This Is Paris #3 - (Boarding School) - Therapist Reacts

hey deserving listeners it's time to continue watching the paris hilton documentary let's get to it my name is dr kirk honda i'm a therapist and a professor and when i watch these sorts of things i often have a lot of things to say so let's see if anything of interest comes out of my face as i watch the documentary next video showing paris and her ex was released to media outlets and is circulating on the internet all of this without her consent these sex video tapes are all over the internet how many of you have seen them i've seen them that was a private moment with a teenage girl not in a right headspace but everyone was watching it and laughing like it's something funny that poor family to have your daughter do a porno film in a marion hotel i mean yes okay this brings up a another interesting point that i didn't think we're gonna get into watching this is that the way we treat women in our society regarding sex is very problematic and maybe we'll get into that here but i guess i have a question i always thought that paris actually released that on purpose but the way that they're saying is that she didn't release it on purpose i don't know i never really followed it back then it wasn't one of those things that you know i really was interested in following in in terms of the news so this is this is actually kind of new to me let's let's find out we lived in a hotel where the new york daily news the new york post was on everyone's front door down the whole hall so on days where it was a cover story i would run down the hall first and flip every newspaper over so they didn't have to see it okay a little bit more data about the sister that she seems to be in that role of over functioner or at least she feels very responsible for other people that that's her role because we certainly see that in the dynamic with her and paris nothing wrong with that it's just notable i was in bed a lot i didn't want to like get up and take the kids to school you know face other people if that happened today it would not be the same story at all but they made me the bad person like i did something bad yeah again i i wasn't really paying attention to the news but from what paris is saying is that she was made out to be the butt of the joke and today if that came out and maybe they'll get into more details it would have been seen as a terrible thing that it was released that someone released it right it would be essentially akin to assault on paris it was my first real relationship 18 i was just so in love with him and i wanted to make him happy and he was kind of pressuring me into it like oh you're so boring like don't we just call someone else no one will ever see it you know in the beginning they said that i raped her and she was incapacitated and you couldn't see the whites of her eyes and you know i have a full color version on trustfundgirls.com trustfundgirls.com you can see it was two people in love enjoying sex everybody has sex and it's you know two people very much in love and having a good time it was like being electronically raped he released it and she did not want it to be released if that is true yikes yes that is essentially a sexual assault and for people to think that i did it on purpose because after that all of these leaked tapes were coming out and it almost became like a blueprint to become famous i don't know like i didn't need to do that like i always had a plan okay so what she's saying is that people accused her of putting it out on purpose so that she could become famous and that she didn't need to do that because she had a plan on how she was going to you know be successful in in entertainment so i guess all of us just are free to make our own judgment if you were paris and you did purposely put out the tape and you did lie about that then it's within your interest to continue lying about that it's also very very possible that it was released without her consent because other people stood to benefit from that release particularly that guy it sounds like he was selling it or i don't know i guess i just have to say i just i don't know what happened like i could see either happening but i could also see society just jumping to this conclusion of oh she must have wanted it because who would do that you know you're you're you're such a [ __ ] and blah blah and she was 18 at the time i did not know that she was so young if we go with the story that she did not put this out on purpose and that it was completely against her will and her consent then yikes that is an awful experience i just can't imagine what that must have been like for her my grandmother always called me grace kelly marilyn monroe and i always wanted to live up to that for her i just felt when that happened that took it all away from me i think one of her biggest struggles is trust she's been betrayed so many times so she has a real tough time trusting people and letting people in all right interesting so her sister says that she has a hard time trusting other people usually that's because as the sister is also saying the trust has been broken in some very traumatic ways why are you doing this i'm doing this because i have a new boyfriend who's going to be here long gone i do want to know what's happening when i'm not here put this on the phone so it's live so she is going to put cameras in her place so she can secretly spy on a guy that she's dating while she's not home is that what she's saying uncool even if i get if you're worried for sure but there are other more ethical ways to make yourself feel less insecure now some people might say well she's videotaping because she has been videotaped in her past and so she's getting back at people two wrongs don't make it right hi babe yes welcome back hello thank you okay so i don't know if you just heard that