Transcript of Tyler Perry: Letting Go - All There Is with Anderson Cooper

A couple months ago, something popped up on my Instagram feed. It was something you said to a woman in an audience when you were sitting with Oprah, and I just wanna play this right now. But this is what you said to a woman named Diane. Diane is here with her sister, Liz. Diane, where are you?

Diane has a question about letting go.

Thank you. So my mom recently died, and sorry. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No.

No. No. No. No. No.

Grief is a very living thing. It visits at random. You can't schedule it. You can't I tried to work it away. I tried to drink it away.

I tried to I booked myself like crazy, and all it did was wait for me to finish. Oh. So so when good. So when it shows up That is good. So so That is good.

So when it shows up, however it shows up, let it let it let it show up.

We are just a couple of days from the anniversary of your mom's death. How how has grief shown up for you? Or how is it showing up right now?

How is it showing up right now? I usually book out this time of year because she died, December 8, 2009. And this time of year is hard for me because she loved Thanksgiving. She loved Christmas. And then her birthday's in February, so it's really a difficult time.

And I woke up yesterday, early in the morning, just feeling my mother, like, really strong, like and sometimes I'll wake up, tears in my ears or just the pillows wet, because I was grieving in my sleep and didn't know it. So yesterday was really, like, I really hard. Like, I'm carrying her and I have this pendant that, went it's shoes, baby shoes, and I I bought it for her, and put all of our initials on the backs of the shoes, my brothers, my sisters. And and she had it. So when she passed, I, had it separated and gave it to all of the kids so we can all carry this with us.

So that's on the nightstand. I'm waking up in the grief, and I'm thinking, okay. It's okay. And I started going back to 15 years ago. And you think 15 years?

Come on, man. 15 years, you should be okay. Right? I thought it was fine this year. I thought, okay.

I can get through this. I can push through it. Until last night, I was being honored at the Paley Center and I'm smiling, taking photos. And I walk up to the press line and the guy's doing an interview, and he's asking me questions, and I'm present, I'm there. And then he holds up a photo of me at 5 years old, and I didn't hear anything else.

Because the photo he showed me, I I immediately saw my mother behind the Polaroid taking it, smiling at me, as I was sitting on a blanket in the backyard. That was it. The rest of the night, I was gone. I was gone. It was too it was, it was powerful and her letting me know she was there, but, also, it's hard to miss people.

It's hard to wanna 1 more hug or 1 more you're okay, you know, you're okay. Because she and I, were even my my brothers and sisters would tell you that I was her favorite. So she and I were, like, lockstep, and we went through a lot of traumas together. And I would do everything I can to make her laugh and happy. So that was, challenging.

So grief shows up when it wants to. You can't no matter what you think, no matter how much time has passed, it'll show up.

You have recently been facing things from your past. How has that been for you? How how because I've I have been doing the same thing and have it has changed my life dramatically just in the last year. And so much of it is trying to develop a companionship with grief and recognizing the little boy that I was and how much that little boy is still so present there and kind of trying to turn to that little boy and bring him back from the place he was hiding.

Bring him back from the place where he was hiding, but also you get arrested in those moments, especially as a child. You you get arrested in that memory, and you hold it even though you think, oh, I'm fine. I'm okay. When it's not processed, when it's not worked through, when nothing's done with it, it is just held. And what happens is it becomes this weight inside of you, and you're holding it and holding it and holding it again.

And then you hit a certain age where it everything comes home, and it's like, woah. Wait a minute. What is that? And I think that's what happened for me. I was, doing really well.

People were people would say, oh, you're so prolific. You're doing so many things. But the truth of the matter is it wasn't about being prolific as much as it was about not dealing with the abuse, not dealing with the pain. And the year my mother died, I it was probably the busiest I'd ever been because I booked myself crazy to try to work my way through all of it. And that works for a while.

I think that that worked all through my twenties thirties and forties, but come 50, there was something inside of me that started to break, and it was all of those traumas that were ripping the seams. Because what I found in these intensive therapy sessions that I the first time in my life ever doing therapy, I went to Arizona in this intensive that you do for 7 days, and I ended up staying 3 weeks because it was so powerful for me. I I walk in the room and I'm talking to this incredible therapist named Christine, and, she tell she said, tell me what's going on. And I said to her, I said, I just feel like something's breaking, and I can't hold it altogether anymore. I feel like and I don't know what it is because everything's okay.

