II

FROM JANUARY TO DECEMBER 2006

 

 

JANUARY 2006

1 Therapists Afraid of Questioning Parents

I obviously idealized your country. In my book The Body Never Lies you will find many examples of how therapists all over the world are afraid of questioning the behavior of parents. The problem is that the more people were abused the more they defend their parents because the fear of the small, defenseless, severely offended child is still very active in them. It holds them in a state of dependency and denial that often causes panic attacks in adulthood.

9 The Child Has No Choice

For staying silent, victims often pay with depression, then they take antidepressants, and then they take something against the secondary effects of antidepressants, and so on and on. Staying silent is rarely a must; it is a choice, at least for adults. Only children have no choice, and their fear unfortunately stays with many of them their entire lives, meaning that they don’t take the risk and never experience how relieving it can be to speak out.

9 Antidepressants Suppress Your Truth

You write: “Meanwhile, I’ve had a headache for seven months; I have the impression of being constantly dizzy; my blood pressure can fall severely. I am taking antidepressants and twice a week I go to psychotherapy. I love my parents, who worry about me…. My nightly dreams are essentially scenes where I get furious toward a bunch of people from my environment (I beat my sister, break dishes, set my colleague on fire, etc.). I would like very much to stop taking the medication, but I am extremely scared that my situation is irreversible. Your book is helping me to believe that this condition is temporary and that I will succeed in becoming healthy by regaining my feelings, which are repressed because of my childhood.”

The depression proves that you are suppressing your strongest feelings. By taking antidepressants you are also suppressing your truth. You love your parents but at night you experience rage—which fortunately you still can feel. I hope that your therapist can help you to understand who deserves your rage and why. When your child, who had to suffer cruelty, feels accompanied by a courageous witness, you will no longer need medication and will be able to feel and understand the origins of your suffering.

10 Tumors Are the Screams of Silent Children

I don’t think that your patients need psychology or psychiatric help, since they would reject it anyway. In no way do they need psychoanalytical theories. What they doubtlessly need is to come in contact with their emotions, with the history of their childhood and the tragedies connected to it. They have denied them their whole lives. Thanks to your compassion (see my article on “Indignation” and other articles on the Web site) they may dare to give up their denial, and I would not be surprised if their tumors decreased. These tumors are the screams of the silent children who never rebelled against the cruelty they endured in childhood and who are now asking the adult to finally stop denying the truth. I wish you success in your endeavors and hope that you can forget the psychoanalytic theories that would only conceal your view of your patients’ childhood reality.

12 The Suffering of Children

I was very moved by your thoughts concerning Schiller and agree with you that, thanks to the first four years of life spent with his loving mother, he might have had the potential to understand the meaning of his rebellions in Wilhelm Tell and the other dramas. But in his time the presence of an enlightened witness was unthinkable; even today, it is rare. My last book was published in Germany in 2004, but you are the first reader interested in answering the essential question I asked: how can we explain the fact that a man can suffer so much, see so much, and yet have not the slightest inkling that his terrible tragedy has something to do with his suppressed childhood rage? I am glad that you try to enlighten religious people. To me, it is absurd that people imagine a loving God who needs the suffering of children and of his beloved son on the cross. They can imagine this only because they have been told very early that they were spanked to please God.

13 How Do I Find My Voice?

I can imagine that reading my book The Body Never Lies could give you some ideas of how you can liberate yourself from guilt and become the loving, protecting parent of the girl you were, so that your inner child will feel taken seriously. The tragedy is that the more the child was mistreated the more the adult she becomes tends to deny this painful fact and to blame herself for the torture. Read also the FAQ list on my Web site if you are looking for a therapist with whom you can learn to feel what happened to you and how it hurts.

21 Our Body Cannot “Turn the Page”

Your question is very important, but it contains the assumption that we can manipulate our feelings without letting others pay the price for it. In reality, we cannot. You are saying here what everyone says, what we all have learned from our parents, in school, in church, and even in most of the therapies: “One has to turn the page.” It is, without doubt, a nice idea: that the hatred can go away and never ever return. We want to turn the page and live in peace.

Everyone wants this, and it would be nice if it worked. But unfortunately, it does not work. Not at all. Why? Because rage, like all other emotions, cannot be controlled and cannot be manipulated. It dictates to us; it forces us to experience it and to understand its causes. It can return every time someone hurts us, and we cannot prevent that, because our body cannot “turn the page” it demands from us that we listen to it. What we can do, though, is suppress our rage, despite all the consequences: illnesses, addiction, crimes. When we do not want to feel our justified rage because we already have forgiven our parents even the worst abuses, we will soon find out, to our surprise, that we passed on the same pain we endured to our children or to others. If we are truthful, we will not claim that we acted “for their own good” (that beatings are “a good means of education”). Unfortunately, this is what most parents do say; this is why our society is so hypocritical.

On the “Articles” page on my Web site you can find my text about hatred, which should be able to help you better understand what I am trying to explain. Also the book The Body Never Lies can help you to understand more.

22 What I Feel Without Antidepressants

I thank you for your most important letter, and I congratulate you on having the courage and wisdom to give up the medication and to see what suffering is hidden behind this poison so sought out and appreciated by so many people.

25 Treating Ourselves with Love

We can’t change our past, but we can stop repeating it unconsciously, by denying ourselves love as our parents did. However, we can’t achieve this unless we know emotionally what it means for a child to live for years without love, or even surrounded by hatred. If we deny this knowledge, our body will remind us of the work we have to do in order to give the child inside the care and attention she needs now from us.

29 Surviving Childhood Corporal Punishment

I hope that many readers of my books will want to exchange their experiences with you. Your action seems to me necessary, especially in your country, where politicians still maintain that there exist “reasonable” beatings, and where they refuse to learn the simplest thing: that the child’s brain forms according to its environment. In the first three years of their lives, children learn either violence and brutality or kindness and love.

30 A Short Question for Alice

Children never cry without reason. Many times they are not consciously aware of their reasons, but nevertheless crying proves their distress. It is very cruel to leave distressed children alone, for what they most need then is the warm presense of a loving person. Then the source of the trouble can appear in their mind, and they can learn to trust, to express themselves in another, more understandable, way, and screaming is no longer necessary. Screaming should not be seen as bad behavior. It is only a signal of pain.

FEBRUARY 2006

1 Hitting Is Not Loving

You are right that hitting is not loving; the assumption that it is is a lie. This lie is still held in high esteem, and children believe what they are told. As adults, they tell their children the same and so we cultivate violence and lies in every new generation. But I don’t agree with you when you say that the grandmother was loving when she was not hitting the child. It is possible that she was able to play with the child in a way that both of them enjoyed, but this has nothing to do with love. When you love a person, you care about him, you don’t want to damage him, to make him suffer, to humiliate him, to destroy his future. A loving person can’t hit a defenseless child; it is impossible to any decent person to do it. But many don’t realize that hitting children is a barbaric habit that excludes every feeling of love.

It is hard to accept that we were not loved at all—but only the truth can really help us.

5 Unconscious Hatred

I think that the first years of his life gave Schiller the sensibility he needed to become aware of the stupidity and cruelty of authoritarian behavior. He described this attitude in his dramas again and again. Most people who don’t know anything else don’t see it; for them this behavior is normal. In some exceptional cases, if love and honesty were experienced in early childhood, cruelty can later be recognized. This was the case of Schiller; he hated cruelty, hypocrisy, and perversion, but he was unable to consciously hate his own father. The unconscious hatred offended his body; he suffered terribly from corporal pain and died at forty-six.