voice shift that she just did it went to that that baby voice now there's nothing wrong with having different voices it's just notable which was a big deal to me because after my last relationship i was basically planning on being single the rest of my life but i don't want to be seen in public together yet i'm not ready for that my mom you're two blocks away oh yeah what time is chris coming [ __ ] well it's 7 30 now just say i'm running a few minutes behind and i would like to see you okay love you bye my mom treats me like i'm 12 so i literally am like forever a teenager in my mind okay very interesting statement right there she said my mom treats me like i'm 12 so i feel like i am forever a teenager and that's often the case for a lot of people is that we feel like the way people treat us if we're treated with respect and love admiration and as if we have agency in the world then we feel like we have power and that we matter if we're treated like we don't matter then we feel like we don't matter it's universal everyone is like this we like to think of ourselves particularly in america as if we're independent creatures we are not independent creatures it's a vicious cycle a lot of parents their efforts to make their children be more responsible is to chastise them and to put them down it's like i can't believe you did that you did what to the car you are such an irresponsible human being you know that kind of messaging and parenting is complicated but you know you can imagine that sort of vibe being received by the child of just like oh i am i'm immature i'm stupid i don't know what i'm doing and i made and i make big mistakes in my life and then they want you rinse and repeat that and the child walks away going like well i am irresponsible i didn't just do an irresponsible thing i am irresponsible i i didn't just act immature i am immature that is who i am and then the child acts immature and then they get chastised more and treated more like they're a child and the vicious cycle just continues and continues we're starting to see that in you know little little red flags of that for paris and her family her she's paris is saying her mom treats her like she's 12. paris's sister treats her like she's 12. and she acts like she's 12 and she has a 12 year old voice or even a younger voice and she says things that we would imagine teenagers to say all in the midst of a very intelligent business person who has done things with business and marketing and entertainment that that a lot of people would aspire to so she's not stupid she is not incompetent she is a highly competent responsible person but our vibe or the way we see ourselves or the way we interact with people that are close to us might be different from that stars turn around show me what you got look at dad that's pretty paris my sister and i were teenagers we moved to new york i was the new girl at school i dealt with a lot of bullying and the girls kind of ganging up on me and being mean to me in new york there's a social light scene everyone knew i was my mom had us go to etiquette classes okay so add that to the list of traumas bullying at school and you could imagine that that would cause her to not trust other people which the sister says that she has trouble trusting other people it could also result in having a hard time with romantic relationships because again you don't trust people you don't want to let people in it could also result in always wanting to better other people if i could just get more money and really establish to all those bullies out there that i'm a legit billionaire then all of you will realize that you can't bully me anymore and it also makes you wonder about you know the bullying she experienced in high school that she's reporting and the undoubted bullying that she has incurred throughout her career from haters online and journalists this kind of thing so i wonder if she is in a constant state of trying to outdo the bullies but because she's famous and more famous she just continues to get more and more bullies so we basically were taught how to be debutants it's very proper very prim almost like a stepford wife it just didn't seem real or natural to me i wasn't allowed to go out or go on dates or school dances my parents were so strict no dating no makeup know this know that everyone had late curfews no you had to be home early no no no no and then finally she was just like doing what i want all right so i've treated a lot of families with rebellious teenagers and there's a lot of different hypotheses as to why that would happen one is is that just normal for teenagers and young adults to experiment if you will with their own independence their own power nothing wrong with that another hypothesis is that the parents were having other issues so i would get called in as a family therapist to work with families or they would come to my office i would do in-home and sometimes they'd come to my office and a frequent complaint was that my kid isn't doing what they're told they're not doing their chores they're not going to school they're smoking too much weed they're staying out late they're you know whatever they have the wrong friends you know there's a there's a very consistent set of complaints that i would get from parents and what i would find was that they were underlying those behaviors was a usually another reason as to why all that was happening because most teenagers not all most teenagers will rebel most teenagers will experiment or even use substances most teenagers will lie to their parents they'll try to get out of chores they'll their grades might go down a little bit you know whatever it's it's a very normal teenage thing to do but what is it about some families where it becomes a problem well that's usually indicative of some other issue and the main issue that i would find and this