Secret Followers, Silent Fears, and the Price of Freedom

 Recently, I received a private message from a reader named D. He told me he had written to Alice Miller years ago and even received a reply, but he was too self-conscious to share it. He also shared his reflections on Mark Zuckerberg — how the tech mogul’s carefully polished image hides the wounded child who never heard the words: “I love you just as you are. You don’t have to perform for me.”

D sees clearly the tragedy in Zuckerberg’s life, yet he is still afraid to face his own. His words reminded me again why so many people follow my blog in secret, leaving private messages but not public comments.

Secret Followers

In 2017, I wrote a post titled "Secret Followers." Even then, I noticed how many people read my blog silently, afraid to be seen. I understand their fear. After I published my book A Dance to Freedom, I was targeted by a mob of sociopaths at my job of almost ten years. It was an orchestrated psychological warfare campaign designed to destroy me. To watch someone go through that is triggering, because it reminds people of their own fears of being punished, scapegoated, or left alone. So they visit in secret, but rarely share or comment.

Why I Survived

If I had not truly resolved my childhood repression, I would not have survived. My dyslexia, which was once seen as a handicap, became a catalyst in my liberation. When present events triggered old wounds, I often could not write. In those moments, I lay on the couch or in bed in a fetal position, just like a baby. The difference was that I now understood what was happening — I knew I was reliving the child’s fears and grief that had once been too dangerous to feel.

I couldn’t talk to anyone in my family — they would have only pushed medication or cult-like rationalizations, as they did when I was a teenager. Instead, I locked myself away with Alice Miller’s books and website. Only after the storm of feelings passed would I begin to put them into words. That is how I discovered emotional freedom: not by analyzing, not by sympathizing with others, but by consciously feeling my own truth.

The Eye of the Storm

Later, at my job, I found myself again in the middle of psychological warfare. Sitting in the gatehouse, I felt like I was in the eye of a storm, watching sociopaths spin around me. I could sense their next traps and maneuvers even before they unfolded in their board meetings. They tried to make me their scapegoat, their poison container. But because I had already faced the fears of the child I once was, they could not hijack my mind.

Since publishing my book, I have been targeted in this way four times. Each time, those who attacked me exposed themselves. Some have already died. Now, the sociopaths in power pretend not to see me, as if I were invisible. They are afraid, because coming after me means exposing themselves.

Why I Wrote My Book

If I had chosen to use my psychological knowledge to build a cult, I could have made far more money. In our society, no one cares if you exploit others to get rich, as long as you don’t challenge their lies and illusions. But I never wanted followers or slaves. I wanted freedom for myself and for others. That is why I wrote my book.

I remember my ghostwriter once told me: “You are bringing everyone down. You are not going to make a lot of friends with this book.” And I answered: “I am not writing a book to make friends.”

The Most Dangerous Moment

The most dangerous moment in any toxic relationship is when you are about to leave. As long as they believe they own you, they love you — or at least, they love their illusion of you. But the moment they sense you are truly free, the mask of love vanishes, and their rage erupts. That is when they gather all their forces to destroy you.

This is what happened to me. When the sociopaths at my workplace believed I was under their control, they showered me with gifts, dinners, and attention. But the instant they saw I was free, they turned against me with all the power at their disposal. They could not live with the reality of my emotional freedom.

The Difference

D’s story, and the many “secret followers” who visit silently, remind me of the difference between seeing the wound in others and healing it in yourself. To heal means to consciously feel the fears of the child you once were, without repression, without distraction, without escape. When you have truly done this, you lose the fear of standing alone. You no longer need to hide in the shadows. No one can manipulate you again.

That is real freedom. And it is worth more than money, power, or false immortality.

Over a Half a Million People Know that I Exist!

Most of my readers follow my blog anonymously. But over a half million people have visited my blog! 

Over half a million people know that I exist! 

I thank all those who have bought a copy of my book. You all helped me stay afloat when I was between jobs because of being targeted by malignant narcissists in the workplace. 

I'm hoping my book has inspired you to develop the courage and strength to leave the emotional prison of your childhood and do your emotional work, which is the most essential work in a person's life. 

Once we are emotionally free, we can no longer be manipulated by malignant narcissists or evil people. 

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2017/07/secret-followers.html 

Narcissism is a cult

There is no way to true liberation without pain. People do all kind of things no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing and feeling their own painful truths. One does not become enlightened by affirmations, rituals and meditation, but by facing and feeling our painful truths.

