IMPERFECT Lady

Production of Evil

I am thinking Alice Miller may be one of my new favorite authors on Childhood and its affects as well as understanding why parents do what they do.

Here is what she writes on the back of her book, "Banished Knowledge"

"The JUngian doctrine of the shadow, and the notion that evil is the reverse of good, are aimed at denying the reality of evil. But evil is real. It is not innate but acquired, and it is never the reverse of good but rather its destroyer...It is not true that evil, destructiveness, and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that evil is always engaged in producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is similarly avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to this production of evil."

Theories as a Protective Shield

“Theories as a Protective Shield” chapter 4, in Banished Knowledge by Alice Miller, she writes…

“The feminist movement will forfeit none of its strength if it finally admits that mothers also abuse their children. Only the truth, even the most uncomfortable, endows a movement with the strength to change society, not the denial of truth. When men abuse their women and the women put up with it, both the violence of the men and the tolerance of the women are consequences of early child abuse. Hence young children, male as well as female, can become victims of adults of either sex. When sensitive nonbrutal women (and men) are incapable of protecting their children from the brutality of their partner, one must contribute this inability to the blinding process and the intimidation experienced in their own childhood. That is the simple truth. Only when these roots of all violence are exposed is it possible to examine the phenomena without retouching or embellishing them.”

“When a female therapist has been taught that men are solely to blame for all the evil of the world, she will, of course, be able to support her female patients when they eventually discover that they have been sexually abused by their fathers, grandfathers, or brothers: Unlike the followers of the drive theory, she will not talk them out of this truth. But as long as the truth about their mother who allowed the abuse to happen, who failed to protect the child and ignored her distress, is kept out of sight, the full reality is not allowed to be either perceived or acknowledged. And as long as the child’s feelings cannot be experienced, the rage against me – a rage she can already experience – remains impotent; it can even remain coupled with the undissolved loyalty and devotion toward the father or other abusive men.”

“When mothers are defended as pathetic victims, the female patient will not discover that with a loving, protective, perceptive, and courageous mother she could never have been abused by her father or brother. A daughter who has learned from her mother that she is worth protecting will find protection among strangers too and will be able to defend herself. When she has learned what love is, she will not succumb to simulated love. But a child who was merely pushed aside and disciplined, who never experienced soothing caresses, is not aware that anything like nonexploitative caresses can exist. She has no choice but to accept any closeness she is offered rather than be destroyed. Under certain circumstances she will even accept sexual abuse for the sake of finding at least some affection rather than freezing up entirely. When, as an adult woman, she comes to realize that she was cheated out of love, she may be ashamed of her former need and hence feel guilty. She will blame herself because she dare not blame her mother, who failed to satisfy the child’s need or perhaps even condemned it.”

“Psychoanalysts protect the father and embroider the sexual abuse of the child with the Oedipus, or Electra, complex, while some feminist therapists idealize the mother, thus hindering access to the child’s first traumatic experiences with the mother. Both approaches can lead to a dead end, since the dissolving of pain and fear is not possible until the full truth of the facts can be seen and accepted.”

“But even in the absence of ideological motives, the truth can be disregarded in therapies if the patient is offered no tolls to deal with his feelings and to systematically query and test his hypotheses. Even the harshest reproaches directed at the parents won’t help the patient achieve liberation as long as the truth remains inaccessible. This will be the case if, for example, the child had a father in whose presence he could scarcely utter a word without being interrupted and barked at. This patient may for a very long time find it impossible to achieve an inner confrontation with his father and to articulate his accusations. The liberated feelings are directed first against the mother, who terrorized the child less. The reverse may also happen – that the child feared his father less than he feared his mother and that the patient first accuses his father, quite unconsciously because the earlier experiences are still inaccessible, of things he actually experienced with his mother. Thus, based on self protection and fear, a distorted picture of the past takes shape. In the course of therapy these distortions can be corrected, provided the therapy is aimed at discovering the reality. If it is, the therapists knows that the patient can accuse only the parent in who he still had a modicum of confidence and not the parent in whose presence he had been paralyzed with fear. The therapist will help him discover the truth of his history so that he doesn’t blame the wrong people but blames those who really deserve it and, moreover, only for those deeds that were actually committed. For nobody achieves freedom by blaming people who in reality never harmed him. By directing diffuse, nonspecific, and unsubstantiated accusations at surrogate persons, the patient will achieve no improvement of his condition but will often remain in a state of disastrous confusion. Liberation comes with the ability to defend oneself where it is necessary and appropriate. The more realistic a person becomes and the more he frees himself of ideological and theoretical trimmings the better he will succeed.” Alice Miller

