If you look at the way positive or negative feedbacks travel, they are exactly the same, leaving a person and landing within you, the only difference is the content or is the only difference from where it comes?
Or is it the real affect, you.
Can you change a positive to a negative by how you hear it?
Is it possible our state of being had more to do with the incoming message than the message itself?
How about our expectations of the person and the difference in what they are saying compared to what we believe they should be saying, that our forecast is failing us?
I have a feeling that our inner reception area is very much filled with expectations and needs and desires, leaving little room for incoming truths to show up as themselves, we have demands and commands for them.
Is it possible there are no negative messages, just messages to show us the way? And a negative becomes a positive if you lay its truthfulness against your life.
It is my belief that there are truthful positive feedbacks, and then there are pretend positive feedbacks.
Pretend ones are much more common than truthful feedbacks…and way easy to give. Words that won’t hurt another’s pretend life…for you don’t want to be the one to shatter their world with a truth.
I have great respect and admiration for the folks who tell you what you don’t want to hear, compared to the ones who just are parrots to you.
Mostly when folks get what they call a negative comment, they never stick around long enough to ask why; it is the story behind the remark that’s important.
The one instance that I stuck around to ask why, I was shocked to find, that this person cared about Art as deeply as I did, and he was able to tell me why. I had watered down the art with craft like ideas, and when explained, it made perfect sense to me. That if I had aspirations of being an Artist, there were guidelines, however subtle that kept art from being a craft, and I had crossed the line.
His truthfulness kept me on track, he didn’t pretend positive feedback to spare my feelings, for sparing me would have hurt my art.
This is true in all of life…sparing our feelings hurt them in the long run, for we are led to believe that which isn’t true.
My most positive influences in my life have been folks who have been brutally honest, not caring about hurting my feelings; rather they say what they have to say in order for me stop hurting myself by pretending that which isn’t true.
Isn’t a false positive really a negative in disguise?
I also believe we need huge amounts of false positives to keep our lives of pretend working; we need others to shield us from ourselves. But, if you are standing in your own truth, you don’t need anyone’s feedback to keep your life going, your life just goes.
You are as you are, there isn’t this thirst for others to keep your life going, and you are able to be self-sustaining.
You seek out any part of your own life that isn’t truthful, wanting to uncover instead of cover up the pretend places.
Living authentically is to live outside the covers, to crawl out yourself and not pretend even to make others feel okay.
It seems this false positive can go either way, flowing from us as well as into us. It is up to us to put up a filter that can discern fact from fiction, both coming and going.
Art and writing seem to be the process of building this filter, of facing yourself for the first time without the shield of pretending.
Tag: childhood
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Shield of Pretending.
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My Second Childhood.
I am reading the chapter titled “Basic Tools” in The Artist Way book by Julia Cameron and love her take on both.
“Logic brain is and was our survival brain. It works on known principles. Anything unknown is perceived as wrong and possibly dangerous. Logic brain likes things to be neat little soldiers marching a straight line. Logic brain is the bran we usually listen to, especially when we are telling ourselves to be sensible.”
“Logic brain is our Censor, our second (and third and fourth) thoughts. Faced with an original sentence, phrase, paint squiggle, it says, “What the hell is that? That’s not right!”
“Artist Brain is our inventor, our child, our very own personal absent-minded professor. Artist Brain says “Hey! That is so neat!” It puts odd things together (boat equals wave and walker). It likes calling a speeding GTO a wild animal: “The black howling wolf pulled into the drive-in…”
“Artist Brain is our creative, holistic brain. It thinks in patters and shadings. It sees a fall forest and thinks: Wow! Leaf bouquet! Pretty! Gold-gilt-shimmery-earthskin-kings-carpet! Artist brain is associative and freewheeling. It makes new connections, yoking together images to invoke meaning; like the norse myths calling a boat a “wave-horse.” In Star Wars, the name skywalker is a lovely artist-brain flash.”
“Why all this logic-brain/artist-brain talk? Because the morning pages teach logic brain to stand aside and let artist brain play.”
At the end of that section on Morning Pages, she writes.
“Often, the students most resistant to morning pages come to love them the best. In fact, hating the morning pages is a very good sign. Loving them is a good sign, too, if you keep writing even when you suddenly don’t. A neutral attitude is the third position, but its really just a defensive strategy that may mask boredom.”
“Boredom is just “What’s the use?” in disguise. And “what’s the use?” is fear, and fear means you are secretly in despair. So put your fears on the page. Put anything on the page. Put three pages of it on the page.”
As for the Artist Date, the second main tool, she writes.
“The other basic tool of The Artist’s Way may strike you as a nontool, a diversion. You may see clearly how morning pages could work yet find yourself highly dubious about something called an Artist Date. I assure you, artist dates work, too.”
“Think of this combination of tools in terms of a radio receiver and transmitter. It is a two-step, two directional process out and then in. Doing your morning pages , you are sending – notifying yourself and the universe of your dreams, dissatisfactions, hopes. Doing your artist date, you are receiving, opening yourself to insight, inspiration and guidance.”
“But what exactly is an artist date? An artist date is a block of time, perhaps two hours weekly, especially set aside and committed to nurturing your creative consciousness, your inner artist. In its most primary form, the artist date is an excursion, a play date that you preplan and defend against all interlopers. You do not take anyone on this artist date but you and your inner artist a.k.a. your creative child. This means no lovers, friends, spouses, children – no taggers of any stripe.”
“If you think this sounds stupid or that you will never be able to afford the time, identifying that reaction as resistance. You cannot afford not to find time for artist dates…”
She writes later on to say. “It is frightening to spend quality time with a child or lover, and our artist can be both to us. A weekly artist date is remarkably threatening and remarkably productive.”
“A date? With my Artist?”
