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
Thursday, July 4, 2024
Displaced Anger: One Destructive Way We Disavow Anger
"Displacement is a defense mechanism in which a person redirects an emotional reaction from the rightful recipient onto another person or object.
For example, if a manager screams at an employee, the employee doesn't scream back—but he may yell at his spouse later that night. Displacement often involves deflected anger or aggression, but it can include other feelings and impulses as well.
The concept of defense mechanisms was originally developed by Sigmund Freud and his daughter Anna Freud; they function to unconsciously protect the ego from discomfort or distress. Although many Freudian theories have been disproven over time, defense mechanisms like displacement have endured."
Redirecting our anger toward a safer target is one way we disavow it.
Displacing anger is often rooted in the past
As a clinician addressing issues with anger, I’ve often witnessed how individual history contributes to displaced anger. All too frequently, I’ve listened to clients describe some form of aversive childhood event (ACE) in their development, events that would naturally yield anger (2015). These include situations such as physical or emotional neglect or abuse, sexual abuse, parents’ divorce, being bullied by siblings or peers, or being a witness to violence.
For many, unfortunately, their emotions regarding these events were both consciously and unconsciously disavowed. This is reflected in comments such as “The divorce happened so quickly it wasn’t a big deal.” “Sure my father hit me, but that was what parents did at the time,” or “I really enjoyed being alone most of the time."
As a child, we may suppress or repress feelings about such events due to our inability to effectively manage the fear, anxiety, and confusion as well as anger we experience with caretakers. It is too overwhelming for us to endure such pain and not be able to seek comfort from our caretakers who, in fact, are the perpetrators of our suffering. Displacing anger toward others or with ourselves may be one resolution to this dilemma. When the anger is directed inward we convince ourselves that we were bad or did something wrong.
Idealizing our caretakers may accompany our use of displacement as a way of dealing with such anger. When doing so, we elevate their status in our eyes while minimizing, denying, or suppressing our anger toward them. This approach is often revealed in comments made by my clients, such as, “He was just such a wonderful provider for the family. I understood that he had no time for me,” or “He suffered so much from his father. He was just trying to make me stronger. You got to be tough in this world," or “His criticism was out of love, trying to make me more perfect.”
“Should we as adults be treated in the same way as our parents treated us as children, many of us - especially if we have been through therapy - can become aware of the cruelty endured before. But the knowledge of the whole amount of cruelty can still rest repressed because the terror happened when we did not yet have a name for it. For this reason, we need what we call "the transference", hating, for instance, another person instead of our mother or father.
The transference is unavoidable if we were once abused, as children. It can also be highly confusing.
But it can be liberating as well if we are ready to see it as a consequence of our early life.
If we have summoned the courage to look our outraged, hateful YOUNG parents in the eyes,
and to feel the fear of the small child we once were, then the misleading, confusing, and defensive role of the transference disappears.
We can then strive to feel the fear of the small baby, scared to death by the two big human beings holding our body and soul in their hands and doing or saying to us whatever they wanted, totally careless about our future, about what consequences their abuse might have on our lives.
They acted like robots, directed by their own childhoods, unable of any kind of reflection whatsoever.
If we don’t want to become like them we must strive to SEE them as exactly as possible. We can use in this way the transference as a means for discovering the feelings of the small child that we once were and to deepen our understanding of him or her. At this moment the transference becomes our guide that will enable the small child in us to BELIEVE what their body KNEW its whole life but his mind could never believe: that so much evil and hatred can be directed towards a small, innocent child only because the parents have endured the same and have never questioned this.” Alice Miller
Here is where most of humanity is stuck. unconsciously and compulsively looking for scapegoats or poisonous containers to temporally alleviate their own childhood repression. Repeating exactly what their own parents did to them and this vicious circle goes on endlessly...
Anger it’s not a dangerous emotion, it only becomes dangerous when it’s repressed and directed at scapegoats. The words written below by Alice Miller in her article What is Hatred? Are so true: “We tend to associate the word hatred with the notion of a dangerous curse we need to free ourselves of as quickly as we can.
An opinion also frequently voiced is that hatred poisons our very being and makes it all but impossible to heal the injuries stemming from our childhood. I take a very different view of this matter, and this has led to frequent misunderstandings. Accordingly, my attempts to cast light on the phenomenon of hatred and to subject the concept to more searching scrutiny have not yet been very successful.
I too believe that hatred can poison the organism, but only as long as it is unconscious and directed vicariously at substitute figures or scapegoats. When that happens, hatred cannot be resolved. Suppose, for example, that I hate a specific ethnic group but have never allowed myself to realize how my parents treated me when I was a child, how they left me crying for hours in my cot when I was a baby, how they never gave me so much as a loving glance. If that is the case, then I will suffer from a latent form of hatred that can pursue me throughout my whole life and cause all kinds of physical symptoms. But if I know what my parents did to me in their ignorance and have a conscious awareness of my indignation at their behavior, then I have no need to re-direct my hatred toward other persons.
In the course of time, my hatred for my parents may weaken, or it may resolve itself temporarily, only to flare up again as a result of events in the present or new memories. But I know what this hatred is all about. Thanks to the feelings I have actively experienced, I now know myself well enough, AND I HAVE NO COMPULSION TO KILL OR HARM ANYONE BECAUSE OF MY FEELINGS OF HATRED.
