Hi K,
Sorry it took me so long to answer your last letter. You probably thought I forgot you, but every day while doing my daily chores I think about you and tell myself: I need to answer K’s letter.
I am sorry your mother is not able to make the connection to her own childhood and see that you have nothing to do with her painful feelings and troubles, that your birth was just the trigger of all that was repressed in her. Your longing to have a connection with your mother is very understandable and reading your mother’s letter, it had to be very painful, because it shutter this hope or illusion, but now even painful you have your truth and you are free of this false hope or illusion and now you can move on and the pain will start diminishing in time. My family and my ex they were very good too at getting my hopes up of understanding, but today I have come to see clear and accept that they are not capable of understanding and seeing and unconsciously they tell you lies that they themselves are not aware of, but now I see clear their lies, even they themselves are not conscious of their lies and what we see clear and know for sure can’t hurt us anymore. They want to tell the truth and love you, but they can’t, because for that they would have to see and feel they own tragedy of what happened to them as little children, but it’s too painful for them and only they can give you is temporally the illusion of love and understanding. Today I live with the truth that the chances for them to gather the courage to face and feel their own tragedy is very slim and I don’t any longer fall victim of their illusions.
You say: “And only in some days I started to feel the terrible, mortal fear - it was like I realized, how dangerous was to be with her. When I have my panic attacks, I can feel this mortal danger of being denied and feel that I am totally wrong - every part of me is wrong, so everybody can hurt me and I cannot defend myself, cause they are right - I’m really very bad.
I think this is something about death. In my dreams I often see dead people, or zombie, the cemetery, and only zombies around me. They want to kill me, cause I am still alive.”
I think this is something about death. In my dreams I often see dead people, or zombie, the cemetery, and only zombies around me. They want to kill me, cause I am still alive.”
The dreams are showing you the dangerous you lived with as a small child and your mother almost succeeded in murdering your soul, but by your letters it obvious you survived and manage to keep your soul alive and now the adult in you can take care and protect yourself from your mother and anyone that want to use you as their scapegoat or poison container. The panic attacks are the intense repressed fears of the child you once were triggered by present invents, Have you read the answers Alice gave about panic attacks? “AM: Panic attacks are always connected to traumatic childhood experiences. If we have access to our history we can sometimes easily find the memory and the triggers in the presence that explain the fear so that the fear disappears. In your example the woman feels panic after a happy experience. It CAN be that one of her parents or both envied her for her gifts and her success in school, in sport etc and critisised or ridiculed her after each achievement. Then, instead of being happy she felt bad, ashamed, guilty, and in her brain pleasure became connected with pain. The adult can later suffer from panic attacks after having been successful. The introjected parent repeats then what the real parent did to the child by destroying her pleasure out of pure envy. Is this understandable to you?”
You say that you suffer from depression. Depression is a symptom of the repressed authentic feelings of the child we once were, the loss of vitality, and of still believing in lies or illusions, so ask yourself: what feelings am I repressing and whose lies I am still believing in; are those of my parents or of people in the present moment symbolizing my parents. Alice says it best in one of her letters to her readers: “AM: Thank you for your honest and thoughtful letter. You might be right, in some cases: when the parents are still alive and can show themselves (sometimes?) as kind, friendly, charming, it seems "that hope indeed springs eternal and this can be very painful at times". However, I don't agree with you that depression is unavoidable, even when the parents are alive.
I wonder if you have read my recent book: The Body Never Lies. A better title would probably have been: You Can't Fool Your Body. The problem is that in the eternal search of being loved by our parents, most of us can't give up the illusion that once, just now, at this moment perhaps, they will finally become loving. With this illusion we come in danger of betraying our bodies and the memory of the child. Because the body knows the history of the child we once were, it perfectly knows of the cruelty the child had to endure without being able to feel it. For it was too dangerous. Now, as adult, you could be able to feel the pain of the small, teased child of two successful parents if you had access to his suffering. But maybe that your still idealized image of your parents hinders you in getting this access. Ask the child inside you how they treated you when you were small, helpless, so totally dependent on their love. Where you never spanked or slapped? Do you know how it feels like? It is not necessary to fall again and again into the state of depression but protecting our parents from our rage of the once beaten, humiliated child blocks our feelings and thus MUST almost produce depression.
