from within.
	Certainly as a therapist, I've had no lack of people, especially early on when I was at clinics.
	I would have people referred to me within the clinics who were mandated to therapy by parole officers or by hospitals, and it was always awful.
	The therapy was terrible because these people didn't want to be there.
	Now, sometimes the therapy could become wonderful if the people found the motivation within themselves to want to come.
	But often I could totally understand why they had no desire to be there and took me as an abusive person, a therapist who was participating in the punishment whims of the state.
	And eventually I said, I'm not doing this anymore.
	But what I did do while I worked with mandated people is I would say, okay, we have one goal in therapy.
	And I said, what do you think the goal is?
	And they say, well, I think you probably want me to stop being an alcoholic or to learn how to get along better.
	I say, no. If you're mandated to therapy, there's one goal in therapy.
	And that goal is to get rid of your mandate.
	That's all I care about. And once the mandate is gone and you have free will to come, you have 100% right to leave.
	And I'm going to help you get that mandate removed.
	And that's what we're going to work together on since you're forced to be here.
	Because I personally don't even want to talk about your issues.
	Because I think it's rude and cruel to talk with someone's issues when they're forced to come.
	Now, I don't know exactly. I think I just went off on quite the tangent.
	Yeah, no, I think you're right.
	Without choice, there is no identity.
	And the whole point of therapy, as far as I understand it, is to self-actualize, to become honest with yourself about your history and your relationship to yourself and others.
	And you can't do that in a situation of compulsion, for sure.
	But we were just talking about why it is that you think that people have children.
	And you've said it's to have the children serve their own needs.
	I can't remember exactly how you phrased it in one of your videos, but it was something like they have children in order to act out.
	Is that somewhat fair characterization?
	Could you speak a little more about that?
	Sure. The idea that people have children in order to act out, that being a motive.
	I guess it would first beg the question of what is acting out?
	Acting out Is taking one's own internalized unconscious material and finding a place to put it on the world, a place to replicate it and to let it out.
	And that's where a child makes a perfect moldable object to manipulate and to damage in some way.
	Or to form into something that's going to feel good to the parent.
	That, I think, is to some degree the sick motive that every parent I've ever seen uses.
	To some degree, that's the motive.
	But there also are wonderful motives for having children.
	And I probably will never have children, because I've got too many other purposes.
	And by the way, an incidental thing is when you said your good motives for having had a child, and I respect those motives, That I can often paint a bleak picture about human motives, but I also think that it's wonderful to bring a new being into the world.
	I think it's wonderful to bring a new being in and to love him or her and to give him an incredible opportunity to grow and to become real and to manifest and to not have to face the horrors that so many children face, to have a wonderful, beautiful, perfect childhood even, or ideally as close to the ideal of perfection as possible.
	But in my mind, the reason I don't think I'll ever have children, or probably won't, is that I actually am having a child right now, and that child is the unmanifested sides of me that I give birth to whenever I grow.
	And that's my purpose in life, is to 100% give birth to myself.
	And I don't mean that in a cheesy new age way at all.
	I really mean actually the person that I was born to become.
	And it sounds dangerous because it sounds almost religious, the person I was meant to become, but I don't mean it that way.
	I just believe there's a true self within me and a true self within everyone.
	And I personally believe that it's our obligation to manifest that true self and to do whatever we have to do to let that true self manifest 100%.
	And that, I know, again, sounds pretty New Age because a lot of the spiritual gurus and the spiritual leaders and the self-help people all talk about, oh, we've got to manifest our true self.
	But I think the reason that I believe and my observation is that I differ from them is that I think that they have a very truncated, limited conception of what self-actualization is and a truncated, limited conception of what the true self actually is.
	So I think it's very easy for people to fall into the trap of saying, I've actually manifested my true self.
	I've done it. I've worked out my traumas and now I am ready to give back, for instance, to a child or to give back to the world in other ways.
	And even Alice Miller, who I think is, for me, the best psychology writer I know out there, she's fallen into that trap many times.
	And throughout her writings, she's said either directly or said it through implication that she's already healed.
	She did her work. She went through therapy.
	She went through self-therapy. She did it.
	She's manifested herself. She's resolved her childhood traumas.
	She's free of the past. And I... Don't believe it.
	It's not even that I don't believe it.
	I know it's not true. And she even said so many times that she had breakdowns after.
	Unfortunately, I did my really intense study of Alice Miller about four years ago, so I don't have all the times and dates on hand.
	But in terms of...
	So I guess it's like I'm going to speak with the spirit of the law, not the letter of the law.
	But that in her early writings in the 80s, she was talking about having fully manifested.
	And then whatever it was, it might have been the late 80s or the 90s, she suddenly had breakdowns, which she labeled near psychotic, because actually she really hadn't fully manifested.
	And there were whole parts of her that were still split off.
	And she became very arrogant and in denial of just how broken she still was in the inside.
	She still remained quite dissociated, split off from her wounded sides, and she didn't know it.
	And I think that part of that allowed her to speak so assertively with such incredible confidence.
	But part of it also left her very vulnerable, which is why at various points, you know, she fell apart or came near to falling apart.
	And I don't want to fall into that trap.
	And I think the way I don't fall into that trap or haven't really fallen into that trap yet is that I keep looking within and seeing, mm, there's parts of me.
