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
"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
Something I keep witnessing --- people with unresolved deep-seated trauma --- that has been transmitted from generation to generation, either overtly through abuse or covertly with the illusion of love aided by the hypocrisy of a political or religious cult, they are obsessed with politics, religion, or both, so they don’t have to face, see and feel their deep-seated trauma.
What if, there was once life on other planets and we once lived there, but humans destroyed those planets, and the planet Earth is the last planet that sustains life and we are about to destroy this one too? This is our last chance to preserve life and create a heaven for us.
"Genuine feelings cannot be produced, nor can they be eradicated. We can only repress them, delude ourselves, and deceive our bodies. The body sticks to the facts." — Alice Miller
“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 “The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects ofHurtful parenting” by Alice Miller
As long we go on repressing our painful feelings with the aid of religion, medication, alcohol or drugs, or what else we come up with to distract us from facing and feeling our true feelings, the compulsion to repeat our painful childhood dramas will continue sooner or later in one form or another. Avoiding facing and feeling our painful truths causes blockage and intensifies our guilt feelings, supporting our blindness and neurosis.
I intend to make use of my freedom as an adult to let the child within finally ask the questions she always wanted to ask.-Alice Miller [Me too, I intend to do the same!]
"Not leaving sooner is not an indication or a measure of a victim's strength or intelligence. It has more to do with the severity of trauma they have experienced."
""The smarter you become about narcissistic abuse, the crazier the narcissist will say you are.
"When conflict arises, we are able to let it go and move on. Narcissists must get revenge. We trust in the good of all people.
Narcissists believe everyone is just like them. We like to help people feel good about themselves and feel relief when a conflict has been resolved.
Narcissists like to fight. We take responsibility when we've made a mistake. Narcissists blame everyone else.
We enjoy being compassionate. Narcissists enjoy being manipulative."
"If I allow myself to feel what pains or gladdens me, what annoys or enrages me, and why this is the case, if I know what I need and what I do not want at all costs, I will know myself well enough to love my life and find it interesting, regardless of age or social status." Alice Miller 'Free from Lies'
Yes, the powerful enables in our society are the real problem. The malignant narcissists, sociopaths, assholes, or whatever you like to call them, they, would never have been able to go on with their lies and mind games without the enablers... enablers are just as guilty if not more... https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2015/10/enablers-are-just-as-guilty.html
I used to walk into a room full of people and wonder if they like me... Now I look around and wonder if I like them...
For cult leaders or religious leaders, charlatans, hypocrites, sociopaths, and psychopaths --- all fake people acting as if personality, my book is a piece of shit, because it exposes them, but for those that want the whole truth based on facts, my book is a treasure.
It’s so sad to constantly witness how awful, how fake a person is, yet everyone loves them because they put on a good show.
This should be common knowledge by NOW! That everything we become and what happens to us is connected to childhood! People are constantly unconsciously and compulsively reenacting their childhood dramas as adults...
How many more fxcking studies do we need?! People in power positions over others are constantly showing us how they were treated in childhood by the way they treat those working under them...
"...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." -- Alice Miller
This is why the workplace becomes so toxic because is full of malignant narcissists, sociopaths, bad players, psychopaths, assholes, or whatever you like to call these NOW evil people.
And this is why since I published my book sharing my life experiences and psychological discoveries I have become constantly a target of these NOW evil people or psychopaths. I have compassion for the children they once were but I have no compassion for the monstrous adults they have become. As adults, we have the choice to look for real answers and healing and make a conscious choice to not become like our childhood abusers. I made a promise to myself when I was a little girl that I would never become like my childhood abusers. Breaking free from the chains of compulsion repetition is my proudest achievement in life!
Hurting and destroying others' lives is their painkilling drug. It's an addiction that keeps their own childhood repression intact.
“…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 childhood without having to re-experience those fears.” Alice Miller
"New psychology research links childhood betrayal trauma to secondary psychopathy in adulthood. A new study has found that people who reported suffering betrayal trauma in childhood were more likely to exhibit psychopathic and callous traits in adulthood. Dissociative experiences were found to mediate this association.
A new study has found that people who reported suffering betrayal trauma in childhood were more likely to exhibit psychopathic and callous traits in adulthood. Dissociative experiences were found to mediate this association. The study was published in the Journal of Trauma and Dissociation.
