Miley Cyrus is giving the world the middle finger

I thought I would share here some comments I made on someone's Facebook status about the Miley Cyrus saga.  

She is 20 years old and lost like most people in the rest of the world. Let’s not demand more from a 20-year-old than we do from the rest of the world. They are a lot of people and a lot older with that same or even bigger platform masquerading as responsible, loving caring people making millions of dollars selling the same old recycled seductive lies and half-truths that do a lot more harm under the disguise of help. They are nothing but cult leaders promoting others cult leaders misleading and deceiving the public, like for example, a lady whose name starts with an O. I don’t want to say her name, because right now I don’t want to deal with the backlash because sadly most people are just like little children that cannot bear the truth about their parents and will defend and attack anyone that dears to expose the big lies or illusions of people standing in symbolizing their mother/father. At least Miley Cyrus is not deceiving anyone! She was just acting silly and using her sexuality to get attention and make money!

That was my thought too. If it was a guy sticking the tongue out and grabbing his crotch in a disgusting way no one would care. This gender bias in our society has always pissed me off since I was a little girl. And the truth be told. She was exploited as a child and taught that money and fame was the most important thing in life. Every artist is trying to communicate something in a symbolic way and if we judge the artist and his/her art form instead of trying to understand its language, we miss the message. What I see from her performance is that she is disgusted and pissed off. Her anger is justified because she has been exploited by everyone in her life since she was born and now as an adult, she is grabbing herself in a disgusting way and sticking her tongue out at the world and she really saying: Fxxx you all! She is stuck in a time capsule like the rest of the world and the only difference between her and the rest of the world is that she is in a time capsule with a lot of more money! But at least she is not deceiving anyone like most people in our society in power positions pretending to have it all together behind a pretty façade fooling everyone and blocking the truth that could save the world, so they don’t have to face and feel their own painful truths. I hope Miley finds true freedom from her time capsule before she dies. Madonna use to bug me a lot more with her every calculated move, but her just like Miley is stuck in a time capsule and I don’t think Madonna will ever find true freedom before she dies. This quote by Alice Miller comes to mind: “It is not true that evil, destructiveness, and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that we are daily producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is absolutely avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to the production of evil.” — Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge, p. 141

You see their plan worked beautifully! They wanted to make money and they did it! They all are giving the hypocrites of world the middle finger! :-) "Despite the scorn earned by her performance of “Blurred Lines,” Cyrus has since sold 90,000 digital downloads of her new track “Wrecking Ball BLL -0.87%,” which debuted the day of the VMAs. The song now sits at No. 13 on Billboard‘s digital songs chart. The impact has been even broader in social media. According to data outfit MusicMetric, the former Hannah Montana star has seen a 112% rise in activity over the week before, adding 226,273 new Facebook FB +0.06% fans and 213,104 new Twitter followers from August 24 to August 28.
Her manager reportedly summed up her VMA performance quite simply: “It could not have gone better.”"http://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomalleygreenburg/2013/08/30/miley-cyrus-and-the-vma-aftermath-the-latest-numbers/

By the way, I never heard the word twerking before and I didn't know its meaning until now! J
According to Quartz, the word "twerk" has even been added to the Oxford Dictionaries Online. "Twerk" has been defined as "a dance to popular music in a sexually provocative manner involving thrusting hip movements and a low, squatting stance."

Lady Gaga has to be really pissed! I heard she was almost naked on stage! But I don’t see any videos of her anywhere! She probably said to herself: damn it I got naked for nothing! :-)
Miley whatever you do in the future just don’t go sit on Oprah’s couch! Please don’t let that woman exploit you like everyone else!

Also, this quote by Alice Miller just came to mind:

"The tragedy is that of early psychic injuries and their inevitable repression, which allows the child to survive. In a broad sense, it is the tragedy of almost everyone: As chil­dren we strive, above all else, to accommodate our parents' demands - spoken and unspoken, reasonable and unreason­able. In the process, we blind ourselves to our true needs and feelings. In our adult lives, this is like trying to sail a ship without a compass. Not knowing who we are, what we feel, and what we need, even as grown-ups we remain sub­ject to the expectations placed upon us from the very begin­ning of our lives, expectations we fulfilled not for love but for the illusion of love. Without that illusion, we could not have survived childhood." Read more in the link below:
http://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2012/08/introduction-to-revised-edition-1995.html


Some people can't let go of Miley Cyrus and someone posted a video of this hypocritical woman projecting her shame on Miley. Here are my comments on that video.

