Category: FALC

And, Alice Miller again!  

"If I succeed in making even a few people aware of how the victimization of children is concealed by placing the blame on them, then all the misunderstandings and reproaches for being one-sided that I anticipate would be a very small price to pay, compared to the importance to me of what I shall have achieved."

"Those who have read the first chapter of my book "For Your Own Good" will understand why Freud's first theory, his trauma theory, and my own findings that support it inevitably encounter much greater resistance than the theory of the Oedipus complex.  I see this resistance as a social phenomena and am prepared for the misinterpretations and reproaches it engenders.  If there were none, it would have been superfluous for me to write this book.  The heritage of millennia cannot suddenly cast aside.  As analysts we must be understanding of this, but we cannot be expected, on the other hand, to shut our eyes tighter than ever after analyzing patients all these many years and making discoveries no one wants to know about.  People don't want to listen because they are not ready to bear what they will hear. That is justifiable, for to achieve genuine insight is a slow process in which intellectual knowledge plays only a small role.  What is decisive is no doubt the willingness to remain open, open to what "the patients" and the poets tell us, to what our children have to reveal to us, and, finally to the discoveries we can make about our own selves once we are able to take our feelings and our fantasies seriously and see them as messages about earlier situations in our lives." 

"As soon as opposition to the truth about the damage done to young children under the cloak of silence becomes less widespread and unyielding than it is now, these messages will not need much coding. Mariella Mehr's moving book, "Steinzeit (Stone Age), is an indication of this. At age thirty-two this woman succeeded in uncovering the most inconceivable martyrdom of her childhood and youth as well as a whole long and hidden chain of persecution and assault; she did this by experiencing her pain and other accompanying feelings in their full intensity, and in the process found her true self. The change from petrified, dehumanized creature to a vital, feeling, and suffering human being took place of primal therapy, apparently in its best possible form. In any case, we sense here the presence of a trustworthy nonpedagogical, empathic support figure, who is never placating, never conceals the truth with theories, ideologies, or mystification.  The only concession Mehr makes to the reader's resistance is her designation of the book as a "novel" thereby giving her reader the opportunity to take a psychiatric approach and call the whole thing the product of a "diseased imagination." But even the most horrible imaginings seldom approach the horror of reality. Mehr's book is an exceptional peice of work, both for its conviction as well as for the significance of its findings.  This work illustrates and indirectly confirms several of my premises."

1. it is the depth, intensity, and authenticity of experience that gives a literary work its force and not the psychological naivete (or lack of awareness of the unconscious) of the author; therefore, a writer's familiarity with his or her unconscious does not diminish literary power.

2. The source of creativity lies in the creative person's capacity for suffering, not in his or her neurosis.

3. Liberation and the ability to love are attained by experiencing traumatic childhood situations and articulating the resulting hatred and despair, not by acting them out.  Only if these emotions are dissociated from their cause will they lead to destructive and self-destructive behavior.

4. Change in society is brought about by uncovering and recognizing the truth in its entirety, not by manipulative methods based on acceptance of social taboos.

5. Old wounds will heal over if feelings find full acceptance and if emotional access to childhood traumas is provided, not if drive conflicts are intellectually resolved or if improved control and mastery over drive desires are achieved.

6. Access to these traumas will be facilitated by a trustworthy, sincere support figure, not by complicated theories.

"Once this access has been won, then the numbness that was needed to survive gives way, even in the case of a woman whose schizophrenic mother twice attempted to murder her as a little girl, a woman who was repeatedly raped and was forced to undergo electric shock treatments and disciplinary measures of unbelievable brutality.  No "mere" imagination could have invented all this, could ever have described it in such a consistant way. There are simply some horrendous things in this world tha the philosophers (the fortunate ones) have not yet dreamed of. But at the same time there are an increasing number of people who are able to see these things because at some point along the way they have found an aware and sensitive support figure. To be sure, the truth that individuals discover through their pain can be crushed over and over again by the tomes of pedagogical, pyschriatric, and theological wisdom, but it cannot be destroyed, for every newborn child has the capacity to discover the truth anew."  Alice Miller

Alice Miller's brilliance is that she truly gets that the truth is there for everyone…and that you can't love until you first feel the trauma of childhood, and that it also takes someone who is willing to listen; be supportive to our truths.

At anytime, if the listener leans away from the child to defend the adult, they have withdrawn their support.  It doesn't take much, and the trustworthiness is broken.

What I also love about her writings and discoveries is that they match head to head with my own.  

While I get lost in her famous Analysists and their theories, I am one with her on what works, and that is in direct opposition to these famous theories.

I know what they were saying and why, but I also know how it would never support the child and their truths.  

Just as I know the mission behind the FALC and their forgiveness of sins and how it doesn't take into the equation the wounded child. 

When we don't see the child's needs, we are never going to fix if you will the plight of what most call the mentally ill.  What I know to be true, the only real mental are the ones who are not in reality. 

Most of society live one or two or even three steps away from reality…and they call those of us who refuse to abide outside of reality Mental.

I see the mental as living in the space outside of reality.  Believing that the forgiveness of sins can literally change the reality of what happened in childhood.

And what society has labeled as mental…are those who can't live in the pretend world, but are locked into reality.  

Our failure to fit back into a pretend space has us labeled as mental….when in fact we should come up with a new term, Reality Dwellers; those refusing to not see what isn't there.

Byron Katie is a lover of reality…perhaps the "mental" folks are just that….Lovers of Reality. 

And, their refusal to pretend has them labeled as mental.  If you could just picture the insanity of this concept, you would find that the majority of folks are truly mental and those who have carried the label as "Mentally Challenged" are not. 

What they are being chastised for is their inability to pretend reality different.

I have experienced this phenomena…when I failed to flip my father back to dad after knowing he was a pedophile.  My refusal to see him any other way gave me my label, "I am Mental".

This is the quilt that came forth after being with my estranged family….as they seen me, "not even humane" for standing by my truth.

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!)