This blog is about learning to understand all of our feelings and learning to consciously face, feel and experience all of our feelings within the context of our own childhood.
Everything we become and happens to us is connected to childhood. Not every victim becomes an abuser, but every abuser was once a victim of abuse, these are facts, Violence is not genetic, it’s learned.
https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2014/08/a-dance-to-freedom-book-reviews.html
AM: Thank you for expounding your vision. Yes, it would be wonderful if we could initiate a powerful movement towards more awareness. In fact, by understanding the emotional needs of children we would come to understand OURSELVES too, the basis of our existence, of our own Being as responsible adults. But this is impossible without liberating the strong bitterness of the abused child we hide deep in our bodies because of the fears of our parents. Unfortunately, ALL religions FORBID this emotional liberation, they rather allow wars, some of them even consider wars as sacred because they have never understood that feeling the legitimate rage PROTECTS us from acting out in wars and criminality.The last is organized exactly by people who DON’T feel.
"I am also glad that you have the hope that we can pass on our knowledge to the masses.I had this hope 30 years ago when I wrote the Drama. I thought that showing the truth can change so much. Meanwhile, I became more skeptic or just more impatient after I discovered the fear of the beaten child in all of us that built up the omnipresent resistance against the truth." Alice Miller
(Me too like Alice Miller had the hope that the writing of my book would help pass this knowledge to the masses, but like Alice Miller, I have become skeptical, and with the writing of my book I too learned that people's repressed fears at the parents builds omnipresent resistance against the truth. People rather destroy others than face and consciously feel their own repressed fears to see the truth. This is why I have been harassed,prosecuted, and ostracized in the workplace since I published my book. I understand people's fears of their childhood pain that have been trying to keep repressed all of their lives, but it is still disappointing that pretty much everyone I meet doesn't have the courage to face their fears and become real and grow into a mature conscious adult)
"I wonder how the high colleges managed to produce so many high asses." Paracelsus
As long as people's childhood repression goes unresolved -- they will be shackled into the chains of compulsive repetition -- and it doesn't matter how well anyone articulates very nice ideas... The problem is not a 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 our painful truths, intelligence alone is not enough --- intelligence alone just helps create seductive rationalizations, theories, illusions, and lies.
Alice Miller explains beautifully in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in child-rearing and the Roots of Violence pages 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.”
These crimes committed by Russia against humanity cannot ever be forgiven.
Putin is showing the world how he was terrorised as a defenseless little child -- by unconsciously and compulsively reenacting in the stage of the world his unresolved childhood repression -- and is terrorizing a whole nation -- making others feel what he cannot feel, coward.
Unfortunately humanity everywhere is full of dangerously repressed people that have grown into full blown sociopaths psychopaths and are a bunch of cowards monsters like Putin.
But before he dies he will be forced to feel the hell he has been transferring into others all of his life!
" . . . the anger felt by every individual person stems from the primary justified anger of the small child at the blows inflicted on it by the parents. The immediate expression of that anger is suppressed, but at a later stage this suppressed fury will be directed at innocent victims with uninhibited savagery." -- Alice Miller, "Free From Lies"
“If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.” Alice Miller Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs page 55
“It is not true that evil, destructiveness, and perversion inevitably form part of human existence, no matter how often this is maintained. But it is true that we are daily producing more evil and, with it, an ocean of suffering for millions that is absolutely avoidable. When one day the ignorance arising from childhood repression is eliminated and humanity has awakened, an end can be put to the production of evil.” — Alice Miller, Banished Knowledge, p. 143
The conversation about the effects of childhood repression in our society needs to start happening in the stage of the world, sooner rather than later, if we want to save ourselves and humanity from falling off the cliff and committing mass suicide.
"The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person." Alice Miller -- Breaking Down the Wall of Silence page 82
“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.
However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel leaders.
Dictators and the dynamics of cruelty
Every dictator torments his people in the same way he was tormented as a child. The humiliations inflicted on these dictators in adult life had nothing like the same influence on their actions as the emotional experiences they went through in their early years.
Those years are “formative” in the truest sense: in this period the brain records or “encodes” emotions without (usually) being able to recall them at will.
As almost every dictator denies his sufferings (his former total helplessness in the face of brutality) there is no way that he can truly come to terms with them.
Instead, he will have a limitless craving for scapegoats on whom he can avenge himself for the fears and anxieties of childhoodwithout having to re-experience those fears."
“A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood. The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved.” ― Leo Rosten