Unable to Heal.

Here is another part of Alice Miller’s book “Banished Knowledge”…again from the chapter, Wicked Child.

“Reactions to new insights reflect not only training but also the tragedy of unequaled chances: A loved child receives the gift of love and with it that of knowledge and innocence. It is a gift that will provide him with orientation for his whole life. An injured child lacks everything because he lacks love. He doesn’t know what love is, constantly confuses crime with good deeds and mendacity with truth, and hence will continue to be subject to new confusions.

(Had to look up the meaning of Mendacity…telling of lies: deliberate untruthfulness)
“This confusion also became apparent to me in a discussion of an actual case among experts: A woman who had not been subject to achievement pressure in her childhood and had been much loved took into her home a nine year old autistic boy, who she later adopted. She was able to give him plenty of warmth and physical contact, react to him positively, confirm feelings, sense needs, pick up his signals, and eventually understand them too. In her arms the boy learned how to show emotions, to experience anger at what had been done to him in the past, and to discover love. He developed into a healthy, intelligent, very lively, and candid youth.
“I recount this history to a group of experts in the field of autism. The doctors among them said that autism was an incurable neurophysiological disease and that the history in the case showed that the boy had not been suffering from autism; in other words there had been a wrong diagnosis. The psychologists, family therapists, and analysts said that this history was probably a crude simplification, for they knew many cases in which years of psychotherapy had brought no change in autistic patients (which incidentally, I am perfectly willing to believe). They went on to say that such a history could be of no help to parents of autistic children; on the contrary, it would give them guilt feelings because not all parents were in a position to devote that much love and time to their child. The parents usually had several children, had to earn a living, and, after all, they were only human. I said it seemed to me irrelevant whether a parent acquired guilt feelings when it was a matter of uncovering such an important truth.”
“The history of the nine-year old boy confirmed something I had long suspected: A child’s autism is a response to his environment, sometimes the last possible response open to a child. Whether autism is curable depends on the extent to which the people in a new environment can become aware of the truth of the child’s past. The reaction of those expertss showed how difficult it is to find such people. Their resistance prevented them from realizing how greatly this boy’s history could help us in our dealings with children.”
“Later, after many years, I heard of similar though still rare cases of autistic children being cured. A technique was developed, the ‘holding’ technique, aimed at the need of the lost, lonely alienated child to be held. Unfortunately this technique was once again coupled with pedogogy, and that is where I see its great danger. If the mother has gained the child’s trust by holding him and proceeds to place pedagogic demands on him, the child will do anything in his power not to lose his mother’s affection again. I has actually been shown that children treated with this technique do brilliantly in school. But since I wrote my first book in 1979, I have known that this is not necessarily a genuine cure. The mother’s complete physical and psychic devotion to the autistic child can no doubt work miracles, provided she refrains from making pedagogic demands; otherwise she will create the drama of the gifted child – the very thing the child is warding off with his autism.”
Alice Miller

What I am finding so intriguing as well as being affirmed, is that the child and its wellness is often times sacrificed for the comfort of a guilt free parent.
I believe that her definition and the other definition of ‘Gifted Child’ must be different. I must read her book called “The Drama of the Gifted Child”.
Her books are wonderful in showing the costs to the parent and child…and in my humble opinion, it is the voiceless child who is overlooked most often…and it is that child who continues the legacy of what it suffered and was unable to heal.