Narcissists have secret lives. They lie effortlessly. They are two faced - appearing with a perfect public image that most people believe. In the shadows, when no one is looking, they do tremendous damage to family, friends, coworkers and those who live with them.

Narcissism can be similar to a cult in a few ways:

Narcissistic families

Can be like small cults, with a narcissistic parent as the leader, submissive followers, and people who want to please the leader. Family members may feel isolated from the world and have difficulty developing a sense of self outside of the family.

Narcissistic relationships

Can be like cults, where one person, such as a romantic partner, friend, or workplace colleague, hijacks reality and controls the other person. The leader may use manipulation, lies, scare tactics, and coercion to control the other person, who may then provide the leader with praise and adulation.

In narcissistic families, personality disorders can cause intense emotions to circulate and be passed down through projection, transference and identification. This can lead to a distorted reality for family members, who may have difficulty developing a sense of self outside of the family system. 

Narcissistic personality disorder is a lifelong mental health condition, but treatment can help manage symptoms and reduce its impact on relationships, work, and self-esteem. People living with narcissists can also try to preserve their well-being by setting strong boundaries, building a support network, and working with a therapist who's knowledgeable about narcissism. 

Just like every self-respecting cult, the narcissistic family has its own deep-seated secrets and bizarre traditions. Unquestioning obedience is usually valued over freedom of thought and action. The narcissistic parent is all-powerful, all-knowing and intransigent.

Yes, they are very talented at playing the victim role. 

"The thing that concerns me most about cult groups is the unconscious manipulations that I have described in detail in my work. It is the way in which the repressed and unreflected childhood biographies of parents and therapists influence the lives of children and patients entrusted to their care without anyone involved actually realizing it. At first glance, it may seem as if what goes on in cults and cult-like therapy groups takes place on a different level from the unconscious manipulation of children by their parents. We assume that in the former instance we are in the presence of an intentional, carefully planned, and organized form of manipulation aimed at exploiting the specific predicament of individuals.

In my view, however, this allegedly conscious exploitation can also be traced back to unconscious motives. Terrible as the consequences were, I do not believe, for example, that the two initiators of “feeling therapy,” discussed earlier, actually set out to establish a totalitarian regime. It was the power they gained over their adherents that made them into gurus. And this is what I have in mind when I refer to the unconscious aspects of manipulation. In the end, they themselves become the victims of a process with an inexorable logic of its own, a process they were unaware of because they had never given it any thought.

Thus they sparked off a conflagration they were unable to control, much less extinguish. First, they had learned how to reduce people to the emotional state of the helpless child. Once they had achieved that, they also learned how to use unconscious regression to exercise total control over their victims. From then on, what they did seemed to come automatically, in accordance, with the child-rearing patterns instilled into them in their own childhood." Alice Miller 

https://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2011/08/gurus-and-cults-leaders-how-they.html?m=1

Open Letter to Cristiano Ronaldo

Dear Mr. Ronaldo,

I’m extremely dyslexic and writing is one of the hardest things for me to do in life.  I can’t afford to pay an editor at the moment to edit my writings, so I apologize if you have difficulty understanding my letter. 

To tell you the truth I have given up on humanity. I think humanity has passed the point of no return.

But I feel compelled to reach out to you.

These words by Leo Tolstoy could not be truer: “Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.” This is the problem with our society. No one wants to look in the mirror and face themselves. 

If you like to take the attention from yourself and put it on someone else that should be held by Portuguese society to a higher standard than athletes. 

Ask all the talking heads on TV -- why are they protecting Dr. Julio Macchado Vaz with a wall of silence? 

I have been trying to tell my story since the year 2000, I went to Portugal and contacted the media there to go public with my story and I even tried to contact a lawyer there to sue this doctor for malpractice, not because I wanted money, but to expose the harm done by the so-called professionals/experts that are "supposedly" to help the public, but no one got back to me, so I came back to America and started thinking about writing a book to tell my story, share my life experiences, and psychological discoveries. I published my book  A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusion in 2014 -- and I hope you read it. 

Just like here in an America that was an open secret in Hollywood of Bill Cosby's problems with women. 

I know without a doubt that there is also an open secret in Portugal of this doctor having sex with his patients. 

