Celebrating an Unbroken Voice: An Introduction to Alice Miller’s Final Gift
Years ago, a reader of mine from Germany reached out with a revelation: before her passing in 2010, Alice Miller had compiled a final, profound piece of work. It was a collection of her direct, unfiltered answers to readers who had written to her from across the globe, seeking guidance on their healing journeys.
When Alice Miller attempted to publish this collection conventionally, her publisher turned her down, dismissing the material as "repetitive."
To that, I say: Alice Miller might repeat herself, but these truths remain absolutely essential so long as children everywhere are still being exploited, used as "poison containers," and abused by the adults around them. The core realities of childhood trauma must be endlessly and unapologetically repeated until society at large finally wakes up to the systemic danger of childhood repression. Refusing to stay silent, Alice Miller chose to bypass the traditional gatekeepers entirely, publishing the compilation as a free eBook directly on her website so her readers could access it without barriers.
For a long time, I have deeply desired to translate this text into English to share it with those who cannot read the original German. Today, with the invaluable collaborative assistance of AI, the massive hurdle of translation has finally been cleared. I am incredibly moved to present this vital work to my English-speaking readers for the very first time.
My deepest hope is that these pages serve as a companion for your own journey. May Alice Miller's unwavering clarity help you connect with, understand, and consciously feel the authentic emotions tied to your own childhood—ultimately liberating you from the emotional prison of past repression.
For those who read German and wish to experience her original words, you can find the complete text via the link below:
A Note on the Text: Beyond All Taboos
As you dive into the entries below, you will find Alice Miller at her most radical, compassionate, and fiercely partisan. She does not mince words, she does not coddle abusive histories, and she firmly stands by the side of the child you once were.
Here is the complete translation of Jenseits der Tabus (Beyond All Taboos), pages 2 through 88:
Alice Miller Beyond All Taboos Selected Responses to Letters from Readers
© 2009 Alice Miller All rights reserved
Foreword
In my book For Your Own Good (1980), I used several examples to demonstrate the catastrophic consequences that can result from denying the abuse suffered in childhood. Thanks to these investigations, I came to understand that even the most cruel criminals were, as children, victims of severe abuse by their parents—abuse that they, out of panic and fear, never dared to question.
Since then, among my numerous letters from readers, voices have emerged from survivors of extreme torture who, encouraged by my books, are attempting as adults to give up their denial today, even if very tentatively at first. In their first letters to my mailbox, they describe what was done to them in their childhood by their parents almost devoid of feeling, without indignation; they stick only to the facts.
Now, over time, it turns out that the mere act of telling their story sets a process in motion for most of them that allows them to experience their true, previously suppressed feelings, and in this way free themselves from often severe chronic symptoms. In my replies to the letters, I accompany this process by encouraging the child within the survivor of torture to rebel against the cruelty of the parents. With the support of my books and my personal answers to their letters, those who write eventually find the strength to no longer evade their tragic history, and the courage to take their truth seriously for the first time in their lives. This leads to an astonishing, but completely understandable, strengthening of self-awareness, to internal clarification, and to liberation from the child's fear of the all-powerful, threatening parents. It is logically consistent that this process also leads to liberation from numerous symptoms such as depression, migraines, addictions, and eating disorders, which signaled the distress of the body in which the childhood history was previously stored. With emotional access to this history, the lives of those affected change fundamentally, even if the wounds once suffered leave behind their more or less visible scars.
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This is not therapy in the usual sense. Rather, based on the facts provided to me, I explain how the denied suffering arose and how one can free oneself from it if one is willing to take on the inner work. Of course, this work is preceded by reading my books, which makes my explanations easier to understand. Nevertheless, I am so surprised by the unusually positive results that I absolutely want to report on them.
For this reason, I am publishing here some of my replies to readers from the last two years that are particularly important to me because, through a direct, unambiguous language, they enabled people to gain access to their authentic feelings and to their personal truth, and also allowed them to express their justified anger over the abuse by their parents. Only the conscious experience of this anger gradually diminishes the fear of the early parents and thereby leads to growing clarity about one's own history. I hope that, thanks to this collection of my responses, suffering people can give themselves encouragement—the encouragement to make themselves independent not only of their parents and their opinions, but also of the prevailing opinions about upbringing, and to trust the voice of the child within them and its feelings.
Every letter I have answered here is permeated by the fear of the small child before the newly angered parents who beat them more or less frequently. This fear "resides" in the body of the adult all their life and can have a destructive effect throughout their life as long as it remains in the unconscious, because there it cannot be resolved. This fear owes its origin to the treatment by the parents, to their psychological and physical cruelty that the child had to experience in the first four years, during the time when their brain was forming. At this age, almost all of us learned that beatings were good for us. We had to learn that our parents and grandparents were wiser and better than us, and that we should admire and imitate them. As children, we had no way of ever questioning such assertions, because we desperately needed the illusion of our parents' love to survive.
Namely, the prevailing attitudes also include what I call the "cult of the ancestors" (Ahnenkult), which the collection published here also indirectly illustrates. Some people whose parents were particularly cruel not only continue to idealize them ("They only beat me for my own good," "They didn't know any better"), but actually practice a literal cult around their deceased parents. One can say that these parents are revered like "gods."
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An impressive example of this is the Austrian Josef Fritzl, who locked his daughter in a cellar for years and fathered seven children with her, some of whom he also kept imprisoned in the cellar. In court, as well as in conversations with his lawyer, Fritzl never tired of paying homage to his brutal and perverse mother, who had kept him like a slave as a child.
The ancestors were also children once and needed the recognition of their parents, which they missed while being raised in humility and obedience. Only as adults could they DEMAND this recognition, admiration, and willingness to sacrifice from their offspring, likewise with violence, in order to make up for what they had missed. In many cultures, adolescents are subjected to brutal abuse called initiation rituals. Here, the most natural emotions like fear and rebellion must be suppressed if one wants to be recognized as a man, because the will of the ancestors has demanded this of the youth for millennia. In Western culture, this exercise of power by the ancestors plays out less obviously, but the emotional terror of ancestors starved for love and respect can be observed in very many families. Should just one person attempt to see through it, they are usually cast out by all members and treated as a traitor. Psychiatric institutions have always harbbed victims of such persecution, among them several artists whose works were later admired. Today, they help families render their "dangerous attackers" harmless with the help of medication, so that family secrets, especially the sexual abuse of children, do not reach the public.
Yet the public still seems incapable of feeling outraged about child abuse, let alone understanding its consequences. In the case of mass shootings (Amokläufen), which are multiplying, it is generally asserted that the "motives" of the perpetrator are absolutely incomprehensible, and recently it is repeatedly claimed that the loss of a job due to the economic crisis led to "this act of desperation." Apparently, it is completely unknown to almost all people that a mass shooter has been "living" with time bombs in his brain since his torturous childhood, until these bombs explode.
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The answers published here are addressed to people who saw through this system and who, despite their fear, found the courage not to submit to the power, not to let themselves be confused by the lies of the family, but instead to develop their emotional honesty.
Thanks to the reports of these people, I owe a knowledge of the momentous suffering of children under their parents that I never would have held possible. On today's television, but also in the ENTIRE world literature, we have been and are shown what bestialities man is capable of. But the roots of this cruelty in childhood are generally kept secret, leaving the causes of violence in the dark.
On my website, however, precisely these causes are addressed. What is forbidden worldwide is named here. The causes of human suffering are not hinted at here in symbols, nor with the help of poetry and fiction; neither is an abstract environment of the child spoken of, as in classical therapies, regarding its important "caregivers," but instead real FACTS are reported, without glossing over them. It is told, with sadness and rage, what father and mother DID. And lo and behold: thanks to this concrete reference to reality, the body experiences its liberation.
It can finally function normally; it does not need to create symptoms, it no longer needs to remind its owner of the truth, it no longer has to be the guardian of family secrets, because its owner is now ready to know their history and can draw from it the strength they need to no longer let themselves be confused.
In Spiegel Online from November 1, 2008, I read a report about fourteen million Germans over the age of sixty who are only now suffering from the traumas they experienced during the war and post-war period. They had mastered their lives well up to now, had married, founded families, and were successful in business; only now, however, do they suffer from sleep disorders and depression.
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In dreams, they are haunted by memories from childhood that they had not thought about for decades: of bomb attacks, the ruthlessness of occupying soldiers, hunger, and much more. The psychological expert explains this phenomenon with the rapid loss of certain neurons in old age, which in younger people cause the forgetting of traumas. That may well be true, but I think that the decline in physical strength and increasing helplessness certainly also contribute to the body remembering the time of its childhood helplessness.
The circumstance may also have played a role that older people no longer have the opportunity, as they did in the past, to compensate for the traumatic experiences of childhood powerlessness by exercising power over their own small children and venting their resentment on them, because these children, having since left the house, are no longer so completely dependent on them.
In any case, it turns out that these suffering people experience great relief when therapies help them to experience their REPRESSED memories. The letter-writers to my mailbox have discovered precisely this positive role of memories as well. But, unlike the fourteen million former war children, they did not suffer under bombs and occupying powers, but under their own parents. That is why they found no help in their therapy attempts, which often lasted twenty or thirty years. Almost always, their therapists protected the parents, were unable to emotionally accompany the patients as empathetic witnesses, and therefore the therapies did not help.
Suffering from war is not a taboo, but the truth about the endured torments of child abuse still is. And it is not enough to "work through" individual traumas to resolve their consequences if therapists are afraid of their patients' anger toward the real parents, who often made their lives a living hell for twenty years. This is not about memories of individual events, but about a years-long existence in prisons in which the tormentors were expected to be loved and respected.
It is obvious that access to traumatic memories, and with it the resolution of their consequences in therapies, would be eased if the whole of society were not permeated by the cult of the ancestors. In order for former victims of child abuse to find their repressed emotions and thereby also their memories in therapy, and to be allowed to rebel against the mercilessness of their parents, they need the indignation (Empörung) of their therapists (cf. my article on my website: "Indignation as a Vehicle of Therapy"). If, however, the therapists stand under the commandment of the cult of the ancestors, they will always protect the parents and thus make the healing process impossible.
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We must free ourselves from the cult of the ancestors by recognizing that it not only causes illnesses by forcing us to repress true feelings, but also hinders the healing of illnesses by preventing therapists from perceiving the outrageous childhood reality of their patients. Besides the cult of the ancestors, we are also paralyzed by the fear of our own parents, of their expected punishment that would have threatened us if we had dared to rebel against cruelties. This fear of angering the parents, stored very early on, later blocks—often for decades—both our perception of the truth and our protests against the lies and confusions.
My answers to the correspondence attempt to free survivors of abuse from this fear by clarifying the origin of the fear for them.
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Responses to Readers
MAY 2007
07 Letters to the Parents Presumably, the child within you is still terrified of your mother, who wanted to kill you. This fear prevented you from reading the letter aloud yourself, and this fear still seems to haunt you. Try reading your letter aloud in therapy after all, in order to consciously experience this fear as an adult, in the presence of your therapist, by whom you feel protected and understood. Perhaps you will then also find the courage to allow yourself to feel the rage. As you can see, simply sending the letter accomplishes nothing—nothing is overcome by it. Only the experience of the fear and the rage will free you from your mother, and also from the expectation of receiving love and understanding from her.
08 The Language of Rage You asked the child a question, and it answered you. Unambiguously. You do not like the answer—the rage—and it makes the child still fear punishment. But it contains the truth. And as an adult, you will not be punished; instead, you will free yourself from your symptoms. You have dared to take an important step and will see for yourself what it brings you.
15 The Therapists' Fear of Criticism I can understand your indignation, but I am surprised that you want to make the truth heard in the exact place where it is forbidden to see and name the truth about child abuse. Psychoanalysis was, after all, created to cover up Freud's "slip-up" of 1896, and the successors of all schools of thought seem to remain faithful to this taboo—out of the fear that the once-beaten children have of their parents, a fear that permeates not only our Western society but every society known to me.
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Therefore, I also consider even the most logical arguments and discussions to be useless, as long as we do not confront the origin of this disastrous denial: the beating of children.
17 Human Rights Organizations and Child Abuse We share your indignation over the recommendation of the WHO and over the indifference of Amnesty Germany. The latter does not surprise me, because I know that appeals to Amnesty regarding child abuse are rarely answered, not only in Germany but also in other countries. These organizations apparently do not yet have a "department" for children, or they view the torment of children as something completely normal. I consider the circumcision of children—whether for religious or other reasons—to be a cruel barbarism.
18 Colin Goldner Thank you very much for pointing out the writings of Colin Goldner, who exposes the danger of the seemingly harmless infatuation with irrational, esoteric, and "spiritual" "wisdom." I read the texts on his website with relief, because finally there is someone who does not allow himself to be co-opted by this currently spectacular deception business. Finally, there are also authors (even if unfortunately not many) who do not shrink from taking a closer look at people like the Dalai Lama, their activities, and their circle of friends, and exposing political interests that remain hidden behind the sweet-sounding "theories." The fact that the Dalai Lama was, or possibly still is, friends with the dangerous Japanese cult leader should force many people to think. But this does not happen, because the Dalai Lama has assumed the position of the unshakeable father, before whom one falls to one's knees and whom one must never question. It is a pity that Goldner nowhere mentions the origin of this attitude, which in my opinion lies in the abuse of the child and the necessity of denial. Without this background history, the extent of the mystification and manipulation (Verdummung) that brings in so much money to these businessmen would hardly be possible.
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23 Admitting Mistakes to the Child Have you already tried telling your son that it was a mistake to hit him, that you did not know back then, and that you only know now how harmful it is? You can promise him never to do it again and ask him to remind you of this promise if you should ever "lose your patience" again. You can write to us and tell us how he reacted to it.
24 Resolving the Separation from Oneself I was very pleased with your letter because you succeeded in bringing the child out of the lonely room and keeping it with you now. And because you were able to realize emotionally, and not just intellectually, how much this enriches and deepens your life.
25 My Experience with "Poisonous Pedagogy" It is good for you, and helpful for others, that you see through the perfidious nature of what is called upbringing and were able to describe it so vividly. Our readers will see from this how their parents were able to take revenge on them for the torments of their own childhood, without having to take responsibility for their desires for revenge—because the "beautiful" custom gives them permission to act unconsciously. Millions of customs throughout the entire world give adults this legitimacy, especially the initiation rituals that strike terrifying fears into children. For us, this theater plays out around Christmas time, where Saint Nicholas helps parents thoughtlessly reenact their own history of fear with a good conscience and at the expense of their children.
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JUNE 2007
01 The Massive Revolt of the Body I think that fibromyalgia belongs to those illnesses that express, in a very massive way, the mental and emotional pain once suffered but denied. Fortunately, as an adult, you can already understand this language of the body. Yet the child who was so cruelly tortured, and who continues to live inside you, presumably still trembles with fear of your terrible mother and does not allow itself to be indignant about this torture. If you succeed in feeling this indignation and standing by the child in its fear, the illness will leave you. After all, it only protects your mother from your rage and indignation over so much cruelty. And your supposed helpers did the same; they allied themselves with the mother against the child. To forgive this mother would mean saying YES to your illness. I hope that you can say a clear NO by no longer having to evade your truth.
05 The Awakening It is good for your child that you have already understood so much. Putting it into practice is not always easy, but you will learn many important things from your child, since you are letting them grow up without beatings and humiliations, and you want to remain open to your painful memories. A child who suddenly stops speaking must have experienced something very terrible. I wish you much courage for this truth.