And, I started describing a lot of what I was dealing with, and she said, turn around. I turned around in the office, and there is a a painting of a child that's in the ring that's just sobbing. And then there's another painting of a man, holding an umbrella, holding back the ring. And she started explaining to me about the parts of us, how we're born as these beautiful innocent children. And then this moment comes along where we have traumas and pains in life, and we become this sobbing child.

And then you grow up into an adult and you become this controlling child. That's the guy with the umbrella, and he's holding off the rein, and he's he's trying to hold it all together, but then there comes a point where he can't do it anymore. And when I saw the painting, I lost it because I'm like, that's exactly what I'm doing. And she said to me, do you believe that all of this can be healed? I said, I don't know.

And she says, it can. I promise you. By the time we got through the 1st week, I felt like a different person. Yeah. So it was really, really powerful.

This past year, I felt like the tears are just on the brink and they come at times I cannot control, and it is lovely because I'm feeling for the first time. And I'm trying to kind of turn to that little child and say that I see him and I talk to him now. I try to talk to him a little bit every day, and I realized this voice I've had in my head, it's been keeping me distant from everybody because I've been telling myself to be wary and to be on guard my entire life. And it served me well for a long time, but it's not serving me well anymore.

That's exactly right. And and what happens with age what happens with age is that the the sobbing child begins to just scream and yell. And then with age, the the controlling child, the adult that you are, because that's what we all are. We're all just big children trying to survive. That breaking point is different for many people.

Some people can push past it. Some people can, ignore it. But for me, and it sounds like for you, it had to be addressed. And to hold on to grief and sadness and pain and trauma, at this part of my life for whatever time I have left on this planet is not something I wanna do anymore. I wanna be pure, free, authentic in all of it.

So so that's what I'm leaning into.

I don't know how many people know about your childhood. I I did not know much about it until I I watched this documentary. Your your mom was 13, I believe, when her mom died. Yeah. Gets married at 17 to this man, Emmett is his first name.

You are born when she's 24, and this man brutalized you. He, I mean, he tortured you Yeah. Throughout your childhood.

Yeah. Yeah. I didn't understand it. I didn't know why. I didn't but I I innately felt that this man hated me because I wasn't his kid.

I just knew it from a child. I would ask my mother all the time. I was like, is this my father? Is this my father? And she her answer was always the same.

I hate to tell you that, but, yes, he is your father. And all the way up until the day she died on her deathbed, I asked her. I said, is this man my father? She said, I hate to tell you this, but, yes, he is. Yeah.

After her death though, you learned something else. Yeah.

I did a DNA test, and that test came back, and he's not my father.

And you've been public about it. There was sexual abuse as well, by multiple people view it as as a child. If I could, I'd like to play something that's in the documentary in which you are talking about a a memory you have of being this little boy holding on to a chain link fence. It it's originally I think from, you were talking to Oprah, but it's in the documentary. I just wanna play that.

Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

I remember holding on to a chain link fence and I'm holding so tight my hands are bloody as he's hitting me and I'm I'm holding. Wow. Just trying to hold on for my life. I was so enraged about it in my mind. I see myself running from me.

Wow. And I couldn't get the little boy.

I couldn't get the little boy to come back to me. That was, if I'm not mistaken, it was 2 it's 2010. That's after my mother died. Mhmm. And it was the first time I was able to say a lot of the things that, I hadn't been able to say before.

Because as long as she was alive, the thought of me bringing pain to her or hurting her was I'd rather not even talk about the things that I endured because she would internalize it as as what she didn't do. And, I couldn't bear that.

Did that boy ever come back to you or would did do you feel like that was that a moment where that little boy died and you became something else?

You know, I I think I have said that in the past that I feel like he that part of me died, but what I found in these sessions was that sobbing child that's there's this separation of the 2. And I think that there are people who legitimately legitimately have multiple personality disorder, and they split into different personalities. And if it hadn't been for the grace of God, I don't know where I'd be because that is 1 moment that could make something like that happen from what I understand. But now I know that in in life and going through life and going through grief, going through trauma, you you separate into different individuals as I was talking about the sobbing child, the controlling child. And, and part of the work that I was doing was fusing that child that never came back to me to the adult that I am.

And as you were saying earlier, how you talk to your younger self, you encourage your younger self. That's I often do that now. Talk to him, encourage him, thank him. So I'm gonna take you with me. You're safe now.

We're safe. We're together. Just reminding myself that I'm a whole person, and I don't have to be in these parts.

