A great danger indeed

"I designate as pessimistic the thought that we are far more dependent than our pride would like to admit on individual human beings (and not only on institutions!), for a single person can gain control over the masses if he learns to use to his own advantage the system under which they were raised. People who have been "pedagogically" manipulated as children are not aware as adults of all that can be done to them. Like the individual authoritarian father, leader figures, in whom the masses see their own father, actually embody the avenging child who needs the masses for his own purposes (of revenge). And this second form of dependence--the dependence of the "great leader" on his childhood, on the unpredictable nature of the unintegrated, enormous potential for hatred within him--is decidedly a very great danger." Taken from the book "For Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence" by Alice Miller (page 243)

Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering

You ask me why I spend my life writing?
Do I find entertainment?
Is it worthwhile?
Above all, does it pay?
If not, then, is there a reason?...
I write only because
There is a voice within me
That will not be still.

SYLVIA PLATH

Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child's wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded; usually the purpose of this prohibition is to protect the parents' defense mechanisms. Adults are free to hurl reproaches at God, at fate, at the authorities, or at society if they are deceived, ignored, punished unjustly, confronted with excessive demands, or lied to. Children are not allowed to reproach their gods--their parents and teachers. By no means are they allowed to express their frustrations. Instead, they must repress or deny their emotional reactions, which build up inside until adulthood, when they are finally discharged, but not on the object that caused them. The forms this discharge may take range from persecuting their own children by the way they bring them up, to all possible degrees of emotional illness, to addiction, criminality, and even suicide.
The most acceptable and profitable form this discharge can take for society is literature, because this does not burden anyone with guilt feelings. In this medium the author is free to make every possible reproach, since here it can be attributed to a fictitious person. An illustration is the life of Sylvia Plath, for in her case, along with her poetry and the fact of her psychotic breakdown as well as her later suicide, there are also the personal statements she makes in her letters and the comments by her mother. The tremendous pressure she felt to achieve and the constant stress she was under are always emphasized when Sylvia's suicide is discussed. Her mother, too, points this out repeatedly, for parents of suicidal people understandably try to restrict themselves to external causes, since their guilt feelings stand in the way of their seeing the situation for what it actually is and of their experiencing grief.

Sylvia Plath's life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity, she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person. In all her letters, she assures her mother how well she is doing. The suspicion that her mother did not release negative letters for publication overlooks the deep tragedy of Plath's life. This tragedy (and the explanation for her suicide as well) lies in the very fact that she could not have written any other kind of letters, because her mother needed reassurance, or because Sylvia at any rate believed that her mother would not have been able to live without this reassurance. Had Sylvia been able to write aggressive and unhappy letters to her mother, she would not have had to commit suicide. Had her mother been able to experience grief at her inability to comprehend the abyss that was her daughter's life, she never would have published the letters, because the assurances they contained of how well things were going for her daughter would have been too painful to bear. Aurelia Plath is unable to mourn over this because she has guilt feelings, and the letters serve her as proof of her innocence. The following passage from Letters Home provides an example of her rationalization. 

The following poem, written at the age of fourteen, was inspired by the accidental blurring of a pastel still-life Sylvia had just completed and stood up on the porch table to show us. As Warren, Grammy, and I were admiring it, the doorbell rang. Grammy took off her apron, tossed it on the table, and went to answer the call, her apron brushing against the pastel, blurring part of it. Grammy was grieved. Sylvia, however, said lightly, "Don't worry; I can patch it up." That night she wrote her first poem containing tragic undertones.

I THOUGHT THAT I COULD NOT BE HURT
I thought that I could not be hurt;
I thought that I must surely be
impervious to suffering--
immune to mental pain
or agony.
My world was warm with April sun
my thoughts were spangled green and gold;
my soul filled up with joy, yet felt
the sharp, sweet pain that only joy
can hold.
My spirit soared above the gulls
that, swooping breathlessly so high
o'erhead, now seem to brush their whirring
wings against the blue roof of
the sky.
(How frail the human heart must be--
a throbbing pulse, a trembling thing--
a fragile, shining instrument
of crystal, which can either weep,
or sing.)
Then, suddenly my world turned gray,
and darkness wiped aside my joy.
A dull and aching void was left
where careless hands had reached out to
destroy
my silver web of happiness.
The hands then stopped in wonderment,
for, loving me, they wept to see
the tattered ruins of my firma-
ment.
(How frail the human heart must be--
a mirrored pool of thought. So deep
and tremulous an instrument
of glass that it can either sing,
or weep.)