07 Standing Up for the Future I am so glad that you "stand up where others remain seated." You are absolutely right: child abuse is never just a family matter. In my opinion, the beating of children is like an industry where future abusers are produced with the permission of the entire society, all governments, and all religions.
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09 Children as "Aliens" Parents experience their children as "aliens"—as threatening, evil, foreign—ONLY IF they themselves were experienced this way as children and refuse to admit it at any price. Then they fight their children, and if they do not have any, they speculate endlessly about the origin of evil in religions, philosophies, and myths. All of this just so they do not have to see the terrible history of their childhood and feel the rage of the persecuted, humiliated, hated, deceived, lied-to, confused child. Everything seems easier for them to bear than the truth. Perhaps it is so for many, especially if they do not know the price they are paying for it.
Children who grew up with respect never felt like "aliens" and do not produce horror movies later on. Today, this industry of confusion flourishes thanks to television, where people are kept believing that extreme cruelty belongs to normal life (and can even express "love," as a celebrated director said in an interview). But that is not true. Only as children did we have to believe that, because we had no other choice. As adults, we forfeit our sanity ("WE DRIVE OURSELVES OUT OF OUR MINDS") if we believe it.
11 The Child's Fear You cannot feel any indignation? Not even against the "Family Constellation" practitioner who violated you, and whom you allowed to do so because the tortured child within you was so terribly afraid to resist?
12 What Purpose Theories Serve Thank you very much for your addition. I agree with you. If we can allow the simple but painful truth without glossing over it, we do not need theories. The light becomes clearer. But sometimes the truth is so horrifying that we need a lot of time before we can fully allow it. In the meantime, theories serve us as crutches.
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13 Defensive and Aggressive Boundaries I cannot answer your question because I do not think in such terms. Even the idea that one must set boundaries for a child is foreign to me, because it assumes that one cannot escape power structures. That is not my opinion; I think one can communicate with a child better, more freely, and more meaningfully without these inherited structures and prohibitions of poisonous pedagogy (schwarze Pädagogik).
13 The Truth in (Fantasy) Movies You are, of course, free to look for the coded expression of truth in art; I partially do the same when I paint abstract pictures. But I believe that film offers a great opportunity to expose the reality of the child in the prison of power-obsessed parents, and that it could open the eyes of many people. It is a pity that few filmmakers have the courage to present this reality uncoded; they also lack the necessary awareness that you apparently possess. However, I do not share your fear that uncoded films would find no viewers.
14 Indignation Over a Family Constellation Practitioner 2 A child cannot feel indignation when it is being violated; it is too deeply terrified and must submit to the violence. Any resistance would mean mortal danger. Unfortunately, this child continues to live on within most of us with its fear unchanged, because we had no opportunity to say NO in our childhood, and we continue to persist in this system. But now you have experienced that, as an adult, you could allow the indignation and did not have to die from it. In this way, you were able to leave the system in which most people live and function—and unfortunately, in which they also "conduct therapy" in this manner, as long as clients continue to let themselves be violated like terrified children by gurus of every stripe.
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15 The System of Upbringing You write: "A child should simply be allowed to be what it is and develop among adult human beings." I completely agree with you on that.
If parents knew how they themselves had been tormented as children, they would immediately understand this sentence of yours and give their children what they need. But most parents are afraid to feel the torments of their childhood and to rebel against them. Instead, they torment their children in the exact same manner that was done to them, call it upbringing, and consider this to be normal and correct. For this purpose, they utilize various theories, often supplied by professionals who still live and offer counsel entirely within the system of poisonous pedagogy (Schwarze Pädagogik)—a system from which they do not dare to break out, likewise out of fear of their own parents.
16 Standing by One's Own Feelings Before you (have to?) leave the daycare center, you can use it as a training ground to develop your courage to resist the nonsense of poisonous pedagogy, and to speak your mind—all the things you were not allowed to do with your parents. You will certainly feel the fear of the small child, but you will endure it, because now you are not in danger; you have a loving family, and you are an adult. You know that what you are saying is right, and you no longer need to let yourself be confused and insecure like a child. The physical symptoms will disappear as soon as you dare to express your feelings. I consider it an illusion to believe that hypnosis can help you "cope with everything," an illusion that, by the way, is not harmless. Yoga is the exact opposite of what I mean; yoga serves to calm things down where restlessness reigns—and not without reason. The point is to UNDERSTAND this restlessness and to give it expression, even if it contains a rage, because that rage is healing.
16 Alleged Love It is deeply excruciating to have to believe in love when you can clearly feel that the assurances of love are deceitful because the facts expose the lie (a child being left alone in the hospital for four weeks, for example).
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A child cannot afford to perceive this feeling and hold it to be true. But as an adult, you have dared to take this step, and now you no longer need my books; that seems entirely consistent and logical to me. I rejoice with you that you have succeeded in taking your feelings seriously.
18 Having to Grow Up Without Empathy This is even worse than poisonous pedagogy (Schwarze Pädagogik). This is an absolute lack of compassion for one's own child, who has just escaped death. You were only able to sense this lack of empathy when, through reading the books, you began to feel that you were entitled to this empathy. How terribly a child must suffer when it cannot allow this need to surface at all, out of sheer fear of being punished. Thank you for your letter; presumably, many will find themselves in your story, although it is very extreme and seems almost sadistic.
20 When a Child is Silent 2 Back then, I wrote to you: "A child who suddenly stops speaking must have experienced something very terrible. I wish you much courage for this truth." With that, I wanted to draw your attention to the suffering of your childhood, but you do not yet seem to want to hear this sentence. Take your time; the bleeding has already spoken, after all. The child will find the words when it senses your protection. Then it will gradually free itself from the fear. Trust your feelings, take them seriously, and no longer ask "what is proper."
20 Traumatic Therapy You write: "I have strong feelings of guilt because I PUT MYSELF into this situation, and took no responsibility for myself when I had the chance."
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You describe very clearly and comprehensibly how this man treated you, how he did not respond in the slightest to your fears, your written life history, your person, or your presence, yet you feel guilty. Why? Could it be that, even as a child, you had to learn to blame yourself for cruelties (such as extreme withholding of contact, for example) and absolutely never react to them with rage? Because rage with your parents meant mortal danger?
23 Family Constellations You write that you have read all of my books, but if you had read even a single book of mine with open eyes, you would surely know how I think about poisonous pedagogy (Schwarze Pädagogik). How does it happen that you still do not recognize it, even in its blackest form? Is it your mother's maxims that prevent you from this realization—despite reading my books?
23 Protecting Oneself Today You are on the way to noticing, and that will protect you. It is true: no child chose to be abused. People are fed this nonsense when they do not want to notice, at any price, how terribly they were mistreated. You cannot force them to open their eyes if they do not want to. But one must protect oneself from remaining dependent on these people. That is why, for example, a divorce can mean a great opportunity—in certain cases, most definitely.
24 Fear and Rage You could hardly describe your situation any better. And this description applies to very many people. You are afraid of your rage because it was forbidden to you. You would like to experience it now because you have understood its purpose and, at least theoretically, you know that today no dangers threaten you if you show your rage. You also know that it would relieve your body if you dare to express your
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rage and to understand it as justified. Yet the completely understandable fear of the little boy seems to be greater than your insight, especially since both the fear and the rage are suppressed by the medications and therefore cannot be consciously experienced. But without medications, the fear could be gradually allowed, experienced, and understood. Then the path opens up to the rage that has been waiting for a long time to be set free, in order to free you. Ask the little boy you once were what scares him so much, what he fears would happen if you were to allow the rage. He will surely give you a precise answer. You can rely on the fact that he does not lie. It only remains for you to take his answer seriously.
24 Blind Spots Congratulations, you have understood: better to be uncomfortable than to suffer from migraines, right?
26 Revolt of the Body You write: "As I said, I want to do everything to support this well-behaved and submissive child within me. Could you perhaps give me some advice on how I could deal with this condition more easily?" Unfortunately, I cannot do that, because I want to support the rebelling child within you, the one who was never allowed to defend itself—and not the well-behaved one that brings you so many symptoms.
28 It Really is a Miracle I congratulate you on your success and thank you for letting us have this letter for publication. It will encourage many people to walk the path they have always wanted to walk, but feared they could not manage and would be punished for.
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Your story shows that one can endure the fear, allow the truth, and thereby gain new strength for liberation. I rejoice with you over this success.
29 Indignation as the First Step You ask: "Can I trust that if I question things, carry out inner dialogues with my parents from the perspective of today's adult (only for myself, because I no longer want any contact), and defend myself against their cruelties, I will then get a little more strength for life? Is indignation a process that sets in when one begins to defend the soul of the child? Does one's own dignity then gradually return—my feelings that I can live out?" I can absolutely answer 'yes' to all of these questions; you have understood me very well, and now I wish you the courage to try out these paths. Your fear will most certainly decrease, because thanks to you as an adult, the child will receive the communication that it always needed and that it tragically never received.
JULY 2007
01 Suffering and Rage It borders on a miracle that you succeeded in protecting your true essence and did not inflict upon yourself the hatred, malice, coldness, and deceitfulness that you experienced from your environment. Very often, after all, we treat ourselves today exactly as we were treated as children. I think that you will continue to accompany your child with your honesty and wisdom, even when it shows you its justified rage toward your parents and the therapist. If the hatred persists, you will surely be able to choose actions that express your strong feelings without letting fear hold you back. The therapist exploited and deceived you; it may be that you do not want to be satisfied with his silence. And why should you be? You paid for a deception and a massive abuse; you have every right to demand the money back from him if you can prove the obvious abuse. And this seems possible for you.
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03 Klaus Barbie Thank you very much for your important letter and the copy of the Spiegel article, which is truly telling. One gets the impression that monsters like Barbie fall from the sky and had no history at all that could explain their actions. I would love to write to Spiegel and draw the editorial team's attention to the fact that they owe readers more than just such horrifying information without providing the slightest reflection on it. However, in all similar cases, the editorial team has left my attempts to point out the consequences of child abuse unutilized. Apparently, here as in the entire press, a strict taboo exists; this topic must not be touched. Since all people had parents and most were beaten, they apparently still live with the small child's fear of the next beating and fear this topic above everything else. Thus we live with a chain of violence that could absolutely be broken if a few people in the press had the courage to ask themselves the simplest questions: How are people like Barbie created? Why do the press and other media never speak about the nests of violence that are built undisturbed within families, and out of which monsters later grow, to everyone's wonder? Their deeds are described far and wide as "genetically determined," and humanity can quietly continue its sleep. But in order to break the chain of violence, we only need to open our eyes and want to see the hitherto hidden school of violence in childhood and its dynamics.
04 Will I Make It? You have already made it—you SURVIVED the horror and the mortal terror. And back then, you were so small. Now you are an adult, and you want to experience (erleben) your history. You can do that, and today, no danger threatens you, even if it feels that way.
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You state clearly that you want to get to know, feel, and understand your history. Therefore, based on your letter, I have no doubt that you can do it, and that these experiences will free you from a great deal of pain and insecurity. Do not let yourself be confused by "spiritual" speculations in order to evade the truth. Seeing the truth will save you, not fleeing from it. And the pain does not last forever if one wants to understand its REAL reason. And that is exactly what you want. Some therapists do help patients experience strong feelings, but they shrink from empathizing with the terrible, REAL distress of an abandoned infant and offer various theories instead. In doing so, they confuse the patients and leave them circling in their unresolved pain, out of which the theories offer alleged solutions. You are well on your way to not letting yourself be confused.
07 Better Without Parents Than Sick? You are absolutely right: better without parents than sick. You quote a book that I wrote more than ten years ago, when I did not yet have the clarity and experience that I possess now. I, too, had to free myself from the constraints of morality that weighed on me for so long and clouded my thinking. You are well on your way; do not let yourself be made insecure—not even by me or by the old editions of my books. The new edition is coming out now as a paperback, which no longer contains any of those earlier compromises. After all, I did not grow up with my current knowledge; I had to conquer it for myself over time, even though I presumably sensed the truth as a child but, like every beaten child, was afraid to take it fully and completely seriously, especially since no one stood by me.
08 TV Experiment and One's Own Experience You ask me for my opinions on your "observations, conclusions, conjectures." But you were describing YOUR experience. How DID YOU FEEL when you saw the child—the child with heartbreaking screams, turned bright red and desperate, the loneliest creature in the world? And how do you feel NOW with this memory?
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This mother, like many parents, lives CONSTANTLY in her traumatic past, which she does not know and does not want to know. Therefore, she cannot have the slightest empathy for her child; she can neither perceive nor fulfill his emotional needs. She sees the little boy like a robot who is supposed to obey her and fit into her world. I can understand that it shocked you to witness this as an adult. Many of us were victims of such mothers, and as children, we were not even shocked; we considered this attitude to be normal because we knew nothing else. Only as adults can we feel indignation.
21 Depression I think that depression also gives us an opportunity. In your case, it would mean not only knowing, but also FEELING what it meant for you as a child to live with and believe in the love of a mother who wanted to KILL you. If you allow your true feelings to surface—the rage, the indignation, and the desperation—your depression will leave you.
22 Hatred and Rage In your case, I consider it a stroke of genius to get the two parrots. Most people have children in order to repeat their history with their parents. But unlike you, they do not give it any thought; they beat their rage into their children, thereby damaging them for life.
You had a severely sadistic father who, for two hours, sawed away at his child's—your brother's—beloved toy with satisfaction and joy. What did you, too, have to suffer from this monster? You write nothing about that, presumably out of fear of his revenge. It is no wonder that you hold your rage inside your body for decades, thereby poisoning it, out of a panicky fear of your mother's WHITE-HOT ANGER and the punishments you would have had to endure for every word that was not WELL-BEHAVED (artig).
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The two parrots have to endure something, to be sure, but they seem to defend themselves quite well. You, meanwhile, they help enormously to get in touch with your rage and thereby free your true self from the horrifying, understandable fear of the child you once were. In this way, you get the chance to experience your true emotions—your absolutely justified anger—and to become emotionally healthy. Thanks to the birds, you can observe exactly what happened in your childhood and how a free child should have reacted to it if it had not been brutally prevented from doing so, if it had not grown up in mortal terror. This ought to help you get rid of your guilt feelings and dare to drive your cruel mother to white-hot anger, because firstly, she has thoroughly deserved your reaction, and secondly, her white-hot anger was not directed at you, but at her own parents. You were the innocent trigger. You already possess a great deal of insight; I wish you the courage to put it into practice.
Today, absolutely NO dangers threaten you from your parents—at most, only from the destructive traditional morality. But you will put a stop to that as well, perhaps with the help of your parrots, which you might still need for a little while longer until you have become COMPLETELY free from the guilt feelings.
23 My Memories Of course you may trust your memories; I think you even must do so if you want to free yourself from your almost lifelong, tragic self-deception in order to get well.
26 Acknowledging the Truth When one reads your mother's short, horrifying letter—which you (rightly) do not want published—one has to wonder how you succeeded in saving your life to the extent that you have managed up to now. You want to go even further, although you know that you must expect pain, but you will make it; there is absolutely no doubt about that. Because you need your truth and do not want to lie to yourself under any circumstances just to make it easier for others to lie. I wish you much strength for action. You already have the courage to see.
