I will not be a scapegoat or a poisonous container to anyone, family or not family

This Friday after work I went to do my side jobs as usual and while I was checking on a resident’s house, one of my nieces, now 25 years old, that lives in complete denial of what happened to her as small child calls me on the phone, I was surprised, because she never calls me, but only she wanted to talk about was theories and rationalizations.

After a long day at work, I had no patience for it. Later when I got home I wrote an e-mail to her to apologize for my lack of patience. It’s so sad, but my niece is suffering and is nothing I can do for her. I think she was calling me, because she would like to come to the States, but she does not understand, that I would not ever let anyone live with me that idealizes their abusive parents and lives in denial of what happened to them as a small child, because that is putting myself on the line of fire of someone’s repression. No one will come to my house again and make me their scapegoat or poisonous container, family or not family.

Dear D,

I am sorry I was too tired and did not have much patience to listen to you and plus our call got dropped, but anyway I think it would be best if you wrote your thoughts down and send it to me by email and I will be more than happy to answer you, because talking on the phone I have a hard time following you and understanding what you are saying and after a long day of work I am tired to try to figure out what you are saying. And plus it's expensive to talk on the phone.

I wish you courage and strength to face and feel your painful truth and I hope one day you are able to free yourself from the emotional prison you were born in to.

Sylvie

P.S. Please read Alice Miller’s books I left in Portugal and visit her website to help you understand yourself because if you don’t understand yourself you will never find anyone that will. When we understand ourselves it does not matter if others do or don’t.

Sylvie,

On 14th of April, I was to send you the following e-mail:

"At some point, we must examine ourselves. We are not all alike or with similar backgrounds, it is a pure tyranny assume that our responses serve others. I confess that it would be easier to say it is the fault of others, it is based on the premise that fetches childhood each and every problem. But if it did not know why it no longer applies to things that are not bad.

Honestly being a victim at one point or not is a choice, is to transfer our problems to others. Why do not agree with the choices of others does not mean they are sick. The result of this statement and to convey the idea that should never have been born, for allegedly you feel that people should not have kids. The option to not have followed this path was yours, but you can not covet what you think is right to become the tyranny of saying such a thing.

Do not know if somewhere then we say that you should not have been born if someone told you you'd be likely to hurt. After using this rule blindly could say that.

I'm not in denial of anything, I was building a mechanism to have the ability to put up with everyone's theories. Honestly, the vision that you will always be conditioned, the difference is that I'm not saying you're sick and I will not use this argument blindly and by the way hurt you.

It also makes me confused when speaking in truth, the dogmatic truth, the truly universal. Because when we defend the truth, whatever it is so close, we could run the risk of not seeing anything beyond that. There is a subtle difference between not agree but respect and defend our truth to others blindly. This is called intolerance.

I do not define people by who may have had problems, but by how they reacted to them. Many times the problems, obstacles that we teach. Is there one sees the true character and strength. Sincerely walk around, blaming childhood for everything, is a phenomenon of transfer. Because somewhere the question arises, what then? Who do you hear someone still thinks that was the victim of domestic violence or sexual abuse, do not know. These were clearly were injured, they must be protected, but do not know if you ever question the goodness of the limits you make. But all other parents, the majority does what it can and knows and wants his children to be happy. There are no perfect parents and families much less perfect, but there are no perfect children.

Do not know if you ever ask, what the true effects that could have been my mother sent me to the USA, with 4 or 5 years. You chose to be childlessness. Imagine it was you the mother, how would you react? Imagine it was you who sent you away. It is substantially different beings you to go away, rather than sending you away. But it is always easier to educate the children of others.

It's easy to say what are the others who are sick, it is easy to blame childhood, but this is not what defines me. I do not want to sell any theory, nor do I have to instill some interest. I know that the limit is when we cause harm to others and honestly does not matter the good intentions of anyone.

I hope you are happy with that vision. I can not stand that long theories, see the examples that people are or not and try to be one. I do not hear people, hear what they say. See what critics and their concerns. I see how they react to adversity. Can I make a mistake, but I will not blame others or circumstances for my decisions or actions. Calls to this responsibility, for freedom without responsibility only to the indictment.

Finally, I only reply now, for consideration, because in normal cases even gave me the job, but I close this issue here because it's like arguing with a Communist or a cleric. They like to instill truth, but do not like to talk about the gulags or inquisition ... And the basis of the latter two has always been a universal truth that any dogmatic and in theory was for the good of mankind. "

 Maybe I would rather have sent the e-mail because today it is the same,

If you want people to respect your opinion, you have to be able to accept others. It is a basic principle.

