“By the shore of the lake there is a girl
twelve years old, watching the water fold and disappear. I walk up behind her, I touch her shoulder, she turns her head—I see my face. She looks through me up at the house. This is the one I have come for. … She does not know any of this will ever stop.
She does not know she is the one
survivor.”
SHARON OLDS
GIVEN THE PAIN OF so many childhoods, there are three riddles: why many people pass the pain on to their children, why many do not, and what makes the difference. Since illness demands and receives more attention than health, there are more answers to the first riddle of why people do pass on their legacy of pain:
Because this kind of childhood patterning runs deep in psyches and wide in cultures.
Because when pain has been intertwined with love and closeness, it’s very difficult to believe that love and closeness can be experienced without pain.
Because many adults are proud of surviving, and therefore believe the damage wasn’t serious, or even that it toughened and helped them.
And perhaps most of all, because our children are the only people on whom we can safely take revenge for what was done to us.
But there is great hope. Though figures vary widely, an umbrella survey of forty studies concluded that only about a fourth to a third of abused children actually grow up to abuse their own children. Linda Sanford cites these figures in Strong at the Broken Places out of justifiable concern that survivors may be stigmatized twice: once by their own suffering, and again by societal assumptions that they will repeat it. (For example, she recounts the case of a mother who was deprived of custody of her children in a divorce case—not because they had been abused, but because she had been abused as a child.) What made the difference for those who were able to break the patterns in which they were raised was the support of family and friends and an ability to be open and angry about their own past abuse.18
Since females are less likely than males to pass on their own violent abuse to others, socializing boys a lot more like girls would probably help to diminish these cycles. Learning to talk about feelings more openly, to solve conflict in nonviolent ways, to reject dominance as part of gender identity, and to be empathetic with the feelings of others—all these are skills of which boys are often deprived. On the other hand, if girls were raised a little more like boys—if they had more right to say no, to declare boundaries, to develop a strong personal identity, to be angry, to rebel—they would be less likely to be revictimized as adults. Studies of battered women show that many were battered in childhood or saw their mothers battered (though, of course, the sheer number of violent men means that many wives and partners will suffer this fate, regardless of their backgrounds). Many studies of female prostitutes have shown that a disproportionate number were victims of childhood sexual abuse. Many also tried to save themselves by fleeing abusive homes, but the feeling of having only a sexual value was even harder to escape.
What makes self-rescue possible, says Alice Miller, is one condition: at least one person in our childhood who affirmed our true feelings, and thus let us know that our true self could be seen by others and did exist.
I’ve come to believe that this hopeful “one person” theory is true. But something more: that even if there was no such person then, it’s possible to become that “one person” for ourselves now; to journey back to a lost child, recover and experience what that child experienced, and become our own parent.
The stories that follow are of people who went on this journey at very different stages and places of life, sometimes with a guide, sometimes with others on a similar quest, and sometimes as solo explorers.
Toward the end of the 1960s I watched a little boy who came each day to a storefront childcare center in a crowded, changing neighborhood of New York’s West Side. He was a serious child with big, dark, expressive eyes who always stayed separate from the other noisy kids. Mostly, he just watched from a safe place near the wall. When he did play with toys, he touched them as if they might be more alive than he was. As far as anyone knew, this four-year-old had never said a single word.
Each morning, Dorothy Pitman Hughes, the neighborhood leader who had started this pioneering center, would steal a few minutes from her busy day and take him over to a quiet corner with a full-length mirror. Kneeling beside him so that her eyes were on a level with those of his small reflected self, she would go through a quiet litany: “Look at that face. Isn’t it beautiful? Do you know there’s no other face in the world like it? … Now, hold up that hand. See what an amazing hand it is? Those fingers can tie sneakers and draw pictures and do things no one else in the world can do. … And see how strong those legs are? They can run and dance and play for a very special little boy. … His family loves him very much, I love him very much—kids here would love to play with him. … And look at those eyes. There’s a very special person looking out of them. He knows things no one else can know. …”
At first, Dorothy’s patient routine seemed to have no effect at all. Passive and obedient as always, he held up a hand or an arm when requested, but his eyes just watched as if from very far away. Weeks went by with no change.
Then one afternoon when Dorothy was so busy at the center that a day was coming to an end without their private ritual, the little boy tugged at her skirt and led her over to the mirror. It was his first expression that went beyond hunger or the simplest need.
A few days later, he began to anticipate the steps by holding up a hand—then a foot, then a knee—as if to make sure that each part of him was still okay and included. When he heard once more that it was, he smiled without being asked.
