I M Perfect lady

Tag: childhood

  • Transference

    About Transference, by Alice Miller
    Tuesday October 14, 2008

    “At the beginning of our lives we were, as very small children, totally dependent on our parents. And we believed, we HAD TO believe, that we were loved by them. Even when we were abused we couldn’t realize this. Then, after 4 years, we grew up and couldn’t avoid suffering from being rejected, hated and treated cruelly. But as dependent children we still could not afford to FEEL this suffering, we were too small to deal with these feelings, thus we had to repress our rage, indignation, and our deep disappointment into our bodies. When we become adult, these repressed feelings stemming from the cruel treatment of our parents may come to the surface, but they are still connected with the small child’s fear of being punished for every sign of rebellion.

    Should we as adults be treated in the same way as our parents treated us as children, many of us – especially if we have been through therapy – can become aware of the cruelty endured before. But the knowledge of the whole amount of cruelty can still rest repressed because the terror happened when we had not yet a name for it. For this reason we need what we call “the transference”, hating for instance another person instead of our mother or father.

    The transference is unavoidable if we were once abused children. It can also be highly confusing. But it can be liberating as well if we are ready to see it as a consequence of our early life. If we have summoned the courage to look our outraged, hateful YOUNG parents in the eyes, and to feel the fear of the small child we once were, then the misleading, confusing and defensive role of the transference disappears. We can then strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives. They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever.

    If we don’t want to become like them we must strive to SEE them as exactly as possible. We can use in this way the transference as a means for discovering the feelings of the small child that we once were and to deepen our understanding for him or her. At this moment the transference becomes our guide that will enable the small child in us to BELIEVE what their body KNEW it’s whole life but his mind could never believe: that so much evil and hatred can be directed towards a small, innocent child only because the parents have endured the same and have never questioned this. Alice Miller

  • Production of Evil

    I am thinking Alice Miller may be one of my new favorite authors on Childhood and its affects as well as understanding why parents do what they do.

    Here is what she writes on the back of her book, “Banished Knowledge”

    “The JUngian doctrine of the shadow, and the notion that evil is the reverse of good, are aimed at denying the reality of evil. But evil is real. It is not innate but acquired, and it is never the reverse of good but rather its destroyer…It is not true that evil, destructiveness, and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that evil is always engaged in producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is similarly avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to this production of evil.”

  • Theories as a Protective Shield

    “Theories as a Protective Shield” chapter 4, in Banished Knowledge by Alice Miller, she writes…

    “The feminist movement will forfeit none of its strength if it finally admits that mothers also abuse their children. Only the truth, even the most uncomfortable, endows a movement with the strength to change society, not the denial of truth. When men abuse their women and the women put up with it, both the violence of the men and the tolerance of the women are consequences of early child abuse. Hence young children, male as well as female, can become victims of adults of either sex. When sensitive nonbrutal women (and men) are incapable of protecting their children from the brutality of their partner, one must contribute this inability to the blinding process and the intimidation experienced in their own childhood. That is the simple truth. Only when these roots of all violence are exposed is it possible to examine the phenomena without retouching or embellishing them.”

    “When a female therapist has been taught that men are solely to blame for all the evil of the world, she will, of course, be able to support her female patients when they eventually discover that they have been sexually abused by their fathers, grandfathers, or brothers: Unlike the followers of the drive theory, she will not talk them out of this truth. But as long as the truth about their mother who allowed the abuse to happen, who failed to protect the child and ignored her distress, is kept out of sight, the full reality is not allowed to be either perceived or acknowledged. And as long as the child’s feelings cannot be experienced, the rage against me – a rage she can already experience – remains impotent; it can even remain coupled with the undissolved loyalty and devotion toward the father or other abusive men.”

    “When mothers are defended as pathetic victims, the female patient will not discover that with a loving, protective, perceptive, and courageous mother she could never have been abused by her father or brother. A daughter who has learned from her mother that she is worth protecting will find protection among strangers too and will be able to defend herself. When she has learned what love is, she will not succumb to simulated love. But a child who was merely pushed aside and disciplined, who never experienced soothing caresses, is not aware that anything like nonexploitative caresses can exist. She has no choice but to accept any closeness she is offered rather than be destroyed. Under certain circumstances she will even accept sexual abuse for the sake of finding at least some affection rather than freezing up entirely. When, as an adult woman, she comes to realize that she was cheated out of love, she may be ashamed of her former need and hence feel guilty. She will blame herself because she dare not blame her mother, who failed to satisfy the child’s need or perhaps even condemned it.”

