I M Perfect lady

Alice Miller writes in "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware"…

"The consequences of sexual abuse however, are not restricted to problems in one's sexual life; they impair the development of the self and of an automous personality. There are several reasons why this is so:"

1. To have one's helplessness and total dependency taken advantage of by the person one loves, by one's mother or father, at a very early age soon produces an interlinking of love and hate.

2. Because anger toward the loved person cannot be expressed for the fear of losing that person and therefore cannot be lived out, ambivalence, the interlinking of love and hate, remains an important characteristic of later object relationships. Many people, for instance, cannot even imagine that love is possible at all without suffering and sacrifice, without fear of being abused, without being hurt and humiliated.

3. Since the fact of abuse must be repressed for the sake of survival, all knowledge that would threaten to undo this repression must be warded off by every possible means, which ultimately results in an impoverishment of the personality and loss of vital roots, manifested, for example, in depression.

4.The consequences of a trauma are not eliminated by repressing it but are actually reinforced. The inability to remember the trauma, to articulate it (i.e. to be able to communicate these earlier feelings to a supportive person who believes you), creates the need to articulate it in the repetition compulsion.

5. The unremembered plight of being at someone else's mercy and being abused by a loved object is perpetuated either in a passive or an active role, or alternately in each.

6. One of the simplest and completely unnoticed forms of perpetuation of the active role is abuse of one's children for one's own needs, which are all the more urgent and uncontrollable the more deeply repressed the original trauma.

"I can imagine that this last point will bewilder many readers, who will angrily ask: Is the affection I show my child wrong, too?  is the love I have for my child also to be forbidden me? Of course this is not what I mean.  Physical attraction and affection are always part of love, and this has nothing to do with abuse. But parents who have had to repress the fact of having been abused and who have never consciously relived it can become very confused in this regard.they will either suppress their genuine feelings of affection for fear of seducing their child or they will unconsciously do the same with the child that was done to them, without having any idea of how much harm they are causing, since they themselves always had to distance themselves from their suffering. How can these parents be helped? There is probably no possibility of curing their compulsion to repeat without extensive therapy. It is indeed difficult for people who as children were the property of their parents to realize when they are treating their own children like their property.  Nevertheless, I see some hope if people becomes sensitive to the question, if they become conscious of these connections.  This assumes that a person can at least admit that his or her parents were not gods or angels but often deprived and emotionally very isolated people for whom their child was the sole permissible object for the discharge of the affect; these parents moreover, found justification for their behavior in various ideologies, including pedagogy and, not least of all even psychoanalysis with it's theory of "infantile sexuality."   Alice

This explains, at least to me, the way abuse goes from one generation unto the next and how it is spread and why and then, what it will take for it to stop.

This book has history of how we as a species have evolved…and until we see the child as innocent and not our property…we are going to NoT see how abuse is spread. 

We will continue to teach good touch bad touch…while the parental role will go unnoticed…

I find this chillingly tragically spot on…it is exactly as I know it to be true. 

The parents are the grown child who has repressed his sexual abuse…the cycle goes on until you can see what you have repressed.

The battle I feel I am fighting is for the plight of the innocent child…and what stands against me is the repressed victim who is now a parent.

(The blueprint of sexual abuse within a family!)