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30 Critique of Religion in Alice Miller's Books Certainly, it would be good if the Church were interested in new scientific discoveries, because it has an enormous influence on schools and upbringing; but unfortunately, it is not in the least bit interested in these discoveries. I have proof of this, because all of my years-long attempts to inform the Vatican about the new findings of neurobiology and the harmfulness of beating children fell on deaf ears. I do not engage in a "critique of the Christian religion"—I leave that to others who possess more competence in that area than I do. I am only deeply indignant, even horrified, by the fact that the Church has NEVER spoken out against the beating of children. Quite the contrary: in the course of the two thousand years since the birth of Christ, children were beaten so that God might find favor in them, and NO ONE rebelled against it.
But today we have alarming information about the consequences of such practices, and the scandal can no longer be kept secret. Neurobiologists have discovered that the brain of a beaten child shows lesions that can be clearly seen on monitors. Thus, it is finally scientifically proven that the beating of small children under the age of four—at the time when the brain is structuring itself—DESTROYS their capacity for EMPATHY, and thus contributes to the production of violent adolescents and adults.
It is high time that the Vatican takes note of this, that it gets serious with its frequently used words like brotherly love (Nächstenliebe) and peacefulness, and calls for non-violence in upbringing after 2000 years of blindness, mercilessness, and indifference to childhood suffering. This absolutely must happen so that more people can grow up with the capacity for empathy—people who will not need wars or genocides, nor hypocrisy, to compensate for a self-esteem that was damaged very early on. These people will have the courage to PUBLICLY combat the hidden production of violence within families.
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31 But I Am Not an Evil Person No, you are not an evil person. They demanded the inhuman of you; they wanted to steal your true feelings and force false ones upon you. THAT IS EVIL. It is good that now, thanks to your tears, you are discovering the genuine child—the one who was not allowed to have its feelings and who was overwhelmed beyond measure with responsibility. I hope that my new book will not only bring back your forbidden tears and, above all, the forbidden, justified RAGE held back in your body, but can also give you the full validation that you are on the right path. You have the right to lead YOUR OWN LIFE and to be joyful and happy. You do not need to take on the fate of someone else. This demand by your parents is unreasonable and absolutely unjustified.
AUGUST 2007
01 Interrupting the Vicious Circle That all sounds very good. The important thing is that you now seem to know exactly where the poison lies, that you are learning to protect yourself from it, and that you no longer want to let yourself be deceived about it with medications and beautiful-sounding words. Your intense rage toward the children was actually directed at your parents, who humiliated you so much, as you write; but feeling that made you afraid, especially since your parents acted—and apparently still act—as if nothing had happened. Your daughters seem to believe this facade, and you would so love to be able to do so too. It is good that your therapist does not let herself be deceived.
06 You Are Worthless Read your letter to me A FEW TIMES until you almost choke on it. Then ask yourself who talked to you like that, and what kind of feelings that triggers in you. Then write to this person what you feel (not think). And if you feel an irrepressible rage, then you should know that it is absolutely justified and
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has been waiting for a long time for you to finally listen to your body and your rage, and not to the "systems."
10 Finally Letting Go of Cruelty It is a long road, isn't it, until there are no more doubts, no new illusions, until it is completely clear: I am not a doormat, and I will never let myself be treated that way again. You have walked this path; I congratulate you on that. A woman recently wrote: "After all, you don't put your hand back where you burned it." You seem to have realized the same thing.
11 Sexual Abuse? I think that a total lack of physical contact cannot be labeled as sexual abuse, as tragic as it is to grow up in such an atmosphere. Yet the coldness and the lack of tenderness do not necessarily mean that the child was free from sexual abuse, which may have remained completely repressed. Sexual abuse occurs precisely in families where NO tender feelings for the child exist. Could it be that your fears of contact point to something you cannot remember because it was so painful and terrifying?
14 Without Medications You have chosen life and want to stop merely functioning. You will achieve that, too, if you no longer let yourself be forced to function by medications.
18 Pope Benedict's Christmas Sermon If the Pope wanted to take his own words seriously, he would have informed young parents long ago that children who are beaten under the age of four show lesions in the brain that establish a foundation for a violent development
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responsible. A single, unambiguous declaration by the Pope could spare hundreds of millions of children and future adults unspeakable, lifelong suffering, and protect society from the unsuspecting production of future criminals. His refusal to do this—to use his authority for this good cause—is incomprehensible. How can one use the word "love" over and over again and refuse to see that a violent upbringing destroys, and actually kills, the capacity for love and empathy in the first years of life? Perhaps you, as an enlightened representative of the younger generation, will write a petition to the Pope and try to inform him about this?
I have sent my letters not only to the previous Pope but also to the current one, of course. From the former, I at least received an inquiry asking what I thought could be done; but to my advice to inform young parents about the harmfulness of beating children, I never received an answer. From the current Pope, on the other hand, I received absolutely no reaction to all of my information material, and no statement regarding my urgent plea for intervention on behalf of abused children.
21 I Do Not Want to Live Without Emotions You already know what you are defending yourself against, but you are in a panicky fear of this knowledge. Your mother could not tolerate your tears. Thus, the little girl had to suppress her feelings in order to survive. It is no wonder that you get scared now when your strong feelings surface. Yet it is precisely these feelings that make up your essence, your life, your wealth, and your creativity. No one can forbid them to you today—except you yourself, if you imitate your mother. Your mother suppressed your feelings, and that is like a murder of the soul (Seelenmord). Fortunately, she did not succeed in this murder; your life is making itself known. You will endure your fear because today you are stronger than this fear.
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28 The Truth of Feelings The fatigue is a sign that you want to suppress your feelings—which, fortunately, are already clearly present—because this therapist confuses you, likely because your feelings scare her (reminding her of her own). This woman, with her theories, is a danger to you. You need a different kind of support.
Trust your feelings; they are your friends and helpers on the way to your truth. The panic attacks show that, as a child, you had reason to fear your mother, but now she can no longer confuse you—unless you allow your therapist to do it in the mother's place. You do not need behavioral therapy, because you are already so close to the truth: that you experienced no love as a child. Now, as an adult, you can endure it and do not need to let yourself be TALKED OUT OF YOUR TRUTH.
28 Feeling Anger and Rage Your letter shows how one can help oneself when one gives oneself permission to try something out and can learn more about oneself from it. Writing can indeed be a great help because feelings that have been precisely expressed, and whose justification has been understood, make room for new feelings. In this way, needs also become clearer, and the ways to fulfill them will take on more concrete forms.
29 Can One Also Repress Good Memories? I wouldn’t know why one would need to repress beautiful memories. After all, it is only pain that forced us into repression. But the thought that there was so little or nothing good is, of course, also painful. Therefore, you are perhaps looking for "literature." It is wonderful that you have the courage to allow the truth and to live your feelings. The fear of your own liveliness hindered you for so long because you were begrudged that liveliness—and life in general, freedom, and joy. How could beautiful experiences have been possible under those circumstances? Perhaps at most experiences in nature, which were not threatening?
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30 I Could Write a Book About My Life You have understood and seen through as much as only a few people who had to suffer so much ever dare to. Because they are afraid. Why shouldn't you "fill a book with it" if you feel like doing so? It could certainly help many people open their eyes, and give them the courage to speak out as well and describe their experiences with parents and therapists. Many could find their own history in your book, because you write very clearly and courageously.
SEPTEMBER 2007
07 Memories Hide, Perhaps for Good Reason You are right; we do not allow too many memories to surface out of fear of the pain and our rage, which was severely punished in childhood. But today, your father can no longer punish you—unless you allow him to. You have MANY memories, and you do not need any more at all in order to rebel against your father's bizarre, controlling, and unpredictable behavior. What you know is fully sufficient, but your fear (which is no longer justified today) prevents you from taking this knowledge seriously.
In your previous letter in French, you told how your father suddenly wanted to attack your brother and injured your mother in the process. Such a father strikes panicky fear into a child, fear that must be repressed; and it is this repressed fear of the little boy that holds back your suppressed rage and prevents you from revolting. Perhaps you can explain to the terrified child within you that the father no longer has any power today, so that the child can allow you to feel the irrepressible rage that has been waiting in his body for twenty years to finally be EXPERIENCED, understood, and expressed, so that the body can free itself. If you have the book The Revolt of the Body, I would recommend that you read the chapter on Friedrich von Schiller closely—especially the pages about the switchings and torments (Schikanen) by the father, who, for example, demanded that the children stop eating when the
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dish tasted particularly good to them. All of Schiller's dramas revolve around the revolt against the absurd commands of authorities, but Schiller never wrote anything about his rage toward such a father. He died very young from his physical pains, which likely reminded him of the cruel punishments at home and in the military school without his ever letting this fact enter his consciousness. And precisely because of that.
11 Recommendation for Therapy Unfortunately, I do not know of any therapists whom I could recommend to you. That does not mean, however, that there are no recommendable ones. They are simply not known to me.
When I look for therapists on the internet, I find a lot of esoteric, sectarian, and religious offers, advertising of all kinds, poisonous pedagogy (Schwarze Pädagogik), and traditional traps—but nowhere the acknowledgment of the essential meaning of childhood in the life of the adult and the devastating effects of beating small children. If you are looking for a competent therapist, you would need to make sure during the first sessions whether he or she brings the following prerequisites:
The willingness to answer your questions about his (her) view of his (her) own childhood and training during the initial interview.
The freedom to feel indignation over the cruelties of your parents and NOT to remain neutral when you tell your story.
The capacity to stand by you empathically when you can finally experience and express your anger, which you held back for decades out of fear of punishment.
The wisdom not to recommend forgetting, forgiveness, meditation, positive thinking, and Buddhist "teachings"—which combat real, vital emotions as "negative"—and in this way increase your guilt feelings even further.
The integrity not to offer you empty words like "spirituality" and others if your history should evoke too much anxiety in the listener.
The knowledge that the suffering adult must free themselves from the anger stored in their body as a reaction to the abuse experienced in childhood by consciously experiencing this anger, expressing it, and understanding its justification.
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Since I have no list of therapists to offer but am constantly asked for one, I have published a FAQ list that can be found on the "Articles" page. Should a therapist refuse to answer your questions during the very first consultation, you can be sure that you will save yourself a lot of money, time, and unnecessary hope if you do not arrange a second appointment with him or her.
Should you be afraid to ask your questions, your anxiety would be entirely understandable as a fear of your parents, because the therapist may represent an authority figure. Yet your questions are nevertheless very important, and it is worth asking them in order not to risk a confusion that can last for years and will bring nothing good. If you take it upon yourself to ask questions, you can only win. It may also help you to read, at the entrance to this website, about my rejection of psychoanalysis, which in my opinion BLOCKS the access to the REALITY of our childhood.
13 All a Lie It is not "as if"—they ARE deaf and blind, "globally." And it is a miracle every single time when people like you escape these blind and deaf parents and dare to see, to hear, and to understand. Perhaps these few people, thanks to their knowledge, will one day save the world from the lies and ignorance that currently populate the entire planet?
18 Compassion Of course, it is the same for others as well. When someone has the courage to feel their own tragedy, they see it in others too. That would be the prerequisite for a good therapist. But unfortunately, very many are content with what they learned at the university about the human psyche without knowing themselves and their own history—and that can lead to catastrophes.
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19 Fear of Authentic Feelings I think that you will have many ideas to help free the child from its fear and encourage it toward truthfulness as soon as you yourself no longer fear your own parents and their outbursts, should you dare to show your authentic feelings. Then you will also understand the books that you read and want to understand. It is the fear that hinders you, and not a lack of intelligence, which you certainly possess.
22 Question Regarding the Answering of Readers' Mail You criticize a response given to a female reader because we did not offer any advice or suggested solutions for her extremely difficult situation, but instead only expressed empathy. We respect your standpoint and can understand it as well. Where it appears meaningful and possible to us, we naturally give suggestions. However, there are also people who cannot yet grasp at all how heavily fate has struck their lives, and who blame themselves for the terrible suffering they had to endure. They want to be brave, absolutely avoid complaining, and under no circumstances be viewed as a victim. They feel ashamed of the actions of their parents; blaming their parents causes them infinite fear, as if the mortal danger of back then were still threatening them today. We do not always consider it meaningful to give advice to such people, because for them, it is first and foremost a matter of feeling the full extent of the suffering inflicted upon them and seeing how POWERLESS they were as children, BEFORE they can discover their strength for action today and actively stand up for themselves. As long as they deny that they WERE victims, they cannot free themselves.
Therefore, I am of the opinion that we acted exactly right when we dispensed with advice and instead showed engaged, nuanced, and honest empathy, which can help the reader to perceive her situation empathically as well, and to feel with the child she once was.
25 Separation from the Mother
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You write: "From then on, I was banned from her house, and under threat of police intervention should I enter her home anyway, she also demanded that I address her formally using 'Sie' and 'Frau R.' I was exhausted and drained, but still very courageous."
When I read this, I think that you must not only grieve, but that you will also have to experience an irrepressible, long-withheld rage multiple times in order to finally allow the truth about your mother and your illusions to surface, and to become free from this terror. I hope that you will get the opportunity to do this at the clinic, and I wish you trust in the path you have taken. You are truly very courageous. It is hard to believe that one can be treated this way by one's own mother, but nothing remains for us but the truth if we want to get well.
25 Living Without the Father's Love You write: "You know, I have the feeling I will die if I give up the wishful illusion of a protective father."
With that, you express exactly the feeling of the child—the fear of the child that it would die without the "love" of the father. You believed in this love so much that you internalized it. But today, you are beginning to discover that this was not love, but a deception that you had to believe in so as not to starve alongside your mother. The constant unpredictability (Wechsel) completely confused you; you had to accept it because there was no one else there for you. Today, you need to love neither the confusion nor the cruelty of your father. You are free to hate that which appears hateful to you. You only need your truth in order not to die, to be free, and to feel truly alive. I wish you the courage you need to let go of the child's love and to allow yourself to see how much you suffered under your father's behavior.
29 Everyone in the Family Represses in Their Own Way In all of your letters, you see your parents very clearly, yet you constantly blame yourself for your feelings, whose justification you really ought to understand. But you are afraid. Presumably, you still do not believe the little boy within you when he tells you that he felt panicky
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fear choking off his throat whenever he tried to articulate his thoughts. And that his mother made him angry when she made stupid remarks and refused to understand how much you suffered and are still suffering. Your feelings frighten you terribly, as your dream clearly shows—the dream in which you lose sight of the two-year-old child that represents you, let it run into danger, and occupy yourself exclusively with your parents who threaten you.
You are constantly asking yourself, and also me, what you should feel instead of taking your true feelings seriously. Yet your dreams show you the dangers of your obedience and seem to be guiding you well now. Trust them, and then you will not need to get sick. You are not a bad person if you react to hypocrisy with rage. Quite the contrary.
OCTOBER 2007
03 Plea for Help I do not know how I can help you, except through my writings. What helped me was my will to get to know my childhood precisely and to understand my feelings. I hope that you will want to live for yourself, and not for the many children who need your life, as you write at the end of your letter.
03 Projection Onto a Knowing Witness It frequently happens that a younger sister, who received a great deal of understanding from the older one, later heaps hatred upon her as a substitute, in order to spare the parents from her accusations. Because the sister may have given her love, she does not need to be afraid of her. With the parents, she must under no circumstances show her rage. It is certainly very painful for you that your daughter allows herself to be influenced this way. Perhaps you must give up your illusions, no longer expect any gratitude, and distance yourself more clearly from your sister if a constructive conversation is no longer possible.