“Yes. Your artist needs to be taken out, pampered, and listened to. There are many ways to evade this commitment as there days of your life. “I am too broke” is the favored one, although no one said this date need involve elaborate expenses.”
“Your artist is a child. Time with a parent matters more than monies spent. A visit to a junk store, a solo trip to the beach, an old movie seen along together, a visit to an aquarium or an art gallery – these cost time, not money. Remember, it is a the time commitment that is sacred.”
“In looking for a parallel, think of a child of divorce who gets to see a beloved parent only on weekends. (During most of the week, your artist is in the custody of a stern, workaday adult.) What that child wants is attention, not expensive outings. What that child does not want is to share the precious parent with someone like a new significant other.”
“Spending time in solitude with your artist child is essential to self-nurturing. A long country walk, a solitary expedition to the beach for a sunrise or sunset, a sortie out to a strange church to hear gospel music, to an ethnic neighborhood to taste foreign sights and sounds – your artist might enjoy any of these. Or your artist might like bowling.”
“Commit yourself to a weekly artist’s date, and then watch your killjoy side try and wiggle out of it. Watch how this sacred time gets easily encroached upon. Watch how this sacred time suddenly includes a third party. Learn to guard against these invasions.”
“Above all, learn to listen to what your artist child has to say on, and about, these joint expeditions. For example, “Oh, I hate this serious stuff,” your artist may exclaim if you persist in taking it only to grown-up places that are culturally edifying and good for it.”
“Listen to that! It is telling you your art needs more playful inflow. A little fun can go a long way toward making your work feel more like play. We forget that the imagination-at-play is the heart of all good work. And increasing our capacity for good creative work is what this book is about.”
“You are likely to find yourself avoiding your artist dates. Recognize this resistance as a fear of intimacy –self-intimacy. Often in troubled relationships, we settle into an avoidance pattern with our significant others. We don’t want to hear what they are thinking because it just might hurt. So we avoid them, knowing that, once they get a chance, our significant others will probably blurt out something we do not want to hear. It is possible they will want an answer we do not have and can’t give them. It is possible we might do the same to them and that then the two of us will stare at each other in astonishment, saying, “But I never knew you felt like that!”
“It is probable that these self-disclosures, frightening though they are, will lead to the building of a real relationship, one in which the participants are free to be who they are and to become who they wish. This possibility is what makes the risks of self-disclosure and true intimacy profitable. In order to have a real relationship with our creativity, we must take the time and care to cultivate it. Our creativity will use this time to confront us, to confide in us, to bond with us, and to plan.”
“The morning pages acquaint us with what we think and what we think we need. We identify problem areas and concerns. We complain, enumerate, identify, isolate and fret. This is one step, analogous prayer. In the course of the release engendered by our artist date, step two, we begin to hear solutions. Perhaps equally important, we begin to fund the creative reserves we will draw on in fulfilling our artistry.”
Julia Cameron
Tomorrow morning is day one of week one. I am excited to begin this process. While I have been writing each morning for 6 ½ years, I will once again return to pencil and paper to see again the process of Morning Pages. As well as follow her suggestions for each week, and planning Artist Dates.
I look forward to cultivating or seeking to find new and exciting things I like to do. It has been a very long 6-½ years of healing and unraveling; I am looking forward now to actively grow Art, to intentionally play with my child self, to go hand and hand out in the big world and see what is out there.
It feels like being two or three, but in a big body, with words and able to drive myself place, to be a child without a mom holding me back, warning me or scaring me of unknown things.
My second childhood.
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In the Land of Falsehood.
In David Hawkin’s book “Truth vs Falsehood” he writes,
“The Reality of Freedom and Happiness.”“Just as all that is destructive has a common source, so do freedom, success, health and peace have a common source, which is that of spiritual truth and integrity.”
“ Everyone is potentially free to be free. It is merely a matter of choice to follow the pathway to truth to the degree that one can discover it as identifiable, knowable, and confirmable. Instead of envying or hating success, the truly successful imitate it, copy it, identify with it, and develop the patterns. To take responsibility for one’s own actions and their consequences is, it itself, extremely powerful and almost instantly raises one’s calibrated level of consciousness to over 200.”
Above 200 – Levels of Truth
Below 200 – Levels of Falsehood“An extremely valuable insight that is learned by all spiritually evolved persons in the course of their development is seeing ones own personal consciousness as the decisive influence that determines all that occurs in one’s life.”
“Another operative principle, whose recognition results in greater aspects for positionalities, is that the mind either consciously or unconsciously tends to manifest that which is held in mind. It is very helpful to see that, in reality chocolate is not the enemy of vanilla but represents only a contrasting option. It is also well to recognize the infantile ego that secretly hides within is extremely needy, constantly hoping for praise and input, and is obsessed with being “right” as well as nursing “wrongs,” “grievances,” injustices and grudges. It takes little reflection to see that the ego gets much energy and benefit from negative postionalities, and that spiritual evolution is accelerated greatly by the willingness to forego these dubious payoffs in return for real gains.”
Pathway to Freedom and Happiness
“The steps out of failure, unhappiness, frustration, lack, want, anger, and depression are deceptively simple. Life is a voyage comparable to being out at sea in which a shift of one degree on the ships compass will determine by the end of the trip whether or not one is hundreds of miles off course. The strongest too, which already exists within, is the spiritual will itself, which when firmly set, will face and take on any obstacle. It is this spiritual will that determines the success of the venture. From subjective experience, as well as many years of clinical practice, spiritual education, and research, it is confirmed that the spiritual will is the primordial rudder that determines not only this lifetime but classically termed karma (cal 1,000)”
“By one simple decision, the impossible becomes possible because the lead sinkers that were attached to the cork have been released and now the cork effortlessly rises because of the density and power of the field. Thus, one can let go of the egoistic illusion that spiritual progress is difficult and that one has to do it all alone. On the contrary, illusions of lack disappear and powerful energies now help to sustain one’s progress, which is now accompanied by the pleasure of increased self esteem, and the world magically begins to appear to be a friendly and helpful place. The brains neurochemistry changes in a positive direction, and like a butterfly out of a cocoon, the etheric brain springs forth as a consequence of the onset of the flow of spiritual (i.e. kundalini) energy, and the experience of life and the self in the world transform.”
