Most of the girls at Bourbon Street weren’t able to make enough money just dancing. They were always working on some scheme behind the scenes, or were trying to find a sugar daddy to live off of for as long as they could. Most of the time, the dancers I knew were broke because they spent all their money on drugs, shopping, and who knows what else. I approached the job differently and always had money. I was very aware that someday it would all be over. While the money kept flowing in, I wanted to save as much of it as I could so I’d never have to be dependent on anyone. I was the only dancer I knew of who had any credit cards — and I had all of them! I just loved collecting them because it gave me a sense of independence. I wouldn’t use them much — only for small things or in an emergency — and I always paid the balances in full. Most of the other dancers liked having me around because I was so responsible. They could always rely on me to get them out of a jam. Sometimes they’d get in big trouble and come to my house crying. One girl came over at 3:00 a.m., dripping wet because she was chasing her boyfriend and crashed her car into a canal. I’d let these wayward souls stay with me for a while until things settled down. I became a loving mother figure to more than a few of the girls, who saw me as being genuine, real, truthful, and understanding.
1. Trauma
It’s been half a lifetime since I saw my seven-year-old sister Zita on fire. I was just two years old and was playing at home with Zita and Isabel, who was five. Our brother Carlos was supposed to be watching us, but he left us alone in the house to help a man from the village who was having engine trouble. In my family we were all told to put our own needs aside in order to help others. And since Carlos was a better mechanic than he was a babysitter, it seemed only natural to him to put a seven-year-old in charge of us while he left to look at the machine.
Nobody heard our screams as the horrifying flames engulfed Zita’s dress. She had ventured too close to the fireplace in an attempt to prevent the fire from dying so we could stay warm. When her dress caught fire, Zita ran through the house like a blazing fireball and Isabel and I followed her like complete maniacs. By the time my poor sister careened through the hallways and somehow managed to extinguish the flames that surrounded her, she had suffered severe burns all over her face and body. After an agonizing few days in the hospital, Zita died. Even though I really can’t remember Zita, her untimely death has had a significant impact on me.
My mother wore black for the rest of her life and remained in a constant state of grief. I remember going to the cemetery with my mother when I was a little girl, to visit the graves of Zita and a brother of mine who died in 1950. My mother talked about these two children of hers like they were perfect little angels. “If only they had lived, all of us would be better off,” she would say. I would listen to her and feel her grief. I was angry at God for taking these perfect children away from my mother, who wore their cherub-like photos in a necklace every single day and would kiss their likenesses all the time. Living in the shadow of the perceived perfection of our dead siblings was difficult for the rest of us. And years later, I’d gain insights into my mother’s behavior and its effect on our family from Alice Miller: “Experience shows that the death of a child … plays a very important role in a mother’s life.
The birth of every child inevitably awakens or reawakens desires in the parents that are somehow connected to making up for their own childhoods. Either they look to the child to compensate for their not having had good parents … or to be the child they once were. If the child dies soon after birth, before the parents’ expectations are disappointed by the child’s desire for autonomy, the mother may idealize her lost child and thereby preserve its central importance for the rest of her life. Often after the death of an infant, there is no real period of mourning that runs its course: instead, the parents’ hopes become attached to an ‘if’: if only the child had lived, the parents think, their expectations would have been met. The belief in the fulfillment of all their hopes, originating in their own childhoods, is associated with the memory of this child, whose grave they visit and tend for decades after.” [The remaining children] must be dutifully cared for and raised in a way to rid them of their bad behavior and make them acceptable in the future.
To be too affectionate would be dangerous, for too much love could ruin them … And so the poor … mother feels a duty towards her living children to train them well and to suppress their true feelings. But it’s a different matter in the case of her dead child, for that child needs nothing from her and does not awaken any feelings of inferiority or hatred, does not cause her any conflict, does not offend her.” 7 My father handled his grief over Zita’s death differently than my mother did. He went even deeper into the alcoholic haze that helped him cope with all of life’s injustices. I have a feeling that he retreated into drink, not because his children died, but because of the way their deaths changed my mother. My mother’s constant grief and my father’s amped-up drinking were just two of the more obvious signs of the helplessness and despair that perfect Zita and Antonio left behind them. But quite honestly, even without my sister being burned to death and my brother’s head being crushed by a wheel from a farm cart, my family life in rural Portugal was pretty traumatic. We were poor. I was the youngest of 10 children. My mother and father were in an arranged marriage. My father was a drunk. And at the time Zita was being burned beyond recognition, my mother was actually visiting my brother Nuno at the hospital because he had been badly injured in a traffic accident.
