Introduction to Letters Section
I am occasionally asked how I can be so sure of myself in contradicting established opinions. After all, I do not belong to any school of thought, any cult or other community of the like-minded that supplies so many people with what they believe to be the “right” answers. So what is my confidence based on? It is indeed true that I only believe in facts I can test for myself. My access to these facts is based on my own experience and on the thousands of letters I have received from the readers of my books since the appearance of The Drama of the Gifted Child in 1979. I have frequently felt the desire to respond to these letters and greatly regretted that for reasons of time I have not been able to do so. Another desire I felt was to make these important testimonies and accounts by victims of childhood cruelty available to others. But this I could not do because it would have been a breach of confidence.
Only in 2005 did I hit upon the idea of establishing a mailbox on my Web site, where letters of general interest could be published with the consent of their authors. This provided the writers of these letters with a platform where they could express themselves freely and seek ways of liberating themselves from the tragic consequences of childhood abuse in the company of others. In this book I shall be publishing only a small number of my answers. The readers’ letters themselves can be found under “Readers’ Mail” on the Web site, complete with title and date.
The striking thing about most of these letters is the way they reflect an almost total denial of reality by the people who have written them. They tell of unimaginable torments that the writers have never acknowledged as such despite years of therapy. The letters are almost always written from the perspective of the parents, parents who were totally unable to tolerate, let alone love, their children. The children’s perspective finds no expression whatsoever, except in the sufferings of the adults they have become, the physical symptoms, the bouts of depression, the thoughts of suicide, the crippling feelings of guilt. The writers of these letters constantly insist that they were never abused as children, that the only physical “correction” they received was an occasional slap of no consequence at all, or a kick or two they had richly deserved because they sometimes behaved abominably and got on their parents’ nerves. I am frequently assured that deep down these people were loved by their fathers and mothers, and if they were cruelly treated from time to time, it was because things just got too much for their parents, who were unhappy, depressed, uninformed, or possibly even alcoholics, and all because they themselves had been deprived of love when they were young. So it is hardly surprising that these parents were quick to lose their tempers and take their unhappiness and resentment out on their children. Such behavior is, after all, readily understandable, is it not? The dearest wish of these children was to help their parents, because they loved them and felt sorry for them. But however hard they tried, they never managed to free them from their depression and make them happy.
The tormenting feelings of guilt triggered by this failure are unrelenting and implacable. What have I done wrong, these people ask themselves, why have I failed to free my parents from their misery? I try the best I can. My therapists tell me to enjoy the good things in life, but I can’t, and that makes me feel guilty too. They tell me to grow up, to stop seeing myself as a victim; my childhood is a thing of the past, I should turn over a new leaf and stop agonizing. They tell me not to put the blame on others, otherwise my hatred will kill me. I should forgive and forget and live in the present, otherwise I’ll turn into a “borderline patient,” whatever that is. But how can I do that? Of course, I don’t want to put the blame on my parents, I love them, and I owe my life to them. They had trouble enough with me. But how can I banish my guilt feelings? They get even more overpowering when I hit my children. It’s awful, but I can’t stop doing it, it’s driving me to despair. I hate myself for this compulsive violence, I disgust myself when I fly into an uncontrollable rage. What can I do to stop it? Why must I hate myself all the time and feel guilty? Why were all those therapists unable to help me? For years I’ve been trying to follow their advice, but I still can’t manage to dispel my feelings of guilt and love myself as I should.
Let me quote my answer to one letter that contained all these elements:
“In your first letter you said you had never been cruelly treated as a child. In this one you tell me that when you were young, you were cruel to your dog because you were a naughty child. Who taught you to see things that way? The point is that no single child anywhere on earth will be cruel to his or her dog without having been severely maltreated. But there are a whole lot of people who see themselves as you do and whose guilt feelings drive them to despair. Their sole concern is not to see their parents’ guilt because they fear the punishment they would incur for putting the blame where it belongs. If my books have not helped you to understand this, there is nothing more I can do for you. You can only help yourself by no longer protecting your parents from your own justified feelings. Then you will be free of the compulsive urge to imitate them by hating yourself, blaming yourself, and describing yourself as a monster.”
How can someone love themselves if the message that they were not worth loving was drummed into them at an early stage? If they were beaten black and blue to make them into a different person? If they had it impressed on them that they were a nuisance to their parents, and that nothing in the world would ever change their parents’ dislike and anger? They will believe that they are the cause of this hatred, though that is simply not true. They feel guilty, they try to become a better person, but this can never succeed because the parents take out on their own children the rage they had to suppress and hold back in their dealings with their own parents. The child was merely the butt of this rage.
Once we have realized this, thanks to the body language implicit in physical symptoms, we stop waiting for the love of our parents, and we know why it will never materialize. Only then can we allow ourselves to see how we were treated as children and to feel how we suffered as a result. Instead of understanding and commiserating with our parents, instead of blaming ourselves, we start taking sides with the abused child we once were. This is the moment when we start loving that child, but this love can never come about without the prior insight into the tragedy we were involved in as youngsters. This is when we stop playing down our sufferings and embark on a respectful engagement with them and with the child. The doors barring us off from our own selves suddenly swing open. But we can never open those doors just by telling someone “You should love yourself.” A person receiving such advice will be completely confounded by it as long as he or she is cut off from the knowledge of what their childhood was really like and why the truth is so painful.
My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents’ behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all. They will train their affections on the children they once were. But for this change of perspective to succeed, we need a witness who sides fully with the child and does not hesitate to condemn the deeds of that child’s parents. Genuine “enlightened witnesses” can help us to abandon denial and face up to our own past, so that we can finally leave it behind without feelings of guilt. Knowledge of our histories and our feelings enables us to find out who we are and to give ourselves what we so badly need but never received from our parents: love and respect.
The following is my response, dated 28 August 2006, to a reader who asked me what I meant by “uncovering therapy,” a form of therapy that has proved effective both for myself and others.
I call therapy “uncovering” if it helps clients to get to know their own suppressed, painful childhood history with the help of reawakened feelings and dreams. Then they need no longer fear the dangers that threatened them in childhood but now threaten them no more. These clients stop unconsciously fearing and repeating what happened to them at such a tender age because they know their childhood reality and can respond to it with rage and grief in the company of a therapist acting as an empathic witness. They stop treating themselves like nobodies, blaming themselves, harming themselves with all kinds of addictions, because they have now been able to develop empathy for the child that suffered so severely from the parents’ behavior. If in their adult lives they should be threatened by dangers, they will be better equipped to withstand them because they understand their old fears and can assess them for what they were.
This kind of procedure differs crucially from the kinds of treatment that involve practicing new behavior or improving one’s well-being (via yoga, meditation, positive thinking, or whatever). Here the subject of childhood is invariably skirted. Fear of it is ubiquitous in our society. I trace it to the fear felt by abused children, the fear of the next blow that is bound to follow if they should dare to see through their parents’ cruelty.
Psychoanalytic theory is also grounded in this fear of the parents. Sometimes for decades on end, clients and analysts remain bogged down in a maze of half-baked concepts, permanently suffering from guilt feelings because they made it so difficult for their parents to understand their “disturbed” children. In all this they frequently have no idea that they were in fact severely abused children. Whether therapists will be able to make this knowledge accessible will depend on what they know about their own lives and their first few years. To clear up these questions I have compiled a FAQ [frequently asked questions] list [see chapter 14, “How to
Find the Right Therapist,”] that can give people guidance on what they need to know before they enter into an attachment.
Of course, these people still face many questions they have evaded so far. My answers, which follow in this section, are attempts to help them get their bearings in this new situation and find therapists who will stand by them as empathic and “enlightened” witnesses and make full use of the knowledge thus gained.
Should I Confront My Family with the Truth?
Sometimes confrontation with the parents is necessary in order to get a grip on the truth if one has a tendency to deny that truth to oneself. But if it has been clearly identified in all its grimness, then direct confrontation is not absolutely necessary. The strong desire for confrontation may be conditioned by the hope that we may have been wrong in our judgment, or that the parents may have changed in the meantime. In other words, we may be hoping that they will understand us after all if we only manage to explain things to them properly.
Sometimes we believe that we will feel stronger in the face of our old, enfeebled parents. This may be the case, but I wouldn’t bank on it. The small child’s latent fear, still effective in the adult, is very strong and may accompany us all our lives. The task of therapy is to enable us to experience it consciously, understand its justification and thus overcome it. If therapy succeeds in doing this, there is usually little need for confrontation with the parents. Sometimes conflicts with our siblings can be avoided in this way, especially if we are able to accept and respect their fears because we know from experience how persistent those fears can be.
We can only overcome our own fear, jettison our own denial. We cannot do this for our brothers and sisters. If they prefer not to embark on this path, then we are powerless to intervene. It is distressing for us not to have “enlightened witnesses” in our siblings, but we must learn to accept this as our fate. In the course of time we may find friends who have been through similar experiences, and they may become “enlightened witnesses.”
Some people find a way of overcoming the fear of their overweening, menacing parents by writing letters to them that they never send. Here they can give an uncensored voice to the small child they once were and in the course of writing admit, and actually feel, for the first time, the bitter disappointment, helpless rage, crushing indignation, and ultimately the endless grief that have been condemned to silence for decades. Confrontation with the actual parents is no substitute.
I wish you every success for your therapy.
(7 July 2005)
Fear of the Truth
I have obviously failed to arouse your indignation and encourage you to rebel. You still write like a good girl practicing philosophical forbearance. You describe the facts very clearly, but you obviously feel nothing. Emotionally, you are still waiting for your parents’ love. You try to understand them, to suppress feelings like rage and indignation, and you are living in a small child’s panic fear of your parents’ brutality. But you are also asking questions. Perhaps this letter is the beginning of the long-overdue rebellion your body has been waiting for to finally rid itself of those superfluous pounds with the help of justified, healthy rage. You tell me clearly how your tolerance for your parents and the complete absence of rebellion and anger are destroying your life and forcing you to carry the weight of your parents’ crimes in your own body. Those 260 pounds are hardly anything other than the burden of the abuse inflicted on a tender, bright, and intelligent girl.
