Trauma is Trauma: A Mental Health Talk with Kevin Smith | PEOPLE

hey kids it's me Kevin Smith five years ago I had a massive Widowmaker heart attack I don't know if you heard about it of course you did because I would not stop talking about it for five years it was the most exciting thing that ever happened to me since clerks um and we're gonna do that again because I just went through a thing that I think a lot of people go through but nobody ever talks about so I'm gonna give you some details and hopefully it'll be useful in your own life okay here we go for the last month I have been at a mental health facility in the you know parlance of our times I went crazy uh I lost my marbles I had a complete break with reality and uh became very uh dissociative this uh next section is about sexual abuse when I was six years old there was a kid a little older than me nine or ten I don't know who he was because I grew up in a summer town and people were kind of transient in the summertime particularly so I don't know who this kid is I see his face very clearly never saw him again after this incident uh took me and I was six years old and a friend of mine whose name won't disclose but she was a six-year-old girl and uh made us put our mouths on each other's genitalia the the other kid the older kid was going to make us put our mouths on him and then an adult walk pass it was an Alleyway behind an apartment building it was sheer white wall so there were no windows next to us only on the second floor and on the other side of us was a fence that grape leaves covering it so unless you walk right past the alley you never would have known what happened he wouldn't even seen us and luckily some adult did walk past the alley was like what's going on and chased those kids away and then I went home and never said anything uh because I was scared and humiliated and ashamed and you know as a Catholic kid so I was like God and worried about Sin and whatnot and never told anybody about it I've told the story in my life to other people um but always presented thusly oh I played Doctor when I was a kid um recently when I was at uh a facility called Sierra Tucson in Arizona a mental health facility that literally saved my life I was talking to my trauma therapist uh Kelly parks and I told her this story and she stops me dead we were walking around the track and she goes Kevin that's sexual abuse and I said oh my goats we were playing doctor and she goes doctor is I'll show you mine you show me yours there's a third party instructing you what to do and it's against your will that's sexual abuse and so blew my mind and I was like why then why why my whole life about thought I was playing doctor and Kelly said because it was a traumatic event something insanely traumatizing happened to you and in order to live with that in order to survive after something like that your coping mechanism was to minimize it to make it small to make it well we just played Doctor perhaps because later in life I heard of other uh people getting abuse or sexual abuse became more talked about and since it didn't sound like other stories I heard I was able to keep it small and that's what we do everyone suffers trauma and then tries to keep it small in order to survive it's a survival mechanism everybody suffers trauma uh on a regular basis some it's a process yeah where the amygdala in the brain goes into protection mode in order to protect the mind in order to protect the body uh you might have heard of the term fight or flight the fight-or-flight response um there's also two others that they've added there's fight there's flight uh there's freeze and there's Fawn uh freeze is something that happened to me at age six uh the amygdala is crazy man it's uh in your brain it's the lizard brain part of you it's the thing that protects you your entire life and it's what reacts to trauma as does the human nervous system so when I was in Sierra Tucson at first I didn't really want to talk about the traumas that I suffered and I gotta stop doing that because they are trauma traumas because I felt they were small I was in a facility where they also had veterans members of a program called red white and blue men and women who have been overseas been in service and seen action and suffer from PTSD and and other afflictions and when you sit in a room with somebody telling a story about being in battle and gunshots and things blowing up and Friends dying you you know you tend to shrink yourself and not want to say what your trauma is because well my it's real small compared to that here's the news the human nervous system doesn't recognize or the levels of trauma it doesn't equivocate the human nervous system doesn't go like lots of little trauma so that's okay that's a big trauma so we'll deal with that the same traumatic effect of having a kid in an Alleyway say put your mouth on that person um is the same traumatic effect of nearly getting hit by a car the same traumatic effect of being mocked in a classroom in front of people uh the same traumatic effect of having a gun put into your face there are no levels when it comes to trauma trauma is trauma so I know as people watch they're like well that's small compared to like what other people have gone through that that's patently not true scientifically not true trauma is trauma so case in point when I was nine uh my grandmother died my father's mom my grandfather died my mom's dad my father was in a massive car accident he almost died and my mom was in the hospital and this was all in the span of like four months um you know as kids in the 70s there wasn't a lot of uh hey be careful they didn't treat children like Faberge eggs they treated kids like kids in the 70s which is like you can handle this growing up I grew up in an era where if you cried people be like I'll give you something to cry about you know it wasn't a lot of nurturing and understanding and stuff so um when I'm nine I'm in fourth grade and my fourth grade teacher who shall