IMPERFECT Lady

Elders of the Church

There are no coincidences in life and the fact that I am learning about more and more sexual abuse in my old church while I am reading Alice Miller is profound.

She is literally writing about the hows and the whys that seemingly intelligent functioning adults are unable to stop this behavior…or it seems “Knows” and does nothing.

What I am getting a view of is my family but displayed in a much bigger group, widespread from state to state.

That there is an underlying very pervasive evil preying upon the children, while half the adults sleep and the other are the perpetrators, and all presenting a mask to society of high morals and values, where TV, Music, drinking and drugs, etc are forbidden, where truth and honesty is the way of life….

The grand scale and its history from generation to generation of criminal sexual behavior under the auspices of a religion of high morals and value is mind blowing.

My mother was not an anomaly she was a typical church mother.

And what is so extremely shocking to me is that I didn’t know of it when I was in it. Yet, here is the deal on that…I didn’t leave the church until I had seen the truth of who my father was. So, I guess, their families were like my family we all matched…so we were not outstanding in the fact that the children in the family were abused.

Knowing that my father abused the neighbors and the neighbor’s parents were in the church and did nothing shows to me, that they too didn’t find this shocking or something that should be presented to the law of the land.

Again, I felt I lived in this little nest of incest with neighbors that I later found out had their own nests, but that we were the ‘odd’ ones in the church. But 6 years later, I am finding out that we are far from odd, but perhaps just normal parishioners.

In Alice’s book she speaks of forgiveness in how I seen it work in the church and how it actually is the juice that keeps the evil in the pulpits and on the church boards, literally running the church while raping the children.

“Can forgiveness for the crimes done to the child be not just ineffective but actively harmful? It certainly can because the body does not understand more precepts. It fights to make our conscious minds admit the truth and transcend our denial of genuine feelings. This is something children cannot afford to do. They have to deceive themselves and turn a blind eye to their parent’s crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to repress their feelings. But if they do, the price they pay is high. Either they ruin their own health or make others foot the bill.”

“A therapist who has forgiven his parents for the cruelty they showed him may feel the urge to suggest this same remedy to his clients. In so doing, he is exploiting their dependence and their trust. If he is not in touch with his own feelings at all, he may indeed be unaware that he is doing to others what was once done to him. In suggesting forgiveness as a solution, the therapist is abusing and confusing others, while rejecting any kind of responsibility for his actions. He is convinced that he is acting for their own good. Are not all religions unanimously in their conviction that forgiveness is the path to Heaven? Was not Job ultimately reward for the fact that he forgave God?”

“Unlike children, adult patients have a choice. They can leave a therapist once they have seen through his deception and self-deception….”

“To break through this vicious cycle we need to understand that so-called love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And if it requires new victims it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me and take it out on innocent people because now I know what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.” Alice Miller

What is so vastly incredible is that the one thing a child needs to heal is not offered to him in that church, instead the only thing that is offered is the forgiveness of sins and the fourth commandment…”to love and Honor thy parents”.

It is no wonder to me, as a person who has lived in the system, who was abused and left untreated there, and has witnessed the responses of my siblings, that this vein of power is still in play, whether you leave the church or not, it will take Herculean power to stop the mind set of forgiving sexual crimes and not passively accept love hurts.

As long as forgiveness is preached, children will suffer abuse from the elders of the church.

Children will suffer.

From Alice Miller’s book “The Body Never Lies,” she writes…

“My attempts to persuade the Vatican of the importance of early childhood experiences have revealed how impossible it is to arouse feelings of compassion in men and women who right at the beginning of their lives learned to suppress their genuine, natural feelings so mercilessly that there is no trace of them left in their conscious minds. All curiosity about the feelings of others has been stifled. It seems that people who were physically mutilated in early life immure themselves in a fortress deep inside themselves, where they can only pray to God. It is to Him that they delegate all their responsibility, and they carefully obey the precepts of the church so as not to be punished by this “loving” God for any sins of omission they might commit.”

“Shortly after the capture of Saddam Hussein in late 2003, the Vatican was largely instrumental in orchestrating the sudden increase, all over the world, of voices expressing compassion for the unscrupulous tyrant who had been such an object of fear and loathing while he was still at large. But in my view we cannot simply allow ourselves to base our judgment of tyrants on ordinary compassion for the individual, if that means disregarding things they have done.”

“As biographers Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie tell us in their 1990 book “Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf”, Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937. He grew up in a peasant family living in penury near Tikrit. They had no land of their own. His biological father died before his birth. His stepfather, a shepherd, constantly humiliated the boy, calling him “son of a whore” and “son of a bitch,” beating him mercilessly and tormenting him in the most brutal way imaginable. To exploit young Saddam’s working capacity to the full, he forbade him to go to school until the boy was ten. Instead, he would wake him in the middle of the night and tell him to guard the flocks. In these formative years, children develop and image of the world. Ideas take shape in their minds about the values that are worth upholding in life. At the same time, they begin to cherish desires and dream of their fulfillment. For Saddam, the slave of his stepfather, these desires all centered around one thing; limitless power over others. In his brain the idea presumably took shape that he could regain the human dignity he had been so radically deprived of only by possessing the same power over others that his stepfather had over him. Throughout his childhood, there were no other ideals, no other examples to live up to, only the omnipotent stepfather and himself, the defenseless victim of the terror inflicted on him. It was in line with this pattern that the adult Hussein later organized the structure of the country he ruled over. His body knew nothing but violence.”

