JANUARY 2008
5 Terror and Panic
Yes, you are right, the illusion made you ill. But now you seem to be very close to your truth, and I am thus very hopeful that you will succeed in getting what you so much wanted: to know your true feelings and needs and to live your own life. It takes time, of course, but your tears show that you are on your path.
5 The Spiritual Ideology of “Negative Emotions”
Your thoughtful letter is so clear and true, and I think that it could help many people to understand important connections. If you want to have it published on our Web site, please let us know, and we will do this with pleasure.
Thank you for your permission to publish your earlier letter, which I loved. I can’t understand why you think that you have Asperger’s syndrome. To me you are absolutely far away from it because you are a feeling person; otherwise you wouldn’t have been able to write the letters you have written.
7 Reader’s Question Regarding Emotional Memory
You are certainly right to look for the keys in your actual feelings—in this case guilt. There are mothers who scream at a baby, often shaking him and holding his arms when blaming him of being nasty. Why nasty? Just because he cried? Perhaps he felt uncomfortable. Instead of looking for the actual reason for his crying, they punish him. Does it make sense to you that your body tries to tell you a story like that using your forearms? I can’t know it for sure, since you did not tell us at all how your mother “cared” for you.
16 Taking Things on Faith?
Thank you for saying that I don’t need to be taken on faith. It is important to me that everybody can check what I am writing with the help of his or her own history.
18 The Reason for Child Abuse
Unfortunately, I can’t promise you anything at the moment, but if you want to send me your book anyway, you can do it through my publishers in New York: Norton or Basic Books. As you read my books and are empathic with small children, I hope that you might be interested in my message that the sole reason for child abuse is the denial of the pain endured in our childhood. As almost everybody was beaten very early on, the denial of suffering became a part of our brain structure. My therapy concept is based on this fact, and it turns out that it helps survivors of mistreatments to liberate themselves from chronic symptoms if they want to know the truth about their childhood. I would be happy if you could make your patients and students aware of these facts by using the material published on my Web site (interviews, flyers, articles, and the mail).
19 Guilt
Freeing ourselves from the feelings of guilt imposed on us by others and never questioned by us already makes a big difference on our path to freedom.
20 Tantrum
A tantrum shows a deep despair and helplessness that a child is not able to express with words. An empathic adult will try to remember what happened right before it in order to understand what drove this child into despair and to let him know about it with empathy. That can help the child to understand himself. But never should a child be punished for his despair. Such stupid, cruel advice shows why children cannot express themselves other than through a tantrum. Let us assume that your friend is coming to you and is sobbing without being able to tell you why. Would you lock her up in a room as punishment to make her stop? Such advice is given to parents when children are at stake.
21 Two Years Later
Your letter is strong and true; it will encourage others to take their feelings seriously and not force themselves to believe in lies in order to save illusions. Hence it is exactly because of our illusions that we become sick. You saved your life, your future.
31 My Therapist Is Violent and a Liar
A person who scares you can never help you, and if she lies, she is also dangerous. Why don’t you leave her immediately? You seem to know exactly what you have to do. Why are you hesitating? Is it because you had to learn very early on to live with such a danger and to tolerate it? Today you are free to refuse this. Look for another therapist or read more on my Web site. Above all, read my interviews and the FAQ list.
31 A Letter from Greece
To travel for two hours to Athens to be received by somebody who doesn’t talk to you, who lets you talk for twenty minutes instead of an hour as was agreed upon, is totally absurd. You are tolerating this extreme abuse like a small helpless child who has no other options. But now, as an adult, you are not forced to endure this arrogance. As you so strongly reacted to The Drama, you are able to help yourself. Try to read my interviews on my Web site and my other books, especially The Body Never Lies, which is already available in Greek (if I am informed correctly). This book may awaken more feelings in you. Try to find in your town a person with a heart who can listen to you. You can also try to write letters to the small boy you once were, who never had a helping witness. You can become his witness. But traveling to Athens to be humiliated by this person who calls himself a therapist doesn’t make sense at all, unless you go once—but only once!—to tell him how you feel about his arrogance. That could help you indeed.
FEBRUARY 2008
1 The Illness and Death of My Father
You can only start from the place where you actually are, not where you think you should be. You are looking for the emotions of the small child that was abandoned by the father, when nobody gave you any information, nobody saw your suffering. Can you feel your suffering now about being not seen?