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05 Spiritual "Healers" My team did not want to forward this letter to me because it rightly gave the impression that you have, unfortunately, not understood my writings, which you just discovered "a few days ago." When my colleagues read that you are of the opinion that your grandfather loved you when he sexually used you as a three-year-old, they were outraged by this confusion. Nevertheless, they replied to you kindly.
Your subsequent accusations (that we "exclude" those who think differently, as if in a totalitarian regime) and your demands that we must change our opinions and adopt the opinions of you and your school regarding healing through spirituality and forgiveness—as well as your demand that we must grant you the right to be published on our website—led to your letters finally being presented to me.
I am glad about this, because it gives me the opportunity to explain, using a concrete example, why I consider traditional therapies to be misleading and therefore dangerous. This mailbox was opened for readers who want to free themselves from their fear of their abusive parents in order to be able to live their true feelings and, IN THIS WAY, achieve their emotional integrity and freedom from symptoms of illness. THEREFORE, there is no room here for spiritually "enlightened" gurus, no matter how well-known they may be, who basically refuse to have any idea of what they are truly feeling or what history has shaped them, but who gladly offer pleasant-sounding words that go over well almost everywhere.
I have decided to publish your first letter, just as you wished, because it confirms my frequent observations and illustrates so clearly that forgiveness by no means frees one from hatred; rather, it only helps to hide it in the unconscious behind meaningless concepts, to displace it onto innocent people, and to fail to notice what one is actually doing. For this reason, in my eyes, this forgiveness is not only useless but even harmful to one's health, because it leaves the person concerned blind and confused, which endangers their body—which ALWAYS insists on the truth (the reality) of its history.
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Behind the "good" advice there is, as you demonstrate all too clearly, a massive amount of blind rage. However, our website offers no outlet for the rage that the allegedly healing ideology of "spirituality" leaves behind uncontrolled. If you are, nonetheless, actually interested in an exchange of ideas with us, as you claim, I would like to ask you a question for the sake of CLARIFICATION: What do you understand by the word spirituality?
06 Attachment to the Parents A child cannot survive without the attachment to the parents. The adult can learn to do so, and actually must, if they truly want to become an adult. The circumstance that we were once inside the mother's womb does not force us to live like an embryo; after all, we don't want to think like a first-grader when we go to the ballot box to elect the president of our country, do we?
09 Confusing Double Messages You have the courage to see through hypocrisy, and the talent to communicate what you have recognized and felt clearly to others. These are rare gifts today.
Your letter confirms my conviction that it was necessary to publish that confusing contribution about spirituality and forgiveness as an example (cf. number 05), because it could open the eyes of many readers to how mothers at home spoke to the child. The opinions of the grandparents were forced upon the child without listening at all to what the child actually wanted to say. In this way, its creativity was nipped in the bud before it could develop.
I think that many therapists function according to this pattern. They need neither to know anything about human suffering, nor to feel their own, nor to inform themselves about the development of the child's brain. They only need to adopt the maxims of their parents and call it "therapy." Many clients are enthusiastic because they have known this language since childhood—only they didn't know until now that these demands, well-known to them since their childhood in the sense of poisonous pedagogy (Schwarze Pädagogik), signify THERAPY. They travel in droves to workshops and
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pay expensive money for something that has always been so well-known to them, but has now received a new label: instead of "You must be good, obey, love Mommy and Daddy, no matter what cruelty they inflicted upon you," today it says: "You must practice forgiveness and immerse yourself in spirituality, even thank them for the cruelty—that brings you happiness and health."
The gurus of every stripe make money this way using the "wisdom" of their mothers, and everyone seems satisfied with it, but ONLY AS LONG AS they can pass their confusion along to others. And that seems to work well, because the "wisdoms" of grandmothers have barely differed from one another since Schreber's times, and therefore sell well in various countries.
Granted, in order to get away from the mindset of poisonous pedagogy (Schwarze Pädagogik), former victims of childhood torture need a great deal of courage. But the body frequently forces them to summon this courage. They begin to discover their true feelings and to respect them. In this way, among other things, they succeed in freeing themselves from the power of therapeutic schools, which ever since Freud have been built upon the former child's fear of the parents. You obviously do not let yourself be deceived by this propaganda, because you had the chance to recognize the hollowness of your father's maxims.
11 "It Can Be Done" Thank you very much for your letter, especially for the sentence "It can be done," because it clearly bears witness to your own experience. From my experience and that of many people, I know that one can free oneself from the consequences of abuse if one no longer lets oneself be deceived by poisonous pedagogy, whether in the parental home or in various consultation rooms.
15 Experiences with Book Reviews Thank you very much for your clear, informative, and balanced statement regarding the reviews of your book, which I hope very many readers will discover.
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It is a scandal that your book is being silenced, distorted, or devalued, instead of people thanking you for this important publication. For at long last, a female physician has been found who did not evade the horrific childhood histories of her patients, but was willing to listen to them with a great deal of compassion and understanding, and was thus able to help them free themselves from the pathogenic consequences of their childhood. You describe exactly how the consequences of child abuse impact the entire life of the victims if they, as adults, remain in denial of their sometimes horrific suffering. In doing so, you have dared to open a door behind which lies the hell of tortured children, which simultaneously conceals the breeding grounds of future perpetrators.
You did not make it easy on yourself; you did not provide addresses of institutions that confuse and betray the child by telling it: "Daddy knew why he had to beat you, he wants you to become a decent person." Instead, you describe facts from which one can learn. Peter's story shows that one can free oneself from the repetition compulsion and stop beating one's children if, with the help of an empathic physician, one dares to remember what anxieties one had to suppress in the face of a sadistic father. It is a deeply moving story and absolutely coherent. Thank you for writing your book, and I hope that you will soon be able to write the second volume.[^1]
15 Once Again "Spiritual Healers" It is a miracle that you were finally able to free yourself from this mean exploitation and the whole history of lies and manipulations. You have only yourself and your will to clarity to thank for that.
I am asked again and again whether one can one day free oneself from the misery of childhood. I think that one can, if one summons the courage to no longer evade what the body has always known. Your story shows it clearly. You wanted to see; you did not let yourself be deceived. You saw through the game of your pseudo-helpers and did not allow them to exploit your history. Your letter
[^1]: Note: This comment refers to the book Bitte keine Gewalt ("Please No Violence") by Dr. Anke Diehlmann, Frankfurt am Main, 2006.
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Confirms my assumption that one could process even the most difficult childhood much faster if one were not prevented from doing so by allegedly "professional" helpers. I wish you continued good luck!
15 What to Do When a Helping Witness Is Missing? What a great deal you have gone through, again and again, time after time, and you did not let yourself be broken, nor enslaved, nor made blind and submissive.
You write: "There was never any escaping my father's beatings. He didn't need a specific reason for it; he simply 'let off steam.' He lunged at or kicked every one of us like a man possessed—us children as well as my mother. It was necessary to be vigilant 24 hours a day. This constant internal state of readiness was the only protection I had. Only in this way did I succeed in instantly hardening myself totally on the inside—being as hard as steel inside, no longer feeling, whenever it was necessary—so that nothing inside could break and I could survive it."
That is absolutely horrifying. Nevertheless, you remained true to yourself and will certainly be able to found a group in your city. In this way, you will overcome your loneliness and find people who are good for you. That is a great idea. I wish you many good encounters.
15 Fear of Women You write that you have "a fear of women" and would like your therapist to "take" this fear "away" from you. You suffer from asthma. You have a HISTORY; that history cannot be TAKEN AWAY from you. You must find it by learning to feel and understand the suffering of the little boy you once were. Then your symptoms, which are trying to tell you this history, will disappear.
19 How Sadism Develops If this single sentence from your wife was enough for you to feel the indignation, then that is wonderful. Then you could publish your discovery, and
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free millions of people from their fear, their guilt feelings, and their pity for their poor old parents, which makes them sick or violent. Perhaps you can publish your recipe in a book. Apparently, in your opinion, I have taken on far too much unnecessary work and, moreover, had pity for Hitler (!?), instead of recognizing his evil intentions. I have the impression that in your euphoria over your relief—which does not surprise me—you are disregarding important matters and simplifying others GREATLY.
I have always wanted to understand how people GROW UP who later take pleasure in destroying millions of their fellow human beings and mercilessly torturing their own children. I asked myself the question: How does someone become an evil person? This question does not seem to interest you, but it does interest me, because I do not believe in a God who sends evil, unfeeling humans down to Earth. Thus, I think: only if we WANT and DARE to comprehend how innocent newborns are turned into beasts with the help of corporal punishment and humiliations can we change something for the future. Do you believe in all seriousness that Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Ceaușescu, and also your parents came into the world with evil intentions? It completely contradicts my sense of logic to think that the good Lord sent millions of sadists down from heaven to Earth to help Hitler realize his intentions. You seem to have read my new book with your eyes closed. That may well have had its reasons.
20 The Horror of Back Then You had to "live" in a hell for years. Many people go through such hells and save themselves through denial, adaptation, and repression; yet you seem to have retained a great deal of knowledge and a great deal of courage to report on it. You succeeded in preserving your integrity and remaining a feeling human being. That is very rarely possible. You did not let yourself be confused, nor did you let guilt feelings be imposed upon you just to be loved as the good daughter after all. You remained true to yourself, and you do not let yourself be blinded now either, even when your mother courts you. You do not let yourself be lured into the traps after having recognized them so well. I congratulate you on this from the bottom of my heart.
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23 Organizations Against Child Abuse I understand well your need to inform people in positions of power that by beating small children, we produce violent or sick people. Yet officials in high positions, in particular, are hardly willing to hear anything about the suffering and powerlessness of children, which could remind them of their own history and which they want to forget at all costs. Against this deliberate ignorance, I have not yet found any remedy other than writing about it. It is, of course, very regrettable that hardly anyone wants to know how he or she grew up. Yet any life can only be truly understood once one has come to know its beginnings. I wish you open-minded colleagues in your activities and good experiences.
24 The Revolt of the Body Your concern is entirely understandable, especially since you are willing to understand the connections, which is not often the case. Perhaps it is possible for you to let your son feel your willingness for dialogue and for honestly answering HIS questions, if HE wishes it, without forcing these upon him. Children then often feel pressured into something that they perhaps do not want at all at the moment. Perhaps you can obtain my new book Dein gerettetes Leben ("Your Saved Life") and read the first chapter carefully. That may give you an idea of how you might want to handle things now. Try to protect your son from helpers who prescribe him medications for anxieties.
Compulsions, just like depression, are an expression of fear of one's own unwanted feelings. This fear would not need to be suppressed even further if the understandable feelings were allowed to be lived. Your attitude and your present knowledge can contribute to this understanding.
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26 Smacks If someone wanted to explain to you what I wrote about smacks (Klapse), and you had trouble understanding it, would it be a help to you if that person gave you smacks on your fingers to "lend emphasis" to what was said? I think that this person would rather confuse you, even put you in a state of fear, and that IN THIS STATE you would understand hardly anything more than before.
30 Should I Confront Her with the Past? Your letter actually contains all the answers that I would like to give you. I only need to say YES when you ask: "Then an eerie rage builds up inside me—why am I always supposed to be the lovely one on whose back everything rests, why am I far too fat, why do I have skin problems? Why am I always supposed to swallow everything down? How am I supposed to be friendly toward her when it is completely hypocritical. Wouldn't the truth be a chance too, also for her? I don't know! Can you give me some advice? Am I even allowed to tell her the truth?"
You see it very clearly; you owe yourself the truth, absolutely. Everything also suggests that you can dare to do it and that you will also be doing your foster mother a great service by doing so. In this way, you save the good relationship you had with her and also help your body, which cannot bear the lie and the concealment. Fortunately, all the prerequisites for sincere communication are present. Why do we think so often that lies are better than the truth? Because that was drummed into us in childhood?
NOVEMBER 2007
01 We Are Allowed to Defend Ourselves Of course you can contest the will. I think you owe that to yourself and to your dignity. The memories will not harm you; on the contrary, they will help you to stand up for your rights and to integrate the WHOLE truth
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of your history—the cruelty of the abuse AND of the disinheritance. One does not die from the truth, but one often falls ill from self-deception, unless one takes revenge on one's own children for the lifelong lies. Obviously, your father did precisely this.
You have the RIGHT to your statutory minimum share (Pflichtteil), and I hope that you can enjoy it, because the adult's victory in battle can comfort the child who was unable to defend itself back then. Find yourself a strong, clear-headed lawyer and tell him everything. You do not need to feel ashamed for what others have done, and you do not have to spend decades hoping for reconciliation and paying for that hope with illnesses. Now you have the chance to confront yourself with the truth and to free yourself from pathogenic illusions.
02 Responsibility You say so much that is true and deeply lived through in your letter that I am very grateful to be allowed to publish it. We have the responsibility to see, you write. That is exactly how it is. But most people are afraid of this and believe that they are better people if they lie to themselves. Why is that? Because as children, we had to learn that the truth (anger, for example) is dangerous, and that we please God better if we kill off our true feelings and pretend to have other, artificial ones? And we call that "responsibility"?
04 The Power of Dignity Thank you very much for your letter and the beautiful heading. Actually, my new book could also have been called Die gerettete Würde ("Saved Dignity"), because in my therapeutic concept, my focus is also on saving one's own dignity and finding the language for the fate one has suffered. This, however, also excludes the tolerance for parental transgressions that is demanded by all religions. Their morality is grounded in the child's fear of the next blow—a fear that usually survives in the adult and strips them of their dignity (the courage for one's own truth).
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09 Diagnoses You are most certainly on the right path to helping yourself. Everything you describe points to this. Your body will continue to accompany you because you have the courage to take your history seriously and to open your eyes to the cruelties you experienced. You did not let yourself be confused by diagnoses, and you want to finally understand and protect the abused child that you were. That is more than the doctors were able to give you. Writing down your feelings will also help you. In this way, you will discover what you are missing, what you lack, and what you can do to understand your anxiety and free yourself from it. You had more than enough reason for fear in your childhood, but only now can you afford to consciously experience these terrible anxieties and to allow the rage that you absolutely need in order to become completely well. I congratulate you on your clarity.
10 My True Story Yes, you grew up ALL ALONE in a concentration camp, and it is a miracle that you were able to save so much awareness and truthfulness. Writing the letters seems to be your very effective detoxification cure. Your immune system reacted promptly to it; your body understood, and that is the main thing.
Your lines about my book contain a thought that was somehow new to me: namely, that the work on childhood by just one person can also serve the whole family, if they want it to. In your case, that is hardly to be expected, but it can certainly help you. Your brother's denial must have been very painful for you; she will presumably do everything to protect the father. But you have found your truth, and you will no longer let that be taken away from you. Fortunately.
12 Helping Oneself Since you have a good, knowing witness and had the courage to understand my book Das gerettete Leben ("Your Saved Life") as well as my other books so well and to profit from them, you will help yourself better than you would with an analyst who would just detach you from your truth.
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Try to do without the medications and to allow your rage. After all, you know what makes you angry; you know what frightens you. And you know that these feelings are justified as far as BACK THEN is concerned, but are only consciously EXPERIENCIBLE today. Today, no one can humiliate and torment you anymore unless you allow it. Read the letters and my answers here. You will make it. You will find people here who have suffered similar things and were able to help themselves because they wanted to see and feel their truth. That is exactly what you are doing, too. I wish you a great deal of courage. Keep your clarity and do not let yourself be confused by people who understand less and have less courage than you.