5 Corporal Punishment and Gender

I think that if we have suffered corporal punishment (and who did not?), we will often be affected by any kind of nonsense people tell us about it. Who can prove “scientifically” which gender is more beaten? What has happened (or still happens?) in British public schools is no longer a secret, I hope, but what happens to small boys and girls in their own homes before they go to school must still be discovered.

7 The Counseling Profession and Corporal Punishment

Like you, I wonder what can be done to inform people, especially counselors, about the destructive effects of corporal punishment that are so widely denied all over the world. If you read The Truth Will Set You Free, you will know that I explain that this universal blindness is caused by the mental barriers we required in early childhood. In my new entry on my Web site, I try to say it more simply. But I must realize that the most active effect of being beaten is actually the fear of the beaten child, which in most cases stays with us our whole lives and forces us to deny the truth. Therapists are no exceptions. Obviously, you have the courage to see and feel what happened to you and maybe you can prepare a book such as you have suggested here. Write and tell us how you would like to present the knowledge you have gained. Perhaps you could write to many different counselors and send them a questionnaire about their opinions on their childhood. Then you could publish the results—without names, of course—to show how the spirit of the poisonous pedagogy remains, still undetected, in the answers. Since the big majority thinks in the same way, you would need to write a comment. You can use my FAQ list on my Web site (see “Articles”) as inspiration for your questionnaire if you want to.

9 Nurturing Self-Esteem

To open the eyes of others we must first open our own, by exploring emotionally the atmosphere of our childhood and acknowledging its effects on our adult life. Once we have done this difficult emotional work, plenty of ideas will come up about what we actually want to do.

MARCH 2006

3 Effective Therapy

For me, effective therapy must be able to bring me in touch with the story of the child I was and with her suffering that we usually deny. To bring me to my origins by undoing my denial, I need an enlightened witness who knows his or her history and thus wouldn’t be afraid of my own. In my FAQ list I describe how you can find such a therapist. Also, the article “The Longest Path” on my Web site and my book The Body Never Lies can be helpful. The therapies you mentioned are mostly not tailored to exploring the histories of childhood except maybe the primal therapy of Arthur Janov. But in my opinion there are some kinds of PT that can be dangerous because their settings produce a dependency on strong feelings and on the person of the therapist and his integrity. You can learn more about this danger if you read the chapter “Helga” in my book Paths of Life.

5 Forgiveness—Flight from Oneself

You are by all means right when you ask yourself this question [Am I still carrying a lot of rage?]. You know from your mother that you were beaten very early; you can remember neither the emotional nor the physical pain of the little being that was forced to block out her suffering. But with multiple sclerosis the body can revive these pains if something in the present triggers it (for example, the feeling that no one understands you). If your analyst does not even consider this, try to find a therapist who is not afraid of your history. Maybe my FAQ list on my Web site could help you with this. What your analyst has recommended is in my opinion exactly that which makes us ill, because it suffocates the justifiable rage. The reconciliation can bring some relief for a while because it weakens the agonizing feelings of guilt. One feels like a good, therefore loved, child if one forgives the mistreatments. But the body insists on the truth. I myself tried very hard as a child to understand my parents and have continued these attempts—probably like most analysts—for decades. But this prevented me from discovering the child who was tormented by them. I did not know this child—not in the least. I only knew the suffering of my parents, also of my patients and my friends, but never my own. Only when I gave up trying to understand my parents’ childhood (which they themselves did not want to know at all) did it become possible for me to feel the whole extent of my pain and fear. Only then did I discover slowly the history of my childhood and begin to realize my fate. And only then did I lose the physical symptoms that had tried for so long to tell me, in vain, my truth. While I was listening to my patients, I began to understand, through their fates, what happens to beaten children. I comprehended that I betrayed myself. Like so many analysts, I did not know who I truly was, because I was fleeing from myself and believed that I was capable of helping others. Today, I know that I have to understand myself in order to understand others, not the other way around.

7 Trust Your Truth

You write, “Yours is the only truth I trust.” I hope and wish that my books could help you to trust your truth, to get in touch with the little girl you once were, to learn to love her in her pain, to give up the distance that separates you from her and from her suffering. She is still waiting for your love—nobody else can replace you.

15 Matriarchy? Patriarchy?

Thank you for sharing with us your experiences with female teachers and students. I am very sorry that you suffered so much from their cruelty, and I don’t doubt even for a moment that things happened in the way you describe them. But I don’t think that gender makes a difference when it comes to cruelty. Active cruelty is the effect of endured violence and perversion in childhood and nothing else. Feminists dislike it very much when I write in many books (The Drama, Banished Knowledge, Breaking Down, and others) that the space society gives to man to rage and destroy life with impunity is war, whereas for women that space is their home, where they can do whatever they want to their babies and toddlers to teach them to obey. What they do in this way—never controlled, never punished—is to cripple millions of people who will never accuse them of their crimes because almost every child loves his or her mother and would never, never get her in trouble. They may hate the whole world or all women, but their own mother must stay protected from their hatred forever. In this way we revolve in a vicious circle of blindness. A brutally beaten child will, as an adult, prefer becoming a serial killer to accusing his mother of brutality. And the same is true for crazy dictators who become “heroes” for whole nations because people learn so early to love and admire the people who were cruel to them—no matter what they really did.

19 The Causes of Addiction

You write that you have read my last book and at the same time you write, “As an addict I would love to fix myself with a pill and be normal.” There are many pills that promise you such an outcome, so why do you write to me? If you read my book, you must know that I do not have this kind of pill to sell and that I insist on the fact that all psychic disturbances and addictions have their causes in the denial of one’s own childhood’s suffering. That suffering must be found and respected in therapy with an enlightened witness.

20 Buddhism and Your Work

If you found peace in the Buddhist philosophy, that’s okay. But then why do you need my confirmation? I can only say that I don’t know of any Buddhist who said or has written that hitting children is a crime and the cause of human misery. Do you know of such an author?

20 How to Respond to Bullying and Mobbing?

Do you know the book Stalking the Soul by Marie-France Hirigoyen? She is an expert in what you are looking for; she has the courage to see through lies and she also knows my books. I suggest that you arrange an interview with her (she lives in Paris). If you want to publish anything on child abuse, you can copy articles or interviews already published on my Web site.

22 The Absurdity of the Belief That Hitting Children Is Harmless

Absurdity seems to be the most beloved food of all humanity (not only in our culture). All over the world people believe that hitting children is harmless. We can’t change these people, but we can do our best to inform them, as you did.

26 The Abused Child Suffers

This is a good question to which I often have to respond. To know more you can read my articles on my Web site, especially the one about the role of a helping witness in childhood. Unfortunately, the last one, about the cause of our suffering, is now only available in German and French, but will soon be translated. Also, the book For Your Own Good is now available free online at www.nospank.net. I am glad that you are fascinated by the story of Hitler; I was also (and still am) fascinated. For a long time I could not understand why only a few understood its importance and import. Now, I understand more: it is because most people (about 95 percent of the world population) were beaten as children. They had to learn very early to suppress their feelings and as adults don’t want to be reminded of their suffering. For that reason almost everybody still says today that hitting children is both harmless and necessary.

29 Hitler and Murderous Rage

You are right: if a person can, thanks to the help of witnesses, to books, and to the work on his emotions he has done, acknowledge the cruelty and stupidity of his parents, he will not become like them. All the monsters known to me, without any exceptions—dictators, Hitler helpers, serial murderers—have idealized their parents.

APRIL 2006

5 “How to Punish Children”?