Then one morning in the middle of Dorothy’s litany, he pointed to the area of his heart and said, “Me?”
“Me,” Dorothy confirmed. She asked him to say his name.
“Me … Robert!” he said. These were the first sounds anyone there had ever heard him utter.
To each of his classmates, one by one, he repeated his name, as if making sure he existed in their eyes, too. With every response from someone who asked him to play, or just said hi, he seemed to take a little more courage. As he once had gone from quiet watching to a conviction that he didn’t exist at all, he now reversed his journey and went from saying his name to expressing more and more thoughts to actually responding to playmates and grown-ups alike. With every new bit of impact on the world, his face lit up with a smile of delight. Little by little, Robert became as active and irrepressible as any child at the center—perhaps more so, as if he were making up for lost time.
Now that this boy is a man in his twenties, I’m told that he is married, living somewhere far from New York, and raising a daughter and son of his own. Because Dorothy understood how to value the mind and heart of a four-year-old, two more children are learning that they are unique and valuable, too.
When I checked my memory of Robert’s story with Dorothy, who was then my speaking partner in feminist lecture tours and is still a friend and colleague, she remembered much more. Unlike some of the kids in that makeshift storefront center in a neighborhood of both poverty and gentrification, he hadn’t come from a home that was either very uncaring or very poor. Unlike a few from both ends of the economic spectrum, he never arrived in the morning with suspicious bruises or with a parent who seemed to resent the effort of bringing him there. He just happened to be the smallest, newest member in a pressured and busy household that included one older sister, three cousins who had been sent from the South for better schooling in New York, and a hardworking, exhausted mother who was responsible for supporting and taking care of them all.
In fact, she was so pulled in different directions, so pressed for time and attention, that she had come to depend on Robert’s quiet preference for playing alone, as had his older sister and cousins who looked after him in the long hours after school. A doctor had told Robert’s family that there was no physical problem, and they hoped that words and self-expression would come in time. But they also had grown used to him exactly as he was.
Without Dorothy’s help, this little boy’s sense of his own unique self might have been cut off at the start. When I asked her how she had known what to do for Robert, she explained that she, too, had felt a little invisible as a child in rural Georgia, where schoolbooks showed no black faces and still leaned toward a Confederate version of the Civil War. Her understanding of what to do had come not from any formal training but from her own unschooled, very young parents, who managed to raise eight children with love and confidence at the same time that they were growing up themselves. It was especially Dorothy’s rebellious, musically gifted mother, a cleaning woman for white families, who had helped her children feel cherished. She had explained to Dorothy that a lot of white people and even some black teachers just hadn’t been raised to understand that black children were important; that this was no fault of Dorothy’s; and that, like each of her sisters and brothers, she was deserving, smart, and beautiful.
Without this early belief in herself, Dorothy’s childhood would have been more damaging than Robert’s. Her schools had been more segregated, her family’s poverty more extreme, and her rural area so racist that Ku Klux Klansmen terrorized her own and other black families by shooting into their windows at night. Yet because she was brought up with love and attention in a strong black community, Dorothy learned she was worthy of love and attention. Because people close to her made her feel valuable, she didn’t have to seek approval by creating an artificial self.
In retrospect, Robert’s problem had been less the presence of something (prejudice, violence, anger, humiliation) than the absence of something (attention, support, response, assurance that he was important and therefore that he existed), and so he almost did not survive at all.
By guiding him back through his short life to the time in late infancy and early toddlerhood when a sense of separate self develops, Dorothy helped him forge a missing link in a developmental chain. She did this without academic instruction, but with what even therapists and scientists are beginning to recognize as a more important qualification: a radical empathy for one’s subject. As maverick geneticist Barbara McClintock put it, “a feeling for the organism.” With this kind of help, even children often go back to mend the earliest broken places.
The woman who came up to me after a fundraiser and introduced herself as Katharine was large and rounded, like the Willendorf Venus, dressed elegantly in a pantsuit, and wearing a plastic identification bracelet like those given to hospital patients. She wanted to talk about my reference to Louisa May Alcott and the neglected influence of Little Women on generations of little girls. Where else, I had asked, could we have read about an all-female group who discussed work, art, and all the Great Questions—or found girls who wanted to be women and not vice versa?
As we walked to a coffee shop, Katharine explained that only now in her fifties did she know how much Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy had meant to her. “Jo was my real favorite,” she explained. “I had a secret life of writing poems and reading boys’ mysteries, and I thought only Jo would understand. But everybody in the March family seemed closer to me than anybody in my own. I mean, my mother worked as hard at the gas company as my dad did as a printer—so why was she the one who did everything at home? And my older sister seemed younger and sillier than I was. She would ask me which earrings to wear or if I thought some boy was cute. I vowed never to be like either one of them.”
