I M Perfect lady

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  • Your children are sure to follow.

    "The Body Never Lies," by Alice Miller.

    ‎"Children cannot escape their own parents, so they cannot afford to see through them either. Blindness makes it possible to survive. This is the way the abuse of children has functioned since time immemorial. BLINDNESS AND FORGIVENESS ARE ESSENTIAL TO SURVIVAL. But at the same time they lead to repletion and they perpetuate cycles of cruelty."

    "To break through this vicious circle we need to understand that so-called love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And if it requires new victims, it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only UNFLINCHING REALIZATIONS OF ONE'S OWN PAST REALITY, OF WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED CAN BREAK THROUGH THE CHAIN OF ABUSE. IF I KNOW AND CAN FEEL WHAT MY PARENTS DID TO ME WHEN I WAS TOTALLY DEFENSELESS, I NO LONGER NEED VICTIMS TO BEFOG MY AWARENESS. I no longer need to re-enact what happened to me and take it out on innocent people because now I know what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge." Alice

    What seems so clear, yet is so hard to wrap your brain around, is that a defenseless child is left without escape and in order to survive turns itself blind to what the parent is doing.  You mind will not allow you to SEE your parents.  Not 'remembering' what happened, allows you to live in a fanatasy. And in this so called, 'loving home' you then begin to grow and develop awkwardly.

    You set into place the opposite screen to what is.

    Love is abusive.

    Caring is neglectful.

    Your 'truth' is backwards…you become authentically dysfunctional and can't even see it.

    It is my belief, that we then hurt our children in order to keep 'love' alive.  Love means there must be a victim and a perpetrator.

    The fog of not seeing who my parents were, also swirled and darkened my access to emotions that were what they truly were.

    Meaning, I didn't have access to moving away from fear, and even more tragically, I didn't have emotions of warmth and kindness that moved me towards goodness.

    Not having access to warmth and kindness, kept me pushed back on the inside, not feeling drawn to children inside.

    My insides were all wrong.  

    My arms could wrap around them…but not my heart.

    My heart was used for clinging to abuse….so oddly it is, if you could see your children as hurtful, unkind, etc, then they could be loved.

    Not sure if you all can follow this, but it makes bitter sense to me.

    What gratitude I have for the fog lifting 7 years ago…and to see in harsh reality my parents and what they did to defenseless children unable to escape; I then was able to walk right-side up.

    Walking and pushing back from abuse and things that hurt me…allowed me to feel warmth toward my children…to feel their innocence and my deranged mind.

    For all the mothers out there who have doubts and glimpses of their childhood terrors, and are unable to see straight through to what their mother did…You will enact her emotional pattern.

    You will love what hurts…and be pushed back and away from kindness, love, peace and joy.  You will shut out the Light side of life, while stoking the fires of hell…and not even know it, for the blindness of surviving your childhood blocks you from seeing.

    Growing up means taking down the survival glasses and facing the reality of your childhood, feeling and seeing the defenselessness of being you in their home.

    The blocking out abuse lenses are also blocking you from seeing your innocence.  

    If you can't see you as an innocent child, your children will never wear that banner…

    It all falls down to pick one.

    You or your parents are innocent or to blame, for the childhood abuse.

    Depending upon what path you take; your children are sure to follow.

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  • The body truly doesn’t lie

    Within my family, there are two ways in which we have dealt with the sexual abuse of our childhoods.  One side believes and is actively in the camp of forgiving and forgetting, while only two of us are in the camp of discovering our own story and giving free expression…as Alice Miller writes in The Body Never Lies.

    " In each and every case I examined, I was able to establish that when people found the kind of therapeutic care and companionship that enabled them to discover their own story and give free expression to their indignation at their parents behavior, they were able to liberate themselves from the maltreated child's destructive attachment. As adults they were able to take their lives into their own hands and DID NOT NEED TO HATE THEIR PARENTS. And the opposite was the case whose therapist enjoined them to forgive and forget, actually believing that such forgiveness could have a salutary, curative effect. They remained trapped in the position of small children who believe they love their parents but in fact allow themselves to be controlled all their lives by the internalized parents and ultimately develop some kind of illness that leads to premature death. Such dependency ACTIVELY FOSTERS THE HATRED that though repressed, remains active, and it drives them to direct their aggression at innocent people. We ONLY HATE AS LONG AS WE FEEL TOTALLY HELPLESS." Alice Miller.

    This is extremely accurate in my experience.  

    I have do not hate my parents.  I understand them.  I completely get who they are and that the only love they can give me is their backwards hurtful love.  