“ It will be discovered that the ego consists of interlocking building blocks and that to move even one unsettles the whole pile which then begins to fall of its own gravity. Even a seemingly small effort can have very major effects, and one discovers that just a simple smile can totally change one’s life. The many thousands of people who follow self-improvement and spiritual pathways confirm the reality of this discovery.”
“Following is a list of “winner” attitudes, all of which are quite simple to choose and have extremely long-term benefits. Life lived in the energy field of a calibration level over 200 is quite different from life lived from the conscious level of 180.
Available 265
Balanced 305
Benign 225
Calm 250
Considerate 295
Content 255
Cordial 255
Dependable 250
Diligent 210
Diplomatic 210
Easy going 210
Equitable 365
Ethical 305
Fair 305
Faithful 365
Firm 245
Flexible 245
Friendly 280
Genuine 255
Glad 335
Happy 395
Hard Work 200
Healthy 360
Helpful 220
Honest 200
Honorable 255
Humane 260
Humility 270
Idealistic 295
Kind 220
David HawkinsWhat I found so affirming is that your Spiritual Will is the motivator and that by changing just one little thing, your ship will sail in a new direction, especially over time. And you are the one who can go inside and dig down and find the will you want and by standing by it, life will change.
The other thing that I love is that just by owing your responsibility and accepting the consequences of your actions you rise to the level of truth. For when you blame anything outside of yourself, it registers Falsehood and is below the level of 200.
Now, these numbers don’t mean as much as the words or implication of the numbers. That your life will change when you become responsible for it, you will see that your action delivered to you its consequence. So instead of blaming the consequence, get ahead of it by changing the action. The falsehood is that it is someone else responsibility for your happiness.
And what is wildly exciting and filled with freedom is that it all begins with you. Just as Gandhi stated, “you are the change you are waiting for.”
What I see is that your own truths when faced in a responsible manner automatically raises your happiness level, while in our heads it seems that it will lower it.
We believe that if we show our truths, expose the reality of our lives, all hell will break lose, but in fact the opposite happens, heaven appears.
I didn’t even know there was a number system out there that could calibrate the truth of things, but how curious it is that the higher the number the better you feel or in my case, I headed out and steered my world by feelings.
I simply stopped doing things that didn’t feel good or that had terrible consequences to me feeling good.
Some things seem at face value easy to do and harmless, but if you look at how it sits with your integrity it is huge.
The greater tragedy in this business of Truth vs Falsehood is the application of my old religions tool of ‘blessing away the sins’ when in fact it is removing the truth from our lives.
I see that religion as preaching falsehood and I know that many within there would be in shock and awe of my blaspheming.
Yet, it is only when you have been on the receiving end of them disregarding the actions of a pedophile, that you can see the application of this.
Instead of all preaching and singing halting when a pedophile is in their mix, they stay the party line and bless his sins away.
How they believe they are heading in the direction of Heaven is beyond me…for it seems that just to arrive at the level of truth you have to take responsibility and their consequences, until then you live in the land of falsehood.
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In Peace I walked Free!
After my last post about the Civil War in abusive homes, I had to look up the meaning of Civil to see what it means to be in a Civil war.
Civil -polite: polite, but in a way that is cold and formal.
And then I looked up the combination of the two words, Civil War,Civil War – is a war between organized groups within the same nation state or republic or, less commonly, between two countries created from a formerly-united nation.
The formerly united family is now at war with themselves, brothers against brothers, sisters against sister, children against parents for some of the blind can now see, some of the brainwashed are beginning to think on their own, an awakening is happening, and this causes a war within a war.
I don’t want to leave the feelings that in this Civil War no peace is found, for it is. Peace is found in no longer remaining silent. Power is replacing the forced politeness…children are rising up and finding their true self, they feel the stirrings of their Spirit.
They are finding their unused voices, speaking forbidden words and names, identifying the enemy and no longer remaining civil – polite cold and formal.
They will become warm and informal, perhaps become unconventional and different, they will be marching to their own drums, hearing their own music for the very first time.
Hearing the stirrings of inner freedom and expression, of passion and of self-awareness, they will fight now to be free from being held prisoner to another.This civil war will end for the lucky ones, for the ones who can find the thread of their soul, the inner knowing that their very aliveness depends on them leaving the family, that if they stay they may as well die.
There wasn’t a moment of hesitation when I left my family, there wasn’t a drop of doubt, for to the depth of my being, I knew I had been one of the living dead and staying there aware would be to be buried alive, for now I knew I was alive but dead.
What I had found that day back in December of 2004, was a dead me. A me that had no me in it. A me that was full of the definitions from my parents, the beliefs and thoughts of my religion, but there wasn’t but a speck of me there.
Not a part of me that defined by me, just me.I was a body being used by my family and a religion, but I wasn’t alive and now I was aware of it. And once I knew, I could no longer not know. And when you know you are then awake of how asleep you have been.
And when you are awake, you see the civil war you lived in.
Imagine being in a war but unaware you are at war. Or even aware that you are scarred and lame due to the battles you unsuccessfully fought.
A civil war refugee that finds its imperfect self is on the path to perfection.
“Coming from whence you came…” you should act, be and walk and talk like the walking wounded.You are the perfect representation of an abused child. You are the signpost or the poster child for abuse. You have displayed yourself perfectly, the perfectly abused.