It is not a matter of right or wrong, of true or lie, reality or illusion.

It is easy to judge miles away. It is easy to say what people should do when it isn’t you that has to face the consequences of your options.

You don’t are really listening, somehow you are trying to use your perception of things into others peoples lives. Your perception may be wrong, like mine could be wrong, as well. But I don’t impose my perception to others. I don’t have that need.

Maybe you are in a prison, a cognitive one that stops you to think outside the box that you built.

At the end of the day, I respected you more because I respect your way of thinking without imposing mine. I don’t have the need to convince others.

You just didn’t get that people may love you and yet cannot be in accordance with your ideas. It’s easy to love the ones that are in agreement with you.

Love, D

D,

Thanks for writing. It’s obvious you are in pain and you are not ready to see the roots of your pain and live with your own reality that your parents were not capable of real love.

I never said you should not have been born, but the truth is: most of us are here because our parents were unconscious and in spite my parents not being conscious and had me without thinking what kind of life they were giving me. I am living with my reality that my family is not capable of real love and have let go of the illusion of the family and their illusion of love and after facing and feeling my sad reality, today I no longer feel pain, I feel free and I am enjoying my life and I will not let any members of my family come into my life and take away the joy I feel today.

Maybe, one day you will gather the courage and strength to stop idealizing your father and see him as he really was, UNCONSCIOUS, and live with your own reality, because the truth is we are all alone and each of us has to find our own way to ourselves and save ourselves, because no one else can. I can’t walk your path with you, just like no one could have walked my path with me.

I wish courage, Sylvie

 I am going, to be honest, and straight:

You don’t really get it. You didn’t learn yet that different approaches can be both right.

The true pain is trying to talk to you and besides really listening; you show more interest to project your ideas.

I didn’t judge your choices, but you at some point are trying to judge everyone else. Who is the one that always settles the presence with absence? You have to do better than that.

It is easy to speak, as always. Even, I never found a shelter in you, always a storm that was not related directly to me, but a derivative one from your unfinished matters.

You don’t really know me because you never listen. You speak with your image of me, not me as an individual.

At last, I will not attack you, because I do respect and love you. Unfortunately, you are not able to do the same, because you are so closed into to your little box that can’t see further.

Love,

D

D,

You are talking with your head and not with your heart. I tried to help you when you were little, when I really could have made difference, but your mother did not allow it and I was powerless to take you away from the nightmare you were born into, now, not me or anyone else in this world can give you what you needed as a small child. Now you are an adult and only you can help yourself and for that, you have to stop idealizing your parents and see them as they really were and mourn the loss of your childhood and have compassion for the child you once were that lived in so much terror from her parents. I wish you the courage to face the nightmare of the child you once were and I hope one day you can liberate yourself. Courage, sylvie

Can you do better than that?

When are you going to respect me as a human being? If I was using my head, I would advise you to check your arguments, because they are weak. You have too many weakness in your reasoning... Perhaps, because you only read what was in accordance with what you wanted. It´s a typical Heisenberg effect...

My parents love me more than you ever loved your cats, and imagine... even they taught me to love you like you are (with all odds...)...

But as I said, could you switch down the doctrine button? 

I guess it is you who is in pain because it is you who is trying to prove something...

Love, D

D,

I don’t know what to tell you, but you are unconsciously reenacting your childhood drama with me, talking with me, exactly the same way your father talked with you. If you respect yourself is all that matters, if others do or don’t it does not matter, when I don’t feel respected by someone, I just walk away, as a child we could not walk away from abusive people, but the beauty of being an independent adult, I can walk away from anyone that I consider abusive to me. I can’t make you open your eyes and see, just like I was not able to open your mother's eyes and make her see. I have learned to walk away from people, family or not family, that refuses to open their eyes to see.  If you ever find the courage to open your eyes to see then we can talk until then we don’t have anything else to talk about. I live my life my way and you live your life your way. Live and let live.  Sylvie

D. B.:  Wow, a tough situation Sylvie. I commend you on your integrity & I think you handled this very well

J. C.: Ditto

Sylvie Imelda Shene:  Thank you D and J, it’s very sad to see people, family or not family, say they had a wonderful childhood and loving parents and they don’t realize that they tell their true story by unconsciously and compulsively reenacting their childhood drama everywhere they go and whoever they interact with. I hope she does not have children, but I could tell in her e-mails that she desires to have children. The words below by Alice Miller to one of her readers are sooooo true “AM: Thank you so much for your brave and insightful statement. You are right, unwanted children are usually mistreated. But there exist as a rule also a huge amount of people who were "wanted" indeed, but only for playing the role of the victims that their parents needed to be able to take revenge on. They were wanted to give their parents what the parents never had gotten from their own parents: love, adoration, attention and so many other things. Otherwise, why would so many people have five or more children when they have no time for them? Why do they adopt children if their body refuses to give them what they apparently "want?”

