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
Wednesday, December 18, 2024
Dictators
Here is an example that when power comes from the external world it can be taken away at any time. Is just sad that so many had to suffer horrifically for so long because of these mad dictators.
"The unconscious compulsion to revenge repressed injuries is more powerful than reason. That is the lesson that all tyrants teach us. One should not expect judiciousness from a mad person motivated by compulsive panic. One should, however, protect oneself from such a person." Alice Miller -- Breaking Down the Wall of Silence page 82
“Humiliations, spankings, and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away.
However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel leaders.
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 childhoodwithout having to re-experience those fears.
“The Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu knew nothing of the way he suffered as a child from having been pent up in one room with ten brothers and sisters in a state of extreme neglect.
As an adult living in the monomaniacal opulence of luxurious palaces, he repressed all explicit memory of it. But implicit (body) memories of his childhood suffering remained, and they incited him to take vengeance on a whole nation.
Like his own mother, the women in this dictatorship were not allowed to have abortions. Like his own parents, most couples in Romania were forced to have more children than they wanted or were able to take 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. "
Taken from the book “The Truth Will Set You Free” by Alice Miller
"I designate as pessimistic the thought that we are far more dependent than our pride would like to admit on individual human beings (and not only on institutions!), for a single person can gain control over the masses if he learns to use to his own advantage the system under which they were raised. People who have been "pedagogically" manipulated as children are not aware as adults of all that can be done to them. Like the individual authoritarian father, leader figures, in whom the masses see their own father, actually embody the avenging child who needs the masses for his own purposes (of revenge). And this second form of dependence--the dependence of the "great leader" on his childhood, on the unpredictable nature of the unintegrated, enormous potential for hatred within him--is decidedly a very great danger." Taken from the book "For Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in child-rearing and the Roots of Violence" by Alice Miller (page 243)
A great danger indeed
"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
"Children who are told the truth and are not brought up to tolerate lies and cruelty can develop as freely as a plant whose roots have not been attacked by pests (in our case, lies)" Alice Miller
The great malady of our society, implicated in all our troubles and affecting us individually and socially, is the idealization of our parents and childhood and the denial of childhood suffering. When we idealize our parents and childhood and deny childhood suffering, it does not go away. It appears symptomatically in obsessions, addictions, violence, greed, deceit, and loss of meaning. Our temptation is to isolate these symptoms or try to eradicate them one by one, but the root problem is the idealization of our parents and childhood and the denial of childhood suffering.
"...there is a difference between the powerless, legitimate rage of a desperate 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 imitating 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 endpoint 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
"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 and 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, and 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."
" . . . the anger felt by every individual person stems from the primary justified anger of the small child at the blows inflicted on it by the parents. The immediate expression of that anger is suppressed, but at a later stage this suppressed fury will be directed at innocent victims with uninhibited savagery." -- Alice Miller, "Free From Lies"
“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.” Alice Miller Free from Lies: Discovering Your True Needs page 55
The conversation about the effects of childhood repression in our society needs to start happening in the stage of the world, sooner rather than later, if we want to save ourselves and humanity from falling off the cliff and committing mass suicide.
Having formal education or not has nothing to do with being a conscious person.
Adolf Hitler was emotionally blinded by the repressed emotions of the child he once was; just like the masses that followed him.
Society has not changed since then, and people still are emotionally blinded by the repressed emotions of the child they once were to follow dangerously repressed leaders into an abyss. Humanity is doomed.
As long as people's childhood repression goes unresolved -- they will be shackled into the chains of compulsion 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 and seductive theories 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.
Alice Miller explains beautifully in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence pages 42 and 43: "Just as in the symbiosis of the "diaper stage," there is no separation here of subject and object. If the child learns to view corporal punishment as "a necessary measure" against "wrongdoers," then as an adult he will attempt to protect himself from punishment by being obedient and will not hesitate to cooperate with the penal system. In a totalitarian state, which is a mirror of his upbringing, this citizen can also carry out any form of torture or persecution without having a guilty conscience. His "will" is completely identical with that of the government.
Now that we have seen how easy it is for intellectuals in a dictatorship to be corrupted, it would be a vestige of aristocratic snobbery to think that only "the uneducated masses" are susceptible to propaganda. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation. Educators have always known this and have exploited it for their own purposes, as the following proverb suggests: "The clever person gives in, the stupid one balks."
For example, we read in a work on child raising by Grünwald (1899): "I have never yet found willfulness in an intellectually advanced or exceptionally gifted child" (quoted in Rutschky). Such a child can, in later life, exhibit extraordinary acuity in criticizing the ideologies of his opponents--and in puberty even the views by his own parents-- because in these cases his intellectual powers can function without impairment. Only within a group--such as one consisting of adherents of an ideology or a theoretical school--that represents the early family situation will this person on occasion still display a naïve submissiveness and uncritical attitude that completely believes his brilliance in other situations. Here, tragically, his early dependence upon tyrannical parents is preserved, a dependence that--in keeping with the program of "poisonous pedagogy"--goes undetected. This explains why Martin Heidegger, for example, who had no trouble in breaking with traditional philosophy and leaving behind the teachers of his adolescence, was not able to see the contradictions in Hitler's ideology that should have been obvious to someone of his intelligence. He responded to this ideology with an infantile fascination and devotion that brooked no criticism.”
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