I wanted to share the excerpt from my book below on the blog Toxic Positivity triggered by the video below, but then it slipped out of my mind.
So I will share the vedio again with the excerpt from my book on this blog.
Yes, don't let yourself be driven by the unresolved repressed emotions of the child you once were to do something you might regret later. Learn to be still and consciously feel the emotions within the context of your own childhood.
Just like I wrote in my book A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions pages 163, 164, 165, 166, 167 and 168
I’ll be honest with you, some of the feelings at times were
so intense that I probably shouldn’t have been alone with
them. But thanks to Alice Miller’s books I was able to
understand and move through them. Frankly, I didn’t have a
choice.
Before I discovered Alice Miller I was close to the
breaking point, and I probably wouldn’t have been able to go
on much longer without her writings.
You may not have a choice, either. Regrettably, true
enlightened witnesses are hard to come by. To this day I
haven’t met a therapist I can recommend. All I can really
suggest is that you get as much as you can out of this book,
and out of all the writings of Alice Miller you can get your
hands on.
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.
Before Marty and I broke up in the year 2000, I was
planning an extended trip to Portugal to take care of some
family business. But the triggering of my repressed emotions
put an end to that plan right away. I knew my family couldn’t
help me explore and understand my feelings, since they
couldn’t handle their own.
They use every technique available
to them to repress their own feelings, and I was afraid —
knowing that I was in a vulnerable emotional state — that
they’d once again make me their scapegoat, projecting their
own repression into me like they did when I was younger.
Sometimes you have to let go of some money or time to
free yourself from certain people, like I did with that
Mormon guy Justin, but that’s nothing compared to your
freedom and peace.
Other times it may not be practical to
show people in your life the exit door, but do the best you
can given your specific circumstances.
The real key is to be patient with yourself. Keep trying to
focus on your intense feelings and eventually, you’ll begin to
understand them. Once you do, they’ll start to subside and
you’ll start to feel liberated from your old wounds, roles, and
patterns. You’ll begin to realize that any intense, excruciating
emotions you feel today are the repressed emotions of the child you once were and have very little to do with your
present situation.
When a current event or person triggers a
strong emotion, you’ll be able to take a step back from it.
You’ll be able to tell yourself that the intense feelings of
powerlessness, fear, or anger are from the child you once
were, and that the present event or person is just a substitute
that reminds you of a time when you were really vulnerable.
In the future, you’ll no longer be blinded by your
repressed emotions. You’ll be able to clearly recognize red
flags and avoid getting too intimate with people who’ll reenact your childhood drama and have you relive old pains
over and over again.
You’ll be able to better deal with
present-day triggers. As a child you were powerless, but as an
adult, you can obtain the power and the freedom to take care
of yourself and get yourself out of abusive situations.
While the child you once were was unable to feel intense
fear or anger, it’s safe for you to feel these emotions as an
adult today. Eventually, you’ll no longer feel scared and angry.
Just don’t give up! You must let your honest feelings show
you the true story of what you had to go through as a child.
The thing that really kept me going was the fact that I
knew I’d be incapable of loving anybody — especially
myself — unless I faced and resolved my repression. I was
tired of false starts and sustained failures. The promise of real
change gave me the courage to soldier on against the odds.
If you can do the same, then you too will have this
incredibly liberating experience, and you’ll be truly amazed at how much the quality of your life will improve.
By 2003, I was feeling stronger. Every day, the
excruciating feelings started to diminish and I found that I
could enjoy being around other people again.
I was energized, yet relaxed; confident, without being
arrogant. In a word, balanced. Not being trapped inside an
emotional prison of my own making I was able to deal with
day-to-day problems without connecting them
subconsciously to my repressed childhood traumas and
blowing them out of proportion.
For the first time in my life, I was able to keep things in perspective, and was finally free
from repeating the drama of my childhood every time
something went wrong.
I even felt strong enough to return
to Portugal. I had come a long way from the 22-year-old who
had left her family behind for a new life in London.
My visit lasted a year and a half, and I was able to see my
family members for who they were — without being
triggered by their projections.