The deck was definitely stacked against us. My mother and father were no strangers to abuse. My mother didn’t get along with her parents, especially her mother, and one of her uncles tried to molest her when she was 15 years old. My father’s father left when my father was still a young boy, and my father’s mother died shortly thereafter. Abandoned and rejected by his real parents, my father was raised by a family friend. My father was a very depressed man. He drank almost every day to numb himself from the pain of his own childhood. As a consequence of his emotional unavailability, I was very neglected as a child. I grew up alone in an emotional desert, and I would repeat the pattern with the emotionally unavailable men I fell in love with.
My father supported us — and his drinking habit — as a government road worker, while my mother tended to the house and kids. She kept chickens and rabbits and other small animals, and maintained a large garden that produced most of our meals. It wasn’t an easy life, especially with the family always growing. By the time I was born in 1959, my parents’ marriage was strained to the breaking point and my father was drinking pretty heavily. I’m actually surprised that my parents were able to stay together at all. My mother was pretty ticked off when her parents agreed to marry her off to this strange man. My father would go off drinking every night, and every night my mother would just lose it. Despite his addiction, however, I think my mother grew to like my father.
I remember her saying many times that the only bad thing about him was his drinking. I think she always had the hope that if she could just get him to stop abusing alcohol, everything would be fine. But my father never stopped drinking. It got so bad that people in our village would entertain themselves by buying drinks for him — just so they could laugh at him when he got wasted and when my mother got pissed off. One time I was with my father in the village bar, trying to get him to leave. I must have been only three or four years old. All the men were buying drinks for my father and laughing at him, while I kept grabbing his hand and pulling it so he’d go home with me. My father kept letting go of my hand to grab another drink.
I had to endure this rejection until the bar closed. Finally, my father had to leave with me, but he was so drunk he could barely walk. To add insult to injury, some teenagers from the village laughed and threw rocks at us as we made our pathetic journey home. As a young child, I had no choice but to repress the pain of this and many other experiences. Facing the painful truth of my parents’ shortcomings at age three or four was incomprehensible. But until I could finally feel the pain caused by an emotionally blind father who preferred drinking with the men at the bar than going home with the little girl who loved him, I would remain a prisoner to the pain.
I used to have crying spells when I was with my boyfriend Marty at sports bars. His desire to keep drinking with his friends rather than take me home triggered the repressed pain of having my love discarded by my father in a similar way. As painful as my family dynamics were, much of the trauma swirling around me had little direct effect on me in my earliest years. I have fond memories of my mother protecting me in my first years of life. And despite my father’s alcohol problem and inability to be present emotionally, he was never violent and never spanked me. He was gentle and kind when he was sober, and would often give me the food off his plate when I was hungry. I was actually a pretty happy child. And, for a few years, from the time I was three until the time I was seven, I was lucky to have had the full attention of my mother. All the other children were gone and would only come to visit on weekends and other special occasions. So, for a time, it felt as though I was the only one who mattered. Some of my happiest memories are of helping my mother in her rose garden, smelling the magnificent flowers in the summer sunshine.
We also shared long talks while we walked together to the village, where we would visit with my mother’s friends or wash clothes at the river with a group of women. I also remember many pleasant evenings sitting by the fireplace with both of my parents, listening to the radio, and eating roasted chestnuts. Before my father had too many drinks, he would play with me and tell me stories. I always asked him to tell the tale of Maria da Fonte. She was a brave Portuguese woman from the province next to ours who started a revolution in 1846 against the corrupt local government. My father would sing her song to me, and I have to say that his voice was very pleasing. He could be quite entertaining when he had only a couple of drinks in him. Things started getting a lot worse for me by the age of seven when I was supposed to start first grade. I was eager to learn and excited to see what school was all about, but before I could even get to the classroom, I contracted hepatitis and nearly died.
