I recently watched your video "why I quit being a therapist" and it helped me in terms of being in the process of quitting my job-though I am not a therapist, I have worked for 13 years in homeless shelters/domestic violence, supported housing for "chronically" homeless, and briefly in mental health, with people who have experienced extreme and often chronic trauma. While not in a clinical capacity I have often been in the position of crisis worker as I was often on the 'front lines". I agree with what you said about the MH field, the liability focus and drudgery of many people in the field. Overall I have loved the work I've done but am taking a break-perhaps for good. Stomach problems, feeling too drained, etc. now I am going to do all the yoga I want, backpack and hike and eventually find a way to do something that feels meaningful again. But it is a bit of a loss of identity which is king of ridiculous. day three of unemployment! in a coup;le weeks ill prob start cleaning hotel rooms or something. Here's to breaking free! "let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pool of what you really love, it will not lead you astray"-Rumi

The song video of The Seeker’s Ballad is really lovely and that song will stick in my mind along with the image of the walk that turns into a dance. It was very interesting watching your vid about stopping being a psychotherapist too. Thank you! I mainly stick with comedy these days but I’m glad I happened on your channel. Have you seen Martin Shaw of the Westcountry School of myth annd storytelling? He would love you cos he is wild truth too.

Hi! First thank you for sharing your experience in the video "why I quit being a therapist". It looks like you did your work in that area and you did GOOD! I'm also a social worker and therapist and feel many of the things you wrote. The mental health system in my country is still not that bad. There is no regulation, which is bad, but I can be more free and less pressured by system. That means that there is more pressure inside because I need to watch and self regulate. Beside therapy I have many other obligations (other job, family) since I don't work full time in private practice. That certainly helps to have space and time to change focus. I've heard many stories of horror from my clients. I held them, some tears escaped, some nights were not slept. I also believe that there is no way a therapy can heal if the client doesn't feel that you are there fully. Being distant and not affected is not just impossible but wrong. One thing that kind of protects me is the fact that I have so many personal horror stories, from which I have survived and healed, largely thanks to therapy that sometimes was not even that good. I continued to go so I got something. This helped personally but provided lessons for me as a therapist. What I strongly feel is lack of support and the same problems regarding clients with difficult problems and no money are finding me more and more . Unfortunately, healthcare in my country does not cover psychotherapy so you can imagine how this goes. Working in totally dysfunctional society, dealing with war traumas on all levels, many social problems and challenges I wonder when will I start thinking about career in lets say gardening 🙂 With all that said, I still enjoy it very much and it gives meaning to my life. I just wanted to chat with you with this entry. Good luck with your work, from what I saw on your web page you still do therapy 🙂 Just listening to you was therapeutic. It provoked the best remedy there is "I'm not alone". Thanks!

Hi Daniel I just want to say thank you for being such a compassionate professional. Good luck on your journey through life

Dear Daniel, I respect your presence on Youtube so much and have been so inspired by your film on Schizophrenia. I want to thank you for all the content you have made on mental health. I am starting my journey on healing from childhood and recent traumas, and will be attending one to one therapy very soon. Once I'm healed, I know I will look back on your videos knowing that you contributed to my personal healing. I'm only 20, but I strongly resonate with your content and I'm so thankful and grateful to the universe that I found you. You are a very special guy, and I wish you all the best on your journey to enlightenment. Hopefully we both can make it. Lots and lots of love from London!!

