I Pronounce Myself a Hero

Well,  Brian Williams the NBC anchor man is really in the news today, not as the anchor but as someone anchored to a strange story.  This story helps explain the value of Primal Therapy, not that he would ever consider it.  He would not consider it because he is too busy acting-out his need.

Here is a man, the leading news reader in America, watched by over nine million viewers every night and it just wasn’t enough.  Why not? Aah, therein lies the sad tale of a man gone wrong through a need unfelt.

He was famous and could not feel it.  He needed more, so he fabricated heroics—his life was in danger, he was shot down and so on ad nauseam.  He wanted to be something other than a news reader (which is what they are called in England, and not journalists).  Since he could not be a field journalist reporting from dangerous war zones, he did the next best thing; he invented his life.  Although he already had, approbation, worship, and admiration it was never enough.  He wanted admiration for what he was not,  and had not done; someone who lived a more dangerous and more glorious life.  He wanted to be more famous and more glorious than just reading the news.  He needed to be famous for putting his life in danger.  By the way,  he did that in his football career.  It was dangerous, and he was proud  on air to say that his injury during the game was something rarely seen.

He needed—admiration, love, importance; something he must have lacked in his early home life.   Those needs never go away.  And whatever anyone’s reality those deprived needs dominate, always.  Why?  Because at the time those needs were at their apex, it was a matter of survival to have them fulfilled.  Nice to have them filled when we are ten or twelve but will not change the brain and its biology as it does when we live in the womb.

You can be important and yet feel unimportant to those who mattered—your parents.  That is what was imprinted  deep in the brain and biologic system; it endured and rarely changes..

He felt unimportant in the face of his very important job at the News.  Deep down that is what drove him.  First to get a great job, and then to trash it because it just was not enough.  He invented fulfillment.  Why on earth did he have to do that?  Because the feeling of unimportance gnawed away inside for a lifetime and made him act out,  as it does to all of us, despite the reality of our lives.  When we are not loved for ourselves, we feel unimportant.  If only he could have felt it and stopped the act-out in its tracks. But short of Primal he could never feel it; it was buried deep inside and not accessible.    His unconscious thought, "if I am very important they will see it and I will feel loved."  Sorry, it  doesn’t work like that. They never saw it and never will and sadly, never will you.  That is why your apology fell short.  It was another compromise with the truth because you did not know what the truth is and was. He could not say, I reinvented myself to feel important; because that notion was beyond him.

So instead of feeling his deep need, he acted-out and when caught he invented again; "I was confused and conflated the plane in front of me from my plane," or some other nonsense and unbelievable tale.  He lied again. Can you imagine?  He lied about his life and when caught he lied again about his life.  Remember the comic who used to say, "the devil made me do it"?    His excuse is not too far from that.  For all intents and purposes, his feelings are really the devil inside.