	I have too many indications that I remain damaged in parts of me.
	And I see this with other people, too.
	So I think that... I mean, I suppose I could be accused of grandiosity or arrogance in some ways, but part of me remains humble in that way, just realizing that I remain damaged.
	I'm not fully enlightened. Parts of me are quite enlightened, and parts of me are not.
	And I have my indications that I'm not.
	And I actually am fascinated with other people, especially people who are real leaders, to see what parts of them No, no, that's a perfectly fair question.
	So the question is, what parts of myself do I think are still limited or damaged or unenlightened?
	Yeah, if you want to go there, I certainly would be curious to know.
	Sure, I mean, that's a perfectly fair question.
	And that also makes it a little easier when we discuss things.
	Yeah, I mean, that's a perfectly fair question.
	I would say that the two areas that I think that I'm susceptible to error, if not actually manifest error on regular occasions, relative to my ideals, are in the realm of anger and fear.
	And of course, these two aspects of myself are highly correlated.
	And because I grew up in a very aggressive family, and so you either had to comply in a sort of, it was fight or flight.
	You either complied or you were very aggressive to get any resources at all.
	And so I find that for myself, I'm still susceptible to...
	An excess of anger or an excess of fear in my dealings with the world.
	So that can absolutely happen.
	But I would say that my greatest failing as a human being is I, you know, studied philosophy for a quarter century and have developed, I think, a fairly coherent set of principles to live by.
	But when I run up against unconscious cultural prejudices within myself, then I find that I'm very susceptible to abandoning my principles for the sake of cultural expediency.
	And I feel that that's just been so deeply programmed into my central cortex that I really have to concentrate to remember to apply philosophical principles to the world.
	And I'm constantly surprised And then not surprised by the degree to which, you know, when I fail to apply rational principles to my understanding and interactions with the world, things go completely awry and become quite negative quite quickly.
	So I think a lack of integrity, sometimes a volatility in terms of anger, which is born out of a fear that I'm not admitting to myself.
	I think all of those things occur in my relationship with the world.
	And these are things that, of course, I still, you know, write about and think about and dream about and work on within myself.
	Because, I mean, we do have to act within the world.
	Otherwise, we just abandon it to all the unconscious crazies on the planet.
	We still have to act in the world.
	And I think we do still have to be humble in our approach to it.
	But I've really had to fight with myself to recognize that my worst actions are still better than the majority, simply because, not because I'm any kind of stone genius, but simply because a quarter century of work has to Produce something.
	It has to. Otherwise, there'd be no point doing it, right?
	And so, you know, I feel like I eat a good meal.
	I eat well. And if I have a Big Mac once a month, that may not be optimal, but it's still better than people who eat Big Macs every day.
	So I think keeping that perspective has been very important, but that's a very interesting question.
	I'd also like to just mention something which popped into my head while you were talking about not being a kid and not having kids.
	And I'll just mention it, and you can take it for what it's worth.
	I'm not a Platonist, but if I were...
	I'm not a Platonist, like the follower of Plato, that there's this world outside the world that is ethereal, where souls come from and inhabit bodies and so on.
	I'm not a Platonist. But if I were, and if you can imagine that there's a sort of cue of...
	So can I just make sure, because I don't know that word, meaning like believing that there's an afterlife and a previous life, that kind of thing?
	Yeah, that there's a supernatural world that is sort of outside the world that we have.
	But if we can imagine that there were souls queuing up To be born.
	And those souls could see the parents that they were going to be born to.
	I think that if you were coming up, people would be jostling.
	these souls would be jostling like crazy to make sure that they were in the line to be born to you.
	Oh, I totally agree with you.
	Yeah.
	If I were to become a parent, I think I would be, according to the norm, I think I'd be in the top 1% of the 1%.
	I think it'd be fantastic, but I still don't think that's good enough.
	Because I go to perfection.
	Call me kooky, but that's just my point of view.
	But anyway, so go on.
	I think I cut you off.
	No, no, that's fine.
	And of course, perfection is an ideal that can very quickly become self-attacky.
	Obviously, we all know that, right?
	Because then you always feel like you're short of the mark and so on, right?
	And, of course, nobody's ever in perfect health, but there's still a difference between healthy and sick.
	And what I would say is that, in a sense, if the—and this is going to sound all kinds of Darwinian— If the smart and wise and virtuous people don't breed, we all know that the people who are on the opposite side of the spectrum breed like crazy.
	And this is no responsibility to the future or saving the world or anything like that.
	But the simple fact is that if we say, well, I'm imperfect and therefore I'm not going to have children, then all we do is allow the world to be overrun by people who are far from perfect, even by their own standards.
	Interesting point and I get that one thrown at me sometimes and my response is that actually I am breeding and that I'm breeding not genetically not generationally I'm breeding laterally and I think you are too that you're spreading your message I don't know how many people listen to your radio show thousands or tens of thousands or whatever I saw you know you're getting tons of YouTube hits on your YouTube stuff people are hearing your message you are actually breeding ideas and I feel like I am too and to me That actually is reproducing.
	It's just reproducing in a non-biological way.
	And I feel like To my mind, that actually is so much more valuable than bringing one child into the world.
	Don't get me wrong. Now, if I had a child, I mean, I could have gotten people pregnant along the way.