In fact, I had a quiet calm
about me that everyone noticed. My family could tell that I
was a different person and they all had a strange kind of
respect for me. They still tried to bring me into their dramas,
but I politely refused to get involved.
I finally understood that they, too, were victims of their
upbringing. When I was young I allowed them all to
convince me that they were superior, that they knew what
was better. But when I went back to see them after feeling
the true emotions of my childhood, I knew that we were all
equals — and that nobody knew what was best for me
except me.
While I never expected to get my siblings to change their
ways, I was heartened by the fact that some of the younger
members of my family were interested in what I had to say.
Some of them would take a step forward and then retreat
when some repressed childhood feeling got triggered by what
I had to say, but they were making an effort and that was a
step in the right direction. I tried to explain what was
happening to them in a gentle, loving way. Sometimes they understood, and other times they’d freak out and stay away
from me for a while.
But usually, I wasn’t alone for very long because lots of
people in my extended family were curious about my
newfound freedom.
One of my nephews and his wife, for
example, were having a hard time handling their two-year-old son’s temper tantrums. They both tried to dismiss the
child’s behavior as the “terrible twos,” but I could see that this
little boy was in a lot of emotional pain. His father buried
himself in his work, and his mother had no idea what her son
needed.
When I saw this cute little guy for the first time, both of
his parents were trying to force him to stop crying and come
give his Great Aunt Sylvie a kiss. I told them it was okay to
let him cry and express his unhappiness, and that it’s never a
good idea to force a child to kiss anyone.
I certainly wasn’t
taking it personally! The boy had never seen me before, so I
thought he should at least get to know me first before giving
me any kisses. My nephew and his wife backed off, and sure
enough, the little boy stopped crying.
The next day my niece-in-law said that she had never
heard anyone talk about children like I had. From then on
she pretty much came to see me every day or asked me to be
with her and her child. She didn’t want to abuse her son
anymore. She wanted to help him and become a better
mother.
We spent many hours talking about the pain her son was
feeling because his father worked so much, and because for
two years he was left in the care of a nanny who, they found
out later, was taking psychiatric drugs. When I finally had to
return to Arizona, I felt so bad leaving my niece-in-law. I
continued to help her via phone and Skype, but one day I
wasn’t available and she went to her doctor and told him she
felt suicidal.
Instead of helping her process and understand the roots
of her despair, this doctor put her in the hospital. They gave
her strong drugs and kept her there — and away from her
son — for an entire month. My nephew was working, of
course, so the child was shipped off to his maternal
grandparents. When I tried to call him, the grandparents
kept me away. They blamed me for their daughter’s
problems. It was easier to make me their scapegoat than to
take responsibility for what they did to their daughter.
Also from my book pages 61, 62, and 63
"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 lives 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 to 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."
Once your emotions are understood and consciously felt in the right context, they start to subside and released from your body and you liberate yourself from the emotional prison of your childhood. You will no longer be blinded by them to fall victim again to people in the present moment standing in symbolizing your parents or childhood caregivers triggering your emotions to manipulate you to play the part in their twisted dramas.
I'm always amazed at how doctors articulate very well half disconnected truths and no one ever mentioned the root cause of people's dysfunctions is the repressed emotions that drive people into the state of compulsion repetition. As I wrote in my book A Dance to Freedom pages 129, 130, 131 and 132
I’ve touched on this a lot in this chapter and elsewhere in this book, particularly in the section about Dr. Julio MachadoVaz — the psychologist who used me for sex — but I really want to reinforce the idea that so-called therapists and gurus only substitute one dangerous illusion for another.
As Alice Miller writes, “What can happen when a doctor doesn’t stop at self-deception in his flight from pain, but deceives his patients, even founding dogmatic institutions in which further ‘helpers’ are recruited to a faith advertised as scientific ‘truth,’ can be catastrophic.”64
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. But when a therapist regresses us to the state of the desperate child we once were and keeps us feeling old pain over and over again, that just reinforces our dependency, keeps us vulnerable to all kinds of manipulations, and makes our addiction to pain harder to shake.
