I thought I would share in a new blog the Facebook post comments that triggered the sharing of J. H. emails full of poison.
ST: Okay. As one who has lived outside the US quite a while, and who's not nowhere anywhere even close to being "of" the Christian right, I'd say any book - whether it's "nuanced" or not - whose title advertises that the author (in this case a Presbyterian minister) is good with calling an entire segment of the US population "fascists" is certain to be a complete load of crap.
Actually, anyone who calls any living person a "fascist" loses all credibility with me the instant I hear the word come out of their mouth. They might as well say evolution is "just a theory" or that the earth is flat.
Sylvie:
S T
you might be right. But I know and lived with a few authoritarian figures in my childhood. Call them authoritarians, dictators, fascists, or whatever you like. I have not read the book! Just the reviews and I liked this review! But I didn't know the author proclaims to be a minister. I don't usually listen or read books of miniseries because usually are full of BS.S T: Sylvie Imelda Shene
Okay, I'll take your word for it. My bad. In any case, calling anybody a "fascist" is stupid, irresponsible and so far as I'm concerned, manipulative. Historians and political scientists specializing in fascism have argued since Mussolini about what fascism actually "is". The best of them consider it the "vaguest of all contemporary political terms" and its use among lay people to be purely ignorant invective.Tiresome and easy to criticize as the Christian right may be, it's likely that there is no more genuinely antifascist group of people anywhere. Again, I admit this comes just from the use of "Fascists" in the title, but it sounds like the book could very well just be a distraction from what's really going on, even a projection.
It seems obvious that he's *not* examining his own prejudices or questioning the absolute totalitarianism that's part and parcel of Wokism/Critical Social Justice Theory. It sounds suspiciously more like he's written a preaching-to-the-choir book in which he rallies those of his own tribe to "Look how bad and awful those people over there are!"
Tiresome and easy to criticize as the Christian right may be, it's likely that there is no more genuinely antifascist group of people anywhere. Again, I admit this comes just from the use of "Fascists" in the title, but it sounds like the book could very well just be a distraction from what's really going on, even a projection.
It seems obvious that he's *not* examining his own prejudices or questioning the absolute totalitarianism that's part and parcel of Wokism/Critical Social Justice Theory. It sounds suspiciously more like he's written a preaching-to-the-choir book in which he rallies those of his own tribe to "Look how bad and awful those people over there are!"
Sylvie: S T, you make a lot of valid points... I myself I used not to like to put labels on people... and I just started calling some people malignant narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths, after a group of evil people at my job of nine and a half years went out of their way to try to destroy me after I published my book.
Most people will never know what's like having a mob of evil people trying to destroy you! If you survive something like that! You will never look at another human being in the same way. Thanks to that experience I know without a doubt many people act as if personality pretending to be good people but are wolves in sheep's clothing, they are pure evil, doing their evil acts behind closed doors, call these people assholes, malignant narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths or whatever you like! People that consciously go out of their way to hurt others are pure evil because they know consciously, exactly what they are doing! And unfortunately, they are too many like that in our society and I think humanity at large has become corrupted everywhere.
S T: It's horrible what happened to you. I've spent a half-hour trying to think of a better way of putting that but the truth is I stink at support. I really think you should hear something like that, and probably more than a few times, but that's the best I've got.
No question people can suck. I can agree with your assessment of people except that I agree even more with Solzhenitsyn's observation that nobody is "purely" one way or the other. And that actually makes life more complicated. Hope you're not taking that that I'm suggesting you 'forgive' anybody because that's not what I mean and it's none of my business anyway.
Far as I'm concerned, Miller put her finger right on the button in For Your Own Good in accounting for the rise of Nazism before WWII. In the US, next to the children of black parents, the children of evangelical Christians are raised with the most similar mindset to what existed in Germany back then.
The Christian right is famous for its belief in the "necessity" of corporal punishment. The treatment of Nathan Phelps by his father Fred, founder of Westboro Baptist, is as similar to the way Adolf was treated by Alois as any I can think of. Nathan managed to reject everything and escape btw. The point is, there's an obvious parallel.
Still, imagining that that huge swath of the US is "fascist" is like thinking all Germans during WWII were Nazis. Actually, calling a group of people "fascist" like he did is I think more analogous to WWII Nazis calling Jews "vermin" or whatever else it was they said about them. The Left would call it "othering".