It is true: nobody wants to talk about corporal punishment, not because they didn’t experience it, but because they don’t want to be reminded of their pain. You are an exception because you want to remember and to talk about this issue. In France there is a magazine called Psychologies, and they recently published an article called “How to Punish Children” in which psychologists were asked how to punish. No one said that children shouldn’t be punished at all because by punishing them they only learn violence; no, they said that you must punish the child under two years old, otherwise punishment would never be effective. I am afraid we are moving in the old direction of poisonous pedagogy.

6 Yes, Life Did Owe Them a Living

Why shouldn’t your children feel that life owes them a living? Because you were forbidden to feel that life owed you love, acceptance, and joy? But it did owe you all this. You had an extremely cruel childhood, and you are lucky that you didn’t abuse your children. But in therapy you should be able to find the suffering of the small, unwanted little girl who knew from the beginning that her existence was hated and couldn’t afford to feel the pain consciously. Now you are able to feel it and thus give your children your love. Maybe the book For Your Own Good (now available online), and also my last article can help you to understand what I mean.

7 The Freedom to Feel

At the end of your letter you are almost answering the letter yourself: as adults we must be able to give ourselves the freedom to feel, but if our parents and other caregivers didn’t give us this freedom in childhood, we think that we need the permission to be given to us from the outside. Nobody will do this “job” for us, though it is true that some people may make you feel more or less free. Unfortunately, our tendency to repeat old traumas sometimes means that we create a big attachment to people who remind us of our parents. For that reason, we may stay for twenty or thirty years in a marriage where we feel treated like we once were by our mothers and don’t dare to express our actual feelings because we are waiting for permission. We must learn that as adults we are the only ones responsible for our well-being and authenticity.

13 Disappointed

I understand and share your disappointment about the lack of interest in the role of our childhood in our lives, but I can’t do more than I do: understand and educate others about the reasons for this deplorable indifference. I have written about this issue in all my articles.

15 Corporal Punishment

When people hear you talking about “child abuse,” they can stay at a distance and remain at ease. They do not feel that they have been abused (of course not!), so they think that you are talking about “others,” not about them. However, when you raise the topic of corporal punishment, they can’t avoid remembering that they were indeed punished (even if they call it harmless spanking), all of them, and that it was painful. But they prefer to avoid the memories of being beaten and so will hardly join you in your endeavor to make this topic known. They avoid the pain.

21 They Deserve to Be Punished?

You describe in few words the crucial confusion from which all mistreated children suffer: they are not allowed to see how cruelly they were treated and have to believe that all the cruelty they endured was because they were bad, because they deserved to be punished. So they feel guilty their entire adult lives. You may be interested in reading my article about feelings of guilt and my last book, The Body Never Lies, as well as the book Breaking Down the Wall of Silence. I wish you much understanding from your therapist.

23 Homosexuals Are Not an Exception

Why do people expect and demand more from homosexuals than from heterosexuals? Why do the latter have more of a right to live unconsciously (with the image of their happy childhood and a wonderful mother intact) than the former ones? Homosexuals do even less harm to society because they don’t produce children to exploit them, abuse them, and teach them violence. Of course, they can abuse children and do much harm when they force them to keep silent. But many heterosexuals do the same, even if they are parents. So what is the matter with our demands? Do we question why millions of religious people say that beating children is right because of Solomon’s wisdom? No, we don’t do anything and see this as normal. Do we ask why millions of women let their daughters become sexually mutilated? No, we think that their religion demands that. But even the Koran does not demand this at all. It may be (I don’t know for sure) that the repressed rage of some men who were beaten as children by their mothers or sisters unconsciously causes these men to take revenge when they are adults for what they had to endure in childhood. They honor their mothers and punish their daughters instead. So they feel good with this tradition and support it with their whole might. But be careful and don’t give such information to anybody who does not ask you for it. They would kill you rather than accept the truth that they suffered abuse in childhood. You know how much time it takes to confront one’s own childhood. So don’t try to be a healer by telling people what they definitely don’t want to know. You can only heal yourself, and this is still a great achievement.

26 Harmful Nonphysical Abuse

Yes, nonphysical abuse can be as harmful as beatings. But it is often less visible. The reason I write mostly about physical abuse is because I want to show that even in the most obvious cases of abuse the adult children tend to deny it. So much more if the abuse was hidden.

MAY 2006

1 Our Body Does Not Accept Compromise

No, our body doesn’t accept the compromise you suggest because it doesn’t understand the Bible, or the moral principles of our education. It only understands the language of emotions directed toward real parents. To understand my response you should read my book The Body Never Lies and the articles on my Web site. To me, forgiveness is even harmful because it conceals the true feelings.

3 Paralyzed

I was reading your letter and looking for your rage. I didn’t find it. But I don’t doubt that it is in your body and makes you suffer without end. Hopefully, you will soon decide to feel the abuse and the cruelty you suffered from your father and your uncle.

7 Take Seriously What You Already Know

It seems that you benefited from reading and that you now understand much more about yourself than before. But you need to take seriously what you already know and to stop ignoring your knowledge in the way your mother did. She maintains that she doesn’t remember anything, but your body remembers very well. If you are ready to see that it was your father in your dream (who else?), you will no longer be compelled to choose cold men and countries where nobody can understand you. I wish you good luck in finding a country where you want to be and can be understood.

7 Oedipus Complex

In my opinion the Oedipus complex was one of the ways Freud chose to avoid confronting the whole tragic truth of child mistreatment. On my Web site (see “Articles”) you will find an excellent essay by Thomas Gruner on this topic. If you can read more, you can find my own position with many details in my book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware. You are also right when you suppose that I understand drug addiction in a much wider context than “the mother’s breast.” You can read about this in my last book, The Body Never Lies, especially the chapter on drugs.

13 Buried Memories and Emotions

Your letter may indeed help other readers to understand that the memories of our body show us how our parents actually behaved toward us in our first years of life. Your mother may now seem very different to you, and the older she becomes, the more she feels dependent on your care, like a child. But your feelings tell you the true story of the child whose emotions you feel now: “I have grown up with the feeling that I am the bad, moody, ungrateful daughter—never able to live up to her standards of niceness and calmness and not able to match her love for me. Consequently, I have felt guilt and a huge sense of obligation to her all of my life.” There must be good reasons for feelings like that. Unless you find them, you don’t know yourself because you don’t know the suffering of the small girl you once were. Before you choose a therapist, try to ask them the questions I suggest to ask on my FAQ list. I wish you much luck in finding the right person.

14 The Body Will Never Understand

You can now understand why your father treated you badly, but this will not help you because your body (the child) will never understand that. It insists on being understood through your acknowledgment of the suffering of the little boy.

15 Depression

Yes, you are right. I must only add that if you already know your history, without minimizing the suffering of the little boy you were, the depressive phases with time will become less and less frequent, since their role is only one of signalization; they want to make you aware of the fact that very intense, strongly suppressed emotions need to come up and be felt. If this is done, the depressive state disappears immediately. Everybody can have this happen. However, it is impossible to do this work if your body is misguided by antidepressants. It is a shame that so many people don’t have this important information, because once they are using this medication, they are unable to have healthy and enlightening experiences.