13 Bedwetting Bedwetting is the cry for help of an unhappy child begging for understanding of its situation. Apparently, you already understood that as a child. But most parents cannot understand it and experience it as an aggression against themselves. Of course, if they could understand the child's distress, it wouldn't need to speak in the language of the symptom at all—after all, it suffers from it itself.
23 Helping Oneself 2 You confirm what I suspected and what is now being confirmed to me again and again: when someone truly wants to help themselves and avoids their truth under no circumstances, they CAN help themselves. And the body plays along. The loneliness is often tragic, but over time, one finds people who are likewise searching for their truth. You can see this from the reaction to the reader's letter that moved you so much.
24 A Voice from Russia You are the first voice that has reached out from Russia, and you are the first person, with the exception of my circle of friends, who reacted emotionally to my paintings. That pleased and touched me very much. Did you read the drama in the Russian language? I have no idea whether my books are available, although the
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rights were sold years ago, but the publisher supposedly dissolved. Now, another publisher in Moscow has shown interest in my books. I highly hope that we have better luck with it, because I think that the "Russian soul" can express its emotions more easily than the Western one. Your letter proves this clearly.
24 A Letter to My Father I was deeply shaken when I read your letter, for which I thank you from the bottom of my heart. At the same time, I felt a kind of gratitude toward fate, which helped the bright, brave, clever little girl not only to survive the terrible prison of her horrific parents, but to remain intact—preserving full clarity and unusual courage to SEE and to ACCUSE, without an "if" or "but," without illusions, without self-deception. This attitude is very rarely encountered, and your letter will certainly help others to see their own situation and to dispense with the "buts."
Here, the child has the strength to speak for countless other children as well, who are forced to endure the more or less visible madness of their parents for years and to experience it as NORMAL. Shaped by this ignorance, they frequently remain blind to the suffering of children for their entire lives and continue to recommend corporal punishment. They work for pointless "research" projects, for the pharmaceutical industry, organize wars, produce cruel films, and have no idea that they are still "living" in the prison of their sick parents—because they never had the courage to see through their madness, and therefore continue to poison the world with the venom they had to swallow as children.
25 Courage to Grieve Unfortunately, there are not many people who dare to weep, and not many who have the courage to show their heart. They were taught from childhood to be hard and to have no feelings.
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26 Pain and Suffering With the help of my writings and presumably the readers' letters, you have been able to understand astonishingly well why your patients' pains do not go away. Now, at the end of your letter, you ask me to "dedicate myself to this topic," as if I had not been doing exactly this (with success) for nearly thirty years. I have even succeeded in developing a meaningful therapeutic concept for former victims of child abuse, from which many readers are already profiting.
Most professionals have not noticed this yet, but since you belong to the few exceptions who do notice it, it is now up to YOU to do something meaningful for the suffering patients. I know that expensive medical equipment must pay for itself, and for many people, a book is just a bundle of paper pages. But perhaps the clinic administration would allow my latest book, Dein gerettetes Leben ("Your Saved Life"), to be placed in the patients' rooms to see what happens. Some readers of this site were even able to free themselves from severe ailments after they resolved to unearth their long-lost history. They desperately wanted to know why they were suffering from such severe physical pain; they discovered within themselves the beaten, humiliated, abandoned child and its rage, which they had tried by all means to suppress for decades. And they had the courage to feel this justified rage and give it words. To their astonishment and great relief, the symptoms disappeared.
Now it is up to you to spread this knowledge, but you will only experience success with patients who WANT to walk this path. It is neither easy nor simple, but liberation from previously incomprehensible symptoms is the reward for the work accomplished. What you write about the role of accidents seems very accurate to me and shows that you understand these mechanisms very well. I no longer give lectures, but you can use the material on this site—for example, the flyers—when you speak at conferences and wish to bring some light into the darkness and confusion.
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DECEMBER 2007
03 Psychoanalysis I did not understand your letter at all. You write: "I ended a psychoanalysis a year ago and feel abandoned, retraumatized, confused, and burdened in the termination phase. The end of the therapy was extremely threatening to me. I had panic attacks, and physical symptoms (thrombosis) developed as well." And then: "She wrapped herself in silence, even during the final hour. It was ice-cold." And a bit further down, you inform us that you later invited this female analyst to your newly built house "so that her presence would bring a good energy into this house."
In my eyes, this is absolutely incomprehensible and incoherent. Can you help me understand why you expect positive energies from a woman whom you describe as so negative?! Did you learn in your analysis that one has to swallow a lot of unpleasantness and call it helpful?
04 Comments to Online Magazines Thank you very much for informing us that you tried to contact the magazines. There is at least hope that someone in the editorial office will sit up and take notice and, like you, have the courage to think further and finally allow themselves the insight that two and two make four, and not five. Unfortunately, this courage is rarely encountered when it comes to the consequences of child abuse. It is good that you resolved to do something to inform the media; that is certainly not a punishable offense. At most, one encounters deaf ears, but over time the truth will prevail—it cannot be any other way.
04 Helping Witnesses I am glad that you are reflecting on how one can awaken a respect for the child's personality in educators and contribute to liberation from poisonous pedagogy (Schwarze Pädagogik). Actually, all of my books are dedicated to these themes,
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but perhaps most strongly the last book Dein gerettetes Leben ("Your Saved Life"), especially the preface.
The first step toward this liberation leads through the discovery of one's own childhood and the humiliations one experienced. Only then, as if by themselves, do many doors open to empathy for the suffering of children, for their emotional needs and vulnerabilities, as well as to honest, open communication. The child is no longer an object that one is supposed to repair—as I showed in Am Anfang war Erziehung (For Your Own Good / "In the Beginning Was Upbringing")—but becomes a partner in a dialogue in which one is allowed to MUTUALLY ask questions and receive answers in order to get to know one another better. The preface to my last book could perhaps be discussed in groups to encourage venturing into freer communication.
06 Made It! And today you know that you will support YOURSELF. You will never abandon yourself the way your parents did, and never treat yourself as cruelly as happened in the home. Because you had the courage to investigate and WANTED to know what happened back then.
07 Back to the Parents? I completely share your opinion, and all of your arguments make perfect sense to me. If one has learned through therapy what one can no longer tolerate and what one has suffered under for so long without realizing it, why should one want to force oneself again to make it so that "it doesn't bother you"? The theater would just start all over again, and the body would react with symptoms once more. Anyone who, after such work, feels like ruining everything for themselves again is still under the compulsion of having to lie to themselves. Sensitivity, once recaptured, accompanies us for a lifetime—fortunately. That is a great treasure that one should not throw away.
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09 Taking the Body Seriously I think that YOU are saving your life when you take the messages of your body seriously and perceive them. The more often you do this, the easier it will be for you to understand yourself. There is no magic to it. One also gets practice at it. And the body rebels ever more clearly if one ignores its messages, just as the parents once did with the child.
09 The "Evil Eye" of the Parents You are not only good; you are an unusually strong, truthful, and clever human being who has dug themselves out of a horrific misery and been able to achieve so much good. This speaks from all of your letters. I hope that you will never again let your family convince you that you are evil, just because your confused and malicious mother wanted it that way. It is important that you continue to take the messages of your body seriously and avoid everything that would put it in danger. Your decisions in this regard are absolutely right.
10 Violence Is Weakness I can feel from your letter that you were able to profit from my books, and that, of course, pleases me. It is a blessing that you and your husband support each other and can thus spare your son from a repetition of your fate. By the way, I do not believe that one can "end" conflicts with violence. It is a sign of weakness and helplessness when one resorts to violence; this can easily be observed in the behavior of abusive parents. The strong person can defend themselves verbally; they are more likely to have perspective and are not driven by unconscious, suppressed offenses and other emotions. Even if their words do not please the other person, they must correspond with THEIR genuine feelings—then nothing bad can happen to them anymore.
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14 The Detachment Begins Slowly You mention only briefly and in passing in your letter how much you were beaten and humiliated in your childhood, as if even today, the worst punishments would threaten you for merely speaking it aloud. Surely it WAS that way, and this explains why it is so difficult for you to allow your justified indignation and rage. But your anxiety will soon decrease because you are moving in the direction of your truth. You clearly demonstrate your desire to no longer lie to yourself and to finally believe the little being you once were (whom your parents called a liar and whom they beat for its truths), as well as to remain true to it. Even if you are still trying to explain your feelings to your parents in order to avoid their anger, you seem increasingly to notice that you will achieve nothing by doing so. For your parents are apparently not in the least bit interested in understanding you and your arguments, but only in discharging the unconscious rage stored within them since time immemorial at your expense. But you no longer want to function as a container for your parents, and it is your good right to want to free yourself from this role—definitively.
14 Liberation? Presumably, it brought you great relief to bring the repressed wartime experiences that you had to endure as a child into your consciousness. Whether you also succeeded in remembering what your parents did to you, I do not know; you write almost nothing about that except for the sentence: "My mother said that father also came back brutalized from the war. I was made to feel it."
It would be possible that your son has suffered from something of which you are not yet aware. I do not know. I only wonder why you wrote to me of all people, when you surely know that I deal with the traumas caused by the PARENTS—traumas with which one is completely alone, in contrast to wartime experiences, which are a shared fate.
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15 Caring for Aging Parents? If your health suffers from visiting your parents, you must decide whether you want to make this sacrifice, and clarify why. You write that even abusive parents have the right to be cared for by their children. I do not understand that. Why shouldn't one prefer to be cared for by strangers instead of by people whom one has gravely harmed, sometimes for a lifetime, and who must deny their feelings at the expense of their own health because lies are more highly valued in society as a whole than the sad truth? Isn't the damage merely doubled that way?
My initiative for an "SOS Hotline" (for parents who are in danger of beating their children) found no response; a few women made themselves available, but not a single call ever came in. That is very telling. When one is under the strong, blind impulse to beat a child, just as one's parents once did, one apparently does not perceive oneself as needing help, but rather as being "justified." At least those who have never reflected upon it.
15 You Shall Not Notice Everything you write seems absolutely logical to me; I completely share your opinion about this sick, crazy, and ignorant system that is offered to people who are in distress. I can only congratulate you for following your feelings and no longer expecting help from this system. After all, we clung to the good sides of our parents throughout our entire childhood in order to survive. But that made us blind and incapable of recognizing the abuse. This blindness is revealed to us, among other things, by the theories of psychoanalysis, which are built upon the denial of child abuse and upon the small child's fear of beatings and other punishments if one dares to see and speak the truth.
20 Losing One's Memory What you write about Alzheimer's disease coincides with my own reflections. When one is young, the bad memories from
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childhood can be staved off more easily than in old age, since physical weakness reminds people of their early helplessness and dependency. But if one has avoided memories of childhood for one's entire life, how is one supposed to be willing and able to allow them as a weakened human being?
22 Painting I looked at all of your paintings carefully and was very touched. They show powerful feelings with so few resources, but anyone who can feel will find their own history mirrored in them. I congratulate you on this ability. I think that painting can free you from your anxieties, because in doing so, you open your eyes wider and wider to your horrific reality.
26 I Already Know Everything Anyway You write: "And now my father is pushing his way forward. Coming out of the shadows. And I am afraid of what still lies hidden there. He used to just cause me guilt feelings. My feelings toward him are ambivalent. He always remained a stranger to me. He annoys me. I don't really like him either. He burdens me. Is he burdening my bronchi as well?" And then you ask me to show you a clue.
But you are already on the right track; you are merely refusing to perceive it. Your bronchi, however, are doing just that. You write that your feelings toward your father are ambivalent, but what you recount shows that you have reason to fear your father. There is apparently nothing left to save of the love to which you feel obligated. If you free yourself from this compulsion, you will no longer cough; you will then no longer need to exert your bronchi, because you are ready to bear your truth yourself—the truth that your father clearly does not deserve your love and that you are allowed to give up this compulsion for self-deception.
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28 Abusive Psychologist This complete blindness and tolerance toward brutality, lies, and deception are consequences of the total denial of the traumatic reality of one's own childhood. You could listen to similar stories a THOUSAND TIMES over daily and publish them on your homepage. Yet telling them does not help with healing as long as the willingness to look at the actions of one's own parents is missing. Apparently, it is missing in your case as well, because you write that you have NEVER seen a person like this psychologist before. Yet there must have been a perverse person in your childhood who had power over you and ruthlessly exploited your childhood naivety and distress; otherwise, you would not have fallen for this psychologist so easily. It is good that you are beginning to see here. Read the chapter "Helga" in my book Wege des Lebens ("Paths of Life"). Perhaps it will help you in the future to see through other charlatans more quickly and to further develop your courage, which you clearly possess. You merely believe that you must spare your parents, and you pay for it with partial blindness and tolerance for deceivers.
29 My Saved Life Thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful, courageous, clear, and—for others—groundbreaking letter. It borders on a miracle that despite the barbarism of your mother, you were able to become such a courageous person. Apparently, thanks to empathic accompaniment, it was possible for you to recognize the causes of your illness, not to deny them, and thus save your life. This desire to know is very rarely encountered among cancer patients; therefore, I am so astonished and so delighted by your story. Everything you write fits into a logical connection. I congratulate you on this victory over heartlessness, ignorance, and lies.
29 Taking Pain and Suffering Seriously You report: A woman is injured twice on her right hand, allegedly "by accident," by her colleague while performing her duties at her workplace. Although there is no bone
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fracture, this woman suffers from severe pain for 1.5 years; her right hand is unusable, she loses her job and independence, can no longer operate her car, is "treated" by several doctors in various clinics, even has to undergo two surgeries that are of no use, has to consume enormous amounts of painkillers, and is ultimately even accused of having taken drugs. This was based on an analysis that proved to be an error. When she asks for an apology, it is refused to her in a harsh tone by the professor.
Now, after this scandalous odyssey, the patient comes to your clinic. You offer her a conversation of 2.5 hours and recommend that she read my book Die Revolte des Körpers ("The Revolt of the Body"). She finally feels that her EMOTIONAL SUFFERING is taken seriously by you, listened to, and understood by my book, and within two weeks a significant improvement occurs (fifty percent).
I do not know what this woman told you, whether she was somehow able to recognize that her tolerance for rudeness, humiliations, and for the ignorance of her distress is connected to her childhood—where she had to learn it—and whether she was finally allowed to rebel against the colleague who injured her. I believe that a complete healing and permanent self-protection can only occur when the patient has understood the connection between the experiences in childhood and the "accident." Perhaps the book helped her to break down a part of her pathological tolerance.
Countless victims of abuse in childhood function exactly this way: they blame themselves for what was done to them, and allow doctors to tinker with the CONSEQUENCES of the emotional injuries, without wanting to see the causes, without wanting to perceive the injury to the child and the prohibition against complaining about it. This story shows how people must suffer unnecessarily when their emotional injuries in childhood, the knowledge of which is stored in the body, are ignored by both medical professionals and the patients themselves. As you can see, the long conversation with them was enough for the body to free itself from its pains, which were nothing other than a cry for help, a pleading for understanding. I am very glad that you can understand these connections so well, and hope that you will allow your colleagues to share in this knowledge too.
