JANUARY 2007
5 Living Your Life
Fortunately, you now live your life. Isn’t it amazing that we feel better as soon as we dare to see how awful we felt before? Unfortunately, most of us expect punishment if we dare to look into our childhood.
6 Brainwashing in Medical Training II
You write: “I have used the lack of compassion I experienced to heighten the compassion I feel for my own patients, with incredibly rewarding results.” Have you already tried to ask your patients if they were beaten in childhood? I suggested it many times to many physicians, but they were afraid to do so. Only one of them did it and was surprised that a long story of a chronic illness came to an end after the pains of the childhood had come to the surface. Unfortunately, many doctors keep their own secrets to themselves and thus can hardly offer compassion to their patients; their artificial security may fall away. They don’t know that this look at the past could give them and their patients the opportunity to live their own authentic lives, without the lies and without the secrets that protect parents.
9 Follow-Up to Your Question
You write: “I have not asked my patients if they were beaten in childhood, mostly because my patients are still in childhood (I am a pediatric cardiologist, so my patients are children), and parents almost always are with their children at the clinic visit.” If I were a pediatrician, I would ask every parent whether they spank their children and tell them never to do this. Even and precisely in the presence of the child. I would tell them that a spanked child grows up in fear, pain, and with suppressed rage that for many can only be expressed through illness. Why should a permanently frightened child not become ill?
16 Need Help
We don’t have any lists of therapists. I hope that my articles will help you to understand the small abandoned and tortured girl you once were that now, fortunately, starts to feel. If you try to understand and to love her, you can help her more than traditional therapists can.
19 The Key
You think it is strange that you felt relieved when the woman told you that you were sexually abused by your father. It is not at all strange. Your denial didn’t allow you to feel normal reactions to the abuse: the sorrow and the rage. You couldn’t understand their meaning, like you couldn’t understand your abnormal rejection of your first newborn. But he gave you the key: by rejecting him, you actually rejected your father. The woman gave you the information that liberates you from doubt. The taboo is not only universal in Poland; it is everywhere, trying to silence the victims. But some of them, like you, begin to realize that they have to pay a high price for that denial, and they refuse to pay it if they want to heal. I wish you the courage that you need to stay with your truth, to stay on the side of the exploited little child you once were—and to save your health.
19 A Book About Fighting Depression
I am glad that you succeeded in liberating yourself from the depression by having admitted the whole, extremely painful truth of a child with an alcoholic father. It is understandable that you want to become a witness to others who also suffered severe abuse in their childhood. Unfortunately, I can’t write you a preface, nor can I read your manuscript. But if you honestly stay with your truth, if you don’t preach forgiveness, or tolerance and understanding for endured cruelty, and if you don’t offer the flight into a nebulous “spirituality,” your readers may feel understood and supported by an enlightened witness whom they can trust.
22 Confusing
Around 1997, I met two persons who became addicted to primals in the hope of eventually liberating themselves from their past and emptying the “pool of pain.” They tried to do their best: they cried and cried, without any resolution. They felt not good enough if they didn’t succeed in healing. At the same, time they were unable to question even the cruelest behavior of their parents. To me this was exactly the reason why they were blocked. I think that you don’t need to recall every traumatic event if you deeply feel the devastating effect that your mother’s or father’s hatred for you created in your soul. It is hubris, and it doesn’t make much sense to forgive oneself. Of course, flashbacks may come again and again and will help you to understand your feelings (of the past and of today) once you are open to them. You can find my concept of effective therapy in my recent articles on my Web site.
22 Healing the Trauma
Probably, there was not one trauma but a long history of pain that you don’t mention here. But if you dare to feel this pain, you can try to resolve the old trauma in the present time by responding in another way than that of the agonized child—by defending yourself. You are now an adult and can try without taking the risk of dying. At the same time, the old wounds can heal.
23 Before We Have Children
I can understand why you question my statement, and I agree with you that it would be better if we could learn to feel and understand the tragedy of our childhood earlier, at least before we have children. But many people of a younger age are still dependent on their parents, financially and emotionally, and they are less motivated to confront them. They may suffer from lies, but they usually hope that everything will be okay once they have their own family, a partner and children. The realization that the illusions don’t work—because the repressed and thus unresolved memory of their cruel childhood is still in their body—comes later. Then the time comes when it becomes essential to confront ourselves with our truth: essential for our health, even for our life, if we don’t want to fool ourselves by taking antidepressants or choosing beliefs (religious, political, or sectarian) that help to maintain our illusions. This is not a rule, of course (as you see, there are still exceptions), but young people sometimes write here very enraged about the manipulations of their parents. They feel suffocated, but still live with the parents who make them suffer daily and don’t dare to move. In most cases, they are too afraid to see the truth and to take their feelings—themselves—seriously. As children, they learned to never take their feelings seriously, but rather to say, “It is OK.”
25 Why Mental Illness?
You are right to ask for more explanations, but you will find them in my books and at least in the twenty-one points on my Web site under “Flyers.” I can’t repeat here what I have written in all my books, and I can’t avoid being simplistically labeled as “antipsychiatric” by people who don’t take the time to read and understand my work. Concerning your sister, I think that only she could say if and how she had to suffer in her childhood if she had had a compassionate witness of her pain. As she obviously didn’t have anyone, only her body knows her history; her mind can’t know it. It does everything it can to disguise it with physical symptoms because the painful truth is unbearable in isolation. However, it is only the truth that can heal. Now your sister has her illness, her medication, and her family who sees the causes of her illness only in her genes. But fortunately she also has a sister who obviously wants to know more.
26 Mental Illness and “Supportive Families”
You write: “To be able to say about another human being one must have monitored that person every second, 24–7, from the moment of birth, and even more important, one must know for sure how that other person feels and thinks.” But we have so many diagnostic labels that help to disguise the abuse. And this is exactly the reason why people MUST become severely ill: they are in total isolation with their pain. Nobody wants to see the facts that explain the “illness.”
27 Alzheimer’s Disease and Poisonous Pedagogy
I don’t have any doubt that Alzheimer’s is a flight response to flashbacks of a painful childhood that come more frequently for older people because their resistance against remembering the truth is weakened by advanced age.
29 Postpartum Depression
It is absolutely normal that the birth of a child, above all of the first one, triggers in the young mother emotions connected to her own birth. If she gets help, thanks to the presence of a doula, for instance, she can consciously experience these feelings even if they were traumatic and have thus been hidden for a long time. But if she is left alone, with not the slightest understanding from the people around her, she will repress again the emotional “memories” of her own birth and instead of accepting them will get what is called depression. The label “postpartum” suggests that this is a normal reaction to a birth. But the normal reaction to having given space to a new human being is joy, if the mother also was received with joy and not with fear or hatred when she was born.
31 Getting Free
You write: “I do not feel unable to cope as long as I keep away from the lies which surround me. That is what my body is telling me: that I must escape to be with my damaged child. But there is no language or cultural space which affirms this need. I’ll find a way, but I just really needed to share this with you.” You are right: there are not many who affirm the need for the truth. But if you dare to carefully look at everybody’s story, it is always the lie that makes them ill. And the body always rebels.
FEBRUARY 2007
2 The Body Never Lies
Some people make the discovery that they were beaten as babies very late in their life, at your age or even later, when they are strong enough to bear this truth. Some never discover it; they take antidepressants instead.
2 Abuse of an Entire Generation?
You write: “Horrifying though it is to believe that a generation of parents would rather see their children dead than have their basic social assumptions challenged, I have come to believe that there is an element of truth to this.” I am afraid that this important quote not only concerns one generation, but many.
2 Unraveling the Abuse
You write: “Why do I still want this man? Why do I still think I love him? Is it my father-hunger? Bulimia, anorexia, alcoholism, self-hatred, have plagued my life for twenty-five years…. I’m so exhausted from punishing myself….” So you do know very well the answers to your questions. What you have yet to do is realize how your father treated you, how much you suffered because of him, and to rebel against him. You write that you loved him so much; why did you? When you get rid of this “love,” substitutes will no longer be necessary.
2 Your Emotions—Your Friends
You are asking, “Have you heard of other cases like mine?” Your case is not at all an exception. In almost all cases the family (or the institution) protects the abuser and they put the blame on the victim who insists on the truth. So she, or he, feels abandoned and isolated because other victims prefer to stay in denial and refuse to be witnesses. But eventually it is the truth that will set you free; working in a group will enable you to gain compassion and witnesses to your suffering. But above all, your emotions of sorrow and rage will become your best friends; they will protect you from the lies, denial, and becoming ill.
4 Forgiveness
I wrote about the damaging function of forgiveness in articles on my Web site and in my books, above all in the books Banished Knowledge and The Body Never Lies.
5 In Pain but Conscious
I agree with you when you write, “I cannot but state that those who hurt their children are simply insane.” But I must add that they became like this because they were beaten as small children and then learned to believe that this madness was okay. I think that parents who, like you now, can understand how hurtfully they have treated their children can tell them that it was wrong and apologize. In this way, they can help them to become conscious before they have children of their own. They may not accept these apologies if they are in denial, but at least they will be given true information.
7 How to Live
You seem now to be closer to yourself than ever before. Trust yourself. Maybe you need just a break after the long work you have done. Your feelings will soon tell you what you need next. Nobody knows better what you need than your feelings when they eventually become your friends.
7 Breaking the Cycle
As you honestly want to explore the pain of your childhood, you should know that antidepressants may hinder your doing so. I hope you can find in my FAQ list (see “Articles” on my Web site) the help you need to find a therapist who can become your enlightened witness. As you succeeded in breaking the cycle of violence, you will certainly succeed in finding the right therapist. You have my best wishes.
8 I Never See Anyone Express Emotions like Me
You seem to be recovering from the brainwashing of the twelve-step groups, and this indeed is not easy. But you are becoming a feeling person and this will give you real strength. You dare to feel and to have your own thoughts. Congratulations.
8 To Please for Love
If you want to please, and to feel what you think that others expect you to feel, you are never yourself and thus you don’t know yourself. We are not born to please; we are born to be who we are. We are entitled to have our own feelings and thoughts. If our parents refused us this right in our childhood, we must learn to reclaim it later as adults, otherwise we will never know who we are. We are our feelings. Rereading The Drama might help you to understand this.
12 Forethought and Hindsight
If you were able to get in touch with your anger during this short time, the many dollars you had to pay were worthwhile. Prisons are full of people who kill but can’t feel their anger, and they kill because they are unable to feel.
13 The Angelic Role Model
You write: “I…usually always have wanted to understand them. I have been the angelic role model of this to my family and friends, but not as easily anymore.” You need to stop this if you want to stay healthy.
15 Thank You
Yes, goodness begets goodness, as you say—provided that it is authentic and not just pretend. You see it proven in the next generation, as in your case.
17 Ritual Abuse
You are right: “People who write and create these movies seem to be totally unconscious to their own story, and have little understanding of what they’re actually portraying and why.” So what I am doing is writing time and again about why they are doing this, why they are showing monsters and brutal sex in their films and sell it as their “art,” as a fantasy. Actually, it is the perversion they experienced as small children from their caregivers, which they have deleted from their memory. Children who watch these horror films must pay the price for the self-deception of the filmmakers.
19 Some Answers
I will try to answer you as far as I can:
19 Exploitation of Unmet Needs
As a child, you get love from your parents if they are free to love you. If they are not (for whatever reason), you can’t make them loving. However you may try, whatever you may do for them, it will never be enough. But as an adult, you can learn to recognize your actual needs, to take them seriously, to try to fulfill them. Then you will discover with surprise that you yourself can become the loving person you were always longing for.
20 Feeling like Shit
Yes, it is very common that, after denouncing the deeds of their parents, people feel very badly at night, as if they were being punished. Because to see and condemn what the parents did was the worst sin, and children were often cruelly beaten if they saw too much. Feeling like shit is the memory of what probably happened many times, but this time you understand the connections and can no longer be forced to remain silent.
