Never put your life in someone else’s hands, it can very dangerous. As children, we had no choice and our lives were in the hands of our parents and caregivers, but now we are adults and we must be in charge of our own lives, if we still have an inner wounded child inside of us, the adult in us has to be the one paying attention and listen to our wounded child and if we need help understanding our feelings, we need to look for an enlightened and sympathetic witness to help us understand and experience all of our feelings within the context of our own childhood.
NEVER, allow people symbolizing your parents take charge of your life and make decisions for you or make another adult your substitute parent and let her/him regress you to the wounded child you once were because that is putting you in a position of being controlled and manipulated by another person, just like when you were a little child and can be very dangerous to your mental and physical health and well-being.
An example is the followers of the secret by James Arthur Ray, he symbolizing their parents/caretakers and the followers “the good children” follow his directions without question it and two paid the price with their lives for this mistake. Read more about this sad tragic story here
Another example is Tony Robbins with his TV program “Breakthrough” he like many gurus out there is taking advantage and exploiting emotionally blind people and putting people’s well-being in danger, a few years ago I was going through the TV channels and Tony Robbins’s show “breakthrough” was on and he had this emotionally blind woman sleeping outside with the homeless, so she would have the experience of having nothing and in this way she was supposed to get over her depression and make her grateful for the things she has, how sad that this grown person puts her life in this guru’s hands and allows him to regress her to the helpless lost child she once was and exploit her just like her parents did when she was a little defenseless child.
I am amazed at the amount of smart and intelligent people who fall for seductive words by charismatic people like Tony Robbins. Just like Alice Miller says in her book “For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence.” “… We have seen how easy it is for intellectuals in a dictatorship to be corrupted, it would be a vestige of aristocratic snobbery to think that only “the uneducated masses” are susceptible to propaganda. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation.”
NEVER, allow people symbolizing your parents take charge of your life and make decisions for you or make another adult your substitute parent and let her/him regress you to the wounded child you once were because that is putting you in a position of being controlled and manipulated by another person, just like when you were a little child and can be very dangerous to your mental and physical health and well-being.
An example is the followers of the secret by James Arthur Ray, he symbolizing their parents/caretakers and the followers “the good children” follow his directions without question it and two paid the price with their lives for this mistake. Read more about this sad tragic story here
Another example is Tony Robbins with his TV program “Breakthrough” he like many gurus out there is taking advantage and exploiting emotionally blind people and putting people’s well-being in danger, a few years ago I was going through the TV channels and Tony Robbins’s show “breakthrough” was on and he had this emotionally blind woman sleeping outside with the homeless, so she would have the experience of having nothing and in this way she was supposed to get over her depression and make her grateful for the things she has, how sad that this grown person puts her life in this guru’s hands and allows him to regress her to the helpless lost child she once was and exploit her just like her parents did when she was a little defenseless child.
I am amazed at the amount of smart and intelligent people who fall for seductive words by charismatic people like Tony Robbins. Just like Alice Miller says in her book “For Your Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence.” “… We have seen how easy it is for intellectuals in a dictatorship to be corrupted, it would be a vestige of aristocratic snobbery to think that only “the uneducated masses” are susceptible to propaganda. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation.”
One more example is religion; religion/god symbolizing the all-powerful parent and the followers permanently trapped in the role of the child. Our goal is to free ourselves from all illusions, become autonomous adults and stand on our own two feet without crutches.
Also in her book Paths of Life, Alice Miller says: "MANY PROBLEMS APPEAR in a new light when we look to childhood as a source of possible explanations. We are living in an age in which democracies are gaining the upper hand over dictatorships. At the same time, the cult-group phenomenon is an indication that there is a growth in the number of totalitarian systems to which people voluntarily submit themselves. People growing up in a spirit of liberty and tolerance, accepted in childhood for what they are, rather than being throttled and stunted by their upbringing, would hardly place themselves at the mercy of a cult group of their own accord. And if by chance or skillful manipulation, they did fall afoul of such an organization, they certainly would not stay there very long.
...In my view, however, this allegedly conscious exploitation can also be traced back to unconscious motives. Terrible as the consequences were, I do not believe, for example, that the two initiators of “feeling therapy,” discussed earlier, actually set out to establish a totalitarian regime. It was the power they gained over their adherents that made them into gurus. And this is what I have in mind when I refer to the unconscious aspects of manipulation. In the end, they themselves become the victims of a process with an inexorable logic of its own, a process they were unaware of because they had never given it any thought.
Also in the article below Alice Miller articulates very well the dangers of re-birth therapy.