15 Writing Specifically on Depression

I have already written about depression (see “Articles” on my Web site and my first book, The Drama of the Gifted Child). I agree with many of the things you have written, except your argument that we need years to come out of depression and your assumption that depression is a feeling. It is not; it is a protection against feeling the most authentic emotions, like rage, sadness, fear. Once you can feel them, you are no longer depressed; you gain access to your history, to the suffering of your childhood that is generally painful. So depression is the body’s attempt to remind us that we need to do important work in our interest. You are right that the pharmacy and many doctors who offer antidepressants suggest the opposite path: to forget and to deny one’s own history. The U.S. soldiers in Iraq use prescribed high doses of antidepressants, yet many have killed themselves.

17 Wishing to Train in Psychotherapy with Children

Unfortunately, I don’t know of any training that would offer what you are looking for. Try to find the suffering of the small girl you were, to become familiar with her and learn to have empathy for her, in the presence of an enlightened witness. This will teach you more than lectures at universities. There is not one university in the world where the effects of child mistreatment are being discussed. Before you decide who should be your therapist, you may want to read my FAQ list.

19 C. G. Jung

I wrote several times about Jung in my books (Thou Shalt Not Be Aware and Banished Knowledge). Many of his theories, especially the one on archetypes, I regard as a way of escaping from the reality of his childhood, from the trauma of being sexually abused by his father. I wrote among other things that it is easier to fear the archetype of the mean but abstract goddess Kali than to feel the pain of being exploited by the beloved parent. If you read my FAQ list, maybe you will understand why I insist on questioning the future therapist about what he knows about his own childhood and how he worked on it.

JUNE 2006

5 Which Books to Start With?

To start, I would recommend The Body Never Lies and the recent articles on my Web site, especially on depression. You are absolutely right that the depression forces you to look into your cruel childhood, the terrible abandonment and injustice you had to endure from your parents. Fortunately, you have your husband on your side, and if you decide to look for a therapist, it could be helpful to read my FAQ list. I wish you good luck with finding the right, well-informed witness!

19 The System of Lies

It is rather surprising that a woman of your profession has the courage to leave, at least partially, the system of denial and open her eyes to 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, nor 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 latter 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 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 this rage that can now help you to heal.

The method of Marshall Rosenberg is very nice and may be helpful to people who were not severely mistreated in childhood. Those who were, 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.

22 The Suppressed Rage

You ask me for an answer, but I don’t find any question in your letter. You seem to accept what has been done to you and to pay the price with your terrible illness, without rage or without indignation. But it is exactly this rage that could help you to heal. If you want to know my opinion more exactly, you can read my book The Body Never Lies and the articles on my Web site.

24 The Proof

Thank you for your letter. You write: “Expounding the truth will always bring up hell and high water. The resistance and denial of others (in my experience) is proof that one is on the ‘right path.’” Unfortunately, you are right. But people who are on the path to themselves hardly want to go back; they find so many unexpected things there that they would not want to miss again.

25 The Journey I Travel

It is good to know that there are some counselors who dare to liberate themselves from the “conformism, distortion and denial” and feel the pain of their own childhood, instead of confusing their clients again, the way their parents already did, by preaching forgetting and forgiveness as well as other destructive ideas. I wish you all the best on your journey.

26 More Solutions?

It is not my goal to write books about how you can “mitigate your rage against your children,” but rather to encourage you to look for the reasons for this rage. And I have already written books of this kind. My impression is that you still protect and admire your mother and the way she brought you up and don’t allow yourself to criticize her perfectionism and her fear of making an error. No wonder that these emotions of suppressed rage are now directed against your children. I also think that your creativity was stifled from a very early age and it wants to eventually liberate itself—fortunately. But in order to not do it at the expense of your children, you will have to find the suffering of the small girl dependent on a very strict mother. You don’t need new books, which should tell you how to be with your children. You know that very well. You need only the permission to be yourself. That means to be authentic, even with your rage against people who deserve it, who are not your children.

JULY 2006

1 Traditional Morals Among Professionals

I am glad that, thanks to this mailbox, you have gained more awareness of the traditional morals in the language of professionals, because to make this clear was my purpose when I decided to open this page. Psychoanalysts now go so far as to admit that some patients were not “loved enough” in childhood. But they are still far away from recognizing that most of us had to survive torture when our creativity was stifled so that our parents could finally obtain the obedient child they apparently needed. In their language many therapists avoid being “judgmental,” and you can feel in this hesitation the fear of a small child that could be punished for “talking back.”

3 Hope Amidst Hopelessness?

I share the hope that you express in your beautiful language: “may we continue remembering and witnessing every tear shed, and hope that humanity will not drown in denial.” Your writing shows that it is eventually possible to become more and more the person we are born to become, the person we were meant to be, if we dare to see what was done to us and if we clearly refuse to tolerate violation. Even if you can’t become the child again, by connecting with her as you do and by condemning her mistreatment without hesitations, excuses, etc., your path toward growth continues to open. Then you know: never again will you become a victim of such a terrible betrayal like the one you endured from your parents, since you dare to see your parents as they actually are. We were not mistreated “for our own good,” but only because of our parents’ denial, which is pure poison to us and nothing else. With all my best wishes for your path of discovery.

4 It Was a Long Night

If your body is happy with this outcome, it may be okay to you. However, don’t forget the small child who had to accept so much violation. Should you have any problems with your body in the future, don’t hesitate to remind yourself to empathize with the small child, totally alone with tremendous pain, who speaks so clearly in your letter with these words: “She had totally violated my poor little jungle camp, leaving her mark on every detail! And the worst thing: I was so afraid of her reactions that I never dared to rip those sheets off again during the night…. It was a long night, and I have never forgotten how horrible it was, and I never got any understanding from my friends when I told them the story. They said they wished they had such a loving mother as mine, I was an ungrateful bitch.”

5 A Common Misquote

Your “quotation” is not complete and thus not correct. You write, “Alice Miller writes in her books that the children who were abused will abuse their own children since they do not know how to be any different.” But I have always written that this happens only if they stay in denial as adults. If they have the courage to know how they suffered as children, they do know the difference and will not repeat what their parents have done to them. Only people who don’t know that they suffered cruelty in childhood are prone to repeat what they once endured.

8 Loneliness

It is indeed very painful to realize how lonely you were as a child. But as you will see, the more you remember and the more you rebel against all these humiliations and the cruel lack of love, the less alone you will feel. You will start to become your knowing witness, a person who never before existed in your life.

8 A Suggestion for Your Next Book?

Thank you very much for your letter. I know the tragic story of Mozart, but I will not write about him. It is very frustrating to describe tragedies of artists’ and writers’ childhoods and to receive reactions that show little empathy because apparently there are not many people who can feel. To write about the pain of a genius doesn’t fit into most people’s mentality. Would you like to write about Mozart’s love and suffering? I wish you much luck in your life and work.

11 Love and Thanks

I am glad that my books gave you the support you needed when you realized that you were “living a lie.” Such a realization is very painful and you need a witness in the process, of course. But it is also very liberating. You are coming out of a prison that was invisible to you until now.

12 Genes

I don’t speak about “unresolved childhood traumas” but about the whole atmosphere of families in which children grow up without being allowed to feel and to express their needs. Without a helping witness, these children often learn not to feel at all in order to please their parents and to survive, as I explained it in my book The Drama of the Gifted Child. Later, they may develop different illnesses like obsessive neurosis, anorexia, etc., because their bodies need to make them aware of the fact that emotions are very important to a human being; they make it alive. Grown-ups may then realize (in the fortunate cases) that the reasons that made them fear their strong emotions no longer exist and that as adults they are free to feel them and to enjoy themselves.

