Hi, everyone,
Just opening a thread beginning with a list of Alice Miller's repsonses to her readers. Maybe some people here will find some of them validating.
Have you touched your inner child rage yet? Does your body speak to you re the abuse? Of course there's no need to answer any question here. It's your pain and your journey back to find you.
I simply want to state this. Your parents had no right whatsoever to hurt you at all. They were wrong. What they did was wrong. You had every human right to be respected, loved, validate, nurtured, encouraged, loved and protected. If your parents didn't do this you've every right to be mad as hell with them.
I think until we get to the point of feeling that, and being okay with feeling that - then maybe we often find ourselves confused and misdirect our anger. Oh... maybe we're just indiscrimately as mad as hell at 'whoever'. Or maybe just mad. And when we're like that, not being specific about who really did the damage, who we're really mad at, who originally did us wrong, maybe we won't ever be able to connect with our authentic feelings and find our authentic self, and move along with our lives, peacefully.
If anyone wants to read and then have a good rant to the original abuser/s in your life, feel free.
I’ve left out the questions from these letters. I think her responses are broad enough to apply in so many situations.
Warning - some may be slightly triggering.
Papillon
AM: Why are you asking me questions before you read anything of my work? My answer is: One repeats with one's children the cruelties endured in the own childhood only as long as one denies that one was treated cruelly. If you know your history and don't protect your parents (by saying that everybody MUST (???) be cruel), you will never abuse your child. Because you can have empathy for his or her emotional needs only if your feelings are not blocked in denial. To understand what I am saying here you can read my articles on this web site or - if you don't have enough time - you can just read the first page of this web site.
AM: Your pity for your mother is absolutely comprehensible but it seems to swallow completely the empathy you need for the suffering of the small child who has to become the protector of the mother without being protected by a helping witness. It IS possible now for you as adult to become this witness and to develop compassion for the most overburden child you once were.
(AM's offsider) Barbara: When I worked with my own pity for my mother, which she had exploited shamelessly, it changed when I could rebel against it out of the realization that she never had and expressed pity or any compassion for me, her child. It was an important turning point in my therapeutic work when I left pitying her and being stuck in her self-pitying behind and began to be on my side. How can a mother with such a severe illness want to lash out at her child instead of having the deepest compassion for him for the devastating fate of living with a severely ill mother and the prospect of loosing her?
AM: Thank you for your letter, full of determination, consciousness and clarity. It is impossible to overcome the aggressions of your father and the lies of your mother, or both, without a lot of rage that you had to repress over such a long time at the cost of your body. Fortunately, you can feel and understand this rage now, thanks to the empathy of your counselor, so that you become more and more free to live your authentic feelings. Congratulations.
AM: You write: “They stole my anger and I want to get it back.” You CAN get it back and it will help you to heal. It will give you the courage to OWN your true feelings and never allow anybody to steal them. You need them more than anything else.
AM: You write: "...her definition also packs a curious disregarding of my being, and much of what I value as a being." I think that this insight could be enough for taking action and for your liberation from the child-like attachment. What you needed in childhood is not the same as what you need today.
AM: She could try to eat the child but can't eat the adult unless you allow her to do so. Meditation doesn't help, you must protect yourself CLEARLY by defending your limits and saying NO.
AM: You write: “Something traumatic must have happened at that time, but I cannot recall it.”
What are you looking for if you know this: “My mother had never wanted a child and made that quite clear to me; she told me so. She tried to abandon me many times. She deliberately made it her mission in life to ruin mine. After all, she reasoned, I had ruined her life by being born; fair is fair. She was a closet lesbian and sexually abused me.”
What you need is to FEEL the suffering of this small girl who was not wanted, was many times in danger of becoming abandoned and was sexually abused. This knowledge is sufficient to get very angry with your mother and to become the loving mother of this tortured little girl who is still in search of a caring, empathic mother.
AM: I think that you will suffer as long as the little girl in yourself will be waiting for your father to understand your torture, to take a risk, to love you and to save you instead of protecting HIMSELF, THE ADULT. But once you can rebel against him, the small girl will feel protected. Does this make sense to you? Try to SEE and FEEL how he betrayed you because of his cowardice.
AM: Don't worry, the anger will come when it is time for it. Now, you dare to KNOW what they did. And this is the first important step. Congratulations
AM: You cannot change your sister. Why don't you listen to your feelings that clearly indicate you that you feel better when you have no contact with her? Nobody can force you to see her if you don't want to. Only as a child you were dependent on your parents even if they were abusive. As an adult you can say NO.
AM: If you are angry you have reasons to be angry, but you may be afraid to recognize them. When you have felt your anger and know what it triggers in your memory it will leave you. Your body doesn't lie.
