Tag: commandment

• How It Feels

  I am reading "The Body Never Lies," again by Alice Miller.  

  What is really standing out to me this time around is the fact about feelings. Or the fact that it is more typical than not to not be aware of your true feelings.

  Alice writes, "Genuine Feelings are never a product of conscious effort. They are quite simply there, and they are there for a very good reason, even if that reason is not always apparent.  I cannot force myself to love or honor my parents if my body rebels against such an endeavor for reasons that are well-known to it.  But if I still attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, then the upshot will be the kind of stress that is invariably involved when I demand the impossible of myself.  This kind of stress has accompanied me almost all my life.  Anxious to stay in line with the system of moral values I had accepted, I did my best to imagine good feeings I did not possess while ignoring the bad feelings I did have.  My aim was to be loved as a daughter.  But the effort was all in vain.  In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place.  On the other hand, I learned that a feeling of love will establish itself automatically (for example, love for my children or love for my friends) once I stop demanding that I feel such love and stop obeying the moral injunctions impossed on me.  But such a sensation can happen only when I feel free and remain open and receptive to all my feelings, including the negative ones."

  "The realization that I cannot manipulate my feelings, that I can delude neither myself nor others, brought me immense relief and liberation.  Only then was I fully struck by the large number of people who (like myself) literally almost kill themselves in the attempt to obey the Fourth Commandment, without any consideration of the price this extracts both from their own bodies and from their children.  As long as the children allow themselves to be used this way, it is entirely possible to live to be one hundred without any awareness of one's own personal truth and without any illness ensuing from this protracted form of self-deception."

  "A mother who is forced to realize that the deprivations imposed on her in her youth make it impossible for her to love a child of her own, however hard she may try, can certainly expect to be accused of immorality if she has the courage to put that truth into words. But I believe that it is precisely this explicit acceptance of her true feelings, independent of the claims of morality, that will enable her to give both herself and her children the honest and sincere kind of support they need most, and at the same time allow her to free herself from the shackles of self-deception."

  "When most children are born, what they need most from their parents is love, by which I mean affection, attention, care, protection, kindness, and the willingness to communicate.  If these needs are gratified, the bodies of those children will retain the good memory of such caring, affection all their lives, and later, as adults, they will be able to pass on the same kind of love to their children. But if this is not the case, the children will be left with a lifelong yearning for the fulfillment of their initial (and vital) needs. In later life, this yearning will be directed at other people.  In comparison, the more implacably children have been deprived of love and negated or maltreated in the name of "Upbringing," the more those children, on reaching adulthood, will look to their parents (or other people substituting for them) to supply all the things those same parents failed to provide when they were needed most.  This is a normal response on the part of the body.  It knows precisely what it needs, it cannot forget the deprivations.  The deprivation or hole is there waiting to be filled."

  "The older we get, the more difficult it is to find other people who can give us the love our parents denied us. But the body's expectations do not slacken with age – quite the contrary!  They are merely directed at others, usually our own children and grandchildren.  The only way out of this dilemma is to become aware of these mechanisms and to identify the reality of our own childhood by counteracting the process of repression and denial.  In this way we can create in our own selves a person who can satisfy at least some of the needs that have been waiting for fulfillment since birth, if not earlier.  Then we can give ourselves the attention, the respect, the understanding for our emotions, the sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us."

  "To make this happen we need one special experience; the experience of love for the child we once were.  Without it, we have no way of knowing what love consists of."  Alice Miller

  While I knew that having lived 46 years trying so hard to possess feelings of love and warmth toward my parents, and working at being a warmer person, it had never not once occurred to me that I wasn't the problem. That due to the lack of feelings of love didn't mean there was something the matter with me…but rather what I was trying to love.

  I remember having odd and horrifying realizations about my self, when the lack of deep caring and love didn't arise from me, towards my parents.  I would not even want to glance to long at this self that seemed to be so detached and cool.  For what child doesn't want to be with her parents?

  The double feelings that I had with the discovery that my father was a pedophile, was that I wasn't a broken love person.  I wasn't cold or detached…I wasn't living in a broken body and cold toward family…I wasn't damaged…but my family was.

  I am not sure I can tell you how it feels to believe you don't have access to warmth and caring or love towards parents…and feel you are damaged. That you arrived empty of that kind of love.  Yet I knew I could feel, but couldn't carry those feelings to my parents.

  It now gives me great peace to know I can't manipulate feelings…that emotions are natural responses, ones that come up without any assistance from me.  It leaves me in a neutral position taking the lead from my body.

  My body never lies…however, I have lied about my body.

  I have lived faking my feelings.

  Living a fake life.

  But no more.  Now, I simply agree with how It feels.

   

  January 6, 2012

  4th, abuse, Alice, body, childhood, commandment, feelings, lies, Miller, never, parents, The

  ---

• 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…

  

  June 2, 2011

  abuse, Alice Miller, attachment, body, childhood, commandment, courage, forgiveness, fourth, legacy, lies, love, never, Religion, sexual, The, therapy

  ---