12 My Mother Didn’t Believe Me

You write: “My analyst concluded that my greatest heartache was not the abuse from my father but rather the fact that my mother didn’t love me.” This is indeed the most painful insight. Realizing that you were not loved is very hard. But you should not forget that being sexually abused by a father also shows a lack of love. To see both is very disturbing, of course, and you need time to work on your father’s betrayal too. Many sexually abused women avoid confronting this betrayal and want to believe that they got some “love” from their father. I wish you good luck and good friends.

14 Physical Abuse, Politics, and Religion

I agree with you. The consciously felt feelings are not dangerous and make us free for finding constructive solutions. But the denied, suppressed rage and fear (of parents), covered up by ideologies and religious fanaticism, lead to irrational actions against substitutes that are destructive for both the victim and the aggressor.

19 An Article

You write: “I somehow doubt I’m alone in saying this, but your books have helped me to understand, feel, and work through so much of my past. It’s an ongoing journey, of course, and some days I feel like I have barely set out, but at least it is a journey and, in many ways, a wonderful one.” Why is this not enough, to want to write an article and share your experience with others?

19 Childhood Insight and Medication

You can continue to ask numerous psychiatrists for help, but I doubt whether any of them will speak with you about your childhood. If you want to know what I think about antidepressants, you can find my answer in my last article on my Web site. I understand that you want to “recover quickly,” just as perhaps your parents wanted you to stop screaming immediately and not disturb their peace. But healing takes time and requires your compassion for the child you once were. Don’t treat yourself like your parents did. Medication can disguise your memories; it can help you to feel better for a while, but the never-acknowledged suffering of the little boy will continue to speak through depression until you are willing to hear what the body (the child) has to tell you.

22 How Do We Change the World?

We can’t change the world; we can only write what we have understood, as you have. Your examples are very telling, and I hope that people who are searching like you will benefit from them.

23 A Question About Violence

I completely agree with you. Using violent means against dictators and other dangerous people is necessary. Unfortunately, we observe it rather rarely because most people fear these people like they unconsciously fear their parents. For that reason, almost all Germans applauded Hitler. Having been battered as children, they directed the resulting rage and hatred toward innocent victims in concentration camps and toward their own children. Also, dangerous dictators are viewed with great respect because nobody seems to dare to fully acknowledge what they are doing.

24 Limit-Setting

You are right; the process of setting limits is a kind of power game that only the adult can win. You know perhaps this kind of limit-setting: A father spanks his son and says: “You pushed your little brother, and he is crying now. I must spank you so that you can learn not to bully someone smaller and weaker than yourself.” Is this father aware of the fact that he is doing exactly what he actually wants to forbid (for good reasons)? Probably not. Why? Is he stupid? No, he might even be a professor of psychology, but his first teacher in behavior was his mother, whose lessons he never dared to question. So he does the same to his son. Will we ever change anything as long as once-beaten children (and almost everybody was beaten) are so afraid of their parents that they don’t dare to question them? They seem to live in constant fear of the next punishment if they dare to condemn the mistreatment they suffered in childhood. However, only then can they become adult and stop behaving unconsciously like a child scared to death.

24 Grieving Following Therapy

You write: “I do not have any misgivings about my therapist [why not?], and feel that he was suitably qualified and experienced in his field, but I am left with a level of uncontrollable grief and sense of profound loss.” This doesn’t sound like a successful end to therapy. Why don’t you tell him how you feel? If he no longer wants to listen to you, why don’t you look for another therapist? You obviously need help and should take your suffering seriously.

27 Learning Empathy for Yourself

If you can learn to feel your suppressed but strong emotions in therapy, if you can learn there to empathize with the small child you once were, you certainly will find many answers to the question you ask me. How should I know anything about your life if you don’t talk about it?

28 Poisonous Education

Your story is appalling. How have you survived all these cruelties and perversions? And why do you “want to stay silent”? Don’t you feel any need to rebel and to scream loudly about what has been done to you?

28 Never Too Late

I read your letter and am very sorry that I can’t respond to it, because I feel that whatever I would write, it will not reach you as long as you take antidepressants. The one thing I can tell you without hesitation is that, in my experience with myself and others, it is never too late to feel and understand our truth, namely the suffering of the small child we once were. This means to feel for the first time his suppressed fear and rage, which would liberate your energies and the joy of life. But, unfortunately, the medication makes all this impossible.

30 Marlon Brando

I haven’t read the book by Marlon Brando, but I can guess what I would find there. We don’t have lists of therapists; I can only suggest that you read my FAQ list when you are looking for a therapist. Also, reading The Body Never Lies may be helpful. For many years now I have been asking the publisher and the author of Reclaiming Your Life to remove my preface from the book because I no longer recommend it. Unfortunately, I have never received any answer and my request has simply been ignored. Obviously—as you now let me know—my text is still being used against my will because it may be not in the interest of the publisher to do what I asked for.

30 Using the AM Paintings as a Tool

At first I was surprised by your mention of the Rorschach test that has been used since the 1950s for diagnostic aims, which I don’t appreciate at all. But then, after a short time, I found your idea very convincing and I like it. Of course, not every psychologist could work with this “tool,” but for sensitive people like you, regarding these paintings together can enable a real emotional contact with the suffering person. If you ask what they feel or see when they regard a painting, they may come in touch with their own feelings in a much deeper way than if they only talk about their childhoods and are blocked by fears of their parents. If you have already had some experiences of this kind, please let us know.

AUGUST 2006

2 Honor Thy Father and Mother

If your metaphysical and metaphorical understanding of the Bible helps you to heal, there is nothing to say against it. But if you were not a mistreated child, you were not wounded, so I don’t understand what you need to heal from. On the other hand, if you were beaten and humiliated, don’t forget to also honor the small child who survived inside of you, whose suffering was never acknowledged, who can’t understand the Bible nor your interpretations of it, and who is still hoping in pain that you eventually may honor his suffering and take it seriously.

6 I Cry Without Reason

You say that you “cry without reason.” Apparently you refuse to know the actual reasons of your plight and you try “to conceal the truth.” Nobody cries without reason. Read the book The Body Never Lies to find more answers to your questions.

6 Response to a Letter on Limit-Setting

I completely agree with what you are saying here and am very grateful for your references to the helpful Web sites. I haven’t yet checked them, but I trust your judgment because I know you and your history. To me you are living proof that even the most abused victim is not condemned to repeat the endured abuse on her children thanks to her growing consciousness. Actually, children could be our best teachers when we carefully observe their (always positive) reaction to our respectful attitude.

9 With Thanks…

You write: “I still feel pity for them [your parents] and don’t wish their pain to be any worse as I guess they have lived with it longer than I.” I can understand your concerns but feel at the same time that here might be the blockade that hinders you from having pity for the battered boy you were and for his strong feelings of being discouraged from life. He could not share his pain with anybody after the death of his grandmother. To understand what I have in mind, please read my article on the reasons for our suffering and the one about feelings of guilt (both in the section “Articles” on my Web site). You also write: “I realized that they will probably never change their ways and I was wasting my time and energy.” Why should they change? The word “probably” shows that the hope of the small child is still very present in your mind. Parents that could beat their small children without pity usually don’t change.

16 My Painting

My experience was that I had no special programs or intention. I just enjoyed playing with colors and the liberty of doing what I wanted, and what came out was my childhood, my suffering of being alone and never understood. I don’t know of other painters who would tell me the same story.

18 Expectations

You write in your letter that now you take full responsibility for your actions toward your son, and you add, “I therefore expect my own parents to do the same: nothing more, nothing less.” I think that as long as you still expect this—or anything else—from your parents, you are not free from them. But one day you will become free because you want to and you understand very much already. I wish you the insight you need to no longer wait for your parents to change.

