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.
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.
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.
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"
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
No comments:
Post a Comment