was actually not taught to me this is something that i just learned by treating families was that everyone essentially felt alone there's various different ways to put this no one was getting their attachment needs met there was too much undifferentiation there was too much disengagement or a measurement or something but essentially everyone felt alone and rejected even though they might have presented themselves as a good family and everything was going fine and because of that pain that everyone was going through they end up either electing a child to have symptoms so that the system can have a family therapist come in and help them it's sort of a mechanism that it you know it's a weird way of looking at families but i find it to be useful is that when a family is suffering sometimes they'll elect someone to have symptoms such that a family therapist will actually or someone will come in and actually try to help them with that and it's it's an unconscious impulse that family systems will have so that's one way of looking at it but anyway let's see if we get some more data on that in new york 14 15 16 everything that i didn't want her to do she wanted to do she'd buy wigs necklaces that said sexy hot [ __ ] what i'm thinking no no this is this is too much for me this is crazy i think i just got addicted to the nightlife i felt accepted [Music] i just felt like like the queen of the night okay so we just heard that her early years in clubs is when she felt finally accepted so what does this tell us well this tells us that maybe she wasn't treated well growing up and didn't feel accepted enough there's there's two different main categories of this there's one where you are obviously abused uh and you feel unacceptable because you're being abused the other category that i will see sometimes is that you're not abused but you're just kind of generally neglected emotionally or you just get this vibe from your parents that you're you're supposed superfluous in their life and even though they might give overt gestures of love and attention there's just this vibe of just like eh you know you're not that important to me so sometimes kids like that will grow up with just as much feelings of lack of acceptance as someone who's being abused and then she is in high school in new york and she is feels bullied and unacceptable and then she's a young adult she goes to the clubs and then she's accepted this is you know potentially very formative event for her that she might still be living in and when she steps out of that vibe of the crowds and the chaos and the whatever other elements it is that she associates with that if she were to move in those other directions maybe it doesn't feel very safe for her and she starts to feel that lack of acceptance creeping back in and so she comes always back to whatever vibe she got when she was in these clubs i got to get her out of here i was just a kid living in new york going to high school obviously ditching a lot of class whatever but i feel like my parents were scared and they didn't want their reputations to be ruined because page six was writing all these stories okay so that's telling that for paris as her parents were trying to stop her from going it sounds like she was in high school and going to these clubs she had a fake id and the parents were worried about her naturally and so they were trying to prevent her from doing that and paris's narrative even today is the only reason why they did that is because they were worried about their reputations they didn't actually care about my well-being they didn't care about my safety they only cared about their own image that's the only reason why they did that that that tells us something now is that true we don't know but that elise tells us that for paris she has a narrative a schema that her parents don't necessarily care about her in the way that we would hope parents would care about their kids and that can lead to a lot of problems later in life feeling like you don't matter feeling like you constantly have to run and chase things to feel like you matter so i felt like i was just kind of sent away to be hidden all you ever wanted was the best for your child i first sent her to an outdoor wilderness program it's for teenage boys and girls needing a change of attitude and direction okay this is interesting so as a therapist i am sort of peripherally aware of these programs i actually have a a student of mine actually ran one of these a smaller operation in which the kids would actually go on a fast and it's just a side note about this is that so there'd be this sort of group therapy situation that would happen for a few days in the wilderness and then on the day of the fasting all the kids would disperse and for five days maybe longer the kids would just stay in a particular region alone and wouldn't eat anything they'd have water but they wouldn't eat anything and the therapist my student who is now a practicing therapist would visit each child for about five minutes in the morning and then after the five days they'd come back and they'd do group therapy again universally the kids and the parents would find this to be of benefit for a lot of reasons the slowing down of life fasting itself has its own psychological effects so there's a lot of programs like this that i'm aware of but what it sounds like is the parents forced her to go which i also have worked with a lot of families in this situation and generally generally what i would say because parents would come to me usually private privileged parents who had enough money to actually send kids to these sorts of programs because they are not cheap believe me um well let me back up so uh a lot of families in the world and in my town would have a teenager that they'd be really worried about and we just heard from the mom i don't know if i included