Psychopathy consists of a set of behavioral traits that are often observed together in individuals. These are serious, chronic antisocial behavior, lack of empathy, bold, and disinhibited behavior that is paired with charming, but exploitative behavior. Scientific studies of psychopathy have, so far, mostly focused on antisocial behavior that is characteristic of psychopathy. It was typically studied in samples of convicts and individuals registered or processed by the criminal justice system. However, psychopathic personality traits exist to a different degree throughout the population. Recently, research focus has shifted to successful individuals displaying psychopathic traits, the so-called “successful psychopaths.” Researchers have proposed that individuals with psychopathic traits who are able to effectively adapt to social norms and can better control their antisocial impulses and overall behavior can avoid incarceration and be highly successful in their careers.
More recent contributions also made a distinction between primary psychopathy, thought to be primarily influenced by biological and genetic factors, and secondary psychopathy, thought to be a consequence of unresolved emotional conflicts and trauma. While the primary characteristic of primary psychopathy is callousness, secondary psychopathy is primarily characterized by impulsive, antisocial behavior.
Study authors Aleksandria Grabowa and Kathy Becker-Blease wanted to explore the childhood factors that led to secondary psychopathy in adulthood. They proposed that betrayal trauma in childhood might lead to emotional numbing and dissociation, which, in time, lead to the development of secondary psychopathic traits."
"I designate as pessimistic the thought that we are far more dependent than our pride would like to admit on individual human beings (and not only on institutions!), for a single person can gain control over the masses if he learns to use to his own advantage the system under which they were raised. People who have been "pedagogically" manipulated as children are not aware as adults of all that can be done to them. Like the individual authoritarian father, leader figures, in whom the masses see their own father, actually embody the avenging child who needs the masses for his own purposes (of revenge). And this second form of dependence--the dependence of the "great leader" on his childhood, on the unpredictable nature of the unintegrated, enormous potential for hatred within him--is decidedly a very great danger." Taken from the book "For Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in child-rearing and the Roots of Violence" by Alice Miller (page 243)
"Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me with the help of innocent people because now I KNOW what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.
...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." -- Alice Miller The above excerpt from the article Deception Kills Love by Alice Miller
"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
"Children who are told the truth and are not brought up to tolerate lies and cruelty can develop as freely as a plant whose roots have not been attacked by pests (in our case, lies)" 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.
Narcissists are trapped in the mind of a two-year-old, and they possess no cognitive ability to reason, to negotiate, to cooperate, to give and take, to love, to empathize. Rather their lives consist of ultimatums, demands, greed, egocentric thinking, bullying, temper tantrums, silent treatments, and a plethora of 'I WANTS' and 'GIVE ME'S'.
Sociopaths target amazing people. They are parasites. They need a strong host with values, beliefs, and loyalty. They seek and snare commitment-minded men and women who bring a lot to the table. A sociopath needs us to prop up and propel their fake and sickening, weak lives forward. They need people who will defend them when past shit hits the fan as it inevitably does. - Loving a sociopath is loving a monster - The shell of a human being housing a remorseless maniac.
The narcissist punishment is living all of their lives and dying in an emotional prison.
"You can’t concentrate on external things and status symbols and be happy. You can’t be happy and abusive at the same time. You can’t mistreat and manipulate others and be happy. That’s not what real happiness is about.
Real happiness comes from within, from a strong sense of self, from growing as a human being, and from being a decent person. So if your core self is rotten, if you are severely disconnected, if you are not growing, and if you are a hurtful person, it’s impossible to be genuinely happy. The best you can do is desperately manage your shaky and skewed false self.
So what’s a malignant narcissist’s punishment? It’s their existence. It’s their inner prison. It’s waking up every day into their life that—despite possessions, power, and status symbols that they may have—they hate deep down. And then one day they die, and it’s all over. That’s the sad reality of a wasted and miserable life. And that’s their natural punishment."
This is my ex's punishment and all the sociopaths in the workplace constantly targeting me since I published my book. All the money in this world cannot save them!
This is why they are so jealous and envious of me and they came after me so viciously --- trying to destroy me and rob me of my freedom -- what I have cannot be bought with money and cannot be stolen and they can't stand it --- I'm free -- and I'm staying free! In spite of all their money --- they are living and dying in an emotional prison! I know it kills them with jealousy and envy...
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood let alone believed by the masses. ~Plato~
FAQ: How to find the right therapist
I know how difficult it is to find the right therapist but I still believe that it is possible if you know what you need. So I try to answer here some questions that may encourage you to check the attitude of the candidate for your therapist, but please take this text as a draft and don’t hesitate to make comments or additions. (I decided to speak of the therapist as a “she,” but of course both genders are meant.)