The never acknowledged, never felt pain of their childhood calls for being avenged. They go to church, they pray, they honor their parents, forgive them everything – and they mistreat their children at home, often in a very cruel way, AS IF THIS WERE THE MOST NATURAL THING, because they learned this so early. Their children learn this perverted behavior, also very early, and will later do the same; and so this perverse behavior continues for millennia. Unless people are willing to SEE the perversion of their parents and are ready to consciously refuse to imitate it.
You are not being "sickeningly sarcastic," you only dared to speak out the truth that most people are afraid of seeing or talking about.’
http://www.alice-miller.com/readersmail_en.php?lang=en&nid=1838&grp=0308

J. R.:  

Until I opened my eyes, I treated men the way my father treated me -- you know nothing, you're naive, you're worthless, do as I say don't ask why, etc., and I treated women the way my mother treated me -- by avoiding them, never getting close to them, not caring about them, etc. When I opened my eyes I was able to separate other men from my father's abuse and other women from my mother's abuse. Until I was able to see what was done to me I could not change

Sylvie Imelda Shene  My niece keeps wanting to make me her scapegoat, her last e-mail below.

“You have a lot of issues to work out. You have an obscene need to prove something, with an alarming lack of knowledge or even experience and, little wisdom in the end, by not questioning your own assumptions.

Honestly, your lack of logic, reasoning, and grounds are a huge handicap, if you aim to be taken seriously. Maybe you should start to read the classics, and only after, try to understand others. Your ideas are like a house with no foundations. You built ideas that can’t be sustained.

Start by reading and understanding Plato, Socrates, Kant, Nietzsche and Stuart Mill… Try to read Dostoevsky, Zola, Balzac, Shakespeare, Goethe…. Maybe, in the end, your mind can be opened, because you just see what you want (“No worst blind than the one who does not want to see”), you don’t have abstract reasoning yet. If you aim to be in disagreement, you have at first, to study and understand the basics. Disagreement is not synonymous of the absence of capability to understand.

Any definitions that you may have to exist thankfully to those men that settle ideas as freedom, metaphysic being and love as you understand them today. You just are not able to understand Man, individuals without knowing were they come from and this, means knowing history, philosophy, and art.

I am not directing anything; I am just amazed at your lack of respect towards others. If you want to be better than others, you need to learn to be humble and open to the idea that you may not know everything.

“I only know that I know nothing”. You just don´t let yourself to be in this position. But without it you will not able never to expand your intellect. Tolerance among others ideas and perspectives is actually a great accomplished that only great people can achieve. Little people tend to shape the world as it is more comfortable for them.

You can always walk away, and waste the opportunity of improving yourself. The courage it is all about being aware of our own ignorance; to by a form of nihilism do a sprit’s renewal.

One of the best law professors said at some point “we don’t accept advice from the ones that didn’t do better”. And that’s the point, you didn’t, you just judge and even didn’t yet learned to listen before speaking.

Even the small task you failed. You can’t listen.

Learn to listen first… You speak too much with little wisdom, which only shows your insecurities and lack of reasoning.

If you were honest with yourself, you would assume your incapacity to be anyone’s godmother. Unfortunately, you are mine, and the only thing you have was the idea that I shouldn’t be born. Well done!
Love,

D

Sylvie Imelda Shene:   Dear D, Like I said in my last e-mail I don’t know what to tell you. Your e-mails are pure projections of yourself into to me. You are the one calling me and writing to me with the need to argue, so who has the need to convince?

I am not calling you or writing to you to try to force you to see what I see. You are angry and your anger is justified because you were hurt, but I was not the person that hurt you and directing your justified anger at scapegoats it does not get resolved and keeps you trapped, your anger will only start to diminish and gets resolved when it’s felt in the right context. You keep saying that I told you: you should not have been born, but you are twisting my words, but like I said before, most of us are here, because our parents were unconscious and now it’s in our hands to choose to wake up, stop idealizing our parents and childhood, face and feel our sad reality or continue the insanity of our parents. 

