The Problem in our Society is an Emotional Blockage with the Educated People

We don’t need more studies to show us what causes mental illness and violence. The problem is not lack of knowledge and educated people, there are plenty of educated people with intellectual knowledge, the problem is an emotional blockage with the so-called “professionals” or “educated people” hiding behind their rationalizations and seductive theories to protect themselves from having to face and feel their own emotional pain.  It takes courage to see, face and feel the repressed emotions of the child we once were, intelligence alone is not enough; but it rather helps create seductive, rationalizations, theories, illusions, and lies to hide behind. 

The Roots of Violence are NOT Unknown

The misled brain and the banned emotions

The Facts:


1. The development of the human brain is use-dependent. The brain develops its structure in the first four years of life, depending on the experiences the environment offers the child. The brain of a child who has mostly loving experiences will develop differently from the brain of a child who has been treated cruelly.


2. Almost all children on our planet are beaten in the first years of their lives. They learn from the start violence, and this lesson is wired into their developing brains. No child is ever born violent. Violence is NOT genetic, it exists because beaten children use, in their adult lives, the lesson that their brains have learned.

3. As beaten children are not allowed to defend themselves, they must suppress their anger and rage against their parents who have humiliated them, killed their inborn empathy, and insulted their dignity. They will take out this rage later, as adults, on scapegoats, mostly on their own children. Deprived of empathy, some of them will direct their anger against themselves (in eating disorders, drug addiction, depression etc.), or against other adults (in wars, terrorism, delinquency etc.)


Questions and Answers:


Q: Parents beat their children without a second thought, to make them obedient. Nobody, except a very small minority, protests against this dangerous habit. Why is the logical sequence (from being a misled victim to becoming a misleading perpetrator) totally ignored world-wide? Why have even the Popes, responsible for the moral behaviour of many millions of believers, until now never informed them that beating children is a crime?


A: Because almost ALL of us were beaten, and we had to learn very early that these cruel acts were normal, harmless, and even good for us. Nobody ever told us that they were crimes against humanity. The wrong, immoral, and absurd lesson was wired into our developing brains, and this explains the emotional blindness governing our world.


Q: Can we free ourselves from the emotional blindness we developed in childhood?


A: We can - at least to some degree - liberate ourselves from this blindness by daring to feel our repressed emotions, including our fear and forbidden rage against our parents who had often scared us to death for periods of many years, which should have been the most beautiful years of our lives. We can't retrieve those years. But thanks to facing our truth we can transform ourselves from the children who still live in us full of fear and denial into responsible, well informed adults who regained their empathy, so early stolen from them. By becoming feeling persons we can no longer deny that beating children is a criminal act that should be forbidden on the whole planet.


Conclusion:


Caring for the emotional needs of our children means more than giving them a happy childhood. It means to enable the brains of the future adults to function in a healthy, rational way, free from perversion and madness. Being forced to learn in childhood that hitting children is a blessing for them is a most absurd, confusing lesson, one with the most dangerous consequences: This lesson as such, together with being cut off from the true emotions, creates the roots of violence. 

Alice Miller

Transference is Unavoidable Stage

Dear M,

Everything you are going through is part of the process to liberate yourself.

I went through exactly the same things with Marty you are going through with R. Feeling all of your excruciating feelings towards R is normal and part of the process and even though some of those painful feelings belong to him because he is trying to control, manipulate you and is hurting you like your childhood caregivers did when you were really defenseless and powerless. Transference is an unavoidable stage and here is where most people stay stuck; to truly liberate yourself and prevent from ever being attracted to another man symbolizing your parents and endless keep reenacting your childhood drama -- you are going to have to see and understand what feelings belong in childhood and what ones belong in the present if the repressed feelings of the child you once were had been understood and resolved the separation would not be this difficult, would be sad, but not this overwhelming.  

These words by Alice Miller in her article About Transference come to mind: “Should we as adults be treated in the same way as our parents treated us as children, many of us - especially if we have been through therapy - can become aware of the cruelty endured before. But the knowledge of the whole amount of cruelty can still rest repressed because the terror happened when we had not yet a name for it. For this reason, we need what we call "the transference", hating for instance another person instead of our mother or father. The transference is unavoidable if we were once abused children. It can also be highly confusing. But it can be liberating as well if we are ready to see it as a consequence of our early life. If we have summoned the courage to look our outraged, hateful YOUNG parents in the eyes, and to feel the fear of the small child we once were, then the misleading, confusing and defensive role of the transference disappears. We can then strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives. They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever.” 

