When people threw bachelor parties at Bourbon Street, the guys who were getting married would usually go up on stage and make complete fools of themselves. The dancers would make the guys walk on all fours like dogs and spank them on their butts — sometimes really hard and with a belt. Some girls enjoyed taking advantage of the situation and showed no mercy! I always refused to get involved. I never understood why any man would ever subject himself to this kind of treatment. After reading Alice Miller, I came to understand that people who were spanked as children on a regular basis repeated their childhood trauma by acting out with rough sex — and getting beat up by topless dancers.
3. Repression
When people threw bachelor parties at Bourbon Street, the guys who were getting married would usually go up on stage and make complete fools of themselves. The dancers would make the guys walk on all fours like dogs and spank them on their butts — sometimes really hard and with a belt. Some girls enjoyed taking advantage of the situation and showed no mercy! I always refused to get involved. I never understood why any man would ever subject himself to this kind of treatment. After reading Alice Miller, I came to understand that people who were spanked as children on a regular basis repeated their childhood trauma by acting out with rough sex — and getting beat up by topless dancers.
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 life 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, 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 for 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. After I tried to kill myself while under the care of my brother Eliseu — but before I found myself back in Portugal with Elza and Laura — I had another misadventure in Spain. I agreed to help my brother Carlos and his wife take care of their kids and I ended up being treated like a slave for three months. Carlos lived in a small village close to Oviedo, in the province of Asturias. My life had gotten somewhat back to normal since I had the chance to rest and recover at my parents’ house, and when I was feeling strong again I went to visit Carlos with my mother. It was just a short taxi ride from our village in Portugal. We had a nice time and when my mother decided it was time to go, my brother and his wife asked me if I wanted to stay for a few months to help out with their new baby.
I admired my brother Carlos, so I agreed to stay. I thought he was the coolest. He kind of looks like Charlie Sheen — who I would meet 16 years later at Bourbon Street — and I soon found out that he was just as crazy! I had no idea how neurotic he really was until I started living with him and his family. One time, I made soup for dinner and he screamed at me for serving it to him when it was too hot. He yelled so loud that he scared his children half to death, and I remember wondering why he hated me so much. My sister-in-law Sabina was just as pleasant. She fought with Carlos all the time and she treated me like her servant. For some reason, I was the only person who could stop the new baby from crying. The little guy was only content if I was carrying him. When he fell asleep in my arms I’d try to put him down in his bed very carefully so I could just hang out in my room and relax for a little bit, but as soon as I put him down he’d wake up and start crying again. My sister-in-law would come racing in, yelling at me to hold the baby. It was exhausting.
The stress of being in Carlos’ house was the last thing I needed. I can’t remember exactly how long I was there, but I missed my period the whole time because of the anxiety. I finally stood up to my brother and demanded that he take me back to Portugal. During one of our many fights over this particular topic, he threw me on my bed and punched a big hole in the door. But I refused to back down. And finally, after several weeks, Carlos had enough of me. One weekend he put me in the car and took me back to our parents’ house.
While I was relieved to be out of his house, I soon found myself back in Vila Nova de Gaia with Elza and Laura. I had just turned 17 and my sisters thought they had finally found someone who could tame me. His name was Dr. Julio Machado Vaz. At the time he was young and unknown, but today he’s Portugal’s most famous sexologist. He has several best-selling books and a TV show that’s a lot like Dr. Phil’s. To get so popular all Julio talked about was sex. Sex was his obsession, and he got all of Portugal to enable his addiction. He became a high-profile celebrity advisor. But before he hit the big time, his methods were unprofessional to say the least. From my personal experience, he was extremely abusive.
My sister Laura worked at the public clinic where Julio was building his reputation. Back then he was a dashing 27-year-old doctor. His mother, Maria Clara, was a famous singer, and his father, Julio Machado Vaz de Sousa, was a respected faculty member at the University of Porto’s medical school. Given Laura’s connections, it was easy for me to get an appointment to see this rising young star. And he was more than willing to take me on as a patient. When we met, the first question he asked me was whether or not I had a boyfriend. When I said no, he asked if I’d ever had one. Once again, I said no. Then he told me that my sister brought me to see him because she was afraid that I was sexually active. He explained to me that sex is normal, that most people are sexually repressed and that what I needed was a boyfriend. After just one visit in the clinic he moved our sessions to his private office.