They don't pay attention to my story, because my story is a connected story and I own it, so they feel threatened by my story. Owned and connected stories like mine need to be told, but sadly most people in the media are only interested in disowned and disconnected stories of victims without resolution they can exploit for pure sensationalism, they are like vultures looking for dead bodies. 

And they feel threatened by owned and connected stories like mine, because stories like mine, makes people look in the mirror to question themselves, their own parents and people in power position standing in symbolizing their parents. AND WHO WANTS TO DO THAT?! Most people are still scared little children afraid of being punished if they dare to speak the naked truth and expose the real state of affairs.

This quote by Alice Miller that I included in my book A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions, page 76 -- it's so true: “To many people, it seems easier to take medication, to smoke, drink alcohol, preach, educate or treat others, and prepare wars than expose themselves to their own painful truth.”

I don’t know the details of what happened in the hotel in Las Vegas, only you and Ms. Mayorga know the real truth.  I read the whole article Her Name Is Kathryn The Woman Who Accuses Ronaldo of Rape by Spiegel online and there is no doubt that something happened.

I used to be a topless dancer for 18 years in a nightclub in Phoenix Arizona. And I met many young famous athletes, like you, and movie stars – suffering from the illusion that success, their talents, money, and fame alone would liberate them -- and  they felt  were superior to everyone else – suffering from grandiosity -- these words by Alice Miller could not be truer: "The grandiose person is never really free; first because he is excessively dependent on admiration from others, and second, because his self-respect is dependent on qualities, functions, and achievements that can suddenly fail." From the book The Drama of the Gifted Child: The search for the True Self  Page 36

All the other dancers were always totally star struck by rich and famous people like you -- and they all flocked to the rich and famous people's table – to me famous people are just like everyone else and I treat them the same --as everybody else -- I don't care how talented or how much money they have -- so most rich and famous people didn't spend much time talking with me and would move on to the other girls that give them the special treatment they thought they deserved.

The look of Ms. Kathryn Mayorga in the picture below, she is totally star struck by you!

Yes, a lot of young girls look at famous and rich guys like you as a path to freedom and salvation, because like you  -- they also suffer from the same illusions that money and fame alone is the path to freedom and salvation.

In 2012 I got into a debate with an ex-dancer from Israel that used to dance in New York City where she confessed to having sex for money with customers, she met at the club.

You can read more about this debate with the ex-dancer on my blog Comments and thoughts on the “Doll” Documentary” by Zohar Wagner that gives insight into these dangerous exploitative relationships.  

Most dancers would enter mutually into exploitative relationships -- men trying to exploit them sexually and the dancers try to get as much money out of them as they possibly could and they did not have boundaries or limits in what they did in order to get to the men’s money, so they were each other’s victims. 

But this doesn't mean it's okay to force yourself on them and not accept their no at any time -- if they change their mind -- and ask you to stop.

While growing up in Portugal I had many experiences with Portuguese boys that they didn't know what the word NO meant! I talk about it in my book -- that I hope you read -- a little bit about my experiences with many Portuguese boys that didn't know the meaning of the word NO.

I also shared in a comment in the article in the link below of an experience with Portuguese boys in the Summer of 1983 while I was in Paris. "..while I was in Paris, France one summer I was working in a restaurant and Portuguese people, that, “look like nice people”, came to eat and they invite me to go with them for coffee and me thinking -- for being with those from my own country --- it would be okay and safe, but when I was inside the car with them, they started to disrespect me and when they stopped at the traffic light I got out of the car really quickly. I am sure if I had not gotten out of the car I would have been raped by those Portuguese young people that looked like they were nice guys, that day I learn to avoid and be careful with Portuguese people because most of them have no respect for themselves and others. ..."
https://www.facebook.com/notes/sylvie-imelda-shene/its-still-a-mans-world/453280120451/

Even if Ms. Kathryn Mayorga accusations are not true. You are in the stage of the world and all eyes are on you! This can be an opportunity for you and your millions of followers to become real and open the path for all humanity to free themselves from lies and illusions.

Is not just dancers that get into these exploitative relationships. Everywhere I look I see people in this type of exploitative relationships and not in an equal partnership between adults.

I am pretty sure most people, if not all the people, around you, are around you, because, they just want to exploit you, stand in your head --  take ownership of your story -- and make as much money out of your story as they possibly can -- if you lost all of your money -- most, if not all around you would leave. 

I have been living in Arizona since 1985! And I didn't hear of you until my niece that lives in Portugal came to visit me in Arizona -- while she was here -- she mentioned to me that you paid a woman to have a child for you --- that gave me a small window right away to a troubled soul.

