Drugs and the Deception of the Body

 Excerpt from the book The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting by Alice Miller

 From Chapter 13, Drugs and the Deception of the Body:

As a child, I had to learn to suppress my entirely natural responses to the injuries inflicted on me, responses like rage, anger, pain, and fear. Otherwise, I would have been punished. Later, at school, I was proud of the skill I had developed in controlling and restraining these feelings. I considered this ability a virtue, and I also expected my first child to achieve the same kind of discipline. Only after I succeeded in freeing myself of this attitude was I able to understand the suffering of children who have been forbidden to respond to injuries in an appropriate way and to engage with their emotions in a benevolent environment, so that in later life they can take their bearings from the feelings they actually have, rather than fearing them.

 Unfortunately, there are many people who have been through the same thing as I have. Unable to display their strong feelings as children, they have no real experience of them, and later they sorely miss this experience. In therapy, some of them succeed in locating and experiencing their repressed emotions. Then they are able to turn them into conscious feelings they can understand on the basis of their own life history and that they no longer need to fear. But others reject this course because they cannot or will not confide their tragic experiences to others. In our present-day consumer society, such an attitude is widespread. It is considered the done thing not to display one's feelings, or only in exceptional cases, after the consumption of drugs or alcohol. Aside from that, feelings (one's own and those of others) are something to be jeered at. In show business and journalism the art of irony is a well-paid commodity, so it is possible to make a great deal of money with the suppression of one's feelings. Even if one ultimately risks losing all contact with oneself and merely functioning as a mask, an "as if" personality, there are always drugs, alcohol, and other substances to fall back on. Derision pays well;

money is no object. Alcohol helps to keep us in a good mood, and stronger drugs do so even more effectively. But because these emotions are not genuine, not linked up with the true story of the body, the effect is bound to wear off after a time. Higher and higher doses are required to fill up the void left by childhood.   page 139.

 Drugs do not always have the function of freeing people from dependency and maternal constraints. Sometimes legal drugs (alcohol, nicotine, prescribed medications) are used in an attempt to fill the void left by the mother. The child was not given the nourishment needed from her and has found no substitute for this in later life. Without drugs, this gap can literally express itself as a feeling of physical hunger, gnawing away at the stomach, which contracts in response. Probably the foundations for addiction are laid at the very beginning of life, as is the case with bulimia and other eating disorders. The body makes it clear that in the past it urgently needed something, something withheld from it when it was a tiny baby. But this message is misunderstood as long as the emotions are ignored. Accordingly, the distress of the small child is erroneously registered as present distress, and all attempts to combat that distress in the present are doomed to failure. As adults we have different needs, and we can satisfy them only if they are no longer coupled with the old needs in our unconscious minds. pages 145-146.

Why Narcissism in the Workplace Will Never End

 

Narcissism in the workplace will never end because of too many enablers and ass-kissers. 

I felt abandoned when the narcissist finally left me in the year 2000, but only because slowly he had regressed me into the state of the wounded child I once was, but after he left I did my emotional work and grew myself up.

Only children and animals are abandoned. We leave adults.

Today I feel like a happy and free child but I think and act like a mature conscious adult.

Resolving childhood repression is the vaccine to protect us from these malignant people.

Now, I recognize these people from a distance, and I stay away from them.

Now, only in the workplace, these malignant people can get close to me, and it's a matter of time before I get targeted by one because I trigger their fears and they get envious of me. But coming after me, they expose themselves. Eventually, I have to change jobs because once a sociopath target you they never give up, and gets too stressful to deal with their lies and mind games old the time. But it's interesting after I leave to watch them from a distance to eventually fall into the traps they have set up for me. https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2023/03/hard-evidence-of-my-ex-boss-being.html

CONFESSIONS FROM A NARCISSIST

 Understanding the narcissist 

I am gonna start by playing games, this is the way I take control of your emotions. I can't control myself, you will eventually figure that out, I have to have what I want, when I want it, or else I will blow a gasket, lol. 

Anyway, Since I can't control myself, will do the next best thing I will control you. 

But first I need to gain control, so I start by love bombing you. 

I will do what I can to make you happy and to make you feel special. 

I will convince you I am the one for you. I will listen intently to what you say you want and then I will mirror it back to you. 

When I see that you are responding to my exploits and accepting what I sold you. 

That's when I change. I transition from Dr. Jekyll to Mr. Hyde. I change the dynamics in the relationship by being distant, not as attentive and like I am not interested in you the way I was before, at least not really. I do this on purpose. 