Our Own Mother Lode.

In Alice Miller’s book, Banished Knowledge, the chapter, called 'the wicked child' is the following.

“In Thou Shalt Not be Aware, I have demonstrated how precisely Freud’s “drive” theory and Melanie Klein’s theory of the cruel infant coincide with the traditional pedagogic view of the child. That which Martin Luther postulated four hundred years ago is still accepted today; thus, for instance, the psychoanalyst Edward Glover writes:

“Expressing these technical discoveries in social terms we can say that the perfectly normal infant is almost completely egocentric, greedy, dirty, violent in temper, destructive in habit, profoundly sexual in purpose, aggrandizing in attitude, devoid of all but the most primitive reality sense, without conscience or moral feeling, whose attitude to society (as represented by the family) is opportunist, inconsiderate, domineering and sadistic. And when we come to consider the criminal type labeled psychopathic it will be apparent that many of these characteristics can under certain circumstances persist into adult life. In fact, judged by adult social standards the normal baby is for all practical purposes a born criminal.”

“When I opposed this thesis of the cruel child, the alleged sexuality of the child is often pointed out to me. Without the moral attitude of ‘poisonous pedagogy,” which I describe in “For Your Own Good”, such a line of reasoning would be unthinkable for it assumes that sexuality is something bad and culpable. So far, psychoanalysis has not seemed to free itself from such evaluations. Although the assertion of infantile sexuality was declared the principal dogma of psychoanalysis, it is not clear what definition of sexuality this assertion is based on. The literature of psychoanalysis contains examples of very heterogeneous phenomena, such as childish curiosity and sensuality and the desire for physical closeness, for stimulation by stroking, for caressing and soothing, for gentle touching, for the physical warmth of another person, and for numerous pleasure experiences in the child’s own body, including the genitals. Yet all this doesn’t amount to sexuality, even though adults who were once raised with coldness and physical deprivation may like to call it that. In Sigmund Freud’s day, childish autoeroticism was punished with extreme severity, and the touching of the genitals was countered with threats of castration because the adults projected feelings of their own ‘impurity” onto the child and punished him for their own forbidden fantasies. However, this is not nearly the reason enough to equate childish autoeroticism, sexuality, and curiosity with sexuality.

“Sexuality is the copulative urge of human beings, who do not receive their hormonal directive until puberty. Proceeding from this biological definition, it is logical that I do not find this sexuality in children. It goes without saying that sexual abuse of children leaves its mark on its victims. Thus an abused child can simulate “sexual” behavior so as not to lose the regard of the adult. The result is a distorted picture. I have long been preoccupied with the question of why the plight of sexually abused children and their behavior are constantly being cited, in courtrooms as well as in psychoanalytic practice, as proof of their guilt. One reason is that the adults unload their ‘impure’ sexuality by ascribing it to the child through projection.”

“Even if the copulation urge were already active in newborn infants – which, of course, is utter nonsense – why should that be regarded as culpable? Sexuality is a natural urge that can’t be held responsible if some people resort to it to impair and destroy the lives of others. Such people become culpable, not because they succumb to the copulation urge but because in their history this urge was coupled with other factors such as cruelty, humiliation, and the exercise of power and because, on the basis of this history, they act destructively. When they include sexuality in their destructive acts, sexuality cannot be blamed for those acts. Taking the example of Jurgen Bartsch, I demonstrated in “For Your Own Good” how a person who was tormented in childhood becomes culpable and how misleading it is to hold his sexuality and alleged “uncontrolled drives” responsible. A small child cannot be cruel for the simple reason that he is defenseless and unable as yet to take revenge on others for the torments he has suffered – except perhaps on small animals. The child has not yet the power to destroy human lives, even though, of course, he can – and must- harbor murderous thoughts and vengeful desires in his imagination.”