Barbara Ehrenreich does a good job of tracing the political ascent of the religious right in "Bright-sided" (which I've read and can recommend). It's possible Sean Faircloth does the same with "Attack of the Theocrats", though that's one I've skipped.
All I can say is while individual acts can be considered pure evil, it gets difficult trying to extend that to any given person 100% of the time. The same goes for groups and the same's true in reverse. Nobody and no group are purely good.
For me these days it feels like "guns to the left of me, guns to the right". And though both sides threaten, the religious right clearly lacks more teeth and is definitely more easily reasoned with than is the Critical Social Justice Theory-inspired Left.
Sylvie: S T, the bottom line most of humanity is corrupted or repressed to a degree and it's the level of corruption or repression that makes some people very dangerous. You were one of the few people that said something when I was being targeted by a mob of corrupted or dangerously repressed people and it's very much appreciated.
Actually, what has been most disappointing was not the actions of the dangerously repressed people, but the silence of many waiting on the sidelines to see if I would crash and burn because many would have been able to make a name for themselves by standing on my head.
There is a lot of BS in this world but very little of humanity if any at all! I have learned most people act as if personality pretending to be good people and everything good they might do is all for image and to manipulate others perception, but don't give a shit about anyone else but themselves and protect their own images. Alice Miller is the only person I know to be authentic and go out of her way to really help humanity and I will forever be grateful to her because it saved my life and now I can enjoy in freedom the rest of my life. People's silence is the most disappointing. Also, explain to me why the whole country of Portugal protects and enables the sex crimes of the prestigious psychiatric doctor Julio Machado Vaz because abuse is systemic in our society... the silence is the real killer!
S T: I don't know. I'll take your word for it that I sent you an encouraging word back then, but I sure don't remember doing it. Makes my day if it's true though. Normally I don't do "thoughts and prayers". At least not Facebook thoughts and prayers. And like I said I pretty well stink at 'support'. It was pretty clear you were going through a nightmare though. Proves the right (just as a good guess) can be as nasty as the left when it comes to canceling people it disapproves of.
Nobody has a right to harass somebody for writing a book, though. They were wrong.
Sylvie: Yes, they were wrong, nobody should be harassed for writing a book sharing their life experiences and psychological discoveries.
I’m not very good at giving support to others too, maybe, because I never got much support from others and been on my own all of my life.
Before the nightmare, I went through with the repressed people at my job after I published my book, even though was tough, but was more expected and understanding! When working on my book with my co-writer I mentioned many times to him that some of the “nice people” from my work that he met at my 53 birthday party in 2012 that the “nice people’s” own repression might be triggered and become very vicious towards me and I might even lose my job.
But my co-writer didn’t want to believe me! That’s the story of my life no one ever believes me! But eventually, the truth comes to the surface! But I did question myself and I thought maybe they will keep acting as if personality and go on with their façade, but I learned that once a sociopath, asshole, or whatever you like to call them, knows that you can see through their façade, they want you gone, and that’s when they will gather all the forces at their command to destroy you!
And that’s exactly what happened! Once they read my book they knew I knew that I was a seeing and a feeling person! But coming after me they end up exposing themselves! Some of the people were professors, doctors and one was a retired FBI or a CIA agent so they had a lot of training in psychological warfare and probably didn’t believe me like most people in my life that I had faced and resolved my childhood repression and were confident that they could manipulate my emotions to get me to self-destruct! Underestimating me was their big mistake!
And they proved my co-writer wrong and proved that my perceptions have been right all along! He even talked me into running the Indiegogo campaign to raise funds to help pay for the book publishing costs. I didn’t want to run a campaign to raise funds! I wanted to publish it when I had raised all the money myself, but he insisted that I should let people help me sometimes! I know people and learned very early in life that I can’t count on anyone but myself to do things that really matter to me! I don’t regret many things in my life, but I do regret letting my co-writer talking me into running the campaign. I know most people are fake supporting superficial things and giving stuff that we don’t really need, but when there is something that really matters, most people will shy away and it’s hard to find support for.
Anyway, before the nightmare at my job of nine and half years I went through a few nightmares that I’m still pretty silent about, with few people I reached out to try to get their feedback for my book and maybe write the foreword or a little review, I thought they were real because they were close to Alice Miller and they proclaimed to understand her books, some of these people are very well known and respected, but I got to see their real persona and how repressed they still are and I got a dose of their poison!