https://www.alice-miller.com/en/about-transference/

http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=116&grp=11   

As soon you understand the stage of transference and are able to see what feelings belong to the child you once were and feel them in the right context, the intense feelings subside and you break free and no longer will you be blind by the repressed emotions to reenacting your childhood drama with people standing in symbolizing your parents.  You will recognize red flags and no longer be driven by the repressed feelings to get involved intimately with people that bring you to this painful place again and again. R’s childhood drama is also being reenacted and it’s obvious his mother was an angry woman and her anger scared him and he probably tried to hide from her when she was angry and behaved nicely to try to get his mother to act loving again and now he is doing the same thing with you -- when you show anger he runs like a scared little boy and then returns acting all nice to see if his substitute mother figure came down and tries to manipulate you to behave like a loving mother, so he doesn’t have to feel the intense feelings of the child he once was of having a mother that could not love him as he was, but once you act loving again he goes back to the old behaviors that trigger you and this is a vicious circle hard to break free from, as long you let him manipulate you to be exactly where he wants you to be, you are letting yourself be used as his medication to manage his painful feelings, be his scapegoat and blame you for his plight and vice versa. Most couples stay together using each other as scapegoats or poisonous containers to prevent from having to face and feel the peak of the excruciating repressed feelings of the child they once were, like fear, shame, powerless, and rage,  even if you and R are meant to be together this separation is a prerequisite for you two have a chance to truly liberate yourself,  to this day I have not seen a couple taking a separation and deal with their repression and then come together in freedom and true love and usually they just go on unconsciously and compulsively reenacting their childhood drama with their partners and their children if they have children; most of the time these relationships whole purpose is to force us to face and feel our childhood repression and never were meant to be permanent.

I too thought Marty was destroying my spirit because before I met him I was doing fine, I was a shiny popular dancer and that was too what attracted him to me! 

But was because my repression was so deep and out of sight with the aid of being a successful dancer and all the money I was making, but my family were the ones that almost killed my spirit and because of it I almost allowed Marty to finish the job they started, but R only can finish the job if you allow him. 

Try to feel the intense emotions without taking action, go for a walk when he is triggering the intense feelings to avoid hurting him and yourself. 

And once he is truly gone is when the peak of the intensity of the repressed feelings come to the surface, so right now you and R are just at the entrance of the intense feelings that are to come and this is why he doesn’t want to give up on the relationship and is trying to control and manipulate you to be all accepting and loving again “the good wife” to avoid from having to feel the avalanche and the peak of the intense repressed feelings of the child he once was from coming to the surface. 

I am sure just like Marty if he can’t control you to be exactly where he wants you to be,  he will look for someone else to distract himself and use as his medication to manage and from having to face and feel his repression, but it’s better to be someone else than you. It’s sad that Marty had to go on reenacting his childhood drama with someone else and now very sadly he also brought into his vicious circle a beautiful little girl with one of the many women he used to avoid facing and feeling his repression and now will also use his innocent little daughter to distract himself and transfer his repression that later will try to control in his daughter and this insanity will continue endlessly.

I wish you courage and strength to move through this very important stage to true liberation,

Sylvie

P.S. Also read the answer Alice Miller gave to one of her readers about Transference 

Passing Laws to Protect Children is the First Step

Passing laws to protect children is the first step, but if they are not steps taken to enforce them, they are only window dressing to help a country look good on paper. I have wonder if society created a program that every time a child is born, would get a visit once a week from an agency looking after the wellbeing of the next generation and help every young mother face her own childhood traumas and consciously help her feel her repressed emotions to prevent the young mother from repeating or reenacting her traumas with her children and unconsciously transferring her repressed emotions into her innocent children; if we did this, we would change the world. These words by Alice Miller come to mind: “…today we know too much about the lingering effects of violence against children to silently tolerate this lack of information. We should know that the whole society will pay the price for our blindness. A government of a civilized country can no longer ignore this knowledge. You can't claim the right to play with nuclear weapons on your territories, only because they belong to you. The society's interests go before your pleasure and your habits. The government must defend these interests. To call it thus "totalitarian" makes so little sense as to insult the fire brigade in a burning house. Look around: When children are small some parents reclaim the sacrosanct "right to them" like to a property. But as soon as they become violent or drug addicted and then emotionally inaccessible these parents are eager to grant their rights to society. The children are no longer "our" children, protected in the sacrosanct family, they become "social cases" and the anonymous taxis-payers will have to pay for the prisons and hospitals these once so eagerly disciplined teenagers will need. The new law must make people aware of a very serious danger we so often oversee because we have learnt so early to oversee it. In Norway and Sweden where this law has been adopted most people already know that beating children teaches them short term obedience but in the long run only violence and anxiety. Children become so as they are treated. The theory that we are born with good or bad genes may be a modern version of the old belief that the devil put his child in our cradle and that we must make it sociable and noble with our vice or birch. We are born with different talents, inclinations and temperaments but our urge to punish others has not a genetical imprint. It is the result of being punished very early and looking for scapegoats to the repressed rage. If it were not so we would need an answer to the question why so many children were born with bad genes 30 - 40 years before Hitler's Reich to make his plans possible. This question shows the limits of a genetical explanation of the Evil. Nobody is born evil, we produce destructive people by the way we are treating them in childhood.

Addition of 2004: In the whole discussion concerning the scandalous behaviour US-Soldiers displayed in Iraq nobody ever used the word sexual abuse though it was more than clear that the torturers used the same way of humiliating the victims as they themselves once had experienced as helpless children on the mercy of their perverse”

http://www.alice-miller.com/interviews_en.php?page=3 

This blog was inspired by Steve Thomas Facebook post in the link below:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10204996875991158&set=a.1189422065262.2029352.1519659475&type=1