He pressed his advantage and manipulated me into having oral sex with him. I knew he was just using me and that he didn’t have a clue about how to really help me, but I kept seeing him to spite Laura and the others. Our little arrangement went on for months, and the whole time I was thinking, “What would my sisters think of their charming doctor now, the one man they thought could solve all my problems?” Looking back I almost can’t believe how despicable this so-called doctor was. One time, he took me to his house while his wife was at the hospital having his second baby. Obviously, part of me was aware that what we were doing was wrong, but I was so focused on somehow harming my sisters that I let him get away with it. When he was tired of his latest conquest, Julio ended our sessions. I imagine that he found another patient to fool around with.
In an interview many years later a reporter asked him, “Is a psychiatrist also a seducer?” “Maybe the reverse is more true,” was my doctor’s smug response. 31 Such a reply should have exposed him. But people in Portugal, and everywhere else in the world for that matter, are too emotionally blind to recognize even the most obvious red flags. Julio revealed just how sick he really was, but by then, he was all but glorified for being an outlet for the whole country’s sexual repression.
The people of Portugal still live vicariously through the escapades of this bold doctor who talks so openly about sex. And no doubt he continues to take full advantage of the collective repression for his own pleasure.
In my opinion, it’s absolutely disgraceful. Interestingly, Alice Miller has a few words to say about the seduction dramas that are reenacted by men like Julio, who are compelled to use women. “The seducer is loved, admired, and sought after by many women because his attitude awakens their hopes and expectations,” she writes. “They hope that their need for mirroring, echoing, respect, attention, and mutual understanding, which has been stored up inside them since early childhood, will finally be fulfilled by this man. But these women not only love the seducer, they also hate him, for he turns out to … be unable to fulfill their needs and soon abandons them. They feel hurt by the demeaning way he treats them because they cannot understand him. Indeed, he does not understand himself.”32
All I really knew at the time was that I was more confused than ever. Dr. Julio Machado Vaz’s “treatment” made me a lot worse off. And my sexual encounters with him opened the door to exactly what my sisters feared most. What’s more, the abuse I suffered at the hands of this doctor was harmful to my sister Isabel. If he had given me the help I really needed, I would have given better advice to my sister five years later.
When Isabel broke up with her boyfriend of 10 years and started feeling some of her own repressed childhood feelings, I did exactly what Julio did to me. Instead of giving her emotional support and helping her use her pain to set herself free, I encouraged her to sleep around. I “treated” my sister with sex by introducing her to other guys, hoping she would forget about her boyfriend. This only made her repress her true self once again, and I believe it contributed to her ultimate downfall. The chain of harm done by doctors, therapists, and gurus under the guise of help is endless.