Also in her book Paths of Life, Alice Miller says: "MANY PROBLEMS APPEAR in a new light when we look to childhood as a source of possible explanations. We are living in an age in which democracies are gaining the upper hand over dictatorships. At the same time, the cult-group phenomenon is an indication that there is a growth in the number of totalitarian systems to which people voluntarily submit themselves. People growing up in a spirit of liberty and tolerance, accepted in childhood for what they are, rather than being throttled and stunted by their upbringing, would hardly place themselves at the mercy of a cult group of their own accord. And if by chance or skillful manipulation, they did fall afoul of such an organization, they certainly would not stay there very long.
...In my view, however, this allegedly conscious exploitation can also be traced back to unconscious motives. Terrible as the consequences were, I do not believe, for example, that the two initiators of “feeling therapy,” discussed earlier, actually set out to establish a totalitarian regime. It was the power they gained over their adherents that made them into gurus. And this is what I have in mind when I refer to the unconscious aspects of manipulation. In the end, they themselves become the victims of a process with an inexorable logic of its own, a process they were unaware of because they had never given it any thought.
Thus they sparked off a conflagration they were unable to control, much less extinguish. First, they had learned how to reduce people to the emotional state of the helpless child. Once they had achieved that, they also learned how to use unconscious regression to exercise total control over their victims. From then on, what they did seemed to come automatically, in accordance, with the child-rearing patterns instilled into them in their own childhood.
Read more here
Also in the article below Alice Miller articulates very well the dangers of re-birth therapy.
CONCERNING PRIMAL SELF-THERAPY
I am frequently asked what I consider to be the decisive factor in psychotherapy today. Is it the recognition of the truth, liberation from the enforced vow of silence and from idealization of one's parents, or is it the presence of an Enlightened Witness? My view is that it is not a question of either-or but of both-and. Without the Enlightened Witness it is impossible to bear the truth of what happened to us in early infancy. But by the term Enlightened Witness I do not mean anyone who has studied psychology or has been through primal experiences with a guru and has remained in his thrall. For me, Enlightened Witnesses are therapists with the courage to face up to their own histories and to gain their autonomy in doing so, rather than seeking to offset their own repressed feelings of ineffectuality by exerting power over their patients.
The adult needs assistance in coping with the present situations as an adult, while at the same time maintaining contact with the suffering and knowing child he once was, the child he could not muster the courage to listen to for so long but now, with help, can finally pay heed to. The body knows everything that has happened to it but it has no language to express that knowledge. It is like the child we once were, the child that sees all but without the aid of the adults remains helpless and alone. Accordingly, whenever the emotions from the past rise to the surface they are invariably accompanied by the fears of the helpless child, dependent on the understanding or at least the reassurances of the caregivers.
Unlike the body, our cognitive system knows little of the events far back in the past; conscious memories are fragmentary, brittle, unreliable. But the cognitive system has a huge fund of knowledge at its disposal, a fully developed mind, and the life experience a child cannot yet have. As adults are no longer powerless, they can offer the child within them (the body) protection and an attentive ear so that it can express itself in its own way and tell its own story. It is in the light of these stories that the looming, incomprehensible fears and emotions of the adult take on meaning. Finally, they stand in a recognizable context and are no longer so obscurely menacing.
In a society, with a receptive attitude to the distress of children, no one will be alone with his/her history. The same is true of therapists. Because then everyone will know that it is not the children who are responsible for their sufferings but the adults.
I recently wrote a letter in French to the forum that I am quoting in English below:
Dear Franck, I understand well your fascination for the manual of Stettbacher. When I read this manuscript in 1989 I thought that it contained the solution for a lot of readers who, after having read my books, were looking, like you, for the sources of their sufferings and fears in the history of their childhood. As I had never had the luck to be understood and helped in my childhood nor in my therapies (it was always me who had to help others) I found the idea of a primal self - therapy at first quite normal and acceptable. It is after some years that I grasped the big importance and even necessity of an enlightened and empathic therapist in the process of recovery. Especially thanks to letters of people that failed to help themselves and who blamed themselves for their plight ( trying to do more and more therapy and turning around alone with their fears and pains) that I understood that the primal self - therapy can indeed trigger easily the old pent-up emotions but can reactivate the situation of the child that was always alone with his/her pains and fears. This repetition of the old trauma is the opposite of a therapy.
Today, I share the opinion of Arthur Janov who always affirmed, that primal therapy without the assistance of a well informed and compassionate therapist can be very dangerous. (cf. his homepage). In addition, I think that it contains (1) a contradiction in itself by reactivating a situation of which one want to get rid of and (2) a perpetuation of the violence directed toward oneself.
I don't have any contact with Mister Stettbacher since 1994 when I stopped to recommend his method but I suppose that the information on its negative effects reached him too and that it already motivated him to stop recommending it. Since the release of his book there is a lot of new information on this topic available that are easily accessible thanks to the internet. Maybe, a next book by Stettbacher will bring the necessary corrections to his present work, published 12 years ago.
Alice Miller
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