I kind of have given up on humanity and was not going to
comment on the extremely tragic case of child abuse that happened recently in
Chicago. Until society as a whole finds the courage to face the root causes of
child abuse, we will never be able to stop child abuse. But MP sent me the
private message below and forced me to comment on it.
The Father had the nerve to get in front of a news camera
last week "Aj come home we love you
you won't get in trouble" Knowing he just buried him in a shallow grave
SICK SICK SICK DRUG ADDICTS The house was decrepit dog feces urine all over trash
and filth And The DCFS of Illinois left these kids in this house a younger brother who is still alive thank God! Just disgusting
Sylvie: I saw the story. It makes my blood boil. Because DCFS
constantly fails to protect children everywhere. And the reason is that people
working in social services are abusers too, maybe not to this extreme, because
with their college degrees, they have become too sophisticated and just stick
to mild physical abuse that doesn't leave marks or evidence in the body, and resort
mostly to emotional abuse and lies.
The media only pays attention when it escalates to extreme cases
of child abuse, but ignores the plight of almost every child in our society that
is subjected to ordinary abuse every day under the disguise of “upbringing” and
“discipline”.
For the media to recognize this ordinary abuse, they would
have to face their own childhood repression and question their own parents. And
that’s the last thing they want to do.
The repressed fears of the child they
once were at their parents can stay with a person for the rest of their lives.
This is why it’s so hard to demolish the media’s wall of silence. Just as Alice
Miller wrote on her website:
"Humiliations,
spankings, and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation,
derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the
integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible
right away. However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let
others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some
victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing
executors to dictators as unutterably appalling as Hitler and other cruel
leaders. Beaten children very early on assimilating the violence they endured,
which they may glorify and apply later as parents, in believing that they
deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love. They don't know that the only reason for the punishments they have ( or in retrospect, had) to endure is
the fact that their parents themselves endured and learned violence without
being able to question it. Later, the adults, once abused children, beat their
own children and often feel grateful to their parents who mistreated them when
they were small and defenseless.
This is why society's ignorance remains so
immovable and parents continue to produce severe pain and destructive - in all
"goodwill", in every generation. Most people tolerate this blindly
because the origins of human violence in childhood have been and are still
being ignored worldwide. Almost all small children are smacked during the first
three years of life when they begin to walk and to touch objects which may not
be touched. This happens at exactly the time when the human brain builds up its
structure and should thus learn kindness, truthfulness, and love but never,
never cruelty and lies. Fortunately, there are many mistreated children who
find "helping witnesses" and can feel loved by them."
I'm not surprised she is pregnant again! Psychopaths need an
endless supply of scapegoats to temporary alleviate repressed emotions.
The easiest way to have an endless supply of scapegoats at
your disposal is to give birth to them!
”Poisonous Pedagogy. The pedagogical conviction that one must
bring a child into line from the outset has its origin in the need to split off
the disquieting parts of the inner self and project them onto an available
object. The child’s great plasticity, flexibility, defenselessness, and
availability made it the ideal object for this projection. The enemy within
can, at last, be hunted down on the outside. Peace advocates are becoming
increasingly aware of the role played by these mechanisms, but until it is
clearly recognized that they can be traced back to methods of child raising,
little can be done to oppose them. For children who have grown up being
assailed for qualities the parents hate in themselves, they can hardly wait to
assign these qualities to someone else so they can once again regard themselves
as good, “moral,” noble, and altruistic. Such projections can easily become
part of any Weltanschauung.”
...Statistical studies are hardly the thing to make
disinterested jurists into empathic and perceptive human beings. And yet every
crime, by virtue of being an enactment of childhood drama, cries out for
understanding. The newspapers carry these stories every day, but unfortunately, they usually report only the last act. Can knowledge of the underlying causes of a
crime be about a change in the way justice is administered? Not as long as
the primary concerns are to assign guilt and impose punishment. But someday it
may be possible to gain an understanding of the fact that emerges so clearly
in the case of Jurgen Bartsch: the accused never bears all the guilt by himself
but is a victim of a tragic chain of circumstances. Even so, a prison sentence
is unavoidable if society is to be protected. But there is a difference between
prison being used to punish a dangerous criminal, according to the principles of
“poisonous pedagogy.”
and human tragedy being perceived, therapy during
confinement.” Alice Miller, “For Your Own Good,” pages 199 and 200
..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." For Your Own Good, pages 196 and 197
“…society we live in continues to turn a blind eye to the facts of child abuse in all its forms. Among thousands of professors at hundreds of universities, there is not a single university chair for teaching about child abuse and cruelty to children. Why? Because that cruelty successfully masquerades as parenting and education,” Alice Miller, taken from the book “The Truth Will Set You Free,” page 101
"I think that violent teenagers are demonstrating what happened to them emotionally when they were small. I have no doubt about that. It might not always be a harsh discipline, but in most cases, there is emotional neglect, lack of authentic communication, of warm, friendly contact. If this lack is also covered by what is called "spoiling" (buying a lot of expensive objects to replace love), the child is often unable to detect the neglect and stays bound to denial. Anyway, every child must deny the pain in order to survive. Only in adulthood is it possible to realize the truth. But the more the childhood history is repressed, the more its cruelty is denied, the less these young people are able to feel, to confront the actual reasons of their distress, the stronger they feel urged to act destructively. They have not always conscious memories of what happened in their childhood, especially in infancy, but this knowledge is stored up in their body's cells and, amazingly enough, they threaten others exactly the same way as they were threatened in the beginning of their life. Unfortunately, the common, ever-present avoidance of the issue of "childhood" doesn't make things easier. I discuss this problem in my book Paths of Life, 1999, and The Truth Will Set You Free, 2002.
