“Through Their Own Words, They Will Be Exposed”

In Honor of Sinead O’Conner: Gen X Warrior for Psychological Truth

It is always a strange sensation when someone famous you like and the same age dies. It is a feeling of sadness that they will be missed, but there is also that moment of relief that you are fortunate enough to keep going. However, it is also a reminder to pick up the pace, because time waits for no one. It is an even stranger sensation when that famous person was someone you really loved and had a big impact on your life. For me, Sinead O’Conner was one of those rare people.

The first time I saw Sinead, I had gone to Europe after college to study European culture and the European Union. Although I was ecstatic to be there, I was also torn because I wanted to be with my college girlfriend/best friend. So after a week of wallowing in missing her, this stunningly beautiful bald girl with an amazing voice comes on TV and just grabs me by passionately belting out one of the most beautiful love songs I had ever heard. When she said, “nothing compares to you,” I knew exactly what she was talking about. I was stunned. I was shook, but mostly in a good way. From that moment on, I loved Sinead O’Conner.

In a sense, we grew up together. We were born a few months apart so we experienced global events at the exact same points in our lives. When she sang, “How could I possibly know what I want when I was only 21,” in the The Emperor’s New Clothes, I again knew exactly what she was talking about and always thought to myself, “Preach sister!” Our chronological synchronicity also always gave me a pretty good idea of where she was coming from, and I loved that she was one of my generation’s warriors for truth and justice, but it was hard to miss her Irish fire and intensity burned “white hot.”

Just from her video, you could see and feel a fire few can contain. Sinead was a fully charged electric rail, she was a fusion reaction, she was a supernova, she was a flame that burned with the intensity of 10,000 suns. She was a fierce social justice warrior before the term existed, no doubt because she was born into social injustice.

That is why she was fearless in being Gen X’s rage at the corruptions we saw in society but seemingly could do little about. She spoke truths before people were ready to hear them. Sinead used her platform to speak hard truths to those in power such as her “wokeness” to the abuses in the Catholic Church, and how the anti-woke wanted to keep it silent, so they demonized her and “canceled” her commercial career.

Indeed those who referred to her as a Joan of Arc figure were right all along, just like Sinead was most of the time, which is pretty incredible considering she carried the weight of the world along with her childhood ptsd, cptsd, trauma-induced self-destructive compulsions and fibromyalgia. Anyone who has any of these struggles and yet can somehow still direct themselves towards doing a lot of good and helping people are to be massively commended for persevering and/or breaking the cycle, and Sinead did both massively.

Sinead was fighting against the narcissistic evil-like childhood abuse she sadly knew of all too well, but not with her own evil, but with the force of her righteous indignation, anger, passion, power and fire. Of course the cost of fighting institutionalized evil is evil fights back the way evil does, which obviously took its toll on her already challenging mental health.

Of course, ripping up a picture of the Pope on live TV in a protest against the Catholic Church covering up sex abuse, and saying we needed to “fight the real enemy” made her a lot of powerful Catholic enemies, and was in essence the end of her commercial career.

However, Sinead was fine with that because she would not be controlled or contained, much the way Dave Chappelle was fine with walking away from a multi-million dollar contract to go live on his farm for several years in peace. Even at 24 years old, Sinead was on The Arsenio Hall Show saying considering all that hate directed at her for speaking truth to power, she understandably often had the desire to go live on a farm as well.  

The life of Sinead O’Conner should teach us how stars who forcefully speak out about powerful institutions are often publicly dismissed as “crazy,” when they are right about most of what they say the whole time. Besides leaving us several amazing songs and iconic lyrics, the main lesson Sinead can teach us is to not go with the instinct of if “some people say” they are crazy, we should dismiss what they are saying, even if they have mental health issues.

The reason this is such a valuable lesson is this is another default procedure of narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths. They lie, trick and trigger their accusers' mental health struggles, so the accuser then looks like the crazy one, when it is usually just the struggle to contain intense righteous anger. Sadly, as many know, pathological narcissists are savants at making the honest accuser seem like the abuser, as they shamelessly gaslight and play the victim, which re-traumatizes the victim.

Amazingly, I think the one thing that Sinead did that impacted me most of all was just one verse from The Emperor’s New Clothes. “Through their own words, they will be exposed. They got a sever case, of the emperor’s new clothes.” While the entire song rocks and is profound, I am not sure if there are another verse in all of music that gave me a better blueprint for how to best understand how to fight lies and evil, and those words only became more prophetic after I learned about narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths. “Through their own words, they will be exposed.” I loved Sinead in so many ways she qualifies, but from the moment I heard those lyrics, she joined my personal hall of fame.

What I didn’t know specifically until her passing was that she herself was a childhood victim of “vicious and extreme” physical, emotional and psychological abuse from her mother. Given Sinead’s description, the evil things her mother perpetrated on her little girl were only things a bitter and sadistic malignant narcissist would do. She never held her or told her she was pretty. She told little Sinead her father leaving them was her fault and repeatedly kicked and beat her. One of Sinead’s brothers confirmed their mother’s full range of abuse.

In reference to a different question, Sinead once said, “I do have a reputation for telling the truth.” Indeed, one did not always agree with her but there was never any doubt that Sinead believed whatever she was saying was for truth and love and light and justice, so she could not fake such allegations.

Another shocking yet not shocking revelation I just learned was that the picture of the Pope that she tore up on SNL that ended her commercial career, was her mother’s picture of the Pope that looked down on her when she was beaten, so that was also a pure act of catharsis and defiance against the church that told her to be a better child, and that her mother was justified in punishing her severely. Who wouldn’t rebel against an institution that said that their abuser was right and they deserved to be punished.