Her English teacher, Mr. Crockett, showed this to a colleague, who said, "Incredible that one so young could have experienced anything so devastating." When I repeated Mr. Crockett's account of this conversation to me, Sylvia smiled impishly, saying, "Once a poem is made available to the public, the right of interpretation belongs to the reader."

If a sensitive child like Sylvia Plath intuits that it is essential for her mother to interpret the daughter's pain only as the consequence of a picture being damaged and not as a consequence of the destruction of her daughter's self and its expression--symbolized in the fate of the pastel--the child will do her utmost to hide her authentic feelings from the mother. The letters are testimony of the false self she constructed (whereas her true self is speaking in The Bell Jar). With the publication of the letters, her mother erects an imposing monument to her daughter's false self.

We can learn from this example what suicide really is: the only possible way to express the true self--at the expense of life itself. Many parents are like Sylvia's mother. They desperately try to behave correctly toward their child, and in their child's behavior, they seek reassurance that they are good parents. The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child -- well-behaved and dutiful -- of one's own parents. But as a result of these efforts, the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me. This can be observed in various parental attitudes. 

Frequently, parents will not be aware of their child's narcissistic wounds; they do not notice them because they learned, from the time they were little, not to take them seriously in themselves. It may be the case that they are aware of them but believe it is better for the child not to become aware. They will try to talk her out of many of her early perceptions and make her forget her earliest experiences, all in the belief that this is for the child's own good, for they think that she could not bear to know the truth and would fall ill as a result. That it is just the other way around, that the child suffers precisely because the truth is concealed, they do not see. This was strikingly illustrated in the case of a little baby with a severe birth defect who, from the time she was born, had to be tied down at feeding time and fed in a manner that resembled torture. The mother later tried to keep this "secret" from her grown daughter, in order to "spare" her from something that had already happened. She was therefore unable to help her acknowledge to herself this early experience, which was expressing itself through various symptoms. 

Whereas the first attitude is based entirely on the repression of one's own childhood experiences, the second one also includes the absurd hope that the past can be corrected by remaining silent about it.
In the first case we encounter the principle, "What must not be cannot be," and in the second, "If we don't talk about what happened, then it didn't happen."

The malleability of a sensitive child is nearly boundless, permitting all these parental demands to be absorbed by the psyche. The child can adapt perfectly to them, and yet something remains, which we might call body knowledge, that allows the truth to manifest itself in physical illnesses or sensations, and sometimes also in dreams. If a psychosis or neurosis develops, this is yet another way of letting the soul speak, albeit in a form that no one can understand and that becomes as much of a burden, to the affected person--and to society--as his or her childhood reactions to the traumata suffered had been to the parents.

As I have repeatedly stressed, it is not the trauma itself that is the source of illness but the unconscious, repressed, hopeless despair over not being allowed to give expression to what one has suffered and the fact that one is not allowed to show and is unable to experience feelings of rage, anger, humiliation, despair, helplessness, and sadness. This causes many people to commit suicide because life no longer seems worth living if they are totally unable to live out all these strong feelings that are part of their true self. Naturally, we cannot require parents to face something they are unable to face, but we can keep confronting them with the knowledge that it was not suffering per se that made their child ill, but its repression, which was essential for the sake of the parents. I have found that this knowledge often provides parents with an "aha!" experience that opens up for them the possibility of mourning, thus helping to reduce their guilt feelings.

Pain over the frustration one has suffered is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is it harmful. It is a natural, human reaction. However, if it is verbally or nonverbally forbidden or even stamped out by force and by beatings, as it is in "poisonous pedagogy," then natural development is impeded and the conditions for pathological development are created. Hitler proudly reported that one day, without a tear or a cry, he managed to count the blows his father gave him. Hitler imagined that his father would never beat him again thereafter. I take this to be a figment of his imagination because it is unlikely that Alois's reasons for beating his son disappeared from one day to the next, for his motives were not related to the child's behavior but to his own unresolved childhood humiliation. The son's imaginings tell us, however, that he could not remember the beatings his father gave him from that time on because having to fight down his psychic pain by identifying with the aggressor also meant that the memory of the later beatings was repressed. This phenomenon can often be observed in patients who, as a result of regaining access to their feelings, now remember events they previously emphatically denied had taken place.
Taken from the book "For Own Good: Hidden cruelty in child-rearing and the roots of violence" by Alice Miller (Page 254)
http://nospank.net/fyog17.htm 

Question of the day

Sylvie, do you consider yourself a feminist? I am interested because someone I know claims that feminism is a hate cult and that patriarchy is a myth. I don't know what to make of this.