I missed the entire year and had to start first grade again when I was eight years old, a full year older than the rest of the kids. I soon realized how lucky I was to have been sick for an entire year when I finally went back to parochial school. My new teacher was an ignorant, hateful woman who called me lazy on a regular basis. She humiliated me in front of my younger classmates because I could never seem to give the right answers. I always understood my lessons, but I got nervous when I was called on. My teacher would hit my hands if she caught me counting with my fingers, and she hit me on the head with a stick when she was teaching me the alphabet and multiplication tables. Rather than try to help me, she resorted to ridicule. She seemed to take pleasure in trying to bring me to tears each day. My older sister Elza was this woman’s teacher when she was a child, and I think she was taking revenge on me. I’m not trying to excuse my teacher’s behavior, but Portugal in and prior to the mid-1960s wasn’t so kid friendly.
Those were the last years Prime Minister Salazar’s long dictatorship and there was a shortage of teachers — especially in rural areas like the one where I lived. To deal with the strain, children were allowed to leave school after the fourth grade — and many of these people somehow became teachers as adults. Classrooms were run with narrow-minded strictness just like the country was, and instructors were quick to pull out their rulers and hurl insults at innocent children. I never gave my teacher the satisfaction of crying in front of the class. Instead, I repressed the pain and acted tough. I remember very well how I used to tighten my muscles to suppress my emotional pain.
I was always tense and had a difficult time sleeping at night. My anxiety levels were so high that my stomach hurt. School was extremely difficult for me, and nobody there or at home seemed willing or able to help me in any meaningful way. Years later I discovered that I had a severe case of dyslexia. Just identifying this condition as an adult allowed me to better understand myself and start letting go of the shame I felt as a child. But back when I was an impressionable first grader I didn’t know what was going on. I lost my passion for learning and started skipping school every chance I got. Things at home weren’t much better for me. My battle with hepatitis and my struggles with school branded me as weak and dimwitted among most of my family members.
My parents didn’t know how to protect me from my abusive teachers. Mom and dad had a warped respect for people who were more educated than they were, so they simply expressed shame at my inability to get good grades. Everyone in the family started to blame me for my difficulties, as if I could have done something different at eight years old to correct the situation. I was considered a burden on the household. While my mother was sometimes a safe haven for me, she was often too preoccupied with the loss of her precious Zita to console me. And my drunken father was too wounded by his own circumstances and failures to be emotionally available. I went from being a pretty carefree child to getting caught up in a toxic environment that was eating away at my psyche and destroying my spirit. I did my best to cope with the trauma by developing a tough skin and a fierce independent streak, not realizing that in the process I was just repressing the emotions of an innocent and impressionable little girl who was teased viciously at school and emotionally abandoned by her family. Like most children, I felt that I was somehow responsible for my problems.
My parents certainly never sat me down and explained what was going on, or apologized for any of their actions. And no other authority figure in my life ever took any responsibility or tried to approach my problems in a different way. They took the easy way out and just blamed me for not being good enough. The people around me all had their own traumas to deal with, and they weren’t dealing with them very well. They were either crippled by them, like my mother, or escaping from them, like my father. Or they were denying that their problems even existed, like most of my siblings and the Catholic school faculty. So there I was, young and vulnerable, unable to understand that the people who were supposed to guide me through life were actually laying the foundation for a path filled with problems that would haunt me for decades. Before I started second grade, my sister Isabel and I were sent to the capital city of Porto to live with our two older sisters.
Elza was 32 — more than a generation older than I was — and Laura was 28. They had moved to the city to work as nurses, and my parents thought that Isabel and I would get a better shot at life under their supervision. By my family’s standards, my two eldest sisters had made it big. They pulled themselves out of poverty and seemingly overcame the misery of life in the village of Zoio by working hard and getting college degrees. One summer day, my mother put us on a bus, and Isabel and I took the eight-hour trip over rough roads to Porto. All I remember is falling asleep and then hearing Isabel announce our arrival. Out the window I could see the bustling port city, the streets crowded and noisy with cars and electric buses. Porto looked incredible to my young eyes, and I was excited to be there. When Elza picked us up from the bus station, we went straight to the beach, and I was thrilled by my first glimpse of the vast ocean. Elza was even nice enough to buy us swimsuits with polka dots and our own little purses. I chose red, and Isabel picked the green one. It seemed like this bright new beginning in a brand new place was just what I needed to leave my problems behind. But I would soon learn that it was all just another illusion. At the time we arrived in Porto, Elza and Laura were finishing up their internships at the hospital São João.
