To my older sisters, being a hard worker was the best quality a person could have and eclipsed any character defect, no matter how bad, and now they are paying the price for their emotional blindness.
I remember very well thinking to myself: this is not a good idea, but I didn’t dare to express my opinion, because I knew I didn't have a voice in my family and I was a nobody to them -- I had heard enough times -- from Isabel that my opinion didn’t count, so why bother saying anything.
But I was right! This family was more wounded than my family, and two wounded families colliding together is like two trains traveling at high speed colliding with each other, very destructive.
Most summers, when I would go visit my parents in the village, I would witness this man bullying my aging parents. He was stealing and using more land than he had been given permission to use, and I was sad to witness my mother and father suffer from the abuse of this man; once, this man even poisoned my mother’s chickens!
I was especially sad when they removed a cherry tree my father had planted that gave the best white cherries I ever tasted.
I witnessed my mother many times crying and yelling at this man that he was stealing our land. She said to him: I never gave you permission to use this part of the land, but my sisters were too busy in the city with work and obsessing about me and following their cult leaders to notice what was happening to our aging parents and our land. You would think the psychic people they were visiting for guidance would have warned them about the dangers of this very wounded family.
While visiting my parents, I became friends with this man’s two daughters. They had two more sisters, but they chose to stay with an aunt in a nearby village; they were still mad at their father.
The oldest girl played the role of the “wife” and “mother” and took care of all the household duties, like cleaning and cooking, while her brother and younger sister went to school. I once asked them what had happened to their mother. They told me that their mother had run away to France from their father and that she went to the extreme to bleach her face and change her identity so her father could not recognize her, because she was very afraid of their father finding her. Of course, she was afraid of their father; he was a bully.
Now his son is a bully like his father and has become a high official in law enforcement.
And from this position of power, he is trying to legalize and put in his name the land his father stole from my parents by falsifying documents and lying, like saying their house was built before 1951 because they built their house without a license. After 1951, no one could build without a permit.
I was born in 1959, and I guarantee their house wasn't built until I was a teenager, in the seventies, but because he is in a position of power, he can bribe people in the courts and get people in the village to lie for him, even the village priest!
My older sister has been fighting their lies and falsified papers for at least 8 years. What should have been so easy to take care of, because the land was in my parents' name, and they never had any of the land in their names; they just had a house built on our land, and that does not give them ownership of the land. They own the house, but not the land.
In a corrupt country like Portugal, people in positions of power can use and bully those below them and do whatever they want without fear, because in Portugal people in power protect each other no matter how big a crime they commit against innocent people.
My family should have learned their lesson, because when I was around 4 years old, they also let a man from a nearby village build a mill on our land, since our land was so central to the bus stop that connected all the nearby villages. It was handy for his clients to drop off their wheat and rye to be milled. He also tried to steal our land, but it was easy to prove it was ours, and when the mill got too old, my parents didn’t allow him to rebuild it. Eventually, he left, and this man was not only a land thief; he was also a child molester because he tried to molest me once. After that, I made sure I was never alone with him.
But now this man, from a place of power in law enforcement, can bribe court officials to do whatever he wants, and the fight goes on forever. In general, people who were extremely wounded in their childhood choose professions that require violence, like law enforcement or the army, to unconsciously satisfy the fantasies of revenge of the child they once were on innocent people and be rewarded for it instead of getting in trouble.
They want to be in a position of power over others, so they can use and bully those in our society who are weaker and powerless, like they once were when they were defenseless little children.
This wound of having been abandoned by their own mother, who ran away to France and left them with an abusive father, and then the father leaving for Germany when they were little children to be raised by aunts, had to be, for them, completely psychic murder. My family made the perfect scapegoats for them to pay the price for their psychic being murdered by the people that brought them into this world. “…The mother, to be sure, has her own sphere of authority in the household, where she rules over the children when the father is not at home; this means that she can, to some extent, take out on those weaker than herself the humiliation she has suffered. In the totalitarian state, the security police serve a similar function. They are the overseers of the enslaved people. However, they are enslaved people themselves, carrying out the dictator’s wishes, serving as his deputies in his absence, instilling fear in his name, meting out punishment, assuming the guise of the rulers of the oppressed.” Alice Miller, “For Your Own Good,” pages 146 and 147
“I designate as pessimistic the thought that we are far more dependent than our pride would like to admit on individual human beings (and not only on institutions), for a single person can gain control over the masses if he learns to use to his own advantage the system under which they were raised. People who have been “pedagogically” manipulated as children are not aware as adults of all that can be done to them. Like the individual authoritarian father, leader figures, in whom the masses see their own father, actually embody the avenging child who needs the masses for his own purposes (of revenge). And this second form of dependence---the dependence of the “great leader” on his childhood, on the unpredictable nature of the unintegrated, enormous potential for hatred within him---is decidedly a very great danger.” Alice Miller “For Your Own Good” Page 243
“Statistical studies are hardly the thing to make disinterested jurists into empathic and perceptive human beings. And yet every crime, by virtue of being an enactment of childhood drama, cries out for understanding. The newspapers carry these stories every day, but unfortunately usually report only the last act. Can knowledge of the underlying causes of a crime bring about a change in the way justice is administered? Not as long as the primary concerns are to assign guilt and impose punishment. But someday it may be possible to gain an understanding for the fact that emerges so clearly in the case Jurgen Bartsch: the accused never bears all the guilt by himself but is a victim of a tragic chain of circumstances. Even so, a prison sentence is unavoidable if society is to be protected. But there is a difference between prison being used to punish a dangerous criminal according to the principles of “poisonous pedagogy” and human tragedy being perceived, therapy during confinement. ” Alice Miller “For Your Own Good,” pages 199 and 200
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