 She is so annoying and no way I can't get through the whole video! I rather have Miley Cyrus any day, has a much more pleasant voice to listen to and is much sexier! I wish people stopped the judging and the slut shaming already.

I feel sorry for her kids to be raised by such a self-righteous and judgmental mother.

Actually, she doesn’t. The internet allows everyone to show their faces, their emotional insights as well as their emotional blindness. Miley is being more emotionally honest unlike the girl in the video that is being emotionally dishonest and with the aid of hypocrisy covertly is passing or transferring her unresolved repressed shame from her own childhood into her children and Miley made herself vulnerable for the collective repressed shame of society to be transferred into her. She seems to be a pretty mature girl having fun and enjoying her sexuality and doesn’t care what anyone thinks, because if she takes in society’s collective repressed shame it will destroy her.

Below is my comment to the open letter of Sinead O'Connor to Miley Cyrus:

Why can’t people let go of Miley Cyrus. Sinead O'Connor suffers from what I like to call the prodigal son syndrome, she used to be a rebel, but came a day when she could no longer cope alone with her painful emotions and turned to religion for help, didn’t she even became a priest herself?! Religion/god is the substitute parent figure and remains a child stuck in her childhood drama that never broke free and now she is slut shaming other young people like once she was shamed. The compulsion to do to others what once was done to us is very hard to stop. She is shaming Miley Cyrus under the disguise of wanting to help. It is exactly what happened to her when she was a young girl. She is reenacting unconsciously and compulsively her childhood drama, but now she is the one doing the shaming instead of being shamed, she just reversed the roles, that’s all.

Good comments on my Facebook post below:
 https://www.facebook.com/sylne/posts/10151747241058922?comment_id=27104709

We can do what the fxxx we want and enjoy doing as long it doesn’t hurt ourselves and others, AND we are not doing it to run away from our painful truths and from feeling our painful feelings/soul, our true feelings are our soul, so if you can’t feel and go on repressing your authentic feelings with the aid of money, religion, drugs, medication, alcohol, sex, relationships, yoga or whatever illusion your head creates to distract yourself from your authentic feelings, you are repressing your soul and therefore living without a soul acting as if personality deceiving yourself and others. Just like the German-Swiss alchemist and physician Paracelsus established some 500 years ago, "Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy." And as Alice miller says: “There are plenty of means to combat symptoms of distress: medications, sermons, numerous ‘treatments,’ ‘miracles,’ threats, cults, pedagogical indoctrination, and even blackmail, they can all work for a while, but only because they reinforce the repression and reinforce the fear of resolving it. … A lot of money and fame comes from this business of repression because it satisfies the longing of so many grown-up children: to be loved as a good child. … In the long term, we have to pay a high price for this repression.” Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, page 126

I wish people stayed out of other people sexuality, teenagers, or not teenagers, just give young people the facts how their body works and how to protect themselves and respect everyone’s choices of when, how and with whom they choose to express themselves sexually! As long they are equal partners, other people's sexuality is nobody’s business. Not having sexual education based on facts and reality is in itself sexual abuse.

Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries

Quotes from the book " Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries" by Alice Miller

 

Preface  

The only possible recourse a baby has when his screams are ignored is to repress his distress, which is tantamount to mutilating his soul, for the result is an interference with his ability to feel, to be aware, and to remember. Page, 2

Parents who have never known love, who on coming into the world met with coldness, insensitivity, indifference, and blindness and whose entire childhood and youth were spent in this atmosphere, are unable to bestow love - indeed, how can they, since they have no idea of what love is and can be? Page, 2

A human being born into a cold, indifferent world will regard his situation as the only possible one. Everything that person later comes to believe, advocate, and deem right is founded on his first formative experiences. Page, 2

2 - Murdering for the Innocence of the Parents  

I was unable to question the actions of my own parents because of my lifelong fear of the feeling that re-experiencing my former situation might arouse: my sense of dependence on my parents who had no inkling of either their child's needs or their own responsibility. For everything they did to me and failed to do for me, I always found countless explanations, so I could avoid asking: 'Why did you do that to me? Why didn't you, Mother, protect me, why did you neglect me, ignore what I said? Why were your versions of me more important than the truth, why did you never tell me you were sorry, confirm my observations? Why did you blame me and punish me for something for which you were clearly the cause?' Page, 19