They were staying in the nurses’ dorm rooms and they sneaked us in to sleep in beds that weren’t being used. One night, Isabel and I were left in the care of two other nurses. One of them asked me what grade I was in. I told her that I’d be starting second grade in the fall. For some ignorant reason, the other nurse asked me if I knew how much three plus two was. I remember feeling nervous, and I said four instead of five. The nurses started laughing, and when I looked to 12-yearold Isabel for help, I saw that she was laughing, too. It may sound like a small thing to you, but given my history, that little incident hit me hard. I still remember the malicious laughter in vivid detail, and how I couldn’t believe that my own sister was turning against me. That was the day I learned I was on my own.
I also began to understand Isabel’s response to growing up in the same traumatic environment that I did. Unlike me, Isabel did everything she could to fit in and be the shining star. She always had the right answer. She always did what was expected of her, intent on pleasing adults. She would get good grades in order to be trusted and admired. One summer, when she was only six years old, she won praise by reciting beautiful poems at a festival celebrating the Lady of the Serra. All the adults were in awe of her and she loved the attention. I believe she loved it so much that she falsified her true feelings just to be accepted. As Alice Miller writes, “The real tragedy of people never given the chance to express their needs in childhood is that, without knowing it, they are leading a double life. … They have constructed a false self in childhood and do not know that they have another one where their suppressed feelings and needs are hidden away as effectively as if under lock and key.
The reason for this is that they have never encountered anyone who could help them understand their distress, identify the prison in which their feelings are confined, break out of that confinement, and articulate their true feelings and genuine needs.”8 Isabel says that it was all the attention I received as a child — from being sick and problematic — that caused her to act that way. Whatever the reason, and despite the fact that her life seemed so easy to me, I remember feeling even as a little girl that Isabel was giving away an important piece her true self in order to gain approval. That just wasn’t my way, and as a result I never really found my groove in Porto or anywhere else when I was around my family. I consistently got bad grades and felt out of step.
I was always the underperforming student who screwed everything up. In fact, throughout my school years, I never had the impression that anyone ever believed in me. After Elza and Laura finished their nursing internships, they rented an old house across the Douro River in Vila Nova de Gaia for the four of us. The city is known for the caves in which Port wine is aged. While our house was a modest dwelling, it was a symbol of success that my adult sisters lorded over me, along with their educations and their jobs. They both had superior attitudes that conflicted with my free spirit, and they repeatedly told me that I was the shame of the family. And Isabel, always trying to fit in, joined in the chorus by telling me that I was “the zero on the left.” I simply didn’t count. By the tender age of nine I was already an outsider in my own family. The alienation I felt was really more traumatic than I could bear. I compensated by becoming very good at hiding my true feelings inside a tough exterior and by developing a highly sensitive bullshit meter.
I also got good at preparing for emergencies and getting out of bad situations. Even to this day I make sure I always have money or credit cards on hand, and I always have an exit strategy when I’m in unfamiliar territory. While these traits have served me well in various situations, I definitely paid a price for my independence — just as Isabel has paid a price for her compliance. What I didn’t know was that by continuously repressing my true feelings of fear and anger I was setting myself up for years of suffering. During these difficult years I would constantly repeat my self-destructive habits and put up with malicious treatment from others. This compulsion to repeat my childhood trauma was my inner child’s desperate attempt to get my attention, so that I could finally wake up and deal with the root cause of my various problems.
As Alice Miller puts it, children’s brains are misled and their true emotions are banned. She theorized that the human brain is use-dependent; that it relies on experiences and environments to develop over the first four years of our existence. “The brain of a child who has mostly loving experiences will develop differently from the brain of a child who has been treated cruelly,” she writes.9 She goes on to say that because almost all children are beaten in the first years of their lives, their brain development is even more damaged. While I wasn’t spanked at home or scared of my father, my older sisters abused me emotionally and my teachers hit me all the time. My mother never called me names or forced things on me, like food I didn’t like or her religious beliefs. Sadly my mother’s only outlet to cope with her suffering was religion. This really harmed her by forcing her to have children she couldn’t take care of or protect, just so the church could survive.
