I am re-reading a book "The Body Never Lies" by Alice Miller. She and her viewpoints make complete sense to me.
She writes.
"In his famous novel Fateless, the Hungarian writer and Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz describes his arrival at the Auschwitz concentration camp. He was fifteen years old at the time, and he tells us in great detail how he attempted to interpret the many grotesque and appalling things he encountered on his arrival there as something positive and favorable for him. Otherwise he would not have survived his own mortal fear."
"Probably every child who has suffered abuse must assume an attitude like this in order to survive. These children reinterpret their perceptions in a desperate attempt to see as good and beneficial things that outside observers would immediately classify as crimes. Children have no choice. They must repress their true feelings if they have no "helping witness" to turn to and are helplessly exposed to their persecutors. Later, as adults lucky enough to encounter "enlightened witnesses," they do have a choice. Then they can admit the truth, their truth; they can stop pitying and "understanding" their persecutors, stop trying to feel their unsustainable, disassociated emotions, and roundly denounce the things that have been done to them. This step brings immense relief for the body. It no longer has to forcibly remind the adult self of the tragic history it went through as a child. Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected and protected."
"I call the violent kind of "upbringing" abuse, not only because the children are thus refused the right to dignity and respect as human beings but also because such an approach to parenting establishes a kind of totalitarian regime in which it is impossible for children to perceive the humiliations, indignities, and disrespect they have been subjected to, let alone to defend themselves against them. These patterns of childhood will inevitably then be adopted by their victims and used on their partners and their own children, at work, in politics, wherever the fear and anxiety of the profoundly insecure child can be fended off with the aid of external power. It is in this way that dictators are born; these are people with a deep-seated contempt for everyone else, people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built up around them." Alice Miller
What I love, and don't recall reading the first time is that the reason we choose a different perception is to Survive our own mortal fear. It is to run ahead of our fears. I knew we changed the images of our abusers to make them kinder to survive, but I hadn't gotten this part that it is to outrun our own mortal fear.
Fear is chasing us...forever, until we can see our abusers and their crimes. Our body will not rest as long as we pity and understand our abusers. I know this is right.
And, unless we stop and face our fears, we will use others when we feel insecure. We will control them to feel power.
What is taken from us in abuse is our power...for we are overcome by someone older and wiser than us. We allow, for the lack of choice, someone to overpower us.
In order to gain our power, we have to reconcile that moment.
I had to look up the word Reconcile. For, someone told me it must be hard to reconcile with my parents.
I see or feel reconcile differently.
Here are some definitions of Reconcile.
"Restore friendly relations between..."
"cause to coexist in harmony; make or show to be compatible."
"to find a way of making (two different ideas, facts, etc.) exist or be true at the same time."
What I believe most of humanity is looking for between a victim and their abuser, is to return to friendly. When in actuality, from the victim's perspective, we have to reoncile the two people. The friendly one and the non-friendly one. To bring into account the two different sides of one person.
I don't believe the two can even be brought together in harmony. In acceptance yes...but not to return to friendly in the relationship.
When therapies and society and religions are looking to the victim to reconcile, do they know what they are asking?
How is it possible to reconcile things that are the polar opposites?
How will they co-mingle in harmony?
I think our greates Fear is knowing it is impossible. We can't reconcile in our minds and hearts that the man/person we loved and trusted, did this to us. We know, we will not be able to trust this person again. Our greatest fears is that we are alone. Or worse, alone and vulnerable to attacks. That the friendly life of harmony is over.
How can we restore something we didn't separate?
I did reconcile my past.
I brought in the truth and no longer pretended to be friendly or be in harmony with such energies of abuse.
To those who want victims to find peace and love and joy with their abusers, they are asking the impossible. Our bodies will hold the differences.
The body doesn't lie.
The body will feel the juxtaposition between title (Dad) and the energies (negative) that are running inside. It feels the power seeking and the controlling. It feels the energies of abuse.
Abuse will end when we can all see the separation between father and pedophile and not ask victims to reconcile...but separate.
My reconciliation was to bring in the negative that I feared. Somehow we know that the relationship is over when you can see the negative. We fear being alone.
Some have even told me how alone I am.
Isn't it better to be alone in the truth, than in company of lies?
The well being of victims comes when we can separate ourselves from those who seek to gain power outside of themselves.
When I found my own power within, I stopped trying to control others to be powerful.
My power comes from the freedom to make choices that bring me peace, love and joy.
Healing comes with freedom. The freedom to reconcile my past.
