Giving Love a Chance

Dear L,

You said that you cried when you read my words and I cried when I read yours. Coming across a mother that speaks her truth and has become authentic is very rare, and until now I only knew of Alice Miller! I understand why so many mothers deny their truth to protect themselves, because admitting their truth would mean being rejected and ostracized by others, so they go on lying to themselves and others, acting as if, pretending to love, most people's love is nothing, but a farce, a sham and a façade. Look what happened to Alice Miller that admitted the truth to herself and others. But only by finding the courage to admit the truth, even if we lose the people we love and are ostracized by others, and only through this pain that liberation is possible and real love have a chance to develop and grow. Love cannot ever develop and grow based on lies and illusions. 

As Alice Miller wrote in her book The Body Never Lies: “A mother who is forced to realize that the deprivations imposed on her in her youth make it impossible for her to love a child of her own, however hard she my try, can certainly expect to be accused of immorality if she has the courage to put that truth into words. But I believe that it is precisely this explicit acceptance of her true feelings, independent of the claims of morality, that will enable her to give both herself and her children the honest and sincere kind of support they need most, and at the same time will allow her to free herself from the shackles of self-deception.”

While back someone posted on Facebook an article about a mother that openly admitted her true feelings, and of course she was criticized and ostracized for admitting her true feelings, that she didn't love her children. She said in the article that she wished, she never had children, that she was born without motherly instincts, and she felt trapped by her children, and she resented them for it, that not everyone is born with motherly instincts and that not everyone is supposed to have children, she didn't understand that we all are born with motherly instincts, but childhood deprivations killed our motherly instincts. 

People that attack me for having an abortion are really unconsciously trying to transfer their guilt feelings for not being the parents their children needed and feel jealous and resent me for escaping my childhood drama and their are stuck in theirs. A lot of young people look and work hard for their independence, to escape their parents’ emotional prisons, and don’t realize that getting married and having children before facing and resolving their childhood repression is a guaranty to take them right back into their parents’ emotional prisons, and making liberation a lot harder, because they have reenacted their childhood drama with their own children, you can't divorce your children, making them feel trapped and prisoners like when they were little children living with their own parents, because they have unconsciously transferred their internalized parents into their children, and then they see and attack their own parents in their defenseless children. 

Freeing oneself from this vicious cycle of compulsion repetition is very hard. It has been going on since the beginning of time. I feel like I am one of the luckiest people in the world, that I have been able to escape this vicious cycle of compulsion repetition, but of course I would not have been able to do it alone without Alice Miller’s books. I am so grateful to Alice Miller for having the courage to write her books.

Again thank you for your support and best wishes,

Sylvie