22 Blocked Memories

You are right; your memories are blocked by fear. Have you read any of my books? I would recommend The Drama of the Gifted Child and For Your Own Good. And if you start to feel anything about your childhood, write again. By the way, your feeling that you were never together with your parents in the same room shows already how terribly alone and abandoned you must have been in your childhood. Good memories are usually not blocked. It seems that there was nothing good you could remember.

30 Looking for a Therapist

I am very sorry that I can’t recommend a therapist to you. For that reason, I wrote the FAQ list so that you can check if the therapist you are talking to will be on your side and will not try to give you “lessons” in the traditional way. You should also read my last book, The Body Never Lies, and the articles on my Web site to be better informed before you choose a therapist. I wish you good luck!

31 Positive Anger

You write: “I want to do whatever it takes to drive my point home, and you cannot do that with a weak heart.” You are right; anger is often our protector from blindness, cowardice, cooperating with cruelty. Your illness is a language. Can it be that it wants to make you aware that your anger toward your parents is justified and should not be withheld?

SEPTEMBER 2006

7 Chronic Muscular Pains

I am sorry that I can’t help you. It is a very painful illness and I don’t doubt that it is connected to traumatic experiences in childhood. But patients with these symptoms usually don’t want to discover what happened to them in their childhood and to feel the helplessness that they endured.

8 Benign Abuse?

You write: “So many ‘puzzle’ pieces continue to fall into place for me.” I am glad for you. And if you are in trouble again, try to look closer at the “benign” abuse you suffered and try to imagine how you felt as a baby with bound arms to prevent your scratching of the eczema on your face. And you may then ask yourself why you suffered from eczema so young. There are so many kinds of torture for a small kid that we adults consider to be benign.

16 A Dream of the Gifted Child

I was very moved by your wonderful dream and your very telling letter. I do feel that your dream can be explained rationally and I hope that you will be able to do so as soon as you stop idealizing your childhood. Of course, this is a process that might take much time, but the dream will stay with you as your knowing witness, and will reorient you each time you try to fool yourself—because the pain may sometimes seem unbearable. It is rarely so. Usually, feeling the pain and ceasing attempts to understand and pity the parents brings a great deal of relief and insight.

21 Emotional Neglect

I think that neglect (emotional abuse) is as painful as physical abuse, sometimes even more so, but both are denied. I emphasize the physical abuse to show how even people who do recall the slaps and severe beatings they received from their parents believe as adults that they have been loved. It happens even more if there were no beatings at all (which is very rare). Your body may remind you now of what you don’t want (yet) to recall.

OCTOBER 2006

1 The Truth Will Set You Free

You write: “Since beginning to talk about these buried experiences and feelings, I find myself with more energy and have been able to work part-time consistently for almost two years…such a liberating feeling…after nearly a decade of chronic fatigue syndrome.” The fatigue syndrome appears if you try to suppress what you absolutely need to say because you are afraid of being punished if you try to speak out. However, the energies will come back; you will feel that it is worthwhile to live once you can live with your own truth. I hope that my other books, especially The Body Never Lies, will encourage you to fight against the scandalous practice of the “treatment” centers. Fighting against the lies can give you back the energy you have lost while staying silent. I wish you the courage you need to try again and again.

7 The Drama…

Thank you for your letter. I think that you will succeed to liberate yourself from the prison of your past because you want to know exactly what happened in your childhood and you have the good fortune of sisters who want to know as well. I recommend that you read my last book, The Body Never Lies, and the articles on my Web site.

9 Youth Gangs—“Maras”—in Central America

I am willing to answer all questions concerning the causes of violence, but I don’t know of any government that would be interested in my answers, because almost all of us were beaten as children. Thus most of us are afraid of punishment if we realize the truth. Instead of confronting it, we deny the suffering of our past and are unable to understand the rage of the youth. We speculate a lot about the causes of violence, while carefully avoiding the issue of child mistreatment, and thus are helpless in the face of the destructive behavior of gangs. However, it is more than understandable that children who learn from their parents’ violence in their first years of life will keep these lessons in the structure of their brain, mostly forever—if society continues to stay blind.

12 Forgiveness Was a Farce

Isn’t it amazing to discover one’s own denial? And the freedom this discovery brings us? With this experience your path is open. It takes time to walk on it, but you can’t be fooled again.

16 What Is Corporal Punishment?

To me, corporal punishment means injuring, attacking, offending, and beating the body of another person and pretending that this act of aggression is “for his own good.” It is then called spanking, educating, etc. This kind of violence toward children contains a lie because a child doesn’t learn anything good in a state of fear; it only teaches the child to use violence in adulthood. Beating or spanking a child also contains a big danger, because the brain of a small child is use-dependent; its experience later becomes its structure, and to regard violence as good and normal becomes ingrained. To me, so-called corporal punishment is nothing else than disguised child abuse. More information can be found at the rich and interesting Web site www.nospank.net, where its director, Jordan Riak, provides a lot of online material and a very informative booklet.

18 Journal for Miller Studies

As you see, there are not many who are not afraid of invoking punishment if they acknowledge the role of parents in producing violence and psychosis. Since almost all of us were beaten as children, the fear of punishment is still with us unless we work on it. Do you know people who would have the courage to write for such a journal?

19 How to Believe I’m Basically “Good” When I’ve Made My Son Feel “Bad”

You can’t change the past. If you can’t see yourself as a good person, maybe you can see yourself as an honest person who wants to realize her truth without fooling herself. It would mean acknowledging that your parents didn’t provide you with patterns of love for a child. They did the opposite. Now you have a choice, and your son will feel it as soon as you stop blaming yourself for what your parents did.

20 To Find the Poison Is Healing

You say that your patients leave your treatment happy because they found out what poisoned their whole life. It is exactly what therapists need to understand. But most of them are afraid of seeing and feeling how their parents treated them and so offer their patients morality instead of empathy. Yes, you are right: therapy gives us the courage to find the poison in our lives and to get rid of it by learning to have empathy for the mistreated child we once were.

20 Letter from Poland

Your incredible letter is proof that you can recover if you want to know your truth, if you can overcome your fear of it. And it shows that it is easier to succeed without a therapist than with one who is himself afraid of his truth.

21 Age and Change

I am not surprised that you can change even after seventy, because it is not age that makes us change, but the willingness to know our own history and the courage to recognize the things that poisoned our lives.

24 I Am Becoming

Thank you for your letter and your trust. Your life was for a long time shaped by the logical consequences of your childhood—as is always the case. But you find the courage to confront your history and have the good fortune to do it with an enlightened witness. Even if there is much suffering on this path, you are no longer in danger because you know now what happened, and you want to know. I wish you all my best and hope that my books and my paintings (on my Web site) will help you to bear your truth and to believe in what your art is telling you.

26 Freedom

Indeed, the true life begins when you stop trying to please others and start to take care of yourself.

26 Thank You So Much

I was moved by your letter, and I am glad that my books will give company and compassion to the sad and lonely child you have discovered and are going to protect and love.

29 Help Please

You write: “It’s like there’s a volcano of rage inside that I am trying to control so that someone will be sympathetic and want to help me.” It is precisely this fully legitimate rage that can help you if you express and understand it. The depression and panic attacks come when you try to control your rage and other feelings. Since The Drama helped you so much, why don’t you read the other books, especially The Body Never Lies? You need a therapist who can help you feel the plight of the small, abused, rejected, and neglected child you once were. On my Web site, under “Articles,” you will find the FAQ list that can help you find a therapist who is not afraid to see how parents destroy the lives of their children. If you think you should sacrifice your life for your parents because they are old, take the photo of yourself with the bottle and ask yourself: Whom could I have asked then to give me a warm breast? My mother is here, looking at me, and has no pity. She didn’t teach me to care about me. However, I will learn to do it. I will learn from my body, from my feelings—even from my justified rage—to love me.