21 To Give Up the Illusion
Everything you write makes sense to me. If your skin symptoms disappear, that will be wonderful, but if they still persist, maybe you need to give up the illusion that you can confront your mother and that you can “have an honest conversation and perhaps reconciliation.”
22 I’d Like to Be Less Angry
If you are angry, you have reasons to be angry, but you may be afraid to recognize them. When you feel your anger and realize what it triggers in your memory, it will leave you. Your body doesn’t lie.
24 Like the Weather?
No, denial is not just in the nature of things; otherwise we could not recover from our symptoms after having felt our truth. But it is, as you rightly say, common and ubiquitous. Almost everybody fears their parents who thus enjoy the absolute power they have over their own children. I hope that we can change this as we understand the catastrophic consequences of this dynamic (war, genocide, terrorism).
26 Feedback for The Truth Will Set You Free
Yes, you seem to be living proof that “if we have the courage to speak out and claim our truth about our childhood trauma and subsequent reenactments throughout life, we no longer need be imprisoned by it because we are not in denial of it.” For that reason, your body has recovered, and you will now be able to do the work you so much want to do.
MARCH 2007
5 The Need to Be Listened To
Not being heard can be a matter of life and death for a human being, right from the start. Imagine a newborn or a small baby whose only one language is crying. Only in this way can he say: I am hungry, I feel lonely, I need to be touched, etc. If his parents think that letting him cry will teach him to behave, his existence may be in mortal danger. As an adult, he may have very rich language but still be afraid that nobody is interested in knowing what he has to say, unless he has realized that there do exist people on this planet who are not exactly like his parents. Without therapy, parents rarely change in their eighties.
6 Twelve-Step Programs of AA
In my understanding, we can liberate ourselves from the effects of cruel parenting if we become free to feel our own authentic feelings, whatever they might tell us. But if our goal is to become loving and forgiving people who are loved by the Higher Power, we are obliged to cultivate the denial of our reality, which we learned to do as children—forgetting that it was exactly this denial that made us sick from the start.
6 Finding Myself Again
Your letter gives me hope that you will never again abandon the strong and rebellious girl that you have found; you like her and understand her. Probably it is all she needs now to live her own life, to learn for herself and to fulfill all the needs that will come along in the future.
7 Protecting Our Parents
Your observations are absolutely correct; you grew beyond your therapist. Why don’t you look for another one if you still need a therapist? Don’t let yourself be blinded again; you did it enough in your childhood. It is never, never, never right to spank a child. People do it only because they were beaten and still protect their parents.
9 Fear in the Spanked Child
In your honest and thoughtful letter, you write: “I realize it is the Fourth Commandment, public morals, and the fear of the little boy that is obstructing me.” Three years ago I wrote a book to reveal the power of the Fourth Commandment and the public morals that forbid us to recognize the cruelty of our upbringing. But I do think that the last factor you mention above—the fear in the spanked child—is the most powerful obstruction to the truth. Even the fear of a small baby that we carry within us, sometimes for our whole life, can prevent us from admitting the truth about our parents. Because, with few exceptions, our parents were looking not for the truth but for power, which they obtained through our blindness. Thus most people have good reason to be scared by the suggestion that looking at their parents can help them with their health problems. But if they try, and find their symptoms disappearing they don’t need to become convinced; they know why. However, these are rare exceptions. Almost all people on this planet think that children need to be smacked and to become obedient. They don’t know the price of this ignorance.
9 Creating Consciousness
Thank you so much for sending me the photos of your paintings. They are very expressive and powerful because they show authentic emotions. I can understand that talking about them makes you cry, but I hope that shame will disappear once you fully accept that you were the victim of cruelty and not its creator. What you create is consciousness, which is still very rare in the world of artists. Most of them don’t want to know how they suffered in childhood, even if they express this suffering in art, but unconsciously.
11 The Forbidden Feelings
You write: “My quality of life is so much better and so is my health. My back and muscles do not hurt as much, my chronic infections are gone, and my allergies are better. I still suffer from constipation, but I also have a long way to go before I can truly act out my new inner ‘landscape.’ I still find myself repressing my true feelings in many situations and choose not to act upon them because I’m still insecure in many ways.” All this shows that you are on the right path to finding yourself. Nobody knows how long this path will be or how much time it will take to get rid of all the symptoms. But it is clear that you will succeed after all you have done. Your feelings know when they are ready to appear. Trust them.
20 To Stand Up
You say: “When one can stand up to one’s therapist, including their ignorance and abuse, one can truly stand up for oneself in the world.” You are right, but only if the therapist represents parental ignorance. I hope that there are also therapists who are able to bear criticism.
APRIL 2007
3 My Own Rage Scares Me
It is not by kicking soda bottles that you will liberate yourself from your rage, but by feeling and saying what hurts you and by understanding how you were hurt by your parents, how you were humiliated and tortured as a small defenseless child. You must admit that you have been carrying this rage your whole life but that now you are strong enough to defend yourself with words. Good luck!
4 We Will Not Go Mad
No, we will not go mad if we dare to face our truth. Unfortunately, there are not too many counselors who help to do that.
4 The Saved Life
I felt much moved by your story and the powerful self-portrait you sent me. Your letter confirms that healing is indeed possible if you decide to live with your truth. And your child knows it; his body knows that you are not lying. And I know it from your letter because everything you are saying here is coherent. I wish you and your family much luck.
5 I Will Forever Be Thankful for Your Research
Thank you for your compliments, but you are giving me so much credit before reading my other books, written after The Drama. You write that your daughter is doing research into Parkinson’s and Huntington’s diseases. Are the scientists interested only in the description of the symptoms and in their genetic causes, or do they also show some interest in the emotional factors? Can research into Parkinson’s disease be separated from the very obvious symptoms of fear that the bodies of these patients display?
5 Abusive Childhood Leads to Codependence, Another Kind of Prison
You are asking: “Do I still feel lonely and unhappy because I feel chained to this depressed man, or is it my past to which I am still chained and from which I will never be free? Must children who were prisoners of abusive childhoods become and remain codependents as adults? Must I suffer physical symptoms if I stay for the sake of the kids? My knees are bothering me.” These questions and your quotes from Nietzsche in my book show that you are coming very close to your essential question: Do I want to stay chained to my childhood until the end of my life, or are my knees asking me to open my eyes and become free of illusions so that I finally can live my life? You will become free if you decide to live with your truth.
6 There Are Exceptions of Course
I don’t know any exception to the rule that all parents who deny the sufferings of their childhood and idolize their parents because they are (not without reason) too afraid of questioning their deeds will repeat what happened to them in a more or less cruel manner. But I hope that there are some who do dare to admit their truth or who were not abused at all. These kinds of parents are not compelled to pass on the cruelty they endured in childhood and denied in adulthood.
7 The Body as Therapist
You really got it! You write: “Since I have allowed myself to see this and the pain that comes along with it, the moment I lie to someone, my body immediately goes into a kind of panic sensation to let me know that it is not a good thing that you are about to do. This made a true believer out of me, that my body can inform me with this kind of message to keep me in line.” You could say as well that your body is your most reliable therapist.
7 Enemas
Enemas are not a “necessary thing to do” they confuse the natural and healthy work of the child’s organs and make a “patient” out of a normal child. Besides, they produce shame and rage that are not allowed to be expressed and thus may become inaccessible in later life because the adult self thinks that the treatment was “necessary” and well meant. Actually, it is an abuse of power and often also a kind of sexual abuse.
8 Is There a Cure for Depression?
You are on the path to understanding more than your psychiatrist. The lack of serotonin has a cause, and this cause lies in your tragic childhood, but antidepressants will cover up your history. The knowledge of this story (an important part of your life) is the real key to your health. Your depression seems to ask you to face what happened then. You can leave a place only if you know where you have been. But you are still in your childhood without knowing it. I hope that reading The Body Never Lies will help you to make the right decision. Also read the article on depression and the FAQ list on my Web site.
12 Surrealism: The Aftermath in the Minds of “Abused Children”?
You can see it this way: society prefers to admire an artist who presents a “distorted mind” without a cause rather than acknowledge the suffering of a normal child who was submitted to incredible perversions by his or her parents (read the biographies of Surrealist painters).
13 Ignorance
I agree with you when you write that there is not enough creativity in the way parents and children are treated by therapists who are afraid of their own feelings. And I may add that these feelings are often the fears of a beaten child who was forced to suppress them. The adult therapist is not free then to listen and to see what happens to children in general and what happened to his or her clients in their childhood. Creativity means to be free from fear, to dare to have new experiences.
14 Poisonous Pedagogy in Primal Therapy
I totally disagree with the theory you cite and think, like you, that it indeed shows traces of poisonous pedagogy since rage and anger are condemned by all religions. However, these emotions are the most natural, healthy, and logical reactions to pain. Since these emotions are forbidden to children, they must be suppressed (in contrast to sadness, which is allowed). Neither in the family nor in school are these important and life-protecting emotions allowed to be felt and expressed in words. They thus stay blocked in our bodies, producing corporal symptoms in order to be heard. If they are taken seriously in adulthood, these emotions can be felt in therapy and then the symptoms may disappear, as they only occur in the first place as a nonverbal rebellion against injustice, cruelty, perversion, hypocrisy, lies, and a lack of love. In therapy they must be respected by a therapist who is not afraid of them. If clients mistakenly believe that their rage is only a defense against sadness, an illusion of “false power,” they will—again—be unable to admit these emotions that block the functioning of their bodies, and the liberation of which would be healthy. Apparently, the fear of the little child that still lives within us penetrates many concepts of therapy. We prefer to stay good, obedient children rather than adults who can acknowledge the endless injustice they had to endure in their childhood and rebel against it.
15 Confronting Abusers
You seem to know what you want: to let the child in you speak under the protection of your adult self, to hear your voice and to honor your courage in the presence of your abusers. You also seem to be well prepared for the hurt you may confront again. But if you protect the child, you will overcome the pain. Anyway, you should be able to tell somebody how you feel after this confrontation.
15 Causes of Depression
You seem to know the causes of your depressions very well, but maybe you can’t yet find access to the feelings of the little boy who had to care for his parents but was never cared for by them. I would suggest that you read my answer of yesterday, April 14, concerning the importance of feeling the rage.
18 Denying the Inner Child?
It is possible that most of us do not have any experience with the existence of the inner child because our fear of our parents didn’t allow us to listen to his voice or understand his language, not even through body symptoms. Finally, we almost succeeded in killing it. But to declare then that nobody can listen to the inner child, and that it doesn’t exist at all, is like saying that everybody must be blind because I have been made blind. This position is tragic but can be found very often. For that reason, our discovery of the tormented child and the messages it conveys through our bodies, of the suffering endured, is still neither shared nor understood by many. It is covered up by self-blame. But you seem to see through this mechanism, and once you act on it, you will find out much more.
18 Poisonous Pedagogy in the Spiritual Perspective?
It seems to be fashionable today to use the word “spirituality” when therapists reach the dead end of their promises. I must admit that I never understood the meaning or necessity of this word because it can easily be replaced by another one. If you say, for instance, that it is a feeling of being connected to an “All,” to the whole universe, I imagine the feelings of a child who has been punished and isolated from the family before being forgiven and reincorporated into the (family) universe. Offering this outcome to a patient who dared to complain about his parents’ abuse in childhood might be a good idea for some people who still feel guilty about their rage, but in my opinion this is not a healthy outcome and not a sign of successful therapy (see my answer of April 14).
18 Arthritis
Thank you for writing. What you write seems very coherent. Your arthritis will disappear as soon as you dare to feel your true emotions.
19 What Is Child Abuse?
You write: “It’s as if I have no story, no inner life. Is this abuse?” Is it not enough that you feel as if your inner life has been killed? You will find your story and your inner life as soon as you dare to feel rage about what has been done to you.