Alice Miller believed that most people with a “Dr..” in front of their name or a “Ph.D..” at the end of it weren’t in any kind of position to help or guide anyone, especially if they were repressing their own traumas and creating their own illusions. For many years, I blamed myself for what happened with Dr. Julio Machado Vaz. It took me more than two decades to see the truth and speak about the fact that this doctor had exploited my anger at my family to feed his sexual perversions and abuse me sexually, instead of helping me work through and resolve my anger. In the book Boundaries: Where You End And I Begin, Anne Katherine states, “A therapist is entrusted with his or her clients’ deepest secrets. A minister bestows sanctions from the highest power in the universe. The potential for harm is overwhelming. For a person in such a role, essentially that of a guardian, to cross sexual boundaries is a grave violation. A child, a client, a patient, a follower, or a worshiper are vulnerable and usually approach authority out of need. A sexual action by a guardian is very confusing, even to a very strong and healthy individual. For someone vulnerable and in need, such an action can be devastating. When a parent is sexual toward a child, the violation reverberates for decades. Trust is broken, the child takes on responsibility for the act, sexuality is affected, and the bond is damaged. When a therapist, physician, attorney, or clergy person is sexual with a client or worshiper, it is also incest. A trust is broken, a bond is perverted. The person who sought care was used to meet the needs of the caregiver.”33
I didn’t need sex or a boyfriend when I saw Dr. Julio Machado Vaz. What I needed was an enlightened witness to help me feel my repressed pain and give me a better way to deal with my self-righteous, overbearing, domineering, invasive, and authoritarian sisters and brothers. After going for “counseling,” my repressed anger — at my sisters for thinking the worst; at Dr. Julio Machado Vaz for sexualizing me before the time was right and for not teaching me how to protect myself against pregnancy by giving me birth control pills; and even at my parents for bringing me into this world when they were in no position to protect me — fueled my sexual appetite. For a while, if a sexy guy approached me I wouldn’t miss the opportunity to sleep with him. If this was what everybody in my family was thinking about me anyway, I decided to just go ahead and do it. I was actually pretty picky and said “no” more often than not. You’d be surprised how many Portuguese men don’t understand what that word means, but I made it pretty clear to the guys I wasn’t interested in. I was happy to go for months without sex if no one special was around, but if I thought someone was attractive, friendly, smart, and fun, I’d give in to the pleasure of the moment.
At the age of 20, I found myself pregnant. I knew I couldn’t bring a new life into the world, at least not the one in which I lived. But in Portugal, abortion was illegal. Fortunately, I found a midwife who could perform the procedure safely. I was also very lucky that my family didn’t find out. As I mentioned earlier, if they had discovered it, they would have locked me up and forced me to carry the pregnancy to term. At the time, Portugal was a deeply Catholic country, and church leaders mesmerized the majority of the Portuguese people. I was never swayed by religious morality because it always seemed to be a tool of repression. I was repressing enough on my own to need extra help from a priest or a nun!
Alice Miller’s thoughts on religion rang true to me when I read them years later. “When I see the passion with which Catholic priests — men childless by choice — fight against abortion, I can’t help asking what it is that motivates them,” she writes. “Is it a desire to prove that an unlived life is more important and more valuable than a lived life? [The priests] are acting against life, by misusing the weakness and trust of the faithful and dangerously confusing them. The injunction against abortion goes even further: Consciously or unconsciously, it represents support for cruelty against children and active complicity in the creation of unwanted existences, existences that can easily become a liability for the community at large.”34 Alice Miller writes about how restricting abortion caused incredible suffering in the Romania, ruled by the oppressive dictator, Nicolae CeauČ™escu. This incredibly cruel man was penned up in a single room with 10 siblings and was neglected by his parents. And when he rose to power he took his vengeance on the entire nation by forcing women to do what his mother did: “To have more children than they wanted or were able to care 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.”35
I don’t have any doubt that my decision not to have a baby was the best choice for me. Alice Miller says that “to force the role of a mother on a woman who does not wish to be a mother is an offense not just against her, but against the whole human community, because the child she brings into the world is likely to take criminal revenge for its birth, as do the many (mis)leaders threatening our lives. All wars we ever had were the deeds of once unwanted, heinously mistreated children. It is the right to lived life that we must protect wherever and whenever it is threatened. And it should never be sacrificed to an abstract idea.”36
I know if I had a child without freeing myself first from the vicious cycle I was in, I would have buried myself even deeper inside the lies and illusions that kept me from reaching my full potential. And, even worse, I would have taken an innocent child with me. My repression would have been complete and I would have passed it down to the next generation. I never would have had the opportunity to leave Portugal, and I always knew in my heart that in order to become free, I would have to leave home. After my abortion, I started spending time with a different crowd.
Things got even crazier. I hung out with two brothers who lived alone in the house of their dead parents. It was party central, the kind of place people went to score drugs and get laid. I used to steal food from my sisters and cook for these brothers and their drug-addicted friends. One of the brothers had a job, while the other one was an artist who stayed home all day. I slept with both of them, even though I should have said no to the artist. He snuck into his brother’s room one morning after his brother went to work and made his move on me. I should have stopped him, but he was absolutely gorgeous and I was in a bad place in my life. Sleeping with the artist just complicated things, and I knew it was a mistake as soon as it happened.