“Every dictator denies the suffering of his childhood and attempts to forget them by indulging his megalomania. But the unconscious mind of an individual has completely registered his biography in the cells of the body, it will at some point urge that individual to confront the truth. After the coalition invasion, despite the immense financial resources at his disposal, Saddam sought refuge precisely in the vicinity of the place where he was born, the place where all help was denied him as a child, a highly precarious spot that could not provide real protection. The fact that he should have chosen this place to “go to ground” reflects the desperate plight of his early years and clearly illustrates the power of compulsive repetition. His return to his childhood was the return to the place where he had no chance to escape.”

“there is conclusive evidence that the character of a tyrant will not change as long as he lives, that he will abuse his power in a destructive way as long as he encounters no resistance. The point is that his genuine aim, the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it, as long as one denies the suffering it involved. Accordingly, a dictator’s efforts to achieve that aim are doomed to failure. Compulsive repetition will always reassert itself. And an endless succession of victims is forced to pay the price.”

“With his own behavior, Hitler demonstrated to the world the kind of person his father was and the kind of treatment he suffered at his hands when he was a child: destructive, pitiless, ostentatious, merciless, boastful, perverted, self-enamored, shortsighted, and stupid. In his unconscious imitation he was faithful to his father’s example. For the same reason, other dictators like Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Ceausescu, Idi Amin, Saddim Hussein behaved in a very similar way. Saddam’s biography is a striking example of how extreme humiliation in childhood is avenged on thousands and thousands of victims at a later date. The refusal to learn from these facts may be grotesque, but the reason for refusal are not difficult to identify.”

“ The fact is that an unscrupulous tyrant mobilizes the suppressed fears and anxieties of those who were beaten as children but have never been able to accuse their own fathers of doing so. Their loyalty to these fathers is unswerving, despite the torments suffered at their hands. Every tyrant symbolizes such a father, the figure whom the abused children remain attached to with every fiber of their being, hoping that one day they will be able to transform him into a loving parent by being blind.”

“This hope may have been what prompted the representation of the Roman Catholic Church to demonstrate their compassion for Hussein. In 2002, I turned to a number of cardinals for support when I presented the Vatican with material on the delayed effects of spanking and asked authorities there to do what they could to enlighten young parents on this subject. As I have said, not one of the cardinals I approached with this request showed the slightest interest in the universally ignored but crucially important issue of physically abused children. Nor did I come across the slightest indication of Christian charity or compassion in connection with this issue. Today, however, those same representatives are eager to show that they are indeed capable of compassion. Significantly, however, this compassion is lavished not on maltreated children or on Saddam’s victims but on Saddam himself, on the unscrupulous father figure that the feared despot symbolizes.”

“As a rule, beaten, tormented, and humiliated children who have never received support from a helping witness later develop a high degree of tolerance for the cruelties perpetrated by parent figures and a remarkable indifference to the sufferings borne by children exposed to inhumane treatment. The last thing they wish to be told is that they themselves once belong to the same group. Indifference is a way of preserving them from opening their eyes to reality. In this way they become advocates of evil, however convinced they may be of their own humane intentions. From an early age they were forced to suppress and ignore their true feelings. They were forced to put their trust not in those feelings but solely in the regulations imposed on them by their parents, teachers, and the church authorities. Now the task facing them in their adult lives leaves them no time to perceive their own feelings, unless those feelings happen to fit in precisely with the patriarchal value system in which they live and which prescribes compassion for the father, however destructive and dangerous he may be. The more comprehensive a tyrant’s catalogue of crimes is, the more he can count on the tolerance, provided his admires are hermetically closed off from access to the sufferings of their own childhood.” Alice Miller.

What a brilliant cycle this abuse is, for the circuitous madness not looking creates. How nature creates ways in which our mind can overrun our realities for survival and yet this very technique is what allows it to continue.

The hurt child ends up hurting children and the hurt children who don’t want to feel their pain ends up seeing the ‘heroic’ adult and not the monster.

It takes Herculean efforts to go with the body of truths and swing wide of society, church and family to see reality.

Imagine a world full of delusional adults who carry a false picture of their formative years, they will not be able to spot a monster in their presence?

No matter not how detailed his catalogue of crimes are, what matters most is that his followers, family and friends, haven’t discovered their own box of crimes of childhood…the sightless followers, the ones who love to live in the land of denial will not see his crimes.

It is incredible to me, it isn’t that they are not seeing what is going on today, but the long ago blindness that makes them unconscious supporters of evil.

You simply are incapable of seeing in the present if you didn’t see in the past.

And the sheer volume of people refusing to deal in the past wrecks havoc on today’s reality.

While I screamed loudly about the present, they clung to the vestiges of their ‘happy childhood’.

Who knew that holding tight to a ‘happy childhood’ could cause so much pain!

By not seeing who you really are you are incapable of seeing the truth in others…and this works so well for the monsters among us.

Who will stop them?