“ A young pediatric analyst, who practices according to Melanie Klein’s method, once told me; “You obviously have no children of your own. Otherwise you would know that children are not, as you describe them, innocent, but have cruel imaginations. This can be observed even in the way an infant smacks its mother.” I didn’t immediately tell this young analyst that I am the mother of two children; instead I asked her what she meant by “smack.” She described a child who in a frenzy hit his mother’s face with his hands – with his fists even, she said. Although she herself had no children, she had observed such behavior on several occasions; moreover, mothers of children who were her patients had reported the same behavior to her. I tried to query her certainty: This smacking, I argued, might also be a harmless game; it depends on how the mother sees it. It is only if the mother feels humiliated and beaten, if she confuses the child with her own parents and resorts to pedagogic measures, that what began as playful behavior on the part of the child can turn into frustration and assume destructive traits. The child then feels misunderstood, and the only way he can express his frustrations is by hitting his mother with his fists. If I describe such a situation to someone who hasn’t been trained for ten years in the Kleinian theory, I am immediately understood. But this analyst looked at me with suspicion as she said, “Melanie Klein spent all her life working with children and her theories were based on her observations.”

“That is precisely the point: What kind of eyes are doing the observing? A mother sees her frenzied, screaming child and is firmly convinced that the children must be disciplined. After all, that is what she learned from her mother, and those early lessons are extremely affective. Melanie Klein observed her child and the other children from her practice against the background of her own upbringing and apparently did not see beyond what she had learned in her own youth from her mother. Since time immemorial, gynecologists, nurses, and parents have observed screaming infants and have likewise remained blind to the fact that those screams are the expression of psychic distress and are altogether avoidable.”

“My assertion that the infant is innocent has nothing to do with romantic idealization, nor is it derived from this or that philosophical evaluation. It stems rather from the reality of the child’s situation: A baby is defenseless and as yet bears no responsibility for others; as yet, he owes nobody anything. But this fact does not contradict the frequently observation that children can behave very cruelly, just as cruelly as they have been treated by others. Erin Pizzey, the founder of shelters for battered women and children reports that there are even some three-year olds who cannot tussle playfully but fight each other as if to kill. In their behavior these children reflect in every detail the brutality they experienced at home and reveal unmistakably where they learned their destructive behavior.”

"I am often asked by worried parents whether children are learning cruelty from television. In my view a child
who harbors no pent up rage will show no interest in brutal and sadistic TV programs. However, brutal programs are avidly absorbed by children who have never been allowed to defend themselves against overt or subtle tormenting at home or who, for example, to spare a threatened parent. So they satisfy their secret longings for revenge by identifying with what they see on TV. These children already carry within them the seeds of future destructiveness. Whether or not this destructiveness will erupt depends largely upon whether life offers them more than violence: in other words, whether witnesses willing to rescue them cross their path. What is important to understand is that the child learns cruelty not by watching TV but always by suffering and repressing.”

“The school of cruelty is often coupled with sexual abuse. When, for instance, a twenty-year-old man masturbates a five-year-old boy, the destructive components of gratification of desire are imposed upon the child by the adult. The child will never free himself from this type of gratification and, as an adult, will be subject to the unconscious compulsion to avenge another child, in some form or other, the rape he once experienced. Thus destructiveness, with all its attendant rationalizations, is taught, learned and disguised.”