You might like this; THE BIG PICTURE MY THEORY OF EVERYTHING (7-5-2018 and last updated 8-6-2018) dallentx@msn.com HUMANS OR HOMO SAPIENS ARE: • Humans are intelligent great apes. • We evolved from many different and some now extinct species as hunter gatherers over 6 million years and only in the last 10,000 years have we formed modern societies including different forms of government, separate countries, states, cities, suburbs, and even unique neighborhoods. • Our lives can be divided into stages: infancy, childhood, adolescence, early, middle, and late adulthood and eventually old age. We all are born and we all eventually cease to exist and die. • Reproduction or more specifically the sexual act that can lead to reproduction is our primary, and most dominant, instinctual guide or motivation. Testosterone is our most influential hormone and greatly affects many of our individual behaviors. These behaviors can be modified by our other basic needs such as food, clothing, and shelter and sometimes by our individual spiritual needs. The male testosterone level, and therefor it’s influence, fortunately decreases with age such that by his late fifty’s most (not all) males can exert intellectual control over testosterones influence on their behavior. • Most of us do not ever consider ourselves mentally ill. We sometimes suspect we are not normal, but ‘mentally ill? Not me!’ However, mental illness affects all of us at some point during our life. Sometimes it is a temporary illness, but it can affect most of our life. Approximately 10-30% of us satisfy the criteria for a diagnosable personality disorder if we look hard enough for the signs, symptoms, and behaviors. This is likely to increase with time. These personality disorders are one of the ways the subconscious mind copes with childhood psychological trauma. • Almost everyone is psychologically traumatized or damaged as a child, most often unintentionally, by the members of their family of origin! Even those people we meet who we think are remarkedly well-adjusted. Most of these traumatic experiences are buried in our subconscious and we live our lives in a dissociated state that mimics enlightenment. Only a very small percentage of us work thorough the four stages of resolving our emotional traumas and reach the final stage of enlightenment. Our parents are the ultimate source of most of our emotional pathology! They, in turn, can blame their parents; the grandparents can blame their parents; and so on. This cycle is continuous and likely extends back to the origin of our species. The parentally inflicted psychological trauma or damage may have been intentional or, more commonly, completely unintentional. Unfortunately, the result is the same! Very few of us ever commit, have the financial resources, and the desire to do the introspective, extremely frustrating, extremely painful, and prolonged inner emotional work that is required to heal! To finally break the generational cycle of parentally inflicted trauma or damage. Instead, we tell ourselves and promise ourselves and our spouses (if there is one) we will be better parents than our parents were to us, without having done the necessary work to heal. A lot of people tell themselves their parents did the ‘best that they could.’ The few of us that commit to heal their inner emotionally damaged selves, unfortunately, often have already had children, unintentionally caused them damage, and now finally realize what has occurred. Ninety-five plus percent of the population could easily be classified as the walking wounded. It doesn’t have to be this way. Emotional healing leads to enlightenment. Enlightenment is beautiful and exhilarating. • Men tend age much more gracefully while women tend to age very poorly when it comes to sexual attractiveness. Unlike most males a female’s sexual attractiveness lasts around twenty years-- one fourth of her life expectancy. Women after age thirty-eight to forty years of age rapidly become sexually undesirable. By age fifty 99% of females are sexually unattractive to most males! This is a disconcerting observation! I easily can recall distant memories of intense sexual attraction for a specific woman when she was 20-25 only to find myself perplexed by finding myself sexually unattracted to the same woman by her different physical appearance when she had reached 38-45 years of age. Mother-daughter pictures confirm this observation. This 180-degree rapid change in sexual attractiveness is nothing short of profound and extremely depressing! Sexual attractiveness for women only lasts approximately 20-25% of a woman’s lifespan. Having personally witnessed this has significantly changed the way I interact with sexually attractive women. • In the USA our forefather’s chose capitalism as our economic system of trade and wealth accumulation. Because of the great depression capitalism was modified to be fairer to those society deemed less competitive and or those with a physical handicap. Thus, today we practice a modified capitalism. However, the conservative movement is rapidly leading us back to pure capitalism! The increasing financial inequality is a characteristic of this reality. • In the USA our predecessors also chose Christianity and to a lesser extent Catholicism as the predominate religions. In modern societies religion is