Perfectly abused people act perfectly abused. When you are aware of how abused you are, you can then begin to heal.Denying your brokenness is denying your self.
I found myself in a completely broken state and complete freedom arose, for I no longer had to strive for perfection instead I embraced my imperfections and found them to be perfectly me.
In agreement with my history I found peace…and the freedom to be myself.
To walk my walk.
To talk my talk.
To be a me I had yet to be.
An individual, a free spirit, with a clear mind no longer washed by others, in peace I walked free.
Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose!
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Protected me.
For six years I have been saying that I have no memory, and I have lied. I have no mind memory, but my body has always had its memory.
I don’t have actual vivid stories to recount, but I do have the physical reaction within my body’s mass, its nerves and muscles…it knows what I forgot to remember.
For years I wasn’t pleased with my ‘cold’ body, how it chose not to get close to my parents, how it literally would feel unease in their presence, never the desire to snuggle close or lean in and get into their aurora.
It was like I wasn’t driving this body, that this body had a life of its own…it craved things and repelled things on its own volition.
Now with hidden truths and untold stories known, I now am supportive of this living organism that has a beautiful memory, a trusting articulate knowing and isn’t fooled by flimsy masks.
It never pretended to pretend it always reacted accurately aligning itself to the experiences of its past.
Me inside was always disappointed in its lack of warmth for my parents, its lack of trust and faith and its inability to recognize and feel their love.
My body stood strong and resilient to all my longings and childish wishes…it would not give up what it knew.
It knew my father’s imprint, my mother’s indifference…it never once changed its way, lost its courage or grace.
It just was…
An abused body and it knew its source.
Its memory carried me when I was to blind to see, to wounded to know, It always has protected me…
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Grace and Courage
As Alice Miller’s book comes to a close, she encapsulates her thoughts.
“In this book (The Body Never Lies) I express hope that , as psychological knowledge grows, the power of the Fourth Commandment will wane in favor of the appropriate respect for the vital biological needs of the body, including truth, loyalty to oneself and to one’s perceptions, feelings and insights. If I seek genuine expressions of my feelings in a genuine form of communication, everything that was built on lies and insincerity will fall away from me. Then I will no longer strive for a relationship in which I pretend to have feelings that I do not have, or suppress others that I do have. Love that excludes honesty does not deserve the name of love.
The following points may serve to sum up these ideas.
1. The “love” of formerly abused children for their parents is not love. It is an attachment fraught with expectations, illusions, and denials, and it exacts a high price from all those involved in it.
2. The price of this attachment is paid primarily by the next generation of children, who grow up in a spirit of mendacity because their parents automatically inflict on them the thins they believe “did them good.” Young parents themselves also frequently pay for their denial with serious damage to their health because their “gratitude” stands in contradiction to the knowledge stored in their bodies.
3. The frequent failure of therapy can be explained by the fact that most therapists are themselves caught up in the snare of traditional morality and attempt to drag their clients into the same kind of captivity because it is all they know. As soon as clients start to feel and become capable of roundly condemning the deeds, say, of an incestuous father, therapists will probably be assailed by fear of punishment at the hands of their own parents if they should dare to look their own truth in the face and express it for what it is. How else can we explain the fact that forgiveness is declared to be an instrument of healing? Therapists frequently propose this to reassure themselves, just as the parents did. But because it sounds very familiar to the messages communicated to them in childhood by their parents, albeit expressed in a more friendly way, some patients may need some time to see through the pedagogic angle of it. And even once they finally have recognized it, they can hardly leave their therapist, especially if a new toxic attachment has already formed, if for them, the therapist has become like a mother who has helped them to a new birth (because in this new relationship they have started to feel). So they may continue to expect salvation from the therapist instead of listening to their body and accepting the aid it signals represent.
4. Once clients, accompanied by an enlightened witness, have lived through and understood their fear of their parents (or parental figures), they can gradually start to break off destructive attachments. The positive reaction of the body will not be long in coming: its communications will become more and more and more comprehensible; it will cease to express itself in mysterious symptoms. Then clients will realize that their therapists have deceived them (frequently involuntarily) because forgiveness actually prevents the formation of scar tissue over the old wound, not to speak of complete recovery. And it can never dispel the compulsion to repeat the same pattern over and over again. This is something we can all find out from our own experience.
“In The Body Never Lies, I have tried to show that some widely held views have long since exploded by scientific research. Among them are the convictions that forgiveness has a salutary effect, that a commandment can produce genuine love, and that feigning feelings that we do not have is compatible with the demand for honesty. But my criticism of such misleading ideas is by not means to be equated with a refusal to recognize any moral standards or with a wholesale rejection of morality.”
“On the contrary, Precisely because I staunchly uphold certain values – such as integrity, awareness, responsibility, or loyalty to oneself – I have difficulty with the denial of truths that I consider self-evident and have in fact been empirically substantiated.”
“Inability to face up to the sufferings undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation frequently masquerading as philosophy or literature. But ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, nicotine, or medicine, it usually has the last word, because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind, particularly if the mind has been trained to function as an alienated self. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality.” Alice Miller
What I find so affirming is are the major factors that Alice believes will help a person heal from abuse is what I discovered as well…
Honoring thy Mother and thy Father…is no longer valid when they don’t honor you. This is a two way road and that love without honesty isn’t love.
Secondly, the forgiveness to keep them ‘sin’ free…will not put scar tissue on our wound; it will not help heal us at all. In fact, we eventually will hurt our children, for we are still unhealed and hurt.
From what I am hearing in my old church based upon the premise of forgiveness, this is self evident. If forgiveness worked, it would have stopped a long time ago. But when you hear that the grandparent was a perpetrator, the parent was perpetrator and now a child is, Forgiveness doesn’t stop abuse!