P.S.: Today’s letter telling me that your body sweated for an hour when you attempted to imagine your father as a monster confirms my conjecture.
(21 July 2005)
What Is Therapy?
It is never too late to ask your therapist. Her answers will show how close she herself has got to the goal you have set yourself. To find out the truth about one’s own childhood at all costs, as you are trying to do, one needs the kind of assistance that makes that possible, certainly not someone who makes you feel unsure of yourself. A therapist still living in infant fear of her internalized parents and denying her traumas will hardly be able to provide this kind of assistance. Professional training of the conventional kind will not protect anyone from sustaining such a defensive attitude.
On my Web site you will find suggestions for questions that can help you to determine whether your therapist has achieved the inner freedom and authenticity she needs to have for you to go in search of your own truth with her assistance. My recent articles on the Web site (see, e.g., “The Longest Journey”) also offer advice in finding the right therapist. Inspired by some of the last letters addressed to me, I shall attempt to outline here what I understand by successful therapy. I should, however, emphasize that my ideas on this point are not in line with the prevailing trends. They will only be helpful for people truly desirous of getting to know the children they once were and determined to pursue that goal to the end.
In my eyes, the conditions that must be fulfilled if therapy is to be successful are the following:
(24 July 2005)
The Role of Flashbacks
Your letter is clear proof of the way in which the ignorance of some doctors and parents continues to keep the causes of an “illness” (basically a disorder of functional logic) in the dark. What you tell me about instruction at school is also revealing. The phenomenon you describe is not uncommon. The threatened child protects itself by dissociating itself from its perceptions, experiencing itself as it were from outside its own body, from the ceiling of the room where the abuse happened. Former victims of sexual abuse frequently say that they experience themselves in this way. They were thus able to keep the truth and the pain at bay until the memories broke through and their symptoms disappeared. It is highly unfortunate that the attempt is made to cover over such salutary and—as your example shows—such liberating processes with medication or theories, and that so many so-called experts connive in this attempt.
(8 September 2005)
Why Are Children Badly Treated?
Children are badly treated because their parents were badly treated as well, though they deny the fact emotionally, in the same way that you do. If this were not the case, you would not ask this question, particularly as, at least intellectually, you already know the answer. I wish you courage and perspicacity in your further life!
(10 September 2005)
You Are Not Malicious
There is no way of avoiding rage when you start to understand, to feel, and to open your eyes. Your anger is strong, powerful, and very definitely justified. It will lead to rebellion and liberation. But do not overtax yourself with your primal therapy! Take things step-by-step, assisted by a therapist who is neither afraid of your history nor her own. Do not rush any fences! You are not alone. You feel deserted because the emotions from your childhood are telling you how lonely you were. This child was alone and forced to keep silent. But now, as an adult, you are speaking out. You are writing, and you touch others in the process. You are no longer alone, as you were before, even if you feel that you are. And you are not malicious! Your anger is more than justified, and now you finally—and fortunately!—know that.
(21 September 2005)
You Cannot Force Anyone to Open Their Hearts
You quote your former partner as saying: “I don’t want any more of this relationship, I can’t stand the pressure.” I’m afraid you have no choice but to respect this decision and desist from putting pressure on your friend, particularly as you tell me how truly fond of him you are.
If I were you, I would, however, ask myself why I should have to love a person who rejects me, who finds my love a nuisance and drives me into such a state of distraction. Why do I love someone who makes me suffer so much, who is not honest with me, so that I cannot understand him? How does this tie in with my childhood? You have probably already asked yourself these questions, otherwise you would not have written to me rather than someone else. After all, you know of my interest in the consequences of a traumatic childhood.
I believe that we can only truly understand ourselves. We may be able to understand others if they want us to and let us into their feelings. But if they refuse that point blank and close themselves off entirely, unwilling to tell us the reasons for such sudden rejection, then all attempts to understand are futile—unless we actively enjoy trying to crawl up the walls.
(2 October 2005)
The Fourth Commandment
I consider your letter a well meant but misguided attempt to reconcile two absolutely opposing views (mine and that of the Bible) by means of interpretations. One of the things this Web site and the letters published here demonstrate is the immense amount of suffering the Fourth Commandment has actually caused in parenting and upbringing. For me, only the facts count, not interpretations or theories. For thousands of years interpretations and theories have helped to camouflage the truth about the perverted cruelties inflicted on children in the name of upbringing and religion. Such children are bound to fall ill in the aftermath. Accordingly, I have never had any part in such speculations.
(3 October 2005)
So Much Courage in Spite of All
I am grateful to you for your frank and wise letter. It is rare and astounding that a woman so cruelly mistreated and rejected by her parents should find the strength and determination to go in search of herself as you have—and with such tenacity. You can see from the reactions of your body that you cannot only withstand your own truth (infinitely painful as it is), you can also profit from these insights. Your letter will help others to summon up the courage to face their grief and disillusionment, rather than punishing themselves all their lives for the deeds committed by their parents.
(4 October 2005)
Are Women Less Aggressive than Men?
In my view women are by no means less aggressive than men. Of course, they are victimized and disadvantaged by men avenging themselves for the beatings they received from their mothers. But women avenge themselves for such victimization and physical cruelty by taking it out on their little children, thus breeding new generations of avengers who consciously love and honor their parents.
I see no real difference between the cruelty of women and that of men, because both sexes have learned such sadism at the hands of their parents and caregivers at a time when their brains were still in the process of formation. As children, they were subjected to cruelty and even perversion, but they were not allowed to defend themselves. So later they take out their repressed anger on other defenseless people, frequently in the same way their parents treated them when they were small. Women frequently vent this acquired sadism on their children, while men also give free rein to it by victimizing employees at work or lower military ranks, or else participating in orgies of violence like genocide or terrorist attacks. The causes invariably lie in the repressed and totally denied sufferings of their childhood (though most of them will insist that they had wonderful parents). People who were not humiliated, tormented, or beaten in their early years are incapable of sadism.
Women can live out all kinds of covert perversion on their children and torment them with impunity as long as they call this behavior “good parenting.” Society idealizes mothers because people have never consciously realized that their own mothers treated them cruelly when they were small. Accordingly, women normally enjoy total immunity.
I see no sex-specific differences in the suicide bombers. I understand terrorism as an attempt to compensate for the humiliations these people were subjected to, but have never consciously perceived as such, by means of a “magnificent deed” (such as sacrificing their own lives for the sake of a group).
Though it is not difficult to understand this dynamic, there are not many people who would allow themselves to give up their denial and look the truth in the face. The fear felt by the tormented children they once were can prevent this all their lives.
(8 October 2005)
Violence against Babies
I fully understand your indignation and horror at the violence perpetrated on babies. Similar feelings prompted me to do my research, write my books, and establish my Web site. To my astonishment, I quickly realized that very few people take an interest in this taboo subject. Nowhere did I find people who were prepared to listen to me. Recently, I intended to write an article about a mother who had killed all nine of her babies, but no newspaper was interested in publishing it. And when I took the case of Jessica as an example of how infanticide can come about, the journalists I approached behaved like apprehensive churchmen. Nor have I ever been able to persuade the Vatican to express compassion for maltreated babies. Everywhere I have encountered total indifference.
In 1980, I referred in my book For Your Own Good to nineteenth-century upbringing manuals that instructed parents to instill “good manners” into their children from the outset by means of “physical correction.” I expected this to open people’s eyes, but no response was forthcoming. In France I commissioned a statistical survey to find out what percentage of mothers struck their children and how old these children were when they were first given a beating. Again the response was almost nil.
All these experiences have taught me that what you call normal behavior toward a baby—the desire to protect it—is unfortunately the exception. Obviously, the “normal” thing is to bring up little children with slaps and smacks and to inflict pain and fear on them. Why? Because the people who do this kind of thing received the same treatment when they were young and at the same time had the grotesque information drummed into them that it was all for their own good. Repressed rage vents itself later on these people’s own children. You are quite right. The smaller the child, the more omnipotent the adult feels, and the more profoundly he or she hopes that the memories of early cruelty stored in the body can be obliterated in this way.
A major enlightenment campaign for the entire population is urgently necessary. Perhaps you have an idea about how this could be organized. Unfortunately, hardly anyone is interested in starting such a campaign because almost all of us were beaten in infancy and were forced to learn that this treatment was good for us. Most people adhere to this belief all their lives and bring up their children in the same way they themselves were brought up. In this way they can protect themselves from the realization that they were abused when they were small. On no account do they want to know that with every blow they inflict on their children they are abusing them and damaging them for life, be it “only” by destroying their capacity for empathy and logical thinking.
(22 October 2005)
Repressed Rage
Your depression is telling you that you are repressing your strongest feelings. If you take antidepressants you will also be repressing the truth, your own personal truth. You love your parents, and in the night you are assailed by bouts of rage. Luckily, you can still feel it! I hope your therapist can help you understand who deserves your anger and why. If the child subjected to cruelty feels the presence of a courageous witness, then you will no longer need medication. You will become sentient again and understand the causes of your sufferings.
(9 January 2006)
Forgiveness Manipulates Feelings
The question you raise is extremely important. But it rests on the naïve supposition that we can manipulate our feelings without making others pay the price. In reality, we cannot do that. You say what everyone else says, the things we all learned from our parents, in school, in church, and even from most therapists: “Turn over a new page!” It is all very well to be told to tell hatred that it should disappear and never rear its ugly head again. We all want to turn over a new page and live in peace. Everyone wants that, and it would be marvelous if it worked. But it doesn’t. Why? Because, like all other emotions, rage will not let itself be dictated to or manipulated. Instead, it imposes its dictates on us, it forces us to feel it and to understand its causes. It can always return when we have been injured or affronted, and there is nothing we can do about it. Our bodies cannot turn over a new page; they insist that we listen to them.
Of course, we can try to repress our rage. The consequences are illness, addiction, and crime. If we do not want to feel our justified anger because we have already forgiven even our parents’ worst depredations, we will soon realize to our surprise that we have been passing on to our children, or others, the same pain inflicted on us by our parents. If we are honest, we will not assert that we have acted “for their own good,” or that cruelty is a valuable factor in parenting. Unfortunately, most parents do go around saying that, which is why our society is so mendacious.