    While I also totally feel the aggression of my siblings towards me, the innocent in the equation of my parents abuse.

    I can also sense this underneath the 'Forgiving' folks, the rage and anger seething while on the surface the speak kind words.  

    In fact, that is a perfect description of my mother in my childhood.  

    Interesting to know, that Forgiveness and Forgetting, actually fosters hate. And here is what I also know to be right on target…."You only hate as long as you feel totally helpless."  

    Empowerment allows you to feel love…and what I feel most from my siblings is this twisted dichotomy….the surface of 'forgiveness' while underneath rages hatred in their physical bodies.

    The body truly doesn't lie…

  • 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.

     

  • Wish For Your Self.

    What a great year of learning, again.  

    Lessons seemed to continually line up to serve to me… more of me; more freedom, more letting go, surrendering and allowing, more ways to be expressive, a deeper understanding, followed by affirmations of what doing the opposite would look like.

    I think I thought, that when I said I was going forth with love, peace and joy, like magic, that was what would follow.  Wrong.  

    Instead I was served up all of my relationships were no love, peace or joy existed, and asked to redo myself there.

    I was given opportunity after opportunity, sometimes many at a time, all clamoring for my attention…insatiable energies of need and control, that had kept me from peace or feelings of love or experiencing joy.

    What I believe lots of folks believe, is that they stay in the same place, but instead of feeling anxious, controlled, resentful, rage, anger, tight restraint…they will just work harder to feel different.

    To stay with same relationships, BUT feel differently about them.

    Feel more loving…will bring up love.  And to become peaceful where rebellious feelings explode…to dial down or to a different frequency.

    That isn't what real love, peace and joy is.

    That is denying what is there and forcing feelings.  Which is to have false feelings of love, peace and joy.

    Many believe you can simply just 'think' differently about an individual etc and like magic, feelings will change.   That your feelings are the problem within the relationship…not that the relationship itself is where the troubles lie.

    Seeing life differently is where the key lies.

    I am reading, "The Body Never Lies" by Alice Miller.  This is one of the first authors who addresses the child, instead of the parent…she sees abuse from the child's perspective and how the body feels and then how the child is made to 'feel different' in order to honor and love thy parents.

    She writes, "The parenting approach know as "Poisonous Pedogogy" breeds overly well adjusted individuals who can only trust the mask they have been Forced to wear because as children they lived in constant fear of punishment. "I am bringing you up in the way that is best for you" is the supreme principle behind this approach. "If I beat you or use words to torment and humiliate you, it is for all for your own good."

    "In this famous novel Fateless, the Hungarian writer and Nobel laureate Imre Kertesz describes his arrival at the Auschwitz concentration camp.  He was fifteen years old at the time, and he tells us in great detail how he attempted to interpet the many grotesque and appalling things he encountered on his arrival there as something positive and favorable for him.  Otherwise he would not have survived his own mortal fear."

    "Probably every child who has suffered abuse must assume an attitude like this in order to survive. These children reinterpret their perceptions in a desperate attempt to see as good and beneficial things that outside observers would immediately classify as crimes. Children have no choice.  They must repress their true feelings if they have no "helping witness" to turn to and are helplessly exposed to their persecutors. Later as adults lucky enough to encounter "enlightened witnesses," they do have a choice. Then they can admit the truth, their truth; they can stop pitying and "understanding" their persecutors, stop trying to feel their unsustainable, disassociated emotions, and roundly denounce the things that have been done to them.  This step bring immense relief for the body.  It no longer has to forcibly remind the adult self of the tragic history it went through as a child. Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected."

    "I call the violent kind of "upbringing" abuse, not only because children are thus refused the right to dignity and respect as human beings but also because such an approach to parenting establishes a kind of totalitarian regime in which it is impossible for children to perceive the humilations, indignities, and disrespect they have been subjected to, let alone defend themselves against them. These patterns of childhood will inevitably then be adopted by their victims and used on their partners and their own children, at work, in politics, wherever fear and anxiety of the profoundly insecure child can be fended off with the aid of external power. It is in this way that dictators are born; these are people with a deep-seated contempt for everyone else, people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power apparatus they have built around them."