It makes me so angry to realize how exploited she was! She used to pray alone all the time and would sometimes walk all the way to the chapel barefoot or on her knees, praying for a miracle. Of course, the miracle never came! In spite of being contaminated by religion, my mother was actually a very intuitive and honest woman. When I asked her questions and she had no answer, she’d simply tell me that she didn’t know instead of spreading some pretty little lie like my older sisters and teachers did. My mother wasn’t educated, but she was wise and often showed me how much she cared. One time, a woman in the village asked her why she hadn’t pierced my ears. “If she wants to have her ears pierced she can do it when she’s an adult,” my mother said. I loved this response because it gave me power. Another time, when I was very little, I remember sleeping in my bed while my mother was outside taking care of the vegetable garden. She told my father to watch over me because my older brother Nuno was home from the mental hospital and couldn’t be trusted alone with little children. My father spaced out and left the house, and when my mother saw him outside she went up to him like a maniac and scolded him for leaving me alone with Nuno. I have no doubt that these experiences taught me that I was worth protecting and gave me courage throughout my life to stand up to those who were using me to fulfill their own needs.
I want to make clear that the abuse I suffered at the hands of my older sisters and teachers was a lot more harmful to me than the unavailability of my parents, although my parents’ inability to really love and protect us was the catalyst. Just as Alice Miller writes, “This incapacity to love from the outset occurs much more often than we imagine. It is not the fault of the mothers but of the ignorance of society. In a progressive maternity ward a woman having her first baby should have access to enlightened assistance in perceiving and becoming fully aware of the body memories surfacing within her. This would prevent her from passing on traumas of her own childhood (abandonment, violence, and so on) to her baby.”10
My parents’ own repression resulted in their lack of emotional involvement, which made all of their children vulnerable to the abuse of others. One summer afternoon, when I was about five and my sister Isabel was about eight, we were walking home from the village and two teenagers scared us half to death by running after us and threatening to skin us alive. We were so scared when we got home that we couldn’t talk about it! Even to this day, some people from the village continue to harass my family members and exploit their vulnerabilities, just for entertainment. It’s sickening. But like Alice Miller says, “Sadism is not an infectious disease that strikes a person all of a sudden. It has a long prehistory in childhood…”11 The oppression we all experienced outside the home no doubt had a dramatic effect on our brains and on our psyches. “Studies on abandoned and severely mistreated Romanian children revealed striking lesions in certain areas of the brain and marked emotional and cognitive insufficiencies in later life,” Alice Miller writes. “According to very recent neurobiological findings, repeated traumatization leads to an increased release of stress hormones that attack the sensitive tissue of the brain and destroy existing neurons. Other studies of mistreated children have revealed that the areas of the brain responsible for the ‘management’ of emotions are 20 to 30 percent smaller than in normal persons.”12 Whatever traumas we undergo as children, Alice Miller believed that we have no choice but to suppress our anger against and our fear of the parents or other authority figures who humiliate us, kill our empathy, and insult our dignity.
We’re simply not equipped emotionally to handle feelings that seem so starkly opposed to the people who, for better or for worse, are supporting our very existence. Instead of confronting the people responsible, we take out our rage later, as adults, on scapegoats. We mistreat our own children and spouses. We start fights and wars. And we even direct our anger against ourselves, with eating disorders, drug addiction, depression, and, in my case, finding one bad relationship after another. The traumatized child has a lot to deal with and nowhere to put it. In her first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, Alice Miller writes that “it is precisely because a child’s feelings are so strong that they cannot be repressed without serious consequences” later in life.13 She begins that same book with her fundamental concept — one that I’ll return to repeatedly — “that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery and emotional acceptance of the truth in the individual and the unique history of our childhood.”14 The traumas I experienced in my early years, from the death of Zita and my severe dyslexia to my alienation from my family, were just precursors of the traumas I had yet to face and which I’ll deal with in the following chapters. I’m a firm believer that the same is true for everyone who grows up in an imperfect world.