    “Psychoanalysts protect the father and embroider the sexual abuse of the child with the Oedipus, or Electra, complex, while some feminist therapists idealize the mother, thus hindering access to the child’s first traumatic experiences with the mother. Both approaches can lead to a dead end, since the dissolving of pain and fear is not possible until the full truth of the facts can be seen and accepted.”

    “But even in the absence of ideological motives, the truth can be disregarded in therapies if the patient is offered no tolls to deal with his feelings and to systematically query and test his hypotheses. Even the harshest reproaches directed at the parents won’t help the patient achieve liberation as long as the truth remains inaccessible. This will be the case if, for example, the child had a father in whose presence he could scarcely utter a word without being interrupted and barked at. This patient may for a very long time find it impossible to achieve an inner confrontation with his father and to articulate his accusations. The liberated feelings are directed first against the mother, who terrorized the child less. The reverse may also happen – that the child feared his father less than he feared his mother and that the patient first accuses his father, quite unconsciously because the earlier experiences are still inaccessible, of things he actually experienced with his mother. Thus, based on self protection and fear, a distorted picture of the past takes shape. In the course of therapy these distortions can be corrected, provided the therapy is aimed at discovering the reality. If it is, the therapists knows that the patient can accuse only the parent in who he still had a modicum of confidence and not the parent in whose presence he had been paralyzed with fear. The therapist will help him discover the truth of his history so that he doesn’t blame the wrong people but blames those who really deserve it and, moreover, only for those deeds that were actually committed. For nobody achieves freedom by blaming people who in reality never harmed him. By directing diffuse, nonspecific, and unsubstantiated accusations at surrogate persons, the patient will achieve no improvement of his condition but will often remain in a state of disastrous confusion. Liberation comes with the ability to defend oneself where it is necessary and appropriate. The more realistic a person becomes and the more he frees himself of ideological and theoretical trimmings the better he will succeed.” Alice Miller

  • Returns to being good.

    What a multifaceted catch 22 it is when society is asking that the children of abuse be the ones to stop it. To be the ones to name their perpetrator, to come out of their cages of captivity and walk freely with courage seems insurmountable.

    What it fails to realize is the condition of the conditioned mind and how it has programmed the child or the adult child to bow down to authority, to keep silent and suffer in silence.

    We have been taught by experiences to go it alone and to keep to ourselves our selves, to not expose or share the feelings part of us, but instead walk around with a veneer finish that covers our truths.

    We have lived mostly as the veneer and have not allowed the real self to peep through and now in order to stop the abuse we have to completely reverse this.

    The veneer has to fade to the back and what comes forth is all we have tried to keep hidden. We have to now present to the world the very thing that terrorized us.

    Imagine? We are the ones who stop the monster, we whose power they took, now have to come forward fearlessly.

    And yet, as odd as this seems, as backwards and as upside down, the very step in sharing your wounds is the very thing you need to begin building your strength and courage, it will help define who you are from the base of truth.

    To speak your truth of who you are and what happened to you, who you fear and why, are truthful utterances of your journey in life, your biography and pathology, what has made you you. You then are able to see and feel that IT isn’t you that is bad, but them. You are not the problem, they are.

    And, by having a veneer, also shows the lack of support and caring you had. It literally shows how untreated you are.

    If, you had to ‘hide’ your abuse, it shows that you lived in an abusive home. For if you lived in a loving caring home, the abuse would have been treated, you would have been lovingly cared for and nurtured and the Bad Man/Woman would have been put away as so not to harm another.

    When the bad man/woman is not put away, we are left to feel bad and actually are told to put away our wounds.

    What an odd show and tell it now requires in order to stop more generations, we have to show who the monster is and then our wounded self returns to being good.

  • My Body, My mind and My Spirit.

    Something magical happens when you are forced, as in my case, to stand without secrets, to be bare unto the world, to have nothing hidden out of sight, when your worst fears and beyond are realized, you are exposed and free.

    I didn’t seem to have a choice, my incest was uncovered the same time that my father was exposed as a pedophile, and yet in the moment of time, while it seemed as if I would die in shame, I sprung forth with a new resolve to live openly and decided I would carry no more secrets in my pocket.