the clip where she was very worried about her her daughter and you try lots of different things you try talking to them you try discipline you try grounding you take away their screens you do various different things and their behavior doesn't get any better in fact it just gets worse over time and so parents will feel responsible to feel like well i have to do something right there's not a lot you can do beyond a certain threshold to the privileged class they actually can send kids to these sorts of what might be called boot camps this kind of thing and sometimes you even have to force the kid to go which means you have to have you have to hire goons essentially like bodyguards or you know ruffians if you will to roll up to your house and i would as a family therapist i would actually observe this and the goons would come out grab the child throw them in the van and drive them across state lines where so in washington state uh from my memory because i don't treat families anymore they uh you can't involuntarily detain a teenager teenagers have rights in washington state where i live but there are other states i believe utah and particularly like when you go south of the border in mexico children don't have those rights and so you have to hire goons from those states to come to your state take the kid and then once they're in that state then you can actually essentially imprison them in these sort of therapeutic camps at the beginning of my career i was like huh well you know i don't know i don't know much about these sorts of things maybe they work maybe they don't what i found this is just anecdotal is that they never worked these sorts of camps never worked for a variety of reasons one is is that yeah if you exert total control over a child then yeah their behavior will change because they don't have a choice so if you sent a kid to this sort of camp yeah they're going to stop going to clubs and they're going to stop talking back to you why because they don't have a choice they're imprisoned essentially and but as soon as they came back within 24 hours sometimes the kid would be even worse than they were prior and there are a lot of different reasons for this one is is that the kids are so hurt and they're so demoralized by the parents disrespecting them to such a degree that the kids are just like when i get out of here all bets are off i'm done with those parents i had at least kind of a shred of connection and mutual goodwill with my parents prior to what they did what they did to me now i am now cold i've put up my walls i hate my parents in fact i hate everyone and as soon as i'm out of here i'm just going to run away and screw all those people and i'm going to avoid them because if i don't then they're just going to put me right back into one of those kinds of camps now can they work yeah you know sometimes they can work sometimes some kids they just need a little bit of time to sober up to get away from bad influences to grow up a little bit you know certainly i as a family therapist i would see that but sometimes the damage done by the parents essentially imprisoning your children is so great that the relationship is has plummeted so so much between child and parent that it it's way worse for the situation because you know one of the things that i discovered so early in my career i don't know if i was taught this or i just had this idea that children and teenagers the reason why they follow rules is because there's good structure and there's good discipline what i found was that is not true for the vast majority of kids and teenagers the reason why they follow the rules is because they have a good connection with their parents and they have a good connection with authority they follow the rules because emotionally they want to please you now you might look at your kid and you might be like i don't think my kid wants to please me well they probably do deep down they probably just don't like to admit it and they don't like to signal that but i found that to be universally true and the more discipline you do actually that can cause your child to be more disconnected from you which actually lowers their motivation to follow your rules so you can force a kid to follow your rules by doing these kinds of things but by doing so you might be eroding the very thing that actually causes them to want to follow rules in the first place which is their love for you their connection with you their desire not to disappoint you that kind of thing so i would see a lot of bad things from these camps and actually i would see sort of middle class mid-level income families where they would literally take a second mortgage out on their home or condo to fund one of these camps it would all be worthless i actually very distinctly i remember this one mother telling me about how and this is prior to working with me she had mortgaged her condo sent her kid to one of these camps the kid came back and within 24 hours had run away and was completely rebellious after coming back from one of these camps and she was lamenting to me about how now she's in debt a hundred thousand dollars and it didn't do any good so i learned through experience that these things uh sometimes don't work in the way that you hope that they do now the other thing here is that these businesses they are businesses make no doubt about it these boot camps i don't know this one in particular they make a lot of money how do they make money by getting parents to do to sign up for this service okay so their bot their bank account depends on parents believing that their camp works well how do they do that well they have dubious research projects that promote the notion that you know find that they have a 98 success rate you know you see these websites and i've seen them back in the day it was brochures and they would claim very high success