“It is only from adults that an unloved child learns to hate or torment and to disguise these feelings with lies and hypocrisy. That is why, when the child grows up, he or she will say that children require norms and disciplining; this lie provides access to adult society, a lie that permeates all pedagogy and, to this day, psychoanalysis. The young child knows no lies, is prepared to take at their face value such words as truth, love and mercy as heard in religious instruction in school. Only on finding out that his naiveté is cause for ridicule does the child learn to dissemble. The child’s upbringing teaches him the patterns of destructive behavior that will late be interpreted by experts as the result of innate destructive drive. Anyone daring to question this assertion will be smiled at as being naïve, as if that person had never come in contact with children who didn’t know “how they can get on your nerves.” For at least since the days of Sigmund Freud, it has been known in ‘progressive’ circles that children come into this world with a death drive and might kill us all if we didn’t ward off “the first indications.” Alice Miller

When we stop seeing innocent parents we will start seeing innocent children…Especially adult children need to look at their parents in reality and stop glamorizing their childrearing ways as without faults and failures.

And in order for the adult child who still suffers the affects from abuse, we need to rage against the proper person, the one who hurt us, and let it out, changing our ideas of who our parent really is compared to the version with our repression of rage.

When you see someone who has injured you and your repress your rage, you are then building up the steam if you will of repression and if you don’t direct it to the right source, you then get a distorted view of reality and any annoyance or disturbance that springs up, your unexpressed rage falls upon the innocent.

In my experience, my rage for my father and mother was poured upon my children, the moment they did one small thing wrong.

And I knew I was way out of control and that I was way overreacting to a minor infraction, but I couldn’t control it.

Once I was able to see and feel who my father really was, and not my repressed memory and rage, I was able to pour out of me my rage towards him, and it left my children out of the picture.

They just happened to be innocent bystanders in a long-standing abusive relationship.

I had to change my perception of who my parents were.

We do have this all backwards, for each person who makes it to adulthood, and who has a child, they can be rest assured that the rage within will spill upon the child, Unless it has been delivered to the abusive person who began this dance.

Children always arrive innocent. Always.

Adults are the only ones who can turn them into evil destructive people…people who will hurt themselves or others.

If each of us would just mine our own rage and vent it to the proper places, our whole planet would change. We are responsible for our own mother lode.

Rapture is felt.

Today everyone is talking about “The Rapture” and my brother and I wondered about its meaning, the word itself.

Rapture.

1. overwhelming happiness: a euphoric transcendent state in which somebody is overwhelmed by happiness or delight and unaware of anything else
2. mystical transportation: a mystical experience in which somebody believes he or she is transported into the spiritual realm, sometimes applied to the second coming of Jesus Christ, when true believers are expected to rise up to join him in heaven
3. state of great happiness or enthusiasm: a state of great happiness or enthusiasm about something, or words and gestures that express this

Perhaps we can all have a moment of rapture, if you can find something that brings you overwhelming happiness and delight and become unaware of anything else, just immerse yourself in an activity that you forget all things.

For me, it can be in nature or quilting or even reading a really good book, it can be small moments when you are totally present with someone, where only the two of you exist and times slips away.

While some may call this the end of the world, perhaps it is the beginning, the moment in time where only rapture is felt.

The territory of God, Reality.

From David Hawkins's book "Truth vs Falsehood"

"The limitations of religion have been analyzed by historians from secular viewpoint and by theologians in their criticisms
as well as by great philosophers over the centuries. The intrinsic problems arise from the canonization of interpretations of spiritual truth that are the consequence of misunderstanding by the spiritual ego of ecclesiastics. Much is lost in translation of teachings that were not written down until centuries after they were spoken.

"While the above are well-known limitations (as reflected by consciousness calibration), less attention has been paid to the relationship of the follower to the religion itself. The most obvious error is the worship of the religion instead of God (an error not made by the truly enlightened mystic). While religion provides inspiration, spiritual facts, and important information, it is only linear, time-located body of concepts and not the Reality itself. This results in the commonly observed violation of the essential truth of the religion in the name of religion itself. (e.g. Christian and Islamic Crusades, the Inquisition, putting nonbelievers to death, slaughtering innocent in the name of religion, political piracy of religion by theocratic totalitarianism, and rationalization of nonintegrity in "the name of faith," etc)”

"In the manner of speaking, religiosity is a subtle form of idolatry that puts the Church as an institution above God. The current slaughter of the innocent in the name of Allah the All Merciful is the glaring example. A more subtle example is the exaggeration of the external trappings and the ethnic peculiarities of the primitive tribal customs that become the focus instead of the core of spiritual truth. Thus, distortions result in oppression and violation of basic religious premises.”