    I would instead own this legacy of abuse and I would live my life fully aware of where I came from and how it formed me into who I was today. I understood all my idiosyncrasies and me perfectly, they were all birthed in abuse.

    Once I accepted that all the mess was from where I grew, I could then begin to grow in ways that were different.

    While you are holding on to secrets, the secrets are holding on to you and you are not free to heal and move beyond them, but once you agree that it is time for you to accept the truth of your roots, you begin changing out of abuse.

    How tragically sad that we can’t share with the world our deepest wounds that unlike cancer it is a shameful disease and while we keep it hidden in the deep pockets of our bodies, our bodies are not free our spirits are not free and we are in a prison of silence.

    Yet we hold the key that unlocks the door of shame. We have to be brave enough to align ourselves with our past’s reality. We have to have the courage to look upon the secrets that our families carry, our legacy that few will speak of but all know.

    The truth is what sets you free…and the willingness to lose all you are, to become someone you have never met, the person you were prior to abuse.

    My body and I have an agreement, we will no longer hide truths, we will speak our feelings always, regardless of the consequences, we have a bond now, a sacred bond, we are one…my body, my mind and my spirit.

  • What you see and say.

    I am reading David Hawkins book “Reality, Spirituality and Modern Man” and here is something I found fascinating…

    “The mind automatically assumes that it is continuously aware of reality, and it is unaware that what it considers to be reality, is actually own presumptive inner processing function that has been termed ‘the experiencer’ (Hawkins, 2000-2006).”

    “Thus the data has already been automatically processed and edited via ego mechanisms within 1/10,000th of a second that have thereby added or subtracted value, meaning, and importance as well as emotional tone and shadings of memory and significance. What the ordinary mind presumes to be “truth” is actually a processed composite of thousands of variables of differing degrees with superimposed editing, selection, distortion, and emotionalized, preferential evaluation. This editing is done unconsciously in 1/10,000th of a second and is not eliminated or bypassed until one reaches Enlightenment (cal. 600 and above.)” David Hawkins

    What I am extremely intrigued by is that our minds are already programmed to see that which we see and it is near impossible to interject a new idea especially in an old image.

    Which explains why most folks will not change their minds about fathers/brothers/uncles etc that become abusive. Even if their bodies carry the emotions and fears, their minds will not allow them to change the words from father to pedophile, to change the truth.

    What I am asking is for folks who don’t have this ironclad confused mind leading the charge, for the ones who can see and can speak to do so.

    To speak up against this criminal behavior of child abuse, to step in front of the unseeing eyes and see the truth of what is going on and to alert someone.

    We somehow sit in the position that someone in the family would speak IF something were going on. I am here to tell you it is near impossible for the abused and confused to stop this from the inside.

    The rumor mill on the outside churns and spews forth lots of data, but rarely offers the details up to the Child Protective Services, we don’t want to ‘ruin’ a family.

    Let me tell you a family that is riddled with sexual abuse is diseased and needs to be rescued. It needs the light of day to shine in and to halt the actions of the abuser; it needs you to say something. You are not ruining a loving family, but stopping the abuse from going on to generations upon generations. An abusive family isn’t a loving one.

    You may not awaken all the folks within the family, but perhaps you can save one person, one child…

    What I know to the dept of my soul, if you on the outside treat the pedophile as normal, then we believe we are nuts.

    If you on the outside would reflect what we know, “that something is wrong” then we are set free…we are looking for another view, one that honors the fear and yuck factor we feel.

    When you continue on as if nothing is wrong, as if this man is okay, if you continue to perform ‘normal treatment’ of him, we are left in a sea of abuse.

    We are counting on your clear eyes and words to set us free…

    Some will be awakened and others will be incapable of finding the space before the mind takes over and eliminates your truth, but speak it anyway, for you never know if there is one there that can and will be saved by what you see and say.

  • I see me

    “Tolerance is another word for indifference.” William Somerset Maugham

    I am not sure you can have tolerance unless you are indifferent.

    Indifferent – without care or interest: showing no care or concern for or interest in somebody or something.

    I am looking at abuse and addictions from the point of the person who is on the receiving end.

    Usually abuse is looked at from the point of the abuser or addictions from the point of the substance.

    We forget to look closely at the person who is getting abused and why they have the tolerance or seem indifferent to the blows and words that are hitting them; it is because they are without care or interest for their self.

    They are indifferent to their own life.

    They show no care or concern for or interest in their own life.