best defined as a taught unrealistic belief system which then, for those believers (the faithful) serves as a coping mechanism for life’s difficulties and its inherent uncertainties. Organized religion strongly attracts the uneducated, the feeble-minded, the disadvantaged, those prone to authoritarian beliefs, sociopaths, con-men, and con-women. All forms of religion are susceptible to various degrees of radicalization. In this country we have chosen to call those affected by religious radicalization fundamentalist Christians. They tend to be a subset of a very religious group known as evangelicals. However, in predominantly Muslim countries, where the predominate religion almost always is Islam, those members of the religious group who have become radicalized are often known as radical islamist’s. Thus, in the USA we have a radicalized group called fundamentalist Christians and in Muslim countries we have a different radicalized group known as Islamic radicals. Lastly, the various religious dogmas tend to have their greatest effect on the young (immature secondary to age), uneducated, disadvantaged groups, and those prone to develop an authoritarian personality trait. • As hunter gathers we are motivated to form smaller groups often based on family of origin, marriage, religious beliefs, level of education, profession, wealth, special interests, and geographic location primarily to gain a perceived economic, spiritual and/or a reproductive advantage. • When our individual interests align we can easily form strong personal bonds. After these bonds form we can easily overlook newly identified character flaws. However, when our personal interests change over time the prior strong personal bonds can become strained and can even break. Afterward, these newly identified character flaws can no longer be ignored! Once close allies can with time become enemies! • Most, if not all of us, are capable of both very good and very bad behavior! Humans are after all great apes. We as a species can be barbaric to one another or extremely kind and commonly express all behaviors in between. • Every human being is unique! Genetics, nurture, physical attractiveness, circumstance, religious exposure, experiences, luck, culture at time of birth, education level attained, and wealth all contribute to various degrees to our make us unique. • The individual best defines for themselves a successful life. Often, a successful life for one person is not a successful life for someone else! • Each of us is presented with a unique set of problems throughout our lives. The problems are not equally dispersed. In other words, life is not fair! For me the members of my family of origin have caused me the greatest psychological harm during my life! I cannot overemphasize this. Most of this harm was unintentional, but still equally harmful as if it had been intentional. My father has Asperger’s syndrome and my mother has dependent personality disorder. Everyone except my sister has suffered because of their profound lack of parenting skills. My sister, 15 months older, inherited Asperger’s syndrome. After my sister and I both eventually left home, my younger brother was alone living with my psychologically dependent mother. This had a profound effect on him. He eventually became my mother’s surrogate husband and continued to live alone with her until his mid-thirties. Consequently, he developed a severe case of narcissistic personality disorder that has negatively influenced his adult life and ended any chance we as brothers may have had at an adult relationship. The disorder dramatically worsened and became malignant after my grandmother’s death in 2008 and immediately thereafter my DPD mother became his devoted enabler. I currently have a NO CONTACT policy regarding every member of my family of origin. This policy was implemented in 2014 at age fifty-three or four years ago and has been extremely beneficial to my mental health! I have had problems with C-PTSD, alcohol use disorder, victim mentality, validation of the extreme psychological trauma caused by my father’s relocation to become my neighbor, extreme animosity toward authority figures, and sudden unexplainable severe dysarthria. My mental health has significantly improved since initiating the NO CONTACT policy with every member of my family of origin (FOO). In other words, I have BROKEN AWAY from my parents and my FOO. I still consider the policy of NO CONTACT the best description of the relationship with my brother. Again, I cannot overemphasize the negative effect my FOO has had on my life! As more time passes the less I think about them. I have not, nor ever will forget, but I hope one day I think about them only a few times a year. To me the less I think about them the more AUTHENTIC I become. The ‘authentic me’ represents an EMOTIONALLY HEALED me and FREEDOM. • I define success for me as free-time, ability to continuously work on projects (usually associated with my home, but also art and intellectual pursuits), and ability for continued, daily self-reflection, and acquiring new skills. According to this definition I have attained my goal of living a successful life. However, it was NOT the life I envisioned for myself when I was a young man. I am only coming to accept it for what I have achieved during the last 1-2 years. D. Allen