When you go back and forth between being nice and then being an asshole, it creates a trauma bond. This is how I get you addicted to me. Do you see now? I am in control, I always have been and you and you don't even know it. -Maria Consiglio

The Battle of the Sociopaths

All the wars - psychological violence or physical violence, we witness in this world and in the stage of the world are all between sociopaths. 

I try to distance myself and stay in my safe little corner and I just hope not to become collateral damage of the sociopaths' wars. I want to enjoy living in freedom for as long as I can. 

I have been saying for a very long time that most people are insane or with a very dangerous childhood repression and with the aid of technology, they are going to destroy themselves much faster. 

I have compassion for the children they once were but I have very little compassion for the monsters adults they have become. As adults, we have choices to look for answers and the truth that can set us free to remove the shackles from the chains of repetition compulsion.    

I'm going to share the excerpt below from my book from the chapter Repression where all malignant narcissists, bad actors, bad players, psychopaths, assholes, or whatever you like to call these now-evil people are endlessly stuck. They think are smarter but like the old saying says; "too smart for their own good". 

Now, it just came to mind the words a person that became a sociopath too said to me the last time we talked on the phone: "EU SOU PODEROSA"! in English means; "I AM POWERFUL" and I thought to myself after she hangs up: No, you are not powerful. Power is a very dangerous illusion that in the end will destroy you... true power comes from refusing to become like our childhood abusers and refusing to play the dangerous games sociopaths play, cutting our losses, and walking away to do our own emotional work, the most important work in our lives...

"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, seductive theories, and lies 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; but it rather helps create seductive, rationalizations, theories, illusions, and lies. 

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2022/04/intelligence-alone-is-not-enough.html

 3. Repression 

"When people threw bachelor parties at Bourbon Street, the guys who were getting married would usually go up on stage and make complete fools of themselves. The dancers would make the guys walk on all fours like dogs and spank them on their butts — sometimes really hard and with a belt. Some girls enjoyed taking advantage of the situation and showed no mercy! I always refused to get involved. I never understood why any man would ever subject himself to this kind of treatment. After reading Alice Miller, I came to understand that people who were spanked as children on a regular basis repeated their childhood trauma by acting out with rough sex — and getting beat up by topless dancers.

Alice Miller often talks about the “life-saving function of repression.”27 As defenseless little children we have no choice but to subconsciously repress our negative feelings for two reasons. First of all, we need support from others. And second, we just don’t have the ability to understand how the people we must rely on could actually be cruel to us. In the short-term, repression can have a positive effect in traumatic circumstances. But the subconscious actions that we think are saving our life as children are what really keep us down as adults. In fact, Alice Miller believed that it wasn’t so much the traumas we experience that harm us, but “the unconscious, repressed, hopeless despair over not being allowed to give expression to what one has suffered and the fact that one is not allowed to show and is unable to experience feelings of rage, anger, humiliation, despair, helplessness, and sadness.”28 

Abused and otherwise traumatized children are forced to repress their true feelings, unless they’re lucky enough to find someone to comfort them. But because enlightened witnesses (and even helping witnesses) aren’t always readily available, most of us develop what Alice Miller calls a false self — usually for the sake of our parents — only to pay for it later in life. 

In an article entitled “The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society,” Alice Miller writes that “it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person.”29 

This is how the vicious cycle of parental abuse continues for generations. And in extreme cases, the repetition compulsion can lead to violent atrocities against humanity. 

“To his dying day, Hitler was convinced that only the death of every single Jew could shield him from the fearful and daily memory of his brutal father,” Alice Miller writes. “Since his father was half Jewish, the whole Jewish people had to be exterminated. I know how easy it is to dismiss this interpretation of the Holocaust, but I honestly haven’t yet found a better one. Besides, the case of Hitler shows that hatred and fear cannot be resolved through power, even absolute power, as long as the hatred is transferred to scapegoats. On the contrary, if the true cause of the hatred is identified, and is experienced with the feelings that accompany this recognition, blind hatred of innocent victims can be dispelled. … Old wounds can be healed if exposed to the light of day. But they cannot be repudiated by revenge.”30 In milder cases, which cover the majority of human beings on this planet, our repression tricks us into believing in the false self until we die with our lies or until something like depression, psychoses or physical illness jars us out of our illusion. 