	And I'm actually so glad that I didn't.
	But if I had, I think it would have completely changed my life.
	And I think I would have felt totally obligated to be as good of a parent as I could be.
	But since I didn't have that happen, and since I'm not in a relationship, and actually I've been celibate for a long time, 10 years, that I'm not in a position to have a child, and I'm grateful for that.
	So again, to go back to it, I'm allowed to actually bring my true self into the world as optimally as I can do it.
	And I think if I had children, and I think universally it seems to be true, that I think although, yes, children can bring adults certain wonderful things on their growth process, ultimately I think the optimal way to psychologically grow, to psychologically heal, to psychologically evolve is to not have children and to not have the responsibility of Radically meeting the needs of that child.
	And I also believe that to be a good parent, you have to be perfect.
	And that is definitely against all of psychology.
	I've never heard anyone else say that, really.
	Well, just according to definitions, good is not the synonym for perfect.
	So to be a good parent can't mean that you have to be perfect.
	To be a perfect parent means you have to be perfect, but not to be a good parent.
	Well, I guess I mean then to be a purely good parent, to be a parent that doesn't abuse your child at all, doesn't damage your child, even in subtle unconscious ways.
	And that's another thing I actually did want to talk about, if that's okay, is my definition of abuse.
	That I think there's a more conventional, mainstream, societal definition of abuse Which is what I would define as extreme abuse.
	That's the top 1% of the abuse that happens.
	And the other 99% generally doesn't even get labeled as abuse and goes under the radar.
	And a lot of the points that I make and the theories that I have and the philosophy that I have It's actually based on the mildest level of abuse that most people see it as so normal, it's so culturally ingrained in them that to be acceptable and they even label it as good for the child that my theories don't add up at all because they don't recognize it as abuse.
	So the way I define abuse is anything that goes against The spirit of the child, the child's perfect essence, the child's perfect nature.
	And I think most of that abuse does come from parents.
	The extreme abuse and also the mild abuse.
	Not just the 99% that goes under the radar in the conventional world, but even the lowest level that's just so permeated through our world that people don't even see it.
	Sorry, could you give some examples of that milder form of abuse?
	That's fine. Let's say...
	Let me think of some good ones.
	Mild form of abuse.
	I mean, the one that pops into my mind just while you're thinking, I think it's in Drama of the Gifted Child that Alice Miller talks about.
	Parents who she was observing that the child's ice cream fell off his ice cream cone.
	And the child was very upset and the parents just kind of poo-pooed him and said, oh, it's no big deal.
	It's just an ice cream cone.
	It doesn't matter. Right.
	And that was a kind of diminishment of a child's feelings.
	And I think it's very tough. And that would probably fall to me in like the 50th percentile of abuse where it's definitely abusive because it's negating the child's feelings and needs and negating the child's point of view and forcing the child to squelch his or her feelings and shut down.
	Isn't that basically it? Well, yeah, I mean, I think one thing that I've noticed as a parent is that my daughter is extraordinarily passionate and very strong-willed.
	And that's a beautiful thing to see, but of course, it's also a painful thing to see because I see what was kind of scrubbed out of my soul pretty early on, and which I've spent a good deal of time sort of recovering and repairing.
	But it's always been very important for me to recognize that her desires, while, of course, in the larger context of the world, are completely inconsequential, right?
	Like, I want to touch this ball.
	But for her, that is her some massive, heartfelt, complete and total desire in the moment.
	And while it may be inconvenient for me, the respect for her desires, while they, of course, I see them as relatively small from an adult perspective moving in the world, but to her, they're completely all-consuming and enormous.
	And I think to impose the smallness of the perspective on an adult, on the largeness of the passions that the child experiences, Is really inappropriate and damaging to the child.
	Right. Fair enough. Now, I'm going to try and get into even the mildest level of abuse.
	And what I would think there is...
	I mean, I can just list off examples.
	I think when parents are, for instance, taking psychiatric medication, I find that...
	I'm sorry, I just lost a word there.
	Taking what? When parents are taking psychiatric medication, they're going to be whole sides of themselves that are going to be shut down, and they're not going to be able to devote themselves to their child.
	So I say, therefore, they shouldn't have children.
	And it's very risky to say, because people don't want to hear that, but that's my opinion.
	Also, I think children should be raised in environments where there's certainly safety, food, enough money, enough love.
	And I think a lot of these poor countries where people are having tons and tons of kids and the kids are growing up in horrible poverty, I think that's criminal.
	I think it's wrong. Now, of course, one could say I'm elitist, but...
	I just think that children should never have to be born into places where they're not going to get as many of their needs met or all of their needs met as possible.
	And, of course, I think the problem is therefore, oh, children in all these African countries or all these poor Asian countries shouldn't therefore have children.
	I think it's not that simple. I think the whole world needs to reevaluate itself and to see why is it that some of these countries are so devastated, traumatized, and poor.
	I think just by very nature of parents being partially traumatized, they do act out on their traumas on the child, and that is abuse.
	But let's say parents who are trying to make up for all the deprivation they had as a child, so they overindulge their child in certain ways.
	They spoil their child, even mildly.
	I consider that very abusive.
	And I think that anyone who has a propensity to do that shouldn't have children.
	I think that they should instead be devoting themselves to working out why they would ever have a need to do this.