4 Ending the Relationship with the Parents
This is your right answer: “However, this time I am very determined to have my life back, discover my true identity, and pursue my own happiness.” You must take it seriously; your body needs your determination. It will not wait until your parents understand. If they could, then everything would have happened differently. Nobody can force you to answer calls that you don’t want to, since you are no longer a child.
5 The Truth Is a Matter of Choice
Yes, you made the choice and I want to congratulate you on your insight that the truth is a matter of choice. We are unable to convince anybody who doesn’t want to know. S/he will take the newspaper and avoid listening to us. But we can find the courage to take seriously what we are seeing, feel the pain and no longer hope in vain that someday this person will understand. How could she if she doesn’t want to? You can never, ever force anybody to understand the pain of their child if they refuse to understand their own pain.
23 A Response to The Body Never Lies
I have the feeling that you read my book with your eyes totally closed. How did you manage this? The answer to your question actually lies in the book: Society is composed of people so thoroughly terrorized in early childhood that they are, like you, even as adults, still too afraid to see what has been done to them by their own parents.
25 Dealing with Incomplete Memories
Probably, your memories will become more and more clear once your fear of blaming your mother—and hence your need to protect her—lessens. Memories can come in dreams, and they can also show themselves in the way you feel when confronted with lies, pretensions, and abuse. Since you are now ready to see your past without illusions, the doors can open and will do so with time. But the access is always the present: the sorrow, the rage, the shame. The path from fear to courage may seem too long for the little boy, but now he will be protected by the adult he became and will thus succeed.
25 Chekhov and Corporal Punishment
Chekhov could see the truth in all of his writings, especially in Uncle Vanya, but in his own life he was a most devoted son to his father. The strong fear of the severely beaten child did not allow him to protest.
26 Africa
It will be, as you say, a long way. But I am glad that you realized that violence is not the way to make children curious and eager to learn. Do you have any suggestions after this trip?
27 Learning from Children
I am really happy that you understand me so well and that you are able to learn so much from your child. You see how quickly children can be reached if we don’t think that we must win a war with them.
MARCH 2008
3 Unwanted Children?
You are right: unwanted children are very often mistreated. However, there exist as a rule a huge number of people who were “wanted” indeed, but only for playing the role of the victims upon which their parents needed to be able to take revenge. They were wanted to give their parents what the parents had never received from their own parents: love, adoration, attention, and so many other things. Otherwise, why would so many people have five or more children when they have no time for them? Why do they adopt children if their body refuses to give them what they apparently “want?” The never acknowledged, never felt pain of their childhood calls for retribution. They go to church, they pray, they honor their parents, forgive them everything—and they mistreat their children at home, often in a very cruel way, as if this were the most natural thing, because they learned this so early. Their children also learn this perverted behavior very early, and will later do the same; and so this perverse behavior endures for millennia and will continue to do so unless people are willing to see the perversion of their parents and are ready to consciously refuse to imitate it. You are not being “sickeningly sarcastic” you only dared to speak the truth that most people are afraid of seeing or talking about.
6 Daring to Talk
We publish your extremely moving letter because it will encourage others to leave their loneliness and to dare to talk about their suffering. I am so glad that you experienced how healing it can be to share your terrible story with a good friend. The cruel and mean answer given to you by your own mother might have discouraged you from talking for your whole life if you had not met your friend. Until then, the skin rash was the only language available to you. The way may be long, but there is no doubt that you will succeed in healing yourself because you have already had the experience of speaking the truth and winning.
7 A Mother’s Deep Concerns
Have you already asked yourself why you left your son with his father and went far away to do your research despite what you knew about his father? It unfortunately happens very often that we unconsciously repeat what happened to us in our past if we never had the chance to work on our repressed emotions and the story of our childhood. We can have the best intentions, yet the repressed story hidden in our body lets us make decisions that we never would have wanted to make if we knew, emotionally knew, what happened to us when we were very small and at the mercy of our totally unconscious parents.
12 Nearly Insane
Your letter makes much sense and I congratulate you for the work you have done. You understand now that graduation in psychology means near to nothing if you are afraid of your truth, your emotions, and above all your justified rage.