Answer: No, I don’t consider myself a feminist. I do agree that a of lot of women that call themselves feminists, just like a lot of men that idealize their mothers and take revenge on all other women for the wrongs done to them by their own mothers when they were defenseless little children. A lot of feminists do the same; they idealize their mothers and transfer the hate of the little girl they once were into men in general making men their scapegoat and hate can never be resolved by scapegoating, it only can be resolved when seen and felt in the right context.

Behind every crime a personal tragedy lies hidden

"I have no doubt that behind every crime a personal tragedy lies hidden. If we were to investigate such events and their backgrounds more closely, we might be able to do more to prevent crimes than we do now with our indignation and moralizing. Perhaps someone will say: But not everyone who was a battered child becomes a murderer; otherwise, many more people would be murderers. That is true. However, humankind is in dire enough straits these days that this should not remain an academic question. Moreover, we never know how a child will and must react to the injustice he or she has suffered-there are innumerable "techniques" for dealing with it. We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation if parents would respect them and take them seriously as persons. In any case, I don't know of a single person who enjoyed this respect* as a child and then as an adult had the need to put other human beings to death. *

By respect for a child, I don't mean a "permissive" upbringing, which is often a form of indoctrination itself and thus shows a disregard for the child's own world. We are still barely conscious of how harmful it is to treat children in a degrading manner. Treating them with respect and recognizing the consequences of their being humiliated are by no means intellectual matters; otherwise, their importance would long since have been generally recognized. To empathize with what a child is feeling when he or she is defenseless, hurt, or humiliated is like suddenly seeing in a mirror the suffering of one's own childhood, something many people must ward off out of fear while others can accept it with mourning. People who have mourned in this way understand more about the dynamics of the psyche than they could ever have learned from books.

The persecution of people of Jewish background, the necessity of proving "racial purity" as far back as one's grandparents, the tailoring of prohibitions to the degree of an individual's demonstrable "racial purity"--all this is grotesque only at first glance. For its significance becomes plain once we realize that in terms of Hitler's unconscious fantasies, it is an intensified expression of two very powerful tendencies. On the one hand, his father was the hated Jew whom he could despise and persecute, frighten, and threaten with regulations because his father would also have been affected by the racial laws if he had still been alive. At the same time--and this is the other tendency--the racial laws were meant to mark Adolf's final break with his father and his background. In addition to revenge, the tormenting uncertainty about the Hitler family was an important motive for the racial laws: the whole nation had to trace its "purity" back to the third generation because Adolf Hitler would have liked to know with certainty who his grandfather was. Above all, the Jew became the bearer of all the evil and despicable traits the child had ever observed in his father. In Hitler's view, the Jews were characterized by a specific mixture of Lucifer-like grandeur and superiority (world Jewry and its readiness to destroy the entire world) on the one hand and ugliness and ludicrous weakness and infirmity on the other. This view reflects the omnipotence even the weakest father exercises over his child, seen in Hitler's case in the wild rages of the insecure customs official who succeeded in destroying his son's world.

It is common in analysis for the first breakthrough in criticizing the father to be signaled by the surfacing of some insignificant and ludicrous trait of his that the patient's memory has repressed. For example, the father--big out of all proportion in the child's eyes--may have looked very funny in his short nightshirt. The child had never been close to his father, had been in constant fear of him, but with this memory of the skimpy nightshirt, the child's imagination provides a weapon, now that ambivalence has broken through in the analysis, which enables him to take revenge on a small scale against the godlike, monumental paternal figure. In a similar fashion, Hitler disseminates his hatred and disgust for the "stinking" Jew in the pages of the Nazi periodical Der Stürmer in order to incite people to burn books by Freud, Einstein, and innumerable other Jewish intellectuals of great stature. The breakthrough of this idea, which made it possible for him to transfer his pent-up hatred of his father to the Jews as a people, is very instructive."
From the book “For Your Own Good” by Alice Miller, Page 77

Another shooting

Another shooting happened again, and no one in the media is able to ask the fundamental questions: why is this young man so angry? 

