EMOTIONS REPRESSED IN childhood remain stored away in our bodies, and in adulthood they can cause symptoms of varying severity. We may suffer from bouts of depression, attacks of panic fear, or violent reactions toward our children without identifying the true causes of our despair, our fear, or our rage. If we were aware of those causes, it would prevent us from falling ill, because then we would realize that our fathers and mothers no longer have any power over us and can no longer subject us to physical “correction.”
In most cases, however, we know nothing about the causes of our sufferings because the memories of those childhood beatings have long been consigned to total oblivion. Initially, this amnesia may be beneficial, acting as a protection for the child’s brain. In the long term, however, it is disastrous because it then becomes chronic and has a profoundly confusing impact. Though it protects us from unpleasant memories, it cannot preserve us from severe symptoms like the unexplained fear constantly warning us of dangers that no longer exist. In childhood such fear would have been entirely realistic, for instance, in the case of a six-month-old girl whose mother regularly slapped her in order to “teach her obedience.” Of course, the girl survived those slaps, and all the other physical punishments inflicted on her in youth. But at the age of forty-six she suddenly developed heart problems.
For years on end we trust to medication to alleviate our sufferings. But there is one question no one (neither patients nor their doctors) ever asks: Where is this danger that my body incessantly warns me of? The danger is hidden away in childhood. But all the doors that might afford us the right perspective on the problem appear to be hermetically closed. No one attempts to open them. On the contrary—we do everything we can to avoid facing up to our personal history and the intolerable apprehension that dogged us for so long in childhood. Such a perspective would reestablish contact with the most vulnerable and powerless years of our lives, and that is the last thing we want to think about. We have no desire to go through that feeling of desperate impotence all over again. On no account do we want to be reminded of the atmosphere that surrounded us when we were small and were helplessly exposed to the whims and excesses of power-hungry adults.
But this period is one that has an incomparably powerful impact on the rest of our lives, and it is precisely by confronting it that we can find the key to understanding our attacks of (apparently) groundless panic, our high blood pressure, our stomach ulcers, our sleepless nights, and—tragically—the seemingly inexplicable rage aroused in us by a small baby crying. The logic behind this enigma resolves itself once we set out to achieve awareness about the early stages of our lives. Seeking that awareness is the first step toward understanding our sufferings. And when we have taken that step, the symptoms that have plagued us for so long will gradually begin to recede. Our body no longer has any need of them, because now we have assumed conscious responsibility for the suffering children we once were.
Truly attempting to understand the child within means acknowledging and recognizing its sufferings rather than denying them. Then we can provide supportive company for that mistreated infant, an infant left entirely alone with its fears, deprived of the consolation and support that a “helping witness” could have provided. By offering guidance to the children we once were, we can create a new atmosphere they can respond to, helping them to see that it is not the whole world that is full of dangers, but above all the world of the family that they were doomed to fear in every moment of their existence. We never knew what bad mood might prompt our mother to expose us to the full force of her aggression. We never knew what we could do to defend ourselves. No one came to our aid, no one saw that we were in danger. And in the end we learned not to perceive that danger ourselves.
Many people manage to protect themselves from the memories of a nightmare childhood by taking medication of some kind, frequently of an antidepressive nature. But such medication only robs us of our true emotions, and then we are unable to find expression for the logical response to the cruelties we were exposed to as children. And this inability is precisely what triggered the illness in the first place.
Once we have chosen to embark on a course of therapy, all this should change. Now we have a witness for our sufferings, someone who wants to know what happened to us, who can help us learn how to free ourselves of the fear of being humiliated, beaten, and maltreated as we were before, a witness who can assist us in leaving the chaotic mess of our childhood behind, in identifying our emotions and ultimately living with the truth. Thanks to the sustaining presence of this person, we can abandon our denial and regain our emotional honesty.
What kind of people go in search of therapy? And why do they do so? In most cases they are women who feel that they have failed their children and who suffer from depression without recognizing it as such. Men usually come on the insistence of their partners, or because they are afraid of being abandoned, or because they are already separated.
Usually, the majority of these people totally idealize their childhood and find the punishments inflicted on them completely justified. They will frequently give impassive accounts of the cruelties they have suffered.
Therapies are normally expected to solve all our present problems and restore our well-being—but without forcing us to confront our more profound emotions. We fear those emotions as if they were our worst enemy. The pharmaceutical industry caters to these fears or buried emotions with a whole range of so-called remedies—Viagra for impotence, Xanax for anxiety, antidepressives to fend off the deleterious effects of depression. But there is no attempt to understand the deep-seated causes underlying these conditions.
Many therapists offer behavioral therapies to remedy the symptoms displayed by their patients rather than examining their significance and their causes. Their justification for so doing is that those causes cannot be identified. But this is simply not true. In every single case it is possible to identify the causes for the symptoms. They are invariably hidden away in childhood. But only very few people truly want to confront their own histories.
Those exceptional individuals can do so by accepting their emotions for what they are. This is a course of action that we will only recoil from as long as we do not understand the causes of those emotions. Once therapy has enabled us to experience and understand the rage and fear inspired in us by our parents, we will no longer feel the compulsion to take out our anger on surrogate victims, usually our own children. In this way we can discover the reality of our own early biographies step by step, understand the sufferings of the children we once were, and become fully aware of the cruelty we were exposed to in our total isolation. Then we will realize that there were very good reasons for our anger and despair, because we were never understood, accepted, and taken seriously. By experiencing these unexpressed emotions we can learn to know ourselves better.
Many therapists themselves still live in a state of total denial and have never for one moment felt the sufferings of the children they once were. We can see this from their publications. They accuse me of transposing the things I went through in childhood onto all other cases, and they insist that my situation was exceptional. Unfortunately, this is not so, as I have experienced almost daily for decades. While reflection on this fact is still rare, there is a thinking minority of therapists who do their best to uncover their own repressed histories. After reading the articles on my Web site, they frequently ask questions that I shall attempt to answer here.