I came across your YouTube presentations and subscribed and find your talks very interesting and you are pleasant to listen to. Would be interesting to meet in person someday. You may visit my YouTube to hear me play piano.....I see you play guitar. Congrats on expanding yourself into new skills, understandings, and fun in life.

Daniel, I want to thank you so much for sharing your experience. I happened to stumble across your video 'Why I quit being a therapist' on You Tube and what you say is absolutely spot on. I have worked as a counsellor for many years in the mental health field in Australia (private practice) and have suffered continuous burnout for all of the reasons you mention. I agree with your suggestion that listening (and the burden of helping) is something that should be shared amongst communities, not assigned to a percentage of people who are paid to carry the load of many. This is a flawed and unsustainable system. Like many others in this field, my passion for helping has morphed over time into an avoidance of my own life and the things I truly value - and yes, it is impossible not to take client issues home with you. I completely understand the notion that, as therapists, we assist the people we meet to fly free, often at the expense of remaining in a cage of our own making. Your final reason brought me to tears, because I have been trying to put into words what this career choice has taken from me (despite what it has given) and what it stands to take if I continue. I find myself sitting in sessions thinking 'but when is it my time?'. Well, I think my time is now. Thank you for your insight and encouragement.

would you ever consider doing a video on borderline personality disorder, or the concept of personality disorders in general? I have been diagnosed with BPD 8 years ago, since then I have been in and out of therapy. Around 4 years ago i went less and less and was working more in a way which you describe in this video series about self therapy, which helped me much more than therapy. I was forced into therapy, all the while being an active artist, also a writer. No one ever REALLY considered that my work as visual artist and writer could be a vital part of my process. Since I shifted my focus on internally working on myself and also stopped focusing on the diagnosis I have been doing much better. Considering the stigma attached to BPD and other personality disorders, I think it would make an interesting video/discussion. To my knowledge there are 255 combinations of criteria that constitute an analysis of BPD, then you are told basically you are emotionally unstable, hard to handle, angry, empty, people make BPD seem like a terminal illness and paint you in some pretty dark colors. So does this label really help? I don't think so. By now I have become much more open, calm and trusting and found ways of dealing with abandonment issues and rage. Therapists have mostly been a hindrance on this path. I don't say they are always, I am sure most have been well meaning and some do great work, I won't tell anybody not to try therapy, but the whole system of analysis, medication and therapy has made me worse (for example, I gained a benzodiazepine addiction which rendered me completely fucking useless for 2 years), while I was left picking up the pieces. Your critique of therapy made a lot of sense to me, liking your channel! All the best.

Everything you said about being a therapist resonates with me. I was a Vocational Rehabilitation Counsellor and often felt “actualized” in the intense world I found so fascinating, that I became unhinged. Journaling is not something I have set my mind to—I have many obsessions that prevent me from being free and happy. I, too, need to separate from my older sister who is a fundamentalist Christian with what I think are crazy impediments from leading a happy life. Thank you for the Alice Miller plug—I will look her up.

Interesting. I like your perspective - and your way of seeing the world. I like people who can think for themselves and dare to question the generally accepted 'truth'. If you asked me out I would probably say yes 😉

I just heard your Why you left Therapy video and about your personal trauma. My trauma situation is complex and multifactorial but all is better now. If I told you the story, you would never believe me. We have overcome the impossible. You are incredible and have a special gift. Thank you for sharing.

Dear Daniel, Watching your videos has changed my life. There aren’t enough words or ways to say how much. These brought me to your website. This is where I learned about self-therapy. I’d never heard of self-therapy. I’d read some things on self-help from various authors now and again but nothing was very helpful. But your book on self-therapy “From Trauma to Enlightenment” is completely different. As I read it, things started to happen. And thank you for saying that self-therapy can be done in many ways. If you had said that it could only help by writing in a journal or reading lots of books I wouldn’t be where I am now. Self-reflection, self-questioning and inner dialogue are what I find most helpful. But your videos are what started me on this path. In them, you often speak gently and always respectfully, which means the world to me. I believe it’s why people are responding to you. Please keep them online for all to see. Your films are incredibly moving and beautifully done. It’s my hope and belief that these can and will begin to change the world. All I know for sure is that because of your generosity my own inner world has begun change, and I’m finding the person I once was long ago. I need to say thank you for your openness and honesty about talk therapy and especially therapists. My experience with these has not been good - they were harmful, to say the least. These made my already difficult life so much harder. You’ve said the truth about them, things I’ve always thought and felt but didn’t know how to say, and it wouldn’t have mattered if I had because no one I knew would have understood. But now I have hope. Thank you for giving me hope. I hope your website will always be there for me and all who need it. I’m forever grateful. You’ll never know how much. maria

Hi Daniel. Have you read any of psychologist, Arthur Janov books? The 'Feeling Child' and 'Primal Healing' are so in-line with your view of healing our traumas from childhood.

Your films speak truths that need to be heard. Everyone’s experience needs to be respected protected, even when it is hard for others to understand - not pathologized and medicated. It’s about respecting every person’s dignity.