	And I think there's a lot that people can learn about their parenting styles without ever having children to find out what their...
	Weaknesses and limitations might be.
	I also think when two people are in a relationship with each other and that relationship is not based on the most profound, deep love and respect and honor for each other, those people shouldn't have children because it's already a tainted home environment.
	And to a child, The two parents form that child's culture and country.
	It's far more important to a child that, you know, if their mom's in a good mood than, you know, whether we're going to war in Iraq or not.
	The kid doesn't even care about that, of course, unless the kid's in Iraq.
	But over here, it's like the greater landscape of the world.
	If it's a Republican or a Democrat who's a president, the kid couldn't care less.
	The kid wants to know, you know, what's up with mommy?
	And especially when they're very young, even in the womb.
	I think two parents minimum should be there for that child.
	Single parents, I think it's totally inappropriate.
	I think it's an inherent setup for abuse of that child's spirit.
	And two parents working, I have particular issues with.
	To me, that just seems bizarre that you would spend 12 hours a day apart from your child when you've had a child.
	And how does that make the child feel?
	That to me just seems entirely wrong.
	And I've been attacked many times for being sexist on that.
	Oh, so what, you're thinking that the woman should stay home and the guy should work?
	I say, hell no, it has nothing to do with sexism.
	I think both the parents should stay home.
	And I don't see any reason why the mother should be there more for the child than the father is.
	If I ever became a parent, it's like, I would want to be on par with the mother.
	Of course, I can't breastfeed.
	Then again, I've heard some cultures, if you drink a lot of coconut milk and you stimulate a man's nipples enough, you can get a man to actually lactate and breastfeed it.
	Well, a bottle works fine, and I'm certainly home full-time with my daughter, and so it's a wonderful thing.
	To her benefit. Definitely to her benefit.
	And there's, oh gosh, just so many other things that, to me, are setups for abuse.
	And it happens at such a subtle level.
	I mean, I've observed so many kids over the years, and just to see how the subtlest, I mean, the Alice Miller example of the ice cream falling, that was a rather extreme example, but just the incredible level of neglect, people having their children be raised by You know, nannies, semi-uncaring nannies, what a terrible message.
	Oh, and another one, that people who have several children, they already have a limited ability to give full love to their child, and then they're spreading it over two children, three children, four children, five children, eight children.
	It's a setup for neglect.
	And to me, any form of neglect is abuse.
	And according to society, it would be defined as more covert abuse.
	But to me, from my perspective, having more empathy for children, because I've gotten more in touch with the child within me, I consider it quite overt abuse.
	And the problem is, if you say that to a parent, it's considered very hostile and offensive because you're attacking their denial.
	And they don't want to hear that.
	And so when people have their denial attacked...
	The conventional way they respond is to alienate you, to marginalize you, to stigmatize you, to pathologize you, and in the most extreme cases, just to say you're either criminal or you're crazy.
	That's the risk in speaking the truth when people can't handle it.
	And I like that about Freud.
	As much as I'm no Freudian at all, he really observed the horrible sexual abuse that was going on amongst girls in Vienna in the 1890s.
	He was listening to his patients, how horribly they were being sexually abused and the psychological damage it was causing them.
	And he started publishing this, and he became totally alienated and marginalized in...
	In the psychiatric community, in the medical community, because of the significance of what he was saying.
	And he simply could not handle the intensity of that.
	The culture was too important to him, staying and being loved by the culture.
	And also the recognition of what this meant on a personal level to him.
	So he abandoned his theory and came up with all this crap, the Oedipus complex and drive theory and electric complex and all this children have sexual needs and they fantasize that they want to have sex with a parent of the opposite sex.
	Just crap that psychoanalysis was based on.
	And so I like that example that he actually observed the truth.
	He observed reality and he wrote it down and he didn't judge it.
	But when society judged him psychologically, he could not handle it and he shut down.
	And I think that we're all susceptible to that.
	Being too far ahead of the pack in terms of one's perspective is very, very difficult.
	And you have to be incredibly strong to be able to handle the rejection by society.
	And the rejection not only by society, but I think the worst of all is the rejection by one's own family of origin.
	It's terrible. It's devastating.
	It causes people to die, get sick.
	Right. Now, I'd like to ask another question if you can, because I'm no therapist, but I'm continually telling people that therapy is of great value and to really pursue it, particularly when they're talking about their history with their family or with their parents.
	And one of the questions that I get asked a lot that I don't think I'm particularly competent to answer except in the most general terms, which I thought might be useful for you to take a swing at if you'd like, is...
	I mean, you're quite critical of the therapeutic community, and I think in some ways very justly.
	When somebody is going to look for a therapist, I continually get the question of, like, how do I know?
	How do I know what therapist to choose?
	How do I know who's going to be appropriate for me?
	How do I know who's going to be best?
	Because, of course, it's an incredibly vulnerable, not to say expensive, relationship.
	And if somebody leads you astray in therapy, you can be worse off than before you went in.
	And it's not like you can try before you buy, and it's not like there are a lot of testimonials.
	So how would you suggest that people approach the issue of looking for a therapist?
	What do you think they should look for and what do you think they should avoid?
	Great question. Well, and I may not answer it in a way that you expect.
	I don't know what you think I was going to say.
	I have no idea, but if I knew, I wouldn't ask.