A seeing and a feeling man would never pay a woman to bring a child into the world to separate from the mother at birth. And a seeing and a feeling woman would not EVER agree to carry a pregnancy to term for money and give birth to a new being to give away after birth like a puppy or a kitten -- babies are not puppies or kittens ---  the trauma of separation from the mother is a hard trauma to heal and a seeing and a feeling man and woman would NEVER traumatize a baby like that.

I read a little bit of your history that you are, like me,  the product of an unwanted pregnancy --  this pain of being unwanted is hard to heal -- and we go through life feeling unwanted everywhere we go --  it took me more than 40 years to heal this trauma -- and everytime I'm rejected in the present moment -- it is still a painful reminder -- of the pain of being an unwanted and rejected child. 

I read your mother even thought about aborting you; you are unconsciously and compulsively reenacting your childhood traumas -- traumatizing yourself and others like you were traumatized when you were a defenseless little infant. 

You have been repressing this pain with the aid of football, money, and fame, but now with Ms.Mayorga accusation of rape -- she is triggering this pain to the surface and bringing you to your knees -- not to be brought closer to god like religion wants you to believe -- but to face your childhood repression and gain ownership of your own story and free yourself from the emotional prison you were born in. 

Your fans and the people around you don't care about you and how much you suffered as a child because they don't want to be reminded of their own painful childhoods. They are just interested that you win games for them, protect your image, so they can keep on going on, as usual, to exploit you to distract themselves from facing their own painful truths.

Like I wrote in my book A Dance to Freedom: Your Guide to Liberation from Lies and Illusions page 39 and 62: "It’s also important to realize that unresolved trauma will always catch up with us. “Merely forgetting early traumas and early neglect is no solution,” Alice Miller writes. Instead, we have to go back in time and deal with the true feelings we had as children. Only then can we free ourselves from overwhelming fear, shame, guilt, anger, and frustration. Getting to that point is a lot easier when you have someone who can help you understand how present events trigger repressed feelings. 

Alice Miller calls the type of person who can help an adult face their childhood traumas an enlightened — or knowing — witness. Ideally, parents should fulfill the role of helping witnesses while their children are still little —  ...but too many mothers and fathers are too traumatized themselves to provide the patience and loving support their children need. 

When most people grow up they unconsciously and compulsively reenact their own childhood traumas with people who have nothing to do with those painful scenarios, such as their own kids. 

Parents who have suffered are compelled to make sure that others suffer, too, and the cycle can go on for eternity. 

...Abused and otherwise traumatized children are forced to repress their true feelings unless they’re lucky enough to find someone to comfort them. 

But because enlightened witnesses (and even helping witnesses) aren’t always readily available, most of us develop what Alice Miller calls a false self — usually for the sake of our parents — only to pay for it later in life. 

In an article entitled “The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society,” Alice Miller writes that “it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If, lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person.” This is how the vicious cycle of parental abuse continues for generations. And in extreme cases, the repetition compulsion can lead to violent atrocities against humanity."

You have an opportunity here to resolve your childhood repression and become real and authentic.

It will require great courage and you might lose some money and many fans, but you will recover your soul -- and save your soul -- and your children's' souls -- our souls are our authentic feelings -- without our authentic feelings -- we become soulless -- like robots -- and  when we repress and deny our authentic feelings -- we will be endlessly driven by them compulsively and unconsciously -- to do to others -- what once was done to us -- when we were defenseless little infants.

Now you have a choice to become real or go back to live in denial -- falsing your true feelings for feelings you don't have --- acting as if personality -- and continue to live and die in an emotional prison -- like millions of people in our world.

While growing up in Portugal I always said to myself: the pain stops with me and I will never be like my abusers.

It took me almost all of my life to break free from the chains of repetition compulsion and this is my proudest achievement and it doesn't matter if society ever recognizes one's liberation to be the most important achievement in a person's life. I'm free at last.

Wishing you much courage and strength to break free from the chains of repetition compulsion.