What do I need to overcome my plight?
You need an empathic, honest person who would help you to take seriously the knowledge of your body, a person who already succeeded to do the same for herself because she had the chance to have found this kind of help that you are looking for.
How can I know if a therapist is this kind of person?
By asking many questions.
This idea scares me. Why don’t I dare to ask questions?
As a child you were probably punished for asking questions because they might have shaken your parents’ position of power. Your questions were often ignored or you were given lies instead of true answers. This was very painful. Now, you are afraid that this might happen again. It CAN happen that you will not be understood or that your questions trigger the fears and defenses of a therapist but you are no longer the helpless child without any options. You can leave and look for another therapist. The child could not leave, so he tried to change his parents, some people do it (symbolically) their whole life. But as an adult you have options. You can, with the support of the forum, recognize the lies, the poisonous pedagogy, and the defenses. You must only take seriously what you hear, not deny your uneasiness, and not hope that you will be able to change this person (the parent) later. You will not. She will need therapy herself, and this shouldn’t be your job as long as YOU pay the honorary.
I feel guilty because of my mistrust. If I can’t trust I will never find what is good for me.
Your mistrust has a history and your need for SPECIAL understanding too. Your caregiver didn’t deserve your trust and the child felt this very strongly because his body knew the truth. It couldn’t develop trust. Now, trust your body signals, it is the silenced child who is speaking, who starts to talk and needs your truthfulness. If you don’t feel good with a person, take your feelings seriously, don’t push them away, and try to understand these feelings. Once you feel truly and deeply understood by someone, your body will let you know this immediately and very clearly, it will be relaxed without any special exercises.
What do I risk by asking questions from the beginning?
Nothing. You can only win. If the answer is hostile or very incomplete or defensive, you can gain much money and time by leaving. On the other hand, if the answer you got is satisfying, you will feel encouraged to ask more. And this is what you should do.
Which kind of questions am I allowed to ask?
Whatever you need to know. But above all don’t forget to ask the candidate for your therapist about her childhood and her experiences during her training. Where did she get her training, what was helpful to her, and what was not? How does she feel about the defeats, does she have the freedom to see what was wrong or does she protect people who damaged her? Does she minimize the damage? Was she beaten as a child? How does she value this experience? Is she really aware of its consequences for her later life, or is she denying its importance? Does she avoid the confrontation with her own pain? In the last case, she will do everything to silence you, not always visibly.
Is it a good sign if she tells me that she has read Alice Miller’s “Drama?”
It doesn’t say anything. Ask you how she FELT about “For Your Own Good” and the other books, also ask about her criticisms. What helped her personally, and what didn’t? What is in her opinion the main healing factor? Is she capable of deep feelings or does she prefer an intellectual analysis to keep distance? This you may even find with primal therapists who makes you feel the helpless child for years and years so that they can “help” you, but without being themselves able to feel on a deeper level. Then you may end up in a dependence on them and on your feelings of a helpless, unchangeable rage against your parents without being able to free yourself for what YOU really need. A good therapist must help you to find and fulfill YOUR OWN needs, neglected for such a long time, needs for free expression, for being understood, respected and taken seriously. When you begin to look for fulfillment and to protect the child, the rage and hatred will leave you, they will fade. They are alarm signals of your repetition of parental neglect and contempt; they do not have the therapeutic quality we are so often told they have.
Am I not intrusive when I ask so many questions?
Not at all. You have the right to be sufficiently informed and she must have the courage, the awareness, and the honesty to answer you in a proper way. Otherwise, she is not the right person for you.
With this position, am I then looking for an ideal that doesn’t exist?
I don’t think so. You see on the forum our childhood.int that honesty, awareness, compassion, courage, and openness DO EXIST. Why should these qualities not be expected from your therapist?
Illusions Disguised as Spirituality Thursday, December 21, 2006
Ms. Miller,
I am with a fellowship known as Adult Children of Alcoholics. ACA is a 12-step fellowship of men and women who endured abuse, neglect, and indifference as children but who live in confusion about their past unless they get focused help. An adult child is someone who unknowingly responds to adult situations with the childhood fears of being unlovable, inferior, or wrong. We self-sabotage ourselves in friendships and romantic relationships until we find help. ACA believes that addiction, compulsive sexual activity, overspending, overeating, and other forms of self-harm and dissociation have their basis in childhood trauma, neglect, and indifference. We just published our fellowship meeting book. I would like to send you one of these first-edition books for free because I believe you would understand our search for the True Self. This book was 15 years in the making and it encourages adult children to talk about their childhood experiences and to inventory the dysfunctional family (specifically the parents). The goal is to achieve emotional sobriety by externalizing the parents and to reparent ourselves with self-love and spirituality.