(21 January 2006)
How Can We Live with This Knowledge?
Your question is one that I have been asked on various occasions, though perhaps never so trenchantly. My response has always been to inquire whether the person in question would prefer to retrace their steps, whether they would in fact be willing to live as before, without the knowledge they have gained. So far, no one has ever answered this question in the affirmative. Many say that they now have fewer “friends,” but those they have are true friends, people who are also in search of themselves, who react less defensively, who feel no urge to proffer unwanted advice and can speak freely about their feelings. Communication thus becomes much easier. Most insist that they would never want to go back to the stage when they were separated from their own selves. Then they felt lonely even when they were surrounded by other people. Today they feel less lonely because they have a better understanding of themselves and their histories.
(25 January 2006)
Understanding Your Children’s Feelings
I congratulate you on your success, even though your work is not yet over. But you have achieved the most important thing: you have established contact with yourself and your own history. Now nothing can go wrong. Your concern that you might not be able to “deal with” your child may be part of the history of your own childhood. Children who are not tormented have no need of tormenting others. When they are small, we have to pick them up when we are crossing the road, and later we can teach them a great deal without frightening them. But the more completely you see through the attitudes of your parents and caregivers, the more distinctly you will now sense how you suffered at their hands. You will learn to live in freedom and find it easier to understand your own feelings and those of your children. We only neglect, frighten, and maltreat our children as long as we deny that we were treated cruelly in childhood ourselves and forced to regard such cruelty as beneficial. In your case there appears to be no more danger of this happening.
(8 February 2006)
No University Chair on the Origins of Child Abuse
I believe it to be important to spread knowledge about the origins of child abuse in earlier generations. Although so many people have been victims of such abuse, there is still no university chair anywhere in the world devoted to the investigation of this phenomenon. For years I have been reading accounts of the cruelty inflicted on these people, and I know a great deal about the delayed consequences of such treatment. It is this that convinces me that enlightenment about the danger of hitting small children should be given major priority. The ignorance of the parents and the fear of adult children to clearly see the deeds of their parents committed in the name of upbringing and to call them by name can be done away with if we have the courage to talk about this subject in public.
(11 February 2006)
Illness Symptoms as the Language of the Body
Reading your account, I found myself reminded of Franz Kafka and his novella The Metamorphosis. We have here the case of a highly gifted, intelligent child whose mother has an appalling desire for control and an extreme tendency to violate boundaries, while the father categorically refuses to engage in any kind of communication. In these circumstances, how can the child come to terms with his or her fate without falling seriously ill? The symptoms of illness are the only genuine language left. You have elected to write down your story, and you have taken fifty pages to do so. But your body will continue to spur you on, to insist that you take your childhood sufferings seriously and listen to the child you once were.
Of course, you are right. What you definitely need is someone to stand by you. We cannot descend alone into the hell that you survived as a child. But where does one find such assistance? Your description of the mentality of today’s therapists is probably very accurate; it might almost provide you with material for a play that would show the audience the roots of their own experiences. But that would not solve your problem. You need someone who will take an interest in your story because she knows her own and would like to work with you. You might shop around, testing therapists by asking them the questions I propose in my FAQ list, or giving them the story of your childhood to read and then deciding whether you are willing or able to entrust yourself to them. It may be that you are only too willing to tolerate ignorance because you were programmed to do so at such an early stage. But if you let yourself be guided by the responses to your story, then you will not run any risk. Try to understand the distress signals emitted by your body as a plea not to treat it the same way your mother treated you.
There are many people living lives like yours, but they cannot express themselves so well. They suffer from their attachment to their abusive parents, they feel guilty for what their parents did to them, and they squander their remaining energy in doing so.
I wish you luck in your search for a suitable therapist and the courage to ask your questions. You have to ask those questions! They will give you the necessary guidance. I only hope you find someone prepared to answer them. Until you have found someone, you might try spending your sleepless nights telling your mother how things are for you and filling her in on your present feelings for her—including what you wanted to tell her as a child but never dared to. You can also write to your father or an imaginary therapist without actually sending the letter. As soon as you address the person directly, your feelings will surface. Today no one will punish you for it. You will free yourself from the prison to which you have been consigned for so long and which has blocked off your path to the genuine, meaningful, and rich life you are entitled to.
(1 March 2006)
Breaking with Tradition
No, there is no reason to keep on running around in circles once we stop trying to understand parents who have no desire to understand themselves. Your mother worships your father who lashed her mercilessly with his belt. What is there to understand in that? And why should you want to? Because you grew up in that tradition? But there’s nothing to stop you from breaking with it. At all events, it is time for you to try to understand yourself and to discover the feelings of the beaten child within.
(5 March 2006)
Forgiveness—Escape from Yourself
Your mother has told you that you were beaten at a very early age. You cannot remember either the mental or the physical pain of the little child forced to repress its sufferings. But multiple sclerosis is your body’s way of reviving this pain when something in the present reminds you of it (for example, the feeling of not being understood by anyone when you are in a state of extreme distress). If your analyst is unwilling to even countenance this possibility, try to find a therapist who is not afraid of your story.
Your analyst’s recommendations are in my view an instance of what makes us ill by suffocating justified rage. Reconciliation can provide relief for a while, because it mitigates the tormenting feelings of guilt. When we forgive the cruelty inflicted on us, we feel like a good—and hence beloved—child. But the body insists on the truth.
When I was a child, I did everything I could to understand my parents, and presumably like most analysts I continued “successfully” with those efforts for decades. But this was precisely what prevented me from discovering the child that had suffered torments at their hands. I did not know this child. Not in the slightest. I knew only the sufferings of my parents, I knew those of my patients and friends, but not my own. Only when I gave up trying to understand my parents’ childhood (not least because they had no desire to do so themselves) was I able to feel the full extent of my pain and fear. Only then did I gradually discover the story of my childhood; only then did I begin to understand my fate. And that was when I lost the physical symptoms that had been trying in vain for so long to tell me my truth, while I listened to my patients and through their destinies began to achieve an inkling of what happens to beaten children. I realized that I had betrayed myself. Like many analysts, I had no idea who I really was, because I was fleeing from my own self and thought I could help others by doing so. Today, I believe that the best way of understanding others is to understand oneself.
(5 March 2006)
Children Must Believe in Their Mothers’ Love
I can readily imagine that my letter shocked you, but I believed it permissible, indeed necessary, to inflict this shock on you so as to shake you out of your lethargy. Children always love their mothers, and they have to believe in their mothers’ love in order not to die. Accordingly, they interpret even the worst cruelty as a sign of love. But if the adult you manages to engage in an exchange with your child inside, then he will have a lot to explain to him, and the child will understand that, quite definitely, though it may take some time for him to do so.
(6 March 2006)
How Can I Free Myself without Falling?
I can quite imagine that you have to vomit when you read my books because they indicate a course that you are terrified of embarking on, that of taking the mercilessly beaten little girl you once were into your arms and protecting her from her cruel parents. They tell you never to believe again that you have to love the people who injured that child so seriously (a child that you are now solely responsible for). This step frightens you, but the fear you feel is the consequence of the beatings and abuse you suffered. Who would not be afraid in the face of such a story? But you can do something to overcome that fear.
You cannot help your mother. Only she could do that, if she wanted to. And if you want to lead a meaningful life, you must stop betraying the child that suffered so much at her hands and the hands of a brutal father. This child has no one except you.
(14 March 2006)
Long Breast-Feeding
Your question is one I have frequently been asked. My answers have usually been misunderstood because everything I write is based on observation and not on ideology. The crucial point is that children always want to conform to their mothers’ wishes. When they feel that their mother is lonely and is emotionally and sexually dependent on the continuation of breast-feeding, then they will behave, up to the age of seven years, in such a way that she believes they still need the breast. To my mind, to enjoy this response is a selfish abuse of the child’s real need for autonomy. The upshot may be that the opportunities for developing self-awareness offered by life at the age of two, three, or four may be missed out on, thus cementing almost lifelong dependence on the mother. As always, what we need to ask here is the extent to which our behavior is dictated by our own childhood (mother) and to which we feel free to recognize the true needs of the child. In some tribes greatly admired and emulated by many women, children are breast-fed for a long time as a way of preventing another pregnancy. But as soon as a new child is born, the older child is weaned from one day to the next and left to its own devices, while the mother turns to the care of the newborn child with the same zeal. Was it the needs of the child that she was attempting to gratify for many years, or her own?
(16 March 2006)
Illusions of Love
You have definitely not killed off your feelings, otherwise your letter and your sufferings would not have moved me as they did. My impression is that your intellect is not an escape (as it is with so many people) but a source of strength. And if you allow yourself to make full use of that strength, you will manage to free yourself from your confusion by relinquishing your self-destructive love for your father and giving it to the little girl who was ignored, betrayed, and misled by both parents.
Perhaps you think you could never give up this love because it is stronger than you are. Many women believe this, if they are still somehow living in their own childhood and have never been allowed to grow up. But you are mistaken. As an adult, you are stronger than this love, and you can free yourself of it once you realize that you no longer need it. In childhood you were dependent on that love. Because you were forced to grow up with a brutal stepfather and a mendacious mother, your illusions of love for your biological father were indispensable for your inner self. But now they are destroying and confusing you. Why should you (have to) love a father who treated you like dirt, who inflicted so much suffering on you, who destroyed your self-respect? You owe him no love, only the anger that you are holding back in order to be a good girl and to be loved and finally accepted for what you are by someone who is obviously incapable of love. But this self-subjection is destroying your dignity and generating fear in the relationships you enter into. In those relationships you fear the effects of your love for your father. And you are right.
(26 March 2006)
Freeing the Child Within from Feelings of Guilt
Your letter is harrowing because it so clearly pronounces what others feel but never dare to express. At the end of it you ask, “What else can I do but to perceive and accept the lamenting and the tears of the child within as part of myself?” Perhaps my response will shock you, but I can only answer by saying what I think. It is not enough to perceive the tearful child as long as we still “love” the parents who caused its sufferings. Most people blame themselves for their parents’ cruel behavior because they still feel attached to them. By doing so, they betray the tearful child and leave it in the custody of the parents for life instead of rescuing it from them.