Then one day when she was around twelve, everything changed. “My girlfriends suddenly behaved as if any boy were more important than anything we did together,” she said. “I started to feel ashamed of my mother because she wasn’t thin—before that, I loved sitting on her lap, she was so comfortable. I stopped loving school, I stopped speaking up in class, and I started to be what Seventeen called ‘a good listener.’ The only thing left of my secret life was rescuing injured birds and stray cats. My sister and a boy I liked—I’d started to get crushes, too—thought it was silly but okay, as long as I dropped the part about becoming a veterinarian. Sometimes, I slipped up and became my old opinionated self again, but whenever I did, I felt unlovable. I felt selfish. I even burned all my poems so nobody could find out who I really was.
“Instead of being ‘Kate,’ I suddenly became ‘Kathi’ with an i—like all the girls in school named Sandi or Patti or something. We dotted our i’s with little circles and—I don’t know how to tell you this—with little hearts.”
I remembered writing my name with hearts over the i’s, too. We fell into a discussion of the sweetness syndrome, a smiling, always cheerful mask we had begun to adopt as teenagers. No wonder girls started turning anger into depression and eating problems—where else could it go?
“And the girls who get depressed are the sane ones,” said Katharine. “At least they’re rebelling. I just went along. Ever since I’d torn up my poems, I’d been trying to be a new, socially acceptable girl. Unfortunately, I succeeded. I married a socially acceptable man and had four kids. I tried to live through them, which meant I controlled everything they did. I also spent thirty years on a diet so I wouldn’t look like my mother. I became ‘Kit’ then—as if my name and my body should take up as little space as possible. The more I gave up, the more I thought, At last, I’m really a good woman.
“Of course, I started to drive my husband and kids crazy. Who wants to be lived through? But worse, I was going crazy. I spent ten years on tranquilizers prescribed by some asshole doctor who said I should be happy because I had ‘everything.’ After the kids were grown up and my services weren’t needed anymore, my family didn’t know what to do with me, so they put me in a nice loony bin. I suppose after all those years of my controlling their lives, they decided to control mine.”
What eventually helped her had little to do with the hospital. While sitting in the lounge waiting for her nightly dose of drugs, she happened to see Nobody’s Child, a made-for-TV movie about Marie Baiter, a woman who had been put in a mental institution as a teenager, mainly because her family didn’t want her. She spent more than twenty years in hopeless dependency before a woman psychiatrist thought she saw “a person behind those eyes.” I’d seen this movie, too, with a very realistic Marlo Thomas playing the role, and I once had met the real Marie Baiter. She had indeed battled dependency on years of drugs given to her in hospitals, plus extreme agoraphobia—that fear of going into the public world that often afflicts people too long kept out of it. Doctors had predicted that she would never be able to live permanently outside an institution, but through a long process of taking college courses, moving in with a sympathetic family, getting her own apartment, and finally earning the academic qualifications to work with people like herself who needed bridges out of hospitals, she became a national advocate for programs to help people make the transition from institutionalized dependency to lives of their own.
I well remembered the final scene in the movie, in which she returns as a lecturer to the same hospital through whose halls she had shuffled for so many years, numbed by Thorazine and lost to herself. “I know that there were some of you, maybe many of you,” she said from the podium, “who were sure I’d be back. Well, here I am.”
That triumphant moment had made Katharine feel she could recover, too, but what moved her even more was a scene of Marie finally embracing the “ghost” of her inner self, the abandoned and terrified little girl of the past. “Marie puts her arms around her,” Katharine explained, “and then the little girl and Marie merge into one. Well, when I saw that, I couldn’t stop crying. I suddenly thought: Kate is still inside me. If somebody like Marie Baiter can rescue herself, I damn well can do it, too.
“Of course, that was a movie version. It took me weeks of going back in my mind to rooms where Kate had lived before she would let me talk to her. But finally one day, she showed me her poems—the ones I had burned—and suddenly, I remembered every word.
“After that, I used to start every day imagining myself sitting next to her, waiting to hear what she would say. First, she told me how lonely she’d been. Then she told me I was too thin, how could she sit on my lap and be comfortable? Then she said she didn’t understand why I was in a hospital when I wasn’t sick—and shortly after that, I went home.