What will make the blind see, how much destruction has to be spread around the planet, before we can begin to see that children are not born this way, the parents are the cause.

As long as we don’t see the suffering children, children will suffer.

Little Girl is Lost.

(reposting this for my brother)

On Facebook, a former classmate made a comment about a woman who was married to a pedophile, but is now divorced, that if she doesn’t step forth, “She must be dillusional! If she doesn't speak up against him and lets him get off again, it will be simply inexcusable!

The word delusional struck me, so I had to look it up.

-the act of deluding : the state of being deluded 2 a: something that is falsely or delusively believed or propagated b: a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary; also: the abnormal state marked by such beliefs ...

Wow, she is right, the wife is delusional.

I felt it as an attack to call her delusional and to hold her accountable for whether he goes free or not.

I tried to write a few comments, and then thougth I better explore this delusional thing.

What I failed to see is that the whole dance of child sexual abuse is a dance into delusion.

The ex-wife of this man ran away with him at 16, she was very much a child still.

The dance into delusion doesn’t start with revealing the monster first, instead you are introduced to a man who is charming and attentive, he is grooming you into delusion.

Somehow he feeds us a false sense of who he is and a feeling of being special with his attention.

What vital information is left out is the ultimate goal, the prize at the end, our bodies for him.

Perhaps it is hard for us to see ourselves so unworthy in another’s eyes, when indeed it is true.

There must be something that happens then that we will not change our minds. Does he then return to the nice attentive man?

What I hadn’t really understood, was that we FIRST had a wonderful image and belief of who he was, and we didn’t want that first niceness to shatter.

My mother said repeatedly, “It hurts me when you speak of him that way.” She couldn’t even say the word pedophile or repeat monster.

She didn’t fail to see him, she failed to give up her first impressions of him.

She became delusional when the indisputable evidence to the contrary arrived and she didn’t allow it in her mind.

I recall saying that her strength was her blindness, it seemed just absurd that she could hold on to a loving image of this man.

When you see her as delusional, it is hard to expect a different outcome.

What I know for sure is the drop out of delusion is a long fall into a sea of horror and pain, swirling madness and disbelief to see the juxtaposition our minds had against reality, the contrary is wide and vast.

What you are asking of these girls is to switch their hero for a monster, to feel worthless.

Delusion is a perferable place to sleep, you can delude yourself and escape the pain of reality.

It becomes like a drug of choice, to live in delusion, free of pain, suffering and knowing, in a land where ‘love’ abounds where the mask of normal is firmly put in place.

Yet our body feels the precarious ledge we are on, the razor sharp narrow line of where delusion ends and reality begins.

Our whole lives work to keep the delusion alive.

And in the end it is all for naught, a monster roams free, and a little girl is lost.

A New Legacy to Begin.

“There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”
Soren Kierkegaard

I did yoga today, only the second time this week, and I felt the stiffening up of my body, the tight joints and the way I seemed to have drifted away from the presence of me.

I fall quickly into a world that has little of me in it…for without taking the time each day, I slip away unnoticed.

My body pays the price; my essence gets left in the background and to the forefront arrives all kinds of reasons to leave it there.

My weakening resolve plays with any lazy excuse and before I know it a week has passed and I have not spent any time with me just for me.

What came to me in yoga today (which is another reason to do yoga, great insights) is that we are greeted into the world and then ‘told’ or highly suggested how this world operates and are then programmed to fit in. We learn life from the eyes and perceptions and actions of our parents.

Imagine instead if we were left to explore on our own, to see freely and build ourselves from the inside out?

Instead our insides desires and passions, questions and interests are put aside due to the ‘knowledge’ our parents have about life.

Instead of us gulping up and witnessing the fresh look at life when babies arrive, we stifle it and bend it and hurt it so that the child’s view of life matches our own.

How backwards and how growth stunting this is to take new fresh energy and make it look old and stiff.

On my mail route I deliver mail to what we would call ultra conservative families, where the woman are dressed as they did on the wagon trails out west, bonnets and long flowing calico dresses.

As this bonnet-wearing woman answers her door, there are children of each age at her legs, and I am amazed that she has gone along with this dress code and submissively is led to live as they did 100 years ago…yet what I know is that each generation before refused changes, refused to see progress and actually applauds the legacy that has held strong regardless of progress all around them.

The youngest ones smile freer, the bit older ones look in awe but with a tinge of fear as they hang back, but the littlest ones meet your eyes and smile wildly for they react naturally untaught.

Along the route are various degrees of ultra conservatives and what I see the most is the absence of children being children, for they are like young adults, doing adult jobs with adult responsibility.

In Alice Miller’s books, her main trust is the lost child, how adults greet it with all their issues and steal away the innocence, the lack of pure enthusiasm, love, peace and joy, and fill it up with all things opposite.

As I completed my yoga, I thought what most of us are craving and thirsty for is the freedom and innocence of babies, to be able to be set free from our parents legacy, to give back our ‘inheritance’ and go it alone.

Imagine a world of grown up newborns…all living life from what they feel and experience instead of what is acceptable by their parents.

The parents are our biggest detriment to society and yet they can also be the biggest factors in change…for by changing my attitude and by me seeing my children, my children will see theirs.

The chain has to be broken in order for it to be fixed.