16 How Do I Spread My New Knowledge?
People in authority will not help you; they need their authority above all and are afraid of the truth, of their own fear hidden behind that authority. But if you have time, you can print my flyers (they are free) and send them out to schools, to organizations pretending to help children, to nurses, to physicians—wherever you think that your information will get some interest, some curiosity, or even an open ear.
16 Is Obesity the Result of Childhood Abuse?
Yes, we can say this without any hesitation. Every behavior that is directed against the health of a person, that hinders the healthy functioning of the body and mind, is a repetition of once-endured mistreatment, neglect, confusion, lies, betrayal, perverted practices, and the exploitation of the child.
16 “Good Advice”
Your letter shows how hopeless all these well-intended books are: the ones that tell the once-mistreated parents how they should behave toward their children without telling them that their violence, hate, and lack of love come from their own childhood and are blocking their best intentions. Even well-known books avoid this topic. They tell you how you can become a good mother, but they never mention how and when you learned to become cruel to your children. Obviously, in this way they protect your mother and father, and your children will have to pay for your tolerance toward your parents.
21 Strange Experience
From where could the child learn to vent his anger if not his parents? The lesson was for a long time stored in his body because he was not allowed to show his anger; he didn’t feel anything. Now, when you begin to feel, it makes sense that the anger first comes in the way that the child learned it from his father. But with time the adult will learn his own way of showing his feelings. Meanwhile, he must accept that first he reacts like his father or his mother. Fortunately, he can observe it, so he sees more and more how he was suffering in his childhood. Not many people have the courage to admit that they are imitating their parents; they don’t want to be like them—ever. But acknowledging this can be beneficial.
APRIL 2008
9 Different Levels of Messages from the Body
Yes, I want to encourage you to continue your journey to recovery. It makes sense that you can now better bear the pain (the truth), because we can’t heal the wounds of our past by denying them or even laughing about them. We must learn to take them seriously.
19 A Year Later
The fact that the rashes on your skin are disappearing shows that you are on the right path to yourself. Of course, you wanted your mother to validate your suffering, but you know now that this would never happen, even if she were still alive. However, now it is you who can and do validate your plight, and this is what you eventually need the most for your future.
20 Brooklyn Boy Reborn
It took much time and much much suffering, I suppose, before you arrived where you are now. But eventually you have succeeded to understand yourself and no longer need to go back to Florida, where you spent two years fulfilling your guilt (what guilt?) and sense of obligation (what for?) to your mother. To not meet our torturers again seems necessary for our health.
26 Why Psychoanalysis Isn’t Effective
Thank you for sharing your experience with us. Once I understood that psychoanalysis protects parents, it became clear to me that it can’t help former victims to discover the reality of their childhoods and thus liberate themselves from the tragic effects.
27 I No Longer Play Your Game
I did read your letter and felt much moved by it. Congratulations on the courage and honesty that speak through your entire letter, especially where you write, “I have the biggest, biggest, biggest compulsions in this whole wide world to take care of her feelings, but her feelings are not my responsibility.” Exactly. Only the former kid with his great smile is your responsibility. Don’t abandon him, even if he has to cry for a while. Ask him if he needs to go to the funeral, and if he says no, respect what he is saying.
30 Born into Heroin
Your amazing letter is very strong and convincing; it shows that even a former child of heroin-addicted parents can help himself to heal if he dares to confront his truth, to feel and reject the lies and illusions suggested by society, religions, even by philosophy and therapies of all kind. I was very moved by your letter and also glad for you that you are not going to waste your time writing a philosophical thesis, thus avoiding the full truth about your story. Fortunately, you have dared to find it. Heidegger wrote about being “thrown” into existence in an abstract way, probably without realizing emotionally that this is the story of most people, including perhaps himself, but not of all people. There are some people, though not many, who have been raised protected and loved. Your mother lying on the sofa, filled with heroin, next to the highly intelligent little boy crying for attention whom she didn’t see, represents to me the horror that you can feel; so many can’t, and they have to endure illnesses instead.
MAY 2008
12 The Unfelt Pain
In my opinion, if you want “to get your pain off your mind,” you become empty, suicidal, and alone, even with yourself. If you can feel your pain about having been treated so cruelly by your parents and siblings, you become vital, living with your history and moving into recovery. The felt pain doesn’t last forever, but the unfelt pain of the little child you were insists on being heard. Try to listen to it.