So this was even a bigger disappointment because these people were supposed to be more understanding and self-aware.
They have a lot of people fooled by using their sharp intellect with a lot of memorized good knowledge they learned from others like Alice Miller, saying and writing the right things. It’s sad they use their memorized Intellectual knowledge to play with people’s minds to gain power over them and make a name for themselves by stepping on others' heads.
I’m so glad I wrote and published my book because it showed me how most people are much worse than what I always suspected. What the public is allowed to see and what goes on behind the scenes are totally different stories!
I might publish anonymously just by using initials in my blog the e-mails exchanged with these people! The words below Alice Miller wrote to me come truer every day: “I have learned over the years of my work on the internet that there are readers who SEEM to understand SOME of what I have written, at least intellectually, but they are still so afraid of their very cruel parents and of their repressed FEELINGS of rage towards them that they are constantly looking for scapegoats.
They thus live in a continual confusion pretending that they are healed and even offering help and empathy to others. But eventually, they use unconsciously other people (even the ones who are quite friendly to them) as a poisonous container like their parents did to them, and if the offended people begin to defend themselves they can become very mean.
I can only urge you to trust your feelings and to NOT offer your empathy and interest to everybody just because they say they read and understood everything I have written. In most of the cases it is a lie. To understand my books means to overcome the fear of one’s parents, to honestly feel the justified rage TOWARD THEM and to no longer use others to getting free from the accumulated rage.”
In 2018 I published the e-mails exchanged with this self-proclaimed psychologist out of the Netherlands only because she waited 4 years to publish her flawed critique of my book full of her own projections and even went to the trouble of changing her name so I would not know who she was trying to mess with my mind!
Like I wrote to one of her followers that came to her defense: If your idolized Lilianne/Olane is such a compassionate person that cares so much about others --- how come she didn’t reach out to me with a kind word of support when I was being targeted by a mob of sociopaths at my job of nine and half years after I published my book in 2014?
I know she is following my blog incognito and witnessed everything that was taking place.
She didn’t care, because she is a malignant narcissist or a sociopath like them. She was witnessing an attempt of a psychological lynching and said nothing and most likely hoping they would succeed in destroying me for her sadist enjoyment and put her own fears of exposure to rest.
She sat with her critique for four years and then she publishes it after changing her name! She never predicted that I would figure out that Olane Roos and Liliane Rombout are one and the same! If this is not a calculated move of a malignant narcissist to try to discredit someone’s work -- then I don’t know what a calculated malignant narcissist is?
ST: Quite a road you've been on, definitely.
Again, my interest has always just been in trying to understand what drives people to treat kids badly. I'd hoped to figure out what there might be to do about it. Too much crap had shown up in the local paper, years back.
That got me looking into child abuse, and anybody doing that will run into Miller sooner or later.
What I never did become interested in was trying to understand 'fixing' people who'd been damaged. At least not beyond my acceptance of the importance of 'witnessing'. ('Witnessing' isn't really a term I like or am comfortable with, and it makes me even queasier to add 'enlightened' to it, especially in my case.) But what I mean is just I accept it's important to say something on behalf of a kid if ever you see abuse going on. Later is okay but I mean especially right in the moment.
Not to defend anybody who's stayed 'silent' with regard to your own situation, but speaking up is often not easy. Especially face to face when actual poop is hitting the fan. At least it is for me. I can't claim to be good at it.
But beyond all that, all the years-after-the-fact, post-trauma stuff was never my interest. It's so beyond me that it just feels like hocus-pocus. So I leave it alone.
What I think I'm happy to agree with you about is that Miller seemed definitely to have managed to attract a quite flock of very special birds to her. All of whom far as I could tell were heavy into the healing part of things. I wish them the best and that's about all I can do.
Sorry to go on here but I'd like to explain myself as best I can. I hope this isn't something I've already said one time or other:
I think Miller is to 'social ills' (something that covers so much that I don't like the idea of trying to fit it all into one sentence) what Ignaz Semmelweis was to puerperal ('childbed') fever.
He noticed an unmistakable correlation between doctors washing their hands after doing things like performing autopsies on diseased corpses, and pregnant women not dying, then, after getting obstetric exams from them.