	Okay. Well, interestingly, the first thing is I'm actually ending being a therapist March 1st of 2010.
	So in five, six weeks, I'm done.
	I'm ending my therapy practice.
	I'm closing it down, and I'm moving on with my life to try new things.
	So I'm actually not even going to be a therapist anymore soon.
	And I've also been in therapy a fair amount, and I've had essentially mostly very bad therapists.
	And so if I were going to go to therapy again, or if I was counseling someone on what to look for in a therapist again, the first thing I would say is, this might sound out of left field, but I would say, first of all, become your own therapist.
	Engage in a massive self-therapeutic process.
	Have as much internal connection with yourself as you can muster.
	For instance, through all the different things that I talk about in terms of doing self-therapy, massive amounts of journaling, massive amounts of self-reflection, massive amounts of dream analysis, hanging out with the healthiest people possible, building a really strong support network, reading as much of the healthiest amount of psychology as possible, but basically living an incredibly healthy lifestyle.
	I'd say not drinking alcohol, not doing drugs, not being in unhealthy romantic relationships, which I consider to be conventional romantic relationships.
	I think being celibate. I think that can be wonderful.
	So I think doing all those things allow a person to have a much stronger connection with their inner self.
	And as a result of that, they can much more easily hear their internal voice of truth.
	Therefore, when they go to interview a therapist, their inner voice of truth is going to tell them, is this person good or is this person a piece of crap?
	And so the only way to find out if a therapist is good is to really question them.
	And then to be able to listen to the answers they give and to be able to assess them against one's own internal true self.
	So anything that allows a person to connect more with their true self within is going to allow them to assess the quality of a therapist.
	And I think it's a fair assumption that most therapists are pretty messed up.
	It just depends on to what degree they're messed up.
	I mean, I'm not perfect.
	I'm not fully healed, and yet I've worked as a therapist.
	Does that make me a hypocrite?
	Well, I think actually I've been very useful to a lot of people, and a lot of people tell me that I've been useful to them.
	But I also try to be as humble as I can and recognize that I'm not the poobah of truth.
	I've got a lot of it, I believe, but I also have areas in me that I don't have it, and I'm disconnected from truth that I remain dissociated.
	I actually try to really listen to what people are saying.
	But also, I very much respect it when people question me intensely.
	Let them try to figure out if I'm any good or not, and I'll try to answer it.
	Let them ask me personal questions.
	And I say, ask a therapist as many personal questions as you want.
	They may not answer all of them.
	It may not even be appropriate for them to answer all of it.
	But the way that they answer those questions really can inform a person about a therapist's quality.
	Because, like you said, it's expensive.
	It can be very expensive. You're going to pay someone a lot of money and make yourself that incredibly vulnerable emotionally to another person and also give a person, in a way, that much psychological power over you.
	I'd say you better get to know who you're doing that with and don't jump in quickly.
	Really, Grill them, I'd say.
	And I think anybody who comes in and grills me, God bless them.
	I think they have a right to grill me and they have a right to figure out exactly what my flaws are and to figure it out to their heart's content.
	And you know what? If they want to spend six months just grilling me and me not even having to tell anything about themselves, that's fine too.
	That's what they need. And I think a good therapist would...
	I would say, go for it and respect a person's right to do it and honor it and say, I think you're jumping the gun on trying to get into therapy.
	I'm surprised at the number of people who come in don't know anything about me.
	They've been referred by an insurance panel.
	They come in and right away they start telling me the most personal things about themselves.
	They don't know who I am. And I tell them that sometimes.
	I say, why do you trust me?
	You have no legitimate reason to trust me.
	They said, well, you're a therapist. You have a license.
	I said, well, wake up. That doesn't mean anything.
	I was like, there's 20,000 therapists in the neighborhood of where I live in New York City.
	There's junk everywhere. I know therapists who take anti-psychotic medications.
	I know therapists who are perverts.
	I know therapists who are terrible with their patients.
	I know therapists who do totally unethical things and use cocaine and stuff.
	The terrible things that I've seen, those are just extremes, but I think that most therapists are really not worth their money.
	I think they're running a racket.
	And I think that it's a job of the person to question them.
	I like the saying, question authority, because a therapist is an authority.
	Question authority, and if the authority is mature, they will answer, and they will answer in a healthy way.
	And so that's, I guess, the best advice I could give.
	No, I appreciate that. I don't know if I covered the range.
	I think I still made it rather general, but that's kind of what I feel.
	Yeah, and I would also suggest to people to ask the therapist about specific experience dealing with the difficulties that you're coming in with.
	And I think that that could be very helpful.
	I mean, if you have had sexual abuse, You need to grill your therapist on his or her approach and success in dealing with that particular trauma.
	Agreed. Right. Now, the last question, again, mindful of your time.
	Oh, can I try one other quick thing to answer that question too?
	Another thing is that if you look at most therapists' websites, they put very little content on there because they put very little information that you can really dig your teeth into.
	Mostly they want to present themselves as gentle, nurturing, open-minded people.
	They don't really express too many strong points of view because what they really want is they want...
	Patients to project love and healing onto them.
	And so they don't share anything of themselves.
	As soon as I go onto the therapist's website and I see they put almost no deep, significant content about their point of view on their website, I say, scrap them.