    "The sphere of politics is an excellent example of the way in which the hunger for power and recognition is never stilled.  It is insatiable, it can never be entirely satisfied. The more power these people have, the more they are spurred on to actions of compulsory repetition, restore the initial feelings of impotence they were trying to escape; Hitler is his bunker, Stalin in his paranoid fears, Mao in the final rejection by his people, Napoleon in exile, Milosevic in prison, Saddam Hussein in his mortifying fall from power. What impelled these men to abuse the power they had achieved to such a pitch that it ultimately plunged them into impotence and powerlessness?  I believe it was their bodies.  Their bodies sustained the knowledge of the impotence they felt in childhood; they stored such knowledge in their cells, and they set out to force their "owners" to face up to that knowledge. But the reality of their childhood instilled such fear in the hearts of these dictators that they preferred to wipe out whole peoples, to exterminate millions of human beings, rather than confront the truth – their truth."  Alice Miller

    I am reading this book for the second time, and it once again has a much broader meaning to me, than the first time around.  I am now able to see more potently the actual ways a child has to disregard its own body in order to survive, to look for 'positive' so not to drown in its own mortal fears…and how quickly an outsider can spot the crimes, while those within are unable to see.

    I have experienced the view of being an outsider and the quick slamming of the door behind me as I stood on the sidewalk, for the 'family unit' couldn't withstand the truth…mine and theirs.

    Their impotency against truth is what causes such insane behavior. Their lack of self power and worth has them snubbing outside…like that is where their truth lives…within us.

    You can berate me and kick me out of your life, but your truth, just as in the Dictators of the past did…but you are kicking us so as to NOT feel and own your own truth.

    I know that I have been kicked aside.  And it has nothing to do with me, but it has much more to do with the individual's fear of their own truths.  By keeping me out of their worlds, they like the 15 year old Hungarian Boy, keep their concentration camp a place of positive living…of love, peace and joy.

    I am so grateful that I was able to have the courage to see my own truth…

    What I didn't know, is that the most violent among us are those who are in mortal fear of seeing their childhoods in Reality's Light.

    That their violent behavior is to keep themselves from feeling the truth about their parents.

    So, as you go forth on this New Year's day, be careful what you seek for your self in 2012.

    If you seek, like I did, a life filled with love, peace and joy; you will first have to find all the places you have it wrong.  It has been 7 years of learning what isn't…in order for me to then set forth again.

    My wish for you is your own wish for your self.

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Never Lied.

    In "Power vs Force" by David Hawkins, he writes,

    "In the experiments to be described in this book, the reactions of the human body provide such a signal of change in conditions.  As will be seen, the body can discern, to the finest degree, the difference between that which is supportive of life and that which is not." 

    "This isn't surprising: After all, living things react positively to what is life-supportive and negatively to what is not; this is a fundamental mechanism of survival.  Inherent in all life forms is the capacity to detect change and react collectively – thus, trees become smaller at higher elevations as the oxygen in the atmosphere becomes scarer. Human protoplasm is far more sensitive than that of a tree." DH

    There is so much going on in the Universe that we are not aware of; all the little choices that are made due to a detection of change in conditions.

    I see the home environment as a small universe within the universe. And its occupants with highly sensitive bodies, that detect change of conditions.  

    Children come in with bodies of high intelligence, that far exceeds what their minds know.  And they too learn to grow or not grow depending upon the climate within the home.

    No matter what they are told, they can feel the lay of the land, and adapt in order to survive.  When love turns abusive…their bodies detect the change of conditions…they become alert, wary, anxious, etc…and grow accordingly.

    They will require less if less is given. 

    Or flourish and expand according to the safety and love given.

    You don't have to know the intimate details of a family home, just look at its children.  How are they doing in society?  Are they flourishing or floundering?

    We step forth with the markers of how we were raised.

    You can see those of us who lived in home environments where the child wasn't seen; we have a hard time finding ourselves, our voices, our worth.  We grew low…we adjusted our selves and didn't rise higher than the treatment.

    Our stunted growth shows.  

    The lack of emotional growth or balanced lives.

    What is so remarkable, is that we forget we are not permanently planted, like a tree. We can transplant ourselves…and Move to a more Life Supporting environment.

    What is hard for folks to imagine is that parents will naturally keep their children at the same level they are.  They can only raise a child as high as they are, no higher.  

    My life clearly showed how I only grew as high as my mother. 

    And it would have been stunted there, had I not gotten out.

    My body had always felt the negative vibes, but I had overrode them.  I believed that my body was working incorrectly, for it was sending signals Against family.  

    I believed that I had to work harder to be/feel more loving toward my parents.  I had feeling issues.

    It was a horrifying relief to know my body was right on.

    Except now I had to reverse all that I knew and follow this highly sensitive brilliant body…and celebrate each feeling.