You can’t fix things at the same level they were created at, says the wise man Einstein, and I agree.

I told my daughter yesterday, I had to leave my family in order for the abuse to stop; I had to leave my family in order to save my children. I had to do what was best for the child, not the legacy of the family

That old legacy had to end in order for a new legacy to begin.

Survivor Self.

The Drama of the Gifted Child – The search of the true self, by Alice Miller.

Here is what she writes on the back cover of the book.

“Far too many of us had to learn as children to hide our own feelings, needs and memories skillfully in order to meet our parent’s expectations and win their “Love.” Alice Miller writes, “When I use the word “gifted” in the title, I had in mind neither children who receive high grades in school nor children talented in a special way. I simply meant all of us who have survived an abusive childhood thanks to an ability to adapt even to unspeakable cruelty by becoming numb…Without this ‘gift’ offered us by nature, we would not have survived.”

These few paragraphs explain my great power to know what others need, but really have no idea my own needs.

“In my work with people in the helping professions, I have often been confronted with a childhood history that seems significant to me.

· There was a mother who at the core was emotionally insecure and who depended for her equilibrium on her child’s behaving in a particular way. This mother was able to hide her insecurities from her child and from everyone else behind a hard authoritarian, even totalitarian façade.
· This child had an amazing ability to perceive and respond intuitively, that is, unconsciously, to this need of the mother or both parents, for him to take on the role that had unconsciously been assigned to him.
· This role secured “love” for the child – that is, his parents’ exploitation. He could sense that he was needed, and this need guaranteed him a measure of existential security.

This ability is then extended and perfected. Later, these children not only become mothers (confidantes, comforters, advisors, supporters) of their own mothers but also take over at least part of the responsibility for their siblings and eventually develop a special sensitivity to unconscious signals manifesting the needs of others. No wonder they often choose to become psychotherapists later on. Who else, without this previous history, would muster sufficient interest to spend the whole day trying to discover what is happening in other people’s unconscious? But the development and perfecting of this sensitivity - which once assisted the child in surviving and now enables the adult to pursue his strange profession – also contains the roots of his emotional disturbance: As long as the therapist is not aware of his repression, it can compel him to use his patients, who depend on him, to meet his unmet needs with substitutes.” Alice Miller

I lived as a great servant for my mother’s needs for at least 40 years and never fully developed my own. This is an odd substitute for being ‘needed’ for our own self, but rather what we can offer to them.

In a section called, The Lost World of Feelings, she writes…

“ On the basis of my experience, I think that the cause of an emotional disturbance is to be found in the infant’s early adaptation. The child’s needs for respect, echoing, understanding, sympathy, and mirroring have had to be repressed, with several serious consequences.

“One such consequence is that person’s inability to experience consciously certain feelings of his own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, or anxiety), either in childhood or later in adulthood. This is all the more tragic that we are concerned here with lively people who are often capable of deep feelings. It is the most noticeable when they describe childhood experiences that were free of pain and fear. They could enjoy their encounters with nature, for example, without hurting the mother or making her feel insecure, reducing her power, or endangering her equilibrium. It is remarkable how these attentive, lively sensitive children, who can for example, remember exactly how they discovered sunlight in bright grass at age four, at eight were unable to ‘notice anything’ or show any curiosity about their pregnant mother or were ‘not at all’ jealous at the birth of a sibling. It is also remarkable how, at the age of two, such a child could be left alone and ‘be good’ while soldiers forced their way into the house and searched it, suffering the terrifying intrusion quietly without crying. These people have all developed the art of not experiencing feelings, for a child can experience her feelings only when there is somebody there who accepts her fully, understands her, and supports her. If that person is missing, if the child must risk losing the mother’s love or the love of her substitute in order to feel, then she will repress her emotions. She cannot even experience them secretly, “just for herself”; she will fail to experience them at all. But they will nevertheless stay in her body, in her cells, stored up as information that can be triggered by a later event.”

“Throughout their later life, these people will have to deal with situations in which these rudimentary feelings may awaken, but without the original connection ever becoming clear. The connection can be deciphered only when intense emotions have been experienced in therapy and successfully linked with their original situation.”

“Take, for example, the feelings of abandonment – not that of the adult, who feels lonely and therefore turns to alcohol or drugs, goes to the movies, visits friends or makes ‘unnecessary” telephone calls in order to bridge the gap somehow. No, I mean the original feelings in the small infant, who had not of these means to distract and whose communication, verbal or preverbal, did not reach the mother because his mother herself was deprived. For her part, she was dependent on a specific echo from the child that was essential to her, for she herself was a child in search of a person who could be available to her.”

“However paradoxical this may seem, a child is a the mother’s disposal. The mother can feel herself the center of attention, for her child’s eyes follow her everywhere. A child cannot run away from her as her own mother once did. A child can be brought up so that it becomes what she wants it to be. A child can be made to show respect; she can impose her own feelings on him, see herself mirrored in his love and admiration, and feel strong in his presence. But when he becomes too much, she can abandon that child to a stranger or to solitary confinement in another room.”