AM: Yes, you seem to be the living proof that “if we have the courage to speak out and claim our truth about our childhood trauma and subsequent reenactment throughout life, we no longer need be imprisoned by it because we are not in denial of it.” For that reason your body recovered and you will be able to do the work you so much want to do.
AM: You write: “why do I still want this man? why do I still think I love him? is it my father-hunger???? bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism, self-hatred have plagued my life for 25 years.. i'm so exhausted of punishing myself ...” So you do very well know the answers to your questions. What you have to do yet is to realize how your father treated you, how much you suffered because of HIM and to rebel against HIM. You write that you loved him so much, why did you? When you get rid of this “love,” other substitutes would no longer be necessary.
AM: As a child, you get love from your parents if they are free to love you. If they are not (for whatever reason it might be), you can't make them loving through your achievements. However you may try, whatever you may do for them – it will never be enough. But as an adult, you can learn to recognize your actual needs, to take them seriously, to try to fulfill them. Then you will discover with surprise that meanwhile you yourself became the loving person you were always longing for.
AM: Yes, non-physical abuse can be as harmful as beatings. But it is often less visible. The reason why I write mostly about physical one is because I want to show that even in the most obvious cases of abuse the adult children tend to deny it. So much more if the abuse was hidden.
AM: You describe in few words the crucial confusion ALL mistreated children have to suffer: they are not allowed to see how cruelly they were treated and had to believe that all the cruelty they endured was because they were bad, because they deserved to be punished. So they feel guillty their whole adult lives. You may be interested in reading my article about feelings of guilt and my last book that appeared now in Polish under the title: bunt ciala. Also the book Breaking Down the Wall of Silence recently appeared in Polish. I wish you much understanding from your therapist.
AM: Thank you for your letter, full of wisdom. Congratulations. You write: “Now I validate my own anger. I work for sympathy for myself from my self. I realize whenever I feel a 'mean' feeling toward a child, that this is the abusive 'parent's' feeling that was directed at me when I was a child. I imagine how it felt to have been the recipient of that mean feeling. How it broke my heart. The 'mean' feeling diminishes.” There is nothing I can add. You are on the right path to change your life and to rescue your son, and I am sure that you will succeed. Because you have the courage to see and feel the CAUSES of your plight. You were never a bad person; you were only misled by your therapists who didn't allow you to respect your true feelings.
AM: A tantrum shows the deepest despair and helplessness which a child is not able to express with words. An empathic adult will try to remember what happened right before it, in oder to UNDERSTAND what drove this child just now into despair, and to let him/her know about it with empathy. That can help the child to understand himself. But never should a child be punished for his despair. Such stupid, cruel advices show, why children cannot express themselves other than through a tantrum. Let us assume that your friend is coming to you and is sobbing, without being able to tell you, why. Would you lock her up in a room as punishment so that she will stop? Such advice though is given to parents when children are at stake.
AM: You are certainly right if you look for the keys in your actual feelings, in this case of feeling guilty. There are mothers who scream at a baby, often shaking him and holding his arms when blaming him of being nasty. Why nasty? Just because he cried, perhaps he felt uncomfortable. Instead of looking for the actual reason for his crying, they punish him. Does it make sense to you that your body tries to tell you a story like that using your forearms? I can't know it for sure, you did not tell us at all how your mother "cared" for you.
AM: You write: Sometimes I don't speak up to people who've hurt me because I'm overwhelmed by rage and anxiety that I know don't belong in the present situation But you say that they hurt you, and this is real. Why don't you speak up? The rage is a source of information. If you don't use this information and hinder yourself to understand it, you will all your life accumulate more and more rage. Try to understand what makes you angry in the present time.
AM: Thank you for sharing with us your experiences with women in their position as teachers or girls at school. I am very sorry that you suffered so much from their cruelty and I don't doubt even for a while that things happened in the way you describe them. But I don't think that gender makes a difference when it goes to cruelty. Active cruelty is the effect of endured violence and perversion in childhood and nothing else. Feminists dislike my statements very much when I write in many books (as the Drama, Banished Knowledge, Breaking Down and others) that the space society gives to man to rage and destroy life with impunity is the war and to women their home where they can do whatever they want to their babies and todlers to teach them to obey. What they do in this way, never controlled, never punished, is to cripple millions of people who will never accuse them of their crimes because every child loves her/ his mother and would never, never put her in troubles. Rather they would hate the whole world or all women, but the own mother must stay protected from their hatred for ever. In this way we turn in a vicious circle of blindness. A brutally beaten child will, as adult, prefer becoming a serial killer to accusing his mother of brutality. And the same is true for crazy dicators who even become "heroes" for whole nations because people learned so early to love and admire the persons who were cruel to them - no matter what they really did.