18 Dependency as Adults?
Yes, I fully agree with your own answer. I would only add that pain and anger would also suggest that once you are on your own, with your true reliable enlightened witness within you, you might discover to your surprise that you are no longer as alone as before, and you might meet people (if not, perhaps, many) who think like you, who don’t want to deny their past.
19 Not Scared Anymore
You write: “Thank you for giving me the courage to admit my pain. I am still working on my incest issues, but I am not scared anymore.” It is feeling this pain and understanding, knowing the causes of this pain, that gives you the courage. It liberates you from the fear of things that did happen in the past but are no longer happening and thus should no longer be feared. In your short sentence you describe how effective therapy usually works.
23 An Interview with Child Advocate Andrew Vachss
I saw the interview. These are some of my thoughts about it: we will never be able to stop child abuse as long as we say: “I put the past behind me, I don’t feel anger, have forgiven and forgotten and get on with my life.” Saying that repeatedly never actually helps. Why? Because the endured abuse, if it is not worked out, drives the former victims to do the same with their children as long as they deny the pain and the anger, which the abuse left in their bodies. Our feelings may stay repressed, unconscious, for a long time, but they wake up when we become parents. Feeling and understanding the causes of our old pain does not mean that the pain and the anger will stay with us forever—quite the opposite is true. The felt anger and pain disappear with time, enabling us to love our children. It is the unfelt, avoided, and denied pain stored up in our bodies that drives us to repeat what has been done to us and to say, “Spanking didn’t harm me—it was good for me and will thus also not harm my children.” People who talk like this go on writing books on how we should spank babies early enough so that they learn to behave, never realizing what had been done to them so early in their lives.
24 Collective Unconscious
As children, we may potentially inherit the “shadows” of our parents, but as adults who dare to feel our truth and try to understand our feelings, we can liberate ourselves from these shadows by becoming conscious of them and rejecting them. If we no longer think that we must love a father who humiliated us, we become increasingly free of his coldness, his cruelty, and his confusion, and then nobody can make us imitate him. I also read the Web article you suggested. “Egophrenia” may be a good name for describing the madness of a dangerous politician, but playing with diagnoses does not explain anything about the causes of this madness. In my opinion, these causes are always hidden in the endured but denied cruelty of a childhood story. Unfortunately, as the article clearly shows, not only the Buddhist but also the Jungian “spirituality” helps us to stay blind toward the cruelty raging in the “best” families. I think, however, that there is no other way of liberating ourselves from lies and confusion than by becoming aware of our own suffering in childhood and by taking seriously the often tragic or even horrific reality of our fate. In denying this reality, as does the above-mentioned article by a well-known psychiatrist, we will fear during our whole life things that actually did happen in our past but will not happen again, simply because we no longer are children. But all mad and egophrenic dictators are driven by humiliations they endured as children; without consciously remembering them, they take revenge on scapegoats.
28 An Invitation to Honduras
Unfortunately I am unable to travel to Honduras, but I have some ideas about how I can help you: All my flyers are free and will be soon available in Spanish on the Web site Natural Child. You can publish or distribute them among institutions that work with children or parents. You have nothing to pay for these texts. I think that if you can make my texts available to professionals who are still stuck in the traditional, destructive, abusive way of thinking, you have done more for children than if I came to Honduras. I wish you much success in your work against violence toward children and for more awareness and consciousness. This work is not easy indeed but absolutely necessary. Unfortunately, there are not many people who understand how we produce violence and that we could stop this production by becoming aware of its causes.
30 How to Make Up for Mistakes?
The best you can do (for you and your child) is to work on your past, so that you come to understand where your anger comes from. You can tell your child that you are very sorry that you have spanked him; you didn’t know then that a mother should never do this. Now, since you know that hitting children is wrong and dangerous, you promise him that you will never do it again. Don’t ask him for forgiveness, for that would merely be a new burden. You should only inform him that you now know better, that you know of his suffering and regret what you have done. This is important, and you will see how positively it will work for both of you.
JUNE 2008
2 Panic Attacks and Dreams
Exactly! You got it! It seems that your panic attacks can become your guides; they can help you to take your needs seriously. Why should you change and give up the job you obviously like? Because somebody asked you to do so? Sometimes our body knows better than our mind what we actually want and need for the mind may be busy with wanting to please. Congratulations on becoming aware of what is going on.
