Unintentional Cruelty Hurts, Too

Steps on the Path to

Reconciliation: Anxiety,

Anger, and Sorrow--

but No Guilt Feelings

Unintentional Cruelty Hurts, Too

When we examine the child-rearing literature of the past two hundred years, we discover the methods that have systematically been used to make it impossible for children to realize and later to remember the way they were actually treated by their parents. Why are the old methods of child raising still so widely employed today? This is a mystery I have tried to understand and explain from the perspective of the compulsive repetition of the exercise of power. Contrary to popular opinion, the injustice, humiliation, mistreatment, and coercion a person has experienced are not without consequences. The tragedy is that the effects of mistreatment are transmitted to new and innocent victims, even though the victims themselves do not remember the mistreatment on a conscious level.

How can this vicious circle be broken? Religion says we must forgive the injustice we suffered, only then will we be free to love and be purged of hatred. This is correct as far as it goes, but how do we find the path to true forgiveness? Can we speak of forgiveness if we hardly know what was actually done to us and why? And that is the situation we all found ourselves in as children. We could not grasp why we were being humiliated, brushed aside, intimidated, laughed at, treated like an object, played with like a doll or brutally beaten (or both). What is more, we were not even allowed to be aware that all this was happening to us, for any mistreatment was held up to us as being necessary for our own good. Even the most clever child cannot see through such a lie if it comes from the mouths of his beloved parents, who after all show him other, loving sides as well. He has to believe that the way he is being treated is truly right and good for him, and he will not hold it against his parents. But then as an adult he will act the same way toward his own children in an attempt to prove to himself that his parents behaved correctly toward him.

Isn't this what most religions mean by "forgiveness": to chastise children "lovingly" in the tradition of the fathers and to raise them to respect their parents? But forgiveness which is based on denial of the truth and which uses a defenseless child as an outlet for resentment is not true forgiveness; that is why hatred is not vanquished by religions in this manner but, on the contrary, is unwittingly exacerbated. The child's intense anger at the parents, being strictly forbidden, is simply deflected onto other people and onto himself, but not done away with. Instead, because it is permissible to discharge this anger onto one's own children, it spreads over the entire world like a plague. For this reason we should not be surprised that there are religious wars, although such a phenomenon should actually be a contradiction in terms.

Genuine forgiveness does not deny anger but faces it head-on. If I can feel outrage at the injustice I have suffered, can recognize my persecution as such, and can acknowledge and hate my persecutor for what he or she has done, only then will the way to forgiveness be open to me. Only if the history of abuse in earliest childhood can be uncovered will the repressed anger, rage, and hatred cease to be perpetuated. Instead, they will be transformed into sorrow and pain at the fact that things had to be that way. As a result of this pain, they will give way to genuine understanding, the understanding of an adult who now has gained insight into his or her parents' childhood and finally, liberated from his own hatred, can experience genuine, mature sympathy. Such forgiveness cannot be coerced by rules and commandments; it is experienced as a form of grace and appears spontaneously when a repressed (because forbidden) hatred no longer poisons the soul. The sun does not need to be told to shine. When the clouds part, it simply shines. But it would be a mistake to say that the clouds are not in the way if they are indeed there.

If an adult has been fortunate enough to get back to the sources of the specific injustice he suffered in his childhood and experience it on a conscious level, then in time he will realize on his own--preferably without the aid of any pedagogical or religious exhortations--that in most cases his parents did not torment or abuse him for their own pleasure or out of sheer strength and vitality but because they could not help it, since they were once victims themselves and thus believed in traditional methods of child-rearing.

It is very difficult for people to believe the simple fact that every persecutor was once a victim . Yet it should be very obvious that someone who was allowed to feel free and strong from childhood does not have the need to humiliate another person. In Paul Klee's Diaries we find the following anecdote.

From time to time, I played tricks on a little girl who was not pretty and who wore braces to correct her crooked legs. I regarded her whole family, and in particular the mother, as very inferior people. I would present myself at the high court, pretending to be a good boy, and beg to be allowed to take the little darling for a walk. For a while we'd walk peaceably hand in hand; then, perhaps in the nearby field where potato plants were blooming and June bugs were all over, or perhaps even sooner, we would start walking single file. At the right moment I'd give my protégée a slight push. The poor thing would fall, and I'd bring her back in tears to her mother, explaining with an innocent air: "She fell down." I played this trick more than once, without Frau Enger's ever suspecting the truth. I must have gauged her correctly. (Age five or six)

No doubt, little Paul was repeating something here that was done to him, probably by his father. There is only one brief passage about his father in the Diaries:

For a long time I trusted my papa implicitly and regarded his words (Papa can do anything) as gospel. The only thing I couldn't bear was his teasing. On one occasion, thinking I was alone, I was playing make-believe. I was interrupted by a sudden amused "hmpf!" which hurt my feelings. It was not the only time I was to hear this "hmpf!"

Mockery from a beloved and admired person is always painful, and we can imagine that little Paul was deeply wounded by this treatment.

