Day 38 - 7 Feb
HOME VIDEO
There will be no shortage
Of footage
But it will be
The candid
Background shot
Ricocheting
Up under your chin
Like a plastic bullet
That will come in
Through the din
And show you
Buried in a mountain cave
Some digital plateau
The marauders won't
Bother to desecrate
The little one
Unseen
Pixelated child
Not wild
Enough
Not enough
Blow it all to smithereens
Glued hands to trains
On working-class carriages
Bound for the big smoke
Some deep-mind
Will maybe spit back to you
What was you
And who will keep this knowledge?
Dis - Eye of the occult
Lord of the underworld
It will seem black and white to those
adult eyes
even though it was in colour
But those eyes must look
Not look away
And see
And then will come relief
and grief
I was not making it up
It happened - true enough
Niall Campbell
Donald Kalsched, the psychoanalyst, tells a story of a client— a wealthy woman from a high-society family—who unearthed a VHS tape from her gilded yet deeply unhappy childhood. On the tape, she was a toddler running through a cocktail party, weaving around the legs of disinterested adults, demanding to be picked up. The psyche has its own inner physics, and so, as expected, this two-year-old, denied the emotional interface she needed, imploded in a tantrum. She pounded her little fists into the ground—until the cameraman, reportedly her father, finally picked her up, not out of care, but because she was making a scene.
Donald was affected by this. Both he and the client teared up as they watched. If you find yourself dismissing this as self-indulgent navel-gazing, I ask you to consider two things:
You may be rationalizing yourself away from empathy. If you spot it, you got it. You, too, may have experienced emotional privation you are not yet willing to acknowledge.
This client had a ‘good childhood.’ Her father bought her horses. She lacked for nothing—except emotional connection. And man cannot live on bread alone.
Here lies the source code for the histrionics we see in the world today. This almost feels like stating a theorem of physics. A theory, yes, but as self-evident as gravity. When a child’s basic emotional needs go unmet, they do not vanish. They accumulate. And later, they erupt. Those who were unseen as children will scream as adults. Sometimes that scream is silent, but it is there nonetheless.
I use physics analogies because they impose a matter-of-fact, causal logic onto the psyche. This home video was not an aberration. It wasn’t a fleeting moment of neglect—it was a pattern. Her father did not instinctively put down the camera and pick up his child. Instead, he observed, detached as he had been drilled to do, like a soldier watching silent drone footage of the bomb detonate in a far off land - from an air conditioned office thousands of miles away in middle-america. The screen goes black. He gets up, heads to the canteen for a sandwich, texting his wife on the way about picking up the kids from soccer practice. Not the banality of evil. The evil of banality.
That grainy coktail party video was a totemic and symbolic representation of her childhood. And this is what affected both the analyst and analysand.
She later told Donald that what astonished her most was not her own reaction—but his. A father figure, albeit a surrogate one, seeing her pain and feeling it. That is why therapists must develop the skill of conscious, appropriate disclosure. Far from making a client a victim, it affirms their reality. It tells them: Yes, you are not a victim in the here and now, but you were victimised. And from that point, two things can happen—
They can cross a golden bridge toward greater self-sovereignty.
They see that while their suffering was profound, it was not personal. It was systemic and transpersonal.
This paradox applies universally. Your parents did the best they could—and in many ways, it was nowhere near enough. I say this as a parent.
This holds true whether you were raised by addicts who abandoned you at birth or by wealthy parents who gave you everything except themselves.
It is notoriously difficult to get corroboration from caregivers about childhood wounds or even just patterns of neurodevelopmetnal behaviour. Ask any clinical psychologist trying to diagnose ADHD or autism in adults—getting comprehensive developmental history from parents is an exercise in futility. Stonewalling, minimisation, and insouciant denial are the norm.
But future therapists will have an advantage—video. So much video footage.
This woman had the privilege of a wealthy family who could afford a camcorder in the very, very early days if such things. She also had the drive to dig out that tape and watch it. And she was lucky enough to watch it with a therapist trained in symbols and imagery, someone who could act as a surrogate witness to what was lost.
And this is what the poem speaks to—a future where psychological material is no longer locked away in memory, distorted by time and denial. Every dysfunctional parent now carries a camera in their pocket. Donald was an accidental early adopter of a new paradigm. The future has arrived it is just not evenly distributed. I believe it will become the norm to deliver a highlight reel to your future therapist of your childhood footage. Show the footage to your therapist. A picture tells a thousand words. A video tells a million.
Narcissists, in particular, cannot resist recording their children. But what becomes clear, when viewed with a trained eye, is how often the child is merely an extension of the parent’s self-image.