    For each feeling was a signal to me of the condition and changes around me.  It didn't care what I believed, what dogma I followed, what history I had with people, it was literally moving around beeping and binging messages to me, constantly.

    It is like having the best instrument in all the Universe…and you live in it.  

    Once you are aware that the body talks to you constantly, you can't be unaware.  

    To stand by your feelings is to stand hand in hand with the Ultimate power; God/Universe.

    What I see in abusive homes, is we are taught to worship a lesser god, one that disregards our feelings.  Our parents. 

    When you honor and love your parents in an abusive home, going against the feelings of your body, you are being turned away from your Higher Power.  

    What is so amazing to me is that God created our bodies and yet we don't see the connection or feel the vast Divinity of them…nor trust that God made them to work perfectly. 

    Doubting the body, to me is, doubting God. 

    When someone abuses our bodies, they are actually wrecking the gift that God created.  

    When others treat our bodies violently, we are taught to not feel like the gift we are.

    It takes lots of effort to restore our selves to our natural state.

    My life changed completely when I stopped honoring my parents and began to honor my body…it truly has never lied.

     

     

     

     

     

  • 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…

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  • Elders of the Church

    There are no coincidences in life and the fact that I am learning about more and more sexual abuse in my old church while I am reading Alice Miller is profound.

    She is literally writing about the hows and the whys that seemingly intelligent functioning adults are unable to stop this behavior…or it seems “Knows” and does nothing.

    What I am getting a view of is my family but displayed in a much bigger group, widespread from state to state.

    That there is an underlying very pervasive evil preying upon the children, while half the adults sleep and the other are the perpetrators, and all presenting a mask to society of high morals and values, where TV, Music, drinking and drugs, etc are forbidden, where truth and honesty is the way of life….

    The grand scale and its history from generation to generation of criminal sexual behavior under the auspices of a religion of high morals and value is mind blowing.

    My mother was not an anomaly she was a typical church mother.

    And what is so extremely shocking to me is that I didn’t know of it when I was in it. Yet, here is the deal on that…I didn’t leave the church until I had seen the truth of who my father was. So, I guess, their families were like my family we all matched…so we were not outstanding in the fact that the children in the family were abused.

    Knowing that my father abused the neighbors and the neighbor’s parents were in the church and did nothing shows to me, that they too didn’t find this shocking or something that should be presented to the law of the land.

    Again, I felt I lived in this little nest of incest with neighbors that I later found out had their own nests, but that we were the ‘odd’ ones in the church. But 6 years later, I am finding out that we are far from odd, but perhaps just normal parishioners.

    In Alice’s book she speaks of forgiveness in how I seen it work in the church and how it actually is the juice that keeps the evil in the pulpits and on the church boards, literally running the church while raping the children.

    “Can forgiveness for the crimes done to the child be not just ineffective but actively harmful? It certainly can because the body does not understand more precepts. It fights to make our conscious minds admit the truth and transcend our denial of genuine feelings. This is something children cannot afford to do. They have to deceive themselves and turn a blind eye to their parent’s crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to repress their feelings. But if they do, the price they pay is high. Either they ruin their own health or make others foot the bill.”

    “A therapist who has forgiven his parents for the cruelty they showed him may feel the urge to suggest this same remedy to his clients. In so doing, he is exploiting their dependence and their trust. If he is not in touch with his own feelings at all, he may indeed be unaware that he is doing to others what was once done to him. In suggesting forgiveness as a solution, the therapist is abusing and confusing others, while rejecting any kind of responsibility for his actions. He is convinced that he is acting for their own good. Are not all religions unanimously in their conviction that forgiveness is the path to Heaven? Was not Job ultimately reward for the fact that he forgave God?”

    “Unlike children, adult patients have a choice. They can leave a therapist once they have seen through his deception and self-deception….”

    “To break through this vicious cycle we need to understand that so-called love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And if it requires new victims it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me and take it out on innocent people because now I know what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.” Alice Miller

    What is so vastly incredible is that the one thing a child needs to heal is not offered to him in that church, instead the only thing that is offered is the forgiveness of sins and the fourth commandment…”to love and Honor thy parents”.

    It is no wonder to me, as a person who has lived in the system, who was abused and left untreated there, and has witnessed the responses of my siblings, that this vein of power is still in play, whether you leave the church or not, it will take Herculean power to stop the mind set of forgiving sexual crimes and not passively accept love hurts.

    As long as forgiveness is preached, children will suffer abuse from the elders of the church.

  • 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.