Before and since that experience, I’ve always been monogamous, but at this particular point in my life, I had lost all hope and was becoming too numb to really care anymore. I stayed around the brothers for about a year. The novelty of the situation was wearing off, and I knew I needed a change. It was hard being around drug addicts all the time. As Alice Miller writes, “Drug addiction begins with an attempt to escape parental control and to refuse to perform, but the repetition compulsion ultimately leads the addict to a constant concern with having to come up with large sums of money to provide the necessary ‘stuff,’ in other words, to a quite ‘bourgeois’ form of enslavement.”37 I didn’t know at the time that my friends were just using their addictions to repress their true feelings even further, but their behavior filled me with a certain sadness. As Alice Miller says, “Every kind of addiction is a way of escaping from the memories of one’s own painful life history.”38
While the brothers and their friends used drugs to escape, I knew plenty of people who took more accepted routes and used work, politics, religion and relationships the same way my new friends used sex, drugs and alcohol. Anyone who’s addicted to anything is revealing that they have a false self and that they can’t cope with repressed emotions triggered by present circumstances. Their addictions are proof that something is out of balance.
As the German-Swiss alchemist and physician Paracelsus established some 500 years ago, “Poison is in everything, and no thing is without poison. The dosage makes it either a poison or a remedy.”39 Alice Miller says that “every addict can overcome the addiction if she or he is really ready to confront their memories. The manipulative resources of the health care system do not help. As long as a person prefers to live in constant misery rather than face his own history, nobody can help him. But as long as someone remains uninformed of the other options available, we cannot know what she might be able to do once society stops encouraging her blindness. It is not just the will to free oneself from addiction that can really liberate a person, as is maintained by Alcoholics Anonymous; it is the will and the determination to find and resolve the causes of one’s addiction, which always lay hidden in childhood.”40
Intuitively, I knew that being dependent on drugs would make me a slave, and that was the last thing I wanted to be. I had enough oppressors. The only times I allowed myself to drink or do any sort of drug were when I was already feeling happy and strong. I was able to do these things in moderation, without getting addicted, because it was a social activity for me. I wasn’t using substances to numb my pain or avoid it in any way. In fact, I’ve always wanted to understand my pain and figure out where it was really coming from so I could resolve it. I never wanted to rely on drugs to alter my state of mind in order to function in the world.
My time with the brothers and my eighteen years as a topless dancer showed me all too clearly how dangerous drug abuse is. At Bourbon Street, I saw and heard the desperation of the other dancers. They became so hooked that they begged for drugs from their dealers or sugar daddies and promised just about anything in return if they didn’t have the money to pay for them. Fortunately, I had too much self-respect to go that route. When I finally stopped hanging out with the brothers and their friends, I was ready to move on to the next chapter in my life. And at about the same time, to add insult to injury, the pharmacy where I was getting birth control pills decided to stop giving them to me without a prescription.
I was so pissed off! Like Alice Miller, I saw this as a complete power play. It still bothers me to this day that any sexually active woman needs permission to get birth control.
As Alice Miller writes, “Conditioning and manipulation of others are always weapons and instruments in the hands of those in power, even if these weapons are disguised with the terms education and therapeutic treatment.”41 As I mentioned, sex and drugs were just two of the ways I saw the people around me repress their true feelings to avoid the pain of being unloved, neglected children. Religion was another biggie, especially in a country like Portugal. If people could only resolve their childhood repression, the power of religion over us all would crumble like a house of cards. Sadly, I keep witnessing people who, instead of having to face, see and feel the deep-seated traumas that have been passed down for generations, become obsessed with politics, religion or both. My family is a perfect example of this. They were very susceptible to cults and the repression they offered. Elza, for example, used to make us all pray the rosary every night before bed. She was very strict about it, but there was a funny side to it, too.