	I wouldn't want to go to them. And I took the opposite approach.
	I've had a lot of people reject me that would have been patients when they saw my website.
	They saw it and they said, I'm not going to this guy.
	He's nuts. I don't agree with his point of view on this, this, this, this, and this.
	But I say, I always felt good about really loudly expressing my point of view so people know what they're getting into, they know who they're sitting with, and let them make the informed choice if they want to sit with me, be vulnerable with me, and pay me money for my time and my emotional learning.
	And so I think that that allows them to make really informed consent.
	About who they're sitting with. And if they want to not work with me or they want to fire me because of my point of view or what I'm writing, then that is certainly their right and I respect it.
	It might hurt me. It might not make me feel good.
	I might lose money and etc.
	etc. But I keep my sense of integrity.
	And I think most therapists, they don't share their point of view because they want to snooker people.
	They want people to sit there and not know anything about them.
	Because if you don't know that much about the therapist, it's like...
	It's a lot easier to stay in therapy for a long, long time and really not get as much out of the process.
	I think it's very important to know a lot about a therapist.
	And they become a pretty deep bucket for countertransference at that point, right?
	Yes. It's a setup.
	Well, it's a setup for all the transference.
	The patient is going to project a ton onto the therapist if they don't know anything about them.
	It's a lot harder to project if you know more about the therapist.
	But I also think an intuitive person can pick up a lot about someone else without actually knowing that much about them in terms of detail.
	Oh, I agree. Yeah. So anyways, sorry, I cut you off though.
	No, no, that's fine. And I would like to just finish up if we could.
	You have some fascinating insights and research into the treatment of schizophrenia without drugs.
	And I was recently disabused of this notion that although schizophrenia has to my knowledge no biological markers, they can't find something that looks like schizophrenia in the brain.
	I was recently disabused of the idea that it is not treatable through talk therapy by, I think it was Dr.
	Greg Deisher, who I interviewed, who spoke about that, or was Dr.
	Greg Siegel, something like that. And it was Siegel.
	That's right. And so I was very interested in the people that you've talked to.
	So they made the point that you can recover through therapy?
	Yeah, that schizophrenia can be treated through talk therapy and in the absence of medication.
	And in fact, you can't do talk therapy, as one of your interview subjects points out.
	You can't do talk therapy if you're on antipsychotics or schizophrenia meds.
	I think you can do it, but it makes it a lot harder.
	It's like showing up drunk. A lot fewer access to their emotions.
	They're much less present.
	They're so damped down on the drugs often, and then dealing with all the side effects that they're probably going to get, that it makes it much harder to do therapy, and you're much less likely to actually fully recover if you're on the meds.
	I think the research bears that out.
	This is actually where I know much more about empirical research than the other stuff.
	The other stuff, I'm just talking out of internal experience, my own internal scientific process.
	The schizophrenia stuff, actually, I have a lot more of the data on So could you talk a little bit about the research that leads you to these conclusions?
	Sure. Well, the primary research that I do is my qualitative research of having been a therapist and watched people recover.
	I've been through the process with many people and watched them come in on antipsychotic medication with long-term, you know, many years or many decades-long diagnoses of schizophrenia and see them over a course of months, but more often years,
	Come off the medication, work out, start connecting why they're having these psychotic thoughts, why they're delusional, why they're hallucinating, start to resolve it, watch their anxiety go down significantly, and sometimes watch them fully recover.
	Watch them get off disability, watch them go back to work, watch them start to develop relationships, watch them lose their terrible mistrust of others, not become paranoid, become much less socially alienated.
	And so the primary thing that's convinced me before Before I read any of the research was just watching it happen to people.
	And the basic way that I watched it happen to people and helped people, I think, who had schizophrenia was that I was willing to work with them.
	I was curious about what was going on inside their head.
	I never believed any of that crap that it was just a biological thing.
	Therefore, you can't listen to what they're talking about.
	And when they're delusional, you just have to, like...
	You know, get them referred back to a psychiatrist and have their medications raised.
	I never bought any of that. So I listened to people and I tried to figure out what they were going through because I realized a lot of what they were saying, a lot of psychotic material is very similar to the material that goes on in my head when I'm sleeping.
	And that was the first big clue for me that my dreams are very, very similar to A psychotic person's waking reality.
	And so, me doing a massive amount of my own dream analysis helped me profoundly in being a therapist for people diagnosed with schizophrenia, because it's the same things that apply.
	You can't take the dream literally.
	You know, I'm flying through the air.
	It's like, I can't interpret that as that I'm flying.
	It's like, what does that mean? Why would I need to fly?
	What am I trying to defend against by feeling so grandiose that I can fly?
	Or maybe I'm just feeling joy.
	What is it? So approaching a person with schizophrenia in the same way and watching people get better, watching people improve their lives, and watching people after sometimes six months or six years of therapy, you know, looking at them and realizing this person no longer qualifies for a diagnosis of schizophrenia.
	They have no delusions. They're not hallucinating.
	They're not hearing voices anymore.
	And it's actually not that uncommon.
	And sometimes it actually can be pretty common.
	Now the problem is that some people are on such heavy doses of medication for so long that actually their problem does become biological.
	They've become brain damaged by their medication and it's very hard to come off the medication and the problem is what they have is no longer Schizophrenia, per se.
