Couldn't agree more with the statement in this youtube short vedio in the link below.
We have to face and feel our painful truths head-on.
Many people would rather kill and be killed than face their own painful truths.
We understand a lot about human motivation once we realize one thing: ninety-nine percent of humanity spends ninety-nine percent of their time trying to avoid facing and feeling painful truths.
With my book I show people how to get through the pain and be free to live our authentic lives and develop two healthy legs to stand on our own two feet.
Just like I wrote in my book on pages 129, 163, and 164:
“The key to effective therapy is learning how to use your present triggers productively. They can help us clarify, understand, and consciously feel our intense emotions within the context of our own childhoods without losing our adult consciousness. A good therapist can help us regain our adult consciousness if we lose it and encourage our autonomy, so we can deal with present issues from an adult perspective.
… Just remember this: If particular people or circumstances trigger excruciatingly intense feelings inside you, just keep telling yourself that these are the repressed feelings of the child you once were. Feelings don’t kill anyone no matter how intense they are. Only actions kill. So if you ride your intense feelings into shore, direct them at the real culprits who hurt you when you were a defenseless child and avoid taking any actions you may regret later, you’ll be free and no one will get hurt. As an autonomous adult, you do have some control over the people you let into your inner circle, and you may have to make some relationship adjustments as you do your emotional work. I took a lot of extra time to be with myself in solitude because most of the people in my life just didn’t understand what I was going through. When you’re trying to resolve your repression, being around unconscious people who are doing everything they can to avoid their own truths puts you at risk of relapsing into playing your old roles.”
"...there is a difference between the powerless, legitimate rage of a desparate child that reacts to the cruelty of their parents and the rage of the adult who is attacking others out of denial of their history by immitating the behavior of own parents from the position of “power” (even grandiosity). The first rage (of the child) should be felt and expressed in therapy, it can be then RESOLVED. The second one (of the adult), directed toward scapegoats, can NEVER be resolved (see dictators). If therapists see it as an end point of their therapies and don't enable the patients to confront the early parents and the feelings of that time they do much HARM to them. Staying trapped in the hatred toward scapegoats can’t be the successful end of a therapy. I hope that you can continue your work if you have this difference in mind and can also explain it in your forum." Alice Miller
"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."
"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
"Pain is the way to the truth. By denying that you were unloved as a child, you spare yourself some pain, but you are not with your own truth. And throughout your whole life, you'll try to earn love. In therapy, avoiding pain causes blockage. Yet nobody can confront being neglected or hated without feeling guilty. "It is my fault that my mother is cruel," he thinks. "I made my mother furious; what can I do to make her loving?" So he will continue trying to make her love him. The guilt is really protection against the terrible realization that you are fated to have a mother who cannot love. This is much more painful than to think, "Oh, she is a good mother, it's only me who's bad." Because then you can try to do something to get love. But it's not true; you cannot earn love. And feeling guilty for what has been done to you only supports your blindness and your neurosis.
I try to reach the child in the readers, allow them to feel. I see my style as ranking keys. Everybody can take one so that they can go open their own door to find something. Or they can say no, I don't want to go through this door; I will return the key. I try to evoke feelings, images. In this way, I offer keys to your own experience. You can then go look at your children and learn from them, not from me. Because only from your own experience can you really learn.
In my first studies, I was very abstract; I wanted to understand the most abstract ideas -- of Kant, Hegel, or Marx. My dissertation in philosophy was very abstract. Now I see that each philosopher had to build a big, big building in order not to feel his pain. Even Freud.
If a child has been molested and the therapist doesn't deny this fact, many things can open up in the patient. The therapist must not preach forgiveness, or the patient will repress the pain. He won't change, and the repressed rage will look for a scapegoat."
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