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30 Where Is the Rage Supposed to Come From? You ask where the rage "is supposed to" come from. It is already inside you and manifests itself in your depressions and your despair. But you do not allow it into your consciousness because you are apparently still afraid of the punishments from your mother, who told you that you would drive her to her grave. What child wants to risk that? Thus, very early on, you had to learn to throttle your rage and indignation over your parents' behavior, which you describe here very precisely. Presumably, after reading Die Revolte des Körpers (The Body Never Lies) and my last book Dein gerettetes Leben ("Your Saved Life"), you will soon realize that your mother no longer has any power over you today. Then you will allow yourself to finally live out the rage that has been dammed up IN YOUR BODY for decades, in order to get to know yourself better and to free your life from the claws of childhood fear. You can write to us if the fear becomes too great, but the rage will most certainly free you from the depressions. After all, it is completely justified.
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JANUARY 2008
01 Exiting the Victim Role I am so glad that you understood my response so well and that your body is apparently already thanking you for it. You held yourself guilty for so long in order to protect your mother from your justified accusations, and ultimately, you had to hate YOURSELF as well. All of this just so that your mother would finally love you and thank you for the sacrifice of your entire life. Yet she has no intention of doing so. Try now to live with your sad truth, to finally free yourself from the lies of the prevailing morality, and to give the child you were the love it never received. In this way, after forty years, you will save YOUR life, which has rightfully belonged to you for a long time.
06 Realizing One's Own Truth What I have achieved can actually be achieved by anyone who is willing to emotionally discover the truth about their childhood. I have only done that, and in the process, it became clear to me how the system functions in which we live and which most people consider unchangeable. But it is not.
07 Psychotherapy Damages Thank you very much for your letter and the clear description of the Stockholm syndrome. I write again and again that people who were beaten the most as children—even tortured—are later hopelessly bonded to their parents and can therefore hardly detach themselves. But what happens as a result of this bond? In his fascinating book about serial killers Why Killers Kill?, the author Jonathan Pincus describes the horrific perversions to which the criminals he investigated were subjected in childhood. Yet in conversations with the psychiatrist, most of them said they had the best parents. The woman you mentioned, who had invited her cold analyst to have "positive energies" in her new house, did not answer my question "why" at all. Google shows that she herself is a therapist
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and writes a lot. Apparently, she is still oblivious because she has not seen through her own childhood. This is how many therapies function, exactly as you describe it.
I am glad that you are no longer trying to teach the analysts anything, because as long as you do this, you still believe that the "parents" can be changed. Gravely abused children cannot detach themselves because they are still waiting for the parents to change one day; they do not want to miss this moment.
12 How Violence Is Learned I wrote: "It is precisely the beating of small children that is dangerous for brain development, because the human brain SHAPES ITSELF during the first three to four years of life, and does so at a rapid pace that slows down significantly later on. Therefore, the danger of beating SMALL children is THE GREATEST."
The brain receives the message at this time that violence against those who are weaker is harmless. People raised this way claim their entire lives that their parents' beatings did not harm them. Their "arguments" cannot be countered with the new knowledge; they usually do not understand what it is about because their brain structured itself with the false message—unless they discover their pain from back then and learn to feel. Of course, a beaten adolescent can also become violent, but they do not carry damages in the brain if they were not beaten as a small child. Although this rarely happens, it is possible if, for example, the good parents died and the adolescent was adopted by violent ones.
13 Inner Freedom When people ask me what I still wish for from life today, I think that my greatest wish has actually been fulfilled: I can say and write what I see, think, and feel. That gives me the feeling of inner freedom that I missed for so long.
For others, I actually wish for the same thing: that they can free themselves from the fear of their parents and likewise allow themselves to fully trust the knowledge of their body
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and take it entirely seriously. As you write, there are unfortunately only a few who do this. Most puzzle over their "jigsaw-puzzle pictures" and remain stuck on therapists who tend to discourage them from finding the whole picture. Because they themselves are afraid of their truth and have not learned to free themselves from it.
15 Spiritual Freedom and a New Dignity It is wonderful that you were able to help yourself so much after your terrible childhood. Everything you write shows your inner strength, which could not be destroyed with all of this brainwashing and the accompanying cruelty. I am certain that you will also break free from the final traces of dependency because you are searching for your truth and do not give up.
17 State of Hesse Sends 16-Year-Old Student to Siberia Ignorance seems to be increasing everywhere unhindered, and no one dares to open their mouth. Not a single person wants to know where violent adolescents LEARNED their behavior—as if it were forbidden to know that two and two make four, and not five. When one reads in the newspapers daily that poor, time-strapped parents still find the time to torment, beat, and humiliate their children, forcing food and medications upon them with violence (our mailbox is full of such reports), one wonders again and again how the brains of these people function, who send a violent youth to Siberia so that he will COME TO HIS SENSES there in isolation.
17 The Compassion of Animals Your letter is deeply moving; it shows how animals saved your soul—how, despite the barbarism of your parental home, they made it possible for you to preserve your capacity to feel. One reads again and again how parents, due to a lack of time—especially on farms—are "forced" to raise their children to obedience with beatings so that they will work and not laze around. But when one reads in your case how these parents
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take the time to force you to empty your plate, then one realizes how much time and expenditure of energy parents can muster in order to destroy and dominate their child. That is what they call upbringing (Erziehung). Your story casts a clear light on the hypocrisy and ignorance of society as a whole, which is celebrating triumphs today—unfortunately. We also find this in the declarations of politicians, who unconcernedly display their dangerous nonsense because they do not know that, with their assertions, they are denouncing the pedagogy of their parents, who hid their hatred behind punishments allegedly for the child's own good. How terribly you were tormented by your parents and, as a child, had to believe that they meant well by you. Yet in contrast to the clueless politicians, you as an adult have seen through the game.
18 Was My Childhood Good or Bad? The tragic thing is that you can still ask: Was my childhood good or bad? Thus, for decades, you lived with this self-deception that made you ill. Now you are approaching the truth, and this winter you had no depression. That shows that you are capable of dissolving your severe illness if you no longer lie to yourself and no longer cherish illusions. You should avoid your female therapist in any case, and your entire family too, if you want to become well.
18 Facts I do not know what you mean when you write about my "system." I have no system; after all, I only write about FACTS, which anyone who reads the readers' letters on this site can find confirmed: the most tormented children remain loyal to their parents their entire lives; they wait for their love, suppress their rage, and deny their truth because they are still afraid of their violent parents. In return, they pay with severe physical and psychological symptoms. As soon as they stop lying to themselves, as soon as they dare to see how they were tormented, disregarded, and humiliated in childhood, their body can recover, and the depressions can dissolve.
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18 Upbringing in Siberia Thank you for your clear, logical letter. It does you good to witness your optimism. For we ask ourselves daily: How is it possible that not a single one of the politicians and do-gooders asks themselves the question: Where did the adolescents learn the violence? Instead, a 16-year-old is sent to Siberia so that he can learn to become pleasant and reasonable there. Could it be that the grandfathers of such adolescents were forced to learn humanity in their Russian captivity, after they fought like wild for Hitler? Thus, they might grant their children something similar and call that upbringing (Erziehung).
20 A Child's Temper Tantrum A tantrum shows the deepest despair and helplessness, which the child cannot express in words. An empathic adult will try to remember what occurred just before in order to UNDERSTAND what drove this child into despair at this exact moment, and to say it to them insightfully. That can help the child to understand themselves. But one should never punish a child for its despair. Such stupid and cruel advice shows why children cannot express themselves in any other way than in a tantrum. Let us assume your female friend comes to you and sobs without being able to tell you why. Would you lock her in a room as a punishment so that she stops? Yet such advice is given to parents when it comes to children.
21 Insomnia Of course: What we can ward off during the day through work or through other means reports itself at night and disrupts our sleep. Ask your mother HOW she put something into action, and if you cannot sleep at night, write to your mother about what feelings that triggered in you when you were perhaps supposed to have learned your lessons with the help of smacks (Klapse) at the age of a few months. People think that "little smacks" do not hurt, but I know women who
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suffered for decades from blockages in the abdomen until they discovered in therapy that their body had been tensing up their entire life out of the small child's fear of new beatings from the mother.
22 Just Have No Feelings! In order to take your needs seriously, you do not need a pistol; you only need a pen and paper. Your outburst in the car and the endless despair seem (fortunately) to have shown you how much you have suffered your entire life under your father's silence, stubbornness, and lack of empathy. Today, it is perhaps no longer important WHAT exactly happened back then in the war; what is important is that your father refused to feel, wanted to bury everything in the back of his mind, and did not notice how you and your brother suffered as a result.
Since you likewise tried not to feel your pain and instead preached forgiveness to your patients in a thousand family constellations, it is quite possible that your son suffered as well if he could not reach his REAL father. But that no longer has anything to do with the war; it is the upbringing (Erziehung) of your father, and yours, and perhaps your son's in the same spirit: one must not have feelings, one doesn't talk about them, one swallows everything down. It is a blessing that you are beginning to see through this and are now fighting for your truth. You will get it. Perhaps you will write to your father about how you suffered under his silence. Perhaps you will send him a fountain pen and suggest that he write to you too, and finally tell the story of the submarine. Or other stories? That can diminish his fear of your judgment, but above all, you have remained true to your need to want to know. And THAT is important. ABSOLUTELY important for your health and your well-being.
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FEBRUARY 2008
01 Now You Are with Yourself You saw through the game of the female therapist, who resembled your mother, and you drew the consequences. You did not let yourself be trapped anymore. And now you are experiencing liberation—that is entirely logical. You write: "I no longer speak of my path, but of my development—after all, I don't have to go anywhere anymore, I am no longer homeless." That is completely wonderful; now you are with yourself. I congratulate you.
01 Your Saved Life At the end of your letter, you write that you owe your life to me—presumably you mean my books. And above all, you owe the success to your own hard work. This reminds me of the battle with my foreign publishers, who did not want to adopt this title for my book under any circumstances because they claimed it made no sense at all. "Why should I be saved? From what?" one female publisher asked me. Do you see how difficult it can be for people to understand this when they have no inkling of the work you have carried out so successfully? Because they do not want to know that they themselves were once a victim of abuse.
04 Insight? You write that your wife already noticed at the age of thirteen that "something was wrong with her." But apparently, to this day, she has not noticed what is wrong with her mother. Hence the diagnosis, which is misleading and not helpful.
05 Brainwashing Your contribution can help many who are already close to their truth and still need a bit more courage to see it, to stop fooling themselves, and to protect their life. When one allows oneself to be guided internally by lies, it means "driving through life with the handbrake engaged" (as you write).
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It is good that you made the comparison with the camps, which can help many people not to let themselves be misled and not to pity the parents when the latter want to know nothing at all about one's own childhood. Back then, adults were allowed to be liberated from the concentration camps, and many people showed them compassion. But when former children free themselves from the lies of their sick and sickening parents, they are met with hostility, and they are made to feel guilty all over again.
12 I Feel Confirmed in My Perception Your letter will undoubtedly help other people to find their courage and to risk SEEING, just as you did. The outcome of your story shows how important it was for your life and your health to truly free yourself from these monsters and not—like most severely abused children—to hope for a lifetime that the parents would change one day. And it all began with the fact that your parents did not want you and dumped their abysmal hatred of your existence onto you. How wonderful that you did not let yourself be deceived anymore. Your struggle for your truth and your description of this struggle are heartbreaking. Your sudden hearing losses (Hörstürze) do not surprise me when I read your mother's speeches. For the defenseless girl, the sudden hearing losses were apparently the only protection against the horrific time bombs that her mother hurled at her head daily with poisoned words.
14 What Can I Do? You ask me whether I understand your concern. Of course, I understand your situation and the feeling of powerlessness, but I also know that there are ways to escape helplessness. Apparently, you live and work in an environment in which you feel isolated and misunderstood.
Could you imagine printing out my flyers, which you can find on this website, and distributing them among the "difficult" adolescents? You could use this as a basis for a group discussion to show WHY they became the way they now unintentionally are, and that they can change it. A woman in
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a similar situation to you tried that and was astonished that people who were otherwise difficult to reach became curious and thoughtful. She then conducted such discussions several times, with astonishingly good results. This is rarely done because most counselors still fear their own parents very much. But the truth does not kill. It is the lies and self-deceptions that make us sick or even "crazy" ("ver-rückt").
15 The Body Frees Itself I am so glad that your somatic complaints are decreasing "move by move." That shows, after all, that you are on the best path to yourself. No one can dissuade you from it now because your body is helping you to see and to orient yourself. I wish you all the best for the future.
19 "I Confronted Them with the Past" Yes, exactly so! You write: "When I do it, I do it for myself, in order to finally get rid of the image of the good child and communicate my truth, so that the relationship is finally truthful and not always hypocritical! Because I could never be myself; perhaps I will lose them as a family and win myself in the process?" With that, you have answered all the questions in your letter yourself. Every risk is worth taking to get closer to yourself. Liberation from the pressure of lies is the reward.
23 Throttling the Air... You actually see quite clearly what you—with good reason—want to and must do. The body is even helping you by "throttling" your air: yet you ask me what you should do. Apparently, it was entirely dangerous for the child you once were to do something of your own and to resist your mother's will. Now the danger no longer exists, even if the child within you still fears it.
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You are allowed to enjoy going your own way, even if it doesn't suit others. You have the full right to do so—absolutely.
28 Brains Made of Concrete I agree with you completely. The answers to many questions are basically very simple, but they cause the once-beaten children a great deal of anxiety. Therefore, many brains are as if made of concrete; you can explain everything to these people very clearly, but the information does not get through. You receive the same answer again and again: "But the beatings did me good; otherwise, I wouldn't have become this or that."
28 We Imitate Our Parents You have apparently succeeded in noticing how you imitated your father and perhaps your mother as well. That is a courageous and, as you can see, helpful discovery that we rarely succeed in making. In most cases, this imitation remains unconscious. It blocks relationships as long as one is still afraid to see clearly what the parents were really like. Of course, the children pay the highest price because they must maintain their denial for a lifetime—unless they choose the truth.
29 Forgiveness You have experienced horrific things. Yet it is understandable that you cannot "let your guard down" ("fallen lassen können") with a female therapist who preaches forgiveness to you—fortunately for you. That would achieve nothing, only confusion. Make use of my FAQ list on my website and do not let yourself be made a fool of.
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MARCH 2008
03 Unwanted Children You are right; unwanted children are usually abused. But there are also many people who were "wanted," if only to play the role of the victims their parents needed in order to be able to take revenge. They were "wanted" to give their parents what the latter had never received from their own parents: love, adoration, attention, and so many other things. Why else would so many people have five or more children when they cannot muster the time for them? Why do they adopt children even though their bodies refuse to give them what they apparently "wish" for?
The never-acknowledged, never-felt pain of their childhood cries out to be avenged. They go to church, they pray, they honor their parents, forgive them everything, and abuse their children at home, often in a cruel manner—AS IF THAT WERE THE MOST NATURAL THING IN THE WORLD, because they learned it so early on. Their children also learn this perverted behavior very early, and so this perverted behavior is continued for thousands of years. Unless people are willing to SEE the perversion of their parents and are ready to consciously reject its imitation.
You are not “disgustingly sarcastic”; you merely dared to speak the truth that most people are afraid to see and talk about.
09 Why They Wanted to Kill Us Your letter shook me deeply. I am grateful every time someone can reconstruct my observations with their own feelings. It is perhaps precisely the most gifted children who draw the parents' hatred upon themselves, because their liveliness, curiosity, and intelligence show the parents directly what was once throttled in them. But unfortunately, all of this plays out in the unconscious. The hatred is veiled with protestations of love and "legitimized" by lies.