You were never to blame for your parents’ addictions and evasions. Never! And you are equally blameless now. Try to free yourself of the feelings of blame that have been foisted onto you. Children are not responsible for changing their parents. Only the parents can do that, if they wish to.
(21 April 2006)
Lost Childhood
You write: “This time I want to open myself to find out what happened to me psychologically in those nine years of darkness. I would dearly like to know, though I am fairly sure (no idea why) that it will be a great strain for me.” Why do you have “no idea,” although you recount very clearly what happened and give a detailed account of the misery, rejection, and total abandonment you experienced in your childhood? It comes apparent from what you say that you know a great deal but prefer not to believe it, not to see the truth of it because that would have killed you when you were small. You fear that pain as if you were still a child. But you are not. You know this, and you want to admit to the pain for the sake of your children, but also—fortunately—for the sake of the little girl you once were, the little girl no one showed any understanding for, the little girl who had to learn not to feel. Now you want to open up to your feelings, and I have no doubt that you will succeed. I hope you will manage to do what your mother should have done: to discover the richly endowed, intelligent, bright, life-affirming girl you were and love her for what she is. For a long time—much too long—you have treated yourself the way your mother treated you. No wonder you cannot stand her company. The rage that will hopefully materialize at some point is fully justified.
(26 April 2006)
No Longer in Danger
“None of this is easy,” you write. I believe you, but I must add that this ordeal is right and proper and absolutely necessary. And you will succeed. You ask whether it is usual to have so many early memories. No, it is anything but usual; in my experience it is very rare. But it is quite normal for bad memories to be played down, which is something you do to excess. You are thirty-nine, and only a few days ago (!) you realized that your mother is not some perfect, supernatural being. Where have you been living? Was it your many dependencies that alienated you from reality? You know a great deal, but you do not allow yourself to draw conclusions from it. Why? You tell me yourself that you were thrashed from one end of the house to the other when you were small. What did you do with this knowledge to stop yourself from breaking out in a towering rage at the thought of it? You have grown up now. As you so rightly say, no one can beat you any longer. So what do you fear today?
If you let yourself feel the harm your parents have done to you with their exaggerated expectations and complete lack of understanding, leaving you alone at night, beating you black and blue, destroying your (conscious) feelings (which luckily live on in your body), then you will possibly give up your dependencies very quickly. They are the price you had to pay as a child in order not to see what your parents were really like and how destructive their treatment was. But now you are no longer a child, and you can afford to take a very close look, knowing that you are no longer in danger.
(27 April 2006)
What Now?
Your letter, your freedom to see, and your need to share your absolutely crucial knowledge have both gratified and surprised me, because such a clear-cut attitude is extremely rare. What normally paralyzes these abilities is the fear of the abused child in the face of the abusive parents and the strong attachment to them. In The Truth Will Set You Free, I attempt to explain the origins of this almost universal emotional blindness as the product of mental blockades in the first few years of life. But you appear to have escaped that fate and genuinely want to know how your childhood has marked you. How have you managed to preserve this healthy curiosity? Did you have influential “helping witnesses” who encouraged you to keep your eyes open for abuse?
You ask where you can find others with whom you can enter into an exchange on your insights. I do not know, but I have no doubt that you will find such people as soon as you have identified yourself and your own story. Then you will no longer let yourself be deceived by lies and fine-sounding bunkum. Perhaps the Internet can help you in your search.
(9 May 2006)
Where Is the Logic?
The logic is clear. It consists in sparing the parents, playing down their cruelties, denying our own true feelings and our knowledge. At all costs. What else must a father say beyond “I’ll kill you one day!” for a daughter to consider herself mistreated?
(18 May 2006)
Fear of Fear
You cannot force memories to return, neither with meditation nor autogenic training. And everything that is forced is no good to you anyway. To get nearer the child you once were and empathize with her sufferings, you might try questioning your body when it draws attention to itself with symptoms. What does your “illness” consist in? Can you describe it? Can you say what emotions figure when the symptoms recur? Fear? Shame? Anger? Try to commit your dialogue with your body to paper, preferably lying down. And if you do decide in favor of therapy, read my FAQ list beforehand. If you are afraid of asking your potential therapist the questions you find there, do not attempt to suppress that fear, give in to it! It may tell you more about your early childhood than enforced metaphorical but unemotional memories or neurological examinations. You need not be afraid of your fear, it is always rooted in your childhood. But this can only be understood if we do not flee from this feeling but take it seriously. No one actively wants to feel how terrible it was to fear our young parents when we were tiny, to see them lose control, hear them ranting and raving, and in the end to be blamed for their anger. But as adults we quickly realize that this happens everywhere. We only have to watch young parents on the street. Usually, however, we have no access to the feelings this kind of behavior should arouse (memories).
(1 June 2006)
The Power of Repression
Of course, you have repressed most of what you’ve been through. If you hadn’t, you would not have survived that hell. But you don’t need to go in search of countless memories. You are fourteen years old, your feelings are awakening, the way they always do in puberty, you have an inkling of what life has to offer. Then your mother comes along and warns you of the devil so as not to have to recall her own repressed traumas. In this way you and your vitality are sacrificed. And now you are repeating your mother’s behavior, over and over again. You are making progress, you can feel the life you have within you. But you will not allow yourself to do so because you are still just as much a slave to the voice of your mother as you were when you were fourteen. With the help of this one memory, keep trying to work on the problem. You will see that the devil will not come to get you. Instead, you will banish him for good.
(9 June 2006)
Reducing Self-Blame
You seem to have come a long way, and you know a great deal about the story of the child you once were. This helps you to see all the connections. The more empathy you display for that child, the more likely she is to tell you with the help of your body and your dreams how dreadfully she suffered when she was forced to blame herself for all the ill-treatment she received and was not allowed to see who was really to blame. You will listen carefully to all these communications, and you will constantly have to remind the child within that she was a victim of abuse and that there is absolutely no justification for the cruelties inflicted on her. In this way, the child you once were will finally have an “enlightened witness” who can enable her to become a feeling adult.
(12 June 2006)
Fantasies
I can readily imagine that your fantasies provide you with a private space where you can develop your thoughts and sense your feelings without exposing yourself to the fears you were subjected to in reality as a child. This is a creative achievement, and it will give you the strength to face up to reality without fear in future, should this be necessary. To my knowledge there is no literature on this subject, but you can collect your observations, write them down, and later publish something of your own. At the moment your “intact world” is perhaps itself a kind of “helping witness” for you.
(14 June 2006)
Tomorrow’s Perpetrators?
Your remarks are based on a misunderstanding. I have pointed out very frequently that in my view every perpetrator was once a victim. But this does not mean that every victim has to become a perpetrator. Only those who deny their childhood sufferings and play them down or sneer at them are in danger of becoming perpetrators. Those able to take their sufferings seriously do not need to avenge themselves on others. People who have received affectionate attention in childhood do not carry destructive potential around with them, they are not time bombs, they feel empathy for themselves and others. But since most of the torments suffered in childhood are unknown because they have been denied, and since childhood is often idealized, we sometimes hear it asserted that there are destructive people who had a good childhood. This I believe to be inconceivable. Only emotional awareness of what happened to us in childhood and empathy for the children we once were can protect us from the blind repetition of our own unconscious sufferings.
(16 June 2006)
A Miracle
I was shocked when I read the account you have sent me. It is no wonder that after such a dreadful childhood you should have suffered so much in your marriage and with your children. Once we have learned at a very early stage to put up with cruelty in silence, we continue to do so and consider this quite normal. The real miracle is that you have now seen through this system and that you can finally see, feel, and say what was inflicted on you. This is rare because, as I have often experienced, the severity of the cruelties done to us is proportional to our desire to defend our parents and understand them, hoping perhaps to earn their love in this way in spite of all. But you appear to have freed yourself of this compulsion. Though you may still experience setbacks, you have already achieved such a high degree of awareness that you will no longer be tempted by emotional bribery. I hope you’ll have positive encounters in the future with people who have achieved the same awareness as you have and have overcome their childhood fears, at least in part.
(17 June 2006)
What Should I Do?
You write: “He changes her diapers and wants me to watch.” Perhaps this is a more or less conscious plea for help. What stops you from telling your brother what you have observed and asking him whether he knows that these sexually tinged “games” with his daughter’s body will have severe lifelong consequences for her? Is it conceivable that her life is just as indifferent to him as his own was to his parents? A child is not a toy; a child is a person whose dignity must be respected. Today ignorance of this fact can get a person put in prison. Your brother’s reaction will tell you whether you should bring a charge against him or whether you can expect him to change his ways.
(19 June 2006)
Why So Few?
When did people start abusing their children? I do not know. In the 1980s there was a spate of feminist publications full of accounts of an early matriarchal community in which there was allegedly no violence and everyone lived together in peace. I have no way of knowing whether this is true, but today I see that, in terms of violence, women are no less guilty than men. Unfortunately, the people they are most likely to do violence to are babies and small children. Accordingly, the question that interests me is not the theoretical issue of what things were like earlier, but rather what I see now, and what other people prefer not to see because it causes them pain. Speculating about earlier times does no harm, but neither does it suggest any solutions for the damage done to children at a tender age. The idea that things were better in the “old days” stems perhaps from our childhood, a time when we found it impossible to believe that people can be so cruel to such tiny creatures. This made us hark back to better times. I do not know whether they actually existed. Was there ever such a place as Paradise? And if there was, why did God set up such cruel commandments in that Paradise? Why should human beings not eat from the tree of knowledge?
(20 June 2006)
Mental Blockades
Today there are so few people who do not take pills, smoke cigarettes, or drink alcohol. Most of them resort to these things to achieve an artificial state of well-being that can divert their attention from unpleasant thoughts, rather than prompting them to try to understand them. So how can they appreciate their true meaning or even try to? How can they realize that these feelings are their true friends, attempting to put them on a track that would lead to self-knowledge? Experience is the only thing that can bring this home to them. You have had this experience, and now, to your astonishment, you find that the quality of your life has definitely changed for the better. But you will not be able to explain this to someone in the grip of the products manufactured by the pharmaceutical industry. They will not be able to listen to you. They will carry on “loving” their parents until they run into a crisis and suffer from depression or attacks of panic fear or both. But there are allegedly “effective” remedies for that as well. Extreme intelligence is no safeguard. These people will use those remedies as a drug to help them deny their own truth. Why do they do this? Because they are driven by the panic fear felt by the children they once were at the prospects of more beatings if they should dare to see the truth or speak out about it.