And I love how she uses the body as a gauge for our barometer to our honesty. Your body simply does not know how to lie, it just responds in kind to the climate in which it is forced to live.
How easily our world troubles could be solved if we all were brave enough to speak our truth and walk behind it with grace and courage…
abuse, Alice Miller, attachment, body, childhood, commandment, courage, forgiveness, fourth, legacy, lies, love, never, Religion, sexual, The, therapy
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Children will suffer.
From Alice Miller’s book “The Body Never Lies,” she writes…
“My attempts to persuade the Vatican of the importance of early childhood experiences have revealed how impossible it is to arouse feelings of compassion in men and women who right at the beginning of their lives learned to suppress their genuine, natural feelings so mercilessly that there is no trace of them left in their conscious minds. All curiosity about the feelings of others has been stifled. It seems that people who were physically mutilated in early life immure themselves in a fortress deep inside themselves, where they can only pray to God. It is to Him that they delegate all their responsibility, and they carefully obey the precepts of the church so as not to be punished by this “loving” God for any sins of omission they might commit.”
“Shortly after the capture of Saddam Hussein in late 2003, the Vatican was largely instrumental in orchestrating the sudden increase, all over the world, of voices expressing compassion for the unscrupulous tyrant who had been such an object of fear and loathing while he was still at large. But in my view we cannot simply allow ourselves to base our judgment of tyrants on ordinary compassion for the individual, if that means disregarding things they have done.”
“As biographers Judith Miller and Laurie Mylroie tell us in their 1990 book “Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf”, Saddam Hussein was born on April 28, 1937. He grew up in a peasant family living in penury near Tikrit. They had no land of their own. His biological father died before his birth. His stepfather, a shepherd, constantly humiliated the boy, calling him “son of a whore” and “son of a bitch,” beating him mercilessly and tormenting him in the most brutal way imaginable. To exploit young Saddam’s working capacity to the full, he forbade him to go to school until the boy was ten. Instead, he would wake him in the middle of the night and tell him to guard the flocks. In these formative years, children develop and image of the world. Ideas take shape in their minds about the values that are worth upholding in life. At the same time, they begin to cherish desires and dream of their fulfillment. For Saddam, the slave of his stepfather, these desires all centered around one thing; limitless power over others. In his brain the idea presumably took shape that he could regain the human dignity he had been so radically deprived of only by possessing the same power over others that his stepfather had over him. Throughout his childhood, there were no other ideals, no other examples to live up to, only the omnipotent stepfather and himself, the defenseless victim of the terror inflicted on him. It was in line with this pattern that the adult Hussein later organized the structure of the country he ruled over. His body knew nothing but violence.”
“Every dictator denies the suffering of his childhood and attempts to forget them by indulging his megalomania. But the unconscious mind of an individual has completely registered his biography in the cells of the body, it will at some point urge that individual to confront the truth. After the coalition invasion, despite the immense financial resources at his disposal, Saddam sought refuge precisely in the vicinity of the place where he was born, the place where all help was denied him as a child, a highly precarious spot that could not provide real protection. The fact that he should have chosen this place to “go to ground” reflects the desperate plight of his early years and clearly illustrates the power of compulsive repetition. His return to his childhood was the return to the place where he had no chance to escape.”
“there is conclusive evidence that the character of a tyrant will not change as long as he lives, that he will abuse his power in a destructive way as long as he encounters no resistance. The point is that his genuine aim, the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it, as long as one denies the suffering it involved. Accordingly, a dictator’s efforts to achieve that aim are doomed to failure. Compulsive repetition will always reassert itself. And an endless succession of victims is forced to pay the price.”
“With his own behavior, Hitler demonstrated to the world the kind of person his father was and the kind of treatment he suffered at his hands when he was a child: destructive, pitiless, ostentatious, merciless, boastful, perverted, self-enamored, shortsighted, and stupid. In his unconscious imitation he was faithful to his father’s example. For the same reason, other dictators like Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Ceausescu, Idi Amin, Saddim Hussein behaved in a very similar way. Saddam’s biography is a striking example of how extreme humiliation in childhood is avenged on thousands and thousands of victims at a later date. The refusal to learn from these facts may be grotesque, but the reason for refusal are not difficult to identify.”
“ The fact is that an unscrupulous tyrant mobilizes the suppressed fears and anxieties of those who were beaten as children but have never been able to accuse their own fathers of doing so. Their loyalty to these fathers is unswerving, despite the torments suffered at their hands. Every tyrant symbolizes such a father, the figure whom the abused children remain attached to with every fiber of their being, hoping that one day they will be able to transform him into a loving parent by being blind.”
“This hope may have been what prompted the representation of the Roman Catholic Church to demonstrate their compassion for Hussein. In 2002, I turned to a number of cardinals for support when I presented the Vatican with material on the delayed effects of spanking and asked authorities there to do what they could to enlighten young parents on this subject. As I have said, not one of the cardinals I approached with this request showed the slightest interest in the universally ignored but crucially important issue of physically abused children. Nor did I come across the slightest indication of Christian charity or compassion in connection with this issue. Today, however, those same representatives are eager to show that they are indeed capable of compassion. Significantly, however, this compassion is lavished not on maltreated children or on Saddam’s victims but on Saddam himself, on the unscrupulous father figure that the feared despot symbolizes.”
“As a rule, beaten, tormented, and humiliated children who have never received support from a helping witness later develop a high degree of tolerance for the cruelties perpetrated by parent figures and a remarkable indifference to the sufferings borne by children exposed to inhumane treatment. The last thing they wish to be told is that they themselves once belong to the same group. Indifference is a way of preserving them from opening their eyes to reality. In this way they become advocates of evil, however convinced they may be of their own humane intentions. From an early age they were forced to suppress and ignore their true feelings. They were forced to put their trust not in those feelings but solely in the regulations imposed on them by their parents, teachers, and the church authorities. Now the task facing them in their adult lives leaves them no time to perceive their own feelings, unless those feelings happen to fit in precisely with the patriarchal value system in which they live and which prescribes compassion for the father, however destructive and dangerous he may be. The more comprehensive a tyrant’s catalogue of crimes is, the more he can count on the tolerance, provided his admires are hermetically closed off from access to the sufferings of their own childhood.” Alice Miller.
