Illusions Disguised as Spirituality

 I almost fell into this trap or illusion!

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.

http://www.alice-miller.com/en/illusions-disguised-as-spirituality/

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.

http://www.alice-miller.com/en/12-step-programs/

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.