The tragedy of our existence is that most of us aren’t even aware of the fact — or find out too late — that we’ve lost all love and respect for who we really are. Repression is an evil that prevents many people from even giving Alice Miller’s theories a second look, because they seem so radical to someone who’s totally repressed. The fact that repression hides our truth is why writing this book is so important for me. Because I know how great it feels to be free from lies and illusions, I want to make the experience possible for as many people as I can. Great forces were at work against me, but I’m here to tell you that they can all be overcome. It may take a lot of courage, and it may force you to see your childhood with new eyes, but the personal liberation is worth any pain you need to go through to get there.

...I had just turned 17 and my sisters thought they had finally found someone who could tame me. His name was Dr. Julio Machado Vaz. At the time he was young and unknown, but today he’s Portugal’s most famous sexologist. He has several best-selling books and a TV show that’s a lot like Dr. Phil’s. To get so popular all Julio talked about was sex. Sex was his obsession, and he got all of Portugal to enable his addiction. He became a high-profile celebrity advisor. 

But before he hit the big time, his methods were unprofessional, to say the least. From my personal experience, he was extremely abusive. My sister Laura worked at the public clinic where Julio was building his reputation. Back then he was a dashing 27-year-old doctor. His mother, Maria Clara, was a famous singer, and his father, Julio Machado Vaz de Sousa, was a respected faculty member at the University of Porto’s medical school. 

Given Laura’s connections, it was easy for me to get an appointment to see this rising young star. And he was more than willing to take me on as a patient. When we met, the first question he asked me was whether or not I had a boyfriend. When I said no, he asked if I’d ever had one. Once again, I said no. Then he told me that my sister brought me to see him because she was afraid that I was sexually active. He explained to me that sex is normal, that most people are sexually repressed, and that what I needed was a boyfriend. 

After just one visit in the clinic, he moved our sessions to his private office. He pressed his advantage and manipulated me into having oral sex with him. I knew he was just using me and that he didn’t have a clue about how to really help me, but I kept seeing him to spite Laura and the others. Our little arrangement went on for months, and the whole time I was thinking, “What would my sisters think of their charming doctor now, the one man they thought could solve all my problems?” Looking back I almost can’t believe how despicable this so-called doctor was. One time, he took me to his house while his wife was at the hospital having his second baby. 

Obviously, part of me was aware that what we were doing was wrong, but I was so focused on somehow harming my sisters that I let him get away with it. When he was tired of his latest conquest, Julio ended our sessions. I imagine that he found another patient to fool around with. In an interview many years later a reporter asked him, “Is a psychiatrist also a seducer?” “Maybe the reverse is more true,” was my doctor’s smug response. 31 

Such a reply should have exposed him. But people in Portugal, and everywhere else in the world for that matter, are too emotionally blind to recognize even the most obvious red flags. Julio revealed just how sick he really was, but by then he was all but glorified for being an outlet for the whole country’s sexual repression. The people of Portugal still live vicariously through the escapades of this bold doctor who talks so openly about sex. And no doubt he continues to take full advantage of the collective repression for his own pleasure. 

In my opinion, it’s absolutely disgraceful. Interestingly, Alice Miller has a few words to say about the seduction dramas that are reenacted by men like Julio who are compelled to use women. “The seducer is loved, admired, and sought after by many women because his attitude awakens their hopes and expectations,” she writes. “They hope that their need for mirroring, echoing, respect, attention, and mutual understanding, which has been stored up inside them since early childhood, will finally be fulfilled by this man. But these women not only love the seducer, they also hate him, for he turns out to … be unable to fulfill their needs and soon abandons them. They feel hurt by the demeaning way he treats them because they cannot understand him. Indeed, he does not understand himself.”32 

All I really knew at the time was that I was more confused than ever. Dr. Julio Machado Vaz’s “treatment” made me a lot worse off. And my sexual encounters with him opened the door to exactly what my sisters feared most. What’s more, the abuse I suffered at the hands of this doctor was harmful to my sister Isabel. If he had given me the help I really needed, I would have given better advice to my sister five years later. When Isabel broke up with her boyfriend of 10 years and started feeling some of her own repressed childhood feelings, I did exactly what Julio did to me. Instead of giving her emotional support and helping her use her pain to set herself free, I encouraged her to sleep around. I “treated” my sister with sex by introducing her to other guys, hoping she would forget about her boyfriend. This only made her repress her true self once again, and I believe it contributed to her ultimate downfall. The chain of harm done by doctors, therapists, and gurus under the guise of help is endless. 