So all I can say in response to your question about why so few people want to uncover their own histories is that the overwhelming majority of people in this world were beaten in early childhood.
(22 June 2006)
An Attempt to Explain the Origins
To small children, their parents are omnipotent, omniscient, loving gods. Invariably. If they experience things that contradict this view, if their loving father shouts at them and hits them, then they will try to “explain” this by blaming themselves in an attempt to salvage the immaculacy of the gods they need to survive. In my view, this infant strategy perpetuates itself in the attempts by theologians, and also many philosophers, to preserve the childlike image of God. Why did the loving Father sacrifice His son and let him be crucified? To redeem us from our sins. Why did He forbid us to attain knowledge immediately after Creation (birth) and before any “sin” had been committed? Certainly for our own good. We do not need to understand His motives because we believe in His love. Why does He permit wars, child abuse, and senseless murders if He is omnipotent and could therefore help us? Because we are evil and deserve no better. One could carry on this vein and make a nice fable out of it. But it has nothing to do with the reality of a feeling human being who does not need to live with obvious contradictions.
(22 June 2006)
You Cannot Please Everyone
Telling a child in nursery school that he is to blame for his caregiver’s stomach ulcer is unconscionable. Perhaps this caregiver had to tolerate this kind of assertion in silence as a child so as not to risk punishment. But you do not need to please colleagues like this because you know what you are doing and the reactions of the children will confirm that you were right to do so. If you side with the children, you may well be attacked by your colleagues. But you will know why, and your knowledge will give you the strength not to be deflected from your path. I wish you the courage to stand by your own feelings.
(29 June 2006)
Allergies
Actually, you have already provided the answers to the questions you ask me. Obviously there are emotions that you are not yet able to admit to, perhaps because they are too painful or because you are afraid of saying no and running the risk of losing someone (as you graphically illustrate yourself). But then your body will say no in the form of an allergy, and it will no longer need to do this once you let those feared emotions live. After all that you have achieved so far, you will definitely be able to do this at some point. Take your time. Having yourself desensitized is probably counterproductive. After all, it is your regained sensitivity that has guided you to a clear-sighted view and to new health. The allergy is the language of your body. As soon as you manage to understand it, the allergy will disappear.
(4 July 2006)
My Life
Your childhood was terrible, and of course you now urgently need an “enlightened witness” who will stand by you with his indignation and display his true feelings instead of concealing them behind a routine mask of neutrality. But psychoanalysts’ training does not allow them to do this, which is why you quite rightly sense that this cannot be the path for you to take. Your description and your criticism of the situation are completely clear and absolutely plausible. You ask me what you should do, but at the same time you add: “Whatever happens, I shall have to stay with this analyst because otherwise my health insurance will not pay for my treatment.” This sentence reminds me of a story someone told me years ago. A person is walking down a dimly lit street at night and sees a man looking for something under a lamppost. Asked whether he needs help and what he is looking for, the man replies that he has lost his spectacles. “Are you sure you lost them here?” the other person asks. “No,” is the reply, “I may have lost them further down the street, but it’s dark down there, so I can only look for them here, where there’s more light.” This story illustrates the situation of all children dependent on the understanding, love, and respect of their parents, though all they ever get from them is exploitation, humiliation, and physical cruelty. But they never stop waiting for love from people who are incapable of true affection. They have no choice. They do not know that there is anything else but abuse (which they cannot recognize as such). But adults are not dependent on self-deception and the belief that there is no other path they can take. Alternatives always exist, once one is prepared to see how one was deceived as a child and resolves not to be treated in this way any longer. Your insurance company may be playing the role of your parents or the lamppost. It is there to “serve” you. But the “services” of your parents did you severe harm, and one day you will have to feel the anger this has aroused in you. If you can find someone to assist you with empathy for your anger, you will discover the possibilities open to you and relinquish the attachments that have forced you to deceive yourself. Your letter proves that you are capable of seeing the truth of your childhood, step-by-step, that you no longer want to tolerate, play down, or understand the cruelties inflicted on you.
(6 July 2006)
Blind Man’s Bluff
I am very glad to hear that you can make use of my books in your practice. How much confusion and new suffering could be avoided if doctors were prepared to inform themselves of the causes of illness. Sometimes one conversation with a patient would suffice to set the healing process in train. Only the body has these healing powers, not medication. If a doctor were merely to ask a person suffering from asthma, an allergy, a stomach ailment, or a skin disease about their childhood—for example, whether they were beaten or tormented in other ways—then in most cases the truth would come to light, unfiltered, a truth that has been waiting to communicate itself for decades. This would immediately cast light on the whole development of the symptoms and on the early feelings of helplessness that the patient has been fearing all this time, although the reasons for it no longer exist. But doctors shy away from such questions, preferring to prescribe all kinds of medication designed to suppress and camouflage bodily knowledge. The pharmaceutical industry does the rest. Countless advertisements for Valium, Viagra, and antidepressants pop onto our computer screens every day, thus pulling the wool over the eyes of millions. These dupes are all people who suffer from the effects of their own childhood. They are not allowed to know what they are suffering from because society avoids this issue like the plague, and the experts in the health system all take part in this game of blind man’s bluff. If a man is suffering from impotence, his body is telling him that he is repressing strongly negative emotions against one particular woman, or against women in general, or against his mother, although he believes he loves her. As soon as he can actively experience those “negative” feelings and identify the reason for their repression, his impotence will disappear. But if he takes Viagra, he will move further and further away from his feelings, and finally he will be confronted by other symptoms as well. He will be caught up in a vicious circle, instead of pausing to ask himself the necessary questions. Doctors could do a great deal to help if they were prepared to ask questions about their own lives.
(7 July 2006)
Self-Help Groups for People Abused in Childhood
The idea that a self-help group could help you discover little A. and grow to love her seems quite right to me. I cannot understand how you can have been undergoing therapy for five years but only realized a few months ago that you were an abused child. What were you doing in those five years? My impression from your letter is that you now know precisely what you are looking for. You know what you are after, so you will realize very quickly whether a group is right for you or not. If it is not, then you can try another one. You need not fear that you will stop “functioning” if you get closer to your own personal truth. We do not come into the world to function, but to live. For this we need contact with our own histories, our early emotions, and our roots. Once you learn to understand your feelings, you will understand your husband and your son better. I wish you the strength to achieve the goals you have set yourself.
(17 July 2006)
Neglect
You write: “I have not always had a positive perception of my parents and the circumstances of my life. But looking back, I find it necessary to admit that my parents were always good to me, benevolent and helpful. The fact that I was unable to perceive this for so long was not the fault of circumstances but of my own perception. I have never taken a positive view of others and the things around me. Accordingly, I have always felt them to be alien and threatening.”
Obviously, you see your mistrust as an error on your part and not as the consequence of treatment that made you mistrustful. This view of things appears to help you, and it is not for me to correct you.
Instead, I should like to thank you for your important contribution. In the course of this correspondence I have obviously failed to make it clear that I consider neglect of a child and of its need for closeness and stimulation in the early years as a form of mistreatment. You are absolutely right to point out that the first few months have a very decisive influence. This is the time when so-called “primal trust” should normally form. In the parents’ absence it can hardly do that.
(18 July 2006)
The Abandoned Child
When a child is abandoned, his very existence is threatened. He cannot help himself, and his psychic integrity is also in danger if he has to distort himself, repress his true emotions (rage and despair), and keep smiling to earn the affection of others. This generates a great deal of fear. Perhaps the reason you can feel this now for the first time is the fact that as an adult you are no longer exposed to this danger. You are no longer forced to please others; you can admit to, and display, your true feelings, but only to people who can do the same and are open and frank with you. If you feel that this is not possible, that others are afraid of your own true self, then you will also sense the existential fear of the child that was forced to give himself up in order to be “loved.” This is only too understandable, but perhaps this fear will go away if you remain true to your feelings and try to understand them. This is something an abandoned child cannot afford to do. But an adult can. Adults can never again be abandoned in this way, as long as they remain true to their own selves.
(24 July 2006)
Abuse Real or Imagined?
You write: “When I was small, I was asleep in my bed when my father hit me with his belt, waking me up by doing so. Since then, I have always been an apprehensive sleeper. I still have no idea why he hit me. He used to throw shoes at me and my sister. He stood guard over us when we were doing our homework, and if I made a mistake he would hit me on the back of the head.” This makes it obvious that you were a severely abused child. You can only free yourself of the consequences if you have no more doubts about the fact. But you appear to be a long way from this goal, which is why you let your “boyfriend” still treat you as if you were a defenseless child. But you are not. You are an intelligent adult woman, but your fear and denial make it impossible for you to realize that. This is clearly expressed in your next hesitant sentence: “Now I ask myself whether this image of men that manifested itself in my mind all those years might (!!!) have something to do with my father and my childhood. All my ex-boyfriends were drug-dependent, aggressive, in prison, or psychotic. They all treated me badly, then put the blame on me and left me.” These two quotes show that you are fully aware of your situation but are still afraid to express the truth because unconsciously you still expect the blows of your brutal father or the boyfriends who resembled him. But you no longer need expose yourself to such dangers. It is up to you to leave a man as soon as he displays features similar to those of your father. However, to do that, you must take your knowledge about both your parents absolutely seriously and no longer evade it. No such dangers threaten you today unless you expose yourself to them in order to preserve the flattering image of your parents.