What a brilliant cycle this abuse is, for the circuitous madness not looking creates. How nature creates ways in which our mind can overrun our realities for survival and yet this very technique is what allows it to continue.
The hurt child ends up hurting children and the hurt children who don’t want to feel their pain ends up seeing the ‘heroic’ adult and not the monster.
It takes Herculean efforts to go with the body of truths and swing wide of society, church and family to see reality.
Imagine a world full of delusional adults who carry a false picture of their formative years, they will not be able to spot a monster in their presence?
No matter not how detailed his catalogue of crimes are, what matters most is that his followers, family and friends, haven’t discovered their own box of crimes of childhood…the sightless followers, the ones who love to live in the land of denial will not see his crimes.
It is incredible to me, it isn’t that they are not seeing what is going on today, but the long ago blindness that makes them unconscious supporters of evil.
You simply are incapable of seeing in the present if you didn’t see in the past.
And the sheer volume of people refusing to deal in the past wrecks havoc on today’s reality.
While I screamed loudly about the present, they clung to the vestiges of their ‘happy childhood’.
Who knew that holding tight to a ‘happy childhood’ could cause so much pain!
By not seeing who you really are you are incapable of seeing the truth in others…and this works so well for the monsters among us.
Who will stop them?
What will make the blind see, how much destruction has to be spread around the planet, before we can begin to see that children are not born this way, the parents are the cause.
As long as we don’t see the suffering children, children will suffer.
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I Run, Because you can’t.
“There are only two mistakes one can make along the road to truth; not going all the way and not starting.”
BuddhaI felt the loneliness today of my Aunt who ran away. A woman I never met, yet I feel we are one.
I felt her sadness of being misunderstood and unknown, how her choice to save herself, sentenced her to a life alone outside of her family.
Ostracized for escaping, for saving ourselves, for walking free of abuse, we are not cheered, no clapping instead we are jeered with sarcasm.
I never ever thought my harshest critics would be from my own family, they are forever punching the already weakened psyche.
The Little girl within feels so sad, empty of words to make them see.
Today I wondered about my Aunt and her life, how she survived without contact from her family, yet like me the family she missed is the same one that brings her pain.
The intellectual part of me understands that the energy they bring me isn’t healthy, but my heart yearns for acceptance, for understanding and even empathy.
Like missing the stick that is poking you in the eye.
I have more empathy for folks who are set aside because of who they are, parts of themselves they cannot change.
Maybe because my Aunt disappeared and no one spoke her name that I want there to be words about me.
Perhaps this blog is a way that I too will not just simply disappear without a trace. (www.imperfectlady.typepad.com)
In the first few days of my father being accused of criminal sexual conduct, I wrote.
I wrote in disbelief, I wrote the words to anchor myself somewhere, to hold me in the sea of grief.
Writing is evidence of my journey.
I have kept all written communications from my family as evidence. I know that is an odd word to use.
It was the evidence I needed to sort out which one of us was in reality and which one wasn’t.
My mental mind fought a long hard battle up against reality and in reality there are written words from a family who is not cheering me.
In as much as I want them to be cheering, what I needed more were their words of mental ness to shine the way out.
Maybe in the end their shouts of sarcasm are cheering me forward.
They are showing me there is nothing for me back there.
They were showing me how not to be.
Showing me how far I have come.I feel the energy of my runaway aunt; she joins me in spirit as I run along, lending me her courage and strength. I feel the spirit of many little girls whose time ran out, who were too empty to begin, I run for you.
I run towards wholeness with truth at my side.
I feel you with me as I run.The refrain “you are the wind beneath my wings” came to mind.
I am so grateful I was able to run away.
I am so not alone.
All little girls everywhere who suffered like I, I run for you.
I run, because you can’t.
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Kept this Pattern Going.
Being a mother in the middle and having a generation before me and a generation below me puts me in a great place to witness the intricacies of how relationships are formed and how the legacy is passed on.
Being aware of the legacy you are in while you are in it is near impossible…it takes stepping out to get a clear view.
I leaped out of my childhood legacy when my mother’s moral tower displayed her husband of 49 years as a pedophile, it was then I knew the generation before me, and sadly I could also see the generation beneath me and how one man had touched two generations while my mother loved him.
I saw him in his truth, her in her truth, and then me in mine.
I saw the river that flowed beneath all of us and the only way to escape that river is to see what you are swimming in.
Within me lay all the layers of teaching and years of treatment and formation, in horror I saw her in me…
Within a few days I was able to see the structure of our family and how it all was flimsily held together and how each insane idea supported another insane concept, the maze was intricately held together by unquestioning authority.
To see the shocking truth of a pedophile father and the undying “love” of his wife towards him, shatters the scaffolding that I had built called me.
I saw my own insanity.
I then saw how insanely I had treated my children based upon the morals and values of a woman who ‘loved and supported’ a pedophile.
Stuck in the middle with an insane woman above me, mistreated children below me and me aware, I then had to unhitch myself from her teachings and long held beliefs while continuing to raise children but change everything.
In the middle, I knew I couldn’t change my mother, but I had a chance at redoing me and then I had the hope that if I could, my children would then repattern themselves after the new me.
What a tight spot to be in, yet with great freedom.
I knew intuitively that they felt my every move.
Where in the past I had blindly trampled upon their lives, I now knew that I could inflict pain or raise their soul.
It has been my intentions, while not always successful, to see the children.