30 Also in Japan

Thank you for testifying that what I describe in my books is not limited to the Christian culture. I don’t doubt that the same mentality governs the whole world: you are allowed to abuse your child and call it education, but you are forbidden to see the crimes of your parents. Everybody is afraid of being beaten again if they see and name these crimes. However, as long as you don’t dare to see them, you are compelled to repeat them with your children. For that reason, we must learn to know what we are doing and why.

30 Who Will Want Me?

You write: “It has taken forty years to realize what my mother has done to me, and now it seems I am stuck there and selfishly cannot deal with anything else.” It is normal that, having recently realized the early rejection of your mother, you now need time—much time. And please don’t call it selfish if you eventually decide to have compassion for the rejected child you were then. Don’t take any medication, for it will hinder you in understanding your feelings, the deep sorrow, the rage and other strong emotions that have been stored up in your body for forty years! Let them come to the surface and try to express them in your therapy. You will see that talking about how you feel will help you more than taking pills. You can survive a night without sleeping; the next night you may sleep. Let the dreams come up. Don’t fear them. They are your friends because they will inform you about the plight of the small girl rejected by her mother. And don’t think that nobody will want you if your mother didn’t. There are other people in the world who are not like your mother and who may love you once you no longer deny what has happened to you.

NOVEMBER 2006

12 Discovering the Anger and Sharing It

Isn’t it wonderful that you were able to meet yourself, the real you, the angry child that has waited for so long to be heard and understood? Now your adult self has come into the prison of this child and said: “You are safe, you can talk to me, you have plenty of reasons to be enraged, I will listen to them and protect you so that nothing like that can happen to you again. You have survived a hell and you need to tell me how you feel, the words are coming now, what a relief! If you stay silent, these feelings of hate may poison you, but not when you are talking and sharing them with me.” I congratulate you on your success. It is certainly painful to see the truth and to feel the hatred, but it is not dangerous; it is liberating. You will see it soon.

12 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 toward them. And the parents, often with the help of the state, can do almost anything 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 familial institution? 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 in their own family dynamic. In this way they protect their parents and produce violent people again and again. I agree with you that families based on the now-existing system are the source of violence in our society, and I do what I can to make this visible.

13 Freedom and Mourning

It is normal that freedom can’t stay forever and that we will have moments when we may be reminded of our past; but we will be better equipped to deal with the old memories as soon as we know the pain of our childhood. Once you have learned to care for your child, you will be able to let her feel the old fears and at the same time to protect her and find the solution to conflicts in the present. Then freedom will come back. But you will never again want to live without your history, and so memories will still have access to your mind—if they need to find this access. As you show, you could not prevent the therapy group and the therapist from wanting to abuse you, but you were strong enough to realize what happened and to leave. The child in yourself had the freedom to feel, and the adult you have now become protected the child by taking action.

14 My Father Did Nothing to Save Me

You wrote that you wanted to read my other books; I wonder what you will write us after that? Your father might have enabled you to see how your mother has treated you and this is absolutely important for your later life. Most children can’t even see the injustice. But your father didn’t save you from the maltreatment and he scared you terribly with his violence. I wish you the courage to see how you suffered from him. Maybe the articles on my Web site can help.

17 The Helpless Helpers

I think that even new methods that already acknowledge the many traumas endured in childhood are still unable to help if they don’t encourage the clients to clearly see that they were not only submitted to some traumas but lived for many, many years as helpless children in a climate of an unbearable terror without “knowing witnesses.” Only if we as therapists can bear this knowledge can we help the survivors of these crimes to rebel against them, to stop protecting their parents from their rage and to liberate themselves from the feelings of guilt; they pay for this with countless illnesses. If you read my article on indignation and other articles on my Web site, you will understand why my books are not known in Florida or elsewhere. Who wants to know what Dad or Mom have really done? The therapists don’t want to know it either. So many of them prevent their clients from acknowledging the truth. They don’t want to be bothered with my books because these books confront them with their history. There are not many seeking this confrontation, as you obviously are. Most prefer to stay the “helpers,” without knowing their history. But this actually doesn’t work. The body rebels at the end.

17 A Case in Mexico

You write: “Your books should be given to us in the hospitals when we take our babies home. But I understand how threatening to some people they might seem. Especially because we don’t know what to do then; I mean if we don’t use physical force, how can we “control” kids? In Mexico, this is a very important issue; we feel we must have control over the defenseless.” Why should we have control over the defenseless? Only because we learned to do so from our parents. And religion agrees with this. If we dare to see the crimes that come from this control, we no longer feel helpless and we see that we can change much, very much: we can change this mentality and leave the patterns of our parents behind.

21 Remembering

I agree with you. All of them, all of us. But there are, however, some who want to know, and this makes the big difference. I hope that the more people want to know, the easier it will be to break down the wall of silence and lies. But maybe this will take centuries, because the millions of children who are being beaten today will grow up as “beaters” and go on to preach “discipline” tomorrow, without a visible end.

26 Speaking the Truth

I think that you told her the truth, and this is always better than feeding her with illusions and lies, because it will give her the strength to later acknowledge her own truth and to bear it.

28 Using the Rage to Understand

You write: “Sometimes I don’t speak up to people who’ve hurt me because I’m overwhelmed by rage and anxiety that I know don’t belong in the present situation.” But you say that they hurt you, and this is real. Why don’t you speak up? The rage is a source of information. If you don’t use this information and continue to avoid understanding it, you will accumulate more and more rage in your life. Try to understand what makes you angry in the present.

DECEMBER 2006

1 Why I Remain Silent

So you found the reason why you don’t react to being treated badly; you are afraid of then being assaulted even more. But why do you feel ashamed? You are not guilty, it is them; they should be ashamed of treating you so badly. However, you write: “I feel surprise, shame, and anger when she does this, and no words come out of my mouth. Of course, it’s my problem that I feel shame. This was how I felt when I was a child and my parents criticized me (which was constantly)—ashamed. If I said something to defend myself, they would have one or a combination of these reactions: screaming more criticisms at me, contemptuous comments, physical violence or the threat of it. Afterward, I would be shunned, hardly spoken to, and looked at with disgusted eyes. I eventually stopped trying to speak up for myself.” This was what you did as a child in danger. But now you are not a child and not in danger. You can use words to express your feeling of anger. If somebody becomes angry at you because you were honest, it is their anger, not yours, and it is up to them to deal with their feelings. If you go on to suppress your feelings to spare others your truth, your true reactions, you will accumulate anger, as I wrote before, and you risk eventually becoming ill. I wish you the courage you need to take your feelings seriously and stay honest.

1 The Fiercest Taboo

I am very sorry that your very important letter was lost and thank you for having sent it again. It is deeply moving and shows what probably millions of children have to suffer but never are able to put into words. You write: “She told me hundreds of times, maybe thousands of times, not to make a mountain out of a molehill. I learned to make every drastic horror into a very small black dot that I could swallow and hide from everyone. I learned to make tiny molehills out of mountains.” Yes, so many do the same, and they pay for it with severe illnesses and blindness, which make them hypocritical mothers too. It is so terrible that your mother wanted you to love the monster of your father, who mistreated you sexually and physically over many years, because “who else would love him?” This is more than simple hypocrisy; it is a multiple crime because it kills the true emotions of a child and brings to her brain a confusion that could last her whole life. Fortunately, you escaped this fate; you seem to see clearly now what your mother has done. This will save your life, I think.