It makes a difference. When this was proposed, it sounded cheesy to me, like, talk to this little child. I was like, really? Do I have to? I gotta say it it is deeply healing and deeply powerful.

What I found with having my son, it was 5 years after my mother passed because when she died, I felt the most alone in my life, so unloved. I didn't feel like anyone loved me because because I knew she was the only person on the planet that really loved me the way that she did, so when she died I felt like that went with her. And I felt just this incredible isolation until my son was born.

My mom used to quote, a a Scottish philosopher named, I think, McLaren who said, be kind because everybody you meet is fighting a great battle. And my mom actually painted it on a mantle piece on a fire plate. My mom would paint her fireplaces different like, actually paint it herself. She had that saying on a fireplace for a while. And you said something about Emmett, the man who was your stepfather, who you believe was your father early on growing up, who who was so terrible to you, that at a certain point in your mid twenties, you learned his story.

Yeah.

You learned who he had been as a child and what had happened to him as a child. And that allowed you, if not to forgive, to at least understand some of his story.

Yeah.

And that made a difference. And I think that's such an important thing. Everybody we pass on the street is has grief or if they don't, they will. Yeah. And we don't know the battles that they are facing.

Exactly. Right. Yeah. I this is what allowed me to forgive him, which I did. I I really did.

And it also allowed me to give him grace, Because we were talking 1 day, and he was in tears, and he said, you don't know what I've been through. I was like, no. I don't. What he but he couldn't talk. He wasn't the person that couldn't he had a 3rd grade education, so he couldn't express himself through talking.

That's not what he did. He could express himself through building and working and beating and fighting and being angry. But, he was when he was 2 years old this is what I've got from other gotten from other relatives. When he's 2 years old, he was found in the drainage canal, he and his, brother and sister. A white man found them on a horse.

He found them there. This is in rural Louisiana, and they brought them to a 14 year old girl named Mae to raise. And Mae's father, papa rod, was a former slave, and he beat his children. And May, the 14 year old that was raising Emmett, would beat him too. The time and potato sack can beat him if he did anything wrong.

So there there was this cycle of abuse from slavery. So what he knew to do is beat his children, not hug, not love, but beat them. And understanding that didn't make it right. I don't want people to know that. It doesn't make it right.

But for me to get the understanding allowed me the pathway to be able to forgive him and give him grace.

What have you learned in your grief that would be helpful to somebody listening to this?

Oh, gosh. That's really good. What I've learned is that it's it is what it is, and I would try and suppress it or or not cry when it came or just push it to the side. You have to let it visit at will. You have to let it be what it's gonna be so that you can move through it.

And I really do feel like it's a living thing. Like it is a visitor that will knock at the strangest moment at the worst time. I'm like, okay. What is this moving through me? And I would just tell anybody what I've learned about it is you can't fight it.

Let it be. Because in order for it to to get better eventually, it's gotta move through you. I have this friend, her name is Cassie. When my mother died, her father had died and she she really struggled big time with with it. And, he had died many years before.

And I was having a moment 1 year around this time. And I'm talking to her on the phone trying to, you know, find comfort in anything, and she says, you're gonna be okay. You're gonna be okay. I'm like, when? When?

She says, in about 9 years. And I thought, that's not comforting. Why would you tell me that? 9 years. But she was right.

It took her about 9 years to just be okay when the day happened. And for me, it was about 9 years that I was beginning to turn the corner, you know, and it wasn't as it wouldn't show up in a way that it would take my breath away because when my mother first passed, it would literally take my breath away. I'd find myself gasping for air when when I would think about her, or I'd fall asleep and she'd be in my dreams, and I I I would feel myself waking up and I'm fighting to stay asleep so I can just talk to her 1 more time. So yeah. Yeah.

You've said that for a couple years after your mom died, you weren't sure you would survive. You were drinking. You'd said at 1 point that if you hadn't had so many work commitments Yeah. You might not have stuck around.

No. No. That wasn't that wasn't, what what was the point? You know, what was the point? What was the reason?

Again, feeling that level of love leave me and leave me

But but also because all of the so much of the the drive that you had and that

Was about her.

Had was about her. Yeah. I think that's was about providing for her and making sure that she had everything she could ever possibly imagine that she wanted.

Yeah. That was the goal and the purpose. And then when she was gone, so was that desire and that drive to keep pushing and working it hard. You know, the strangest thing was because there was so much trauma, because there was so much poverty, I never thought I had enough for her. I always thought this is not gonna be enough to make sure she's okay, and she never asked me for a thing.