“Now, I don’t need to visit her every day. She’s just a part of my life. Thanks to her, I decided two things were going to become the size they were meant to be: my body, and my name. I also try to do things I know she would enjoy—which is why I love my job running an animal shelter. But the last time I went back to talk, she said a funny thing: ‘You needn’t have worried: Jo was taking care of me.’”
As we got up to leave the coffee shop, my eyes fell again on the hospital bracelet. Now that she was out, Katharine told me, she wore it as a sign of solidarity with the women who were still on the ward, despairing, overmedicated, waiting, as Katharine had once waited. “I lost myself a long time ago,” she explained, “and now I feel better than I have since I was reading Little Women.”
I thought of Kate—and all the Kates within us—when I read Making Connections, a collection of studies by Carol Gilligan and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on girls in the pivotal years just before adolescence. Until this groundbreaking effort, most generalizations about adolescence, like other conclusions in psychology, had been drawn from studies of males, and therefore little attention had been paid to the differences between growing into increased freedom and growing into less. Gilligan writes of evidence “that girls’ development in adolescence may hinge on their resisting not the loss of innocence but the loss of knowledge.”19 But, as she concludes, early female strengths don’t just disappear, they go underground. She points to the number of women novelists, from Charlotte Brontë in Jane Eyre to Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye, who have used a nine-or ten-year-old girl as their narrator, their most clear-sighted witness.
I also thought of Katharine—and all the Katharines we’re trying to become—when I read Writing a Woman’s Life, Carolyn Heilbrun’s small, laserlike book that explains why so many women become ourselves after fifty. As Heilbrun writes: “Age portends all the freedoms men have always known and women never—mostly the freedom from fulfilling the needs of others and from being a female impersonator.”20
Perhaps it’s not quite “never.” There was a time of freedom—not in comparison to males perhaps, but in comparison to women’s later lack of it—for many little girls in the years before the feminine role. It is not surprising to learn that there are two times of crisis in a woman’s life: when she enters that social role in adolescence, and when it abandons her at around fifty. Perhaps one day, we will have changed society enough so women are never asked to submerge a true self. Until then, those early years are the best guide to the person we can become in that last third of life.
But even that submerged stage of “Kathi” and “Kit” isn’t without subliminal, perhaps subversive knowledge. I was looking at photos of prehistoric archeological finds the other day and realized that the heart once symbolized female power. It was a procreative, genital symbol: the female version of the phallic symbol. Though trivialized into romance and deprived of its power by centuries of patriarchy, the heart still belongs to us. In a way, history has progressed oddly like a woman’s life: first a time when we were powerful and ourselves, then a long period of patriarchy and forgetting, and perhaps, with this worldwide wave of feminism, an era of rediscovering our power in a new way.
Perhaps the millions of little girls who incorporated hearts into their signatures, as Katharine and I once did, weren’t so silly after all.
Bryan Robinson is one of the millions of people who now call themselves “adult children of alcoholics,” a term that entered the culture only about twenty years ago. Indeed, in the rural South of the 1950s where Bryan grew up, even the word alcoholic wasn’t used in polite society. There were just “hard drinkers” who were normal if they were men, or less normal “tipplers” who were women. Only the town drunk who fell down in the street was recognized as having a problem. Anything that went on behind closed doors was no one else’s business.
Bryan’s father, a machinist and sometime inventor, was far from being the town drunk. He supported his family and was an affectionate and generous father—when he was sober. But when he drank too much, he became a paranoid tyrant. Instead of a sane and loving father coming home from work, Bryan might see a dictator who felt every smile was ridiculing him. Instead of a calm house after school, there might be a raging battlefield with yelling parents and overturned furniture. Instead of being picked up in front of the theater after a weekly movie, Bryan and his sister might be left to wait so long into the night that a policeman would finally take pity on them and drive them home. Like so many children, Bryan internalized all this. “If my father couldn’t remember to pick me up at the movies,” as he remembered later, “I figured I must not be very important.”
He also assumed that drinking and violence was a shame unique to his family. After his older sister escaped the house by getting married at seventeen, Bryan took over as a prematurely old, superresponsible child who pulled the curtains so neighbors couldn’t witness his parents’ violent fights and swept up the broken glass afterward. Sometimes he got caught in the violent crossfire, especially when he tried to mediate, but the emotional crossfire was worse. “I was embarrassed by the way my father behaved and was afraid people wouldn’t like me because of it,” Bryan wrote many years later. “He seemed to care more for his bottle than he did for us.”