And at whom is he really angry? 

Because he was not allowed to freely express his anger at the people he is really angry at, probably his parents, he unconsciously took revenge on scapegoats by killing other people who had nothing to do with the causes of his rage. 

I don’t know if this young man was on medication, but does anyone remember the Virginia Tech shooter? 

He was seeing psychiatric doctors and was taking medication, but the medication did not help him, and his repressed rage eventually erupted like a volcano and killed other young people who had nothing to do with the roots of his rage. 

The doctors, instead of giving him medication needed to help the young man put and feel his feelings in the right context, but to protect the parents from his rage, other people had to die. 

Repressed rage cannot stay repressed forever; if it does not find expression in this generation, it will find it in the next generation. 

The question is who will be killed, the self, others, or both. 

The flyer below, by Alice Miller, articulates beautifully where the roots of violence lie.

Another shooting! Someone who didn't understand his triggered repressed emotions, most likely triggered by a present betrayal in the workplace, and was driven by the repressed emotions to hurt himself and others. 

Our society is in desperate need of enlightened witnesses, but the media is run by weasels like my friend’s neighbor at FOX News, Mark Rodman, who blocks enlightened witnesses that can help the public see. 

The media’s objective is not to enlighten the public but to keep it blind, so they can manipulate the public in any direction they want and exploit these senseless acts of violence for pure sensationalism and ratings, so they can gain more power over others and make more money for themselves. 

The media says that it was not a terrorist attack, but don’t be fooled. 

The psychological dynamics of terrorists are the same as those of this shooter. This shooter let his unresolved repression turn him into a terrorist.

LIVE: Multiple people reported dead in shooting at Orlando workplace: http://bit.ly/2rW5GS2

The Roots of Violence are NOT Unknown

The misled brain and the banned emotions

The Facts:

1. The development of the human brain is use-dependent. The brain develops its structure in the first four years of life, depending on the experiences the environment offers the child. The brain of a child who has mostly loving experiences will develop differently from the brain of a child who has been treated cruelly.

2. Almost all children on our planet are beaten in the first years of their lives. They learn from the start violence, and this lesson is wired into their developing brains. No child is ever born violent. Violence is NOT genetic, it exists because beaten children use, in their adult lives, the lesson that their brains have learned.

3. As beaten children are not allowed to defend themselves, they must suppress their anger and rage against their parents, who have humiliated them, killed their inborn empathy, and insulted their dignity. They will take out this rage later, as adults, on scapegoats, mostly on their own children. Deprived of empathy, some of them will direct their anger against themselves (in eating disorders, drug addiction, depression etc.), or against other adults (in wars, terrorism, delinquency etc.)

Questions and Answers:

Q: Parents beat their children without a second thought, to make them obedient. Nobody, except a very small minority, protests against this dangerous habit. Why is the logical sequence (from being a misled victim to becoming a misleading perpetrator) totally ignored world-wide? Why have even the Popes, responsible for the moral behaviour of many millions of believers, until now never informed them that beating children is a crime?

A: Because almost ALL of us were beaten, and we had to learn very early that these cruel acts were normal, harmless, and even good for us. Nobody ever told us that they were crimes against humanity. The wrong, immoral, and absurd lesson was wired into our developing brains, and this explains the emotional blindness governing our world.

Q: Can we free ourselves from the emotional blindness we developed in childhood?

A: We can - at least to some degree - liberate ourselves from this blindness by daring to feel our repressed emotions, including our fear and forbidden rage against our parents who had often scared us to death for periods of many years, which should have been the most beautiful years of our lives. We can't retrieve those years. But thanks to facing our truth we can transform ourselves from the children who still live in us full of fear and denial into responsible, well informed adults who regained their empathy, so early stolen from them. By becoming feeling persons we can no longer deny that beating children is a criminal act that should be forbidden on the whole planet.