	It's no longer a psychological problem.
	Sometimes, after years of being on the medication, they actually have a neurological problem now.
	And psychology doesn't care.
	They just mix it all in together and say, see, the person's schizophrenic.
	They're never going to recover. I'm like, no.
	The problem they're having is a result of all these incredibly toxic psychiatric medications you put them on for years.
	So that's personal experience.
	The second thing is... There's not a lot of great long-term studies, but there are some out there, long-term outcome studies, that pretty consistently show that if a person can get halfway decent, good treatment, I don't like the word treatment too much, but if they can get really good, loving, supportive treatment,
	especially treatment that is not just one-on-one therapy, but milieu therapy where they can get lots of social support, lots of innovative social support and things like that, And good, insightful, caring therapists, sometimes even family therapy, though I'm not a big family therapy person, but sometimes that can be very helpful.
	You can get...
	There are studies that show very high percentages of people recover fully.
	The best right now, the best results in the world are happening in one small section of Finland with this guy named Iako Sekula, S-E-I-K-K-U-L-A. I'm going to be seeing him at a conference in Sweden in two weeks.
	And he has a program that's called Open Dialogue Method where he's getting first break psychotic people.
	They've never been on medication.
	They're having their first psychotic break.
	They come to his program.
	They don't even hospitalize people.
	A low percentage of them ever get antipsychotic medication.
	Some get a low dose.
	It's even a subclinical dose mostly.
	And what he gets...
	He involves their whole social support network in the therapy.
	He meets with them in people's homes.
	It's not no hospitalization, none of this brutal, horrible hospitalization that we have in the United States and lots of other countries that he's getting 85% of people fully recovered, Back to work.
	Move on with their lives.
	Wow. That's how they hired people,
	on their niceness, on their empathy, not on their education, not on their degrees, and they just had them live with really nice people, caring people who were really genuinely interested in what they were going through.
	They got incredibly high percentage results of people who recovered without medication.
	They did far better than the hospitals did, and these were double-blind studies that they were doing in the 70s and 80s.
	And I'm actually in the process of trying to track down a lot of the original residents of this Soteria house.
	I have all the staff members, so I want to make a movie on them, because people need to know this story.
	Then there's Harold and Jobe studies from 2007 in Chicago showing that people who are off medication are much more likely to recover than people on medication.
	This is with schizophrenia.
	Then there's Courtney Harding's Vermont Longitudinal Study.
	This is from the 80s.
	These are people from, I think, the 1950s who were long-term psychiatric hospitalizations, long-term diagnoses of schizophrenia.
	She followed up on them, I think, 30 years later and discovered that...
	And they had a really intensive rehabilitation program there.
	And what happened is, years later, a huge percentage of the people who were off their medication Fully recovered.
	And you'd never know they were schizophrenic.
	They went back and they lived in the community.
	And some of these people had long-term psychiatric hospitalizations.
	So I'd say those are four big known studies that show what I'm talking about.
	And the rest of what I know is from tons and tons and tons of qualitative experience of watching people recover.
	And then, because I'm in the whole movement, I know So many people who are psychiatric survivors because of the movie that I made.
	I mean, I've shown the movie all around.
	I've sent it all around the world.
	I'm going to conferences all the time and showing it.
	I speak all the time on this.
	And people approach me constantly and are telling me their stories.
	And there's tons of published stories of people who were diagnosed with schizophrenia in the hospital for years who fully recovered.
	And most of it's without medication.
	And the people who really stay on medication, I question if they're even recovered because how can you say you're recovered if you're taking...
	A medication that suppresses the symptom.
	Because if they stop taking their medication, presumably they're gonna go back to the problem.
	Yeah, it's like if you have constant back pain and you take morphine, it's true that you don't feel any back pain, but it's also true that you're not cured.
	Right. But if you get massages, you get acupuncture, and you work out what psychological issues are playing out in your back, and you actually resolve it, and you no longer have back pain in your off meds, I'd say you're recovering.
	Right. Now, the problem is, the psychology field is incredibly retarded and blind when it comes to schizophrenia.
	And what they say is that when someone has...
	If someone says they're recovered from schizophrenia, they go one of two ways.
	This is the two ways that they undercut people.
	They undercut the hope of recovery.
	They say, one, oh, that person was misdiagnosed.
	They never really had schizophrenia, which is crap.
	The second thing is that they say, oh, they're actually not recovered.
	They're just presently in remission.
	At any moment, they can have a psychotic break.
	The problem is, in this movie that I made, Take These Broken Wings, The two women who I did intensive interviews with who were my main subjects.
	One is Joanne Greenberg, who wrote the book I Never Promised You a Rose Garden.
	You know, famous bestseller from the 60s about her recovery from schizophrenia.
	She's been recovered for over 50 years, not one relapse.
	And it's like... Is she in remission?
	Well, no, they can't really say that because who's in remission for 50 years, even though it happens all the time, that it's not remission, it's recovery.
	What they say is, oh, she really wasn't schizophrenic.
	Aside from the fact that her therapist was, at the time, the world's preeminent clinician for doing outpatient, non-medicated treatment for schizophrenia.
	This woman was a diagnostic master who was her therapist.
	She was diagnosed by lots of other people.
	They're just undercutting that you can recover.