"The underlying defect in all the above is the downside of the ego itself, which then utilizes religion to its own ends; pride, control, gain, prestige, wealth, adoration, social image, and narcissistic gain. Religion is the means, not the end; it is the map, not the territory; it is the cover, not the book. Thus hyper religiosity itself, which appears as piety, can and does become an error as exhibited by scrupulosity. The great teachers taught the Truth about Divinity, not religion, which came centuries later. While the veneration of religion and scriptures is understandable it is their truth and God that are meant to be worshipped and sought."
David Hawkins

I found reading this very affirmative, in that my experience of religion wasn’t about the relationship with God, but rather the ‘faith’ in the religion.

I didn’t know God, until I left the religion, for religion had covered Him up, had danced a variable amount of rules and regulations, of fears and judgments that stood between me and Him.

I love that religion is the cover, not the book…the map and not the territory.

I have asked others who have left my old religion what they now have, and many will say, they took the faith. I am not sure what that means, Faith in what?

When I left my old religion, I didn’t take anything from it, for there wasn’t anything tangible to take I had a belief in the map, but not the territory.

Now I feel that I am walking around in the territory… Of God, Reality.

What my mind can hold.

Glancing through the book “Truth vs Falsehood” by David Hawkins, I read this headline, “Cultism”…so here it is.

“Cults ensnare the unwary by their specialness and false promises. Members have ‘insider’ status and a special ‘lingo’. The group leader is charismatic, seductive, and courts the intimate, who is flattered by the attention. The leader is very ‘special’ and treated with adulation, which is quickly turned into control of members, including especially their money and sex lives, as well as lifestyles, diets, clothing, etc. Members must take allegiance and break off relationships with family or even spouses and often associations or groups.”

“The group often forms a geographic, restrictive enclave and develops a group paranoia as well as a characteristic “cult glaze” (cal. 120) as though in a hypnotic state (the effect of isolation and brainwashing). Once detected, that glaze is easily recognized (the “programmed cult look,” as one observer described it. There is a flatness and automation style to rationalization where content is like a “party line” that is parroted from having been programmed. Cults especially target celebrities and exploit them as showpieces.”

“The influence of the cult leaders is so strong that large groups of people will willingly kill not only others but also themselves (e.g. Heavens Gate, Jim Jones, Islamic terrorists, suicide bombers, Aum Shinrikyo subway gassers, Bolsheviks, Nazi party, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, White Supremacists, Ku Klux Klan, liberationists etc.”

“Another characteristic of cultism is proselytizing and insistence of following the party line of a pseudo-religious group belief system by which individuality is scorned or even threatened. Leaders are very power-oriented, and control plus paranoid egoism are dominant themes.”

“Sometimes a spiritual leader will calibrate as integrous early in their career but then will fall victim to the seduction of prestige, money, sex, or the adulation of followers. Then the original spiritual group degenerates into a cult, or a spiritual technique becomes actually trademarked and then commercialized and marketed by hired publicists. In that case, the technique calibrates above 200 but the organization itself falls below 200 and becomes primarily a marketing organization that trades on the original concept or exclusive technique. The technique is thus only taught for a price and ‘trainees’ are forbidden to reveal the secret teachings (which are usually merely a few simple phrases or sentences with a general application to ‘improve health’, “attract abundance”, “increase love life,” “be more popular”, fulfill your potential success”, “attract a mate”, etc) Some of the promoted techniques can be found in any fortune cookie, e.g. “One smile can change your life forever” (cal. 350), or “Success goes to one who is kind.” (cal. 360)

“The true value of such workshops is not the magic of the central concept or technique, but the disciplined practice of actually applying it with regularity in the daily life instead of merely quickly dismissing it as “I already know that.” The value of training workshops then lies in the learning of the value of steady application and actually putting a valuable tool into practice and steady focus, e.g., the “faithfulness” of A Course in Miracles workbook.”