Alice Miller believed that most people with a “Dr.” in front of their name or a “Ph.D.” at the end of it weren’t in any kind of position to help or guide anyone, especially if they were repressing their own traumas and creating their own illusions. For many years I blamed myself for what happened with Dr. Julio Machado Vaz. It took me more than two decades to see the truth and speak about the fact that this doctor had exploited my anger at my family to feed his sexual perversions and abuse me sexually, instead of helping me work through and resolve my anger. In the book Boundaries: Where You End And I Begin, Anne Katherine states, “A therapist is entrusted with his or her clients’ deepest secrets. A minister bestows sanctions from the highest power in the universe. The potential for harm is overwhelming. For a person in such a role, essentially that of a guardian, to cross sexual boundaries is a grave violation. A child, a client, a patient, a follower, or a worshiper are vulnerable and usually approach authority out of need. A sexual action by a guardian is very confusing, even to a very strong and healthy individual. For someone vulnerable and in need, such an action can be devastating. When a parent is sexual toward a child, the violation reverberates for decades. Trust is broken, the child takes on responsibility for the act, sexuality is affected, and the bond is damaged. When a therapist, physician, attorney or clergy person is sexual with a client or worshiper, it is also incest. A trust is broken, a bond is perverted. The person who sought care was used to meet the needs of the caregiver. I didn’t need sex or a boyfriend when I saw Dr. Julio Machado Vaz. What I needed was an enlightened witness to help me feel my repressed pain and give me a better way to deal with my self-righteous, overbearing, domineering, invasive, and authoritarian sisters and brothers. 

After going for “counseling,” my repressed anger — at my sisters for thinking the worst; at Dr. Julio Machado Vaz for sexualizing me before the time was right and for not teaching me how to protect myself against pregnancy by giving me birth control pills; and even at my parents for bringing me into this world when they were in no position to protect me — 

 At the time, Portugal was a deeply Catholic country, and church leaders mesmerized the majority of the Portuguese people. I was never swayed by religious morality because it always seemed to be a tool of repression. I was repressing enough on my own to need extra help from a priest or a nun! 

Alice Miller’s thoughts on religion rang true to me when I read them years later. “When I see the passion with which Catholic priests — men childless by choice — fight against abortion, I can’t help asking what it is that motivates them,” she writes. “Is it a desire to prove that an unlived life is more important and more valuable than a lived life? [The priests] are acting against life, by misusing the weakness and trust of the faithful and dangerously confusing them.

The injunction against abortion goes even further: Consciously or unconsciously, it represents support for cruelty against children and active complicity in the creation of unwanted existences, existences that can easily become a liability for the community at large.”34 

Alice Miller writes about how restricting abortion caused incredible suffering in the Romania ruled by the oppressive dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. This incredibly cruel man was penned up in a single room with 10 siblings and was neglected by his parents. And when he rose to power he took his vengeance on the entire nation by forcing women to do what his mother did: “To have more children than they wanted or were able to care for. As a result, Romanian orphanages were full to bursting with youngsters displaying severe behavioral disorders and disabilities caused by extreme neglect. Who needed all those children? No one. Only the dictator himself, whose unconscious memories spurred him to commit atrocities and whose mental barriers prevented him from recognizing them as atrocities.”35 "

Narcissism is an epidemic

This is why I became a target of a mob of narcissistics at an upscale gated community, where I worked for almost 10 years after I published my book A Dance to Freedom sharing my life experiences and psychological discoveries. As long they thought I would never fly above them, they all loved me and my work, but after I published my book, they knew I could see through their false self, and it triggered their fears that I could fly higher than them and they could not live with that so they started a very well orchestrated psychological warfare against me. But a mind that is truly free cannot ever be captured again. Communities are micros of the world. Narcissism is an epidemic. 

I'm amazed at how all these well-spoken people on youtube do great analyses and articulate beautifully how the mind of a narcissist works, but not a single one mentions that these people become malignant narcissists "evil" because are incapable of facing their own childhood repression and deal with the repressed emotions of the child they once were. Now as adults, they have mastered the art of repressing, projection, and transference. 

“Children who have been beaten, humiliated, and abused, and who find no witness to come to their aid often develop a grave syndrome in later life: they have no knowledge of their true feelings, fear them like the plague, and are therefore incapable of recognizing vital connections.” 

— Alice Miller

There are many people online articulating very well how the narcissist's mind works and how to deal with them, but very few mention the reason why people become full-blown narcissists and sociopaths?! So most likely, many are narcissists, themselves - talking a good talk without doing the emotional work and liberating themselves first.

The reason many people become narcissists and sociopaths is that they grew up with lies and had very tragic traumatic childhoods and because they can't face and feel this painful truth and consciously feel the repressed emotions of the child they once were within the context of their own childhood -- this is why people grow into full-blown malignant narcissists, sociopaths, psychopaths...