Fortunately, the rational world has caught up with most of Sinead’s prophetic righteous anger at institutions protecting abusers of anyone, let alone children.  If I had to guess, Sinead in a way died of a broken heart with the recent loss of her “true love” son, but what a heart it was.

If you really want to understand what was at the core of Sinead’s life, heart and mental health struggles, I don’t know if I have ever heard a better description of the lost youth of a child of a highly abusive narcissist, or more beautiful plea for kindness and what is needed to move forward than what Sinead published in the Irish Times in 1993, after receiving a lot of hate for doing a no show at a benefit concert.

If you grew up in a similar situation to Sinead, or even if you didn’t, this is a truly profound read on many psychological levels, just as Sinead always was in speaking her truth. She may have been harsh and brutal sometimes, but as she knew all too well, that was a price that had to be paid to stand up for herself and every other good person, as a warrior for truth. She burned so bright. We will miss you Sinead.

Sinéad O’Connor’s advertisement in The Irish Times - June 10th, 1993

My name is Sinéad O’Connor.

I am learning to love myself.

I am deserving.

I deserve to be treated with respect.

I deserve not to be treated like dirt.

I deserve to be listened to.

I am a member of the human race.

I deserve not to be hurt.

My name is Sinéad O’Connor.

I am a woman.

I have something to offer.

I am and have always been carrying a lot of grief for my lost childhood.

And for the effects of its horror and violence on my life.

I am grieving the loss of my mother and father.

I am grieving the loss of my brothers and sister.

The division of my family.

The loss of my SELF.

My own inner child

Who is really me.

(Remember you do not know me).

Who was tortured and abandoned and spat at and abused.

Who has been beaten naked until she was bruised.

Who has grown up with no sense of self-esteem.

No sense of trust.

No ability to be intimate

and who therefore is in very great pain

which needs to be looked at and worked through and expressed.

So that I can be free of its effects on my life.

Which are many and varied.

I have been experiencing the need to be held.

Which I have realized

Is the governor of all my behaviours.

Both productive and destructive.

This is why I didn't show up on Saturday . . .

I find it hard to be myself.

To show my feelings.

To get to the joy I need to release the pain which is blocking me.

If I don’t do this I will not survive.

If I don’t do this I’ll never be the singer I am capable of being

if only I can love myself.

If only I can fight off the voices of my parents

and gather a sense of self-esteem.

Then I’ll be able to REALLY sing.

Which is what I want more than anything else in the world.

Recovery has always been my only goal.

I have used my voice

in every way.

It is my life.

The only thing I put even before my son.

I’ve run away from the pain of not having been held

For all my life.

Until now.

And when the feelings of loss came up this time

I decided not to run away but to go with them.

Feel them and release them

So as to be free of them.

I had to be myself.

I couldn’t deal with being “Sinéad O’Connor” for the day.

I have become very self-conscious and frightened

as a result of being “famous”

One doesn’t see one’s self reflected in the mirror.

I lost my Self.

I cannot sing

until I’m ready to be myself.

And here’s how you could help.

Stop hurting me please.

Saying mean things about me.

I’ve been in public since I was only twenty.

Still a very sad baby.

But I could sing then because I wasn’t frightened.

I know I’ve been angry

but I’m full of love really

do you think you could stop hurting me?

It is suffocating me.

Please?

It’s an accident that I got “famous”. But I think it proves that there

are a lot of people out there like me.

It is their pain, which they hear and see also in me — being expressed

which made them respond to that song or to my songs or my voice.

I represent a group of people.

Adult-Children we are called.

Those of us who have lost our childhoods.

We make up 96% of the human race believe it or not.

We are in very great pain.

Which if it is to be healed must be expressed

Or we will continue to turn our grief inwards as we do

until it becomes anger and we self-destruct.

The ways in which we do that are also many and varied!

What goes on in the sitting room goes on in the public arena.

War in Tibet, war in Africa, war in Ireland, war in Bosnia.

Do you know that the Serbian leader’s

parents killed themselves when he was only a nipper.

And he is “acting out” the rage and grief he has never dealt with.

I swear to you that this is true.

What have the other leaders been through?

I’ve been trying to give this information.

Because I know it can help the whole human situation.

I was angry before because I was frightened.

I know if you could really listen

you’d see that we do not know what we are doing.

When we mock the expression of human feeling.

When we scoff at the sound of our children’s keening.

There is a mirror into which we are not looking.

Love, Sinéad O’Connor

When Annie Lennox says you were cool, you were cool.

Bonus Track - Mandinka totally rocks and Sinead tells us her truth of how she could speak out so passionately and push the envelope so much, so young. After all the abuse she endured as a child, she could take a lot of public abuse because it was nothing compared to the shame and pain she faced as a child, but only for a few years, because abuse always takes its toll. “I don’t know no shame, I feel no pain, I can’t see the flame”

Bonus Track - “Don’t Cry For Me Argentina” is an equally if not more beautiful and completely different song and story when Sinead sang it. You can tell she identifies with every word, and Argentina = Ireland. Her version is a heartfelt and passionate telling of her own complicated young life and relationships with her mother, family and her home country of Ireland.

Bonus Track - “Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of ‘Danny Boy’ is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard.” - Joseph Joestar/CNI community

Sinead later said she was put in the wrong genre. She was really “punk.” She certainly had the fire and rage for punk, but the voice of an angel. Nevertheless, this 1990 Live in Rotterdam shows her intense, rocking, captivating stage presence, and great overall eye for attention-grabbing showmanship. In this one beautiful and complex song, I counted 14 different Sineads, in what I think is an all-time great live performance.