Plenty of Traditional Old Traps on the Internet

 AM: Certainly, if I knew of some therapists who would be respectful enough to answer your questions; free enough to show indignation about what your parents have done to you; empathic enough when you need to release your rage pent up for decades in your body; wise enough to not preach to you forgetting, forgiveness, meditation, positive thinking; honest enough to not offer you empty words like spirituality, when they feel scared by your history, and that are not increasing your life-long feelings of guilt – I would be happy to give you their names, addresses and phone-numbers.

Unfortunately, I don’t know them, but I still like to hope that they exist. However, when I am looking for them on the Internet I find plenty of esoteric and religious offers, plenty of denial, commercial interests, traditional traps, but not at all what I am looking for. For that reason I gave you with my FAQ list tools for your own research. If a therapist refuses to answer your questions right from the start, you can be sure that by leaving him you can save yourself your time and your money. If you don’t dare to ask your questions out of your fear of your parents, your fear may be highly understandable. However, trying to do it anyway may be useful because your questions are important and by daring to ask them you can only win.

6- I talk so much about the “topic” of child abuse because it is essential and nobody else teaches about this topic in universities. It is still taboo although childhood is the base of the whole life, and the ignorance on this issue is very dangerous for all societies on our planet."
Read more here

Questioning the family

Me too, like Alice Miller I am doing all I can to make it visible and enlightening parents, so the family institution becomes a safe place for children, because children need a mother and a father. No, we don’t need more nice words and books written by well intentional authors that write feel good books that are just like medications or drugs that makes us feel good temporarily, but disguise the psychological facts of childhood trauma. Like for example just came to mind the book Chicken Soup for the Soul that is a number one best seller! I could use so many other examples, they are endless! People are suckers for feel good words and a lot of people are more than willing to take advantage of this people’s weakness to get rich and make a name for themselves by recycling the same old seductive feel good traditional traps. We need books that helps us deal with the facts and reality.

Questioning the family

“You write: “In the traditional family the children belong to their parents, who have legal power over them. The children are isolated from the rest of society; they have to respect their parents, regardless of what the parents actually do, they have to obey their parents and to be loyal towards them. And the parents, often with the help of the state, can do almost everything to subdue their children; they can use the whole range of physical and mental tortures against their children.”

You certainly are right but why shouldn't we be able to change the patterns of the family instead of rejecting family altogether? And what do you suggest instead of the institution family? A child needs a mother and a father, but of course they don't need the hypocrisy, the abuse, the exploitation and the terror. We must work on enlightening parents so that families become the place of safety, truth, love and honest communication. We can't do this by writing nice words but by informing parents that they disguise the brutality they endured as children by denying it and repeating it carelessly on their children. In this way they protect their parents and produce violent people, again and again. I agree with you that families based on this system are the source of violence in our society and I do what I can to make this visible.” Alice Miller ~ From Rage to Courage, page, 75 and 76

Read more HERE

Dependency Breeds Hatred

Thank you for writing and sharing your story with me. I am sorry that the child you once were lived with so much terror and has left a painful imprint on your body that is affecting your health and causing you to lose your autonomy.  

I am so sorry.  I can understand your fantasy that primal therapy would liberate you from your repressed emotions and therefore heal your body and start on the road to autonomy. Still, I don’t think primal or any other therapy will help at the moment.

Having someone who understands your situation and whom you can talk to freely about all your feelings will be much more helpful. If you really want to find an enlightened witness, follow Alice Miller's guidance on her website for finding the right therapist. Your situation is very complicated and painful, because as long as we remain dependent on those who were the cause of our painful plight, the latent rage of the child will not start to diminish, but actually accumulate. The words below by Alice Miller from her article “What’s Hatred?” are very true: “a person we are at the mercy of and either cannot free ourselves of, or at least believe that we cannot. As long as we are in such a state of dependency, or think we are, then hatred is the inevitable outcome. It is hardly conceivable that a person being tortured will not feel hatred for the torturer. If we deny ourselves this feeling, we will suffer from physical symptoms.”

http://www.alice-miller.com/en/what-is-hatred/
   
This is why MM is still stuck in his hatred for his mother because he is still emotionally dependent on his mother and also dependent on her money and using her to make money for himself. He is trying to make a name for himself by unconsciously, in a symbolic way, killing his mother with his book to free himself. Still, these are fantasies of a small child, and we never achieve true freedom by allowing the wounded child’s fantasies to dictate our present actions; they will keep us stuck and strengthen the walls of our emotional prison, leaving very little chance of ever escaping our childhood emotional prison.
So my suggestion is to find someone you can talk with freely about all your authentic feelings, who can help you clarify and consciously feel them in the context of your childhood, and who can help you focus on improving your physical health. Also, look for resources that might help you gain autonomy; however slow or small it might be, baby steps are better than not taking any steps at all. I wish you much luck, courage, and strength on your journey.