(26 July 2006)
A Childhood without Witnesses
You had an appalling childhood. It is distressing to think that there was no one who could confirm the fact, so that you have been constantly deceived on this point. But now you have hit on the idea of writing to me, and when we publish your letter, you will have many empathic witnesses who will express their indignation at your mother’s behavior. With this letter you have resolved to become your own “enlightened witness,” and this is the best thing you could have done. You describe your childhood very clearly in a way that invites empathy, but your anger and bitterness at so much brutality, hunger for power, and stupidity still appear to be blocked off. This is hardly surprising. You had to suppress these strong emotions for so long because there was no one to see your plight in the prison guarded over by a severely disturbed mother. Now you have perceived them, and I hope that your therapist can help you live out the strong emotions you were unable to admit to earlier. You have the gift of clear expression; do not let anyone take that away from you. It verges on a miracle that you should have seen through the tissue of lies woven by your mother. You can only help yourself with the courage to see your own truth. I wish you the same clarity of purpose in the future.
(30 July 2006)
How Can I Tell My Parents about My Sufferings?
On no account should you try to talk to your parents. Your body has quite rightly warned you not to do so. We cannot expect people who had so little compassion for their child to become wiser or more humane with age. Your father still displays the same malevolence at the age of ninety. It is right for your body to rebel against such an exchange and to protect you from new injuries. Take its warnings seriously!
In your childhood there was no one to see how you were suffering. Accordingly, your body was forced to develop a symptom to draw attention to your distress, but this was all to no avail. Now you understandably want to write about it and make your parents look your way—at long last! But they are unlikely to do that. Everything you write indicates that they are still as impervious as ever. What you might do is write to the little girl you once were, thus becoming the enlightened witness she so sorely missed. Write to her everything you can remember, tell her how terrible it all was. Ask her how she felt when she was forced to apologize after receiving another beating. Use this dialogue to reveal all the brutality you were exposed to, admit to your feelings of rage, and let yourself respond with horror to this inhumanity. It may be that the symptom will be temporarily aggravated by your arousal, but in time it will almost certainly disappear once you give expression to your indignation and stay in contact with yourself as a little girl. If you give that child someone to talk to, she will no longer need to express herself with physical symptoms. She can use words that only you will hear because you want to hear them and be receptive to them.
(2 August 2006)
Overcoming Fear
You write: “I have the impression that I create problems where none exist. I feel badly when I see the problems other people have to deal with and compare them with the trivialities I rack my brains over.” Who is saying this? Have you identified so completely with your parents’ viewpoint that you are prepared to play down your childhood sufferings without noticing it? If writing does you good, try writing to the little girl you once were, asking her how she felt when she was slapped in the face. Can she remember how she was soundly “spanked”? I believe that this might help you get in touch with the strong emotions that are still blocked off. The reason I believe this is the fact that you so obviously want to do so. The fact that this wish is interfered with by your fear of your parents need not surprise us; it is quite normal. But you seem to have gone in search of yourself, over and over again, so one day you will overcome that fear. I wish you every success in your future attempts.
(3 August 2006)
Dreams instead of Memories
You write: “Try as I may, I have no memory of actual cruelty. But I have terrible dreams that have frequently dogged me for years at a stretch.” But your dreams are your memories. In a highly ingenious way, and with rare clarity, they are telling you what you had to bear as a totally dependent child, something you did not want to know for decades (no cruelty!). In contrast to your assertions, your dreams are obstinately telling you about the constant threats, the monstrously exaggerated demands, and the unending deception you were subjected to. You need no longer rack your brains for concrete memories; your body obviously knows the whole story. What you have yet to acquire is compassion with the little boy who was given the job of saving his parents at the cost of his own life (genuine feelings). You have yet to feel the boundless indignation at parents trying their best to foist their serious perversions onto their child and alienating him from his own heart in the process.
But now your true feelings (rage and disgust) do appear to be making themselves felt. They are still muted, hesitant, and fearful (not without reason, of course), but they are authentic. That gives you the chance, as an adult, to win back your own “heart.” Merely by writing this letter you have abandoned your loneliness and the silence imposed on you. You have told your story to other empathic people and you have started to find your way out of the mendacity and the denial the intelligent child was forced to live in, for all his intelligence. Thanks to your dreams, you have started to see your life in a clearer light.
(5 August 2006)
I Have What It Takes
You write that despite your terrible childhood you are now able to live the way you always wanted to, that you have freed yourself of your guilt feelings, and are also able to admit to feelings of anger when the situation warrants that, above all anger at your parents. This liberation is quite definitely attributable to the fact that you no longer need to fear your parents as you did in childhood, nor do you need to sympathize with them as most people do, because you have the courage to see how they treated you. But where did you get the courage to trust your perceptions rather than allowing yourself to be confused, as is the case with almost all abused children? Might it be that, as a child, you were not alone with your knowledge because you received support from older siblings who also suffered seriously at the hands of your parents? Your brother’s suicide may be an indication in this direction. What do you think of my conjecture?
(6 August 2006)
Brother as “Enlightened Witness”
The sincere love and care provided by your brother (your “enlightened witness”) rescued your integrity, by which I mean your ability to recognize your mother’s cruelty and to engage with its consequences at a later stage. Abused children without witnesses have no choice but to put up with even the worst conceivable tortures, to believe them to be normal, indeed to interpret them as signs of love and affection because they have no opportunity for comparisons. I believe neither in miracles nor the devil. Everything has its causes, good and evil alike. In these unfortunate circumstances you were lucky.
(9 August 2006)
Silent Tears
It is a good thing that you can paint. Much will reveal itself to you of its own accord. Do not try to find anything specific (this never happens intentionally). Just see what you come up with by simply enjoying the activity of painting. This is no contradiction to the tears it is bound to produce. Those tears can be a profound relief for you because they will help you get in touch with your true feelings and emotions. Colors arouse the strongest emotions.
(17 August 2006)
Political Immaturity
Unfortunately, physical “correction” of children did not cease after the war. Most people still consider it a suitable method of bringing children up and are completely unworried about the consequences of such treatment. They blithely tell others of the “good hidings” they received (because this is allegedly quite “normal”) and insist that such beatings were “good for them.” One striking thing about some discussions is that no one inquires how those people who voluntarily threw in their lot with the Hitler regime had been brought up. Accordingly, the assumption still prevails that “normal” parenting cannot do any harm. In discussions about the naïveté of young people signing up for national service of their own accord (this happened in the First World War as well), it is frequently remarked, quite casually, that they were “hardly any more than children.” Obviously, we prefer to forget that political blindness affected not only young people but millions of adults, including writers like the German playwright Gerhart Hauptmann and philosophers like Martin Heidegger. I believe that, almost without exception, those millions were so cruel because they had had obedience drilled into them by physical punishment. This kind of upbringing bore fruit. As adults, these abused children were unable to identify the cruelty of Hitler’s plans. Some unconsciously took advantage of this opportunity to avenge themselves on scapegoats for the insane punishments inflicted on them by their parents, thus turning into active persecutors of innocent people. Others remained passive and swam with the current. Unfortunately, only very few people permit themselves to understand this dynamic. Abused when they were young, they still fear horrendous punishment if they allow themselves to identify the cruelty of their own upbringing and feel the sufferings of the helpless children they once were. As long as they deceive themselves and believe that they deserved those thrashings and that their childhood was “quite all right” in that respect, they need not expose themselves to fear. Today old men who had signed up for the SS when they were young are sometimes upbraided for their connivance. But no one ever asks them: “How did you feel in your parents’ home? Were you allowed to defend yourself against absurd punishment? Were you in fact allowed to identify its futility and cruelty? What makes you so afraid of admitting to something that may have been the consequence of your upbringing rather than your own free will? Was your whole upbringing geared to teaching you obedience rather than allowing you to decide for yourself?” Thus everything that happened prior to puberty remains in the dark. We often seem to think that life begins at the age of fifteen. Although childhood can tell us so much that might wake us up, it is a subject passed over in silence. But in fact it is a mine of information that needs to be unearthed if we want to preserve ourselves from the future consequences of politic naïveté and blindness. Today this is more necessary than ever.
(19 August 2006)
Illness as a Way Out?
Yes, if there is no other way out, an abused child will express himself by means of illness. Luckily, you see the connections and do not deny the pain inflicted on you in childhood. This is rare in cancer patients. But you tell me that you cannot establish contact with your anger. Try to imagine that you are sitting at table, at your present age, with two giants who keep stuffing something into your mouth. They tell you that you will die if you don’t swallow it. You believe them because they’re armed. You don’t want to die, so you gag and swallow the disgusting stuff, cod-liver oil and all. Perhaps now you will be able to feel your rage and stop sparing your parents, who exposed you to such torments without the slightest compunction.
The tragic thing is that you have been forbidden to express your anger. This fear of your parents has made you ill because you were cut off from your strong emotions for so long. But now you have the chance to regain your health because you are looking for your anger, and I have no doubt that you will find it. The reason why I am so confident is that today there is no more punishment threatening you, as long as you are prepared to know and feel how inhumanly you were treated by your parents. Your illness must surely leave you in no doubt about the fact—or am I wrong?
(27 August 2006)
Who Is Perverted?
I am glad that your dreams are trying to guide you. In my view, the child on your lap is no one other than you. It is wonderful that you want to care for him, that is all you need to restore your health. But you are constantly interrupted in this important task by the perversity of your mother, whom you still believe like a little child. The shards of glass you spit out are your mother’s lies and distortions of the facts. In your waking life you cannot see through them for fear of punishment. But in your dreams you keep on spitting out this poison. The truly perverted element in your life is your mother. You have always had to swallow this poison, right from the start of your life. Now you will have to keep on vomiting until all her lies, warnings, and intimidations have been expelled. Then you will stop believing all this rubbish and devote your attention to the child telling you clearly who you are and where you belong, and that you are not alone in your search. There are other people looking for their own truth, but you will only find yours when you have the courage to see that what you thought to be inconceivable was in fact real.