O. G.
AM: You write: The goal is to achieve emotional sobriety by externalizing the parents and to reparent ourselves with self-love and spirituality. What exactly do you mean by "spirituality"?
The spirituality we seek in Adult Children of Alcoholics is reliance upon a Higher Power who is loving and non-abandoning. However, this is a journey more than a destination. The adult child must first realize that he or she has projected the traits and attributes of abusive/neglectful parents onto God. So the God we arrive at in adulthood is usually a projection of our judging and abandoning parents or caregivers. This distortion of a Higher Power is validated by organized religion, which tends to be shaming and controlling. Once the recovering adult child realizes that the God he or she was raised with is really a distortion (this can take years), then the work of accepting a loving Higher Power can begin. Then the concept of self-love becomes believable.
O.
AM: Thank you for your reply; it is much telling to me because in my opinion the word "spirituality" is in most cases covering something that is not clear. In your concept, I don't see the path to growth but rather the repetition and continuation of the child's dependency on illusions. My experience gave me a very different view into illness and healing. If you have enough time, you can read the letters published here and see that growing and healing begin when former victims of mistreatment start to confront themselves with the cruelty of their upbringing, without illusions about the "love" of a higher power and without blaming themselves for projections. They allow themselves to feel their authentic emotions without moral restrictions and in this way become eventually true to themselves.</p><p>If you succeed to read the 12 steps with an open mind, freely, as if it were for the first time, you will easily discover how they continue to keep the ACA in the former dependency of the child: fear, self-blame and permanent overstrain.</p><p>A person who has eventually painfully realized that she was never loved, can, based on this truth, learn to love herself and her children. But a person who lives with the illusion that she was indeed loved by the Higher Power, though she has missed feeling this love, will probably blame herself in the old manner for her lack of gratitude and will tend to demand the love from her children. By so doing, she will pass on the blame to her children if they don't behave in the way she wishes them to do; she will pass on the blame, together with the lie that she learned in her so-called recovery.
Dear Alice, If I may ask, what is your opposition to 12 step program? I apologize if I have missed where you may have covered this question already. thank you, lg
From the team: The following link leads to an exchange with a reader, where Alice Miller expressed her criticism of the 12-step philosophy: Title “Illusions disguised as Spirituality” Published: Thursday, December 21, 2006 Link: http://www.alice-miller.com/en/illusions-disguised-as-spirituality/
Thank you for your response. I am still not quite sure I understand very well. Are you saying that the 12-step program for ACA’s places the burden on the ACA to recover? And that “recovery” outside of the 12-step program is impeded because it does not allow for impedes the ability to “feel” honestly the injustices and abuse endured in childhood? Also, may I ask what view you have of “God”?
Thank you again. LG
AM: In my understanding, we can liberate ourselves from the effects of cruel parenting if we become free to feel our own authentic feelings, whatever they might tell us. But if our goal is to become loving and forgiving persons, loved by the Higher Power, we are obliged to cultivate the denial of our reality, which we learned to do well as children, ignoring that it was exactly this denial that made us sick from the start.
Sylvie: Thank you, K for writing. Me too I miss Alice so much. The only real person I encounter in this world that helped me articulate how I truly felt all of my life. Phony people pretending to be spiritual, loving, and caring really disgust me.
As Alice Miller says: “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.”
People giving the illusion of love to their children and others, that’s, pretty much all I witness in this world. All of my life I have been accused of not being trusty of others. Why should I trust people masquerading with the illusion of love, now thanks to Alice Miller I am able to spot a phony from a long distance.
Sylvie: J, thank you for writing. I have wanted to answer your question for a long time, but at the time I had a lot going on and did not find the time and the words to answer it. But it keeps popping into my head from time to time that I need to answer your question and also inform you of the concerns I have about the therapy that my friend from Israel that is a psychiatric doctor suggested to you at the time and it’s kind of interesting that a few weeks ago I notice that he is no longer among of my friends here on Facebook and I have no idea why, but somehow something I have said here on Facebook must have triggered his fears and his sees me as an enemy because he went as far as blocking me completely. I am kind of curious about what comment or note of mine triggered his fears. Well, after I notice he is no longer my friend I went ahead and deleted his comments recommending his therapy, I will not mention the name of the therapy now, because I find it dangerous and if this therapy does not help him see who his real enemies were that is one more prove this therapy does not work and he once more shutters my hopes of finding health care professionals that have dealt and have resolved their own childhood repression before working on others.