Sincerely,

Sylvie Imelda Shene

Today 6-9-19 my sister shared this post of Cristiano Ronaldo on Facebook:

The only footballer in the world who doesn't have a tattoo to donate blood to children with cancer
Respect 👏👏

My comment on her post: The question is: Is he genuine or he does it just to create a good image for himself. Most random acts of kindness in our society are done just to manipulate public perception. Most people out there are acting as if personality pretending to be good people but are wolves in sheep's clothing -- learn to question everything -- I constantly witness people behind closed doors creating traps to trap the emotionally blind and then when people are looking rescue the people they just trapped so they look like heroes. Everywhere I look I see every well-orchestrated illusions.

Read my blog Experienced Knowledge about my experience with emotional harassment in the workplace.

Secret Followers

I have many people who follow me in secret.:-)

Facebook original post

Recently, most of my readers have come from Russia. Why are they so interested in me!? And why don't I have any readers from Portugal?! There is an old saying in Portugal that says: saints from the same land don't make miracles! It is true, because I very rarely get any readers from my old country, and if I ever do, it's just a few. 

Entry Pageviews
Russia 1545
United States 968
France 757
Germany 646
United Kingdom 636
Ireland 595
Canada 594
Spain 453
Italy 332
Netherlands 382

Facebook post, July 24, 2016, 7:15 a.m., from when the Russians found me! 

Usually, most people reading my blog are from America, but today most of my readers come from Russia!!! What kind of people in Russia are reading my blog?! The Russians have found me!!!

Russia 997
United States 739
United Kingdom 519
Germany 318
Canada 215
France 114
Netherlands 88
Australia 74
Portugal 64
Sweden 54

The Secret by James Arthur Ray -- Fatal Retreat

The exchange of our last texts brought to mind the followers of The Secret by James Arthur Ray, who, because they didn't listen to the messages of their bodies, but instead listened to the stupid guru of the silly book The Secret, lost their lives. I am sure his followers were very well-behaved children and did what their parents asked of them, and now they do what people symbolizing their parents ask them to do, even if their lives are in danger. And never question themselves why they feel something is missing in them? And they allow themselves to be exploited by charming gurus or cult leaders, just like they were exploited when they were defenseless little children.

Arizona Sweat Lodge: The Inside Story of James Ray's Fatal Retreat

My experience is the same as Alice Miller's; it has taken me all my life! " … It has taken me all my life to allow myself to be what I am and to listen to what my inner self is telling me, more and more directly, without waiting for permission from others or currying approval from people symbolizing my parents… Successful therapy should shorten this long journey. It should liberate us from our ingrained adaptation strategies and help us learn to trust our own feelings - something our parents have made difficult, if not impossible. Because it was prohibited and hence feared, right from the beginning, many people find it impossible to embark on such a journey. Later, the role initially played by our parents is taken over by teachers, priests, society, and morality, all of which are conspiring to cement this fear. And cement, as we know, is very difficult to soften.” The Longest Journey 

Never put your life in someone else's hands

Never put your life in someone else’s hands; it can be very dangerous. As children, we had no choice; our lives were in our parents' and caregivers' hands, but now we are adults. We must be in charge of our own lives. If we still have an inner wounded child inside of us, the adult in us has to be the one paying attention and listening to our wounded child. If we need help understanding our feelings, we should seek an enlightened and sympathetic witness to help us comprehend and experience them within the context of our own childhood.

NEVER, allow people symbolizing your parents take charge of your life and make decisions for you or make another adult your substitute parent and let her/him regress you to the wounded child you once were because that is putting you in a position of being controlled and manipulated by another person, just like when you were a little child and can be very dangerous to your mental and physical health and well-being. 

An example is the followers of the Secret by James Arthur Ray, who symbolized their parents/caretakers. The followers, “the good children,” followed his directions without question, and two of them paid the price with their lives for this mistake. Read more about this sad, tragic story here

Another example is Tony Robbins with his TV program “Breakthrough.” he, like many gurus out there, is taking advantage of and exploiting emotionally blind people and putting people’s well-being in danger. A few years ago, I was going through the TV channels, and Tony Robbins’s show “Breakthrough” was on. He had this emotionally blind woman sleeping outside with the homeless, so she would have the experience of having nothing. In this way, she was supposed to get over her depression and be grateful for the things she has. How sad that this grown person puts her life in this guru’s hands and allows him to regress her to the helpless, lost child she once was and exploit her just like her parents did when she was a little defenseless child. 