“Another expression of cultism is the cultification of splinter groups from traditional religions, e.g., the far-right “fundamentalism” most prominent and visible in Islam, Christianity and ethnic variations of worldwide religions.”
David Hawkins

While I know when you are in the midst of a cult, you can’t see the forest for the trees, but when you step out and find your own freedom to be an individual to feel the open space where the programmed mind used to be, it is mind blowing.

Most feel and think that a cult is this small hidden special group, but if you look around within many religions, you will see what they are doing to the individual, they are controlling it.

Any organization that tells you what to wear and what not to wear, what is acceptable and what is not, what you can and cannot do with your own body is a cult. Albeit a milder level for perhaps your religion hasn’t asked you to kill, yet.

In my childhood religion, there was a phrase that could erase all sins and we literally believed in its power. “Your sins are forgiven in Jesus name and blood…” By believing in this phrase, ‘there was no sin to great to forgive’. All transgressions against others was deleted.

With this phrase, many criminal behaviors are washed away without ever needing the police, the law or the court of the land.

It is insanity at its best and what happens to the victims of these crimes? Who is there to protect them, when it is know and approved to have pedophiles preying upon the children, and the only consequences are they have to ‘confess’ and be ‘forgiven’?

Where are all these sins? Do they really believe that Jesus is carrying the weight of all the tortured children? Is he indeed that forgiving to allow the children to suffer while the adults get a new cloak that is whiter than snow? Come on people wake up the sins are living in your midst, they are the abused, the confused and the broken.

There are no magic words that will take away the physical act of abuse on a child’s body nor erase the terror and the shattered trust and innocence….

The most evil words that I can now hear are “Your sins are all forgiven…” For what it means to me, is that the monster has been blessed to abuse again.

When will the people in the cult wake up and see the bleeding children? When will they understand that the words spoken are destroying the spirits/souls of the children among them?

As they sit in the pews singing “Bless be the tie that binds us…” I want them to know, they are the chorus in a ring of child abuse!

I wanted to believe that my family was an oddity that we were not the popular way within the church, yet I fear that I was the tip of the iceberg and what lies beneath is beyond what my mind can hold.

Returns to being good.

What a multifaceted catch 22 it is when society is asking that the children of abuse be the ones to stop it. To be the ones to name their perpetrator, to come out of their cages of captivity and walk freely with courage seems insurmountable.

What it fails to realize is the condition of the conditioned mind and how it has programmed the child or the adult child to bow down to authority, to keep silent and suffer in silence.

We have been taught by experiences to go it alone and to keep to ourselves our selves, to not expose or share the feelings part of us, but instead walk around with a veneer finish that covers our truths.

We have lived mostly as the veneer and have not allowed the real self to peep through and now in order to stop the abuse we have to completely reverse this.

The veneer has to fade to the back and what comes forth is all we have tried to keep hidden. We have to now present to the world the very thing that terrorized us.

Imagine? We are the ones who stop the monster, we whose power they took, now have to come forward fearlessly.

And yet, as odd as this seems, as backwards and as upside down, the very step in sharing your wounds is the very thing you need to begin building your strength and courage, it will help define who you are from the base of truth.

To speak your truth of who you are and what happened to you, who you fear and why, are truthful utterances of your journey in life, your biography and pathology, what has made you you. You then are able to see and feel that IT isn’t you that is bad, but them. You are not the problem, they are.

And, by having a veneer, also shows the lack of support and caring you had. It literally shows how untreated you are.