3 A Question

You write: “Around this time my father started behaving aggressively. For no apparent reason he would become extremely angry with me, jerk me away from what I was doing, take me home, lock me in my room after a severe spanking (buttocks and legs), and then leave me there.” Then you write: “Am I wanting the impossible? My abuse was not like the horror you describe in your books or in the letters on your Web site” [AM: I don’t agree with you], “is there a possibility that I can be friends with my parents without harming myself?” My answer is no. It will be easy for you to understand my answer if you read my book The Body Never Lies.

3 A Painful Relationship

Why do you need a relationship that makes you suffer, with a man who already tells you that he would like to spank his children in the future? Does he remind you of anybody you knew in your childhood?

5 Compassion for People Who Hurt Us

Your letter shows how much you have been suffering in your life and that you have certainly seen others suffer too. I think that your profession has provided you with all that one needs to understand how people become criminals. But as you say, there are only a few who are ready to see the truth with which they are daily confronted. You write: “My scars are deep but not without compassion for those who created them.” Maybe you will suffer less when you give up compassion for those who created your deep scars. You can at least try and see what will happen. And you can tell us then how you feel. Having compassion for people who hurt you hurts your body and soul. Be true to yourself. You certainly need unconditional love and compassion—for the small boy who suffered so much without being guilty—but not for the perpetrators. With the moral lessons we received as children, it is hard to become emotionally honest, but it is possible if you dare to know your story. And you seem to dare.

8 Feeling Overwhelmed

Many psychologists think that The Drama is “all they need.” They seem to be frightened by my most recent books, which show the histories of mistreatments, the cruelty of parents, and the effects of denial. I wish you the courage you need to discover the truth of your childhood. Whatever you choose to do, don’t take antidepressants. They will only hinder you in finding the cause of your depression.

8 Teaching to Hate

You write: “My opinion is that corporal punishment teaches us to hate. Not to be better persons.” You are absolutely right, as in most statements that you made. Why do you call yourself stupid? Obviously, your family is stupid and you refuse to see this; you prefer not to acknowledge it. But it is you who will have to pay the price for this lie. Do you want to pay it?

13 Media Request—Child Sexual Abuse

I agree with what you have written and can confirm that your reference to my work is correct. The statistics you quote (40 to 80 percent) may be based on reports of perpetrators who deny that they have been victims. If they were aware of their histories, of the suffering they had to endure in their childhood, they would have been empathic with themselves and also respectful of other children. They would be unable to molest them. It is precisely this denial of their suffering that drives them to abuse others. And the same denial drives the media to use so-called scientific statistics in order to disguise the truth.

14 A Personal Question

Be patient with yourself. It seems that you are on the right path because you want to discover the truth. But doubts are normal. Who wants to believe that what is incredible was indeed real? And was done to a small helpless human being? It takes time to admit the truth, and you need the company of a therapist who will not preach to you about forgiveness.

16 Personal Comment and Question

You write: “I’m still in therapy, I have changed so much in just four months, and I love logic.” I am positive that you will find the answer you ask me for on your own because you love logic.

16 Where Can I Share Ideas?

Nobody is stopping you from sending The Drama to Spielberg or to other filmmakers, but I guess that it is easier to make films for millions of dollars than to look into one’s own history. Many great filmmakers succeed in brilliantly showing the tragedy of their own childhoods again and again without being willing to feel it. Instead they make fun of it and earn much admiration because this is what most people wish they could do.

16 From Beijing Again

It seems that you found the right therapist and so you can feel the rage about what happened to the small girl. If you can feel indignation toward your parents and uncle without wanting to protect them, you are on your way to protecting the child in you who once suffered so much without any witnesses. This process takes time: be patient and don’t expect miracles from yourself.

20 The Forgotten Rape

I never heard about any perverse sexual fantasies that were not the effects of sexual abuse endured in childhood. In most cases, these causes are denied or disguised, but fortunately you seem to see them clearly. Once you can acknowledge the rage against your parents for the crimes you already know, you will not need the fantasies that scare you so much. In having them, you protect your parents from your rage and yourself from the truth. But your parents no longer have power over you unless you give it to them. If not, you can feel your rage and liberate yourself.

21 Illusions Disguised as Spirituality

Your reply is revealing to me because in my opinion the word “spirituality” in most cases covers something that is not clear. In your concept I don’t see the path to growth but rather the repetition and continuation of the child’s dependency on illusions. My experience gave me a very different view into illness and healing. If you have enough time, you can read the letters published here and see that growing and healing begin when former victims of mistreatment start to confront themselves with the cruelty of their upbringing, without illusions about the “love” of a higher power and without blaming themselves for projections. They allow themselves to feel their authentic emotions without moral restrictions and in this way become eventually true to themselves. But the twelve steps continue to keep the ACA [Adult Children of Alcoholics] in the former dependency of the child: fear, self-blame, and permanent overstrain. A person who eventually, painfully realizes that she was never loved, can, based on this truth, learn to love herself and her children. But a person who lives with the illusion that she was indeed loved by a Higher Power, though she has missed feeling this love, will probably blame herself in the old manner for her lack of gratitude and will tend to demand the love from her children. In doing so she will pass on the blame to her children if they don’t behave in the way that she wishes, together with the lie that she learned in her so-called recovery.

24 Paranoia?

Trust your feelings and your thoughts. Take them seriously. It happens quite often that people who read my books don’t feel understood by therapists who are scared by the issue of childhood. You are free to ask questions and to test the received answers. The child was afraid of punishment when she had doubts; the adult has the right to question everything without being punished. Your doubts may be very essential, very important messages. Listen to them. They have nothing to do with paranoia.

30 Unfathomable!

I do feel your gratitude and can understand it. How could it happen that you worked for ten years on your “recovery” and nobody has yet helped you to feel the rage toward your mother? Her crime is unfathomable to me. She wanted to “give a lesson to her three-year-old girl” who came bleeding because of being penetrated? I’ve heard a great deal about cruelties that parents are able to perform, but this case is beyond any limits. And how is it possible that you can only now feel compassion for this betrayed child? Fortunately, you can. I think that a mother without any compassion made your whole childhood a hell. Do you have a good friend who could accompany you if you decide to go to your mother and tell her how you feel about what she did? In any case you need to tell it to yourself and to rebel against this enormous madness. I am sure that your symptoms will disappear, because you feel already the empathy for the child you once were and you want to know the whole truth. You will thus certainly succeed.

31 Brainwashing in Medical Training I

I completely agree with you and share your concerns. You write: “There is a lot of the same ‘group-think,’ authoritarianism, use of humiliation and rank, to not only “whip into shape” new doctors, but also to negate, wipe out, or pathologize true compassion in the treatment of the patient. And it is truly amazing the amount of rationalization and denial that occurs with this.” And you write further: “I have attempted (without success) to discuss this with other health care professionals, but it seems that everyone has been so completely ‘brainwashed’ that they see no inherent problems with their education nor with the system itself. I would be interested if anyone had any experience or comments on this.” We are publishing your letter here in the hope that other physicians who feel the same discomfort will share some suggestions. Maybe some of them have an idea about how doctors can be encouraged to trust their feelings and take interest in the childhood history of their patients. In my opinion, this could certainly reduce prescriptions of unnecessary and sometimes harmful medication.