It would be wrong to say that, because we understand its origins, the harm we compulsively inflict on another person does not cause harm and that little Paul did not hurt the girl. To recognize this makes the tragedy visible but at the same time offers the possibility for change. The realization that even with the best will in the world we are not omnipotent, that we are subject to compulsions, and that we cannot love our child in the way we would like may lead to sorrow but should not awaken guilt feelings, because the latter imply a power and freedom we do not have. Burdened by guilt feelings ourselves, we will also burden our children with guilt feelings and tie them to us for a lifetime. By means of our mourning, we can set our children free.

Distinguishing between mourning and guilt feelings might also help to break the silence between the generations on the subject of the crimes of the Nazi period. Mourning is the opposite of feeling guilt; it is an expression of pain that things happened as they did and that there is no way to change the past. We can share this pain with our children without having to feel ashamed; guilt feelings are something we try to repress or shift to our children or both.

Since sorrow reactivates numbed feelings, it can enable young people to realize what their parents once inflicted on them in the well-meaning attempt to train them to be obedient from an early age. This can lead to an eruption of justifiable anger and to the painful recognition that one's own parents, who are already over fifty, are still defending their old principles, are unable to understand the anger of their grown child, and are hurt and wounded by reproaches. Then the child wishes he or she could take back what has been said and undo all that has happened; because now the old familiar fears that these reproaches will send the parents to their graves return. If children are told early and often enough, "You'll be the death of me yet," these words remain with them all their life.

And yet, even if a person is once again left alone with this awakened anger because his aging parents can bear it just as little as before, the mere admission of this feeling to consciousness can lead out of the dead end of self-alienation. Then at long last the true child, the healthy child, can live, the child who finds it impossible to understand why his parents are hurting him and at the same time forbidding him to cry, weep, or even speak in his pain. The gifted child who adapts to parental demands always tries to understand this absurdity and will accept it as a matter of course. But he has to pay for this pseudo-understanding with his feelings and his sensitivity to his own needs, i.e., with his authentic self. This is why access to the normal, angry, uncomprehending, and rebellious child he once was had previously been blocked off. When this child within the adult is liberated, he will discover his vital roots and strength.

To be free to express resentment dating back to early childhood does not mean that one now becomes a resentful person, but rather the exact opposite. For the very reason that one is permitted to experience these feelings that were directed against the parents, one does not have to use surrogate figures for purposes of abreaction. Only hatred felt for surrogates is endless and insatiable--as we saw in the case of Adolf Hitler--because on a conscious level the feeling is separated from the person against whom it was originally directed.

For these reasons I believe that the free expression of resentment against one's parents represents a great opportunity. It provides access to one's true self, reactivates numbed feelings, opens the way for mourning and--with luck--reconciliation. In any case, it is an essential part of the process of psychic healing. But anyone who thinks that I am reproaching these aging parents would be misunderstanding my meaning completely. I have neither the right nor the grounds to do so. I was not their child, was not compelled by them to be silent, was not raised by them, and--as an adult--know that they, like all parents, could do no differently than behave the way they did.

Because I encourage the child within the adult to acknowledge his feelings, including his resentment, but do not absolve him from these feelings, and because I do not place blame on the parents, I apparently create difficulties for many of my readers. It would be so much simpler to say it is all the child's fault, or the parents', or the blame can be divided. This is exactly what I don't want to do, because as an adult I know it is not a question of blame but of not being able to do any differently. Children cannot understand this, however, and they fall ill in the attempt to do so because of a lack of access to their feelings. Only if the child in the adult suspends his futile attempt to understand can he begin to feel his pain. I believe that the children of those adults who finally dare to face their feelings will benefit as a result.

Perhaps even this explanation cannot clear up the misunderstandings that frequently arise in this connection, for they are not rooted in the intellect. If someone learned from an early age to feel guilty for everything and to regard his parents as beyond reproach, my ideas will of necessity cause him feelings of anxiety and guilt. We can see just how strong his attitude, instilled at an early age, is by observing older people. As soon as they find themselves in a situation of physical helplessness and dependence, they may feel guilty for every little thing and may even regard their grown children as stern judges, providing the children are no longer submissive as they once were. As a result, the grown children feel they have to spare their parents out of considerateness, and the fear of hurting them condemns the children to silence once again. Since many psychologists never had the opportunity to free themselves from this fear and to find out that parents need not die if they hear the truth about their child, they will be inclined to encourage a "reconciliation" between patients and parents as quickly as possible. If the underlying rage has not been experienced, however, the reconciliation is an illusory one. It will only cover over the rage that has been bottled up unconsciously or has been directed against others and will reinforce the patient's false self, even at the expense of his children, who will certainly sense the parent's true feelings. And yet, in spite of these impediments, there are an increasing number of books in which young people confront their parents more freely and openly and honestly than was previously possible. This fact awakens hope that critical writers will produce critical readers who will refuse to allow themselves to be made to feel guilty (or more guilty) by the "poisonous pedagogy" to be found in the professional literature (in the areas of education, psychology, ethics, or biography). Taken from the book “"For Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence" by Alice Miller http://nospank.net/fyog17.htm