Conclusion:

Caring for the emotional needs of our children means more than giving them a happy childhood. It means to enable the brains of the future adults to function in a healthy, rational way, free from perversion and madness. Being forced to learn in childhood that hitting children is a blessing for them is a most absurd, confusing lesson, one with the most dangerous consequences: This lesson as such, together with being cut off from the true emotions, creates the roots of violence.
http://www.alice-miller.com/flyers_en.php

Whitney Houston told her true story by reenacting it in the stage of the world

Whitney Houston, one more person in the stage of the world told her true story unconsciously and compulsively how she was abused as a small child by continuing abusing herself and finished the job her childhood abusers started… very sad she never made this connection and as an adult, she was not able to save herself from the emotional prison she was born into. She gives evidence that no matter how gifted a person is and how much money people have, being gifted and money alone does not save anyone, can make our journey more comfortable, but if we don’t find the courage to face and feel our painful truths, being gifted and money can make it worse, because it can be used to escape or avoid from facing and feeling our painful truths.

  It confirms how true Alices’s words below are:

“The greatest cruelty that can be inflicted on children is to refuse to let them express their anger and suffering except at the risk of losing their parents' love and affection. The anger stemming from early childhood is stored up in the unconscious, and since it basically represents a healthy, vital source of energy, an equal amount of energy must be expended in order to repress it. An upbringing that succeeds in sparing the parents at the expense of the child's vitality sometimes leads to suicide or extreme drug addiction, which is a form of suicide. If drugs succeed in covering up the emptiness caused by repressed feelings and self-alienation, then the process of withdrawal brings this void back into view. When withdrawal is not accompanied by restoration of vitality, then the cure is sure to be temporary. Christiane F., subject of an international bestseller and film, paints a devastatingly vivid picture of a tragedy of this nature.

Cruelty can take a thousand forms, and it goes undetected even today, because the damage it does to the child and the ensuing consequences are still so little known. This section of the book is devoted to these consequences.

The individual psychological stages in the lives of most people are:

1.      To be hurt as a small child without anyone recognizing the situation as such

2.      To fail to react to the resulting suffering with anger

3.      To show gratitude for what are supposed to be good intentions

4.      To forget everything

5.      To discharge the stored-up anger onto others in adulthood or to direct it against oneself “

http://www.nospank.net/fyog11.htm 

Comment by JR: "The greatest cruelty that can be inflicted on children is to refuse to let them express their anger and suffering except at the risk of losing their parents' love and affection."

This is especially true of adopted children. Having been rejected first by their own mother, they are doubly (perhaps much more) fearful of being rejected again. So they play the people-pleasers, sacrificing their true selves in an effort to prevent a second rejection.

In adoption, one is supposed to feel grateful for having been separated from what one needed most -- one's own mother -- even to the point of dancing on her virtual grave along with the new parents.

Dr. Gabor Maté, when he asked his (drug-addicted) patients to describe how they felt the first time they did drugs, told him, "It felt like a warm, soft hug," -- something they never experienced in their childhood and much needed. He asks, "How do you tell a patient to stop doing this thing that gives them what they needed (and still need)?" How can irreplaceable primal needs ever be replaced if they were not provided when they were truly needed?

Demi Moore Hospitalized: Can Divorce Make You Sick?

Demi Moore Hospitalized: Can Divorce Make You Sick?

No, divorce or separation cannot make you sick; repression can make you sick. Ashton Kutcher was just the perfect trigger for her to trigger the excruciating repressed emotions of the child she once was, and if she does not make this connection, she is screwed. Falling in love and sexual attraction mean that we have found the perfect person to trigger us, rise to the surface, all that was repressed in us; no one can trigger in us what is not already in ourselves. Once we have faced our repression and felt the excruciating feelings of the child we once were, in the proper context. We don’t fall in love anymore and have sexual attractions. We are in love, and if we meet another person in love and choose to stay together, then we'll be two people in love together. We find love when we are in love. Falling in love is more dangerous than most people are willing to admit. If we knew falling in love meant going into all the dark chambers of the soul, none of us would risk it. To become a real lover in life involves opening up our whole being.

Sylvie Imelda Shene: Sharon, I, too for a very brief moment, get annoyed when someone or event reenacts my childhood drama or reminds me of it, but NOW I can keep adult conscious take care of myself and deal with present situation with lucidity without having unresolved repressed emotions of the child I once was throw me off balance. I no longer allow anyone in my life to stand in as a substitute parent figure to dictate in my life. I just read that she is in rehab, and unfortunately, most professionals, “the helpers” standing in as substitute parent figures, have not done their own emotional work, and the only help they are going to give to her is to repress her all over again with medications and manipulative tactics. She loses this excellent opportunity for true liberation. 