“When a woman has had to repress all these needs in relation to her own mother, they will arise from the depth of her unconscious and seek gratification through her own child, however well-educated she may be. The child feels this clearly and very soon forgoes the expression of his own distress. Later, when these feelings of being deserted begin to emerge in the therapy of the adult, they are accompanied by intense pain and despair. It is clear that these people could not have survived so much pain as children. That would have been possible only in an empathic, attentive environment, which was lacking. Thus all feelings had to be warded off. But to say that they were absent would be a denial of the empirical evidence.”

“Several mechanisms can be recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. In addition to simple denial, we usually find the exhausting struggle to fulfill the old, repressed, and by now often perverted needs with the help of symbols (cults, sexual perversions, groups of all kinds, alcohol, or drugs). Intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well, since it is a defense mechanism of great power. It can have disastrous results, however, when the mind ignores the vital messages of the body. All these defense mechanisms are accompanied by repression of the original situation and emotions belonging to it.”

“Accommodation to parental needs often (but not always) leads to the “as-if personality” this person develops in such a way that he reveals only what is expected of him and fuses so completely with what he reveals that one could scarcely guess how much more there is to him behind this false self. He cannot develop and differentiate his true self, because he is unable to live it….” Alice Miller.

The last few words, ‘because he is unable to live it…is the root reason it never develops, instead the only self we know is the survivor self.

I Run, Because you can't.

“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way and not starting.”
Buddha

I felt the loneliness today of my Aunt who ran away. A woman I never met, yet I feel we are one.

I felt her sadness of being misunderstood and unknown, how her choice to save herself, sentenced her to a life alone outside of her family.

Ostracized for escaping, for saving ourselves, for walking free of abuse, we are not cheered, no clapping instead we are jeered with sarcasm.

I never ever thought my harshest critics would be from my own family, they are forever punching the already weakened psyche.

The Little girl within feels so sad, empty of words to make them see.

Today I wondered about my Aunt and her life, how she survived without contact from her family, yet like me the family she missed is the same one that brings her pain.

The intellectual part of me understands that the energy they bring me isn’t healthy, but my heart yearns for acceptance, for understanding and even empathy.

Like missing the stick that is poking you in the eye.

I have more empathy for folks who are set aside because of who they are, parts of themselves they cannot change.

Maybe because my Aunt disappeared and no one spoke her name that I want there to be words about me.

Perhaps this blog is a way that I too will not just simply disappear without a trace. (www.imperfectlady.typepad.com)

In the first few days of my father being accused of criminal sexual conduct, I wrote.

I wrote in disbelief, I wrote the words to anchor myself somewhere, to hold me in the sea of grief.

Writing is evidence of my journey.

I have kept all written communications from my family as evidence. I know that is an odd word to use.

It was the evidence I needed to sort out which one of us was in reality and which one wasn’t.

My mental mind fought a long hard battle up against reality and in reality there are written words from a family who is not cheering me.

In as much as I want them to be cheering, what I needed more were their words of mental ness to shine the way out.

Maybe in the end their shouts of sarcasm are cheering me forward.

They are showing me there is nothing for me back there.
They were showing me how not to be.
Showing me how far I have come.

I feel the energy of my runaway aunt; she joins me in spirit as I run along, lending me her courage and strength. I feel the spirit of many little girls whose time ran out, who were too empty to begin, I run for you.

I run towards wholeness with truth at my side.
I feel you with me as I run.

The refrain “you are the wind beneath my wings” came to mind.

I am so grateful I was able to run away.
I am so not alone.
All little girls everywhere who suffered like I, I run for you.
I run, because you can’t.

Kept this Pattern Going.

Being a mother in the middle and having a generation before me and a generation below me puts me in a great place to witness the intricacies of how relationships are formed and how the legacy is passed on.

Being aware of the legacy you are in while you are in it is near impossible…it takes stepping out to get a clear view.

I leaped out of my childhood legacy when my mother’s moral tower displayed her husband of 49 years as a pedophile, it was then I knew the generation before me, and sadly I could also see the generation beneath me and how one man had touched two generations while my mother loved him.

I saw him in his truth, her in her truth, and then me in mine.

I saw the river that flowed beneath all of us and the only way to escape that river is to see what you are swimming in.

Within me lay all the layers of teaching and years of treatment and formation, in horror I saw her in me…

Within a few days I was able to see the structure of our family and how it all was flimsily held together and how each insane idea supported another insane concept, the maze was intricately held together by unquestioning authority.

To see the shocking truth of a pedophile father and the undying “love” of his wife towards him, shatters the scaffolding that I had built called me.

I saw my own insanity.

I then saw how insanely I had treated my children based upon the morals and values of a woman who ‘loved and supported’ a pedophile.

Stuck in the middle with an insane woman above me, mistreated children below me and me aware, I then had to unhitch myself from her teachings and long held beliefs while continuing to raise children but change everything.

In the middle, I knew I couldn’t change my mother, but I had a chance at redoing me and then I had the hope that if I could, my children would then repattern themselves after the new me.

What a tight spot to be in, yet with great freedom.

I knew intuitively that they felt my every move.

Where in the past I had blindly trampled upon their lives, I now knew that I could inflict pain or raise their soul.

It has been my intentions, while not always successful, to see the children.

To be very conscious of how my choices in life impacted theirs.

For we are all strung on the same string, the string called family legacy.