    My question is when did they become so careless?
    When did they let them selves go?
    What happened that they no longer care?

    What I can know in my life is that I don’t even recall a self; I was too little to know I had a self to hang on to, to care about and to care for, and it was gone.

    My self was gone before I even had a chance to know it and know that there was something to protect.

    When a child is raised in an environment where the adults are indifferent to the child’s needs, we then become indifferent to them ourselves.

    Imagine, parents who are indifferent, without care or interest: showing no care or concern for or interest in somebody or something…and that somebody is you.

    We learn indifference.

    How they treat us is how we treat ourselves.

    We learn how to not care or show interest in our selves.

    In fact in order to survive, it is best to not have a self.

    For a self would feel their indifference and we don’t want to feel their indifference.

    It is easier to be without a self, to live in a pretend space, making believe that they care and the only way you can believe that story is to be separated from your self.

    To deny your body, deny your feelings, to not be connected to the self.

    A self who is not there will not feel their indifference…but lke the old saying goes, “If a tree falls and no one is in the forest to hear it, does it still make a noise?”

    In the same manner, if a child isn’t there to feel the indifference, does the indifference still happen?

    If a self is unaware does the indifference still affect them?

    When you are indifferent how can you know indifference?

    I don’t know what was more shocking their indifferences or me not caring for me, for me to see the lack of interest in my own life and wellbeing.

    I was indifferent to my whole life…and had to bring me back to my world, to undo the indifferences and learn how to care.

    In caring I found me.

    I am no longer indifferent… I see me.

  • Normally intolerant of Abuse

    Addiction is an uncontrollable compulsion to repeat a behavior regardless of its negative consequences. The condition of being abnormally dependent on something…being abnormally tolerant to and dependent on.

    My brother brought to my attention that addiction is to be abnormally tolerant.

    Abnormally tolerant regardless of its negative consequence…to me it is to be addicted to negative results.

    Imagine being addicted to negative outcomes!

    Being abnormally tolerant of negative results.

    Dr. Maya Angelou says, “Children’s talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.”

    What she calls our talent to endure, becomes our abnormal tolerance to negative consequences.

    We have a unique talent to tolerate bad behaviors or treatment to ourselves. I find this highly intriguing, that it isn’t the substance, but the abnormal tolerance to the substance that is our demise.

    Abnormal tolerance…to negative outcomes.

    What a cycle.

    When we have this abnormal tolerance we can withstand and endure what most normal folks couldn’t begin to fathom, and the rougher of a childhood, the stronger this endurance is the more negative treatment we can withstand.

    And mixed in the mix is love. In fact we endure for love.

    We are taught that parents love, that families love and we endure all treatment for the sake of love.

    What I know in my experience is that I tolerated a lot in the name of love.

    What is so striking as well, is that when I began separating myself from the bad behavior I couldn’t find the love.

    I guess what is the most tragic of all is you suffered, endured, tolerated, and withstood huge amounts of pain, in order to be loved, and in the end all that lay on the ground is abuse.

    The negative consequences to abnormally tolerating or being able to live under such dire circumstances is that we don’t know how to be normal. To rise up to the tolerant level, to know what is normal treatment, to thin out our thick skin, to make boundaries from a normal point of view.

    I was tough and I could endure and tolerate lots, but I had to find out how to become weak and vulnerable, to soften and feel the slightest insult and own it.

    I had to become aware of my softness inside and protect it, refusing to tolerate again for the sake of love.

    I had to become normally intolerant of abuse.

  • Holistically I see me.

    I had images of myself yesterday, the woman I had become from being left untreated in abuse. How backwards I viewed life, myself and how I treated others was indicative coming from whence I came.

    Today while trying to write out the differences between living from love and living from fear, I stumbled upon a sentence that said, “Untreated abuse is abuse that isn’t seen”.

    Imagine all it takes to treat abuse is to see it.

    Just see it.

    I was able to crawl to the surface by one child echoing what I had felt about my father, she saw what I saw; we both saw or felt abuse.

    I am not sure how her treatment went from that point on, for when they treated her monster as a father, she was left confused. I lived in that confusion for 46 years.

    I find great peace in knowing that treatment for a child is seeing the abuse and acting in kind.

    All your actions from that day forth have to be indicative of dealing with a monster not a dad.

    I know, from my own Monster experience, that the key in killing what ruled me was to see it.