I think Elza suffered from a sleep disorder because whenever she sat down, she’d fall asleep pretty fast. So she’d start the rosary, pass out, wake up really quickly, and start over. This would go on for about an hour until she finally gave up. I don’t think we ever actually finished an entire rosary! When I was 15, Elza and Laura befriended a woman named Carolina. She was another nurse who worked at their clinic. Carolina also ran a spiritual center based on the books of Allan Kardec, the French founder of Spiritism. Kardec advanced the idea that the dead are still with us, controlling our thoughts and behavior. Elza and Laura were completely seduced by these occult theories because they gave my sisters an easy explanation for everything.
They could blame past lives and bad spirits for all their problems and absolve themselves of any responsibility for their own actions and decisions. They blamed my rebellious behavior on bad spirits and performed special cleansing rituals on me, hoping to make the demons go away. At first, I thought it was funny. Now I had an excuse to act badly! It wasn’t my fault: Those meddling spirits were controlling me against my will! I was helpless before their power over me! Of course I knew it was all a bunch of crap — and eventually the whole charade made me extremely angry. I couldn’t handle my sisters’ lies, their hypocrisy, and their ignorance.
I’ve heard all kinds of nonsense from them, things like “I chose my parents before I was born.” Or “My suffering is due to the bad things I did in a past life.” Or “If you’re tired and yawning, you must be thinking bad thoughts and attracting spirits from a low frequency.” In modern times, reasonable people don’t blame the devil or spirits or past lives for their problems. The extremes to which people go to avoid facing the pain of their own truth — even though such a confrontation would set them free — will never cease to amaze me.
“To many people,” Alice Miller says, “it seems easier to take medication, to smoke, drink alcohol, preach, educate or treat others, and prepare wars than expose themselves to their own painful truth.”42 The kinds of superstitions my sisters bought into, while completely crazy, were another way for them to assert their own sense of control — over themselves and over Isabel and me. When I was 20 years old, just after my abortion, it all started getting to me, and I began having nightmares. Carolina’s daughter, who was my age, told me once that she saw the spirit of an old woman floating on her bedroom ceiling. The image really spooked me, and I started incorporating it into my own dreams. Just before I fell asleep, I was convinced I could feel bad spirits around me. I wanted to move, but the spirits wouldn’t let me. I started to believe that the spirits returned as soon as I lost consciousness, leaving me paralyzed while they inhabited me. I was so sad and freaked out that I started wearing black most of the time. Fortunately, I was saved from this madness by going to London as an au pair. The nightmares went away as soon as I left Portugal because I stopped hearing my sisters’ crazy, repressive talk.
Worksheet: Start Taking the Power Away from Repression.
To protect ourselves from the fear caused by our childhood traumas, we repress our pain. While this may be an effective short-term solution, the long-term results can include lashing out at others, finding scapegoats, and losing ourselves in destructive addictions to things like alcohol, drugs, sex, work, religion, politics, and relationships. The first step toward breaking the vicious cycle of repression is to become aware of the real damage it’s causing in our lives.
1. What techniques might you be using to avoid feeling the pain of the child you once were? List any addictions, medicines, spiritual beliefs, and behaviors that might be getting in the way of discovering the true cause of your problems.
2. What do you believe would be the worst thing that could happen to you if you faced the fears you’ve been repressing?
27 Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, p. 110
28 For Your Own Good, p. 259 29 “The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society,” retrieved from: http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=41&grp=11
30 “The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society,” retrieved from: http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=41&grp=11
31 Teixeira da Silva, Helena, Noticias, 8-25-07. Retrieved 2013 from: http://entre-vidas.blogspot.com/2007/09/jlio-machado-vaz.html
32 Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, p. 80
33 Katherine, Anne. Boundaries: Where You End and I Begin, p. 87–88
34 Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, p. 115
35 The Truth Will Set You Free, p. 126–127
36 Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, p. 114
37 For Your Own Good, p. 133
38 The Drama of the Gifted Child (1994), p. 18
39 Retrieved from: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/p/ paracelsus.html
40 The Drama of the Gifted Child (1994), p. 18–19
41 For Your Own Good, p. 278
42 Banished Knowledge, p. 148
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