I am amazed at the number of smart and intelligent people who fall for the seductive words of charismatic individuals like Tony Robbins. Just like Alice Miller says in her book “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-rearing and the Roots of Violence.” “… We have seen how easy it is for intellectuals in a dictatorship to be corrupted; it would be a vestige of aristocratic snobbery to think that only “the uneducated masses” are susceptible to propaganda. Both Hitler and Stalin had a surprisingly large number of enthusiastic followers among intellectuals. Our capacity to resist has nothing to do with our intelligence but with the degree of access to our true self. Indeed, intelligence is capable of innumerable rationalizations when it comes to the matter of adaptation.” 

One more example is religion; religion/god symbolizes the all-powerful parent, and the followers are permanently trapped in the role of the child.  Our goal is to free ourselves from all illusions, become autonomous adults, and stand on our own two feet without crutches.

Also in her book Paths of Life, Alice Miller says: "MANY PROBLEMS APPEAR in a new light when we look to childhood as a source of possible explanations. We are living in an age in which democracies are gaining the upper hand over dictatorships. At the same time, the cult-group phenomenon is an indication that there is a growth in the number of totalitarian systems to which people voluntarily submit themselves. People growing up in a spirit of liberty and tolerance, accepted in childhood for what they are, rather than being throttled and stunted by their upbringing, would hardly place themselves at the mercy of a cult group of their own accord. And if by chance or skillful manipulation, they did fall afoul of such an organization, they certainly would not stay there very long. 

...In my view, however, this allegedly conscious exploitation can also be traced back to unconscious motives. Terrible as the consequences were, I do not believe, for example, that the two initiators of “feeling therapy,” discussed earlier, actually set out to establish a totalitarian regime. It was the power they gained over their adherents that made them into gurus. And this is what I have in mind when I refer to the unconscious aspects of manipulation. In the end, they themselves become the victims of a process with an inexorable logic of its own, a process they were unaware of because they had never given it any thought.

Thus, they sparked off a conflagration they were unable to control, much less extinguish. First, they had learned how to reduce people to the emotional state of the helpless child. Once they had achieved that, they also learned how to use unconscious regression to exercise total control over their victims.  From then on, what they did seemed to come automatically, in accordance with the child-rearing patterns instilled into them in their own childhood."

Read more here

Also in the article below, Alice Miller articulates very well the dangers of rebirth therapy.

CONCERNING PRIMAL SELF-THERAPY

 

I am frequently asked what I consider to be the decisive factor in psychotherapy today.  Is it the recognition of the truth, liberation from the enforced vow of silence and from idealization of one's parents, or is it the presence of an Enlightened Witness?  My view is that it is not a question of either-or but of both-and.  Without the Enlightened Witness, it is impossible to bear the truth of what happened to us in early infancy.  But by the term Enlightened Witness I do not mean anyone who has studied psychology or has been through primal experiences with a guru and has remained in his thrall.  For me, Enlightened Witnesses are therapists with the courage to face up to their own histories and to gain their autonomy in doing so, rather than seeking to offset their own repressed feelings of ineffectuality by exerting power over their patients.

 

The adult needs assistance in coping with the present situations as an adult, while at the same time maintaining contact with the suffering and knowing child he once was, the child he could not muster the courage to listen to for so long, but now, with help, can finally pay heed to.  The body knows everything that has happened to it, but it has no language to express that knowledge.  It is like the child we once were, the child that sees all but without the aid of the adults, remains helpless and alone.  Accordingly, whenever the emotions from the past rise to the surface, they are invariably accompanied by the fears of the helpless child, dependent on the understanding or at least the reassurances of the caregivers.

 

Unlike the body, our cognitive system knows little of the events far back in the past; conscious memories are fragmentary, brittle, unreliable.  But the cognitive system has a huge fund of knowledge at its disposal, a fully developed mind, and the life experience that a child cannot yet have.  As adults are no longer powerless, they can offer the child within them (the body) protection and an attentive ear so that it can express itself in its own way and tell its own story.  It is in the light of these stories that the looming, incomprehensible fears and emotions of the adult take on meaning.  Finally, they stand in a recognizable context and are no longer so obscurely menacing.

 

In a society with a receptive attitude to the distress of children, no one will be alone with his/her history.  The same is true of therapists.  Because then everyone will know that it is not the children who are responsible for their sufferings, but the adults.