19 The Killings in Virginia
The killer was in psychiatric treatment and took antidepressants, but his rage must have been stronger than all these drugs. Isn’t it amazing that, in the long discussion of this case, nobody raised the question “Who did he hate so much and why?”
20 “Bad Genes”
Feeblemindedness seems to become more and more fashionable. You can write to the journalist of the prestigious New York Times and ask her why “nasty people,” people with “bad genes,” were so frequently born in Germany thirty years before the Holocaust to become Hitler’s willing executors and why such people are not to be found in Germany today. You will probably not get any answer because she will not understand you, and she doesn’t even care about the answer. The right answer is: the Germans’ brutal upbringing thirty years before the Nazi regime, not “bad genes,” produced the millions of adults who adored Hitler and helped him to create a hell on earth. Their bodies knew the hell from their childhood, but this knowledge was deeply repressed. They only learned submission, and as adults they took revenge using entire nations. This has nothing to do with the New York Times fairy tales of “scientific” genes, but much to do with the laws of life. We could see recently in Virginia how easily pent-up rage can destroy life. Unfortunately, nobody seems to ask the most important question: where does the hatred come from?
21 Rage Released with an Enlightened Witness
Everything you write sounds true; now you know where you have been all the time without knowing it. You can’t lose this knowledge, and it will save you. The Virginia Tech story is a flight from personal history with the help of drugs. Drugs only help to flee and not to see. I am so glad that you dared to feel.
21 The Stolen Life
I want to repeat here, in a different way, what I just wrote to somebody else in another response: Not to be listened to in childhood teaches us not to listen to ourselves in adulthood. But your depressive mood speaks a very clear language and you seem to be listening now. When you once dare to do it, you will feel the rage about what you had to endure, and it is this rage and the knowledge that it brings that will make the difference.
26 The Internal Critical Voice
All my books deal with these internal voices. If you take time to read them, they may help you; I can’t repeat here what I have already written. It is not easy to blame the parents, not at all, because it scares us—we expect to be punished. Blaming oneself is easier. But the price we pay might be our illness, or that of our children.
26 Rage
Your rage can become the door to your actual life. Try to feel it as strongly and clearly as possible, then, not before, try to understand its cause. Similar situations from the past will soon come to your mind. Now you can see and feel what the child was forbidden to see; now you can really, and not only intellectually, understand what she had to endure in silence. The more you do this, the more you will become grounded in yourself, in your history, in your reality, and the more clearly you will come to know what you need and what you want to do to be able to live your own life instead of living the life of a person who is not you.
28 Protecting My Child
You dared to feel, you dared to think, and you took action so that you don’t need to hate your child for what your father did. The strong feeling of rage showed you how to care for yourself, what you needed to do to feel better. You will be able to use this experience time and again when the rage comes up; the rage will show you what you need at that given moment to feel comfortable in your “skin.” This is how good therapy works. Since you also dared to consciously feel and understand the fear of the child before you acted as an adult, you know that this fear doesn’t indicate a danger for you now. But it did then for the child. Now you will protect this child from abuse.
MAY 2007
4 The First Step to the Truth
Your moving letter shows that you are already living the truth; it is normal that you can’t stay there all the time, because it is extremely painful to be “on the cross of parental needs for love.” I hope that one day you will be able to leave this cross and take care of the small, abused girl that has been waiting for your attention, your compassion, and your love for such a long time. I wish you the courage to do so.
4 Seeing Through Lies
You are on the right path. You need time. The courage to say no will come with more knowledge. Most people have neither your courage nor your knowledge. They think what they were made to think when they were small: that children have to obey, that by spanking them you can teach them to become a nice person, that children need “limits,” etc. You have already made a big step if you can see through all these lies.
4 I Am Tired of Pretending
It is not easy to suddenly live with the truth, but you see that your body responds with gratitude. I wish you the courage to continue and not to give up.
6 The Courage to See
You can recover from your disease if you find the courage to see what your parents did to the small child you once were and to feel your suppressed rage. With your symptoms you protect your parents from blame and yourself from the expected punishment. Once you no longer do that, your symptoms will disappear because their function will no longer be needed.
8 Hope
You write that my books solidified your faith in your own judgment and your trust in your body. This is exactly what I hope to do with everything I have been writing. I don’t want people just to believe in what I am writing, I want them to prove everything they read through their own lives. It is rather unusual that you are able to do it at such a young age—you can save your future, your life.
9 Mother’s Day
You want me to answer the questions that your body tries to answer you. Maybe it will try as long as your mother is alive so that you can see how far your memories are correct. Some months ago you wrote that you were never beaten, but now you have a new memory. That is not unusual when we are ready to give up our denial. You can benefit now from asking your mother questions and listening to her answers; this will make you more compassionate with the small boy who was forced to laugh when he needed to cry. Now take the liberty to feel your truth.
12 Question of a Therapist
You are a therapist and you have read the three books I wrote first. Now, the only question that you want me to answer is the time it took to write them. I wrote The Drama in a few weeks, but it was based on twenty years of therapeutic experience.
12 Sexual Abuse and Memory
The knowledge of your body and your dreams are your memories. They should allow you to feel the rage about your terrible abuse and it is this rage that will set you free.
13 Activities in Poland
I opened your Web site and was impressed by your serious engagement and skillful organization of the material you want to pass on to others. This is hard work, I know; most people want to avoid knowing what their body knows but what their consciousness has deeply repressed and denied. It is not easy to talk to them about abusive childhoods. However, sooner or later, their lives will force them to confront their truth and then—if not yet misled by pharmacy—they will benefit from your Web site. I wish you courage to continue your important work for the truth.
18 Awakening
I hope that many people will read and reread your letter, because it tells so clearly what good therapy is all about. There is nothing I could add to your text; every sentence speaks the truth of your own experience, and this is more valuable than books could ever be.
26 Nearly Swept Away
I am happy that The Drama helped you to touch your feelings. My most recent books will help you to stay with your decision to love the mistreated child you once were and not to blame yourself for what others have done. As soon as you are ready to see what has happened, your body will no longer need to make you aware of your truth through insomnia and depression.
28 Denying Child Abuse
You are absolutely right in what you have written. The lack of interest in child abuse at universities shows that we are all formerly battered children who are still, even as grown-ups, afraid of the next blow if we open our mouths.
30 Born with Hope
Your letter seems to be written out of your own profound experience. You write: “The depression and anxiety are the consequences of realizing my grandiose dreams won’t come true. But the feelings of powerlessness, worthlessness, guilt, and hopelessness are the feelings of an abused child. I refuse to hold onto those feelings. They were real, those were the feelings any human child would have when held captive by cruel adults. But I won’t have them now, they will kill me, and I won’t let them. I was born with love for myself and others and I won’t abandon it. I’ve noticed that grandiose people who achieve their goals of fame and fortune are often unhappy, drug addicts, alcoholics, etc. Public success does not lead to happiness. How many examples do we need?” You are so right, especially when you say that we are born with the ability to love ourselves and to hope. This ability is so often damaged in us by abusing parents, but we can regain it. I fully agree: public success is an illusion of happiness, often paid for with our health, and it doesn’t nurture us. Instead, love for the tormented child we once were gives us the knowledge of who we are and what we actually need, so we become strong enough to fulfill these needs. In this way we maintain hope.
31 Seing Without Blinders
You write: “Sharing your knowledge and experiences has helped me to open my eyes, heart, and body to understand about my personal life.” The more you open your eyes to the tormented child you once were, the more you will see all the scandalous events around you; but you will also find the courage to speak up, as you did here.
JUNE 2007
1 On Healing
With very strong feelings, it is still better not to be alone, to have a good, understanding witness. But you are right, there is plenty of other work that you can do alone—for instance, writing letters that you will not send, recognizing in this way how your parents treated you and what impact this had on you. Nobody can find this out better than you yourself. The more you see the damage done to you, the more you begin to love the small boy who had to endure it, silently, without any help.
1 Ghosts from the Nursery: Tracing the Roots of Violence
I know the book and both of its authors whom I met in New York in 1998. I loved their book; it is brave, honest, very informative, and written from the heart. I mention it repeatedly in my book The Truth Will Set You Free, and publish with pleasure your letter and the review. I would like to add that by abusing and neglecting children, we not only produce unhappy children and adults but also many future child abusers. This dynamic of passing on cruelty is still unmentioned, ignored, or denied by most authors.
2 Seeing the Parents as the Problem
Of course, the parents are the problem, not the children. But nobody wants to understand that parents are not free to give their children emotional support if they are stuck in their fear of their own parents and don’t dare to question their cruel behavior. Out of this fear, they repeat the cruelties to which they were subjected in their own childhoods.
3 The Effects of Parental Humiliation
Your suspicion is absolutely correct. Acknowledging this is the first step to healing. The next would be to acknowledge the huge rage that has been accumulating in the body for such a long time, then to express it by doing what you always wanted but were not allowed: to write, to speak up, to protect the small tortured boy who lives in fear of being hurt again. Today nobody can hurt you again, unless you let them do it. I wish you the strength and the courage to take your life in your hands, away from the power of your father.
4 A Bunch of Angry Letters
You got it! Write, write, write your “bunch of angry letters,” as many as you need. Read them several days later and then decide whether you will send them. Writing and feeling your rage will lessen your fear; it will give you the strength and the wisdom that you need to make this decision, because then you will only want to express yourself, not to make new troubles. And the felt and understood anger doesn’t stay forever.
5 Anger Is One of My Feelings
You write: “I am listening to my anger now as well. I have more information since doing that and I already feel less angry! What a gift it is to be able to understand the communication of my anger when others thought it was something that I should get rid of! I knew that I was right, and I am very glad that I stood my ground. I will never, ever again allow someone else to tell me what things I should feel and what things I should not feel. My feelings are mine. They belong to me and I will not let anyone take away anything of mine anymore.” I think that with this insight and experience you can’t be lost again; you won’t become a target of addiction again for a long time. Your feelings will inform you at the moment when you are about to damage yourself, and they will help you to choose what is right and healthy for you.
5 My Body Rebels
Ask your body why it rebels. If you hate your mother because she was so cruel to you, why do you think you must help her, especially if she already gets help from your brother, whom she may have treated differently? Probably your body can’t understand this; it insists on your truth. How can you relax if you force yourself to do something that you don’t want to do? Read the letter we are publishing today about “feelings,” and my answer. That may encourage you to listen to your symptoms and to respect their clear message.
6 To Stand Up for the Future
I am so glad about your “standing up when the others sat,” and about your clear insight that child abuse is not only a family matter. In my opinion, it is also the industry, with the permission of the whole society, of all governments, and of all religions, that produces new child abusers.
7 If the Bible Was Against Beating Children
I agree with you completely. Actually, you succeeded in putting my main message into six lines, and I hope that you find a way to spread it widely. I have written thirteen books by now, and it is still unusual to find somebody who understands the last few words in your letter. What can we do to make it clear that by hitting children we are producing abusers?
8 Enlightened Witness
You have read five books written by me, and you ask me to write about how people can become more empathic. If all my thirteen books were unable to teach empathy, it could mean that feeling empathy for children is not teachable once the capacity for it has been destroyed by child abuse and a complete lack of compassion.
12 Ferenczi’s Prison
I totally agree with you when you write: “They [Sándor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud] were indeed prisoners of their heads. They well cemented their childhood feelings with the help of their intellects and rather complex theories.” I hope that you eventually find a therapist who is free to feel indignation. Have you read my article on this topic? Once you can feel the torture children so often have to endure from their parents, you can no longer be fooled by theories. You know that they do nothing other than keep the fear of the tormented child inside. Most people do the same all the time.