3 How Can I Help Myself?
You are already helping yourself by honestly acknowledging your truth. This is the first unavoidable step, and it is always painful. The body will guide you in making the next steps: you will become angry and little by little you will be able to reclaim your life and live it.
5 Paintings
Your painting shows so much of what you already let us feel in your letters: your strength in discovering your true authentic life in spite of the terrible abuse you were suffering. It is a pleasure to see you in your colorful and rich paintings. I think that what makes us happy is not the word “artist” it is, above all, the freedom to be ourselves, to be able to freely express our feelings and to experience pleasure when doing this.
5 Panics
Your panic episodes are an indication of what happened to you. Fortunately, you found a witness who wants to listen to your story so you can work on it. This takes time, of course, but you will succeed because you want to know your truth.
12 Avoiding Pain
Yes, you are right. They are used to it and are, in addition, used to repressing pain so that they can avoid feeling it. They don’t know yet that the body will demand the price for this repression when they become older.
20 Question About Parents
Why should you not see your parents if you feel well being around them? There are people who suffer a lot when they meet with their parents, even when they talk to them only on the phone; they are unable to talk frankly with their parents, must control every word and are afraid of their exploding rage, which must remain hidden. After such meetings they feel very sick. In these cases I ask people why they think that they must visit and lie to their parents if they feel so bad with them. But if it is not your case, why do you ask for my opinion? Enjoy your good feelings and your good health.
21 Escaping an Obsessed Psychiatrist Father
It is always very hard to deal with a sadist if you are dependent on them. And as a child, you depend on your parents; you can’t escape them. Whatever you do, they succeed in making you suffer. Most people then feel, even as adults, that they are still dependent on their parents. And they are—as long as they wait for a change, for a miracle. They believe that a sadist will change because they think that they absolutely need a good father or mother. You are lucky in no longer believing this. To have a good attorney is the best way of communication in your situation. Congratulations. You have the courage to see the truth, and thanks to this sight you have the means to protect yourself.
28 Supernanny: Is She Good, or Is She the Best We Can Get?
I agree with your observation. Can it be that these nannies learn some good things in their schools about how you have to talk to the child, etc., but that when they work with families they can’t avoid the old patterns of their own upbringing and the way they were treated by their own parents, which stop them from being on the child’s side? The same can happen to therapists, even if they had the best training.
28 Moving Beyond the Church’s Complicity
Why don’t you write to the pope and ask him to listen to the cries of the millions of maltreated children who are daily brutally beaten by their religious parents to become obedient so that God will shine on them?
29 From a Reader of The Drama of the Gifted Child
It may be that there are already some therapists who use my method, but I don’t know of it. However, you can check them by using my FAQ list, which you will find on my Web site under “Articles.”
JULY 2008
3 Helping the Little Bloke
Why don’t you tell him that nobody has the right to hit and mistreat him, and that you will talk to his parents and tell them that what they are doing is a crime? It is your duty to protect this boy from the lies he has been taught and to tell him the truth. Otherwise so-called therapy is a farce.
3 Writing You from Spain
I think that you clearly see that you must liberate yourself from the terrible pain. But I hope that one day you will be able to feel your (justified) anger and rage without feeling guilty. The pain is the expression of your taking upon yourself the guilt that others should feel. Even if they refuse to feel it, you should know that it is they who deserve the pain and not you. You were an innocent victim; don’t forget that.
4 Confronting Our Parents
You are asking me: “Do you think he might be able to [understand]? How can I encourage him? How can I reassure him?” My answer is: only through your own courage, through your own freedom from lies. As long as you fear what your colleagues are saying, you can’t help him. The boy will feel your fear and the lies; he will feel your fear of your colleagues (and your parents).
11 My Childhood Story
You can write us about your childhood as frankly as you can. It may be that by admitting the truth about your history you will help yourself to overcome your illness, for you clearly want to support your body in its fight against the lie and to live your life. I wish you the courage to speak up.