3 - The Wicked Child

When a child must consume all her capability and energy for the required labour of repression; when, in addition, she has never known what it is to be loved and protected by someone, this child will eventually also be incapable of protecting herself and organizing her life in a meaningful and productive manner. Page, 37

It is only from adults that an unloved child learns to hate or torment and to disguise these feelings with lies and hypocrisy. Page, 44

I have seen difficult children, even in psychiatric clinics where they resisted the most ingenious pedagogic methods - for instance, by not speaking, by refusing food, by tearing out their hair - because there was no one around who was genuinely interested in their torment and able to understand their pain. Page, 46

A loved child receives the gift of love and with it that of knowledge and innocence. It is a gift that will provide him with orientation for his whole life. An injured child lacks everything because he lacks love. Page, 48

4 - Theories as a Protective Shield

According to Baurman, ninety percent of rape victims are young girls or women, two thirds of them between the ages of five and thirteen. Page, 68

Child prostitution is also a problem in the industrial countries. UNICEF has estimated that some two million children of both sexes are being sexually exploited throughout the world. This does not take into account the sexual abuse that occurs within the family. Page, 70

In the therapy I personally underwent, I discovered that, with every inner confrontation with my parents, the guilt feelings that had been instilled in me reinforced my repression, barred my access to reality, and blocked my experiencing of pain. It was only when I could query my supposed guilt that those feelings surfaced. And only when I could feel that, without and guilt on my part, I had been ignored, not taken seriously, scarcely even noticed by my parents, did I realize what had happened. It became clear that it had not been up to me to teach my parents a sense of responsibility, that it has not been in my power as a babe in arms to render them capable of loving. The only thing I had been able to do was show them that I was useful, that I could be exploited, and that I would never respond with reproaches. At the time, life offered me no other option.  Page, 70  

How I longed to believe that all signals were deceiving me, that things weren't really that bad, and that only my suspicion was wicked and unfair. How I wished that psychoanalysis might be right, because of my longing to cling to the illusion of loving parents. Page, 71

Every patient clings to fantasies in which he sees himself in the active role so as to escape the pain of being defenseless and helpless. To achieve this he will accept guilt feelings, although they bind him to neurosis. Page, 72

The patient must uncover the facts with the aid of his feelings; he must examine his discoveries, query his own statements, until he arrives at the certainty: such and such actually happened. This knowledge enables the therapist to accompany the patient on his journey, a journey that often leads through hells and torture chambers. These must be returned to, again and again, until every detail of the traumatic scene can be experienced, to allow the effect of the trauma to dissolve and the injury at last to heal. Page, 73

It is only in the child that traumas are bound to lead to psychic wounds because they damage the organism in its growth process. These injuries can heal if one dares to see them, or they can remain unhealed if one is forced to go on ignoring them. Page, 78

7 - Without Truth there can be no Help

A great deal of understanding is shown for an unemployed father who beats his children. There is no problem understanding an overburdened executive who does the same thing, especially when he is irritated by his wife. The wife also meets with understanding when she can't help beating her child after the milk boils over. Page, 130

The Jungian doctrine of the shadow and the notion that evil is the reverse of good are aimed at denying the reality of evil. But evil is real. It is not innate but acquired, and it is never the reverse of good but rather its destroyer. Page, 142

Evil people
Our knowledge cannot alter them. They can change only if they sense, not merely intellectually but with their feelings, how they have been turned into evil people. Only then will they be able to remove the blockages and, by experiencing the blocked pain, liberate the abused child who had to wish to harm anyone on coming into the world, the child who wanted love but found no one to make that possible for him. All he found was barbed wire and walls on all sides, and he believed this to be the world. When he grew up he built gigantic worlds full of walls and barbed wire, or complicated philosophical and psychological systems, in the hope and expectation of receiving love in return, the love he never received from his parents when he was an 'unworthy life.  Page, 143

8 - The Enlightened Witness

Formerly abused children could never say, 'How dreadful my childhood was!' Instead they said, 'That's life, that's normal. That's how I'll bring up my own children too. After all, I've turned out all right'. The early destruction of their learning capacities bears late fruit. Page, 149

People who from earliest childhood have been taken seriously, have been respected, loved, and protected, cannot but treat their own children in the same way because their souls and their bodies have absorbed and stored this lesson at an early age. From the very beginning they learned that it is right to protect and respect the weaker, and it becomes something they take for granted. They will need to psychology textbooks to raise their children. Page, 151

Appendix - The Way Out of the Trap

The child is not a toy or a kitten; he is a bundle of needs requiring a great deal of loving care to develop his potential. Those not prepared to give the child this must not have children. Page, 160