14 Your Book Really Touched Me
You describe yourself as high-functioning, and this might have been your “successful” way of escaping depression—but also of escaping your history and your understandable pain. I can thus imagine that my books will touch you and inspire you to feel emotions you have never dared to feel before. They may make you aware of having had these emotions since your early days. Try to trust them; they will tell you the story of the very little girl that needs your compassion and understanding for her plight and loneliness. And you will no longer want to escape her because you have learned to love and protect her. I wish you the courage you need to meet her.
14 Informing Parents
I don’t hold conferences, but you can learn from me if you carefully read the articles and interviews on my Web site. All my books are also available in Spanish. It is a pleasure to learn that you want to inform parents about the needs of their children. This work is very important because most parents merely repeat what they have learned as children—spanking.
14 Spanking as Sexual Abuse
Yes, I agree with you, this is a double taboo. But you are right to keep trying to make people aware of their fear by writing to them about what you know and expecting responses. If everybody stays silent, nothing will ever change. Thank you for your courage, for seeing the truth and trying to make it seen.
15 To Find Our True Needs
You are right: Living with the truth of our history, and finally rebelling against the cruelty endured, gives us the sense and the power to understand our true needs and to fulfill them. How did you find out that your father abused you sexually as a baby?
16 Thomas Gordon’s Parent Effectiveness Training
Thomas Gordon’s advice concerning a “family conference” is excellent and could save our society if it was used everywhere. Also, the ideas of Marshall Rosenberg about nonviolent communication are very helpful. But both were published more then thirty years ago and are still not used by the majority of parents. Why? Because parents who were severely mistreated in their childhood, and who deny these facts, are unconsciously compelled to repeat that damage on their children. Many of them are not motivated to have children who are free and healthy, for this would reveal to them the pain of their own upbringing that they try not to feel. Instead, they make their children feel it. The idea of a free child already scares them. I thus think that to be able to help our child we must get in touch with our repressed feelings concerning our own history of mistreatment. Parents who have done this can enormously benefit from Gordon and Rosenberg; also, all parents who were brought up without violence. Here they can find much important information and are free to use it. People who deny the pain of their childhood are rarely free to understand anything but violence. However, I have always supported Gordon and am glad that you wrote about him and described your experience.
16 Forgiveness
I was very moved by your letter. You write: “I no longer feel emotionally blind. I finally am starting to feel things I never allowed myself to feel.” Your whole letter shows that you are speaking the truth. I wish you the courage you need to be able to face your history, and I am sure that this work will give you all you need to feel well in this world and to help others without being damaged by them.
18 Government-Sponsored Child Abuse
I read your message, and it contains important information indeed; but you are not the first person to report shocking facts concerning organized child abuse. Every day we receive plenty of such information. Although I can’t do more than to write, I am glad that there are people like you who are able to see what others so easily overlook. I thus hope that you will find a way to take effective action and inform the ignorant people in power, instead of writing to somebody like me who is well informed but has not the slightest means to change the state of affairs. I can assure you that I will do everything that I feel I need to do and can do on my own but not more.
19 Vicious Circles of Contempt
Could it be that your deepest, most justified contempt is the contempt the intelligent small boy holds for his sadistic parents who pitilessly tortured their child? But it was then very dangerous to show or even to have these feelings. They could never be felt; they had to be suppressed. Today they want to be acknowledged by the conscious adult you are becoming, and they are, fortunately, at first directed to people who will not punish you, because they love you. To feel all these awful feelings, you have to feel safe. When you can feel the fear of the small boy, you can tell him that he is now no longer in danger and help him to direct his contempt toward your parents, who fully deserve it.
20 My Experience as a Child Victim and as an Adult Writer
You write in your beautiful, strong, and true letter: “I am floating alone, lost in an amorphous universe of family, a family wherein I didn’t merely do wrong; I was wrong. I didn’t make mistakes; I was the mistake.” No, you were not; you are a wonderful, very talented author and an honest person. But your family was a mistake—more than that, your family was criminal. I think that you must publish your story, but I can imagine why people are so afraid of publishing it. It reminds them of their own stories that they don’t dare to confront. I had similar experiences: Many of my books were bought and published in different countries, but in some of them publishers bought the rights more than ten years ago and yet have never published the books, nor have they given back the rights so that someone else could publish them. Your book needs to be fully appreciated. And you need your own courage to come out of your parents’ office and to say: “I am not going to spare you my truth, I hated you for what you did and I don’t owe you any lies about love. Ever.”
26 To Open the Eyes
If you can benefit so much from The Drama, you may find much more information in my more recent books. Maybe you will find the therapist you are looking for when you use my FAQ list to prepare your questions for the first interview. We have no lists of therapists. In any case, today I no longer recommend psychoanalysts, because I feel that, unfortunately, they side with the adult and not with the child, as Freud did in his theories and his treatments. To recover from the tragic effects of child abuse, we need a well-informed witness who is not protecting the abusive parents.
JULY 2007
1 Re: No Idea How Bad It May Have Been—Thursday, June 14, 2007
You should never do “the last thing that you would actually want to do”—even if a hundred counselors say that you should. Rather you should ask your body what it wants you to do.
4 Book-Writing
Just write, and have fun, and feel that you are always yourself without wanting to please anybody. Just say what feels right to you and your body, according to your own experience. Should it feel betrayed, your body will tell you.
4 Fear of Achieving
Never being praised as a child is very intimidating. Your strong emotional reaction to the letter of June 3 may help you to feel the rage of the child who was never supported in what was important to him. I wish you the courage to feel this rage and to give your child the support he now needs from you.
5 Diary I
It is never too late to get in touch with your history and your true feelings. The diary is a good place to start. It can also be helpful to write letters to your parents telling them how you are still suffering from what they did. You must not send these letters at the moment, but writing to them may release your feelings and the rage that is a normal reaction to abuse, but was withheld for such a long time at the cost of your health. Try to read my book The Body Never Lies.
6 Diary II
Thanks so much for your response; I would be glad to hear in a few months how you have succeeded with your work. Now you seem to have already become the enlightened witness to the child you once were, and this is certainly much better than going to confusing therapists who fear their own memories and their suppressed rage.
7 Question About a Therapist
Ask your own feelings and don’t let them be fooled. Don’t you feel betrayed? The contract with a therapist says that the helplessness, the love and trust of the client, should never be exploited for the needs of the therapist. Otherwise the story of one’s childhood abuse is repeated instead of being felt with rage, and rejected in therapy. Abuse continues to be tolerated and seen as normal. It is common, indeed, but it is not right. You still seem to protect your therapist from your anger, just as you probably protect your parents. When you start to protect yourself by seeing what has been done to you, you will no longer need my answers. You will become the expert.
7 Letters to Parents
You seem to have found a kind of enlightened witness, and I think that anything is okay if it helps you to feel and to learn to use your voice. At least these are your words. By listening many times, you will become used to your truth, which at first seemed absolutely unbelievable. This can be more helpful than anything an old-fashioned therapist can do for you today.
8 My Body Is Shouting About Something
Maybe your body was “shouting” about “something that had happened the day before.” Instead of speculating about the badness of human beings, ask the body (the child) what actually made her furious. It will answer you.
9 What My Body Is Shouting About
You’ve got the right answer; your body is enraged because the incident in the hospital triggered your memory. Your parents betrayed you and robbed you of your consciousness, so that you were unable to see what they did and protest against their deeds. You were a child; there was nothing you could do to defend yourself. Now the arthritis tells you how furious you are about this violation and the silence of your therapist. The pain in the body wants to help you, to make you aware of your feelings. Try to feel them, and don’t protect your father in any way. What he did was a crime. Maybe you can write and fully express your feelings, all of them; then the pain in your body will leave.
10 The Global Denial
You are so right: Attachment to abusive parents can be very destructive, and self-destructive, and it is worse that this truth is rarely understood and mostly denied out of fear of punishment. All religions protect the parents and cultivate the blindness and submission of the child. As a result, doctors are not allowed to recognize the true reasons for the illnesses they are confronted with. This global denial leads to a madness that seems “normal” because it is never questioned and is strongly supported by religious authorities.
10 Dangerous “Friends”
I think that your conclusions are absolutely correct. The way your “friend” tried to impose her “opinions” (or rather her fears) on you shows how she might have done the same with her small child. Fortunately, you are no longer blind, and you are no longer dependent on mortifying friends. You asked us not to publish your last letter and we respected your wish. But maybe you could write a shorter version, including your dialogue with the limb and its answer to you. I think that this story could encourage some readers to try the same. They are as scared as you are about daring to feel differently from the way they were told was “right,” but the help and the wisdom of the body is so surprising and so convincing in your history. You can recall it again and again, and work with this memory to soothe your fear. It will work, but only if you don’t let your “friends” intimidate and contaminate you.
11 Abused Abusers
One repeats with one’s children the cruelties endured in one’s own childhood only as long as one denies that one was treated cruelly. If you know your history and don’t protect your parents (by saying that everybody must [?] be cruel), you will never abuse your child. You can only have empathy for his or her emotional needs if your feelings are not blocked through denial. To understand what I am saying here, you can read my articles on my Web site or, if you don’t have enough time, you can just read the first page of the Web site.
11 Stuck
Your pity for your mother is absolutely comprehensible, but it seems to completely swallow the empathy you need for the suffering of the small child who has become the protector of the mother without having a protector himself. It is now possible for you, as an adult, to become this witness, to develop compassion for the overburdened child you once were.
12 How I Help Myself
Your letter will give other people ideas about how they can help themselves to understand the language of their bodies. You are especially creative in finding this language, a kind of pioneer, but others will follow your example in their own way as soon as they get rid of their fear of being punished for discovering the truth. This danger no longer exists—we are free to know; but in our childhood we were not, so the fear may remain. However, we can become free of this fear if we accept that the dialogue with the body really works.
13 Irrational Side of Our Lives
You write: “I think what I like most about your work, what was so powerful for me, was the idea that even the irrational side of our lives can be understood and explained.” I think that what seems irrational to us is the disguised version of our story that we deny because it is so painful. Once people find the courage to face their stories and to feel how terribly they suffered in their childhood, their behavior, fears, and addictions no longer seem irrational; they reveal themselves as logical consequences of abuse endured. Each life is unique, and nothing is irrational if we dare to see the reality of even a single childhood. Unfortunately, this is seldom done in all the recovery programs that offer behavioral, religious or “spiritual” ways to “overcome” the abuse; without being forced to see and recognize the cruelty of one’s own parents, participants cannot face and feel their own reality.
13 Nightmares
You write: “The nightmares always had the same theme: someone was about to kill me or I was caught in a small space between four walls without an escape. Waking up in the middle of the nightmare was extremely fearful and terrifying. My husband told me at one of these occasions that I was screaming, ‘Mummy, mummy’ don’t put me in the closet.’” Your dreams, and the information from your husband, clearly show that your body knows what happened to you at a very early time of your life: you were put into the closet (!). To feel what this was like for a small child is more than one can imagine, so to deny it sometimes seems like the only way to survive. You need time to get in touch with these terrible feelings of fear, rejection, hurt, and despair. But you seem to have the courage, and you are willing to come to know your history and no longer deny it. So you will succeed in doing it, step by step, because now you are no longer in danger, unless you protect your perpetrators by your denial. The nightmares want to help you to eventually believe and take seriously what your body tells you.
14 Psychogenic Hearing Loss
I know that many women suffering from bulimia report that they were sexually abused, but I have never heard about it causing hearing loss.
14 Truth Concealed Causes Child’s Suffering
It is up to you to recognize what your daughter needs to know from you at the moment: you must not impose your needs on her in an attempt to “fix” her again. Be open and honest to her questions, as this will mean much to her. But forcing her to ask questions that she doesn’t have is you imposing your needs on her.