remain nameless um said something that shaped the rest of my life in fourth grade we stand up to do the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning and uh after that since it was a Catholic School Our Lady of Perpetual Help we also did the morning Angeles which is a prayer they do in Church Catholic church and my teacher is walking around the room and comes to a stop right next to me I'm standing and she's standing right here and she's taller of course I was little and I felt they're looking at me like I felt her eyes boring into me and finally before I sit down at my desk I look up at my fourth grade teacher and my fourth grade teacher um who was a woman in her 50s uh looks down at me with the most abject disgust interface and says ugh the gut on you Mr Smith saying that in front of a room full of your peers um someone who's you know meant to be caring for you and and somebody you respect because that's the teacher um devastated a kid who didn't have the tools prepared for that I'm sure there are people like you think that's bad I've been through worse uh that's called playing trauma Olympics I'm sure people have been through horrible things uh way more horrible than that but the central nervous system reacts the exact same way in everybody trauma is trauma remember that the next incident that happened very closely that was we were all the Long Branch water slide and going up and down and having a blast it was the early summer and um fourth time up to the top of the water slide uh there's a teenager who sits at the top and he's like stop go stop go so the you know people going down the slide don't pile up on each other and uh the kid random teenager stops and goes stop pregnant ladies can't ride the slide sounds minimal and even now I want to discount it I want to bring it down I want to be like oh you know that's not as bad as dot dot but again trauma is Trump now I'm going to take you from those two incidences three incidences one at six and two at nine into the present and show you how it shaped the rest of my life a six-year-old kid who was terrified of being told to do something that was completely foreign to him um was directed to do something that disturbs his core values uh guess what that little kid grew up to be a director because nobody's ever going to do that to me again I'm going to be in charge for the rest of my life nobody's ever going to tell me to do something I don't want to do uh the stuff that happened at nine ties directly into the body dysmorphia I've had my entire life I have always seen myself and even now I see myself as disgusting I see myself the way miss the way my fourth grade teacher I don't give her name uh saw me that look on her face and the thing that she said must be true here's an adult who is in charge of me who I spend five six hours a day with so if she's saying it this has to be true now that's not part of my core values that's part of my core beliefs the core values are immutable they come to you in childhood your parents and just tell them and whatnot and even as you grow you can add more you know uh there what you stand for what you believe in your core beliefs are completely different that's the truth or the untruth that you tell yourself constantly so my entire life I've seen myself the way my fourth grade teacher saw me the way the teenager at the top of the water slide saw me and you know I those of you who have seen me over the years I've had a lifelong about with my weight that's gone up and down at top weight I was 330 pounds today I stand here at 180 pounds but um 150 pounds later gone I still see a fat nine-year-old kid because that's all those two people saw and I minimized that my entire life you know as people are doing as they watch this right now like I was called fat when I was a kid well I'm sorry I'm really sorry that happened to you and I hope it didn't affect you the way that it affected me deeply and shaped who I became literally sometimes physically shaped who I became um I became a people pleaser uh the kind of person that will be anything you need him to be and do anything you want him to do just don't call me fat just don't recognize how disgusting and repugnant I am let me distract you with jokes and entertainment so at age nine I start building like for lack of a better description uh that Kevin Smith the public presentational version of myself I've referred to him affectionately as the other guy I started building the other guy because no one's ever going to say something like that to me again I'll beat them to it like you can't call me fat because I'm gonna call myself that first the other guy got me all the way through grammar school through high school all the way up into my early 20s until I fell in love with film and suddenly realized that oh maybe I can make some art or something now this much I know me the authentic Kevin Smith made clerks not the other guy the other guy came online as an adult once clerks was accepted and bought I was 23 I made a little black and white movie with my friends the first thing I ever made the human brain doesn't stop growing till age 26 so to this unformed brain full of self-esteem issues and self-loathing is introduced a world going hey we like what you did that was great I mean this is something that happened back in high school in grade school as well anytime I was on stage and Performing people clap people laugh and nobody was saying ew ew you're disgusting you're fat so I leaned into that very heavily and in September something happened in my life right before we were about to start the convenience tour Clerk's 3 convenience tour and we had like a 94 percent sell through or something like that and 52 cities to go to with thousands of people to see and I didn't have time to take care of my mental health I just had to go go like so many of us in life we have so many things to do some of us have multiple jobs and we power through we've been taught to just power through get to the other side fake it