To be very conscious of how my choices in life impacted theirs.
For we are all strung on the same string, the string called family legacy.
You simply can’t escape the line of your parents, but you can change the dance steps, the outcome, and the way you live your life.
It takes great strength and courage to see the insanity of an abusive family and to see the traces poking out in you, to own your insane madness and to feel the rage of injustice, and the unknowingness of being a child and following along, with love, trust and faith.
I found myself pretty much empty of good value, and had to start from scratch building my own tower of morals and values, and I started with the foundation of truth.
I began building a whole new structure using the pieces of insanity, for its denial is what has kept this pattern going.
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Alice Miller, again. I love her fearlessness.
Chapter 4 in Banished Knowledge by Alice Miller titled “Why I Reject Psychoanalysis Also as a Therapy Method.”
“Following my interview for the April 1987 issue of the German Journal Psychologie heute (Psychology Today), in which I declared my break with psychoanalysis, I was asked several times whether I didn’t owe psychoanalysis the means that enabled me to query it. Today I can answer this question with a clear No. As recently as in my preface to the first German edition of “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware”, I succumbed to the error myself. Yet later developments showed me unmistakably that psychoanalysis is a maze from which it is very difficult to find a way out. Without the illusionary help of psychoanalysis, which further the resistance to knowledge about past events, there is no doubt that I would have found my way to the truth sooner.”
“I owe my first awakening to the spontaneous pictures that I began to paint in 1973. Nevertheless, even years later, 1981, I still closed my eyes to the fact that psychoanalysis was the very thing that kept me away from feelings blocked since my childhood and thus from the truth. I didn’t discover this until, thanks to J. Konrad Stettbacher’s method, I could approach my childhood step by step.”
“What I find most convincing about this method is its openness to creativity, its precision, its effectiveness, its verifiability, and its respect for the uniqueness and special quality of each individual life and history. Since it makes the path to reality possible and is not afraid of reality, it is free of lies, of being enmeshed in any way with them, free of clichés, pedagogy, moralizing norms, spiritual mystifications, and any and all associated ideological trimmings.”
“On the other hand, there is proof that these elements are present in psychoanalysis, and I have supplied such proofs in my earlier books. Today I realize: It was an illusion to believe that the remains of pedagogy could be removed from psychoanalysis, leaving it still suitable for the liberation of those seeking help. It is no coincidence that psychoanalysis has not yet undertaken any revision of it immanent pedagogy; it cannot do this, for as soon as the pedagogic scaffolding is removed the whole structure will collapse like a house of cards. Since in the past psychoanalysis has served only to disguise childhood traumas, how can it be expected to help abused children? This inability is revealed not only in its theory but also in every detail of its technique – which is useless for getting at the truth.”
“Even if some analysts do wish not to manipulate their patients according to theories and pedagogic morality, but wish instead to accompany them in the discovery of their history, they are bound to fail as long as they work with the method of free association. This method, also known as a basic rule, reinforces intellectual resistance to feelings and reality; for as long as feelings can be talked about they cannot really be felt. And as long as feelings are not felt, the self-damaging blockages remain.”
“Both basic rules – the psychoanalytic setting as well as the method of free association – assume that on the one side there is a superior, informed interpreter, the analyst, and on the other the uninformed patient to whom the analyst explains his situation, his unconscious desires, thoughts and impulses. For the analyst to be able to do this, the patient must as it were uncover, betray, and expose his unconscious with the aid of free association. Thus the authoritarian structure of childhood is preserved unthinkingly in both basic rules. Parents, too, told the child from their perspective how he felt, or how he was supposed to feel, and the child believed that they knew better than he did.”
“On the basis of the pedagogic model, indissolubly coupled as it is with Freudian constructs, the student analysands learn to discuss the patient’s emotions and “to be in the know,” but never to feel anything themselves. No wonder they in turn cannot enable anyone else to feel anything. The patient senses that inability and as a rule will not dare to admit any feelings. If he does, perhaps because he has read books that for the first time opened up some access to his pain, he will quickly learn in psychoanalytic practice to bring order into his suffering, to define it with abstract words, and to manipulate it so as to ‘feel better’ again. He will sense that the interpreters of his soul feel threatened by emotions, because in their constructs they have learned only how to fend them off, and he will do anything to avoid exposing his substitute parents to this threat. He will adapt to their method of free association and talk to them about his feelings without realizing that he is letting himself in for years and years of wandering about in a maze, while in the meantime he is missing his chance of living. For his benumbed life cannot awaken until the child’s confrontation with the authors of his suffering begins; until the patient ceases to philosophize and wonder why his parents did this or that to him and instead begins, with the aid of numerous transferences, to uncover what exactly they did do; until in therapy he can finally confront his internalized parents with his suffering; until with each new pain reminding him of the old one he tries to tell himself what he is feeling and then tests the situation. Just as Daniel did. That which the unharmed child can externalize with his reference persons in reality, the once harmed adult has to try out and learn within the protective setting of therapy. How this works in each case has been made clear in Stettbacher’s description of his method.”
“ It is not possible for someone really to clarify his situation and dissolve his fears until he can feel them rather than discuss them. Only then is the veil lifted and he realizes his true need: not a tutor, not an interpreter, not a confuser; he needs space for his own growth and the company of an enlightened witness on the long journey on which he has set out.”
“Someone who has himself never learned to feel will not know that he makes it impossible for the other person, the patient to feel. It is enough, for instance, to explain to the patient the distress of his parents or of other people for all the patient’s latent reproaches to be instantly silenced. He hasn’t any, he isn’t aware of any, all he feels is pity for the authors of his distress. For it is impossible to feel the pain and at the same time understand why it was inflicted. Once simply does not feel it.”