17 Psychosomatic Symptoms and Working Through the Pain I
Were you beaten in your childhood? Can you remember these incidents? Were the beatings painful? Was it your father, your mother, or both who punished you? For which deed were you punished? What can you remember from this time? Can you cry?
17 Psychosomatic Symptoms and Working Through the Pain II
Now you have described everything you need to know in order to liberate yourself from all your physical pain. The problem is that you don’t want to know all this, and for that reason you make your body suffer. It is understandable that, having had a father like yours, your fear of being killed if you show rage is great. So you have kept your rage in your body for twenty-four years, and it is no wonder that this rage produces terrible physical pain. You have no choice other than to feel this fear and rage in order to liberate your body from this poison. Today, your father can’t do anything else to you unless you allow him to kill you. It is important that you understand this. Now you are no longer in danger; you are free to hate him for what he has done, and you have no other choice but to feel your rage so you can save your life. Your therapist seems to understand this, but he must be able to hold your body when you are screaming at your father and telling him that he almost killed you when you were a small child and that this is a crime. Repeat it many times, in the arms of your therapist, and you will see that you will eventually feel your tremendous rage. Scream out your justified rage and the pain of your wounded soul, and the pain of your body will leave you. Do not take any drugs or medication.
19 Is Public Exposure Dangerous?
I wrote this in a footnote about fifteen years ago when this kind of exposure was very rare. It was then very often met with total misunderstanding and a lack of empathy. For the authors of such books, the cold or even rejecting reactions could be very hurtful and the cause of new traumas. I wouldn’t write this note today because I think (or hope at least) that readers and reviewers of autobiographic books dealing with their own abuse endured in childhood are better informed, and that the issue is more discussed today. But it is still very common to ridicule people who describe their plight as children and accuse them of self-pity, because this is what most people learned to do during their own childhood. They learned to side with the abusive parents and are thus afraid of siding with the child.
19 A Horrific Memory Came Up Last Night!
You don’t need medication—it is harmful. Now you can feel what happened to you because you have this important memory that makes you aware of your story. It is amazing, but effective therapy works exactly this way: feeling your extreme weakness makes you strong. And suddenly you want to join a rock group. Yes, why not? Without any doubt, it is right if it eventually brings you fun.
20 Emotional Honesty—Overcoming Brain Damage
If you read and understand my book The Truth Will Set You Free: Overcoming Emotional Blindness, you will see why there is no contradiction, and how the adult can get rid of his brain damage. We have empirical proof, which you can find on these pages, that people can experience the rage they have withheld their whole lives and suppressed in their bodies, getting rid of their symptoms as they become aware of what has been done to them. This happens when they succeed in overcoming their fear of losing their parents’ “love” if they are true to themselves, if they are emotionally honest and show their legitimate rage or criticism. Most people don’t take this risk, remaining their whole life in fear of their childhood. If children are forbidden to show their strongest emotions, such as rage, they may (wrongly) believe their whole lives that withholding them guarantees them the love of their parents. In one of your postings you have also written that you can’t criticize your mother because you don’t want to lose her love. This conviction may be the result of the early brain damage, which can, however, be undone by taking advantage of being adult and taking the liberty to express authentic feelings.
21 The Paths to Yourself
You have succeeded in coming to understand your feelings, as well as respecting them. I thus don’t understand why you write, “Today is my mother’s birthday and I’ve decided to see her after many arguments. But my feelings are no good in relation to her and my memories. I feel responsible for keeping some relationship between my daughter and my mother, but I know that my mother is neither honest with me nor with her.” Why do you feel responsibility for allowing your daughter to have a relationship with a grandmother who is not honest, neither with you nor with her? Don’t you need to protect your daughter? You also write, “My body is telling me about my real feelings through some skin allergy on my fingers, so I decided that I needed to write this letter.” Your symptoms are a language: ask your body what it is telling you. Did you need to write to me so that your truth could be taken seriously? I do it of course, but your body calls for your compassion above all. I am sure that you will learn this. You are on the best path to helping yourself.
21 Killing the True Self
We can learn to give up compassion for somebody who abused us and stopped us from living our true emotions, our true self. This is like killing a person.
24 My Brother Denies the Truth
It is a problem that many people have, and I can empathize with you. You have trouble believing that your parents were so cruel; you hope and hope that your memory is wrong, that your emotions are fooling you, but you want to be honest with yourself and eventually you see. There is no escape from the truth, your body doesn’t let you lie. Then, as a last hope, you suppose that the person who also suffered from the same parents, who knows your reality, will confirm your truth, will say: Yes, I know that you are right. But he doesn’t do it; he does not have your courage and your honesty. If he had them, he would not have punished you in the same way as he had been punished. You can’t change him; you can’t force him to do the hard work if he doesn’t want to. You must let him be how he is. It may be very painful for you; his denial may trigger your rage about what he did to you when you were a small child without protection. I think, instead of having pity for your brother, express your long-withheld rage and write him about how you felt and still feel about being tortured by him sadistically. If you try to help him now by protecting him from your rage, which he deserves, you will betray yourself and abandon yourself like you may have done in your childhood. You know that your body would have to pay the bill for this self-betrayal.
25 Powerless
Even physical abuse in schools is not against the law in twenty-one states of the United States. Out of 192 members of the United Nations, only 19 (mostly European countries) have a law that forbids the corporal punishment of children. I can understand your feelings of powerlessness and do of course share them. Unfortunately, for politicians and the pope this doesn’t seem to be an “issue.” The information that spanking small children during the time when their brains are developing leaves them with lingering destructive effects does not hold their interest at all. It does not motivate them to take any action.
26 Creative Remembering, or Just Craziness?
You know very well that you are not crazy and not to blame, and what your mother wants is to blame you instead of your father. But the small child could not fathom the truth; she could not believe that her father was a criminal and that both parents betrayed her. So you have protected them your whole life, but you wrote novels because the truth wanted to be acknowledged. Now you, the adult, will have the courage to know, to read the novels and to know that they tell you the truth of what you had to endure all alone, as a very small girl, without any protection. Nobody invents horror. You are honest and you no longer want to betray yourself. Why should you? Because that is what your mother wants? But should you lie to yourself so that she can live with her lies? It is your life and you need your truth. Everything you write here shows this need. Trust your memories, trust your novels; reading them can be a very relieving experience. The pain of truth was unbearable for the child, but now it will be liberating for you as an adult. It was of course creative of your child to tell her story through novels, and she absolutely needs to be heard. The first and the most empathic listener should be you. Your mother never wanted to see the truth of your plight; it was very mean of her to blame you for what your father had done. They both should be ashamed for their total lack of courage and honesty.
26 I Didn’t Know Who I Was
It is impossible for a child who endured so much abuse and rape, who was constantly used for the pleasure of others without being respected and without being allowed to show her feelings of rage and disgust, to know who she is. She was constantly forced to suppress her feelings, so how can she come to know herself? I am glad that my books “opened your eyes and your heart,” as you write, and that they could bring you in touch with your feelings, because without them you can’t be an effective psychotherapist. You can’t understand others if you don’t know yourself. I wish you the courage to continue this work.
26 Connected to Myself
Your optimistic reaction to my answer shows your potential for recovery and also what your depression is telling you: “You are protecting your family from your rage so you can feel generous and can hope to be eventually loved by them for your generosity.” This “strategy” is dictated by the agonizing fear of the small boy, fully dependent on his parents and siblings. But now you don’t have to be emotionally dependent on them if you don’t want to be. Once you have realized this, you can (and you have the right to) refuse playing the role of a scapegoat—the role they imposed upon you when you were totally defenseless. Then the depression will leave you for good, and you will be free to show your true feelings without needing to protect anybody from them. Because your feelings of rage and contempt are justified after all, they should no longer poison your body or confuse your mind.
29 Sister Behaves like Abusive Father
You cannot change your sister. Why don’t you listen to your feelings, which clearly indicate that you feel better when you have no contact with her? Nobody can force you to see her. As a child, you were dependent on your parents even if they were abusive, but as an adult you can say no.
31 Your Own Models
You write: “Being a male in western culture is fraught with difficulties. While males are supposed to be stoic and unemotional in this culture, I find it hard to conform to this type of stereotypical behavior.” Why should you conform to this stereotype? If you don’t find role models you like, you can create them. Anyway, what you yourself create will give you more fun than what you will find in books and whatever you do without fun is annoying.
AUGUST 2007
4 After the Knowledge, What?
You write about wanting “to re-create and recover the sense of security, wonder, and power I once had.” I don’t understand how you ever had it if you grew up with a detached mother and an alcoholic father who (as you felt) wanted to kill you. Can you explain this contradiction?
4 Is Contemporary Psychoanalytic Thought Just Another Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing?
You seem to be on the right track. No, I have not changed my opinion on psychoanalysts and self-psychologists and think today, even more strongly than before, that they avoid confronting the issue of child abuse. I think confrontation is absolutely unavoidable if “empathy” is to be more than just a nice word. Words are often used to pretend something that doesn’t exist. The Church loves to use the word “compassion,” but allows children to be beaten so that God can “find pleasure in them.” For two thousand years nobody protested against this practice. As most of us were beaten children, we have not learned to have empathy with ourselves or with the plight of other children. We learned to deny our pain to survive, but this is a big handicap for a therapist. Heinz Kohut tried at first to open our eyes and hearts to what a child has to endure, but he felt very isolated in the psychoanalytic community. He returned to traditional concepts at the end of his life, the concepts that Freud invented when he himself suffered from society’s rejection after he had disclosed the sexual abuse by parents. As soon as he declared that patients talk only about their fantasies and not about real events, he found a huge number of followers who still seem very stable in their denial of the reality of child abuse. To sufficiently answer your very important question I would need to repeat what I have written extensively elsewhere. Try to read the article on indignation on my Web site (Dr. Lachman, whom I mention there, is actually a self-psychologist) as well as the last articles on my concept of therapy.
4 Schizophrenic Families
I agree with everything you write. It is true that the families of incest victims have much in common with families of schizophrenics; in both it is forbidden to see the truth. Because families like that seem to be much more common than healthy ones, we have trouble being heard when we write and say the truth. Almost everything R. D. Laing wrote was right, but psychiatrists of today hardly mention him. We must conclude perhaps that they also learned very early to deny their truth and are afraid of getting in touch with it. So instead of listening to the patients and their stories, they make them silent and even more confused by giving them drugs. Also, politicians, journalists, and teachers seem to be very scared by memories of their own histories when we write about what we found out thanks to our feelings. I can only congratulate you on liberating yourself from this conspiracy of lies and making your life, and above all your body, feel healthier now. Do you know the story of the Freyd family who invented false memory syndrome after their daughter talked about being sexually abused by her father? You can find Jennifer Freyd’s book on the Internet.
5 Arthritis and Anger
Your clarity is wonderful. You don’t deserve to live in such a prison. It is understandable that your body rebels. It seems to say: You can’t live this way; you must make a decision. Can it be that you will find the outcome if you allow yourself to feel the rage of the small girl toward your father, whom you still seem to protect? The child could not leave, but the adult has options that she doesn’t see as long as she is blocked by the feelings of her childhood.
5 An Artist’s Autobiography
You are right: child abuse is not a private matter. For that reason I fully agree with you that it should be revealed and not covered by silence. However, the grown-up children are usually hated by society when they disclose the brutality of their parents in public, because most people were battered children; even as adults, they are afraid to see the truth and to be punished for seeing it. We must work against this fear, and we are doing this here.
6 Shaky but Real
Your answer makes much sense, except for this sentence: “After that I finally accepted the notion that I had been abused, and began the exploration of myself, knowing that perhaps my messed-up life, and who I was, was not altogether my fault.” I would suggest that you take out the word “altogether.” You were terribly abused and it was not at all your fault.