You simply can’t escape the line of your parents, but you can change the dance steps, the outcome, and the way you live your life.

It takes great strength and courage to see the insanity of an abusive family and to see the traces poking out in you, to own your insane madness and to feel the rage of injustice, and the unknowingness of being a child and following along, with love, trust and faith.

I found myself pretty much empty of good value, and had to start from scratch building my own tower of morals and values, and I started with the foundation of truth.

I began building a whole new structure using the pieces of insanity, for its denial is what has kept this pattern going.

Alice Miller, again. I love her fearlessness.

Chapter 4 in Banished Knowledge by Alice Miller titled “Why I Reject Psychoanalysis Also as a Therapy Method.”

“Following my interview for the April 1987 issue of the German Journal Psychologie heute (Psychology Today), in which I declared my break with psychoanalysis, I was asked several times whether I didn’t owe psychoanalysis the means that enabled me to query it. Today I can answer this question with a clear No. As recently as in my preface to the first German edition of “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware”, I succumbed to the error myself. Yet later developments showed me unmistakably that psychoanalysis is a maze from which it is very difficult to find a way out. Without the illusionary help of psychoanalysis, which further the resistance to knowledge about past events, there is no doubt that I would have found my way to the truth sooner.”

“I owe my first awakening to the spontaneous pictures that I began to paint in 1973. Nevertheless, even years later, 1981, I still closed my eyes to the fact that psychoanalysis was the very thing that kept me away from feelings blocked since my childhood and thus from the truth. I didn’t discover this until, thanks to J. Konrad Stettbacher’s method, I could approach my childhood step by step.”

“What I find most convincing about this method is its openness to creativity, its precision, its effectiveness, its verifiability, and its respect for the uniqueness and special quality of each individual life and history. Since it makes the path to reality possible and is not afraid of reality, it is free of lies, of being enmeshed in any way with them, free of clichés, pedagogy, moralizing norms, spiritual mystifications, and any and all associated ideological trimmings.”

“On the other hand, there is proof that these elements are present in psychoanalysis, and I have supplied such proofs in my earlier books. Today I realize: It was an illusion to believe that the remains of pedagogy could be removed from psychoanalysis, leaving it still suitable for the liberation of those seeking help. It is no coincidence that psychoanalysis has not yet undertaken any revision of it immanent pedagogy; it cannot do this, for as soon as the pedagogic scaffolding is removed the whole structure will collapse like a house of cards. Since in the past psychoanalysis has served only to disguise childhood traumas, how can it be expected to help abused children? This inability is revealed not only in its theory but also in every detail of its technique – which is useless for getting at the truth.”

“Even if some analysts do wish not to manipulate their patients according to theories and pedagogic morality, but wish instead to accompany them in the discovery of their history, they are bound to fail as long as they work with the method of free association. This method, also known as a basic rule, reinforces intellectual resistance to feelings and reality; for as long as feelings can be talked about they cannot really be felt. And as long as feelings are not felt, the self-damaging blockages remain.”

“Both basic rules – the psychoanalytic setting as well as the method of free association – assume that on the one side there is a superior, informed interpreter, the analyst, and on the other the uninformed patient to whom the analyst explains his situation, his unconscious desires, thoughts and impulses. For the analyst to be able to do this, the patient must as it were uncover, betray, and expose his unconscious with the aid of free association. Thus the authoritarian structure of childhood is preserved unthinkingly in both basic rules. Parents, too, told the child from their perspective how he felt, or how he was supposed to feel, and the child believed that they knew better than he did.”

“On the basis of the pedagogic model, indissolubly coupled as it is with Freudian constructs, the student analysands learn to discuss the patient’s emotions and “to be in the know,” but never to feel anything themselves. No wonder they in turn cannot enable anyone else to feel anything. The patient senses that inability and as a rule will not dare to admit any feelings. If he does, perhaps because he has read books that for the first time opened up some access to his pain, he will quickly learn in psychoanalytic practice to bring order into his suffering, to define it with abstract words, and to manipulate it so as to ‘feel better’ again. He will sense that the interpreters of his soul feel threatened by emotions, because in their constructs they have learned only how to fend them off, and he will do anything to avoid exposing his substitute parents to this threat. He will adapt to their method of free association and talk to them about his feelings without realizing that he is letting himself in for years and years of wandering about in a maze, while in the meantime he is missing his chance of living. For his benumbed life cannot awaken until the child’s confrontation with the authors of his suffering begins; until the patient ceases to philosophize and wonder why his parents did this or that to him and instead begins, with the aid of numerous transferences, to uncover what exactly they did do; until in therapy he can finally confront his internalized parents with his suffering; until with each new pain reminding him of the old one he tries to tell himself what he is feeling and then tests the situation. Just as Daniel did. That which the unharmed child can externalize with his reference persons in reality, the once harmed adult has to try out and learn within the protective setting of therapy. How this works in each case has been made clear in Stettbacher’s description of his method.”

“ It is not possible for someone really to clarify his situation and dissolve his fears until he can feel them rather than discuss them. Only then is the veil lifted and he realizes his true need: not a tutor, not an interpreter, not a confuser; he needs space for his own growth and the company of an enlightened witness on the long journey on which he has set out.”