These words from Alice Miller’s book “The Drama of the Gifted Child” come to mind: “Because of his early experiences with his mother, he cannot believe that this need not happen. If he gives way to this fear and adapts himself, the therapy slides over into the realm of the false self, and the true self remains hidden and undeveloped. It is therefore extremely important that the therapist not allow his own needs to impel him to formulate connections that the patient himself is discovering with the help of his own feelings. Otherwise he is in danger of behaving like a friend who brings a good meal to a prisoner in his cell, at the precise moment when that prisoner has the chance to escape --- perhaps to spend his first night hungry and without shelter, but in freedom nevertheless. Since this first step into unknown territory would require a great deal of courage, the prisoner may comfort himself with his food and shelter and thus miss his chance and stay in prison.” Sadly, this is what I see happening with her. Also, these words by Alice come to mind: "Pain is the way to the truth. By denying that you were unloved as a child, you spare yourself some pain, but you are not with your own truth. And throughout your whole life, you'll try to earn love. In therapy, avoiding pain causes blockage. Yet nobody can confront being neglected or hated without feeling guilty. "It is my fault that my mother is cruel," he thinks. "I made my mother furious; what can I do to make her loving?" So he will continue trying to make her love him. The guilt is really a protection against the terrible realization that you are fated to have a mother who cannot love. This is much more painful than to think, "Oh, she is a good mother, it's only me who's bad." Because then you can try to do something to get love. But it's not true; you cannot earn love. And feeling guilty for what has been done to you only supports your blindness and your neurosis." 
The intended Profile

“It's a dark, cool, quiet place. A basement in your soul. And that place can sometimes be dangerous to the human mind. I can open the door and enter that darkness, but I have to be very careful. I can find my story there. Then I bring that thing to the surface, into the real world. ” ― Haruki Murakami

Going into the dark chamber of our soul alone or with the wrong witness, it can be sometimes very dangerous, because sometimes we can kill ourselves, others, or both, like James Holmes did, and as many other mass shooters. We need a true enlightened witness like Alice Miller to help us navigate through the dark chambers of our soul, so we can face and feel the true story and bring it to the surface safely without putting ourselves and others in danger with unconscious, disastrous enactments. 

James Holmes, like many other mass shooters, was under psychiatric care, but it was apparent that the doctors were not able to see clearly how much trouble these young men were in. Now, sadly, he lost the opportunity forever to break free from his childhood drama. Now the prison guards are playing the substitute parent figures, and he is in the role of the child for eternity, and the people he killed also will never have a chance to find true freedom. So many lives wasted.

Cheryl: Thanks for sharing so much, Sylvie. I've been wanting to add my own experience, but I've been conflicted about how much I want to share here. Your words, these and the ones above, bring greater clarity and understanding, particularly the "prisoner in the cell" metaphor.

Sylvie Imelda Shene: You're welcome, Cheryl. I am glad my posts bring you clarity and understanding.:-)

Sharon: Yes. Thank you, Sylvie.

Sylvie: You are very welcome, Sharon.

Read more (41 lines)

Derek: "Excellent analysis."

Phd: ‎"I would say what scared me is that I'm going to ultimately find out at the end of my life that I'm really not lovable, that I'm not worthy of being loved. That there's something fundamentally wrong with me." Demi Moore

Sylvie: Really, Phd, she wrote those words, that’s sad. She needs to figure out that she is the one who needs to give herself the love she never got from her own parents when she was a little girl, and now, only she can make up for this loss. Ashton Kutcher or anyone in the outside world can never make up for it.

Gayle: Quote is right on.

Sylvie: I know Gayle. I would not have written it if I were not sure it was true, as I have experienced it myself. Knowledge is experience; everything else is just information, and we know that most information out there is lies and misleading information.

Sharon: So true!

Sylvie: I know, Sharon.

Sharon: Too bad people don't get that. I was just listening to a woman the other day, blaming her soon-to-be ex for why she is suffering from PTSD and how he ruined her life and their daughter's life. I was thinking what a great opportunity it is for her to heal some old wounds.

Sylvie: I know, Sharon, it’s very sad that so few people get it. I, too, witness people constantly missing great opportunities at true liberation. Feeling the feelings of the child they once were in the right context is too tricky for most people, because they would have to stop idealizing their parents and question them.  And unconsciously and compulsively, they keep looking for scapegoats to blame.

 Sharon: I have to admit. I can still fall into the blame game. The good news is that it happens far less, and when I do, I pull myself out more quickly.