“It took me years to get away from this “understanding” attitude. The habit, originating in psychoanalysis, of working with free associations proved to be a great obstacle in my own therapy. Time after time, free association enabled me to establish ingenious, intellectual links and thus obtain what I imagined was an overview. This helped me to evade the painful confrontation with my parents and in turn blocked all the avenues through which I might have gained some insight into the reality of my childhood. As long as I could put a name to my feelings, I retained the mastery over the child in me, and making it impossible for her to find her language, the language of hitherto unnamed sensations and feelings. The technique of the four steps helped me become aware of this blockage because I found that, significantly I tended to skip the first two steps. Finally, after a long time, I could allow the child in me to express her sensations and feelings and to take her time doing so. But she could feel only when the adult, educated part of me allowed this to happen and without interference of explanations and associations.”
“This experience helped me to discover that Freud, with his method, created a system of self-deception that functioned reliably to promote repression. Anyone who does not want to know the truth of his life will find psychoanalysis helpful. In any case he will be helped to reinforce the old resistance to the injuries suffered in childhood and never find out the truth about what happened.”
“Philosophers and other intellectuals have fashioned numerous ways of keeping pain at a distance with the aid of thoughts and of disregarding the realities of life with the aid of an ostensibly defining language. In fact, Martin Heidegger made this is goal of his philosophy. He touched on his former painful and denied experiences only with abstract thoughts that excluded any feelings of the child since the child would have recognized the self-deception. For him there was no duality of passion and thought but only passionate thought, which did not advance toward truth as a result of the thinking process but was itself the goal. It is said that, to make this clear, he once told his students, on introducing Aristotle: “Aristotle was born, worked, and died.” In other words: It is the philosopher’s work that counts not his life.”
“Until a few years ago I might have thought that Heidegger’s error could be regarded has harmless and unimportant as long as his philosophy was not used to confuse the masses. But today I am no longer sure, for recently I have received some proofs to the contrary – among other things, letters from several woman philosophers writing to tell me that, through my books, they had for the first time grasped to what extent philosophy had kept them away from the truth. Its complicated thought processes had helped them not to see that they had been abused children. In spite of the suffering that now erupted, they were glad not to have completely missed the chance to live their lives, for they were still young enough to make use of it.”
“It is possible for a child to protect himself all through life from the tragic, unbearable truth by “passionate thinking” about “the nature of truth” and, as long as his symptoms do not sound the alarm, there the matter rests. However, psychoanalysis is a system that offers the very people who have symptoms to escape from their plight. That is why such people must be told that they can expect no solution from psychoanalysis. The most they can expect is a maze of well-intended paths but with no exit into freedom. It is a prison built with theories of a man who a century ago found himself in the same quandary as most patients do today. To escape insight into martyrdom of his childhood, he fled into the garden of thought constructs, and for a while his symptoms disappeared. But they came back despite increasing efforts to keep the artificial structure from collapsing.”
“Galileo went blind after being forced by the Church to repudiate the truth against his better knowledge. Sigmund Freud forbade himself to voice the truth he had discovered about child abuse and its effects on the psyche of the adult. He betrayed his own discovery after his father’s death. When I read that he later suffered from cancer of the jaw and that after many operations he finally died of it, I have to ask myself whether his jaw was not rebelling on behalf of the truth on which he chose to turn his back. Although my question is to be regarded as a hypothesis which, in the absence of the person involved, I cannot put to the test, I have noticed that, among the innumerable analysts who are so fond of handing out interpretations to their dependent patients, not one of them, as far as I know, has yet published an interpretation of Freud’s illness. Are the disciples not permitted even to wonder why a venerated father figure contracted cancer of the jaw? May interpretations be given only to dependent persons – children and patients? Doesn’t this amount to admitting that interpretations are weapons used against the helpless but not against authority held in awe? Patients are fed all kinds of constructs by the old man and believed that this is genuine nourishment. They believe everything because they need someone who will at last listen to them. And they do not see through the abuse because someone who in childhood experienced nothing but abuse is unable later in life to see through it.”
“The man who was no longer allowed to utter the truth instead wrote volume after volume whose style was universally admired and whose contents led humanity into utter confusion. So “passionate thinking” is by no means as harmless as it appears. In my opinion, everything that suppresses the truth is destructive, even if the consequences cannot be fully realized until much later.”
“In my view, Stettbacher succeeded in finding a way to the injured child in the adult, letting that child express himself with the aid of feelings, and in conceptualizing this way of experiencing the past. This is not to say that there can be no other methods that, based on the same insight into early injuries, enable the same goal to be achieved. The efficacy of various methods will become apparent as soon as publications on the subject become available.”
“Yet one thing remains certain: Since the injured child in us can express himself only by means of physical sensations and feelings related to his traumas, it is essential that therapy secure access to these sensations and feelings and enable the person to articulate them. However, this access remains completely blocked whenever we are satisfied with intellectual speculations, as is the case in psychoanalysis. No matter how impressive and fashionable these speculations may be, they never go beyond the state of self-deception.”
“The invoking of great names such as Freud, Jung, Adler, and others as well as the application of their theories – theories that resist emotions and conceal the truth- cannot possibly help a therapist to rid a patient permanently of his neurosis. They will only produce new, emotion-resistant and ignorant “therapists” who cannot but remain ignorant as long as they cling to fictions, do not query what they once learned, are afraid of the truth, and wish to exert power.”
“The goal of therapy is to allow the once silenced child in us to speak and feel. Gradually the banishment of our knowledge is revoked, and in the course of this process, as the erstwhile torments and the still-existent prisons become evident, we also discover our history, ourself, and our buried capacity for love. A therapy of this kind can be carried out only by a therapist, female or male, who no longer keeps the child in himself and that child’s knowledge in a state of banishment or who at least is moving in that direction – because he wants at all costs to find the truth about himself.” Alice Miller.
I M Perfect lady 