“Someone who has himself never learned to feel will not know that he makes it impossible for the other person, the patient to feel. It is enough, for instance, to explain to the patient the distress of his parents or of other people for all the patient’s latent reproaches to be instantly silenced. He hasn’t any, he isn’t aware of any, all he feels is pity for the authors of his distress. For it is impossible to feel the pain and at the same time understand why it was inflicted. Once simply does not feel it.”

“It took me years to get away from this “understanding” attitude. The habit, originating in psychoanalysis, of working with free associations proved to be a great obstacle in my own therapy. Time after time, free association enabled me to establish ingenious, intellectual links and thus obtain what I imagined was an overview. This helped me to evade the painful confrontation with my parents and in turn blocked all the avenues through which I might have gained some insight into the reality of my childhood. As long as I could put a name to my feelings, I retained the mastery over the child in me, and making it impossible for her to find her language, the language of hitherto unnamed sensations and feelings. The technique of the four steps helped me become aware of this blockage because I found that, significantly I tended to skip the first two steps. Finally, after a long time, I could allow the child in me to express her sensations and feelings and to take her time doing so. But she could feel only when the adult, educated part of me allowed this to happen and without interference of explanations and associations.”

“This experience helped me to discover that Freud, with his method, created a system of self-deception that functioned reliably to promote repression. Anyone who does not want to know the truth of his life will find psychoanalysis helpful. In any case he will be helped to reinforce the old resistance to the injuries suffered in childhood and never find out the truth about what happened.”

“Philosophers and other intellectuals have fashioned numerous ways of keeping pain at a distance with the aid of thoughts and of disregarding the realities of life with the aid of an ostensibly defining language. In fact, Martin Heidegger made this is goal of his philosophy. He touched on his former painful and denied experiences only with abstract thoughts that excluded any feelings of the child since the child would have recognized the self-deception. For him there was no duality of passion and thought but only passionate thought, which did not advance toward truth as a result of the thinking process but was itself the goal. It is said that, to make this clear, he once told his students, on introducing Aristotle: “Aristotle was born, worked, and died.” In other words: It is the philosopher’s work that counts not his life.”

“Until a few years ago I might have thought that Heidegger’s error could be regarded has harmless and unimportant as long as his philosophy was not used to confuse the masses. But today I am no longer sure, for recently I have received some proofs to the contrary – among other things, letters from several woman philosophers writing to tell me that, through my books, they had for the first time grasped to what extent philosophy had kept them away from the truth. Its complicated thought processes had helped them not to see that they had been abused children. In spite of the suffering that now erupted, they were glad not to have completely missed the chance to live their lives, for they were still young enough to make use of it.”

“It is possible for a child to protect himself all through life from the tragic, unbearable truth by “passionate thinking” about “the nature of truth” and, as long as his symptoms do not sound the alarm, there the matter rests. However, psychoanalysis is a system that offers the very people who have symptoms to escape from their plight. That is why such people must be told that they can expect no solution from psychoanalysis. The most they can expect is a maze of well-intended paths but with no exit into freedom. It is a prison built with theories of a man who a century ago found himself in the same quandary as most patients do today. To escape insight into martyrdom of his childhood, he fled into the garden of thought constructs, and for a while his symptoms disappeared. But they came back despite increasing efforts to keep the artificial structure from collapsing.”

“Galileo went blind after being forced by the Church to repudiate the truth against his better knowledge. Sigmund Freud forbade himself to voice the truth he had discovered about child abuse and its effects on the psyche of the adult. He betrayed his own discovery after his father’s death. When I read that he later suffered from cancer of the jaw and that after many operations he finally died of it, I have to ask myself whether his jaw was not rebelling on behalf of the truth on which he chose to turn his back. Although my question is to be regarded as a hypothesis which, in the absence of the person involved, I cannot put to the test, I have noticed that, among the innumerable analysts who are so fond of handing out interpretations to their dependent patients, not one of them, as far as I know, has yet published an interpretation of Freud’s illness. Are the disciples not permitted even to wonder why a venerated father figure contracted cancer of the jaw? May interpretations be given only to dependent persons – children and patients? Doesn’t this amount to admitting that interpretations are weapons used against the helpless but not against authority held in awe? Patients are fed all kinds of constructs by the old man and believed that this is genuine nourishment. They believe everything because they need someone who will at last listen to them. And they do not see through the abuse because someone who in childhood experienced nothing but abuse is unable later in life to see through it.”

“The man who was no longer allowed to utter the truth instead wrote volume after volume whose style was universally admired and whose contents led humanity into utter confusion. So “passionate thinking” is by no means as harmless as it appears. In my opinion, everything that suppresses the truth is destructive, even if the consequences cannot be fully realized until much later.”

“In my view, Stettbacher succeeded in finding a way to the injured child in the adult, letting that child express himself with the aid of feelings, and in conceptualizing this way of experiencing the past. This is not to say that there can be no other methods that, based on the same insight into early injuries, enable the same goal to be achieved. The efficacy of various methods will become apparent as soon as publications on the subject become available.”