We frequently meet people who are grateful to their parents for the beatings they received when they were little, or who assert that they have long since forgotten the sexual molestation they suffered at their hands. They say that in prayer they have forgiven their parents for their "sins." But at the same time, they feel a compulsion to resort to physical violence in the upbringing of their children and/or to interfere with them sexually. Every pedophile openly displays his "love" of children and has no idea that deep down he is avenging himself for the things done to him as a child. Though he is not consciously aware of this hatred, he is still subject to its dictates.
Such LATENT hatred is indeed dangerous and difficult to resolve because it is not directed at the person who has caused it but at substitute figures. Cemented in different kinds of perversion, it can sustain itself for life and represents a serious threat, not only to the environment of the person harboring it, but also to that person him/herself.
CONSCIOUS, REACTIVE hatred is different. Like any other feeling, this can recede and fade away once we have lived it through. If our parents have treated us badly, possibly even sadistically, and we are able to face up to the fact, then, of course, we will experience feelings of hatred. As I have said, such feelings may weaken or fade away altogether in the course of time, though this never happens from one day to the next. The full extent of the mistreatment inflicted upon a child cannot be dealt with all at once. Coming to terms with it is an extended process in which aspects of the mistreatment are allowed into our consciousness one after the other, thus rekindling the feeling of hatred. But in such cases, hatred is not dangerous. It is a logical consequence of what happened to us, a consequence only fully perceived by the adult, whereas the child was forced to tolerate it in silence for years.
Alongside reactive hatred of the parents and latent hatred deflected onto scapegoats, there is also the justified hatred for a person tormenting us in the present, either physically or mentally, a person we are at the mercy of and either cannot free ourselves of, or at least believe that we cannot. As long as we are in such a state of dependency, or think we are, then hatred is the inevitable outcome. It is hardly conceivable that a person being tortured will not feel hatred for the torturer. If we deny ourselves this feeling, we will suffer from physical symptoms. The biographies of Christian martyrs are full of descriptions of the dreadful ailments they suffered from, and a significant portion of them are skin diseases. This is how the body defends itself against self-betrayal. These "saints" were enjoined to forgive their tormentors, to "turn the other cheek," but their inflamed skin was a clear indication of the extreme anger and resentment they were suppressing.
Once such victims have managed to free themselves from the power of their tormentors, they will not have to live with this hatred day in, day out. Of course, the memories of their impotence and the horrors they went through may well up again on occasion. But it is probable that the intensity of their hatred will be tempered as time goes on. (I have discussed this aspect in more detail in my recent book "Our Body Never Lies - The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting", Norton, New York).
Hatred is only a feeling, albeit a very strong and assertive one. Like any other feeling, it is a sign of our vitality. So if we try to suppress it, there will be a price to pay. Hatred tries to tell us something about the injuries we have been subjected to, and also about ourselves, our values, our specific sensitivity. We must learn to pay heed to it and understand the message it conveys. If we can do that, we no longer need to fear hatred. If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.”
Also, these words from Alice Miller’s book “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence” in the chapter Unlived Anger could not be truer:
“In October 1977 the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski was awarded the Prize of the German Booksellers' Association. In his acceptance speech, he spoke about hatred, with special reference to the event that was on many people’s minds at the time, the hijacking of a Lufthansa plane to Mogadishu.
Kolakowski said that time after time there have been instances of people who are completely free of hatred and who therefore offer proof that it is possible to live without it. It is not surprising for a philosopher to talk like this if he identifies humanness with consciousness.
But for someone who has been confronted with manifestations of unconscious psychic reality on a daily basis and who sees over and over again how serious the consequences of overlooking this reality are, it will no longer be a simple matter, of course, to divide people into those who are good or bad, loving or hate-filled.
Such a person knows that moralizing concepts are less apt to uncover the truth than to conceal it. Hatred is a normal human feeling, and a feeling has never killed anyone.Is there a more appropriate reaction than anger or even hatred in response to the abuse of children, the rape of women, the torture of the innocent---especially if the perpetrator’s motives remain hidden?
A person who has had the good fortune from the beginning to be allowed to react to frustration with rage will internalize his empatheticparents and will later be able to deal with all his feelings, including hatred, without the need for analysis. I don’t know if such people exist; I have never met one.
What I have seen are people who did not acknowledge their hatred but delegated it to others without meaning to and without even knowing they were doing it.
Under certain circumstances, they developed a severe obsessional neurosis accompanied by destructive fantasies, or, if this did not occur, their children had the neurosis.
Often they were treated for years for a physical illness that was really psychic in origin. Some suffered from severe depression. But as soon as it became possible for them to experience their early childhood hatred in analysis, their symptoms disappeared, and with them the fear that their feelings of hatred might cause someone harm. It is not experienced hatred that leads to acts of violence and destructiveness but hatred that must be warded off and bottled up with the aid of ideology, a situation that can be examined in detail in the case of Adolf Hitler.Every experienced feeling gives way in time to another, and even the most extreme conscious hatred of one’s father will not lead a person to kill---to say nothing of destroying a whole people. But Hitler warded off his childhood feelings totally and destroyed human life because “Germany needed more Lebensraum,” because “the Jews were a menace to the world,” because he “wanted young people to be cruel so they could create something new” --- the list of supposed reasons could go on and on.” Just as Alice Miller says in an answer to one of her readers about the Virginia Tech shooting. “The Virginia Tech story is a flight from its own history with the help of drugs. They only help to flee and not to see. I am so glad for you that you dared to feel.”
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