To beat a child, to humiliate him or sexually abuse him, is a crime because it damages a human being for life. It is important for third parties also to be aware of this, since enlightenment and the courage of witnesses can play a crucial, life-saving role for the child.  Page, 160

This is not inevitable is, during childhood, he had the chance - be it only once to encounter someone who offered him something other than pedagogy and cruelty: a teacher, an aunt, a neighbor, a sister, a brother. It is only through the experience of being loved and cherished that the child can ever discern cruelty as such, be aware of it, and resist it. Without the experience he has no way of knowing that there is anything in the world except cruelty; the child will automatically submit to it and, years later, when as an adult he accedes to power, will exert it as being perfectly normal behavior. Page, 161

What happens when a child reared in love, protection, and honesty is suddenly beaten by someone? The child will scream, give vent to his anger: Why are you doing this to me? None of this is possible when a child trained from the very outset to be obedient is beaten by his own parents, whom he loves. The child must stifle his pain and anger and repress the whole situation to survive. For to be able to show anger the child needs the confidence based on experience that he will not be killed as a result. A battered child cannot build up this confidence; children are indeed sometimes killed when they dare to rebel against injustice. Hence the child must suppress his rage to survive in a hostile environment, must even stifle his massive, overwhelming pain in order not to die of it. So now the silence of forgetting descends over everything, and the parents are idealized - they have never done any wrong. 'And if they did beat me, I deserved it.' This is the familiar version of the torture that has been endured. Page, 162

To forget and to repress would be a good solution if there were no more to it than that. But repressed pain blocks emotional life and leads to physical symptoms. Page, 162

 

Truth or Illusion?

Afterword to the Second Edition (1984) of For Your Own Good By Alice Miller

This text was not originally part of the book. It was written four years after the book's first publication.

When Galileo Galilei in 1613 presented mathematical proof for the Copernican theory that the earth revolved around the sun and not the opposite, it was labeled "false and absurd" by the Church. Galileo was forced to recant and subsequently became blind. Not until three hundred years later did the Church finally decide to give up its illusion and remove his writings from the Index. Now we find ourselves in a situation similar to that of the Church in Galileo's time, but for us today much more hangs in the balance. Whether we decide for truth or for illusion will have far more serious consequences for the survival of humanity than was the case in the seventeenth century. For some years now, there has been proof that the devastating effects of the traumatization of children take their inevitable toll on society – a fact that we are still forbidden to recognize. This knowledge concerns every single one of us, and – if disseminated widely enough – should lead to fundamental changes in society; above all, to a halt in the blind escalation of violence. The following points are intended to amplify my meaning:

1. All children are born to grow, to develop, to live, to love, and to articulate their needs and feelings for their self-protection.
2. For their development, children need the respect and protection of adults who take them seriously, love them, and honestly help them to become oriented in the world.
3. When these vital needs are frustrated and children are, instead, abused for the sake of adults' needs by being exploited, beaten, punished, taken advantage of, manipulated, neglected, or deceived without the intervention of any witness, then their integrity will be lastingly impaired.
4. The normal reactions to such injury should be anger and pain. Since children in this hurtful kind of environment are forbidden to express their anger, however, and since it would be unbearable to experience their pain all alone, they are compelled to suppress their feelings, repress all memory of the trauma, and idealize those guilty of the abuse. Later they will have no memory of what was done to them.
5. Disassociated from the original cause, their feelings of anger, helplessness, despair, longing, anxiety, and pain will find expression in destructive acts against others (criminal behavior, mass murder) or against themselves (drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, psychic disorders, suicide).
6. If these people become parents, they will then often direct acts of revenge for their mistreatment in childhood against their own children, whom they use as scapegoats. Child abuse is still sanctioned – indeed, held in high regard – in our society as long as it is defined as child-rearing. It is a tragic fact that parents beat their children in order to escape the emotions stemming from how they were treated by their own parents.
7. If mistreated children are not to become criminals or mentally ill, it is essential that at least once in their life they come in contact with a person who knows without any doubt that the environment, not the helpless, battered child, is at fault. In this regard, knowledge or ignorance on the part of society can be instrumental in either saving or destroying a life. Here lies the great opportunity for relatives, social workers, therapists, teachers, doctors, psychiatrists, officials, and nurses to support the child and to believe her or him.
8. Till now, society has protected the adult and blamed the victim. It has been abetted in its blindness by theories, still in keeping with the pedagogical principles of our great-grandparents, according to which children are viewed as crafty creatures, dominated by wicked drives, who invent stories and attack their innocent parents or desire them sexually. In reality, children tend to blame themselves for their parents' cruelty and to absolve the parents, whom they invariably love, of all responsibility.
9. For some years now, it has been possible to prove, through new therapeutic methods, that repressed traumatic experiences of childhood are stored up in the body and, though unconscious, exert an influence even in adulthood. In addition, electronic testing of the fetus has revealed a fact previously unknown to most adults – that a child responds to and learns both tenderness and cruelty from the very beginning.
10. In the light of this new knowledge, even the most absurd behavior reveals its formerly hidden logic once the traumatic experiences of childhood need no longer remain shrouded in darkness.
11. Our sensitization to the cruelty with which children are treated, until now commonly denied, and to the consequences of such treatment will as a matter of course bring to an end the perpetuation of violence from generation to generation.
12. People whose integrity has not been damaged in childhood, who were protected, respected, and treated with honesty by their parents, will be – both in their youth and in adulthood – intelligent, responsive, empathic, and highly sensitive. They will take pleasure in life and will not feel any need to kill or even hurt others or themselves. They will use their power to defend themselves, not to attack others. They will not be able to do otherwise than respect and protect those weaker than themselves, including their children, because this is what they have learned from their own experience, and because it is this knowledge (and not the experience of cruelty) that has been stored up inside them from the beginning. It will be inconceivable to such people that earlier generations had to build up a gigantic war industry in order to feel comfortable and safe in this world. Since it will not be their unconscious drive in life to ward off intimidation experienced at a very early age, they will be able to deal with attempts at intimidation in their adult life more rationally and more creatively." From the Afterword to the Second Edition (1984) of For Your Own Good By Alice Miller

Liberating ourselves from the dependency that breeds hatred

“…I do know that beating are still recommended as method of parenting; that the United states, that self-styled model of democracy, still allows corporal punishment in schools in twenty-two states; and that, if anything, these States are becoming more and more vocal in their defense of this “right” to which all parents are entitled. It is absurd to believe that we teach children democracy with the help of physical force.

My conclusion from this is that there are probably a lot of people living in the world right now who have been through this kind of upbringing. All of them had their resistance to cruelty clubbed down at a very early stage; all of them have grown up in a state of what I can only call “inner insincerity.” We can observe this wherever we look. If someone says, “I don’t love my parents because they constantly humiliated me,” she will immediately hear the same advice from all sides: She must change her attitude if she wants to become truly adult, she must not live with hatred bottled up inside herself if she wants to stay healthy; she can free herself of that hatred only if she forgives her parents; there is no such thing as ideal parents---all parents sometimes make mistakes, and this is something we have to put up with, and we can learn to do so once we are truly adults.

The reason such advice sounds so sensible is that we have heard it all our lives and have believed it to be sound. But it is not. It rests on fallacious assumptions. It is not true that forgiveness will free us from hatred. It merely helps to cover it up and hence to reinforce it (in our unconscious minds). It is not true that tolerance grows with age. On the contrary. Children will tolerate their parents’ absurdities because they think them normal and have no way of defending themselves against them. Not until adulthood do we actively suffer from this lack of freedom and these constraints. But we feel this suffering in our relations with others, with our partners and our children. Infant fear of our parents stops us from recognizing the truth. It is not true that hatred makes us ill. Repressed, disassociated emotions can make us ill but not conscious feelings that we can give expression to. As adults, we will hate only if we remain trapped in a situation in which we cannot give free expression to our feelings. It is this dependency that makes us start to hate. As soon as we break that dependency (which as adults we can normally do, unless we are prisoners of some totalitarian regime), as soon as we free ourselves from that slavery, then we will no longer hate (see Chapter 10). However, if hatred is there it is no good forbidding it, as all the religions do. We have to understand the reasons for it if we are to opt for the kind of behavior that will free people from the dependency that breeds hatred.
Of course, people who have been severed from their true feelings since early childhood will be dependent on institutions like the church and will let themselves be told what they are allowed to feel. In most cases it is very little indeed. But I cannot imagine that it will always be like this. Somewhere, sometime, there will be a rebellion, and the process of mutual stultification will be halted when individuals summon up the courage to overcome their understandable fears, to tell, feel, and publish the truth and communicate with others on this basis.” From the book The Body Never Lies, page, 118 and 119