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10 Thoughts on "Pictures of My Life" You have given me very, very great joy. This is exactly how I wished people would react to my book: that someone looks at my pictures with his or her soul and is free to bring themselves, their feelings, and their history into this viewing. With one exception, no one has attempted this until now. Most viewers perhaps feel insecure and want to hit upon the "correct" interpretation instead of saying what they see, because they do not consider that important. You had this freedom, and your letter is very dear to me.
Your pictures show a great deal of anxiety and despair. I looked at them for a long time. Painting is a process; the important thing is that one engages with it and trusts this process.
12 Poverty as the Cause of Child Abuse? Time and again, it is claimed that poverty is the cause of child abuse. By doing so, people discriminate against the poor and pretend that horrific abuse does not exist in wealthy, pious, universally esteemed, and "best families."
16 Waiting for the Parents' Love Your story is so horrific that I could hardly read it to the end, so sorry did I feel for the incredibly strong, severely abused little girl. Apparently, the abuse began very early, so that from the very beginning, the message could nest itself in your brain that even extreme cruelty can pass as a normal upbringing. Your body has resisted this your entire life, directing all the suppressed rage first against the furniture and then against yourself—with heroin, with smoking, obesity—only against the behavior of your parents were you powerless, because the brainwashing began SO EARLY, during the time when your brain was shaping itself on the basis of what it experienced.
You are highly intelligent and understand a great deal; only your parents remain excluded from this knowledge, because the little girl within you still fears terrifying beatings from them if she sees through the monstrosity of her mother. Then she would have
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to die, she still believes today. You will ask me how I know this. I know this from your story about the visit to your parental home at Christmas. With your longing, expectation, and disappointment, you show that DESPITE EVERYTHING, you are still waiting for your parents' love; that despite your intelligence and your strength, you have not yet understood what awaits you there. You were used, as you write yourself, from the very beginning to be your mother's poison container, and you are afraid to give up this role. You have been playing this role your entire life.
Have you already tried writing to your parents and communicating your truth to them? Perhaps you first need to write many letters, allowing your fully JUSTIFIED feelings to emerge, without mailing what you have written. But ultimately, you will surely find the strength to communicate to your mother everything she perpetrated against you. Then you will be free to also receive people who love you with love, and to practice your profession meaningfully. Then you will have the courage to confront your female patients with the abuse they experienced in their childhood and stored in their bodies, instead of prescribing exercises and diets to them and dissuading them from their truth. I am completely certain that you CAN do this. You can print out my flyers (on my website) and display them in your practice. This will give rise to a conversation with the people who are capable of it and who, until now, do not know why they are tormenting themselves. But your own courage would have to precede theirs. I wish you much success. You deserve it!
16 Child Abuse It is a blessing for you that this door has opened slightly, because right there is everything you need to find in order to FREE yourself. It determines your entire life anyway, without you being able to defend yourself, as long as the contents remain inaccessible to you. What you describe is horrific enough, one would think, but your suffering may hide even more in your body and destroy your life if it remains unconscious. Now your body has invited you to feel, to discover, and to rebel against the indescribable cruelty of which you were a victim. Trust your body and do not slam this half-open door shut under any circumstances. Perhaps you do not need therapy if you write down your feelings, the meaning of which
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you understand, if you can rebel against the barbarism you endured and take custody of the child who suffered so terribly back then.
16 Educating Parents You are also concerned with the education of parents. You believe that Juul's and other books have helped you to behave correctly toward the child. But I think that this is not enough, especially in cases (which are unfortunately very frequent) in which the parents were severely abused as children without being aware of it. Their hand slips against their will, and all good intentions are of little use. It is a pity that Juul and other authors barely mention this back-story of the parents and actually bypass the entire topic. Parents who know their past and were able to allow and process their powerful emotions hardly need educational advice anymore. They know what hurts, what hurt them, and no longer feel compelled to pass the same cruelty on to their own children.
26 Enlightened Witness You dared to understand your truth WHOLLY—not halfway, not a little bit, but completely—by also verifying it through your letter to your mother and your clear demands. You did not allow yourself to be confused by therapists, nor intimidated by priests; you followed your body, you took seriously what it told you, what it recounted to you, and you drew the logical conclusions from it. In my opinion, this is enough to be able to be an enlightened witness (Wissender Zeuge) to others. A degree in psychology cannot give you precisely this, because it demands new sacrifices: for example, adapting to the mentality of the professors, to the prevailing system of the university, etc.—sacrifices that we already had to make as children.
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27 Fear of Thunderstorms I think you should not confront a thunderstorm, but rather your parents, who pushed their own fears of thunderstorms (presumably of the temper tantrums of their own parents) onto YOU. Tell them how you felt when you had to stop eating and were supposed to pray in fear instead; tell them that it is cruel to plant fear into a child's soul instead of calming the child, just because one lacks the courage to see the reasons for one's own fear. Presumably, you will then experience an outburst of rage from your parents, which may heal you of your fear of thunderstorms.
27 Rage It has never helped anyone to punch boxing bags. Such a thing is recommended by people who want to spare the parents and who do not support the voice of the child because its history frightens them. It is no wonder that you are thinking of suicide. In your position, I would feel the same way. You must and are allowed to KNOW that your rage is meant for your parents, who DESERVED this rage of yours; then you will also feel your liveliness, which you are currently blocking in order to spare your parents. Presumably, this is not supported by your female therapist, whom you should leave as quickly as possible.
31 Answer to the Letter from My Mother I congratulate you on your clarity, your courage, and your determination never to be deceived by beautiful words again. As a child, you could not do otherwise, but now you are free to stick to the truth and not allow yourself to be seduced by lies. And you are exercising your freedom, completely and utterly.
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APRIL 2008
01 Guilt Feelings Toward the Mother Why do you have guilt feelings? Your mother should have them, shouldn't she? Did she not significantly disrupt your capacity for relationships with her incestuous behavior? Why do you take on your mother's guilt feelings? Who is that supposed to benefit?
03 Multiple Sclerosis—But I Find No Reason in My Childhood What you recount is, of course, entirely sufficient, because you can neither FEEL nor TAKE SERIOUSLY your suffering from back then. You downplay it; it IS NOT ENOUGH FOR YOU to explain your illness. Side by side with this father, you had to learn very early and very thoroughly not to feel, and now your illness is forcing you to reverse this process. And you can do that. If your feelings, which were frozen back then, are allowed to emerge, you will be able to discover the weight of your terrible childhood. Then your body will no longer need to force you to do so. Whether your mother can help you with this is very doubtful, because she participated in strangling your true feelings so that you would understand your father.
03 Sexual Abuse Among Children Of course, a power imbalance exists between older and smaller children, and of course, it is an abuse in any case—even if we must not forget that the older children learned from their parents to abuse the smaller and weaker ones. It is good that you are seeking your truth and want to see through the denial early enough. That will undoubtedly spare you a lot of suffering in the future.
07 Missing Rage Don't worry, the rage will show up when the time comes for it. One cannot feel everything all at once after such a long period of numbness. Right now, you are allowed
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to weep and feel the grief—fortunately. The rage will also report itself when you are free for it.
11 Confusion Of course you are not a perverse sadist. Such interpretations only produce guilt feelings; they are confusing and dangerous. It is a pity that you have a "helper" from whom you need to protect yourself. Your dream shows that you were threatened as a child and no one was there to help you.
13 Raised in a Cult Thank you very much for your letter, the clarity of which gave me exceptional joy. It happens very rarely that a child raised in a cult can attain this clarity. This is because the indoctrination, the total confusion, and the fear-mongering take place so early that they become an integral part of the brain structure. But you have succeeded in saving the child you were, and now you will never abandon it again, never treat it the way your mother and the cult did. With your knowledge today, which you owe to the saved child within you, you will surely find a profession that will bring you joy.
13 The Opinions of the "Experts" The denial of childhood suffering by nearly all adults—despite university education and rich experience, such as among pediatricians—is terrifying. By this, one can gauge how frightening, even threatening, the terror was in which they themselves grew up. For if this had not been the case, at least all educated people would now be reacting with great relief to the results of the latest neurobiological research, which solves the riddle of child abuse. Yet even pediatricians evade this knowledge, although from their observations they absolutely ought to know that a two-year-old child who receives smacks experiences fear. When they know that the brain of this child shapes itself on the basis of this
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FEAR, they would only have to take one further step in their thinking to understand that a beaten child learns to deny the fear and the pain, not to express them, so as not to be threatened again. During the first three to four years, this attitude becomes part of the brain structure.
In my opinion, it is precisely this fear from one's own childhood that explains the ignorance and indifference of adults, regardless of whether they have become doctors, therapists, judges, or whatever else. Only an insight into their own childhood and the overcoming of this early childhood fear of punishments could bring their blocked empathy to life. Yet they fear the hell of their childhood like the devil, and unconcernedly declare that it was no hell at all and can calmly be expected of all children in good conscience. If we do nothing to enlighten today's pediatricians, these children will repeat exactly the same untruth in thirty years—likewise out of sheer fear.
18 Why Should One "Invent" Traumas? You write: "Officially, at around the age of eighteen, I expressed my suspicion (because consciously I remember nothing) in the presence of both of my parents, to which I received as an answer only a crimson face from my father, as well as hearing the sentence from my mother: 'Perhaps you haven't processed something, but Papa doesn't do something like that, and now leave us in peace with it!'"
When I read sentences like that, I do not have the slightest doubt that you were sexually abused, but I can well understand that even at eighteen years old, you stood before a wall and were afraid to insist on your hunches. Now, however, you can afford to overcome your fear and recognize your truth, because you apparently have a courageous therapist and you read my books. Why should anyone invent that they suffered severely in childhood? Don't all people prefer to believe that they had a good childhood? You are right, schizophrenia is forced upon children in order to save the facade of the parents: "Papa doesn't do something like that, and now leave us in peace."
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18 Mother and Grandfather You write that you suffer from depressions and self-destructive tendencies, but that you see no connection to your childhood in this. Then you describe how your mother begged you to forgive your cruel grandfather, even though you felt the opposite. I can only encourage you to remain true to your feelings and to take them seriously—that is the best remedy for depressions. Conversely, the suppression of one's own genuine feelings in favor of a lie is a danger to the body and the entire organism.
24 Understanding the Fear Try now to understand and calm the small, beaten child within you, who is currently panicking with fear over the punishing reaction to your letter. Tell it that it can no longer be beaten now because YOU will protect it. Then it will let you sleep peacefully through the night. Right now it cannot sleep because it is so terribly afraid of new beatings. During the day you can distract it, so you feel only emptiness because all emotions are suffocated. But at night they are there, and the fear wakes you up, understandably so.
27 Thou Shalt Not Notice! Unfortunately, I know of no colleagues who would truly agree with my revelations all the way to the end. The fear of punishment from the parents still seems to prevail everywhere if they do not bow to the tradition of the Fourth Commandment. Suggestions like spiritual help or positive thinking in order to finally be able to "shed" the "old stuff" show that the proponents of such techniques have not yet understood what riches the discovery of one's own childhood and our warded-off feelings can bestow upon us. It is a treasure trove from which several readers of this site are already able to benefit.
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27 "False Memory Syndrome" The "FMS Foundation" was established to conceal the sexual abuse perpetrated against the children of its founders, when many female patients began to discover these repressed memories in their therapies about twenty or thirty years ago. The foundation threatened therapists with lawsuits in court, found a female attorney who claimed the memories were fabricated—suggested by the therapists—and achieved in a short time that most therapists became afraid of lawsuits. Consequently, they no longer dared to explore with their patients what had happened to them in their childhood. As a result, today is teeming with a multitude of unsuccessful therapy options in which the truth about childhood is not allowed to be discovered.
Your dreams tell you the truth; they help you to gain clarity and to become well. Your doubts show the usual and very understandable fear of the once-threatened child, who expects punishments for SEEING. No human being has the need to invent torments and macabre memories—that would be absurd. On the contrary: almost all adults who were once abused try to gloss over their childhood so as not to suffer from the truth. Yet it is precisely this truth that heals the wounds, and not the lie, which after all caused the illness.
29 The Goal of a Therapy The goal of a successful therapy is free access to ALL feelings, which enables emotional honesty. Moralistic, pedagogical, and religious ideas—by which you seem to orient yourself and which unfortunately also underlie psychoanalysis—block this access. Against this blockage, the body, which knows the WHOLE truth, defends itself with symptoms. These can only be combated through the acknowledgment of one's own history, but not with self-deception in favor of traditional morality, which today still haunts all therapy schools known to me in an unreflected way. Your letter expresses this "spirit" clearly, and we are publishing it here as an example.
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29 Expressing the Truth Perhaps the act of writing it down has already helped to reduce the anxiety? Speaking the truth almost always causes fear because it was forbidden to us so early on. But having dared to do this ALWAYS brings relief to the adult and a reduction of anxiety.
MAY 2008
01 My Parents Wanted to Kill Me I congratulate you on your clarity. You had the courage to take the communications of your body and your unconscious completely and utterly seriously, and you will see how liberating this is. Over time, you will learn to dismantle your guilt feelings—including toward your siblings—step by step, because you will feel how your body and the unhappy child hidden within your body are grateful to you for your courage to feel. These guilt feelings, programmed by the parents very early on, are like toxic waste that must be purged so that the full, natural life is finally possible—a life to which you have had a right since your birth. Yet since birth, they have apparently wanted to prevent this life within you.
05 Amstetten in Austria, 2008: On the Childhood of Josef Fritzl The brief report in the Independent entirely explains Josef Fritzl's behavior. In an incredibly precise way, he enacted (inszeniert) what happened to him as a child: his mother was his SOLE RULER, as the father was not there to provide a balance. She beat him daily, completely possessed him, so that he had no helping witnesses with whom he could have realized how badly off he was—especially since the mother apparently conscientiously provided for his nutrition. He was forced into absolute obedience and had to endure daily violation by his mother; he also had to be grateful to her for providing clothes and food, was perhaps able to fulfill small wishes in secret, and was
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proud of his shrewdness and inventiveness in lying and dissembling. His life played out in hiding, just as it does now in the shadow of police power.
He organized his daughter’s situation in exactly the same way in order to maintain the denial of the sufferings of his childhood. His defense attorney speaks of his "good sides," just as Fritzl would presumably speak of the good sides of his mother, who enslaved him in the way he is now demonstrating to the entire world. Fritzl demonstrated to the world what can later happen to a child from whom freedom is TOTALLY stripped by its mother—a child who has no witnesses, who is supposed to be grateful to the mother, is never allowed to contradict her, and for years builds up desires for revenge in secret, until the adult man can finally satisfy them in a series of rapes of strange women without ever getting enough of it. Because revenge yields no satisfaction and constantly demands new enactments (Inszenierungen), he also had to lock up his daughter, rape her, and father children with her.
If one were to ask Fritzl today how his childhood was, he would presumably praise his mother and her attentiveness, and would not have realized that he grew up in a prison in which his muscles were apparently well-nourished, but his brain was completely POISONED by the disregard for his dignity. I can hardly imagine that this single, power-hungry, and brutal mother did NOT use her young son for her sexual desires, thereby further intensifying the confusion (what is love and what is cruelty?) in his brain. This is how perversions arise that present us with riddles if we do not have the courage to take the stories of childhood seriously.