	Really, what they're saying is you need to stay on drugs for life.
	Frankly, I consider it evil.
	I hate the message. So that's part of why I got really into the schizophrenia thing, because it says the exact same message as all of the other points that I make psychologically.
	It's just this one was, to me, in a way, it's low-hanging fruit, because people really would listen to this, whereas my stuff that I say about child abuse and people shouldn't have kids, that's a lot harder to prove it, and I wouldn't even know how to set up scientific studies to prove any of this stuff.
	I wouldn't know how to get quantitative data.
	Right. So with the other stuff that I say, I just stick with the qualitative data.
	With the schizophrenia stuff, I can cart out all this great, you know, quantitative stuff.
	Right. I mean, my nonsense amateur theory is that if you take somebody who has a high degree of artistic talent, a fertile imagination, combine that with emotional sensitivity and put them in proximity to a parent who has unconscious murderous impulses, That, to me, seems like the witch's brew to produce it.
	But again, I mean, there's no way that you could prove that, at least not easily.
	Well, actually, there are studies that, now, if you're getting into causes of schizophrenia, I do believe that it's radically trauma-based.
	But what I think is...
	I've met a lot of people diagnosed with schizophrenia who don't really say, I don't really have any trauma.
	But that doesn't mean that they don't have any trauma.
	It means they just may not be aware of it.
	Because I think a lot of what sets a person up...
	For schizophrenia, it happens very, very early in life.
	Perhaps it could even happen in utero, but certainly in the first couple of years of life.
	And how many people even remember that time in their life at all?
	I mean, how many people were circumcised and went through the trauma of circumcision, little boys, in their first day old or five days or a week old?
	Who remembers it?
	That was a horrible trauma.
	Nobody remembers.
	I've never met one person who remembers being circumcised.
	And what about people who go day in, day out with horrible traumas as an early child?
	They won't even know it.
	And I think that sets a person up for the vulnerability of schizophrenia.
	Right. They're 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 years old.
	They go off to college. They're having to make this terrible, stressful transition into becoming an adult.
	And it kicks up all their ancient, unresolved, buried, unconscious traumas when they're really, really little.
	And the combination of those two things together can send people through the roof.
	And they deal with it defensively by going into a delusional world.
	Right, right. And it makes the world feel safer to them, actually, to go into this thing called schizophrenia.
	Right, right. If they get hospitalized and drugged, it is almost like a kind of regression.
	Oh, it's terrible. It doesn't help you.
	I think hospitalization, if it were really, really humane and it were voluntary, it could be helpful, but I've never seen a modern hospital that's like that.
	Maybe there's some that are more progressive than others, but when they take people in and they drug them and they don't give them any therapy and they lock them in unsafe places and the food is terrible, there's no counseling, there's no transition from when they get out of the hospital.
	They just dump them and give them a referral to an outpatient therapist who doesn't know anything about how to help people.
	It's like it's a wonder that, you know, to me it's no wonder that so many people actually despise hospitals and despise the medication and despise psychiatry because psychiatry has earned that.
	So to get back to forgiveness, I don't think people should forgive psychiatry.
	I think psychiatry should be getting on its knees and looking in the mirror and saying, what did we do wrong?
	How can we do it better?
	Because it's a mess. Right, but that would mean psychiatrists would have to look themselves in the mirror and that's a very tough thing to do when you've done wrong, right?
	Oh yeah, just like it is for parents.
	It's not easy for parents to look in the mirror and say, oh my god, I was deluding myself.
	I actually did some really awful things to this child who was vulnerable and didn't deserve it.
	And I did some things that were, my behavior was evil and I didn't even know it.
	Or maybe I did know it and I couldn't admit it to myself.
	It's like very hard for parents to do that, very hard for therapists to do it, very hard for psychiatrists to do it.
	Painful. It's the only way forward for us to climb up that ladder towards a more moral existence.
	Looking at the Jungian dark side or whatever you want to call it, our own capacity for wrongdoing is absolutely essential.
	And one of the things, just to close off the loop, which we talked about with forgiveness, when we provide forgiveness for the evil actions of others, whether it's earned or not, particularly when it's not earned, what happens is we're not just writing a blank check for others, we're writing a blank check for ourselves.
	If forgiveness can be willed for the evil actions of others, it will also, we will believe, I think, deep down, we can will it for ourselves, which actually gives us more permission to do wrong.
	And that's another thing, I think, that is a problem with the generally accepted conception of forgiveness, that it gives us a blank check, which only perpetuates the cycle of negative behavior.
	Nicely said. All right. Well, thank you.
	Thank you so much. And just to remind people, if you could just give out your website addresses again, and I will put them in the video, but I just want to make sure that people can get access to your material.
	Sure. It's www.iraresoul.com.
	I-R-A-R-E-S-O-U-L.com.
	And it's DMackler58?
	I think so.
	I'm embarrassed. I don't even know it off the top of my head.
	I would just say go to YouTube and go into the search engine and punch in Daniel Knackler and my face will come up.
	Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for your time.
	It's really been a pleasure. I really enjoyed this and I just have a lot of respect.
	Well, thank you very much and thank you for all the work that you've been doing and I certainly wish you the best of luck.
	I guess your next ventures are going to be in filmmaking and I wish you the best of luck and if there's anything I can do to help, please let me know.

▲