6 Birth Trauma and Psychedelics
I don’t know of any other issue that is so feared and so avoided as the story of our own abuse suffered in childhood, the pain of being exploited, humiliated, hated, and terrorized by people whom we loved, trusted, and needed to survive. So we had to learn not to see what happened to us, and most people would prefer to do anything else rather than face the very painful truth of their story, even if they know that facing it could help them with their health problems. For that reason you can find a huge amount of suggestions of what you can do instead of emotionally acknowledging how you were treated by your parents when you were a small, defenseless child. If you really want to do this work, you don’t need drugs, because the knowledge of everything you had to endure is stored up in your body. I am not an expert for giving you advice about all these ways of avoiding the most terrible pain. I can only say that the truth can’t be replaced, but it can be felt if you are no longer afraid of your parents. Now they are no longer dangerous to the adult you have become.
6 Confused
You write: “But for some reason, after the conversations with my mother, I feel very confused. There is still anger in me at the mother she once was, but I find it difficult to be angry at the mother she is now, because she changed so much. I feel I am losing direction in these contradictions.” Your body doesn’t ask you to be angry at how your mother is now, but it needs you to feel consciously what you didn’t dare to feel when you were the defenseless child, abused by others, and she didn’t defend you. The small child you were suppressed his rage within his body, and it is from there (instead of in your mind) that you can feel your anger originating. Even if your mother is now an angel, this does not change the fact that your body contains the memory of being abused and that you are constantly afraid, as if you were a small child, to show this anger. It is tragic that your mother can’t help you now to do the work that only you can do. But it might be a good, relieving feeling for you to know that she could help herself and that you are free to eventually help the small child you once were to stay true to himself. You don’t need to forgive to feel free (anyway, it would not work); you need the free access to your true feelings (without moralistic and religious prescriptions). The obligation to forgive (for what reason and for whose benefit?) conceals this access.
7 Denial in Psychoanalytic Circles
I can feel with you because the same thing happened to me, too, but I never regretted staying true to my knowledge. And—like you—I learned from these experiences how denial works, how the fear of losing the acceptance of the group (the mother?) brings “intelligent” people to support nonsense so that they will not be abandoned. I learned recently that both Kohut and Ferenczi died from blood cancer, an illness that seems to be very rare. Both of them tried until the end to remain psychoanalysts and to be recognized as such, although what they found out was clearly opposed to Freud. They found the suffering of the child that was not given mirroring, empathy, or understanding. However, they did not find the courage to see that psychoanalysis denies this reality or to clearly separate themselves from it. Both suffered a lot from their isolation within the analytical community and Ferenczi also from the cruel rejection by Freud, whom he loved like a father.
10 Fear of Death
I am not sure if I understand your question well. I think that because the shock told you the truth about your father, you don’t need to be shocked again. Now you know that you don’t need this father, even if the child thought all your life that you did. You needed a good, caring, honest father, but not this one, not a father who scared you to death. This knowledge is very powerful, and it will give you company should the fear of death come up again. You will know why it came and from where, and that the danger was real in your past but not today.
12 Psychosomatic Symptoms and Working Through the Pain III
I read your frank, honest letter twice and was very moved by your desperate search for love and understanding from your family. You can’t believe that they don’t understand even your simple sentence: “Please look at me.” They can’t because their hearts are frozen. The advantage of your search is clear—you will be unable to deny this reality again. Even if by so strongly feeling your solitude you are in danger of betraying again the child you have been, your body will warn you at times, through corporal pain, should you again become a victim of self-betrayal. A child can’t live without the illusion of loving parents; the adult can if he wants to. He may want to because he already knows the terrible price he would have to pay for a new illusion.
12 An Incredible Pain
You write: “I really hope one day I will be able to express my full and real self, not all the masks I had to wear in search of acceptance all my life.” Why should you not be able to do that? Keep in mind that you don’t owe anybody fake feelings; that you are as free as anybody to feel the rage without feeling guilty, because every emotion has its causes and you must not minimize them. As adults, we can live without our parents’ love, only as children we needed it to survive. I think that your pain is the result of forcing yourself to feel what you think you should feel. Your body doesn’t want this; it needs your emotional honesty.
12 Karma?
Preaching that abusers are teachers and that you can make sense of the endured abuse by turning negative energies into positive ones is a very problematic philosophy. It is used for brainwashing everywhere. In this way “teachers” pass on to others the lies that they were told and that caused their rage so they can feel well and “positive.”
14 The Fear After Childbirth
Maybe the book The Truth Will Set You Free will be helpful, but above all try to feel your emotions, to take them seriously and talk about them to your partner or friends. They want to tell you something you need to know. Don’t take antidepressants.
15 An Incredible Pain
Your thoughtful letter reminded me of another one written here in German and saying: “I’d rather be healthy without parents than sick with them. (The famous French writer Marcel Proust, who died very early, wrote to his mother: I prefer to have my illness and be loved by you rather than to be in good shape but lose your love). You are so right when you write that animals don’t need to exploit their children or their lives; they let them go and give them their liberty. It is only the human being that burdens the children with lifelong feelings of guilt. I congratulate you on your insight and hope it will help you to resist every kind of blackmail.
16 The Bad Genes?
Does your solidarity mean that you no longer believe in the fairy tale of bad genes? Dropping this “theory” may lessen the number of your fans, but it gives you a solid basis for serious research and opens your eyes to the real sources of violence that are always hidden in cruel child upbringing that I call child mistreatment. These were the causes of Hitler’s rise. If we believe that people are born with bad genes, we would have to say that many millions of bad babies were born in Germany around thirty years before the Third Reich and they became willing executors of Hitler’s perverse orders. Have you also read my latest book, The Body Never Lies?
18 No “Evil Genes”
We publish your letter for people who do not yet fully understand how the dynamic of child abuse works and how the myth of the bad child serves to excuse the abuse of one’s own children. People who understand this dynamic don’t need any “scientific” proofs of this kind. They know that neither mental illness nor extreme cruelty come from bad genes, and they know why.
20 My Story
I am glad that you feel freer after you decided to face your terrible truth. You have much courage, and I am sure that once you have done this work you will feel much better—provided that your therapists have also the courage you have and will not try to feed you with illusions and moralistic “consolations.”
20 Diagnonsense
I think that these are not exceptions and that many illnesses are produced by diagnoses which conceal the true causes of the symptom and are treated with drugs that produce new symptoms. It is good that you write and publish your letters wherever you can do it.
21 Why Can’t You Recommend a Therapist?
If I knew of some therapists who would be respectful enough to answer your questions; free enough to show indignation about what your parents have done to you; empathic enough when you need to release your pent-up rage; wise enough not to preach forgetting, forgiveness, meditation, positive thinking; honest enough not to offer you empty words like “spirituality,” when they feel scared by your history, I would be happy to give you their names, addresses, and phone numbers. Unfortunately, I don’t know them, but I still like to hope that they exist. However, when I am looking for them on the Internet, I find plenty of esoteric and religious offers, plenty of denial, commercial interests, and traditional traps, but not at all what I am looking for. For that reason I give you my FAQ list for your own research. If a therapist refuses to answer your questions right from the start, you can be sure that by leaving him you can save yourself time and money. If you don’t dare to ask questions out of fear of your parents, your fear may be highly understandable. However, trying to do it anyway may be useful because your questions are important and by daring to ask them you can only win.
22 Psychiatry and Abuse
Your case story is very interesting. You see how the patient regained her trust in her own memory when you didn’t refuse to believe her like the other doctor did. But I think that believing in a neutral position is not enough. The patient needed more; she needed your indignation about the deeds of her perpetrators. Most doctors don’t dare to feel and to show this feeling because they pity their own parents and are afraid to lose their love if they are appalled about parents’ cruelty. Can you remember how you reacted to the story of abuse in this case?
22 Your Decision
It is almost unbearable for a child not to be seen, not to be listened to; he must deny this knowledge. Most people continue it for their whole lives. But you decided to feel the pain, and now nobody can hurt you in this way again because you listen to yourself.
23 An Incredible Pain
To heal a broken bone you don’t need to break it again. You don’t need a dangerous regressive therapy to learn to feel, because you can feel the rage; it is stored up in your body, but it will not leave you until you are willing to understand its cause. Nobody has feelings without reasons. It is not about parents’ “mistakes,” it is about their probably very scary behavior toward the child you once were. It can be this fear that hinders you in seeing the causes of your rage and makes you feel guilty instead. Your last letter was very insightful; try to stay true to yourself and don’t allow anybody to confuse you. A father can’t be the enlightened witness or therapist to his son who suffered from him as a child. This would be highly confusing. You write, “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do. I don’t think so.” Trust your feelings; they know what happened to you, and they will guide you.
23 Unbelievable
Your story reminds me of my own experiences with my Freudian colleagues. They always followed the rule that we should not believe what the patients tried to remember, and the patients accepted this willingly because they wanted to avoid the pain of the truth and thus hoped that their memories were only fantasies, made-up stories. When I insisted on the reality of these memories, my colleagues became irritated, all of them.
24 I Feel Imprisoned by My Past
You write: “His father was the perpetrator. But the boy wanted no one but his father. That is how I feel. No matter what my parents have done, I needed them, and sometimes feel that I still do.” The story about the father and his son shows that you know exactly what you need: to rebel against your parents instead of waiting for them to change. I think that you are able to take this step, but it is possible that the medication you have been taking for years makes it difficult for you. Can you now, when you have a good partner, good friends, and a job you like, try to live without any medication? The pain may increase for a while, but if you really want to liberate yourself from your past, you must stop waiting for the love of people who never loved you, who are just unable to love. As a child, you needed your parents as the boy in your story, but now you don’t need abusive parents: open your eyes and don’t let any medication keep them closed.
25 Hormonal Imbalance Due to Fear?
To me there is no doubt that children who have lived with fear and unpredictability develop a cortical imbalance. Children who are spanked in the first years of their lives develop many kinds of imbalances, and usually doctors try to counteract this imbalance with drugs that are harmful. Even if the parents of grown-up children could change and become loving, this would not alter the malfunctioning of the body because the symptoms (like arthritis) imprison the never-expressed rage of the once-mistreated child. Only by experiencing these emotions and understanding the justified rage can we get away from the terrible pain. Medication “helps” only for a while and usually hinders the appearance of feelings and the development of understanding.
25 Help for Pedophiles
You write: “I was also sexually abused as a child. I did not become a pedophile, but I did suffer a lot with the idea that I liked and attracted the abuse. I was able to get over sexual abuse after I put the blame on my abusers.” So you know quite well what your friend has to do. But if he protects his abusers and doesn’t want to suffer, doesn’t want to feel his truth, nobody can force him. It does not have to take fourteen years if one finds a good therapist.
25 Terrifying Nightmares of Children
Nobody wants to believe that their horrible memories and dreams are real histories, especially when the parents deny everything. If I remember well, your mother said “Shame on you” when you wanted to talk with her about your father’s abuse. Such a mother is able to confuse her child completely and to burden her with terrible feelings of guilt at a very tender age. Your dream shows you what she always has done. It opens your eyes. You are thus no longer in real danger, as long as you don’t try to protect her again. The danger today is your illusion: that she will read and understand your novels, that she will show empathy and will stay on your side. She has clearly showed that she will not. The dream tells you the truth that you would prefer not to know, but it is certainly more healing to know it than to deny it.
29 The Trap of Pretense
I am happy that you no longer cling to the illusion you so clearly describe: that the abusive mother totally changed. I agree with everything you are saying here. You really got it. For the new edition of Paths of Life, I wrote a postscript that confirms exactly how right you are in what you are writing
SEPTEMBER 2007
1 Betraying Your Needs
You seem to see exactly how your parents treated you, and what you had to do to save your health was to see particularly how you betrayed your needs by helping these parents because you thought it humane to participate in the settlement of their care. I think that you are right in calling this a mistake. It is very hard to give up the illusion of eventually having loving parents who will be grateful for having such a good daughter, even when she was treated sadistically. But your body doesn’t agree with your hopes, because it knows your parents better than your mind and it wants to protect you. Listen to your body; being a slave is in your past. Today you are free to make a change and say no to people who were so cruel to you. Where is your rage?