You are using your intellect to run from looking at the facts and see these fundamental psychological mechanisms. It takes courage to see these psychological mechanisms, intelligence alone is not enough; it rather helps create seductive illusions and lies. You are in the last year of law school and now because you think you have “higher education” you got the illusion that the States are hiring people with higher education, but the United States have a lot of unemployed lawyers and the States does not need more emotionally blind lawyers, we got enough of those here already, now, because I am not willing to do what you want me to do, it trigger your anger, but like I said I am not the cause of your anger, I am only the trigger, because I am not willing to let you use me the way you want to use me. In all these years of school, you come out with a lot of abstract knowledge and what I call empty knowledge that only serves to impress others and deceive yourself and other emotionally blind people. Education alone does not save people, it did not save your mother and is not going to save you either, education alone is nothing, but an illusion.

I did not choose to be you your godmother, your mother chose it for me, because she was smelling money in me, otherwise she would never have picked me to be your godmother, but the best godmother I can be is, to tell the truth as I see it even at the risk at triggering your justified repressed anger caused by the hurt of your parents when you were a defenseless little girl. I have read about the classics you talk about and I suggest you read the book below if you really want to understand the writings of these authors. Wish you courage, Sylvie
The Untouched Key
Tracing Childhood Trauma in Creativity and Destructiveness

As in her former books, Alice Miller again focusses on facts. She is as determined as ever to cut through the veil that, for thousands of years now, has been so meticulously woven to shroud the truth. And when she lifts that veil and brushes it aside, the results are astonishing, as is amply demonstrated by her analyses of the works of Nietzsche, Picasso, Kollwitz, Keaton, and others. With the key shunned by so many for so long - childhood - she opens rusty looks and offers her readers a wealth of unexpected perspectives. What did Picasso express in "Guernica"? Why did Buster Keaton never smile? Why did Nietzsche heap so much opprobrium on women and religion, and lose his mind for eleven years? Why did Hitler and Stalin become tyrannical mass murderers? Alice Miller investigates these and other questions thoroughly in this book. She draws from her discoveries the conclusion that human beings are not "innately" destructive, that they are made that way by ignorance, abuse, and neglect, particularly if no sympathetic witness comes to their aid. She also shows why some mistreated children do not become criminals but instead bear witness as artists to the truth about their childhoods, even though in purely intuitive and unconscious ways.
It is Dr. Miller's goal to encourage these sympathetic witnesses, to lend them support, and to inform them about the worldwide and ignored plight of children, for she thinks that only by confronting the truth that has been avoided from time immemorial can human beings be saved from blind destruction and self-destruction. This discovery is eloquently illustrated in the last section of "The Untouched Key", wherein the story of Abraham and Isaac and the story of "The Emperor's New Clothes" are retold to reveal their profound meaning.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B009N989PM/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1

Also, read the letter to D in the link below
http://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2011/07/letter-to-d.html

Blood Does not Flow in Artificial Limbs

All my life I could not help myself, but be true to myself

"Once feelings have been eliminated, the submissive person functions perfectly and reliably even if he knows no one is going to check up on him: …..

This perfect adaptation to society’s norms---in other words, to what is called “healthy normality”---carries with it the danger that such a person can be used for practically any purpose. It is not a loss of autonomy that occurs here, because this autonomy never existed, but a switching of values, which in themselves are of no importance anyway for the person in question as long as his whole value system is dominated by the principle of obedience. 

He never gone beyond the stage of idealizing his parents with their demands for unquestioning obedience; this idealization can easily be transferred to a Fuhrer or an ideology. 

Since authoritarian parents are always right, there is no need for their children to rack their brains in each case to determine whether what is demanded of them is right or wrong. And how is this to be judged? 

Where are the standards supposed to come from if someone has always been told what was right and what was wrong and if he never had an opportunity to become familiar with his own feelings and if, beyond that, attempts at criticism were unacceptable to the parents and thus were too threatening for the child? 

If an adult has not developed a mind of his own, then he will find himself at the mercy of authorities for better or worse, just as an infant finds itself at the mercy of its parents. Saying no to those more powerful will always seem too threatening to him.

Witness of sudden political upheavals report again and again with what astonishing facility many people are able to adapt to a new situation. Overnight they can advocate views totally different from those they held the day before---without noticing the contradiction. With the change in power structure, yesterday has completely disappeared for them.

And yet, even if this observation should apply to many---perhaps even the most---people, it is not true for everyone. 