We all participate in this to some extent—our era is one of performative self-documentation. But within that culture, the truly narcissistic have found an air cover like never before.
I have always respected David Beckham for his stance on this. He was one of the first celebrity footballers, whose cultural relevance was went far beyond football fans. he accepted that he, as a self-styled icon, was fair game for photographers. But his children were not. People used to mock Beckham’s intelligence, but to me, this distinction showed wisdom. He knew where he ended and his children began. He had stepped into the limelight. They had not.
This was not the norm at the time. The press did not understand it. But he was preternaturally ambitious—both in football and fashion—yet possessed an innate sense of his children’s sovereignty. I don’t keep up with the Beckhams so maybe this has all changed in the social media age, but back then he seemed to make that distinction more adamantly than his peers.
Narcissistic parents do not grant their children such sovereignty. They leverage them as props. They curate a pristine facade, beneath which time bombs tick away, waiting for detonation.
This is where we are now.
The future will hold a reckoning. Perhaps our children and grandchildren will look back on our selfie culture and find it grotesque. We are all more narcissistic now than we were before. But true narcissists and sociopaths have never had so much camouflage. This is good. Their handiwork will be observable retrospectively like never before.
In the future, when clients arrive in the midst of a midlife crisis, I won’t immediately focus on the specifics. First, we’ll put out enough fires to stop things from getting worse. Then, once the ship is somewhat stabilised, we can take a look down memory lane.
Moore’s Law suggests that as AI and computational power advance, we’ll be able to retrieve a person’s true childhood experience—the full gestalt—rather than the flimsy but once-impenetrable narrative they’ve absorbed and repeated back to themselves, like a baby bird, about how picture-perfect or emotionally healthy it was. This will allow the therapeutic alliance to cut through illusion faster than ever before.
I don’t think it’s science fiction to imagine future therapists issuing a single spoken command to an app and retrieving an objective, unbiased highlight reel of a person’s childhood.
Take my infant daughter—part of the Beta Generation. Every single day of her young life has been recorded. This is normal now. Her future self is watching her caregivers in real-time. I don’t see this as Orwellian; it’s simply reality. You can choose to leverage this fact however you want, but know this: by 2045, even a decent therapist, using standard computational power, will know what her childhood was like. Unlike the Boomers, we will have nowhere to hide. Every moment is being recorded—not just the accidental recording of emotional neglect at a cocktail party for the coastal elite.
We can use the narcissism and self-involvement of caregivers against them. Take, for example, a father who lacked the insight to realise that if anyone were to watch footage of a particular moment from his child’s life, the only natural response—like the one Donald had when he saw it with his client—would be sadness. Sadness that the father didn’t see his child’s emotional need enough to press stop and pick them up. That footage won’t be deleted because erasing it would require a level of shame and self-awareness he simply doesn’t have. This is what the poem refers to as "these unseen caves on a high plateau."
In the future, I’ll be recruiting AI’s raw computational power to help clients retrieve the highlight reel of their childhoods. Then, with a little more objectivity, we’ll see what was always there but never truly acknowledged: the child who should have been picked up but wasn’t. We’ll watch it—just as Donald and his client did—without comment, simply noticing what arises in the space between us.
The technology is new. The experience of someone witnessing your pain (in the place of your biolgical parents) is probably ancient.
I believe future clients will see the seed of their adult dissociation planted in the grainy footage of their childhood.
I wish I weren’t speaking from personal experience, but I am. The honesty and integrity I offer my clients, I have to offer myself here.
My parents did the best they could. In many ways, it wasn’t enough. I also speak as a parent, knowing I won’t be exempt from this same reckoning. One day, my children will likely have their own asymmetric confrontation with the way I fathered them. That thought is painful.
My goal is to make the gap between the version of childhood they’re presented with—the “official party line”—and their actual lived experience as small as possible. More than anything, I want my ability to repair to be within spitting distance of the inevitable ruptures I will cause.
Poetry helps me grasp both the universality and the weight of this challenge. Read this poem by Philip Larkin—a man of bleak, unassuming genius—and see how it sits with you.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
For those in the know, this is one of the truest and most depressing poems ever written.
True to his word, Larkin never had kids. I believe he was a genius, but this poem doesn’t strike me as particularly brave. I hear it in Jeremy Irons’ droll voice as Scar, not in the voice of Mufasa.
The great karmic joke is that he may be reincarnated as a FIFO dad with five kids, so deeply embedded in family life that he can’t find the mental space to turn a phrase. Never did this cloistered, childless poet get the awful opportunity to completely lose it at his kids in the Coles car park and then be issued the ultimatum by his wife to see a therapist and do his fucking work. I think that’s a shame.