3 Creating Humanity
I think that you have always wanted to be good and human, and to decrease or even undo the pain your siblings had to suffer—to create humanity where your parents created horror. This may have given you the strength to survive with self-respect; it was the source of your self-esteem. But the very small girl also had to suffer terribly, and nobody was there to hold her and to tell her: They are sadistic with you, too; they don’t deserve your love, your compassion, and your understanding. All this is poisoning your body, and it hinders your true compassion for the small girl who always had to be tough and help others without any complaints. It is time for her rebellion.
4 I Can Finally Listen to Myself, Can Feel, Think, and Speak Up
I can hardly believe that this letter was written by the same person who waited a few months ago for their mother to read writings, appreciate their contents, and finally fathom what she did to you. Instead of doing that, she said, “Shame on you.” You seem to have grown up so quickly because you allow yourself to feel and to understand your rage. Should it turn out that your therapist is unable to grow at the same speed, you don’t have to wait for him to do so. It is your life and your freedom to talk that you can now enjoy, and I think that nobody’s limits can stop you from using your eyes, your brain, and your heart the way they need to be used. You are so right about rejecting confusing theories, and your arguments are absolutely convincing to me.
6 I Finally Listen to Myself
With this letter you might eventually reach the small, unprotected girl. Stay with her; don’t abandon her anymore. She needs you, your love and your protection—nothing more.
7 Abuse Is Never Love
I have the impression that the notion of a “harmful love” still conceals and disguises the simple but very painful and scary fact of abuse. I see the betrayal on the side of the abuser and the illusion of love on the side of the child. To me, real love is never harmful, and abuse is never love. Concerning grandparents, I don’t like to make general statements; if I don’t know the specific family situation, I prefer not to make any judgments.
8 Fear
You know everything that you need to know, but you are probably still very much afraid of feeling the rage toward your parents and of staying true to your feelings. Instead, you suffer from insomnia and physical pain that most likely remind you of being beaten in childhood. You write: “It was Father’s day today and I called my Dad. I felt obligated. I said, ‘Happy Father’s Day,’ and I wanted to vomit. I actually ‘gave him the finger’ through the phone as I was talking to him. But part of me just ‘had’ to call him. I know as long as I do this that I am not sympathizing with the child that I once was. I am forgiving my father (ditto for my mom), and they do not deserve it. As long as I continue to do this, I choose them—I forgive them and respect them, more than me. I’m saying what they did to me and the way they treated me is okay, and it’s not. It’s just not.” There is nothing I have to add to your words except to tell you that the fear, which stops you from doing what you feel would be the right thing for you, is the fear of a very small boy who must have been in mortal danger if he tried to defend himself. Today this danger is not real. Try to explain this to the scared child who has been living in your body for forty years and who still believes that his mother is “a saint,” even when you as a grown-up see her coldness and indifference. Try to talk to this child; he will have much to tell you—things that you never dreamt of before. You are on the best path to liberate yourself from your fear, which is fully understandable when you take into account the terror of your childhood.
8 Emotional Abuse of My Stepson
I am very sorry that I can’t give you any advice. I can only say that if I were in this tragic situation and had to see how this woman destroys the love of a child I loved, I would do everything I could to make her access to him impossible. How you can obtain such a solution where you live, I don’t know. In any event, it is a crime to use the child in her battle against you, and he is absolutely put under constant stress between two mothers; he shows his fear very clearly.
12 Lost Again
Denial is the main defense of an alcoholic. It is thus no wonder that you “learned” it from your father. But he didn’t know what he was doing, and you do. You have the courage to question your behavior and to look for its sources. I have no doubt that you will overcome this state, that you will feel the plight of the little boy, the victim of your father’s denial, and he will feel increasingly safe with you. He will not need to behave like your father did.
18 I Hate Them—I’m Similar to Them—I Love Me?!
No, you are not with your children like your parents were with you. Far from that. If you repeat something, you do it to protect your parents from your rage so that you can avoid seeing how mean your parents were. After your mother refused to come to your child, you went to play golf so that you could say: The way my mother behaves is quite normal—it is normal to ignore a kid; I do it too. It is normal to have a hole instead of a heart. But you do have a heart; you only need the courage to look at your parents and to feel the rage. People who were most tortured in childhood are very reluctant to see their truth and to feel their rage because they are afraid of being punished again. Out of this fear they pretend that “it was not so bad.” But now you cannot be punished and will not be hurt again—unless you again have the idea to ask your mother for a favor. Soon you will learn to protect yourself and ask other people for help. There are a lot of people out there who will not hurt you when you need them.
18 Children
They don’t damage the bones of small children in America and Britain like they do in Iraq; at least they don’t do it to so many. But they damage them, most of them, by spanking them and causing lesions in their brains. In this way a new generation of ignorant people is being produced, people who mistreat their children and pretend to do this for their own good.
24 Facts and Pessimism
We seem to agree about the issue of therapy: that working on one’s own history is a way to heal the effects of child abuse and its denial. But there is still another question that bothers us and seems not to bother you, namely: Why is this knowledge (for us so easy to understand) globally denied, ignored, feared, and avoided? What causes this ignorance and blindness of abusers, cruel parents, doctors, lawyers, and why don’t they understand the simplest connections? In our opinion they are hindered by the lesions in their mind, caused by the fear learned as a tormented baby and toddler. Why can only a few people realize that spanking children produces a violent and sick society? How do you answer to this question? Please, answer only this one.
27 All Child Abuse Causes Brain Damage
It was your courage to see your own parents that gave you the capacity to understand more than some scientists can, because they never got in touch with their feelings. They write about irreversible brain damage without having knowledge of successful therapies. In fact, the majority of the population absolutely confirms their beliefs that the damage caused by child abuse can’t be cured if they refuse to work on it in therapy. On the other hand, we can see in this mailbox that there are people who overcame their fear and got rid of their symptoms by daring to see what their parents had done to them and to rebel against cruelty and injustices endured in their childhood.
29 Eventually, the Anger
You write: “Now I validate my own anger. I work for sympathy for myself from myself. I realize whenever I feel a ‘mean’ feeling toward a child, that this is the abusive ‘parent’s’ feeling that was directed at me when I was a child. I imagine how it felt to have been the recipient of that mean feeling. How it broke my heart. The ‘mean’ feeling diminishes.” There is nothing I can add. You are on the right path to changing your life and to rescuing your son, and I am sure that you will succeed, because you have the courage to see and feel the causes of your plight. You were never a bad person; you were only misled by your therapists, who didn’t allow you to respect your true feelings.
29 Migraines and Fibromyalgia
You write: “Although I feel better each day and I’m out of the hole I was in, I do still have to battle physical pain. In the past year my body pains from fibromyalgia and migraines have greatly lessened, but they have not gone away.” Why don’t you trust that your body can do more if you stay on the right path you have dared to find? The pains may tell you that there is still more past cruelty that you will have to face. You need time to do this. One year might be not enough to fathom what you had to suffer over so many years, but I don’t doubt that you will succeed to live without corporal pain once you fully give up the denial. Be patient; it takes time—sometimes much time. Fibromyalgia is a very cruel illness, as cruel as your parents’ emotional brutality that you may be afraid to see and feel.
29 Colic and Hurtful Parenting
Yes, of course, colic is a name for the child’s reaction to the lack of love and the refusal of communication, to cruel behavior of parents who talk about “colics” instead of taking their child in their arms and soothing his or her pain. It is good for you and for your child that you can understand that.
30 Biomedical Scientists Score Higher in Autism-Spectrum Traits
Your letter explains very clearly why the discoveries of brain researchers have not been used to better understand the plight of the human being who experienced fear early in life. To understand these connections we need to be in touch with our own emotions. If we are disconnected from them, we lack empathy for ourselves and for others, and our “discoveries” made with the help of computers may remain fruitless even though they are spectacular and could save millions of lives by reducing the global ignorance of spankers. Your links explain why most people to this day (including scientists) still don’t realize that child abuse and the denial of its danger are nothing less than the effect of endured child abuse that left behind damage in the brain of the once-spanked abusers.
OCTOBER 2007
6 Colic
What you write makes much sense; you don’t need to worry if the relationship turned out to be good. It is also possible that her birth reawakened some sad memories in you from your birth, but you succeeded in overcoming them after she was three months old.
7 An Incredible Pain
I realize now that my answer to you didn’t come through and am sorry about this. I wrote to you that it is very painful to feel that you were not loved, not seen, not understood, and were so alone with this pain. To show you that many well-known people suffered the same destiny, I sent you a quote from the famous composer Igor Stravinsky. You can find this quote in my book The Drama of the Gifted Child, Chapter 2, footnote. I wrote also to you that the pain of your childhood must have been so strong that you were forced to repress it, but your body kept it, so you can eventually fully feel it as an adult and, in time, get rid of it. Consciously felt pain doesn’t last forever. Once you know it, it will leave you and make you free for other emotions because you will no longer need your energies for suppressing your truth. And you will become stronger, because you will not be afraid of painful memories coming up. They will acquire a context and be no longer so scary.
11 Aftermath
Yes, you do have solid reasons for a better future. Once you gave up your illusion of eventually getting the love of your parents, you became free. It was the fear of being punished for the truth and the misleading “philosophy” of your therapists that blocked your progress and increased your fear. Fortunately, you could overcome this fear and allow yourself to see and feel your truth.
12 Wonderful Research and Texts
I am glad that you found a therapist who helps you to see and bear your truth. Everything falls into place then, doesn’t it?
13 Dangerous Parents
Why do you want me to believe in psychoanalytical constructions that I have criticized for more than the last twenty-five years? Your first letter was so confused that I could not understand your question, nor could you understand mine. But now I feel that you can understand me. The real parents of the child were dangerous, but as adults we can learn to free ourselves from our dependency on those parents so that they no longer have any power over us. The analytical construction of dangerous internal parents only proves that analytical therapists still live in a state of fear as long as they deny the cruelty of their real parents. Unfortunately, most of them deny this fact, accuse the child (above all Melanie Klein and her followers like Otto Kernberg and others) and thus make it impossible for their patients to recognize the torture they were submitted to in childhood. Their patients also stay caught within these fears for decades. Why do you go to psychoanalysts?
14 Long Journey Indeed
After having taken antidepressants for a long time, it is quite normal that you can’t free yourself as quickly as you want to. But you are on the path to doing so because you now understand how healing works. The biggest obstacles that you might have to combat are the voices you quote: “Oh, come on, grow up, get a life, stop playing the victim, you are just unable, unfit, stop hiding behind this unhappy-childhood sob story, so many people have had it much harder, you have always been this impossible person, take your medicine and stop pitying yourself, etc.” You need perhaps to look in the eyes of the persons who talked to you this way (or are still doing so?) and realize how destructive their behavior is. Do you need to listen to them now? Have you read the article on depression on my Web site?
15 An Open Letter of Gratitude
I can understand your indignation about the hypocrisy of governments that “care” about children, and I share your feelings. But I have no solution to suggest to you. What you are doing is still the best: to question absurd statements, to show these people the absurdity of their arguments. But most of them are not accessible to your questions because their logic is based on their fear of their parents and on the messages they got from them when they were three to four years old—that children need to be spanked. These messages seem to be stronger than what we say or write. They seem to be the hard disk in people’s brain computers. However, we must continue to talk and to write, as you rightly do.
15 A Letter from the Invisible Man
I am glad that you eventually decided to leave the hiding place and come out in the open air. As you see, your philosophy was not able to fully protect you from the dangers of your family. Now you seem to realize that the dangers you tried to avoid were actually real, but that today your mother can no longer hurt you unless you continue to allow her to do so.