 

I recently wrote a letter in French to the forum that I am quoting in English below:

 

Dear Franck, I understand well your fascination with the manual of Stettbacher.  When I read this manuscript in 1989, I thought that it contained the solution for a lot of readers who, after having read my books, were looking, like you, for the sources of their sufferings and fears in the history of their childhood.  As I had never had the luck to be understood and helped in my childhood nor in my therapies (it was always me who had to help others), I found the idea of a primal self-therapy at first quite normal and acceptable.  It was after some years that I grasped the great importance and even necessity of an enlightened and empathic therapist in the process of recovery.  Especially thanks to letters of people that failed to help themselves and who blamed themselves for their plight ( trying to do more and more therapy and turning around alone with their fears and pains) that I understood that the primal self - therapy can indeed trigger easily the old pent-up emotions but can reactivate the situation of the child that was always alone with his/her pains and fears.  This repetition of the old trauma is the opposite of a therapy.

 

Today, I share the opinion of Arthur Janov, who always affirmed that primal therapy without the assistance of a well-informed and compassionate therapist can be very dangerous.  (cf. his homepage.  In addition, I think that it contains (1) a contradiction in itself by reactivating a situation of which one wants to get rid of and (2) a perpetuation of the violence directed toward oneself.

 

I haven't had any contact with Mister Stettbacher since 1994, when I stopped recommending his method, but I suppose that the information on its negative effects reached him too and that it already motivated him to stop recommending it.  Since the release of his book, there is a lot of new information on this topic available that is easily accessible thanks to the internet.  Maybe the next book by Stettbacher will bring the necessary corrections to his present work, published 12 years ago.

 

Alice Miller

Love is learned through experience not by teaching or preaching

excerpt below from the book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware: Society's Betrayal of the Child by Alice Miller:

Much of what Jesus said in the course of His life and, even more, His deeds insisted that He did not have just this one father (God), who insisted on the observance of His commandments, on sacrifice and was demanding, distant, invisible, and infallible, a father whose "will [must] be done." From His early days Jesus also knew another father--Joseph, who never called attention to himself, who protected and loved Mary and the child, encouraged the child, assigned him central importance, and served him. It must have been this modest man who made it possible for the child to distinguish what was true and to experience the meaning of love. This is why Jesus was able to see through the hypocrisy of his contemporaries. A child raised in accordance with traditional principles, who knows nothing else from the start, is not able to detect hypocrisy because he lacks a basis for comparison. Someone who knows only such an atmosphere from childhood will perceive it as normal in all situations, perhaps suffering because of it but unable to recognize it for what it is. If he has not experienced love as a child, he will long for it, but will not know what love can be. Jesus did know.

There would without any doubt be more people capable of love if the church, instead of urging its members to obey authority and expecting allegiance to Christ on these grounds, would understand the crucial significance of Joseph's attitude. He served his child because he regarded Him as the child of God. What would it be like if all of us regarded our children as children of God--which we could do, after all? In his Christmas message of 1979 in honor of the Year of the Child, Pope John Paul II said that it is the task of adults to instill ideals in their children. These words coming from a man capable of love are certainly well-intended. But when pedagogues, both clerical and secular, set out to instill prescribed ideals in a child, they invariably turn to the methods of "poisonous pedagogy" and at best train children to become adults who train others in turn instead of raising them to become loving human beings.

Children who are respected learn respect. Children cared for learn to care for those weaker than themselves. Children who are loved for what they are cannot learn intolerance. In an environment such as this they will develop their own ideals, which can be nothing other than humane, since they grow out of the experience of love.

I have been told more than once that someone who was able to let his true self unfold during childhood would become a martyr in our society because he would refuse to adapt to some of its norms. There is something to be said for this idea, which is often advanced as an argument in defense of traditional child-rearing practices. Parents say they want to make their child learn to adapt as early as possible so he or she will not have to suffer too much later on in school or professional life. Since we still know very little about the influence of childhood suffering on the development of personality, it would seem difficult to refute this argument. Examples from history also appear to confirm it, for there are many who were forced to die a martyr's death because they refused to accept the prevailing standards of society and instead remained loyal the truth (and thus themselves).

But who is it actually who is so eager to see that society's norms are observed, who persecutes and crucifies those with the temerity to think differently--if not people who have had a "proper upbringing"? They are the ones who learned as children to accept the death of their souls and do not notice it until they are confronted with the vitality of their young or adolescent children. Then they must try to stamp out this vitality, so they will not be reminded of their own loss.