(2 November 2006)
Questions from a School Class
(6 November 2006)
Jehovah’s Witnesses
You write: “I find it very difficult to fathom my deepest feelings. It is as if there were something blocking me off from them, so I make very little progress. Sometimes it goes so far that I have no confidence left in myself and cannot assert myself at all.” In this you share the fate of countless individuals who have experienced similar things, particularly if they grew up in a cult. But what distinguishes you from such people is the clarity of your memories and your awareness of the immense and terrible wrongs that have been done to you. Now it is essential to feel your own revulsion at all the crimes committed on that small, helpless, and innocent girl who had no one to turn to for protection. You must allow yourself this indignation and go in search of people who will share it with you. Psychiatrists normally do not do this; they prescribe medication to tranquilize you instead. But the effect is counterproductive. When you are fully aware of the extent of those horrors, you should not be tranquil. You have been tranquil for long enough because you had no alternative. Only now can you start listening to your body and defending its rights. You can give it your love and your understanding for its anger, which is absolutely justified.
You should take your “negative” thoughts seriously and listen to them. Those thoughts come from within yourself, they are telling your story. How can you expect to live an enjoyable life if you accept without protest that an attempt has been made to obliterate you? Now you are at a point where you have started to rebel against such oblivion, and initially this is probably very tiring. This is a beginning. If you want therapy, then please read the FAQ list first (see chapter 14, “How to Find the Right Therapist”). I wish you courage, and I hope that despite your fears and your experiences of cult terror you will find the strength to defend yourself against absurdity and crime.
(15 November 2006)
Confusion from Therapy
You ask: “Can one achieve one’s integrity at any age, find oneself beautiful and worthy of living, even if one is ugly?” Yes, you can, at any age, provided you are determined to take your own feelings, memories, and dreams seriously and not let yourself be put off the track by clueless therapists. You have clear memories of revulsion at your stepfather and your mother. This is your truth, and your therapists have been trying to talk you out of seeing it as such with psychoanalytic interpretations. Hence your guilt feelings. Your body gives you important information and signals. Let yourself be guided by them. You have been told that you are ugly, and you think of yourself that way because you do not admit to your true feelings. Once you can do that, you will discover your beauty. You write: “My desire is, at least once before I die, to have been myself, just once, to feel and know what it is like…. I have no one I can talk to about it…. Former friends and the therapists I consulted all said that I am impossibly idealistic, that I am living in a dream, that I should wake up. What I want simply does not exist.” Nonsense! Of course it exists. Everyone has the right to be themselves. Whatever age you are and however severely you were abused and humiliated in childhood, you have the chance to rebel, to feel your anger, understand it, and allow it to express itself so that you can eradicate the traces of the crimes perpetrated on you. Childhood is not just a stage in life, it is the basis of our whole existence. You cannot “get rid of it.” But you can integrate it and become aware of it. In my view this is something we must do if we do not want to remain ill and continue to suffer. I wish you the courage to want to see your childhood.
(3 December 2006)
Torn Apart: My Life or My Parents’
Where do you get this idea that the lives and the happiness of your parents are only assured if you make yourself unhappy and ill and refrain from leading your own life? Is this some kind of law? Was this absurd and abominable responsibility imposed on you so early that you have never dared to free yourself of it? Now, fortunately, you appear to have had enough of it. Your letter indicates that you are still full of expectations that cannot be fulfilled. This is why it hurt you to send it. How can people who have never shown any understanding for you over the last twenty years suddenly be able to do so? I presume that you will sleep better and start enjoying your food if you decide not to send the letter and see how your body reacts. You are much too intelligent to continue putting up with so much hypocrisy without staying ill as a result. In fact, your body displays enormous vitality and strength by making you suffer so much for your attempts to adjust to what you call “smarminess.” Listen to it, it is the voice of the little girl tormented first by her parents and now by you. Why should you play down her sufferings? Because religion tells you to? I cannot imagine a God who would demand that of you and still call himself merciful.
(17 December 2006)
Shaking Off Your Parents
You can shake something off that you have and know, but not something you have no knowledge of. Parents we have never looked in the face because we were afraid to do so can frequently ensconce themselves in our hearts and bodies. Finding them there and then freeing ourselves of them is no easy task. Perhaps you can take advantage of the fact that your parents are still alive and allow yourself to see them with the eyes of an adult doing her best to understand the child she once was. You appear to know next to nothing about your sufferings as a child.
(19 December 2006)
Unfeeling
You write: “Can you advise me how to get back out of this dilemma? I see it as an advance that I can actually feel grief, because earlier I was quite unfeeling.” You had to be unfeeling in your early life, and now you can grieve for the child you were. So that child has much to tell you. Why do you want to abandon her again? Why do you want me to help you “get back out”? It would be irresponsible of me to do so. I too see it as an advance that you are finally capable of feeling. Fear of your anger is of course understandable. You would have been beaten if you had defended yourself. But this fear will diminish in the course of time because you will feel assisted by your therapist. Trust your body. It will find the right time for the indignation and the rage you are fully entitled to.
(24 December 2006)
What Should I Do?
You are already doing a great deal of good just by acting differently from most conventional nursery-school teachers. They automatically behave in the way their mothers brought them up, because as children they never dared to question that behavior. It would have been too dangerous. But you have the freedom to cast doubt on absurd injunctions. You might ask, for example: “Why should a child of fourteen months learn to eat with the right hand? If she instinctively reaches for the spoon with her left hand, then perhaps she is left-handed. This is something we must respect, otherwise we will do harm. But even if the child were right-handed, why should she be forced to do something that makes no sense?” The work you are doing is extremely important. It is an attempt to constantly question meaningless behavior, thus shaking your young colleagues’ certainty that their mothers were infallible. Perhaps in this way you can at least contribute to preventing the use of “poisonous pedagogy” in nursery school.
(26 December 2006)
Waiting
I cannot give a general answer to your question. You will have to see what compromises you are able to make and where you have to draw the line. Your body will help you to find that out. And you can trust it. If you want a relationship of the kind we expect from adults, then you have no right to demand abstinence of your mother. You must leave it to her to decide whether she wants to go on drinking or not. But of course you do not need to force yourself to put up with things that get on your nerves. As an adult, you are free. Only children cannot live without their mothers. As adults, this is something we can learn.
(27 December 2006)
Am I Harming Myself?
It is uncommonly painful and infuriating to experience the fact that, although we have been seriously harmed, no one will believe that this is the case, not even our own mother. This is so unsupportable that many people elect to blame themselves and doubt the authenticity of their own (physical!) experience. This can cause very severe confusion, sometimes culminating in schizophrenia. Luckily, you have not let yourself be confused. You see the dangers, though perhaps not the full scope of them. Accordingly, your question is entirely justified. Are you harming yourself by playing down your mother’s guilt? You most certainly are. Full empathy is something you owe the little child you once were, not your mother. That child needs full and unequivocal partiality on your part.
(5 January 2007)
Literature
Thank you for your letter and the quotes you believe to have a rightful place under this heading “Readers’ Letters.” But in fact you are mistaken. These citations are literature. There you will find any number of descriptions of horrific childhood destinies. But as long as the authors present them as literature, the children in them can evade the terrible fear engendered by daring to see through one’s own parents. Most of the letters printed here display that kind of courage. In my eyes this is more than even the finest literature; it is pure, unadulterated truth; it is life itself. I have never come across storytellers or novelists who are able to experience the sufferings of their protagonists as their own. Confronted by this question, they frequently react with raised eyebrows and insist that their products are fictitious. They do not want to admit to the pain of having been tormented by people they loved and expected love of in return. We, the readers, see the children they were when we read their books, but the authors themselves have difficulty in siding with those children and feeling their sufferings. They hope to “heal” themselves with literature. But in my view this hope is futile because the body has no part in the writing of stories. It remains an intellectual exercise.
(6 January 2007)
“Stop Crying, You Only Brought It On Yourself”
You tell the terrible story of your partner as if it were some unavoidable stroke of fate. It is not. Though such tragic stories happen in all cultures, to millions of people all over the world, they would be avoidable if daughters were supported in recognizing the poison that is making them ill. But they do not dare to, and society—therapists included—does not assist them to find out the truth but encourages them to stay blind. Your partner is paying a terrible price for this blindness; it has almost cost her her life and has certainly ruined her health because, as you write, “she does not want to lose her mother’s love.” But what kind of love is it that prompted her mother to look on for years as the child was sexually abused by her uncle and who now attempts to impose silence on her? You can only help her if she wants to help herself. Then you could show her how destructively she was treated by her mother and support her in breaking off all contact with her. As long as she remains dependent on her mother and is not allowed to see her as she is, she is bound to remain ill. Hospitalization or medical treatment would be futile. Could you overcome the effects of poisoning if you had to swallow a new dose of poison every day?
(16 January 2007)
The Torments of Self-Blame
Your mother has actually succeeded in ensuring that your genuine and entirely normal feelings continue to strike fear into you. She imposed extremely severe guilt feelings on you because that way she did not need to question her own behavior. This is tantamount to killing off the emotional life of a child. So it is no wonder that you sometimes hated your mother for that murder, particularly as you were entirely dependent on her as a child. But luckily you were still able to hate her occasionally and perhaps also sense that she deserved that hatred. This rescued your true self. There are people who are completely blocked off from feelings of that kind. Now you quite rightly want to get rid of your guilt feelings. You can do that if you make it clear to yourself that your anger was totally justified. You can write letters to your mother without actually sending them, telling her what she has done to you and how terribly you have suffered as a result. In this way you can give your own self more room to grow, instead of letting yourself be abused to fulfill your mother’s needs and corroborate her versions of the whole matter.
(18 January 2007)
Sexual Interference with Boys
Probably severe punishment would have been the result for you if you had seen through your mother’s unconscious manipulations. She could not allow herself to see how destructively she was behaving toward you, and you have probably taken over this blindness from her. Her sadistic interference with your sleep has left its marks on you to this day. You were forced to go to bed early, then you were woken up in the middle of the night. Normal, uninterrupted sleep was the exception, not the rule, and this has never stopped tormenting you. But you describe these appalling cruelties as if it were not your own life you are writing about. There is no sign of justified anger. I hope that at some stage you will gain access to your understandable indignation.
(27 January 2007)
Loving the Child Within
You say that you do not want to expose the “child within” to any more dangers, that you want to protect her and give her your love, as well as full understanding. It is a major step forward when we stop abusing that child in the same way our parents did when we were small. I wish you (and that child) the courage and determination to carry on as you have begun. Even if you encounter setbacks, you will probably never forget how you felt yesterday when you wrote those two letters. This feeling will be your guide if you should ever stray away from the path you have embarked on and let yourself be tormented by the old guilt feelings that hurt the child within. Those letters are your promise never to leave that child on her own again.