“Yet one thing remains certain: Since the injured child in us can express himself only by means of physical sensations and feelings related to his traumas, it is essential that therapy secure access to these sensations and feelings and enable the person to articulate them. However, this access remains completely blocked whenever we are satisfied with intellectual speculations, as is the case in psychoanalysis. No matter how impressive and fashionable these speculations may be, they never go beyond the state of self-deception.”

“The invoking of great names such as Freud, Jung, Adler, and others as well as the application of their theories – theories that resist emotions and conceal the truth- cannot possibly help a therapist to rid a patient permanently of his neurosis. They will only produce new, emotion-resistant and ignorant “therapists” who cannot but remain ignorant as long as they cling to fictions, do not query what they once learned, are afraid of the truth, and wish to exert power.”

“The goal of therapy is to allow the once silenced child in us to speak and feel. Gradually the banishment of our knowledge is revoked, and in the course of this process, as the erstwhile torments and the still-existent prisons become evident, we also discover our history, ourself, and our buried capacity for love. A therapy of this kind can be carried out only by a therapist, female or male, who no longer keeps the child in himself and that child’s knowledge in a state of banishment or who at least is moving in that direction – because he wants at all costs to find the truth about himself.” Alice Miller.

Our Abusive Parents Loved Us.

Tinogona, It is Achievable! Tererai Trent

Sometimes it is hard to grasp the how or to figure out the way, but all that is needed is the faith in that it can happen.

Surrendering the details up to the Universe and just keep our energy and focus and feeling in ‘it is achievable’ for Who is on our side.

As I sit and begin to hear and know more of the abuse that is running rampant in families and how their legacy goes on for generation upon generation, I feel an overwhelming weight of not just turning one person, but their whole pathology.

A child sits so young and malleable, so impressionable and is being taught the pedagogy of his ancestors most of which have suffered as he is, having been raised by adults who have failed to see their own pathology.

To reach the child, it seems we have to sway the adult, to appeal to the wounded child within, to get the fearful hurt confused essence to hear our words.

What I must remember, is that I heard… I was able to resonate with the words one brave little girl spoke, so perhaps, the children will lead this parade.

Alice Miller speaks of an enlightened witness and the word enlightened means,

1. rational: free of ignorance, prejudice, or superstition
2. well informed: having a sound and open-minded understanding of all the facts, or based on such an understanding
3. having achieved great spirituality: having achieved the realization of a spiritual or religious understanding.

I love the first two meanings, for without them, you can’t achieve spiritual understanding, for I believe that real spirituality is having an open mind that understands all of the facts.

Being an Enlightened Witness for a child means that you will report to the Authorities so that they can question the child. Sadly, our system is set up so that the child has to be the one to start this ball rolling, and perhaps it is they that are the strongest among us, the least ignorant to the lay of the land within their homes.

By being a parent who is willing to say, that the legacy of abuse begins with me, is to free the child from having to point this out. Children are dying and suffering all to keep an image of a good parent, even when all evidence is to the contrary.

It is achievable to stop the legacy of abuse, if we all stand up and speak the truth of what is going on in our homes, for the shame to fall upon the adults and leave the children to be free and innocent.

As it stands now, the children are suffering silently due to the silence of so many knowing adults.

What is your pathology? How was it being a child of your parents? However you were treated as a child, you will ‘naturally’ parent that way, for it was what was taught to you.

In order to change this pathology, you have to see that the parents who raised you were wrong, they did not teach you love, they taught you evil.

It is by becoming enlightened to the facts and by seeing the truth, which you can then stop this insidious disease.

It is spread by ignorance alone…we simply were taught that our abusive parents loved us.

It is achievable to know real love.

Transference

About Transference, by Alice Miller
Tuesday October 14, 2008

"At the beginning of our lives we were, as very small children, totally dependent on our parents. And we believed, we HAD TO believe, that we were loved by them. Even when we were abused we couldn't realize this. Then, after 4 years, we grew up and couldn't avoid suffering from being rejected, hated and treated cruelly. But as dependent children we still could not afford to FEEL this suffering, we were too small to deal with these feelings, thus we had to repress our rage, indignation, and our deep disappointment into our bodies. When we become adult, these repressed feelings stemming from the cruel treatment of our parents may come to the surface, but they are still connected with the small child's fear of being punished for every sign of rebellion.

Should we as adults be treated in the same way as our parents treated us as children, many of us - especially if we have been through therapy - can become aware of the cruelty endured before. But the knowledge of the whole amount of cruelty can still rest repressed because the terror happened when we had not yet a name for it. For this reason we need what we call "the transference", hating for instance another person instead of our mother or father.

The transference is unavoidable if we were once abused children. It can also be highly confusing. But it can be liberating as well if we are ready to see it as a consequence of our early life. If we have summoned the courage to look our outraged, hateful YOUNG parents in the eyes, and to feel the fear of the small child we once were, then the misleading, confusing and defensive role of the transference disappears. We can then strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives. They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever.

If we don't want to become like them we must strive to SEE them as exactly as possible. We can use in this way the transference as a means for discovering the feelings of the small child that we once were and to deepen our understanding for him or her. At this moment the transference becomes our guide that will enable the small child in us to BELIEVE what their body KNEW it's whole life but his mind could never believe: that so much evil and hatred can be directed towards a small, innocent child only because the parents have endured the same and have never questioned this. Alice Miller