In the history of art the massacre of children has been depicted over and over again. Let us take as an example King Herod's slaying of all the male children in his realm. He feels threatened by them because there may be among them the new king who will one day vie for his throne, and for this reason he brings about a bloodbath in Bethlehem by ordering every boy aged two and under to be killed. Mary and Joseph flee to Egypt in order to save their child. Their love not only saves Jesus's life, it also enables the riches of His soul to unfold, which ultimately leads to His early death. One could rightly claim that it was Jesus's authenticity that caused His death, from which a false, conformist self would have saved Him. But can a meaningful life be measured quantitatively? Would Jesus have been happier if His parents, instead of treating Him with love and respect, had raised Him from an early age to be a faithful subject of Herod or to live a long life as a scribe?

The fact that Jesus grew up with parents whose only goal was to love and respect Him can hardly be denied, not even by believing Christians, who, in accordance with religious tradition, see in Jesus the Son of God. Every year throughout the Christian world the child is honored in the celebration of Christmas, yet Christian pedagogy has never been guided by this. Even someone who assumes that Jesus owes his capacity for love, His authenticity and goodness to the grace of His Divine Father and not to the extraordinary loving ways of Mary and Joseph might wonder why God entrusted these particular earthly parents with the task of caring for His child. It is quite astonishing that none of Christ's followers has ever raised this question, which could had led to new directions in child-rearing. The caring parents of the child Jesus have never served as models; on the contrary, religious manuals generally recommend strict disciplinary measures starting in infancy. Once it is no longer a secret that certain psychological laws are behind this kind of model, once enough parents become aware that preaching love will not nurture the child's ability to love, whereas respect and understanding in childhood will, then those who receive this respect and understanding in childhood will no longer be the exception and will not have to to die a martyr's death.

If we also take Herod as a symbol of our own society, we can point to aspects of the story of Jesus that may be used as arguments either for or against traditional child-rearing practices (depending on our personal experience): on the one hand, the massacre of the innocents and, on the other, extraordinary parents, servants of their child, who in the eyes of traditional pedagogues would then of necessity have become tyrants. Society, personified in Herod, fears children's vitality and authenticity and attempts to eradicate them, but lived-out truth cannot be destroyed, not even when the officials of Church and state take it upon themselves to "administer" the truth with the intent of eliminating it. The repeated resurrection of the truth cannot be suppressed; again and again, individual human beings affirm and live it. The Church as a social institution has continually attempted to prevent this resurrection from taking place--for example, by instigating wars in the name of Christ or by encouraging parents, by instigating wars in the name of Christ or by encouraging parents to use strict coercive measures to deaden their children's souls (i.e.,feelings) in the name of the sacred values of child-rearing (obedience, submissiveness, denial of self).

The church's struggle (supposedly an expression of God's will) against children's vitality is renewed daily by training them to be blindly obedient to those in authority and to think of themselves as wicked; this approach is more reminiscent of Herod, with his fear of the resurrection of the truth in the child, than it is of Jesus, with His demonstrated confidence in human potentiality. The hatred rooted in the small child's reaction to this training swells to immense proportions, and the Church (in part unconsciously) abets the proliferation of evil, which, on a conscious level, it professes to oppose.

It requires no great effort to identify the apocalyptic features of our century: world wars, massacres, the specter of nuclear war, the threat to the earth's ecological balance, the depletion of energy sources, the increase in drug addiction--the list could go on and on. Yet the same century has also taught us knowledge that is utterly new in human history and that could bring about a decisive change in our lives if its full significance was to penetrate public consciousness. I am referring to the discovery to the territory that the period of early childhood is of crucial importance for a person's emotional development. The more distinctly we come to see that the most ominous events of the present and recent past are not the products of mature rationality and the more clearly we recognize the absurdity and unpredictable of the arms race, the most urgent becomes the need to investigate the origins and nature of the human destructiveness whose helpless victims we all are.

The magnitude of destructiveness that we read about in the newspapers every day actually represents only the last chapter of long stories we are usually ignorant of. We are victims, observers, reporters, or mute witnesses of a violence whose roots we do not see, a violence that often takes us by surprise, outrages us, or simply makes us stop and think, but we lack the inner ability (i.e., parental or Divine permission) to perceive and to take to heart the simple and obvious explanations that are already available. pages 96-100.

Alice Miller used a term above "poisonous pedagogy," which some people may not be familiar with, so I will enclose a link to a section in her book For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in
Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence, where she explains in a summary what the term "poisonous pedagogy" means 
http://www.alice-miller.com/books_en.php?page=3