Sylvie

P.S. Feel free to write back and let me know what kind of feelings my words above triggered in you.

Also, here is one of my blogs about the risks of primal therapy.
http://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2012/08/the-risks-of-primal-therapy.html
Here is another blog about primal therapy.
Read Alice's article at the bottom.
http://sylvieshene.blogspot.com/2013/10/neve-put-your-life-in-someone-elses.html  

The Assassination of President Kennedy

This month is the 50 years anniversary of the assassination of President Kennedy and Steven Beschloss shows in his book: “The Gunman and His Mother: Lee Harvey Oswald, Marguerite Oswald, and the Making of an Assassin” how dangerous can be when we bring children into the world before we are ready to really love and protect. When women have children before are ready psychologically, emotionally and physically to have children is like playing Russian roulette, just like Alice Miller says: “We never know how a child will and must react to the injustice he or she has suffered,” some become great manipulators, rapists, assassins, sadists and some psychopaths, etc. And because of this, we should do all we can to prevent bringing more traumatized children into the world in the first place, because trauma is so hard to heal, especially once a person has become a teenager or an adult and the powerful enablers in our society don’t help. Every child born needs to be planned, wanted and truly loved.
http://amzn.to/1aw5lk7

The System of Lies

I have left the system of lies! And yes as long as people continue to believe in lies, the body will continue to scream louder and louder for the truth with the help of symptoms.

 “It is rather surprising that a woman of your profession has the courage to leave, at least partially, the system of denial and open the eyes for the truth of her childhood after having read a book. There are millions of people in your position who never find the courage to do so and to question the lies they have been told early in their lives.

 You ask me how you can connect with your father. Why should you? Everybody tells you that you must forgive. But you must not - if you want to heal. You can't fool the body; it doesn't let itself be fooled. And it remembers everything, the butcher’s knife, the soup cans from the garbage, the beatings and so many other cruelties suffered by a small girl from a highly perverse man. Why do you jeopardize your health by thinking of your father's childhood? If a man raped you on the street would you speculate about his childhood or would you become furious? The last would be a healthy reaction. Why is your father an exception? Because God is on his side? Who told you this? The body didn't read the bible, it insists on the truth and the small girl would have done it also if she had been allowed to see the truth. But nobody was there to tell her: you were treated cruelly and have the right to hate him. Unfortunately, you seem to continue to betray your body, yourself, by killing your authentic feelings. In fact, it is exactly the rage that can help you now to heal.

 The method of Marshall Rosenberg is very nice and may be helpful to people who have not be severely mistreated in childhood. The latter ones however must find their pent up, LEGITIMATE rage and free themselves from the lies of our moral system. As long as they don't do this, their body will continue to scream for the truth with the help of symptoms.” Alice Miller ~ From Rage to Courage, page, 53

http://www.alice-miller.com/readersmail_en.php?lang=en&nid=720&grp=0606

 

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

The Tragedy Begins With the Mother

Totally! The tragedy begins with the mother and until the feminists can see this painful truth, they will never be able to stop the vicious cycle of some men taking revenge on other women for the wrongs their mothers did to them when they were defenseless little children.

"Thank you for your letter, I am so glad for you that you have widely open eyes and have the courage to check the courage of the therapists you are talking to so that you will not become a victim of illusions. You can check 20 of them, probably you will get the same answers, full of avoidance but maybe you will find eventually somebody who will answer your questions honestly. If not you learned a lot, and you can benefit from this experience. Concerning the feminist therapists I agree with you completely. I wrote already 30 yours ago that females can abuse their babies, infants and small children with a total impunity, nobody controls them. They can take on their children all the humiliations they suffered from men in our society. Later, their sons who "love" their mothers can transfer their rage onto their daughters or other women or make war and rape women but still adore, defend, and respect their mothers because what they suffered as small children stays unconscious, totally repressed. And many of us seem to need for a long time the illusion of having had a wonderful mother. You are right, the tragedy begins with the mother that is protected by all societies and honored in most religions as the innocent sainte. In German exist already some books that broke with this taboo but for the English publications you must look at Google. The book by Bass and Davis is very helpful for victims of sexual child abuse but unfortunately the authors who are feminists write that only very few women abuse children. That is absolutely not true. There are apparently also women pedophile who live with boys of 10 to 12 year old and say that this is (for them!!!) a beautiful " relationship". Not to be aware of using children to revenge the own trama and ruining their lives is not only the atitude of men but of both genders as long as child abuse remains an issue avoided by the whole ignorant society." Alice Miller
Read more