Using our Triggers Productively

"Those children who are beaten will, in turn, give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder.

...Children who are lectured to, learn how to lecture; if they are admonished, they learn how to admonish; if scolded, they learn how to scold; if ridiculed, they learn how to ridicule; if humiliated, they learn how to humiliate; if their psyche is killed, they will learn how to kill--the only question is who will be killed: oneself, others, or both." -- Alice Miller above excerpt from Pedagogy Fills the Needs of Parents, Not of Children. From the book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence by Alice Miller https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2011/01/pedagogy-fills-needs-of-parents-not-of.html?m=1

C,

You tried to attack and humiliate your aunt and cousin in front of the family and because I didn’t go along with you, and I wrote the words below -- you got mad --and things after that spiraled out of control. 

This shows me you just want to be surrounded by YES people that go along and agree with you all the time! And you still don’t understand your emotions when they are triggered by present events and let yourself compulsively be driven by them.

I wrote: “I already know that! It's better to let go... one thing I have learned is that it's not worth it fighting over money! At the end of our journey where we go, we can't take our money with us anyway! What we leave behind someone else will get to use our money for good or bad and we will not have a saying by then!!! The reality is, as long your mother is alive, she's entitled to give her money to whoever she wants and we don't have to like it! Unless L is declared mentally insane, she can do with her money whatever she wants...”

I feel like all this time I spent with you has been wasted just like your mother’s money! Time to me has more value than money!

The aunt you hate so much is lost and stuck playing the same roles as your mother -- of the hero and victim -- and are one and the same -- so if your hate your aunt -- you also hate your mother, but your aunt is not responsible for your childhood traumas -- your mother and father are.

You have made your aunts your scapegoat your entire life. Maybe, I'm a little guilty that I have not tried to explain this to you more clearly before, that you were making your aunts and cousin your scapegoats.

If you were really smart you would walk away and let go of your mother and her money, and let all of them be. 

You are at crossroads and have to ask yourself what is more important to you -- your freedom or your mother’s money? If you choose to stay in your mother’s emotional prison to guard her money -- you stay stuck – and it can be very dangerous and destructive to you both.

You need to stay away from your mother for you to heal and be free. But that’s your choice and you are the one wasting your life and dying in an emotional prison like most people in our world. Money alone has never saved anyone! If you didn’t make your own money and needed your mother’s money to survive would be one thing but you don’t need her money and this addiction to money can be the destruction to both of you.

This is an opportunity for you to heal and liberate yourself.

Just like I wrote in my book on pages 129, 163, and 164:

“The key to effective therapy is learning how to use your present triggers productively. They can help us clarify, understand, and consciously feel our intense emotions within the context of our own childhoods without losing our adult consciousness. A good therapist can help us regain our adult consciousness if we lose it and encourage our autonomy, so we can deal with present issues from an adult perspective.

… Just remember this: If particular people or circumstances trigger excruciatingly intense feelings inside you, just keep telling yourself that these are the repressed feelings of the child you once were. Feelings don’t kill anyone no matter how intense they are. Only actions kill. So if you ride your intense feelings into shore, direct them at the real culprits who hurt you when you were a defenseless child and avoid taking any actions you may regret later, you’ll be free and no one will get hurt. As an autonomous adult, you do have some control over the people you let into your inner circle, and you may have to make some relationship adjustments as you do your emotional work. I took a lot of extra time to be with myself in solitude because most of the people in my life just didn’t understand what I was going through. When you’re trying to resolve your repression, being around unconscious people who are doing everything they can to avoid their own truths puts you at risk of relapsing into playing your old roles.”

I wish you the courage and strength to spend time alone in solitude to face your painful truths and feel your triggered emotions within the context of your own childhood.

 

Once Again I Became the Target of Someone's Hatred

I became the target of someone's hatred because I didn't join in attacking and humiliating her scapegoats in front of the family group. It makes me sad when people are blinded by latent hatred towards scapegoats. "Those children who are beaten will, in turn, give beatings, those who are intimidated will be intimidating, those who are humiliated will impose humiliation, and those whose souls are murdered will murder." Alice Miller

Also, these words Alice Miller wrote to me come truer every day: “Thank you for your thoughtful letter I agree with you that there is a difference between the powerless, legitimate rage of a desperate child that reacts to the cruelty of their parents and the rage of the adult who is attacking others out of denial of their history by imitating the behavior of own parents from the position of "power" (even grandiosity). The first rage (of the child) should be felt and expressed in therapy, it can be then RESOLVED. The second one (of the adult), directed toward scapegoats, can NEVER be resolved (see dictators). If therapists see it as an endpoint of their therapies and don’t enable the patients to confront the early parents and the feelings of that time they do much HARM to them. Staying trapped in the hatred toward scapegoats can't be the successful end of a therapy. I hope that you can continue your work if you have this difference in mind and can also explain it in your forum.” https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2017/05/scapegoating.html

About Transference

I seem to have the talent of triggering people’s repressed emotions of the child they once were, but handling people’s transference I am not as good as I like to be. It’s never comfortable when people project or transfer into me their repressed hatred of the child they once were at their parents.