rates well when you actually look at the real research you know actual outside research looking at these sorts of things the success rate is far lower so do not believe the hype when you look at these websites and the claims that they make and absolutely look for sound data now for people out there i'm guessing there's a percentage of you that actually have a teenager right now that you're very concerned about smoking pot acting out speak you know talking back to you not doing their chores their grades are plummeting maybe they're not even going to school they're hanging out with bad people according to you what do you do hire a competent family therapist one family therapy can fix the problem two uh parents when they talk a lot of times what family therapy meant for me was that the family would say my kid has all these problems can you fix him or her and i would come into the family and i would figure things out and then eventually i would say you know what the best use of my time is i'm going to talk to the parents i could talk to the kid and there's some things we can do there but mainly what i'm going to do is parents let's let's rework the way that you organize your family let's rework the way that you work together let's rework the way that you communicate to your kids sometimes that was all that was needed and that would fix it now if that doesn't fix it family therapists are trained to know about other services as well so if you contact a family therapist that's the beginning of the road to health not all the time i certainly worked with families where nothing worked and sometimes that just happens but i certainly worked with a lot of families where my help and my colleagues who are also family therapists actually did help them anyway i'm going on a rant let's get back to the documentary let's see maybe for paris this was a great thing maybe this camp was great we were building other camps basically doing manual labor all day long it was just constant yelling at like boot camp style so i whispered one of the girls like let's get out of here tonight we ran through cornfields through mountains the guys that worked at the camp grabbed us and then we got back and they literally just beat the hell out of us in front of everyone just to let everyone know if you run away this is what happens yikes wow a little surprising but also not surprising i've heard reports like this particularly from the boot camps in mexico because the mexican laws are such or at least the regulations are such that they can get away with more down there and they weren't mexican people they were americans who would have these organizations and they would actually purposely go to mexico to create these boot camps because they could get away with more i absolutely heard about physical abuse happening in those camps the way this is being portrayed it sounds like this is actually in the united states but yeah this doesn't surprise me and yeah wow essentially you're forcibly imprisoning your child and subjecting them to physical assaults and abuse and imagine what you what you would feel as a child in a situation like this my parents don't you know i finally found my tribe which was at the clubs i finally found people that make me feel like i matter in the world and then you be because of your image because you worried about the the tittering that was happening but you know behind your back you ripped me away from my one source of self-esteem and threw me into a labor camp and now i'm being beaten because of you you can imagine that would really cause you to distrust other people particularly people that are close to you and then they sent me to this other place which was hell too and i ran away from there she jumped down an entire flight of stairs they shut down highways they shut down the airport i escaped from ascent cascade seadoo all of these emotional growth schools okay so emotional growth school interesting way of framing it i don't know these organizations that she's been at but they're in one sense basically a prison for children so this is also telling that she goes to one she runs away she comes back she's beaten the family knows she runs away i'm sure that they told her and then she she runs away and then she's repeatedly put in multiple camps so imagine what that would feel like as a child that the parents it you know there's a lot of messages now whether the parents meant this there's a lot of messages a young paris could have received you don't matter i don't want you you there's something wrong with you you're dirty you're disgusting uh we don't care about your emotions we don't care about your needs we don't care about you and go away and come back like a nice stepford wife you know you can imagine the prolonged nature even if it was just for like six months of the the notions that would begin to form and become solidified in your mind about what your family was to you and what your parents were to you and what the world was to you and what authority meant and how you fit into the world that there's something broken about you there's something you know again the way we're treated we tend to believe that about ourselves so it's incredible now i don't know the full story maybe if the parents were here they would have a lot to say it's like no you don't understand we loved our child we did this and this and this because i've certainly seen that too i've seen where perfectly loving parents do a lot of really wonderful things and the kid just just makes it very very difficult so and i've seen where i thought both parties were causing the problem that's that was usually the case but anyway so who knows what we would see but it's telling that the family didn't go with another strategy that they just kept sending her to these teenage prison camps instead of thinking wait wait wait okay she keeps