But yeah, losing her was losing the love that I felt, but also losing the purpose to keep working and grinding that hard. Yeah.

Your mom got to see

Yeah.

Everything. Yeah. There's a moment in the documentary where you've opened up your studio and your mom is there with amazing stars, and you look at her and you say, you see what your baby boy did. She saw it. She got to see it all.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was a that was a good moment that night. She, she was having the irony in that is she was having trouble seeing because the diabetes and the things she was dealing with, she was having a lot of trouble being able to see.

So she was she was holding my hand and, we were out going through the stages and she she said everything is so beautiful. And I said, how do you know? Can you see it? She said, I can feel it. You know?

So she was wonderful, man. She was wonderful.

Did

Anderson, I'm angry, man. I'm so angry. I'm so angry. That's a part of the grief too. I'm angry.

That's that's another part that that you have to be careful with when you're, grieving. And this is why around this time of year, I go away because I don't know how it'll show up. But the anger is is, oh god. I remember the first Mother's Day when people are, like, saying happy Mother's Day. I'm, like, I don't even wanna hear it, you know.

And then to see friends who won't even call their mother or talk to their mother, they get the business from me. I'm just like, what is wrong with you? And I I would get angry because I wish I had her. So I'm just I working my way through the stages of grief was hard. I think the anger was the hardest 1.

I have felt this rage, the it's the hard hearted rage of a child. And I remember feeling it as a little kid just terrified when my dad died and stunned but just filled with rage and rage that has continued throughout my entire life. And I think there's it's been fuel in so many things I've done, but it's,

it's hard. I wasn't allowed the rage. I wasn't allowed to to have that, because culturally, just being 6 foot 6 and black, There was this from the time I was in school it was like you're big, get to the back of the line, you're too big. So I wasn't allowed to have that kind of freedom to just be enraged about something. So anger my anger was quiet and, slow slow to to build, but I felt it more with her than anything.

I remember being in some of these sessions and I felt this anger coming up out of me and the therapist, she's sitting a little white woman, she's saying, let it go, let it go. And all I could think of and hear was this you're gonna destroy this room. Don't you can't do that. You're too big. And, by the end of the sessions, we were getting to a point.

1 therapist said to me because you see multiple therapists, but 1 said to me, you deserve to take up as much space on this planet as anyone else because you're here. You don't have to be smaller. You don't have to make yourself smaller, and I was able to just let it all go.

Do you do you cry? I mean, I've never been really a crier. I have been this last year, and I don't know yeah. I feel awkward about it and weird about it and but it bubbles up a lot for me now.

Since I started the this program, it I have wrung myself dry. I just I I constantly go to water thinking about, my mother, my life, my son, how hard I've worked to be here, the cost, the price to be here, all of those things. So but it feels good to be able to cleanse, you know, and, of course, growing up, boys don't cry. You know, you're a man. You're taught to push down every feeling, not really be able to express it.

So to have a 10 year old who is clear in his expressions of what he feels, when he feels joy, when he's upset, we we've given him this great brain of room to be able to come to us in any of those states. So and and when I'm looking at him or hugging him or saying I love you to him or giving him that space or having a conversation with him where he gets to state an opinion or or he gets to have some sort of say in what's going on. All of those moments are helping the little boy that I was healed.

I don't know that I would have been as whatever success I've had, however you define that, I don't know that I would have had the career that I've had if I had been healed earlier on. I don't know if I was not filled with rage and driven by pain, I don't know that I would have worked the level that I've worked at constantly.

Or the courage to do it, yeah. And the same for me, the same for me. So I understand that fully. Oprah and I talk about this all the time. She said to me 1 day, God, I don't know who we would be had we grown up in a house full of love.

Because when I got into this trauma session, the first thing she said to me is, and this I'll never forget, she said, Your success is equal to your trauma. And I forget. She said, your success is equal to your trauma. And I thought, wow. I've had some enormous successes in my life, and I thought, yeah, the traumas are pretty pretty bad too.

You also connect the trauma and your ability as a child to go into kind of other rooms in your head during it with your ability to dream up comedies and dramas and write scripts and work at the level that you have. Things you developed in your mind as a child to cope have served you in your career.