I often tell clients, not everything is therapy. I’d probably say to Larkin, not everything is poetry, mate. I find his last stanza anti-human, an avoidance of a very personal, parochial, and pedestrian pain—likely stemming from two parents who weren’t paying attention to sensitive little Philip. Ironically, I read his poem as a beautifully written but bog-standard defence mechanism—Kalsched’s self-care system writ large.
Poetry has its place in healing the wounds of the past, but in my experience, the prosaic, day-to-day grind of family life is a much more profound teacher. I read Larkin when I’m down, but not for too long—I don’t want to linger with him. He’s a little palate cleanser of sadness, a morsel of dark sorbet to cut through the toxicity of relentless positivity. He has his place. But when it comes to fatherhood, he never entered the fray. That’s a loss, because men of great sensitivity—if properly scaffolded and supported—often make brilliant dads.
I reject the last stanza of this poem. And I’ve had the privilege of helping clients (now parents) break free from this kind of Larkin-esque conclusion. I’ve watched people—who once held the same defensive cynicism—hold their babies in their arms and know, without a doubt, they wouldn’t trade them for anything. Anything.
Larkin was right, and he was also wrong. I don’t mean this to sound smug, but the amount of half-baked, grand geopolitical or climate-based justifications I hear for not having kids from younger clients - especially young women - is staggering. The real answer is often sitting right in front of them: I think my parents fucked me up too much, and I’m afraid I’ll do the same. That is a legitimate fear. But unacknowledged, it gets covered in a veneer of intellectual-sounding reasons. Break the back of the cycle of emotional privation your parents foisted upon you. But don’t wait until you’ve ‘fixed yourself’—there is no finish line. Your eggs or sperm will have shrivelled long before you realise that. Just go for it. If you’re reading this, give yourself the benefit of the doubt. Your parents wouldn’t have.
I used to worry about throwing my parents under the bus with this type of talk, about hurting them. I love them. That is why it is so confusing. But that fear is, unfortunately, irrelevant. They will never read this. And even if they did, it simply wouldn’t scan—it would likely fall forever outside their conceptual awareness or be rolled back into a rigid ontology. That’s how it is. Maybe I’ve invented all of this, and I’m just an ungrateful man-child. Perhaps.
But if I can really listen to my children, they will tell me, in real-time, how I’m fucking them up. And hopefully, I can course-correct—enough. Larkin never got that teaching. In that way, his poem is both brilliant and ignorant. Maybe he is right, and there is no avoiding it. I choose not to believe that to the same extent, he clearly did. It seems like he gave in to despair.
I have lived a life both as a father and not as a father. I know both sides of the argument. Larkin only knew one - non-father. And he who knows only his side of the argument knows not even that.
We have been denied some of the most beautiful poetry about young childhood that Larkin never allowed himself to write because he never had kids. I know nothing of his biography, but that is moot. he would have found his way. Whatever monsters would have surfaced, his pen would have tamed and assuaged. He would have captured - with the same incisiveness - the ineffable feeling of having your infant daughter properly smile at you for the first time as I recently experienced. I cannot fuck her up. Not in any eternal sense. Larkin got it wrong.
A piece of grainy old-school footage from a family party was shared recently on social media by a relative—not dissimilar to the New York ladies’ one, albeit significantly less fancy. Other family members commented on it as a lovely snippet from down memory lane. I did not see it that way.
I’m in the background as a young child of about six, in preppy dress, with a thousand-yard stare I’ve since seen countless times in the eyes of first responders—cops, soldiers, and others. The camera swings to my cousin. He is in his own foxhole of suffering. We are only a few metres apart on adjacent sofas, but like two men who share a cell wall in Guantanamo for 20 years, yet would pass each other on the street as strangers after eventually being released, we had never really met. This is the siloing that occurs. The background hum of unacknowledged anxiety among the adults in the room was deafening to me. I dissociated as I watched it.
All of this was often hiding in plain sight. Because—such was the novelty and excitement of early cameras—people were not yet habituated to them. Humans acted like animals newly observed on an island where they have no predators—their instinct was just to carry on as they were. You get unfiltered footage of what people were actually like, beyond their bullshit revisionist stories. No one had yet developed enough camera awareness to affect a persona.
Not so now. However, I would predict that clear-cut dissociative scenes and silent emotional dysregulation will still be there to observe retrospectively. They won’t be covered up. While more explosive childhood footage will be deleted—or not uploaded in the first place (i.e., the externalised tantrum)—dissociative elements will remain.