Deriving the crimes from the denied childhood situation is by no means intended to mitigate Josef Fritzl's guilt or call for pity. As an adult, he is fully responsible for all his actions and deserves the maximum penalty for them. His masterful skill in deceiving and manipulating all authorities, as well as his extreme sadism, shows that he proceeded methodically and exhibits highly psychopathic traits, but this lets us hope for hardly any positive prognosis for effective psychotherapy. For he, like every psychopath, is not interested in understanding himself, but merely in dominating and deceiving others.
Apparently, he also succeeded in this deception during his conversation with his defense attorney, who, consequently, as an inexperienced layman, is of the opinion that Fritzl belongs in a psychiatric clinic and
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not into prison. It would be very naive and disastrous to follow this idea, because that would mean providing Fritzl with a stage upon which he could masterfully deceive and thus also harm the staff and fellow patients at will.
05 Toxic Bond to the Parents I was astonished at myself when I spontaneously wrote to you that you are stronger than your "love" for your biological father, who humiliated and disregarded you, and that you can give up this destructive, toxic bond. Now it turns out that you were actually able to free yourself from it (which is rather rarely achieved) and set such clear boundaries for him when he called. Your reaction to his phone call shows that it is indeed already possible for you to protect the little girl you were.
Is this not also already the beginning of your love for this child, of whom you dream twice and whom you now under no circumstances want to surrender to your father—even if the temptation in your loneliness was perhaps great to succumb to the illusion? But you did not let yourself be deceived; you saw through his intentions and did not want to expose yourself to a suffering that you already know from childhood and are not prepared to forget. For this reason, I am convinced that you will manage to free yourself from your remaining fears as well. You are already in the process of doing so when you describe the mendacity of your mother. We only fear what has already happened and what we do not yet want to see in its full horror. The child is growing within you, as the dream says; it will continue to guide you, and you will be glad of it. If you no longer forbid yourself from seeing what your parents were like and that your life was HEARTBREAKING, the pains will disappear too.
The ocular migraines show that you still forbid yourself from doing this at times, presumably out of fear of punishment for seeing your WHOLE misery back then—for you need more time for that than just 1.5 years. But you have already achieved a great deal; you are now living YOUR life, with your true story, almost completely free of illusions. That is astonishing, and I congratulate you on it.
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08 Josef Fritzl 2 You are right that professionals, too, will fall for this man Fritzl, and this is already happening. He is very cunning and is already playing skillfully on the sentimental chord. He recounts that he celebrated Christmas and birthdays with the children locked in the cellar, and in this way wants to win the hearts of good citizens. That he succeeds in doing this even with his defense attorney is, of course, terrible. But as you write: empathy for one's own cruel father, who gets into trouble and refrains from hitting for a while, undoubtedly plays an important role there. The emotional life of many people seems to have remained frozen in the panicky fear of the beaten child, so that they cannot feel and think naturally. I naturally share your outrage and your disgust over the gifts from Thailand that Fritzl brought along for the daughter and the incest-born children.
11 "Family Constellations" I can well understand your resentment, but I am beginning to resign myself to the fact that people can use my name for all sorts of things; apparently, they believe this will bring in a little more money. But that is a self-deception. For as soon as these people try to read my texts, they throw them away like a hot potato, because there they no longer encounter the abstract "spirit," but rather the concrete, threatening ghosts of their own childhoods, about which they want to know nothing.
11 Explicit Words In this case, I use words like monster and beast because, in my opinion, these words name exactly what men like Josef Fritzl perpetrate—indeed, they are even too weak for it. As small children, we are forced to consider every behavior of the parents to be right. We learn very early on to feel ashamed and guilty should we discover a deception, a perverted act, or a cruelty in our parents. The commandment "be ashamed" creates a fear of the knowledge of one's own body, a fear of the free expression of one's own authentic feelings and opinions, which accompanies many people throughout their entire lives: unfortunately, even when they have become therapists.
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In this sense, for example, a psychoanalyst writes in his review of my latest book that while one should show the patient compassion, one must never "set oneself up as a judge." This taboo against judging the patient's parents (and one's own) is, in my opinion, the reason why years of analysis remain unsuccessful.
In contrast to this attitude that preaches tolerance, I believe that the therapist has not only the right but also the duty to CONDEMN the inhumane, cruel, and often perverted behavior of his patients' parents, so that his patients can free themselves from the confusion that has existed since childhood. For this, they need a PARTISAN companion. To be able to give this to the patients, the therapist would have to free himself from his own childhood fear and forced tolerance, and stop downplaying his own early experiences of abuse at the expense of his patients.
22 Communication with Oneself I think that you are already capable of caring for yourself correctly if you do not want to expose yourself to such a conversation. That a man like your father would burst into tears is likely a very naive illusion. Letters from you will also only give him a new opportunity to hurt you. Instead, you can write letters to the little boy you were and, with the help of questions, give him the opportunity to tell you how he felt when he was terrorized, beaten, and humiliated by the father without being allowed to defend himself. Such letters will awaken your repressed emotions to life and thereby restore the security in life that your father tried to beat out of you.
28 Scientific Research: Molecular Traces of Childhood Experiences of Violence? The researchers and scientists have already found the truth, but one gets the impression that they do not yet comprehend the consequences of their results. Are they afraid to see what their parents did to them when they were still small? And do
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they still fear being punished for it? That seems very probable to me.
JUNE 2008
06 Obsessive Thoughts If you were tormented or "merely" misunderstood as a child, it awakened an absolutely justified anger within you. Yet you were hardly allowed to express this, so you had to repress it and store it in your body. This anger is now tormenting you by way of "obsessive thoughts." If you can allow your feelings as the abused child and permit the child within you to rebel against the injustice it experienced instead of denying it, your obsessive thoughts will disappear.
11 I Cannot Believe It Your dreams are forcing you to see the perversions of your parents, which hampered and nearly destroyed your life. Yet you still refuse to see this truth and to believe your magnificent dreams. You even feel guilty that you can think "such a thing" at all. For this, you punish yourself uninterruptedly and treat yourself as cruelly as your parents did. You direct your justified anger against yourself. If one day you cast off these guilt feelings and can finally believe your dreams instead of mistrusting them (for who would have an interest in INVENTING these horrific scenes?), then you will be able to FEEL your ANGER toward your parents and be allowed to live HEALTHILY. You will then no longer need to punish yourself with illness for the truth that your parents wanted to conceal. But the child within you is forcing you, fortunately, to live this truth.
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11 The Adult Son Yes, this admission—that you can no longer help your adult son now—is very painful, but it contains the truth and will presumably have a liberating effect for both of you. For it also contains the trust that he will be able to help himself in HIS own way. After all, he seems to be searching, given that he chose this field of study.
17 Letter to a Therapist I congratulate you warmly on the letter to your therapist. It is astonishing. You have apparently gained the security that allows you to protect both the injured child and the severely abused female patient, and to express your outrage in a thoroughly respectful manner. You were able to do this because you needed to do so in order to speak the truth, to reclaim your rights as an abused child, and because you are no longer dependent on this man's understanding. You simply remained true to your feelings and took them seriously. The portrayal of your "therapy" will surely open the eyes of many victims of similar treatments to such abuses, giving them the courage to fight for their rights and not bow to fossilized authorities as they had to do as children. With this, the dependency on the parents dissolves, and with it, the hatred diminishes or even disappears. For we only hate as long as we feel dependent.
21 I Written a Book About My Childhood Fortunately, you are not waiting for your family to understand your suffering, to beg your forgiveness, etc. You let your persecutors grill their sausages together, and you take care of yourself. Instead of waiting for a miracle, you wrote a book about your childhood. That surely did you good and was the best thing you could do, because in the process, you got to know your reality. One can tell that from your letter.
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JULY 2008
03 The Birth of One's Own Child Yes, exactly so. You found the answer yourself. One can repress and deny the abuse and cruelty of one's own parents for a long, all too long time, but the birth of our child gifts us the truth. I am glad for you that you now want to know how terribly you suffered as a child, without wanting to know it back then. Now you can embrace your child and learn from them what a child is REALLY like, and that you never deserved your mother's lack of love. Your child can now help you to discover, love, and understand the tormented child that YOU were. Only then will you become a loving mother, which is what you want to be, isn't it? Only then will you not need to repeat what your mother did. Only when you stop protecting this mother are you truly free for your child. I wish you this from the bottom of my heart.
06 The Idiocy of Certain Therapies You are astonished that so many patients allow themselves to be put off with lies. But when one considers that these are the same lies they had to take for truth as small children, it is, on the other hand, not astonishing at all when these people accept any nonsense in a clinic. It does not sound absurd in their ears that forgetting and forgiving will heal their depression, because no one has told them yet that it is the other way around: depression is the consequence of these confusing teachings and can be dissolved once one sees through this tactic.
06 My Daughter I can completely understand and empathize with your pain and the worry about the future of your children, but unfortunately, I cannot help you in any other way than to recommend reading my books (above all The Drama of the Gifted Child and Breaking Down the Wall of Silence / Eva's Awakening). Perhaps this reading will help you to access the feelings of the severely abused
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child that you were, who had to learn not to feel in order to survive. Your children are now adults; they will have to seek their own truth, but they will succeed better at this if YOU have found your truth. It is so tragic that the time has run out in which one could still stand by the small children—that, unfortunately, cannot be made up for. But you are still here too, and much is open to you if you can finally feel and take seriously your terrible sufferings from the past, without having to be deceived by suspect "therapies."
09 Compulsion to Repeat Part of the tragedy of the compulsion to repeat (Wiederholungszwang) is that the panicky fear of the inner child toward the first primary object (the cruel mother, for example) forces us to spare the mother from the rage of the small, powerless infant so that she does not kill us. Yet the more conscious we become, the more conscious we also become of this once-repressed, once so feared anxiety, which can only now be TRULY EXPERIENCED because the deadly danger no longer exists.
In new relationships, it can happen that our judgment still suffers as long as we need these relationships to work through the original fear of the mother. But you are working on this, as you write. And you will free yourself completely from this compulsion to repeat as soon as your panicky fear of the mother diminishes (because you have experienced it), and you can free the current acquaintance from her double role.
Then you can defend yourself, can show her your true feelings, are no longer powerless, and do not need to hide your rage. You do not need to hate this person, because you are not dependent on her as you were on your mother, but you also do not need to love her, because this woman apparently does not understand you and is not a match for you at all. I have the impression that you are already on the way to these solutions. But do not forget that rage experienced toward substitute objects is not truly liberating as long as it remains unjust, and therefore confusing, due to the conflation with the mother, and remains unresolved. Only JUSTIFIED rage has a healing effect—the rage toward the object that fully and completely deserved this anger of the child.
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10 Project Idea Thank you very much for your letter and your ideas on how one can spread the knowledge that parents so urgently need and almost never receive. We have had very bad experiences in the past with lists of therapists. Very quickly it turned out that poisonous pedagogy (Schwarze Pädagogik) found its way into the therapies, and we do not want to bear any responsibility for that.
The never-processed, unconscious fear of the small inner child toward the punishments (beatings) of the parents makes it impossible for most therapists, even with the best intentions, to stand by the child within the client. I agree that you should cite my website wherever you can, but your letter sparks another idea in me: the preface to my latest book, Paths of Life(Dein gerettetes Leben), actually contains everything that well-intentioned and curious parents would need to know. Would there be a way to reproduce this text and distribute it as widely as possible? Especially in centers that want to train parents to become enlightened parents and inform them correctly? Can you imagine such an activity? I see the major problem in the employees' fear of their own parents if they allow the truth. But the attempt would be worth it.
12 A Person Can Only Help Themselves? You ask me how you can help your brother, who fears the truth like the devil. If I knew that, I could redeem all of humanity from its madness, its fears, and its self-deceptions. But I cannot do that. How do you come to expect this magic art from me?
Therapists as Educators I have the impression that you will be able to help yourself very well because you already feel your anger and see clearly why it is absolutely justified. My book For Your Own Good (Am Anfang war Erziehung) could additionally help you to defend yourself against the hypocrisy
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of your family. Unfortunately, you harm yourself if you go to therapists who preach morality to you and want to educate you because your truthfulness and logic frighten them. That is pure mockery. Without lying to oneself, how can one therapeutically accompany someone if one fears and therefore rejects them? As a patient, you sense this deception, and that is good for you. But you do not need to force yourself to ask such "therapists" for help. By doing so, you would destroy what you have so wonderfully and clearly built up for yourself.
19 The Aging Parents It does not surprise me that you live with a constant rage in your gut, because you are lying to yourself and to your mother. Why are you doing that?
In my book Paths of Life (Dein gerettetes Leben), you will find the chapter on hatred, where I attempt to show that one can only free oneself from hatred when one is no longer dependent on the hated person. YOU are apparently dependent on your mother by waiting for her to love you. After all, your mother could also be cared for by other people who did not suffer under her cruelty as a child.
I know a woman of the same age (87) who never receives visits from her two children, but she knows why. She went through therapy and knows that she tormented her children greatly when they were small, just as she herself was tormented as a child. Now she does not reproach her adult children or cause them guilt feelings when they do not come, because they do not want to lie to themselves. Can you also manage to achieve this emotional honesty?
20 Courage to Rebel I do not know what kind of therapy you are doing. Could it be that in your therapy, a lot of grief is expected, but no rage? Back then, at the age of thirteen, the young girl had the strength to be angry, but that was forbidden, and she risked punishments—presumably beatings. Try to ally yourself with this girl and help her to feel the unbridled rage toward your brother and your parents, which you
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did not protect you, finally. Only in this way will you free yourself—not through years of weeping. That will then no longer be necessary.
20 The "Over-Loved" Child I congratulate you on your success, on your courage to see your reality and to free yourself from the lies. There was no "over-loved" child, but rather a cruelly betrayed one. It is wonderful how your unconscious was able to express itself in your dreams, and fortunate that you were able to understand and take them seriously. The former would not suffice without the latter. I wish you much joy in your hard-won freedom!
22 Free from the Lies How is the world ever supposed to change if all of us, our entire lives, adhere like slaves to the lies that were programmed into us from an early age—first by parents and religion, and then by school and state. It takes a great deal of courage and a lot of work to see through these lies and to free oneself from them. You have succeeded in this enormous achievement. At first, you still protect yourself through irony, but at the end, your powerful feeling breaks through, and your explicit, total solidarity with the suffering child you were now becomes possible. With this, you show that there is light at the end of the tunnel. You have done a great service to others, but above all to yourself, with this piece of writing.
23 Childhood in Africa You ask why the cruel upbringing in Africa does not lead to depressions like it does with us. Depression—the suppression of feelings—is only ONE of the countless possibilities we have to react as adults to the cruelties endured in childhood. The exercise of violence is another. We can hardly claim that there is a lack of the exercise of violence in Africa.
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26 Waiting for Love I am so glad that you understood my answer so well and that your body is apparently already thanking you for it. For so long, you held yourself to be guilty in order to protect your mother from your justified reproaches, and ultimately, you had to hate YOURSELF as well. All of this, just so that your mother would finally love you and thank you for the sacrifice of your entire life. Yet she has no intention of doing so. Try now to live with your sad truth, to finally free yourself from the lies of the prevailing morality, and to give the child you were the love it never received. In this way, after forty years, you will save YOUR life, which has been yours by right for a long time.
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© Alice Miller, May 2009
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