Everybody thought he was crazy. It took more than half a century and Lister, Pasteur and about six other guys before doctors finally accepted that hand washing might really be a good idea. Semmelweis had "only" shown a correlation, is how it's explained now, not proof. Pasteur didn't come up with the beginnings of germ theory for about another ten years. People in Semmelweis' time still attributed disease to "bad air" or whatever.
My feeling is that we're in a period comparable to that 50-60 year stretch between Semmelweis and acceptance. But the point is that studying ways of treating puerperal fever once it's been contracted is *one* thing, and persuading people to wash their stupid hands before they start sticking them into other people's really sensitive places is something else completely.
No doubt both are important. Still, I'm very interested in the second thing and not at all interested in the first. It's beyond me anyhow, like I said. And as you point out, even the pros seem to really struggle with it.
Hope you had a nice holiday and have a good weekend. We're having turkey tomorrow because K worked yesterday
Sylvie: Hi ST, I hope you had a nice holiday season and you and everyone around you are staying safe and healthy.
Sorry, it took me so long to respond to your last comment. Now I only write while I’m at work because the little girl within me doesn’t want me to sit on the desk at home writing -- rather be playing -- doing things I like and hanging with my cats -- so if work is busy I’m not writing at all! As I have shared many times before I'm extremely dyslexic and writing is one of the hardest things to do in life.
I have learned nothing I can write, say or do will do much to help humanity wake up from its deep repression --- so from now on I will just write if I have the time at work and if I feel like it!
I worked also on Thanksgiving Day and Christmas!
Also, the little girl within me doesn’t like me to be on social media anymore, so my presence on social media will be limited from now on too! Like Alice Miller once wrote: “Of course, the Internet allows everybody to show themselves, their emotional insights as well as their emotional blindness” and I have grown tired of the predominance of people's emotional blindness on social media!
Yes, it has been quite a road I have been on! And I’m very proud of my journey! I’m free at last!
And this is one of the reasons I was targeted by very repressed people because they got envious of me and they wanted to steal my freedom and remove my permanent smile off my face forever, but my smile is real! Not fake like theirs! What I have can't be bought with money and I can’t be stolen! And this why they were so envious that they gather all the forces at their command trying to destroy my life!
The only way for people to stop abusing children is to face and resolved their own repression, otherwise, they will be driven by the repressed emotions of the child they once were into the state of repetition compulsion sooner or later in one form or another to abuse others -- especially their own children – if a layperson like me -- can see this clearly -- and understand these psychological mechanisms -- then the real question should be why the talented, gifted, formal educated, and so much more intelligent can’t see and understand these psychological mechanisms?! Childhood repression affects everyone to a degree, layperson or not!
Education alone is nothing more than one more big illusion! The more talented, gifted, and sharp a person's intellect is, the more, they master the art of compartmentalization, dissociation and create elaborated rationalizations, lies, and illusions to help them run from facing and consciously fee their own repression and painful truths --- what people need most is courage! Intelligence alone is not enough!
ST: No apology needed, Sylvie. I did go through your post on the blog. Am I right thinking me using 'special birds' is what got you thinking about it? It doesn't matter, just wondered.
Read more in the link below:
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-time-has-come-to-share-j-h-emails.html
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-time-has-come-to-share-j-h-emails.html
Alice Miller http://alice-miller.com/ "Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away...
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...
The prerequisite for true compassion for others is empathy with one’s own destiny, something a maltreated child can never develop because such a child cannot allow himself to feel his own pain. All criminals, including the cruelest of dictators, display this lack of empathy. They murder others (or have them murdered) without the slightest compunction. A child forced to suppress his own emotions will have no compassion for himself and consequently no compassion for others. This encourages criminal behavior that is frequently concealed behind moral, religious, or apparently progressive verbiage...
Giving the parents advices how to teach their child to behave doesn't open the path to their (the parents') own history, it only gives them more power and leave them often emotionally blind and thus still WITHOUT EMPATHY. For instance, the often repeated advice to send the child away for "time out" is one of the many examples of advices how children should be maltreated when they are "nasty" because they are unhappy. Nobody would send a friend to a separated room when she cries without knowing yet the reason of her distress but doing this with an unhappy child is often recommended by experts of upbringing."