running away let's figure something else out now i don't know again maybe they did try the things but didn't seem like it we're just spending all our time trying to figure out where do we should we move to the moon what do we do okay i don't know but the hypothesis that i would go with if i was the family therapist in that moment would be the connection between paris and you is not strong enough so that's what we need to work on if you and paris can bond and that might take some time and you might have some difficult conversation some vulnerable conversations if you can do that i'm guessing that the behaviors will go down at the very least you'll get to hear more about how paris thinks about things maybe she can explain to you like no mom you don't understand i'm not going to the clubs because i want to hurt you or scare you i'm going there because it's the only place i feel like i matter in the world maybe if there's that bond the kid will feel able to explore that in themselves express it and the parents will get a chance to understand that that won't necessarily mean the parents are saying okay fine go to the clubs but at least there's some basis for understanding so that people don't hate each other so much in these families and so that's what i would work on i was just like okay let's get away from the discipline often what i would find was that i couldn't get parents away from the discipline because if i suggested as much they'd be like oh i see i'm just supposed to give up on my kid i'm supposed to let them do whatever they want to do and i'd be like no that's not what i'm saying so often i would find i couldn't really touch the discipline side so i'd focus on the positive i would focus okay you know you can keep your discipline inside great but we can all agree that the relationship has gone astray that you and you know the parents and the kid do not have a good relationship there's not there's not good will there's not there's not love there's not a bond let's work on that how are we going to do that and sometimes by doing that the discipline would come down or the need for discipline would come down so yeah it's troubling i'm like please can i just go home i've already been through so much i promise i'll never go to a club again please like i i can't go back to these places you have no idea there was no convincing them no matter what i said so i just didn't trust them it made me not trust anyone not even my own family right so i would see this for sure and again i wasn't there and we don't have the full story from the parents but i've seen that before and it's very destructive to a person's psychology basically they conclude that their family does not love them their family doesn't even really like them and that family cannot be trusted that people can't be trusted also they might even conclude that they're not lovable that they don't deserve respect that they don't deserve people to really think about their feelings and so they put up walls and maybe that's what's led to paris's loneliness even though there's a lot of people around her maybe this was a significant part of her putting up her walls because that that's my main conceptualization what we've seen thus far i don't know i can never tell from a documentary that's so short but or from any documentary from that matter when i assess people i i take weeks and hours and hours of people willingly talking with me that's when i get a good idea of a conceptualization but the main hypothesis i would have with her is that she has a lot of walls up that she doesn't let people in why because she is afraid they're going to hurt her they're going to reject her they're going to put her in a prison camp and so she suffers as a result and she's replaced human connection and vulnerability with success in entertainment and in her product lines and in fame and feels as though that actually gets her some level of security and some level of worth when if she just slowed down and and slowly allowed someone into her world that was trustworthy and she built that trust up mutually with that other person then she would actually feel secure for the first time in her life or at least since she was a teenager and we even heard her earlier in the documentary talk about it's just like well i don't know dating is kind of hard because i don't want to date a guy who's at lower of prestige than me because he's going to be emasculated and he's just going to be a i think she called it like a boy [ __ ] and you know this kind of thing and so she even frames her romantic relationships or her attachments in the way that she is seen in society even to this day it's really hard for me to let anyone in [Music] i'm like scared like i haven't got to experience like real life like having a family and being like in love [Music] i want to change okay so we're about halfway through the documentary and she says that she has a hard time letting people in but that she wants to change so and then they're playing the nice music so maybe they're going to maybe that's maybe this is going to be a happy ending maybe we're gonna see her develop and say you know what i think i need to start letting people in i think i need to be vulnerable i think i need to have relationships outside of the limelight that would be encouraging all right well that does it for that episode of psychology in seattle everyone out there please take care of yourself take care of other people as well get the therapy if you need it because you deserve it you really really do

Channel: Psychology In Seattle

Views: 147,451

Rating: 4.9197145 out of 5

Keywords: Paris Hilton, This Is Paris, documentary, therapist reacts, reaction video, commentary, analysis, couples counselor, Dr. Kirk Honda, psychology

Id: WzkE5cxMY34

Length: 39min 24sec (2364 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 23 2020