While you may not have had the same traumatic experiences that I did, I’m willing to bet that you’ve had your share of things that upset you. We were all defenseless children once, and most of us were at the mercy of adults who were — to some degree — ignorant, incapable or downright vicious. As human beings, we can feel trauma in many ways. We can be beaten or neglected. We can be yelled at. We can be humiliated. But even things we don’t often think of as traumas can have a negative impact on our future development. Being in an accident or living through a disaster like a hurricane or an earthquake, for example, can overwhelm a child.
In The Untouched Key, Alice Miller relates the story of how a three-year-old Pablo Picasso was affected by the tremendous earthquake that hit Malaga in 1884. His family fled their apartment and found shelter in a cave, where the young artist-to-be witnessed the birth of his sister in very scary circumstances. Fortunately, thanks to very supportive parents, Picasso was able to avoid becoming psychotic or criminal as a result of these traumas. As helping witnesses, Picasso’s parents loved and protected him with empathy, compassion, and hugs, so he could work out his traumas in more creative ways. Alice Miller looks at the famous painting Guernica as a glimpse inside the mind of Picasso as a child, “while he was watching the dying people and horses and listening to the children screaming for help on the long walk to the shelter.”15 Through people I’ve met, I discovered another experience that can be extremely traumatic — being adopted.
Even though it seems like such an act of love and sacrifice on the part of the adoptive parents, the complete and total rejection by the birth mother is difficult for many people to overcome. And quite often, adoptive parents are too blinded by their own repression to see the real needs of the very traumatized children they bring into their lives. Many people adopt in order to fulfill their own desire to have children, and not to help a traumatized child in need.
Thus, they add to the child’s trauma by projecting their own unresolved feelings onto their new son or daughter. No wonder adopted children are over-represented in prisons and mental health clinics worldwide! Alice Miller holds out hope that any and all childhood traumas can be healed once and for all. Some just take longer than others. “We never know how a child will and must react to the injustice he or she has suffered,” Alice Miller writes. 16 She believed that the timing of a trauma, the severity of it and the temperament of the victim all help determine how hard it will be for a person to work through. While not everyone reacts to trauma in the same way, pretty much all of us experience it to some degree. And that’s what makes Alice Miller so important. Hers is a solution that can help anyone, regardless of race, sex, class, or cultural background.
There’s a comforting universality to Alice Miller’s teachings. No matter what your personal history, there’s no doubt in my mind that you can benefit from an honest exploration of the feelings of anger, fear, shame, guilt and frustration caused by your own childhood traumas. Researchers are constantly learning more about the impact of trauma on children while gaining a better understanding of how children sense the world around them. More and more caregivers are advocating more gentle infant deliveries, as well as the elimination of circumcisions and other mutilation rituals that are performed without any thought to the consequences their pain and trauma may cause. Alice Miller believed that so many people are late to the party when it comes to avoiding the brutality of things like circumcision and spanking because they’ve been traumatized themselves. “The reason why parents mistreat their children has less to do with character and temperament than with the fact that they were mistreated themselves and were not permitted to defend themselves,” she writes.17
The vicious circle of trauma goes back countless generations. Such systemic trauma can lead to the creation of monsters. If we all start out life as innocent little babies, why do some of us turn out to be psychotic killers? Why are so many of us so self-destructive and insecure? Why do millions of people accept abusive relationships? Is it in the genes, or, as Alice Miller believed, the result of parental punishment and other traumas?
Dr. Bruce Perry, who directs the Child Trauma Academy in Houston, Texas, agrees with Alice Miller that violence begins in the brain as a result of traumatic experiences. “It’s not the finger that pulls the trigger; it’s the brain. It’s not the penis that rapes; it’s the brain,” he says.18
The organ that controls our behavior begins developing in the womb, and gets the bulk of its programming from our earliest relationships. Robin Karr-Morse and David Lawrence Junior, who write about the importance of brain development in childhood, confirm Alice Miller’s theories about the brain’s use-dependence, which we already touched on earlier.