If, you had to ‘hide’ your abuse, it shows that you lived in an abusive home. For if you lived in a loving caring home, the abuse would have been treated, you would have been lovingly cared for and nurtured and the Bad Man/Woman would have been put away as so not to harm another.

When the bad man/woman is not put away, we are left to feel bad and actually are told to put away our wounds.

What an odd show and tell it now requires in order to stop more generations, we have to show who the monster is and then our wounded self returns to being good.

Untouched Key by Alice Miller

Here is an Appendix from Alice Miller’s book that I read online that had me ordering this book, “The Untouched Key”…it’s copyright is 1988.

“For some years now there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable toll on society. This knowledge concerns every single one of us, and – if disseminated widely enough – should lead to fundamental changes in society, above all to a halt in the blind escalation of violence. The following are points intended to amplify my meaning:

1. All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.

2. For their development children need the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them become oriented in the world.

3. When these vital needs are frustrated and children are instead abused for the sake of the adults needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated, neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired.

4. The normal reactions to such injury should be anger and pain; since children in this hurtful kind of environment, however, are forbidden to express their anger and since it would be unbearable to experience their pain all alone, they are compelled to suppress their feelings, repress al memory of the trauma, and idealize those guilty of the abuse. Later they will have no memory of what was done to them.

5. Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide.)

6. If these people become parents, they will then often direct acts of revenge of their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats. Child abuse is still sanctioned – indeed, held in high regard – in society as long as it is defined as childrearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape emotions stemming from how they were treated by their own parents.

7. If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials, and nurses to support the child and to believe her or him.

8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has be abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great-grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parent’s cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility.

9. For some years now, it has been possible to prove, thanks to the use of new therapeutic methods, that repressed traumatic experiences in childhood are stored up in the body and, although remaining unconscious, exert their influence even in adulthood. In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults: a child responds to and learns from both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning.

10. In the light of this new knowledge, even the most absurd behaviors reveals its formally hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood no longer remain shrouded in darkness.

11. Our sensitization to the cruelty with which children are treated, until now commonly denied, and to the consequences of such treatment will as a matter of course bring to an end the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation.

12. People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be – both in their youth and adulthood – intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves but not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than to respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. Such people will be incapable of understanding why earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel at ease and safe in the world. Since it will not have to be their unconscious life-task to ward of intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and more creatively.”

Alice Miller

My Body, My mind and My Spirit.

Something magical happens when you are forced, as in my case, to stand without secrets, to be bare unto the world, to have nothing hidden out of sight, when your worst fears and beyond are realized, you are exposed and free.

I didn’t seem to have a choice, my incest was uncovered the same time that my father was exposed as a pedophile, and yet in the moment of time, while it seemed as if I would die in shame, I sprung forth with a new resolve to live openly and decided I would carry no more secrets in my pocket.

I would instead own this legacy of abuse and I would live my life fully aware of where I came from and how it formed me into who I was today. I understood all my idiosyncrasies and me perfectly, they were all birthed in abuse.

Once I accepted that all the mess was from where I grew, I could then begin to grow in ways that were different.

While you are holding on to secrets, the secrets are holding on to you and you are not free to heal and move beyond them, but once you agree that it is time for you to accept the truth of your roots, you begin changing out of abuse.

How tragically sad that we can’t share with the world our deepest wounds that unlike cancer it is a shameful disease and while we keep it hidden in the deep pockets of our bodies, our bodies are not free our spirits are not free and we are in a prison of silence.

Yet we hold the key that unlocks the door of shame. We have to be brave enough to align ourselves with our past’s reality. We have to have the courage to look upon the secrets that our families carry, our legacy that few will speak of but all know.

The truth is what sets you free…and the willingness to lose all you are, to become someone you have never met, the person you were prior to abuse.

My body and I have an agreement, we will no longer hide truths, we will speak our feelings always, regardless of the consequences, we have a bond now, a sacred bond, we are one…my body, my mind and my spirit.