Why do people keep punishing themselves? As Alice Miller writes, “… the awareness was borne in upon me that in a state of regression, it is not possible to judge the competence and integrity of the person one has turned to for such guidance.
This opens up all kinds of opportunities for abuse. The intensive phase with which primal therapy begins is an immediate obstacle to the formation of a balanced, critical, independent assessment of the therapist’s abilities by the client.
The fact that the attendant uncritical and irrational expectations of healing and ‘salvation’ can lead to the establishment of totalitarian sects is borne out by the crass example of mass abuse at the hands of the exponents of ‘feeling therapy’ as described in detail by Carol Lynn Mithers in her book Therapy Gone Mad: The True Story of Hundreds of Patients and a Generation Betrayed (1994).
But this study was possible only after the community she describes had disbanded, something that frequently takes decades. Today we know that such groups exist and that members of sects are done irremediable harm before they become aware of the fact.”65
In another book, she goes on to say, “The thing that concerns me most about cult groups is the unconscious manipulations that I have described in detail in my work. It is the way in which the repressed and unreflected childhood biographies of parents and therapists influence the lives of children and patients entrusted to their care without anyone involved actually realizing it.
At first glance, it may seem as if what goes on in cults and cultlike therapy groups takes place on a different level from the unconscious manipulation of children by their parents. We assume that in the former instance we are in the presence of an intentional, carefully planned and organized form of manipulation aimed at exploiting the specific predicament of individuals. … First, they had learned how to reduce people to the emotional state of the helpless child.
Once they had achieved that, they also learned how to use unconscious regression to exercise total control over their victims. From then on, what they did seemed to come automatically, in accordance with the childrearing patterns instilled into them in their own childhood.”66
Most people who search for answers never actually find them, because people suffering with their own repression are the ones who practice traditional therapies. Since the beginning of human history, priests, teachers, gurus, psychics, doctors, philosophers, and psychologists have all duped people into thinking they could provide real assistance when it was never possible because the healers were also victims of their own childhoods.
Alice Miller saw the promise of psychotherapy to help people understand why they behave like helpless victims as adults and also to help them take responsibility for their actions.
But she was disillusioned when she realized that practitioners couldn’t treat patients effectively as long as they failed to deal with their own repression. The people who write self-help books and lead 12-step groups and otherwise claim to heal people are for the most part little children themselves, afraid to speak the naked truth that could actually lead to true liberation. “I don’t see the path to growing but rather the repetition and continuation of the child’s dependency on illusions,” Alice Miller writes of traditional healing methods. “Growing and healing begin when former victims of mistreatment start to confront themselves with the cruelty of their upbringing, without illusions about the “love” of a higher power and without blaming themselves for projections.
They allow themselves to feel their authentic emotions without moral restrictions and in this way become eventually true to themselves. But the 12 steps continue to keep the ACA [Adult Children of Alcoholics] in the former dependency of the child: fear, self-blame, and permanent overstrain.
A person who has eventually painfully realized that she was never loved, can, based on this truth, learn to love herself and her children. But someone who lives with the illusion that she was indeed loved by the Higher Power, though she has missed to feel this love, will probably blame herself in the old manner for her lack of gratitude and will tend to demand the love from her children.
By so doing, she will pass on the blame to her children if they don’t behave in the way she wishes them to do; she will pass on the blame, together with the lie that she learned in her so-called recovery.”67
It is the major flaw in most human therapies that they are themselves grounded in the fear of the parents and the repressed emotions of traumatic experiences. It’s why therapy so often doesn’t work, and it frustrated Alice Miller and encouraged her to find a new way. “Sometimes for decades on end, clients and analysts remain bogged down in a maze of half-baked concepts,”68 she writes. Whether or not a therapist has been freed of his or her own repression is what will determine the success or failure of a given therapy."
Many people have no integrity and dignity, But they try to manipulate people's perceptions and worry about their image and reputation, that's all they care about...
Yep!
.
What good does it do a man to gain the world and lose his soul.
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