There have always been individuals who refused to be reprogrammed quickly, if ever. We could use our psychoanalytic knowledge to address the question of what causes this important, even crucial, difference; with its aid, we could attempt to discover why some people are so extraordinarily susceptible to the dictates of leaders and groups and why others remain immune to these influences.

We admire people who oppose the regime in a totalitarian country and think they have courage or a “strong moral sense” or have remained “true to their principles” or the like.  We may also smile at their naiveté, thinking, “Don’t they realize that their words are of no use at all against this oppressive power?  That they will have to pay dearly for their protest?”

 

Yet it is possible that both those who admire and those who scorn these protesters are missing the real point:  individuals who refuse to adapt to a totalitarian regime are not doing so out a sense of duty or because of naiveté but because they cannot help but be true to themselves.  The longer I wrestle with these questions, the more I am inclined to see courage, integrity, and a capacity for love not as “virtues,” not as moral categories, but as the consequences of a benign fate.

 

Morality and performance of duty are artificial measures that become necessary when something essential is lacking.  The more successfully a person was denied access to his or her feelings in childhood, the larger the arsenal of intellectual weapons and the supply of moral prostheses has to be, because morality and a sense of duty are not sources of strength or fruitful soil for genuine affection.  Blood does not flow in artificial limbs; they are for sale and can serve many masters.  What was considered good yesterday can---depending on the decree of government or party---be considered evil and corrupt today, and vice versa.  

But those who have spontaneous feelings can only be themselves.  They have no other choice if they want to remain true to themselves.  Rejection, ostracism, loss of love, and name-calling will not fail to affect them; they will suffer as a result and will dread them, but once they have found their authentic self they will not want to lose it.  And when they sense that something is being demanded of them to which their whole being says no, they cannot do it.  They simply cannot.

This is the case with people who had the good fortune of being sure of their parent’s love even if they had to disappoint certain parental expectations.  Or with people who, although they did not have this good fortune to begin with, learned later---for example, in analysis---to risk the loss of love in order to regain their lost self.  They will not be willing to relinquish it again for any price in the world.

 

The artificial nature of moral laws and rules of behavior is most clearly discernible in a situation in which lies and deception are powerless, i,e., in the mother-child relationship.  A sense of duty may not be fruitful soil for love but it undoubtedly is for mutual guilt feelings, and the child will forever be bound to the mother by crippling feelings of guilt and gratitude.  The Swiss author Robert Walser once said:  “There are mothers who choose a favorite from among their children, and it may be that they will stone this child with their kisses and threaten... its very existence.”  If he had known, had known on an emotional level, that he was describing his own fate, his life might not have ended in a mental institution.

 

It is unlikely that strictly intellectual attempts to seek explanations and gain understanding during adulthood can be sufficient to undo early childhood conditioning.  Someone who has learned at his or her peril to obey unwritten laws and renounce feelings at a tender age will obey the written laws all the more readily, lacking any inner resistance.  But since no one can live entirely without feelings, such a person will join groups that sanction or even encourage the forbidden feelings, which he or she will finally be allowed to live out within a collective framework.

 

Every ideology offers its adherents the opportunity to discharge their pent-up effect collectively while retaining the idealized primary object, which is transferred to new leader figures or to the group in order to make up for the lack of a satisfying symbiosis with the mother.  Idealization of a narcissistically cathected group guarantees collective grandiosity.  Since every ideology provides a scapegoat outside the confines of its own splendid group, the weak and scorned child who is part of the total self but has been split off and never acknowledge can now be openly scorned and assailed in this scapegoat.  The reference in Himmler’s speech to the “bacillus” of weakness which is to be exterminated and cauterized demonstrates very clearly the role assigned to the Jews by someone suffering from grandiosity who attempts to split off the unwelcome elements of his own psyche.

 

In the same way that analytic familiarity with the mechanisms of splitting off and projection can help us to understand the phenomenon of the Holocaust, a knowledge of the history of the Third Reich helps us to see the consequences of “poisonous pedagogy” more clearly.  Against the backdrop of the rejection of childishness instilled by our training, it becomes easier to understand why men and women had little difficulty leading a million children, whom they regarded as the bearers of the feared portions of their own psyche, into the gas chambers.  One can even imagine that by shouting at them, beating them, or photographing them, they were finally able to release the hatred going back to early childhood.  From the start, it had been the aim of their upbringing to stifle childish, playful, and life-affirming side.  The cruelty inflicted on them, the psychic murder of the child they once were, had to be passed on in the same way:  each time they sent another Jewish child to the gas ovens, they were in essence murdering the child within themselves."

 

From the book: “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence” By Alice Miller