Yeah. I when I when I started these sessions, when we talked about my childhood, she was clear about what happened to you is you had to be hypervigilant. You had to look at 10 things at once to survive. You had to walk in a room and calculate every moment in the room in order to know that you were safe. And that ability is in you as a man.

It's still as strong as it was then. And also my ability to disassociate, it was during those horrible moments that I could leave, like, not literally, but in my mind, be somewhere else. And then when the moment was over, I was come back to myself. But as I'm coming back to myself, I had no memory of what had happened. Like, there'd be a hole in the moments of the memories.

As I got older, it wasn't just happening for bad things. It was happening for good things too. Anything that was heightened in me, I believe, wouldn't be there. Wouldn't remember the moment. So when I write a script, a story, or a movie, I get quiet and I can be in that world for hours and see everything that's happening and and and I can use that this association as now use it as a gift.

So for you right now, just circling back to really how we began, for you right now grief is what? What does grief look like?

For for me right now, grief is a wave. It's a wave. And my prayer for anyone who's going through grief is that it comes in waves. How do you stand on that wave? Do you let it drown you, or do you have the surfboard where you can try and get on it?

Sometimes there are gentle ones where it's just like, wow, that is a wonderful memory. Gosh. That's a wonderful memory. Then it's like, woah. Then last night, I was in a tsunami.

It was a tsunami.

Do you feel your mom for the first time since I was a little kid, I now feel I can feel my dad. I can feel my brother inside me in a way

Yeah.

That I've never experienced before.

Yeah. Yeah. And I I I dare I say this because you made room for it. Because maybe when it was when it was blocked before and you were putting everything away, there was no room for it. But now that you've made room for the grief, you can feel them getting closer.

I understand that so well. I've been cradled by my mother since she's gone, cradled, and it just felt like, what is this feeling? When she first passed, I could I could smell her. I could she was, you know, my senses were actually that close to me. And I'll never forget because she died at 64, December 8th, right around Christmas.

And I I had a dream about, I got that she'd given me a gift, this red air red biwing airplane that she'd given me. And I was like, well, I was so happy that she'd given it to me. I woke up, of course, sad, go downstairs to the Christmas tree. My sister gives me a gift. She said, I bought this for you.

I opened it up, and it is the exact airplane that was in my dream. And and I hadn't told anybody but my aunt. My aunt and I look at each other. I had to leave the room. They're like, what happened?

What my sister's like, what happened? What I do wrong? I just you didn't do anything. I just dreamed about this plane. So I do believe that they are with us.

I do believe that they are close. I I I really, really do believe that.

And you you feel that?

Oh, yeah. I feel it. I feel it. I know it. There's a knowing in it for me.

It it to me, the irony is I pushed all this stuff down so that I wouldn't feel sadness and it left me feeling alone and disconnected from my dad and my brother. But now at 57, I allow myself to feel sadness and that pain which I've been running from and yet it actually makes me feel better. Yeah. It doesn't make sense on paper, but it's it's absolutely the case.

But also at I think at the time of life where you are, you know, with a father and children and older, I think I think you were ready for it now because there are many times when people aren't ready to face it. Or what would you have been now had you been able to touch get in touch with it earlier?

Yeah. Yeah. To somebody who's grieving out there, anything else you would say?

It's gonna be about 9 years. So, no, again, my hope my hope is that we're talking about this. My mother was only 64 when she when she died. And the the last 7 years of her life were really difficult through illness, but also her whole life was just hard. And I don't wanna reduce her life, and I would say this to anyone who's going to greek, don't reduce the person's life to the moment or how they died.

Look lean to the good times and the good moments and the smiles and the laughs. And that's when when grief really overwhelms me, that's what I try to do. That's what I was doing all day today. All day today, I didn't leave the room, after last night. I I stayed in the bed.

I've got photos of her, and I was just thinking about the good times we had and and trying to think myself happy inside of the grief. Leaning into as many good times as we had. The laughs, the smiles with me and my mother at church. Oh, gosh. We love to go to church together.

And I love to see her singing in in the choir, and and she could not sing. She could not carry a note in a bucket, but she would just try singing her heart out, and I would see her happy. This is when I really, really started to lean into God and faith and Jesus is when, I would see her in church happy after all the hell she had just went through the house. She would just be happy and smiling. It's like, God, I need to know this God that makes her feel like that.

So what I would tell people is that lean into lean into the good in it because the grief is gonna be hard. It's gonna be hard.

Tyler Perry, thank you so much.

Candacell, thank you, brother. I appreciate it very much.