15 Not Giving Up
You didn’t give up and now you found the small girl playing in the sand. You will learn a lot from her, I am sure. Good luck to both of you!
15 Nightmares and Novels of Horror
Why do you need to look for more memories? You know enough to understand what happened to you, and I know it from you. But I think that you can’t believe that all this cruelty really happened, that your mother told you “Shame on you” when you tried to tell her what your father did to you and you needed her help. This reaction from a mother is so horrible that I can understand that you hesitate to believe. So you want to find more details, to convince me, your therapist, and maybe others about your right to be enraged. Actually, you want to convince yourself to believe eventually that the horror was indeed real. With a mother who denied everything and made you feel guilty, you are afraid of feeling your rage, but it is this rage that will help you to leave your family alone and become true to yourself. Does your therapist prevent you from feeling this rage? Can it be that he is afraid of it and you want to protect him?
20 Thanks from a Replacement Child
I am glad that you found the story of van Gogh. No matter what he could provide, it was never enough for his mother because the other Vincent was the one she “loved.” Would she have loved him also if he had not been dead? You are on the right path and fortunately your body helped you to recognize the confusion of your therapist and decide to stop seeing him. Now you no longer can be fooled.
21 Thank You and Info Request
I think that if you want to help children you need to work with parents on their histories, to help them to find out what stops them from being the parents their children need in order to feel protected, respected, and loved. To do this, work with a clear knowledge of your own history could help you more than a university degree.
26 To Protect Your Child
I am so happy that my book could support your feelings and help you to stay true to them. Of course, you should not go back to your abusive parents; your childhood was a hell. Now they want to destroy your well-being with your family, to make you unhappy and dependent on them again, and they want to continue their destructive work by exploiting your child. Fortunately, you have the insight, the courage, and the strength to protect yourself and your family from them.
28 I Don’t Want to Give Up!
You write: “So my question then is, is there some way to self-validate when one is isolated, some way to lead oneself through the mourning and recovery process so that one can choose to live rather than to give up?” In my opinion you made it clear that you understand enough to not want to destroy your memory and thereby give up. You know your history and are on the best path to becoming free of its effects. Don’t give up—you do have a choice. Making the right choice will give you the self-validation you are looking for.
28 Using Medication
You write: “I am seeking your opinion about my continued use of these drugs. Will they prevent me from being able to access these repressed feelings? I am afraid that if I stop taking them, I will be unable to work. I am also afraid of withdrawal from these unfortunately very addictive medications. Any advice you could provide would be appreciated.” I can’t change your reality. If you think you can only work when you take the medication even though you see the danger of losing your true self, I am unable to give you any advice. It is up to you to make the choice. You are well informed about the effects of your medication and I can only say that in my opinion you will not lose the capacity to work if you decide to live with your true self. I think that the opposite is true. But it is possible that you will have to change the “work” you are doing now.
30 Do I Need to Know More?
You write: “Something traumatic must have happened at that time, but I cannot recall it.” What are you looking for if you already know this: “My mother had never wanted a child and made that quite clear to me; she told me so. She tried to abandon me many times. She deliberately made it her mission in life to ruin mine. After all, she reasoned, I had ruined her life by being born; fair is fair. She was a closet lesbian and sexually abused me.” What you need is to feel the suffering of this small girl who was not wanted, was frequently in danger of becoming abandoned, and was sexually abused. This knowledge is sufficient to make you very angry with your mother and become the loving mother of this tortured little girl who is still in search of a caring, empathic mother.
NOVEMBER 2007
2 Finally!
You write: “They stole my anger and I want to get it back.” You can get it back, and it will help you to heal. It will give you the courage to own your true feelings and never allow anybody to steal them. You need them more than anything else.
9 She Eats Me
She could try to eat your child, but she can’t eat your adult self unless you allow her to do so. You must protect yourself clearly by defending your limits and saying no.
11 Follow-Up
So I wasn’t far away from the truth; I had the right intuition when I wrote that you know how healing works. You will have times like you describe here, and also dark times when old memories will dare to come up, but you will no longer forget or abandon yourself. The wonderful dream shows it very clearly.
23 The Danger of AA
I have written many times about the dangers of AA, of this kind of manipulation, hypocrisy, poisonous pedagogy, and confusion. You see that you felt the negative influence of this “treatment” when you write, “I went into this meeting, but such rage rose in me that I had to leave.” Your rage is understandable, and if your therapist regards it as harmless, he may no longer be the right therapist for you.
25 A Letter to My Father
I was distressed to the core when I read your letter, for which I thank you wholeheartedly. At the same time, I felt a sort of gratefulness for the fate that helped the lively, brave, and bright little girl not only to survive the terrible jail of her horrific parents but also to keep the full clarity and courage needed to see and to accuse, without “buts,” without illusions, without self-betrayal. This stance is very rarely encountered, and your letter will certainly help others to recognize their own situation and to forgo the buts. If you have no objections, we can also publish your letter in French. I would like to do this because here your child also has the strength to speak for countless other children who are forced to bear the more or less visible delusions of their parents for years and to experience that as normal. Formed by this ignorance, they often remain blind to the suffering of children their entire lives and still recommend physical punishment. They work in senseless “research” for the pharmaceutical industry, organize wars, produce cruel movies, and don’t know at all that they still “live” in the prison of their sick parents because they never had the courage to see through their parents’ delusions. Thus they continue to poison the world with the toxin that they had to swallow as children.
30 Nursing Homes
You have done well. Even if they pretend to be deaf, something may nevertheless bother them if they receive messages like yours often enough. We have no other choice than to write and to hope that one day the truth will be heard. Words can be stronger than arms, which show fear rather than strength.
30 A Note of Gratitude
Your letter is full of determination, consciousness, and clarity. It is impossible to overcome the aggressions of your father and the lies of your mother, or both, without a lot of rage that you had to repress over such a long time at the cost of your body. Fortunately, you can feel and understand this rage now thanks to the empathy of your counselor, so you are becoming more and more free to live your authentic feelings.
DECEMBER 2007
2 The Journey Home to Our True Self
You write: “I had been terrorized to feel I must love my mother! I realized that a part of me was trying to love her and that I did not feel love for her. I only felt fear my entire life, fear of my mother, not love. When I let this go from my body, this attempt to force the feeling of love, a major shift happened. Since that time, my days are free from this undercurrent of anxiety.” With these few words you describe a situation that millions of people probably share with you without having the courage to voice it. I am so glad that you could eventually feel this pressure and reject it, and that you now can feel the liberation you can find when you decide to be true to your real feelings without lying to yourself. All religions, however, demand the opposite from us. How can so many people believe in a God that wants us to lie to ourselves and call these lies a virtue?
2 Detachment from Parents
It is correct and logical that, if you didn’t have good parental attachment as a child, you will look for it your whole life in the hope that you will get what you so painfully missed when you needed it most. You can’t easily detach yourself and are waiting for your parents to change, unless you realize in your therapy how much you suffered because of your lack of attachment and take steps to overcome this loss. Waiting for them to change will only increase your dependency on your parents, because usually they don’t change. And even if they do, you still need to feel and understand the pain of the small, abandoned, and hurt child you once were so that you can understand and resolve your plight of today. As an adult, you don’t need abusive parents, not at all. Unfortunately, in childhood there was no other choice.
2 The Importance of Finding One Empathic Person
Your letter shows how much we can change even in the most tragic situations if even one person (your teacher?) is clearly, without any buts and pedagogy, on the side of the mistreated child. Unfortunately, this attitude is very rare. None of our presidents, religious leaders, popes, and other people in power, none of the philosophers, well-known authors, filmmakers, and actors, seem to see that children all around are being mistreated, tortured, daily, every minute. This fact means our activity is needed to save their lives, and also to save our future from criminals and mad dictators.
7 Enlightened Witness Revisited by Science
You are asking what we think about the article you sent us. I personally feel that it is better to admit 10 percent of the truth than nothing, but I prefer of course that one admits 100 percent (and definitely with fewer words than it has been done here). The lack of serotonin is not the cause of depression; it is one of the symptoms. And the cause is not genetic; it is the necessity of repressing strong genuine emotions like rage and sadness in an abusive family. And the “social support” will not work as long as there is so much fear about acknowledging the devastating role of abusive parents who teach their children from the beginning of their lives to suppress their vital emotions—not to cry, not to scream, to learn obedience, etc. An enlightened witness, in contrast, is a person who can listen to the victim with indignation, without being scared by her story.
16 We’re Not Doomed to Repeat
No, we are only doomed to repeat what happened to us as long as we deny it. If we have the courage to know the truth of our childhood, if we don’t need the lies to protect our parents, we can change. Unfortunately, our whole society and all religions prefer to protect the parents and let the child suffer by calling beatings “education.” You can find the list of my thirteen books on my Web site.
16 The Facts Denied
Your honest and moving letter will strongly resonate with most of our readers. I don’t doubt that every illness children (and adults) have to suffer is linked to the physical and emotional mistreatment and neglect they endured in their childhood. Unfortunately, this link is strongly denied by doctors, and indeed whole society.
18 Separation from the Soul
Yes, you are right; the price of being comatose is the heartbreaking separation of the soul. For that reason, people who did overcome this separation rarely find understanding in their families. They often feel as if they are talking to a wall. Separation from the soul happens so frequently that it seems to be the normal state. Thus cruelty and even sadism against children can go on and on without the slightest memory of the once-endured pain.
18 Pea Soup
You will not find anything other than what you have already stored in your body without knowing it. Knowing it can only help.
19 Thank You!
I like to know that looking at your bookshelves and seeing my book helps you not to spank your child.
22 Santa Claus and Deception
Since you have read the first chapter of Banished Knowledge, you may know what I think about this kind of child abuse. It is a way of fooling children into submission and blinding them to realities.
23 The Truth Is Not (Say Not) a Punishable Offense
You are absolutely right; the truth is not an offense, but we were punished for seeing it so many times. You are lucky that you can remember this incident well, so you can work on this memory. Millions of children suffered the same treatment, but they can’t recall it and have never gained the insight you have. Your letter may help others to recall similar situations.
25 What Should I Do?
Continue listening to your feelings and trying to understand what they are telling you. You seem to have had good experiences with that. Why should you abandon yourself again for new illusions?
26 Problems with the Word “Discipline”
I very much agree with you concerning the word “discipline.” I never use it. I also became skeptical toward authors who do use it, and I no longer recommend them.
26 I Believe in Santa Again
You got it! Your letter shows that a book can help one to understand oneself and to begin to love oneself. By understanding that you can’t love anybody whom you fear, you have already made a big progress that will save the rest of your life. This discovery will help you to avoid much unnecessary suffering—futile attempts to love and to elicit love where this is impossible and self-destructive. I needed many more years to understand that. And as you see on my Web site, so many people try and try to succeed in respecting a law that is based on a lie.
28 Avoiding the Truth
Open the “Flyers” page on my Web site and read the text “21 Points.” In my opinion, memories are always true, even if not exact, but the idea that traumas can be invented is one of the most serious psychoanalytical errors, because we don’t need the memory of our suffering to survive; as children, we needed the repression. Therefore we may invent stories, but they will always be less harmful than the real trauma itself. The answer of your therapist seems to be avoiding the main issue.
29 Hatred and Pain
In your heartbreaking letter, you say that mornings are better after you cry at night and that you have learned to respect and understand your feelings so that you will no longer hate yourself. You don’t deserve to be hated; once you can fully hate the people who made you suffer so much, the pain will go away, you will breathe freely, and you will feel free.
31 How Long Will It Take?
I think that you will suffer as long as the little girl in you is waiting for your father to understand your torture, to take a risk, to love you and to save you instead of protecting himself. But once you can rebel against him, the small girl will feel protected. Does this make sense to you? Try to see and feel how he betrayed you through his cowardice.