until you can make it so at that point I kind of put the other guy completely in charge and let him run the show and that's because all of my self-worth all of my value my validation has never come from inside of me I can't historically I have not been able to validate myself I needed you I needed him her I needed an external Force to tell me you're worthy you're good there's nothing wrong with you um or oh you're great at what you do and we haven't noticed that you're fat in 10 minutes or something I got the bright idea years ago to go from being a filmmaker because if I'm a filmmaker I can get paired get compared to other filmmakers you know there are other people that direct like me and some of them direct better according to others and naturally if you're graded against somebody you know it's it's easy to be judged Epictetus one of the stoics had said something to the effect of um if you want to win enter a competition in which you are the sole contestant um kind of paraphrasing that and so at that point I was like oh I will become myself for a living my job will be me uh and the other guy went from being something I would pull out and put on stage uh to being on 24 7. the dumb thing about making yourself your job kids is that the moment you wake up you're working until the moment you go to sleep and I burned out over time um because you need a rest add to this my codependency I am an incredibly insanely codependent person that's the people pleasing um if you need help my hands instantly go on my hips what can I do I go into hero mode hero complex mode I can solve your problems because I can't solve mine so it's much easier for me to focus on you than I don't have to think about me my I could think about you um you know in that way uh you tend to be somebody that people with intention or not use up and we only have so many resources um you know I've heard that expression like hey man you got to fill your own cup you gotta keep the cup filled my cup was empty over time a lifetime of codependency professionally personally um I gave it all out and eventually ran dry until there was no sense of me left uh I opened up the other guy about a month ago looking for me for the authentic Kevin Smith the real Kevin Smith and I was uh terrified to find out that I wasn't there there's nobody running the show and I was scared beyond belief that a either the authentic me had just kicked off because he was so bored with what I'd become and what I'd done with myself or even worse that the other guy had burned the authentic me for fuel to get as far as we got and at that moment I realized I needed help um I have never really loved myself um I objectively loathe myself I love the other guy the other guy is my creationist creation of a nine-year-old perfected to the point where I was able to inhabit the other guy for a living and let the other guy do everything while I sat back and watched you know I was a passenger in my own life and um that's not healthy by these threats of the imagination what they taught me at Sierra Tucson Sean battle my process group therapist who was wonderful uh Dr foul uh Kelly they taught me to be mindful to be in the moment to breathe really comes down to just breathing because this is a mind Bender when you breathe you know you're here in the moment you know you're right here and right now you cannot breathe in the past it's impossible and you cannot breathe into the future breathing grounds you it makes you mindful it puts you right here why does one need to be mindful because this is fraught with Peril because the amygdala perceives everything as a threat you know you're at work and you're like hi to somebody and they don't say hi instantly the thoughts start racing what's wrong with me what did I do is that person mad at me sometimes just for being preoccupied but we don't think of it that way because our minds race our thoughts wander because that's what thoughts do one of the most dangerous addictions isn't alcohol isn't drugs it's thinking because we can't stop it and most of our thoughts are negative because most of us believe the worst about ourselves whether it's something that was said to us a childhood somebody oh you're stupid that's something you carry with you for the rest of your life like I'm stupid and these are things that are said to us when we're young and they kind of shape us and when we're at our most quiet that's when those thoughts come in now how do people steal those thoughts um many different ways a few years back I started smoking weed on a regular basis at about age 38 I smoked weed throughout my life a couple times and was never really for me I thought and then at age 38 I started smoking and I was like well this is this is great why isn't this for me I mean I made all those movies about this so I should you know I should this is I enjoy this because THC CBD cannabinoids cannabinoids all have medicinal value to the body I got to a point where there was never a moment where THC wasn't shifting throughout my entire system I would wake up and smoke weed all the way until I went to bed and I would sleep for four hours and it doesn't leave your system after four hours and so I'd wake up feed it again and the whole system would start over so I have been numb for the better part of uh 10 years well I've been smoking weed for 15. I would say probably 10 of those years was me trying to be present while not being present weed is wonderful because unlike alcohol or some other substances you can in my job in my world I could be high as a kite and still do everything I need to do in fact probably do more than I could if I wasn't numb because when I'm not numb I have to be alone with my own thoughts which is some of the most terrifying places to be alone with our own thoughts so oh my God Let's Take On The World those thoughts are gone I I've suppressed them and not buried them it's just all the negative all the negative self-talk constant monologue The Voice the inner critic all that stuff just