The great malady of our society

“Wherever I look, I see signs of the commandment to honor one's parents and nowhere of a commandment that calls for the respect of a child.” Alice Miller

The great malady of our society, implicated in all our troubles and affecting us individually and socially is the idealization of our parents and childhood and the denial of childhood suffering. When we idealize our parents and childhood and deny childhood suffering, it does not go away. It appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, greed, deceit, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or try to eradicate them one by one; but the root problem is the idealization of our parents and childhood and the denial of childhood suffering.

"...All social violence--whether by war, revolution or economic exploitation--is ultimately a consequence of child abuse should not surprise us. The propensity to reinflict childhood trauma upon others as an adult in socially-approved violence is actually far more able to explain and predict the actual outbreak of wars than the usual economic motivations, and we are likely to continue to undergo our periodic sacrificial rituals of war if the infliction of childhood trauma continues. The human race is now quite able technologically to satisfy its needs if we can live together without violence toward each other. But unless we employ our social resources toward consciously assisting the evolution of child-rearing, we will be doomed to the periodic destruction of our resources, both material and human. To Selma Freiberg's dicta that "Trauma demands repetition" I would only add "repetition through social action." We cannot be content to only continue to do endless repair work on damaged adults, with our therapies and jails and political movements. Our task now must, in addition, be to create an entirely new profession of "child helpers" whose can reach out to every new child born on earth and help its parents give it love and independence." -- Lloyd deMause www.psychohistory.com

Above excerpt from The History of Child Abuse by Lloyd deMause www.primal-page.com/ph-abuse.htm

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“Inability to face up to the suffering undergone in childhood can be observed both in the form of religious obedience and in cynicism, irony, and other forms of self-alienation frequently masquerading as philosophy or literature. But ultimately the body will rebel. Even if it can be temporarily pacified with the help of drugs, nicotine, or medicine, it usually has the last word, because it is quicker to see through self-deception than the mind, particularly if the mind has been trained to function as an alienated self. We may ignore or deride the messages of the body, but its rebellion demands to be heeded because its language is the authentic expression of our true selves and of the strength of our vitality.” From the book “The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting” by Alice Miller

“Our parents project the repressed feelings of their own childhood onto us and without realizing it blames us for the things that once happened to them. Like the psychiatrist Henry in Brigitte’s story (see Chapter 2), parents often react blindly and destructively because they are still caught up in the reality of their childhood without realizing it. To survive cruelties---beatings, humiliations, and neglect---they had to conceal their own feelings from themselves. Now they have become slaves to those emotions they cannot control them because they cannot understand their meaning, and they cannot understand their meaning because, like Adam and Eve in Paradise, they have been told to regard cruelty as love. They have been taught to obey incomprehensible commandments and have been made to remain in a state of blindness all their lives, threatened with brimstone and hellfire should they dare to dissent” Alice Miller, taken from the book “The Truth Will Set you Free” page 96

"It is a never-ending source of acute distress for me when I think of the devastating power of denial in producing the barriers in our minds. One of the ways this obstructive power manifests itself is in the persistence of theologians and philosophers in discussing ethical issues without taking any account of the findings produced by brain research and the laws governing infant development. These factors are crucial to a clearer understanding of how evil originates and how we actively perpetuate it. For psychoanalysts, it is also high time to rethink the concepts of destructive drives and evil, "perverted" children, which they have inherited from poisonous pedagogy. But in order to do so they would have to take modern research on infancy seriously." - Alice Miller

Above excerpt from BARRIERS IN THE MIND

 Chapter 7 from The Truth Will Set You Free

 By Alice Miller

“Many people who can tolerate the loss of beauty, health, youth, or loved ones and, although they grieve, do so without depression. In contrast, there are those with great gifts, often precisely the most gifted, who do suffer from severe depression. For one is free from it only when self-esteem is based on the authenticity of one's own feelings and not on the possession of certain qualities.” Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child: The search for the True Self) Page 34

“It is precisely because a child’s feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences. The stronger a prisoner is, the thicker the prison walls have to be, and unfortunately, these walls also impede or completely prevent later emotional growth. “Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child: The search for the True Self) Page 58

Getting through the strong repressed feelings of the child we once were -- is not an easy task -- but it's the most important work for us to do on this planet if we want to grow and liberate ourselves and if we really want to create a more peaceful world. Everything else we do is just a temporary and superficial fix. As long as people's repressed feelings of the child they once were remained repressed, they will be driven by them sooner or later in one form or another to hurt themselves, others, or both.

“Several mechanisms can be recognized in the defense against early feelings of abandonment. In addition to simple denial, we usually find the exhausting struggle to fulfill the old, repressed, and by now often perverted needs with the help of symbols (cults, sexual perversions, groups of all kinds, alcohol, or drugs). Intellectualization is very commonly encountered as well since it is a defense mechanism of great power.” Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child: The search for the True Self) Page 11

“We cannot really love if we are forbidden to know our truth, the truth about our parents and caregivers as well as about ourselves. We can only try to behave as if we were loving, but this hypocritical behavior is the opposite of love. It is confusing and deceptive, and it produces much helpless rage in the deceived person. This rage must be repressed in the presence of the pretended “love,” especially if one is dependent, as a child is, on the person who is masquerading in this illusion of love.” Alice Miller (The Drama of the Gifted Child: The search for the True Self) Page 23

"We do not arrive in this world as a clean slate. Every new baby comes with a history of its own, the history of the nine months between conception and birth. In addition, children have the genetic blueprint they inherit from their parents. These factors may help determine what kind of temperament a child will have, and what inclinations, gifts, and predispositions.

But character depends crucially upon whether a person is given love, protection, tenderness, and understanding or exposed to rejection, coldness, indifference, and cruelty in the early formative years. The stimulus indispensable for developing the capacity for empathy, say, is the experience of loving care. In the absence of such care, when a child is forced to grow up neglected, emotionally starved, and subjected to physical abuse, he or she will forfeit this innate capacity. While I ascribe immense significance to the experiences of infants in the first days, weeks, and months of their lives to explain their later behavior, I do not wish to assert that later influences are completely ineffectual. Rather, if a traumatized or neglected child can later come to know what I call an "enlightened" or "knowing witness," he or she can deal positively with the effects of that childhood trauma.

We know today that the brain we are born with is not the finished product it was once thought to be. The structuring of the brain depends very much on the experiences of the first hours, days, and weeks of a person's life. In the last few years, scientific studies led by neurologist and child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce D. Perry (www.childtrauma.org/) have further established that traumatized and neglected children display severe lesions affecting up to 30 percent of those areas of the brain that control our emotions. Severe traumas inflicted on infants lead to an increase in the release of stress hormones that destroy the existing, newly formed neurons and their interconnections." -- Alice Miller