Try to imagine what you had felt if somebody had told you in your childhood that beating children is a crime (what it actually is). And if your parents are able to tease you now, try to imagine how they did the same to the defenceless child you once were. If you can feel the rage, the fear and the sorrow and if you dare to see the cruelty you had to endure silently without helping witnesses, your depression WILL disappear. Because by discovering and understanding the pain of the former neglected child you start to love and cherish him, perhaps the first time in your life.
Usually parents are less violent at 70 than at 30. If a client succeeds in his or her therapy to see their parents of THEN (not of today) and to feel the fear their body remembers they will no longer suffer today from panic attacks or addictions. They will understand their causes not only intellectually. But as long as we are compelled to protect our parents we pay our loyalty with our depressions. My last articles can be helpful if you want to understand this text more profoundly.”
I wonder if you have read my recent book: The Body Never Lies. A better title would probably have been: You Can't Fool Your Body. The problem is that in the eternal search of being loved by our parents, most of us can't give up the illusion that once, just now, at this moment perhaps, they will finally become loving. With this illusion we come in danger of betraying our bodies and the memory of the child. Because the body knows the history of the child we once were, it perfectly knows of the cruelty the child had to endure without being able to feel it. For it was too dangerous. Now, as adult, you could be able to feel the pain of the small, teased child of two successful parents if you had access to his suffering. But maybe that your still idealized image of your parents hinders you in getting this access. Ask the child inside you how they treated you when you were small, helpless, so totally dependent on their love. Where you never spanked or slapped? Do you know how it feels like? It is not necessary to fall again and again into the state of depression but protecting our parents from our rage of the once beaten, humiliated child blocks our feelings and thus MUST almost produce depression.
Try to imagine what you had felt if somebody had told you in your childhood that beating children is a crime (what it actually is). And if your parents are able to tease you now, try to imagine how they did the same to the defenceless child you once were. If you can feel the rage, the fear and the sorrow and if you dare to see the cruelty you had to endure silently without helping witnesses, your depression WILL disappear. Because by discovering and understanding the pain of the former neglected child you start to love and cherish him, perhaps the first time in your life.
Usually parents are less violent at 70 than at 30. If a client succeeds in his or her therapy to see their parents of THEN (not of today) and to feel the fear their body remembers they will no longer suffer today from panic attacks or addictions. They will understand their causes not only intellectually. But as long as we are compelled to protect our parents we pay our loyalty with our depressions. My last articles can be helpful if you want to understand this text more profoundly.”
You also write: “I think something like this happened to my mother - her soul was dead, killed by her own parents, and she wanted to revenge, to kill my soul. I think her purpose was to kill in me the slightest hope that the love, the trustore the closeness can exist. She wanted to see how this feelings and needs of love and trust die in me.” This longing for love, trust and closeness were from the child you once were, NOW, the person you need to love, trust and get close to is your true yourself, once we truly trust ourselves, love ourselves and are intimate with our true self we gain our autonomy, these words from her book “Breaking Down the Wall of Silence: the Liberating Experience of Facing Painful Truth” Alice Miller Says: “To live with one’s own truth is to be at home with oneself. That is the opposite of isolation. We only need confirmation when we are alienated from ourselves and in flight from the truth. All the friends and devoted admires in the world cannot make up for the loss.” Me too like Alice, since feeling the almost unfathomable isolation of my childhood, I myself no longer feel isolated.
You continue to saying: “She wrote me in this letter: "It was violence in my family as well, but I forgave everybody and I forgot it, because I love my family". I paid for this "forgiveness". I don’t know what happened in her family, but that’s not my fucking business. I paid for all of it.”
You continue to saying: “She wrote me in this letter: "It was violence in my family as well, but I forgave everybody and I forgot it, because I love my family". I paid for this "forgiveness". I don’t know what happened in her family, but that’s not my fucking business. I paid for all of it.”
Your mother unconsciously and compulsively took revenge in you for what her parents did to her when she was a defenseless little girl, try to kill your soul just like her parents had killed her soul, parents have been taken revenge on their children for what their parents did to them for a millions of years. You are right you paid for her “forgiveness” just like Alice said: “…The never acknowledged, never felt pain of their childhood calls for being avenged. They go to church, they pray, they honor their parents, forgive them everything – and they mistreat their children at home, often in a very cruel way, AS IF THIS WERE THE MOST NATURAL THING, because they learned this so early. Their children learn this perverted behavior, also very early, and will later do the same; and so this perverse behavior continues for millennia. Unless people are willing to SEE the perversion of their parents and are ready to consciously refuse to imitate it.”