kind of gets dulled way way down so metaphorically or to use an image of sorts um I had a wound that marijuana was really good for and I had this open wound and I put a Band-Aid on it that's what weed was uh but the wound kept getting bigger and bigger and then I put more Band-Aids on it more Band-Aids on it and by the time I walked into Sierra Tucson I was a mummy just covered in bandages and not really present in the real world because constantly I was numbing myself and I'm wait for it I'm not gonna smoke weed anymore I know that may be disappointing to a bunch of folks sorry Silent Bob should be smoking weed uh he didn't when he made those movies so he did when he was making the later movies and stuff which could explain you know yoga but um I'm gonna I've stopped it's been over a month since I smoked weed because I don't want to be numb anymore when you're numb terrible things happen when you're not present with your thoughts and sometimes those thoughts can be treacherous but there's ways around treacherous thinking being here present in the moment and they gave me this a life hack which is called 54321 it is basically you talking you have to say it out loud and you describe your five senses so you list out loud because the brain cognizes your voice better than it does your thoughts that's why you know some people talk out loud when they do tasks that's a very effective way to get things done you're actually informing the brain so this 54321 which is insanely quick and very useful and anybody could use it and it takes you out of the past and out of the future and brings you right to the present is as simple as this you say it out loud five things I see the light the camera my hands the floor the ceiling uh four things that I hear the traffic outside in Los Angeles my own voice my feet the rustling of my jacket three things I smell this room my jacket my breath uh two things I taste Cheerios that's what I have for breakfast um my wrist that's what I like to do and then one thing I could feel and that is the ground under my feet and then you say out loud you can stand down I got this and that's you literally talking to your amygdala and telling it that you're not in some sort of state of trauma you're not in some sort of state or fight or flight because that's what it's trying to do it's assessing these horrible thoughts that you have about yourself or thoughts worries about the future or you reviewing things from the past constantly or reliving traumas and you're reminding the amygdala that those things aren't happening right now they're just thoughts the more you are focused and being here rather than being here being there or being there and the best place the only place you could be is in the moment we miss so much of the present because we're so busy dealing with the past and so busy being worried about the future so when I walked into Sierra Tucson I was this hollow ghost of human being and uh you know I told him I was like hey man I see myself as a performative version of myself uh the I call him the other guy and uh you know I looked in the other day and I wasn't there anymore so when I walked into Sierra Tucson I was convinced that I'd stopped existing that was my break with reality and uh Sean battle smart bless this man um paid for the whole trip simply by saying this he was just like um well I the other guy would never come in here because he does everything right and he's the one that you put out there for the world he's the one that you feel accepts all the adulation and whatnot so the other guy would never come here that's how I know Kevin Smith exists because Kevin Smith is here and for the entire month that I was in in a facility with you know rubber doors on the bathroom and showers so you can't harm yourself and whatnot um the other guy couldn't come in there was nothing for him there there was no way for him to sell a t-shirt or Jay and Silent Bobbitt or you know get up on stage and tell stories or make money so the other guy stood down and for lack of a better description stood outside the gates of Sierra Tucson while the actual me the authentic me went in there and worked on himself and found healing there's healing out in the desert one doesn't have to go to Sierra Tucson uh but if you're going to go to a place well I can recommend it enough all one has to do is take care of oneself look into mental health you don't have to go all the way to Arizona someplace near you could be very helpful there's a process that I did a few times called EMDR and 52 year old me was in the room with nine-year-old me and his classmates and my teacher who said the thing and I was able to talk to my teacher and you know I didn't ream her out and be like you son of a you know I just said this Kelly's like talk to her tell her what tell her what you want to say and I was like this kid's not ready for that like this kid has no coping mechanisms whatsoever and so this comment is going to shape the rest of his life um more importantly I got to talk to nine-year-old Kev who's been frozen in a moment for 43 years and tell him that because he didn't break that day I was like look I know it's bad and I know that you don't you don't know why this happened and that you're crushed and embarrassed and humiliated and split but because you don't break in two because you hold it together one day we get to put our hands and our footprints in the cement at groman's Chinese Theater and I took nine-year-old Kev to groman's Chinese Theater and showed him our hand princess it was a miracle not only did it clean up a long-standing core belief that I had about myself it trickled down through everything because remember that moment shapes the rest of my life and starts cleaning up all that other stuff as well right up into the present um it's a miracle and they have it everywhere you don't have to go to Just Sierra Tucson you go anybody go to Psychology today or Psychiatry today and I think it's Psychology today and you can enter in you know