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!)

In Alice Miller's book, "Thou Shalt Not Be Aware" she writes about groups and our need to belong. 

"How can it be explained psychologically that the same person who exhibits so much acumen and critical judgment concerning his enemies at the same time retains a touching, childlike loyalty and submissiveness vis-a-vis the dictates of his own group? Anyone who knows what it means to belong to a group knows how critical this membership can sometimes seem. Even a brief contact with a group can give one of feeling of maternal warmth, of a good symbiosis with the mother, never experienced before, which makes on feel secure yet at the same time free and comfortable to express oneself satisfactorily. This is how it actually would have been had there been a good symbiosis with the mother. But since a group is only a substitute, the search for what is missing can never stop. In order for this to happen, a process of mourning would have to take place. Every form of addiction, instead of doing away with the old longing, simply perpetuates the tragedy by repeating it. A glass of whiskey or a cigarette that can be held in the hand, set aside when not needed, and immediately reached for when needed, establishes the comfortable feeling that an available mother can give. Since the real mother was not available, however (or the child would not have become addicted as an adult), the child was not permitted to experience either a good symbiosis or a liberating separation and remains dependent for the rest of his life on the image of an ideal mother he wishes for but never had. the addictive substance thus provides not only a feeling of comfort but also the torments of dependency."

"When a group takes over this ersatz role, although it gives the illusion of being an ideal mother, it mercilessly requires the same adaptation to its demands that the real mother once did. Since the origins of this situation reach back to the early beginnings of life, a person will have a hard time recognizing his predicament."
                                                                                                                Alice

What Alice Miller does in her writings, are to show the whys of our behaviors and that we don't just do things without a cause.  We are literally seeking that which we missed and are often blind to what is missing…while seeking it.

Like craving something, not knowing what it is, but finding its substitute and believing you found it.

Her depiction of what happens when a mother and child relationship is incorrect and what it means in the choices we make, is remarkable.  It is the baseline for how we live.