(8 February 2007)
Hospitalization
Your questions are entirely justified. Aggressive dreams and fantasies are susceptible of understanding, particularly if we know the reason for them. Perhaps you could talk to the boy about those reasons? Try not to spare his parents, even if they are your friends, and do your best to take his sufferings completely seriously. Without your aid as an empathic witness, this is something he will hardly dare to do himself. No one at a psychiatric hospital will do that either. He will be given medication that will only exacerbate his profound confusion. I cannot say whether you will be lucky enough to find a wiser psychologist. Can your son talk to the boy about his childhood?
(13 February 2007)
Delusions
The picture you paint is alarming, but unfortunately it seems to be realistic. Present-day psychiatry appears to be laboring under the delusion that modern medication provides all the resources needed to drive out the demons of the past (the abuse suffered), both in patients and doctors. This leads to the grotesque denial of the causes of human suffering and also of fundamental logic. Unfortunately, I know of no hospital anywhere in the world where this is not the case, which of course does not necessarily mean that they do not exist. You will have to search. Luckily, you appreciate the logical connections. Might it be that your son’s “psychosis” helps him to disbelieve his own traumatic experiences and hence to spare his father? Perhaps it would help if you and your husband told him how he was treated as a child and that unfortunately you have only now realized how wrong and presumably painful this was for him.
(13 February 2007)
Epigenetics—the Influence of Experience on the Genes!
I watched the program you refer to on television. I have not the slightest doubt that the first three to four years have the greatest impact on a person’s character and emotional development, a process that begins at the prenatal stage. To understand this, we need to have got in touch at least once with the feelings of the little children we once were, children that may have grown up in an emotional vacuum or complete and utter horror. This is what I call torture. Only very few people are prepared to embark on such a journey into the heart of their own selves, and scientists are constantly devising theories to avoid the childhood factor and provide a genetic explanation for irrational behavior. As far as “epigenetics” is concerned, I consider it highly problematic to assert that the hunger suffered by the grandparents should have more impact on the lives of their grandchildren than the experiences of those grandchildren, either as the victims of beatings and other torments or as the recipients of love and respect. If extreme affective hunger dogs a child in its future life, then that is probably due to a family tradition of hard-heartedness and cruel treatment. It has nothing to do with the lack of food one hundred years ago. It is easier and more convenient to trace the causes back so far because this helps us avoid feeling our own pain. But that has nothing to do with scientific thinking; it is merely the flight from demonstrable facts.
(25 February 2007)
How Can I Tell My Daughter?
You have already done the right thing. You have told your little daughter the truth, and she has understood. This does not surprise me. Usually, children will understand readily enough if they are told the truth, unlike adults caught up in conventional thinking. People are now making you feel uncertain by trotting out the usual arguments (“every child needs a grandmother”—but why should this be so?). Part of your uncertainty may have to do with your desire for your mother at least to love this child, even if she could not love you. Such hopes are understandable, but they will quite frequently prompt a mother to leave her child with a grandfather who deserves the greatest mistrust and then to be horrified at the abuse he inflicts on her daughter. If the illusion had not been so strong, all this could have been prevented. It may turn out well, but the risk is too great to justify playing with fate like this. Trust your original feeling. Be guided by this feeling and your daughter’s response, not what “people” normally think.
(3 March 2007)
Profound Gratitude and Inquiry
Incontrovertible facts indicate that you were marginalized by your family. Understandably, this both saddens and angers you. But your family insists that they did no such thing. They attempt to talk you out of your own perceptions and to blame you for being so sensitive. This kind of behavior suggests that as a child you were subjected to treatment of this kind for a long time. You tried to believe what you were told instead of trusting to your perceptions. This is how schizophrenia comes about. A child is forced to ignore his or her own perceptions and feelings. As a child you were helpless and at your wits’ end. Now you are not. You feel you are at your wits’ end because now—perhaps for the first time in your life—you are able to experience the feelings of the deceived child so intensely. It is a good thing that you can. Trust your feelings. Later they will show you the right route to follow. They will tell you what you want to do, whether you want to submit to your family’s judgment or not. And you will act in the way that is right for you.
(7 March 2007)
Article on the Erasure of Traumatic Events by a Medicinal Agent
This is an interesting question. Will we be able to snuff out memories of traumatic events in humans in the same way we can with rats? And if we can, what good will this do? You ask whether this is not the same thing as repression. I believe it is. The fact is that we easily forget traumas. We do not suffer so much from conscious memories as we do from compulsive repetition and other symptoms produced by repressed, unconscious memories. In many cases it transpires that conscious awareness of the trauma in the context of our own histories can liberate us from our symptoms. Then the significance of the trauma is real and can be snuffed out for good. So how will “science” of this kind benefit us? Even more victims of tragic Alzheimer’s disease? Would this be a consummation devoutly to be wished? People who want to know nothing about their own histories? We already have medication geared to the obliteration of painful memories. It is designed to combat depression, it works wonders, and many experts consider this the only solution. But many people could not find any meaning in their lives if they were separated from their own histories. Those histories give us the chance to understand our feelings and to behave in given situations in a way that helps us to find the ideal solution. How are we to find our bearings in life if we are only left with the good memories and we can never find out, say, why we suffer from headaches or stomach troubles? This would lead to extreme self-alienation. I fear that this idea of freeing people, like rats, from their unpleasant memories and thus “healing” them will catch on, particularly if the pharmaceutical industry gets interested in the prospect. But perhaps this has happened already and it is already investing money in such research.
(17 March 2007)
Feeling the Anger
Now it appears that the fears stored in your body are beginning to venture into your conscious mind, because at last you can afford to admit to them. As a child, you survived the horrors inflicted on you without being able to put a name to them. Now, as an adult, you have the chance to come to terms with them by feeling the appropriate anger and indignation. This is good. What we consciously feel and can give a name to no longer needs to express itself in physical symptoms.
(I April 2007)
Religion, Christianity, Easter, Child Sacrifice
Thank you for your letter, which I agree with entirely. Unfortunately, opinions like yours are rarely voiced because anger is always felt to be a nuisance. The fact is, though, that repressed anger is a breeding ground for all kinds of illnesses. But neither physicians nor the majority of therapists wish to know that. Of course, the Crucifixion is an example of the sacrifice of a son, and the Old Testament is full of examples of this kind of mentality. All religions prize obedience to the parents as a supreme virtue. So what do we do with our repressed anger? Should we direct it at infidels (enemies) or take refuge in illness instead? It definitely cannot be eliminated, only directed at innocent victims.
(16 April 2007)
Poisonous Pedagogy in Primal Therapy
I heartily disagree with this theory and believe that it does indeed contain traces of poisonous pedagogy, compounded with Buddhist thinking, in which anger and rage are not allowed to exist. These vital and protective emotions are condemned by all religions, though to my mind they are the healthiest, most natural and logical reactions to the pain inflicted on us. Since children are not allowed to feel them, they have to be repressed (unlike sorrow, which is permitted). Neither in the family nor at school can they be felt and expressed in words. Accordingly, they have to remain trapped in our bodies and produce physical symptoms as a way of finding a hearing. If they are taken seriously in adult life and felt in therapy, the symptoms can go away because their sole purpose was to rebel against injustice, cruelty, perversion, mendacity, lies, and hard-heartedness. All this bitterness was locked up in the body. Now, in therapy, the hitherto forbidden emotions have to be experienced in the presence of a therapist who is not afraid of them. But if clients are made to believe that their anger is only a defense against sorrow and the illusion of “false power,” then once again they will be prevented from admitting precisely this emotion into their conscious minds, an emotion that interferes with their bodily functions and that absolutely needs to be released for the sake of the adult’s health. Obviously, such theories originate from the small child’s fear of the next blow, a fear that lives on inside us and permeates so many therapeutic approaches, primal therapy among them. We prefer to be “good,” obedient children and go on crying forever rather than becoming adult and feeling, and rebelling against, the endless injustice we were forced to bear in childhood. In my view this is precisely the risk adults must take.
(18 April 2007)
Poisonous Pedagogy from a Spiritual Perspective?
It appears to have become fashionable to use the word “spirituality” when therapists have become trapped in the blind alley of their own promises. I must admit that I have never understood the meaning or the necessity of this word that could so easily be replaced by others, once we try to think in concrete terms. When I read that authors agree with Buddhist or mystical thinking and understand spirituality as a feeling of communion with the universe, then I imagine the feelings of a small child punished and isolated by the family, then ultimately forgiven and reunited with the universe (the family). Fobbing off clients presumptuous enough to complain about abuse at the hands of their parents in childhood with vague, imprecise concepts may be a source of gratification for therapists still harboring feelings of guilt about their own anger. But in my view this is nothing other than deception, and certainly not a token of successful therapy.
(18 April 2007)
Denying the Child Within
Many people know nothing of the existence of the child within them because fear of their parents has always prevented them from hearing its voice and understanding its language. For this reason there are still many who neither share nor understand our discovery of the tormented child that communicates with us by means of physical symptoms and tells us of the sufferings it had to tolerate and experience. This voice is smothered by self-blame. To assert that no one can hear the child within and that it does not exist is like saying that everyone must be blind because we are blind ourselves. But you are beginning to see through this mechanism. The more successfully you do so, the more you will find out.
(18 April 2007)
Rage and Anger
I am so glad that you have recognized the significance of anger and rage. This realization is usually tabooed, notably in forms of therapy still influenced by poisonous pedagogy. These strong, liberating, and logical emotions are avoided until everything breaks down. No one can be healed if they fear their true and salutary emotions and understand them as something that prevents them from being “good.” Clients are then frequently offered nebulous spirituality as a substitute for the inner vacuum, and everyone thinks they understand the word “spirituality” because they have been accustomed to manipulation since their childhood. They believe that anything is better than the simple truth that they were abused as children. This is why tremendous rage has been building up inside them. They can only free themselves of this rage by no longer denying its existence and by learning to see why it is justified.
(19 April 2007)