EMDR near me with a zip code and you'll find a place that does it it's absolutely miraculous and very very healing I went into Sierra Tucson they were like you got to learn to put yourself first and I was like that's all I do I'm literally like every day of my life I wake up and I'm like what do I want to do and I make a thing and they're like Kevin that's what you do who are you put yourself first what do you actually like doing that has nothing to do with your job it has nothing to do with the other guy that has no J in Silent Bob in it and I had no answers I I don't know what I like because I don't know who I am and now at age 52 just starting to figure it out so one of the things that I found when I was in there was a group called Coda which is codependence Anonymous codependency Anonymous um you know there's Alcoholics Anonymous there's Narcotics Anonymous there's an Al-Anon and stuff but I never felt the place in any of those communities because I didn't suffer from those afflictions but Coda I was forced to go to the group one day and instantly I was like oh this is where I belong surrounded by a bunch of other people who see the world the way I do who see themselves as so minimal and so terrible and So Unworthy of love that they'll do anything to get it from somebody else um and when I was leaving Sierra Tucson like I had two weeks in a row at the code of class they always ask somebody who wants to lead the group facilitate if you will you open up the book you read what you're doing and stuff like that and I did that and I I loved it I thought it was great and right then and there I was like you know I'm gonna start holding Coda meetings like I got my own movie theater it's mod Castle in Atlantic Highlands New Jersey and we're closed on Mondays and Tuesdays so I figured on Monday nights like seven o'clock I'm gonna start holding Coda meetings man anybody can go as long as you're codependent and um I thought about it a lot and so the other guy because the moment the other guy heard that I was gathering the crowd he was like all right how do we make money off of this how do we turn this into a business but you can't can't charge fees there are no dues you can't make a t-shirt that says Bob Strike Coda or something like that it's about anonymity as well and right then and there the other guy kind of off and I realized that that's the authentic Kevin Smith that's something that I would like to do and now I'm going to start figuring out more of those things that's not related to what I do for a living I'm not putting away what I do for a living I built that other guy and I love him but I'm gonna maintain them now he's not going to maintain me so it was quite the experience that I had and I'm gonna wrap up by telling you like my favorite thing that happened when I was in there other than getting healing um and and saving my life which is honestly what I feel they did in there um I was in there with another patient we can't use names but he's a great guy and he came from Detroit and he was sitting next to me we're eating it was his first day there we're in the dining hall and you know I was engaged with everybody because that was the real Kevin Smith I wasn't putting on a show or trying to entertain I was just me and so we were chit chatting and his first day in so nervous maybe quiet so reticent to engage deep but I kept talking to him and finally at one point he was like man you know what you remind me of that guy from the movies I was like all right here comes Ben you could be like yeah well I do play Silent Bob from time to time and before I could say anything he goes Robert Downey Jr and that was worth the price of admission alone like I know I'm trying to figure out who I am but having this guy say that I looked and sounded like right your mannerism is like Robert Downey Jr I was like I love Iron Man uh but not as much as I love Kev um and that's what I'm going to try to do for the rest of my life love Kevin put him first uh in that way I don't know that you'll see much of me online anymore I've been this is not me you know going like I'm gone forever but I have been a creature of the internet for 27 years I started back in 1995 trying to find out what people thought about me in interactive forums you know we had a viewsq message board for years before there was a Twitter and that opened up the whole world to give him their opinion so it's not like I'm I'm quitting Twitter or something like that but if you want to see me um you'll see me live wherever I do live shows comes mod castle and watch a movie and stuff come see me when I'm on the road and we'll talk um but don't look for me online kids because I'm gonna be looking for happiness you know the other side of the hardest thing it is you'll ever do in your life is your joy and isn't that worth getting to at least before I leave this best of all possible world so in conclusion not crazy anymore um deal with your trauma folks uh I'm dealing with mine and it's improving my life vastly so hopefully this information is useful to somebody there's no you know link to click to sell anything or whatnot is is me learning something and passing it on to people that I care about and I care about all of you even the ones who are like I hate this guy I don't hate you I care about you um I just don't need your validation anymore and that's good because now we can just be friends so there it is um thanks for listening to everybody go take care of your mind

Channel: People

Views: 704,669

Keywords: People, people magazine, news, celebrities, interview, magazine, celebrity news, celebrity, famous, Hollywood, celebrity (media genre), entertainment news, entertainment, mental health, mental health awareness, mental health awareness video, kevin smith, kevin smith mental health, kevin smith trauma, trauma, trauma is trauma, mental health celebrities, mental health celebrity speakers

Id: JBvc7Ny4iUk

Length: 34min 31sec (2071 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 26 2023