    To see the total make up of this monster, to see the triggers, the cause and the affect, to gain control over the monster that lived within me.

    This monster was created from Untreated abuse.

    Imagine.

    The word Holistic came to mind…and I looked up the meaning.

    1. analyzing whole system of beliefs: characterized by the view that a whole system of beliefs must be analyzed rather than simply its individual components
    2. considering all factors when treating illness: taking into account all of somebody’s physical, mental, and social conditions in the treatment of illness.

    When folks talk about holistic treatments for illness, they usually speak of natural substances to treat the affects, but rarely look at what the cause was.

    Holistic to me is to look at the whole person, to see the whole view of where they traveled and whom they traveled with, what they were taught and how that fits into reality.

    I am thinking that just like religion is learning about God and Spirituality is experiencing God, there is an equal space between trying to apply natural remedies upon an unnatural life.

    An unnatural life for me would be to live like I was never abused. A more natural life would be to live as an abused girl. And the holistic approach is to see all the aspects of abuse and to feel that there was no part of my life that it didn’t touch, it isn’t just a mole in my life, but my life.

    I love that I know two things now, that seeing abuse is treatment and to see all points of my life, is living holistically.

    I grew naturally into an unnatural person in the land of abuse.
    I was born right side up and was flipped and then tried to act normal from an unnormal place.

    Holistically I see me.

    IMG_5627

    This tree and me are one…I have such great love and compassion for how it grew and stands tall with its roots showing!

  • Love without Hurt.

    What I didn’t know was that my distrust of kindness and love, was actually fear, that love to me was very wobbly and had lots of sharp edges and was ever changing, it was smooth and calm one minute, but filled with rage or hurtful the next, I didn’t know that love didn’t have a hurtful side.

    To me, Love hurts. If not now, it is coming so prepare it room! There was no time in my life that love didn’t eventually turn to hurt, turn to mistrust, turn to betrayal…so, Love Hurts, eventually.

    In fact the people I loved were people with two sides.

    They had the side of trying to be good, be better, be kinder and then the side that failed.

    We were taught to forgive the failing side and to focus on the trying side.

    I was taught that all folks had this Light and Dark side, and that you overlooked (forgave) their darkness and put them back in the Light.

    It wasn’t focusing on the Light that did the damage, but overlooking the dark side.

    This dark side seemed to be forgivable, because it was uncontrollable, its animalistic ways were beyond human control, it rendered many a man helpless.

    It was a sin, that seemed to come in from the outside, but it wasn’t really them. A happenstance, but not of them, so do not throw a person away due to bad behavior. Forgive and forget, until the next time…

    These sins were just clouds that happened by and you got caught in them, it wasn’t something you had control over and within each human was a weak spot.

    A spot colored in by whatever ‘bad’ behavior they didn’t have control over.

    It is this spot that I have spent 6 years investigating within me, and it isn’t a spot, but my whole pathology of becoming me, a monster whose love was nothing but fear.

    I began to dissect all my relationships and all my actions to see what was what, only to discover, unbeknownst to me, I never met love, not the real love, the love that doesn’t change love, the real genuine thing.

    I was a stranger to real love. I had never felt real love, for within me lay fear. If you are full of fear you can’t feel love, all you feel is fearful.

    Fearful it won’t last, fearful it will betray you, unease and afraid, you sit with fear by love.

    My journey has been to climb out of the hole of fearful love, as a monster of fearful love and then in the Light of day, learn what love is.

    It was scary to show the world that I am fear, that I do fearful things, that I come from fearful places and have wounds of fear and that for 46 years I had no clue what love was, and was loveless inside.

    I had such empathy and love for my monster of fear while I was so inept at what love does, how love feels, where love goes, how it speaks, how it listens, how it lives.

    How grateful am I that I was able to transition from a fear-based life to one that is embracing love.

    That saddest part of being the monster of fear is that you feel you are handing out love, compassion, caring while you are sowing seeds of fear.

    I had to feel the icy water drip into me after I had transformed myself, to really understand this monsters message.

    When my daughter’s abuse presented itself to me, I had post traumatic like behaviors, I vacillated between fear and love, and I felt the calm peace and acceptance of love and the wild terrorizing bitter cold fear, and watch the affects both had on my daughter.

    My brave little daughter was caught in the maelstrom of this fear filled love monster.

    What an incredible transformation and what a roller coaster ride, for all who live with me, myself include, to get to just one side of love.

    Love without hurt.