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How do you explain to a person that the money is the trigger of the latent repressed hatred of the child she once was at her mother, now, directed at her aunts' --- making them her scapegoats. 

For repressed hatred to be resolved it has to be seen, understood, and consciously felt within the context of our own childhood, otherwise, we will endlessly be lost in projections and transferences with a constant need for scapegoats or poison containers in our lives. 

The money is just giving her permission to hate her aunts instead of her mother. Sadly, in our society, if you publicly, admit that you hate your mother, you will be condemned, rejected, and ostracized in the eyes of society, so it's a lot safer to direct your latent repressed hatred at substitute figures or scapegoats. 

It makes me sad to witness people all the time waste opportunities for true liberation -- and see them staying trapped in the emotional prisons of their own childhoods that the only changes they make, is reversing the roles, where, the mother becomes the child and the adult child plays the role of the mother that treats the aging mother, exactly, the same way the mother treated her when she was a small defenseless little child. 

Everywhere I look I see this scenario being reenacted either with their own parents or people standing in symbolizing their own parents or childhood caregivers. 

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

Also, read the article about hatred in the link below:  
https://www.alice-miller.com/en/what-is-hatred/  

What is Hatred ?

Repressed hatred cannot ever be resolved when is directed at scapegoats. Hatred can only be resolved when is understood and consciously felt within the context of our own childhood, otherwise, we will endlessly need scapegoats in our lives to temporarily and superficially alleviate childhood repression.

It's amazing to me how smart people with a DR in front of their name or a Ph.D. at the end cannot understand and make this fundamental connection. And remain stuck lost in projections and transferences their entire lives. The words Alice Miller wrote in the article below are so true:

"...hatred can poison the organism, but only as long as it is unconscious and directed vicariously at substitute figures or scapegoats.

When that happens, hatred cannot be resolved. Suppose, for example, that I hate a specific ethnic group but have never allowed myself to realize how my parents treated me when I was a child, how they left me crying for hours in my cot when I was a baby, how they never gave me so much as a loving glance. If that is the case, then I will suffer from a latent form of hatred that can pursue me throughout my whole life and cause all kinds of physical symptoms.

But if I know what my parents did to me in their ignorance and have a conscious awareness of my indignation at their behavior, then I have no need to re-direct my hatred at other persons.

In the course of time, my hatred for my parents may weaken, or it may resolve itself temporarily, only to flare up again as a result of events in the present or new memories.

But I know what this hatred is all about. Thanks to the feelings I have actively experienced, I now know myself well enough, AND I HAVE NO COMPULSION TO KILL OR HARM ANYONE BECAUSE OF MY FEELINGS OF HATRED.

We frequently meet people who are grateful to their parents for the beatings they received when they were little, or who assert that they have long since forgotten the sexual molestation they suffered at their hands.

They say that in prayer they have forgiven their parents for their “sins.” But at the same time, they feel a compulsion to resort to physical violence in the upbringing of their children and/or to interfere with them sexually.

Every pedophile openly displays his “love” for children and has no idea that deep down he is avenging himself for the things done to him as a child. Though he is not consciously aware of this hatred, he is still subject to its dictates.

Such LATENT hatred is indeed dangerous and difficult to resolve because it is not directed at the person who has caused it but at substitute figures.

Cemented in different kinds of perversion, it can sustain itself for life and represents a serious threat, not only to the environment of the person harboring it, but also to that person him/herself.

CONSCIOUS, REACTIVE hatred is different. Like any other feeling, this can recede and fade away once we have lived it through. If our parents have treated us badly, possibly even sadistically, and we are able to face up to the fact, then of course we will experience feelings of hatred.

As I have said, such feelings may weaken or fade away altogether in the course of time, though this never happens from one day to the next.

The full extent of the mistreatment inflicted upon a child cannot be dealt with all at once. Coming to terms with it is an extended process in which aspects of the mistreatment are allowed into our consciousness one after the other, thus rekindling the feeling of hatred.

But in such cases, hatred is not dangerous. It is a logical consequence of what happened to us, a consequence only fully perceived by the adult, whereas the child was forced to tolerate it in silence for years.

Alongside reactive hatred of the parents and latent hatred deflected onto scapegoats, there is also the justified hatred for a person tormenting us in the present, either physically or mentally, a person we are at the mercy of and either cannot free ourselves of, or at least believe that we cannot. As long as we are in such a state of dependency, or think we are, then hatred is the inevitable outcome.

Read the full article in the link below:

https://www.alice-miller.com/en/what-is-hatred/