You are so right what happened to your mother as a child is not your fucking business, because you trying to understand and feel what happened to her will not liberate her and will keep you stuck in the vicious circle with her and unconsciously and compulsively reenacting your childhood drama with substitute figures symbolizing your parents. I spent most of my life trying to understand my whole family and I specially felt my father’s depression for years until I realized that it was his repressed emotions from the child he once was that he never had the courage to face and feel and silently overtime were passed down to me when I was just a little girl, thankful my father was never violently to me and never hit me, he was the classic case of a passive aggressive, when I made this connection that my depression was my fathers and most of the painful feelings I was feelings belonged to my family, but of course not before I reenacted my childhood drama with my ex, a young man that was just like my father that wanted to be kind and good, but not capable to stand for himself and me and finally I felt the anger and pain of the child I once was of not having a father able to stand for me that I was able to liberate myself of the compulsion to reenact my childhood drama with substitute figures symbolizing my parents.
Thank you for your sympathy for my niece-in-law, at the moment she is not able to get in touch and feel her repressed emotions of the child she once was and the big block I believe is because she remains very afraid of being alone and stays dependent on her parents or substitute figures symbolizing her parents, it’s very sad, but the more abused a person was the more dependent remains for the rest of her/his life to his/her parents or to people symbolizing their parents. We must gain our autonomy first and find an enlightened witness to safely feel the excruciating feelings of the child we once were. You are right her son is being affected by her mother’s compulsions and unconscious behavior, but he knows is not his fault and not one bit guilty and I have to give credit to his mother for reaching out to me to help her and in the process she saved her child’s soul, because I have been able to be his helping witness and in spite of all he is doing very well and is a pretty happy nine years old boy.
You ask me how I broke up with my parents; at the physical level I never broke up with them, but by leaving home and put an ocean and continent between me and my family it helped me maintain strong boundaries to protect myself from the family’s repression and take care of myself, but it took me almost 20 years to fully cut the emotional ties with the family and in spite of the distance I would never have been able to free myself from the emotional prison without the books of Alice Miller as my enlightened witness. You ask me if I was afraid of loneliness, sure I had moments of intense fear and now looking back I think they were panic attacks and when this happened I would hide in my house from everyone. I was lucky to have had a job that allowed me the freedom to come and go as I pleased. My fear was not of being alone, because I always enjoyed being alone, my fear was of becoming dependent again on the family or other people and sometimes if I had a bad night at work would trigger a panic attack and when I sold my house it triggered the worse panic attack I ever felt. You asked me who helped me; the only person that truly helped me was Alice Miller.
As long you feel emotional vulnerable keep strong boundaries with your mother and avoid seeing or contact with her to protect yourself from her repression.
I wish mush courage and strength on your journey to true liberation.
Sylvie
Hi K,
I like to add a little bit to the letter I sent you yesterday. Your mother asking you for forgiveness, she is unconsciously trying to tie you permanently to her through the feelings of guilt. I was shackled to my family for many years through guilt, because I would try to forgive them, but when my repressed anger/hate would surface, I would feel guilt and repress my anger all over again and try to forgive some more keeping me a prisoner in their emotional prison. I only free myself when I faced my painful truth that I was never really loved and all they ever gave me was the illusion of love and I allowed myself to feel all my true repressed feelings of the child I once was towards the family without guilt. As Alice Says: "Pain is the way to the truth. By denying that you were unloved as a child, you spare yourself some pain, but you are not with your own truth. And throughout your whole life you'll try to earn love. In therapy, avoiding pain causes blockage. Yet nobody can confront being neglected or hated without feeling guilty. "It is my fault that my mother is cruel," he thinks. "I made my mother furious; what can I do to make her loving?" So he will continue trying to make her love him. The guilt is really protection against the terrible realization that you are fated to have a mother who cannot love. This is much more painful than to think, "Oh, she is a good mother, it's only me who's bad." Because then you can try to do something to get love. But it's not true; you cannot earn love. And feeling guilty for what has been done to you only supports your blindness and your neurosis."
Wishing you much courage and strength,
Sylvie
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