48 hours Story on the Cult Family

Good Morning M,

I stayed up late last night watching the 48 hour story on the cult family 

I was not surprised to find out at the end that the cult leader still alive in her mid-nineties and some of the children she abused fell ill and died young. 

It gave evidence that people with deep-seated unresolved repressed traumas can avoid getting sick and live a long life if their have an endless available supply of scapegoats at their disposal to use to alleviate their own repression. And was very interesting to see how some of the children she destroyed got sick and died young. No wonder the cult leader in the interviews she gave, she kept proclaiming to love children, of course, she loves children, they make the perfect scapegoats she desperately needed to live off to alleviate her own repression.  

Most abusers proclaim to love children...

Just like I wrote in my blog of Friday, May 13, 2016 Secrets to a Long Life 

Maybe one of the secrets to live a long life is to be disconnected for one’s own truth and feelings, but it’s done at the expensive of others and the next generations. When I was a kid I used to say to myself: the pain stops with me and I was willing to die than passing it into an innocent being. I much prefer resolving my own childhood repression to have a chance of living a long life than living a long life at the expense of others. These words by Alice Miller also come to mind: “".Am I saying that forgiveness for crimes done to a child is not only ineffective but actively harmful? Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. The body does not understand moral precepts. It fights against the denial of genuine emotions and for the admission of the truth to our conscious minds. This is something the child cannot afford to do, it has to deceive itself and turn a blind eye to the parents’ crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to do this, but if they do, the price they pay is high. Either they ruin their own health or they make others pay the price – their children, their patients, the people who work for them, etc." 

The media only pays attention to the very extreme cases of child abuse, like this one, but ignore the plight of almost every child in our society that is subjected to ordinary abuse every day under the disguise of “upbringing” and “discipline”. For the media to recognize this ordinary abuse and stop child abuse before escalates to an extreme, like this case, they would have to face their own childhood repression and question their own parents. And that’s the last thing they want to do. The repressed fears of the child they once were at their parents can stay with a person for the rest of their lives. This is why it’s so hard to demolish the #media’s wall of silence.  And this is why your neighbor is intimidated by me and sent me that BS letter, he is driven by the repressed fears of the child he once was at his parents to close the eyes to this very important story that could be life-saving for many people. Just like Alice Miller wrote: “… Rather than take the risk, they prefer to forgo information that might be of life-death importance for coming generations."

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2017/04/the-silence-from-media-is-deafening.html?m=1

These words in Alice Miller's article Gurus and Cults Leaders How They Function

 are so true: "The thing that concerns me most about cult groups is the unconscious manipulations that I have described in detail in my work. It is the way in which the repressed and unreflected childhood biographies of parents and therapists influence the lives of children and patients entrusted to their care without anyone involved actually realizing it. At first glance, it may seem as if what goes on in cults and cult-like therapy groups takes place on a different level from the unconscious manipulation of children by their parents. We assume that in the former instance we are in the presence of an intentional, carefully planned and organized form of manipulation aimed at exploiting the specific predicament of individuals. 

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."

Watching this story also gave evidence that formal education alone doesn't save people from falling victims of a cult. Education alone is just another illusion. Resolving childhood repression is the only long-term solution for people to stop following blindly political leaders and cult leaders. 

Also Just like Alice Miller wrote in her book For Your Own Good: hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence page 42 and 43: "Just as in the symbiosis of the "diaper stage," there is no separation here of subject and object. If the child learns to view corporal punishment as "a necessary measure" against "wrongdoers," then as an adult he will attempt to protect himself from punishment by being obedient and will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system. In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His "will" is completely identical with that of the government.

Now that 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. 

Educators have always known this and have exploited it for their own purposes, as the following proverb suggests: "The clever person gives in, the stupid one balks." For example, we read in a work on child raising by Grünwald (1899): "I have never yet found willfulness in an intellectually advanced or exceptionally gifted child" (quoted in Rutschky). Such a child can, in later life, exhibit extraordinary acuity in criticizing the ideologies of his opponents--and in puberty even the views by his own parents-- because in these cases his intellectual powers can function without impairment. Only within a group--such as one consisting of adherents of an ideology or a theoretical school--that represents the early family situation will this person on occasion still display a naïve submissiveness and uncritical attitude that completely believe his brilliance in other situations. Here, tragically, his early dependence upon tyrannical parents is preserved, a dependence that--in keeping with the program of "poisonous pedagogy"--goes undetected. This explains why Martin Heidegger, for example, who had no trouble in breaking with traditional philosophy and leaving behind the teachers of his adolescence, was not able to see the contradictions in Hitler's ideology that should have been obvious to someone of his intelligence. He responded to this ideology with an infantile fascination and devotion that brooked no criticism.”  

Also this quote by Alice Miller comes to mind: “Statistical studies are hardly the thing to make disinterested jurists into empathetic and perceptive human beings. And yet every crime, by virtue of being an enactment of childhood drama, cries out for understanding. The newspapers carry these stories every day, but unfortunately usually report only the last act. Can knowledge of the underlying causes of a crime bring about a change in the way justice is administered? Not as long as the primary concerns are to assign guilt and impose punishment. But someday it may be possible to gain an understanding for the fact that emerges so clearly in the case Jurgen Bartsch: the accused never bears all the guilt by himself but is a victim of tragic chain of circumstances. Even so, a prison sentence is unavoidable if society is to be protected. But there is a difference between prison being used to punish a dangerous criminal according to the principles of “poisonous pedagogy” and human tragedy being perceived, therapy during confinement. ” Alice Miller “For Your Own Good” page 199 and 200

Also, read the blog about Wayne Walter Dyer Sadly the World is Full of Charlatans that Keep us Distracted and Numb