“Experiences of all kinds literally stimulate electrical connections among brain cells as well as build gray matter in the brain,” they write. “The stimulation a baby experiences before birth and in the first years of life shapes the type of brain the child develops. Those years are simply for developing capacities. An inadequate or traumatic caregiving relationship is deeply damaging, especially during those early years when the brain is forming chemically and structurally.
That part of the brain that allows the baby to feel connected with another person can be lost or greatly impaired. Absent adequate nurturing by an emotionally competent caregiver, the baby faces an unpredictable tide of unregulated emotions. … If a baby’s experiences are pathological and steeped in chronic fear early in development, the very capacities that mitigate against violent behavior (including empathy, the capacity for self-regulation of strong emotions and the emotional modulation essential for complex problem-solving) can be lost. As these children grow into adolescence and adulthood, impulsive and aggressive behaviors are so often the outcomes.
Moreover, genetic proclivities toward mental illness also are exacerbated. Communities inevitably absorb the consequences. We ignore the root of the problem at our peril.”19
More and more medical professionals are confirming the theories put forward by Alice Miller from the late 1970s until her death in 2010. Dr. Gabor Maté, for example, confirms Alice Miller’s contention that addiction, autism and other conditions aren’t caused by genetics, but by trauma in childhood or even pre-birth in some cases.
“The hardcore drug addicts that I treat … are, without exception, people who have had extraordinarily difficult lives. And the commonality is childhood abuse,” Dr. Maté says. “In other words, these people all enter life under extremely adverse circumstances. Not only did they not get what they needed for healthy development, they actually got negative circumstances of neglect. I don’t have a single female patient in the Downtown Eastside who wasn’t sexually abused, for example, as were many of the men, or abused, neglected and abandoned serially, over and over again. And that’s what sets up the brain biology of addiction. In other words, the addiction is related … in terms of emotional pain relief and neurobiological development, to early adversity.”20
Perhaps the largest single examination of childhood trauma comes in the form of the famous Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) study, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The study incorporates responses from more than 17,000 participants. The initial phase of the landmark study was performed by Kaiser Permanente from 1995 to 1997 and demonstrated how specific childhood traumas can predict problems in adulthood. The baseline participants, who ranged in age from 19 to over 60 years old, are still being studied to determine their medical status. Revealing the “staggering proof of the health, social and economic risks that result from childhood trauma,” the study shows a significant link between a person’s ACE score and their chances of being saddled with addictions and medical problems.
Adults with an ACE score of 4, for example, were 460 percent more likely to have depression and 1,220 percent more likely to attempt suicide than adults with an ACE score of zero.
The study concluded that a strong relationship exists “between the breadth of exposure to abuse or household dysfunction during childhood and multiple risk factors for several of the leading causes of death in adults.”21
ACE Study Traumatic Stressors The adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) listed below were shown to have an impact on a person’s health as an adult.
As the number of ACEs increases, the risk for health problems increases in a strong and graded fashion. The percentages indicate the prevalence of each traumatic stressor in the original ACE study sample of 17,337 participants.
Emotional Abuse 10.6%
Physical Abuse 28.3%
Sexual Abuse 20.7%
Emotional Neglect 14.8%
Physical Neglect 9.9%
Mother Treated Violently 12.7%
Household Substance Abuse 26.9%
Household Mental Illness 19.4%
Parental Separation or Divorce 23.3%
Incarcerated Household Member 4.7%
Source: cdc.gov/ace
No wonder we’re all so screwed up! Alice Miller puts it well when she says, “the anger felt by every individual person stems from the primary, justified anger of the small child at the blows on it by the parents.”22
Think about what this means: When we’re mad at our boyfriend, frustrated by a traffic jam, or upset by our boss, we’re on some level reenacting what happened to us as children.
It’s also important to realize that unresolved trauma will always catch up with us. “Merely forgetting early traumas and early neglect is no solution,” Alice Miller writes.23 Instead, we have to go back in time and deal with the true feelings we had as children. Only then can we free ourselves from overwhelming fear, shame, guilt, anger, and frustration.