Most people rather idealize their parents and childhoods, and to survive, they have learned the art of repression, projection, and transference to perfection -- they go through life unconsciously and compulsively looking for scapegoats to use as poison containers to temporarily and superficially alleviate their own repression -- so they can have the illusion that they are perfect, better and superior to others and they rather kill and be killed than face and feel their own painful truths. 

They are endlessly driven by the repressed emotions of the child they once were to hurt themselves, others, or both. I don't see many saying that there is people's denial and the repressed emotions that turn many into -- people of the lie -- and become full-blown sociopaths, malignant narcissists, assholes, bad players, or whatever you like to call these evil people. 

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2022/08/i-will-no-longer-be-on-social-media.html

I have been saying for a very long time that time is the most valuable resource.

And that's why I don't want to waste any longer -- one more minute of my life -- with people that are -- chasing illusions -- and living a lie --  without the courage -- to open their eyes to see -- and feel their own painful truths.

I refuse to be anyone's scapegoat.

Most people are afraid to live and afraid to die. When we lose the fear to live we also lose the fear to die!  “Sometimes we stay busy not to feel. We buy things, consume, or get drunk without necessity. When life frightens us we try to dominate it and control it. It is risky to get carried away by emotions, and as a society admire imperturbable individual icons. We see in the movie's heroes impassive acting unencumbered. Do and achieve. They strive to have successfully controlled, like machines, not act as what we are: human beings. They belong to the generation of action whose maximum is doing more and feel less."

“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. The approach adopted by Daniel Stern and the followers of John Bowlby still appears to gain only peripheral attention in psychoanalytic circles, perhaps because by his theory of initial attachment Bowlby exploded a taboo. By linking the causes of antisocial behavior with the absence of a resilient attachment to the mother, he was flying in the face of Freud's drive theory.

But my conviction is that we have to go a step further than Bowlby went. We are dealing here not just with anti-social behavior and so-called narcissistic disorders but with the inescapable realization that denying and repressing our childhood traumas means reducing our capacity to think and conspiring to erect barriers in our minds. Brain research has succeeded in uncovering the biological foundations of the denial phenomenon. But the consequences, the impact on our mentality, have not yet been adequately contemplated. No one appears to be interested in examining how insensitivity to the suffering of children--a phenomenon found the world over--is bound up with a form of mental paralysis that has its roots in childhood.

As children, we learn to suppress and deny natural feelings and to believe sincerely that the cuffs and blows we receive are for our own good and do us no lasting injury. Our brains, furnished with this false information, then instruct us to raise our own children by the same methods, telling them that it is good for them just as it was good for us.

This way of thinking causes billions of people to believe that children can become good and decent citizens only if we do violence to them. 

They are blind to the fear in their children's eyes and refuse to acknowledge that the only thing we can really instill in children by beating them is the determination to use violence later in life, either against themselves or against others. These destructive beliefs, also held by many intellectuals, are impervious to argument because they are stored in the body at a very early stage. Such people will make blunt assertions that, without their realizing it, stand in the starkest contrast to the pure intellectual knowledge they acquired from books." -- Alice Miller

Above excerpt from BARRIERS IN THE MIND
Chapter 7 from The Truth Will Set You Free
by Alice Miller

*Alice Miller on "Poisonous Pedagogy"

Poisonous pedagogy is a phrase I use to refer to the kind of parenting and education aimed at breaking a child’s will and making that child into an obedient subject by means of overt or covert coercion, manipulation, and emotional blackmail.

— Alice Miller, The Truth Will Set You Free

There is a good deal else that would not exist without “poisonous pedagogy.” It would be inconceivable, for example, for politicians mouthing empty cliches to attain the highest positions of power by democratic means. But since voters, who as children would normally have been capable of seeing through these cliches with the aid of their feelings, were specifically forbidden to do so in their early years, they lose this ability as adults. The capacity to experience the strong feelings of childhood and puberty (which are so often stifled by child-rearing methods, beatings, or even drugs) could provide the individual with an important means of orientation with which he or she could easily determine whether politicians are speaking from genuine experience or are merely parroting time-worn platitudes for the sake of manipulating voters. Our whole system of raising and educating children provides the power-hungry with a ready-made railway network they can use to reach the destination of their choice. They need only push the buttons that parents and educators have already installed.

— Alice Miller, Thou Shalt Not Be Aware

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2022/07/poisonous-pedagogy.html