Guruism

Open Letter to the Participants in the Forum
May 2001

To Steven and all the others: I'm not a guru

Hi Steven, thank you so much for having raised the issue of "guruism" and your mistrust that I share with you. To be a guru-believer and wanting to grow is in my opinion a contradiction in itself because a guru sells his "wisdom" at the price of people's authenticity. I hope that nobody here will need to see in me a guru, especially if you make them aware of this danger to them, as you convincingly did in your letter of May 16 to Anna.
You wonder about my childhood. Like you I was a stranger to everybody in my family. Today, I know for sure that I was unwanted, rejected from the conception on, never loved, emotionally completely neglected, and used for the needs of others. But above all I was lied to, I grew up with a perfect hypocrisy. My parents, both absolutely unconscious of their true feelings, pretended to love me very much, and I believed this (because I so much needed this illusion) for more than 40 years of my life until I started to suspect the truth hidden behind their pretensions, hidden probably to them too.
Suspecting is not yet as much as knowing for sure but it was the start. It took me 20 years more to get rid of my denial because I was so alone with the knowledge of my body and my dreams, and a wall of denial surrounded me wherever I opened my mouth. Writing and painting were the only ways to continue with my search without being offended and "punished" for being the troublemaker.
The reactions to my writing showed me that what I discovered for me was true also for some others. I felt then less alone. I began to work with groups of young parents and found again and again the same pattern, the emotional blindness of parents who were afraid of confronting their past traumas and inflicting them unconsciously on their children. And now we are finding it together on this forum. Thus, for the first time in my life I no longer feel like a stranger, I feel belonging to a group of people who think like me, whom I don't need to convince, to inform, to shake, to wake up. I am here with people who are not scared by what I am saying, who understand me because they have known the same terror, who say so many things that move me profoundly and with whom I can openly communicate like I always wanted but was not given the chance.
This is more than I ever dared to wish. Talking freely about one's feelings, without using the well-known conventional defences was in my opinion possible only in dreams or on another planet. And now, surprisingly to myself, this became reality. Unbelievable!
So please don't see me like a guru, this would again put me in a special position where I no longer want to be. I am not your teacher or leader, am not giving advices or imposing anything on you, I am not your mother or grandmother, I am Alice, a sister in pain, like Bent's sister Toril who can tell him: I know what you are talking about, I know dad and mom and the answers they gave us because I can finally feel. And Bent can say the same to Toril. I am not the author here, I am one of the people who endured like you a horror in their childhood and who enjoy to know that what they say in English or German or whatever will not be received as sounding Chinese to others. Can you imagine that I had this feeling all my life until recently? Thank you all for being there.
Alice Miller
https://www.alice-miller.com/openletters_en.php?page=5