Getting to that point is a lot easier when you have someone who can help you understand how present events trigger repressed feelings. Alice Miller calls the type of person who can help an adult face their childhood traumas an enlightened — or knowing — witness. Ideally, parents should fulfill the role of helping witnesses while their children are still little — like the young Pablo Picasso’s parents did for their artist-to-be — but too many mothers and fathers are too traumatized themselves to provide the patience and loving support their children need. When most people grow up they unconsciously and compulsively reenact their own childhood traumas with people who have nothing to do with those painful scenarios, such as their own kids. Parents who have suffered are compelled to make sure that others suffer, too, and the cycle can go on for eternity. Alice Miller broke that cycle of repression for me. But before I could become free, I had to go through a lot of heartache. In the chapters that follow, I’ll share stories from my past that illustrate the progression that can take people from their earliest traumas to ultimate freedom.
Worksheet: Recognize the Traumas from Your Childhood.
Everyone has his or her own traumas, many of which can’t even be remembered. For me, my sister Zita’s burning isn’t a memory I can recall. It happened and I was there, but my conscious mind has repressed it. The fact that other people have had to reproduce the memory for me makes it no less real or important to my personal history.
Other traumas are a lot more obvious, like my emotionally unavailable father, my domineering sisters, and my humiliating teachers, or even natural disasters like earthquakes and hurricanes. 1. List some of the traumas you may have experienced in your life, either directly or indirectly. Were you spanked as a child? Bullied by other children? Abused by an uncle? Try to run the gamut from seemingly minor incidents to major events. 2. In what ways, physically or emotionally, were your parents or other caregivers abusive to you when you were a child? 3. How did the people around you respond to your trauma when you were a child? Were you left to cope on your own? Were you told that spanking was good for you? 4. Alice Miller calls someone who can help another person clarify and understand his or her pain an enlightened witness. She also uses the term “helping witness” to describe someone who is kind to a child who’s being misunderstood or mistreated. My mother’s younger sister, who lived in Lisbon and often visited us, was truly a helping witness for me when I was a child. She took time to explain things to me with kindness and patience, and was never mean to me. This can be extremely important for a child, and I try to fulfill this role with my own nieces and nephews. Was there anyone who was kind to you when you were a child, maybe a relative, teacher, or neighbor who counterbalanced the cruelty that was otherwise dominant in your everyday life? 5.
Because people unconsciously and compulsively reenact their childhood traumas in the present moment, your current circumstances can reveal a lot about what happened to you as a child. We often feel intense or overwhelming feelings when people or situations subconsciously remind us of painful childhood experiences. In these cases, it’s important to connect your current problems to their root causes instead of the present-day triggers. What people or situations cause intense or overwhelming feelings in you today? How might these people or situations relate to your childhood experiences?
7 The Untouched Key, p. 27–28
8 The Truth Will Set You Free, p. 73
9 “The Roots of Violence are NOT Unknown.” Retrieved from: http:// www.alice-miller.com/flyers_en.php
10 The Truth Will Set You Free, p. 162
11 For Your Own Good, p. 265 12 The Political Consequences of Child Abuse, The Journal of Psychohistory 26 (2) Fall 1998. Retrieved from: http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/ 06_politic
13 The Drama of the Gifted Child (1994), p. 79 14 Ibid., p. 26
15 “The Childhood Trauma,” excerpted from a lecture at New York’s 92nd Street Y, October 22, 1998. Retrieved from: http://www.vachss.com/ guest_dispatches/alice_miller2.html 16 For Your Own Good, p. 177
17 For Your Own Good, p. 105
18 Quoted in The Miami Herald, “Violence and the Brain in Early Childhood Development,” by Robin Karr-Morse and David Lawrence Jr., January 6, 2013. Retrieved from: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/ 01/06/3168100/violence
19 The Miami Herald, “Violence and the Brain in Early Childhood Development,” by Robin Karr-Morse and David Lawrence Jr., January 6, 2013. Retrieved from: http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/01/06/ 3168100/violence-and-the-brain-in
20 “Dr. Gabor Maté on the Stress-Disease Connection, Addiction and the Destruction of American Childhood,” December 25, 2012, Democracy Now! Retrieved from: http://www.democracynow.org/2012/12/25/ dr_gabor_mat_on_the_stress
21 ACE Study, cdc.gov/ace
22 Free From Lies, p. 11
23 The Truth Will Set You Free, p. 124
No comments:
Post a Comment