I checked that therapy’s website and I even spent $100 and went to talk to a therapist that uses that method of therapy. I found that the therapist and this therapy use the same poisonous pedagogy as most therapies out there and in the end take the parents' side and leave the wounded child in the patient alone contributing to the patient staying and going deeper in their repression, so this therapy just like all the therapies I have encountered out there cannot help people liberate themselves from their repression and achieve freedom and autonomy.
Once again these words Alice Miller wrote to me came true to me: “AM: 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 get free from the accumulated rage.”
Okay, now I will try to answer your question. First I am so sorry for all the pain you went through as an adopted child. I have no idea what that pain might be like. I so agree with everything you wrote in your comment above and while reading it, Oprah’s picture got in my head, because she has been the most famous phony on the stage of the world for so many years that whenever I see her I want to throw up. You ask me how I deal with this phoniness. Well, before facing and feeling the repressed feelings of the child I once was, use to drive me crazy, up the wall, because it use to trigger my repressed anger to the point of wanting to through things at the TV. Now, it’s just a little annoying and makes me a little sad, but it does not drive me up the walls anymore and I am happy that I can see very clearly through all the different cloaks of people's phoniness and never again enter into intimate relationships with phony people. Free at last! But I feel for every child that is growing up and being deceived by this phony love and I hope when they grow up they are as lucky as me to find an enlightened witness like Alice Miller and break free from this trap of fake love and confusion.
J, I am glad to hear his information went in one eye and out the other and did not pause in your brain for a moment, because I still give him the benefit of doubt and I went to check it out for myself and wasted $100 and an hour of my precious time. I really liked Nimrod and I liked reading his notes, he articulated a lot of things I know to be true that I have a hard time articulating myself, because of being dyslexic, but now I know it was all just intellectual knowledge that he memorized, but he is still very afraid to feel his own repressed pain and all just comes from his head and unconsciously and compulsively is using innocent people as his scapegoat, because I sure never did anything to him, I did not even criticize his stupid therapy and I wanted to! But I repressed myself, so I would not trigger him and I still did! It seems to trigger some people just by breathing! I suspected you would not be fooled by it. I thought about deleting his comments or expressing my concerns about his therapy, but I was afraid to hurt his feelings because I did not want to happen the same thing that happened with Sabina a while back when I deleted some of her comments that were very confusing to people that might still be emotionally blind and it triggered her anger and she projected it all at me. I was planning to write to you in private to warn you about this therapy, but when I notice he has blocked me then I went ahead and deleted his comments promoting this therapy because I am no longer afraid of hurting his feelings! Because he blocked me and he cannot see what I am writing anymore, so you could say he did me a favor and freed me.
Now I see rejection as protection, because in most cases when people reject you, they are really protecting you from themselves, if my family had not rejected me, I probably would still be in the family’s vicious circle, but because they rejected me, they forced me to go out in the world and find my way. Now I look at them I see them living in a living hell and I am the only one that escaped. Now I am so grateful they rejected me, “rejection is protection”. I am so curious about what I did that triggered Dr. Nimrod, I will never know! I hope that if anyone tried this therapy to stop wasting their money on it. I too never was able to find an enlightened witness and I had to do all my emotional work alone, is like I became my own enlightened witness with the help of Alice Miller’s books and website. Free at last!
J, I don’t know if my emotional work is completed finished either, for the last few years I have been feeling free and happy, but of course, there is a chance that some event in my life might regress me and I need to do more emotional work, but now I know how to handle, understand and be responsible with my feelings. I am glad you have your art as your witness that is a pretty awesome tool to have! And what makes it even better is that you make that connection and understand the language of your art that sadly most artists never make that connection and they don’t understand the language of their own art that is expressing in a symbolic way the suffering of the child they once were and therefore their art does not help them free themselves.
Kind of interesting because today I was reading Alice Miller’s book “Banished Knowledge: Facing Childhood Injuries” the chapter “My Path to Myself” where she warns us about the dangers of only understanding intellectually.