Donald Kalsched outlines, at the centre of his self-care model, that the lord of the underworld is, as in Dante’s Inferno, Dis. This personification of pain and unbearable rejection that children feel in the face of overt and explicit trauma—but no less in response to the constant, unspoken trauma of not being seen for who they really are—inevitably leads to dissociation. It is the dark angel of our own preservation, and it can take a lifetime to undo. Personal and internally directed rage is its accomplice.
Careful examination of these ‘Dead Sea Scrolls’ from one’s past will, I believe, one day help accelerate the process of restoration and reintegration of all parts of the psyche.
I used to wakeboard when I had time and disposable income (remember those things?). When you weren’t wakeboarding, the boat skipper would have you spot. You’d sit in the passenger seat, facing backwards, watching the wakeboarder. The moment they came off the rope—whether by choice or accident—you’d immediately inform the driver, who was focused forward, busy making sure they didn’t crash into other boats or their wakes.
This is how group therapy functions. The driver—the therapist acting as facilitator and content provider—focuses on steering, keeping things moving, and making sure nothing crashes. Meanwhile, the spotter—the process-oriented therapist—sits in the passenger seat, paying attention to the clients, noticing when they go under, and signalling when they need help. The spotter doesn’t control the boat’s direction, but they are absolutely essential to the safety and flow of the whole experience.
As a therapist working in rehabs, I naturally took on the process role rather than the content role. I could do both, but I excelled at spotting. I could pick up on even the subtlest dissociations in clients. Why? Because if you spot it, you’ve got it.
For a long time, I was somewhat proud—if that’s the right word—of how my childhood trauma expressed itself. I saw it as wholly externalised: explosions of rage, observable emotional dysregulation. In a messed-up way, I preferred it that way—better out than in. At least I could work on it. I wasn’t a spacer, I wasn’t passive-aggressive. My trauma response was out there on the plains—like a lion—scary, aggressive, but visible. Mammalian. Understandable.
But that was only part of the equation.
That was just the numerator of my trauma response. The denominator was deep, constant dissociation—reflexive, protective, almost wall-to-wall at times. The crocodile lurking beneath murky inner waters. Reptilian. Unseen. But just as devastating to myself and those around me.
Fantasy proneness has been both a blessing and a curse. I lost myself in my mind to drown out the pain of being unseen by my parents in creative ways. And I want to be clear—I love them, and they did the best they could. But this is my lived reality, and I have now seen it so clearly in so many of my clients. I’ve heard their defences and protestations of their families, and I’ve admired that, too. And now, I realise I have done the same.
Most people—and this is actually a deeply inspiring thing—as children will fall on this particular grenade to protect their family name. But I now realise this is not actually appropriate or fair, or even the most noble and celebratory of paths.
I used to hear this Tracy Chapman lyric and think it was noble, thinking—what a stellar young person she is in this song. I couldn’t do that:
*"See, my old man's got a problem
He lived with the bottle, that's the way it is
Said his body's too old for working
His body's too young to look like his
So, Mama went off and left him
She wanted more from life than he could give
I said, ‘Somebody's got to take care of him’
So, I quit school and that's what I did”*
But if Tracy were a client of mine and relayed such a rationale, I wouldn’t just hold space for her to assume this was, of course, the most noble path of action. The hardest, no doubt, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the hardest path is the most heroic. I would tell her she shouldn’t do this. Not only is it not noble, but it’s also not actually going to help her dad. It is inappropriate, misguided, and the path of least resistance. You might get some brownie points from other dysfunctional people who pat you on the back, but some higher power does not congratulate or reward you for this. Some grenades should be allowed to explode.
A drunkard in the home with a poorly educated teenage daughter-helper is a static situation. It will remain like that for forty years until one of them dies—embittered and enraged. Far better for the young person to go off and live their life. Chances are, when they have won back their sovereignty, healed from all the pain, and can now earn a few quid, the dad will have either died alone or sorted himself out. They can now have an adult, non-codependent relationship. Or the daughter, from a place of safety and sovereignty, can circle back and pay for her dad to sort his shit out. He either won’t, and she will have closure, or he will receive the nudge towards the light with grace, and they will round out their time together on Earth as father and daughter, and also as friends.
So, when you see a narcissistic parent insist that their child stop what they are doing and put on a smile for the curated Instagram feed—when you see them reduced from a sovereign being to an appendage—don’t let the ennui creep in.
Know that it is in the clouds. In a high mountain cave. Unsullied and unseen.
Someday, a quantum chip will retrieve it.
And me and my client will wordlessly watch it on a screen in my office.
We will be sad and compassionate for the big people in the room.
What fuck-ups we see them as now.
Then—for the little unseen person in the room—my client will cry.
And so will I.