Thank you for writing us your story. Since there are forty-three pages of it, we can’t publish your full text, but I want to congratulate you on awakening from your dangerous sleep. You have damaged your health by loving your highly abusive family, by waiting for their love and trying to kill your absolutely justified anger and rage by using marijuana for forty years, as well as taking antidepressants. Now that you allow yourself to feel, to write your history, your migraines have disappeared, and we can also hope that your cancer will leave you. The body is not cruel, not mean; it only wants to help you to listen to yourself, to love yourself, and to care for your life and body instead of waiting for your family to change. They will not change and, as a conscious adult who is learning to love herself, you don’t need parents to care for you, because you can do it much better. Please let us know how you felt after the surgery, and try to give as much compassion as you can to the child in you that suffered so much all her life.
11 The Unsolved Problem
I am not sure if I understand your question. Could you please explain with the help of an example what exactly you have in mind? To resolve one’s problem through scapegoating (even in the transference with the therapist) does not liberate us from the fear and rage our body has accumulated since we were (perhaps) very small children. If we don’t make the connection with the emotions of our very early experiences, we will continue to look again and again for new objects of our transference, but our body will pay the price of our unresolved fear, or our children will have to pay it, or both.
16 Shock Therapy Is Soul Murder by Butchers
I agree with everything you wrote in your letter and frankly don’t know what you can do. Perhaps you can ask your friend about his childhood and see if he shows any interest. If yes, you can let him tell you what he never told anybody before and show him your empathy and support. If he denies suffering in his family at all, I am afraid that there is hardly anything you can do. But you may see more when you are with him without any “program.”
16 Self-Understanding
I admire your clarity, your wisdom, and your courage to express honestly and frankly what you feel, even toward the person who might have helped you for some time but who does not seem to understand you now. To try to change her would mean to repeat the story with your parents, the never-ending and hopeless effort to change them. Now you seem free from this compulsion, and you don’t need to change anybody so that they understand you (this doesn’t work anyway) because you perfectly understand yourself.
17 My “Friend’s” Children
Fortunately, you found out that you had wanted to change your mother, or maybe both of your parents, by lecturing to your “friend.” This is to no avail. If you write songs, you can say what you need, and also what the child in yourself needs, and other people may actually better understand you than this friend who “prefers denial.” As you say yourself, there is no “getting through,” even if you give her my book. Give up your effort there, and enjoy your talent!
18 Child Abuse and Brain Damage
Sadly, it has been twenty years since Martin Teicher published his research; likewise, many others. But scientists are rarely interested in, and hardly informed about, the dynamic of child abuse, nor do they try to know the ways of therapeutically overcoming the consequences of early abuse by questioning their own abusing parents. They may only know the traditional, psychoanalytically oriented treatments that are indeed ineffective. However, they can show what has been denied before—that the mistreatment of children damages them for life. The damage that I describe as barriers in the mind still does not yet seem clear to them. Though it is quite obvious, they don’t seem to realize that enforcing discipline—spanking—from the beginning of the child’s life has the precise effect of brain damage. Maybe you will want to write about your own experience using the research others have done, showing concretely how you found your way of overcoming the terrible abuse you were already suffering before you were born.
20 An Incredible Pain
Writing may help to say everything and to clear up your mind, but don’t send the letter to your parents. You will not change them. Try to give as much affection as you can to the small child living in yourself who needs your understanding and your love. This will help you to come out of your prison and to live your life without feeling guilty. You are not guilty. You have very good reasons to be outraged! But there is not any doubt: the rage will leave you once you fully understand its reasons and dare to act for your benefit.
20 To Love Yourself
No, you are not at all crazy; your father was crazy when he beat you with his belt. Fortunately, you can feel your absolutely justified rage so that you can get free from the people who did so much harm to you and eventually learn to love yourself. Your rage will leave you as soon as you no longer feel dependent on their love and can fully enjoy your life without any guilt.
20 An Interview
I don’t know which kind of therapy you are undergoing now, but I hope that it is with somebody who is neither afraid of your story nor of her own. Like you, I hope that the brain researchers in the future will be able to clearly inform people about what they are doing to their children by beating and humiliating them, teaching them violence, by denying the suffering they themselves had to endure in their childhood, by worshiping instead their abusers and ancestors, by ignoring the emotional needs of their children, etc. Unfortunately, the interview seems to me far from this insight. Both persons speak about the child growing up in an abstract “environment” the concrete word “parent” is never mentioned, and words like fear, mistreatment, and torture have been avoided throughout the long text. My impression is that there is much goodwill but still much fear blocking sight toward the truth.