Bryan withdrew into the refuge of his room and his imagination. As soon as he could hold a pencil, he began to write stories because in them, everyone—unlike his uncontrollable father—did exactly what Bryan said. He also discovered that in school if he worked hard, he could win approval and thus have something predictable in his life. Nonetheless, he was always on guard against revealing his family shame. When his third-grade teacher asked why he never smiled, for instance, Bryan remembers believing that “she had detected my hidden secret. … I found myself smiling for no apparent reason—not because I was happy but because I wanted to hide the fact that I was sad.” With all the force of his intelligence and desperation, he created a false self.
After growing up to earn four degrees including one doctorate, Bryan turned the same energy to his work as a teacher and psychologist. Weekends and holidays gave him a feeling of panic, just as they had at home, so he extended his work hours at the expense of time with his family. “I was hooked,” he later wrote.
I had become hopelessly addicted to work. I worked for the sake of work and the superficial, fleeting feelings of esteem and accomplishment it gave me. … In work I had found my salvation, my Nirvana—or so I thought.
My behavior was highly rewarded in my job, and I quickly made it through the professorial ranks. … I became obsessed with my career. … Like an alcoholic, I felt restless and became irritable when I went more than a few days away from my desk. … Hardly a vacation passed that a stuffed briefcase of work didn’t accompany me as part of my luggage. While others swam and played in the surf, I toiled over my word processor back in the cottage. My family became concerned, and after many stormy protests, work was no longer allowed on vacations. My response was what any normal work addict would do: sneak it into my suitcase. I hid my work as my father had hidden his bottle.
Gradually, his addiction had reached such a level, and such a clear parallel with his father’s life, that Bryan himself began to realize he was out of control. Though his father had died a lingering and painful death five years before, he was continuing to dominate his son’s life. Moreover, Bryan’s drug of choice was all the more seductive for being the only one an addict is paid and praised for taking.
But the pattern of addiction is the same whether it attaches to alcohol or cocaine, food or work—a growing realization that has caused self-help programs like Alcoholics Anonymous to diversify into everything from Overeaters Anonymous and Workaholics Anonymous to groups for those whose lives are affected by the addictions of people close to them. Such programs enable people who’ve experienced these problems to help each other identify unchosen patterns o£ behavior, dispel feelings of shame and isolation, and begin to change, “one day at a time.” When he began going to these groups regularly, Bryan made discoveries:
The interesting thing is that after the shame goes, the strengths remain. Dr. Bryan Robinson now considers all that he is and does “a culmination of having lived in an alcoholic family and having worked for twenty years in the helping professions as a teacher, counselor, family researcher, therapist, and professor of child and family development.”
To bring his personal and professional life together, he wrote a small book about work addiction, with an intimate first chapter from which I have been quoting here. Though not something professionals have traditionally adopted, the use of the personal is what gives his work its power.21
Perhaps you know, are living with, or are yourself someone for whom this parable has echoes. I know I feel them. I remember so well the dread of not knowing who I would find when I came home: a mother whose speech was slurred by tranquilizers, a woman wandering in the neighborhood not sure of where she was, or a loving and sane woman who asked me about my school day. I, too, created a cheerful front and took refuge in constant reading and after-school jobs—anything to divert myself (and others) from the realities of my life. Years later when I became a writer, I mined my life for amusing anecdotes. Only in my forties did I begin to leave that false self behind by using some of the grimmer experiences in my writing.
In the early days of that change, I remember comparing childhoods with Julie Andrews, not yet a movie star, but already a stage success in My Fair Lady and Camelot. I was amazed to discover that inside this calm, talented, beautiful woman there was still a very unpretty, isolated, prematurely old twelve-year-old whose hard work and freakily adult soprano voice had supported her own uninhibited mother, her alcoholic stepfather, and two young half brothers. Like Bryan Robinson, she had concealed this totally out-of-control life by writing in-control stories; in her case, an almost entirely false diary in which she made up a “vibrant and jolly” family life, hour by hour, day by day.
I never forgot this contrast between a small, sad grown-up with very real duties and the carefree child she had created. While she changed the “nappies” of her two half brothers, toured as a performer to pay the family bills, and was unable even to attend school with her contemporaries, Julie was also creating a cheerful and elaborate fiction because, “If someone found the diary, this is the life we were supposed to have.”
When I asked her if I could include this story, she said yes, that psychoanalysis had finally given her a way to look on both her childhood and her parents with compassion. “I only began to feel grownup—truly in charge, as if I had grown into my own skin and bones—about ten years ago,” she explained. In retrospect, she felt that two things had given her “something to hang on to in all the chaos”: the accident of a singing talent that was part of the reason for her plight, but also gave her an identity; and the faith of her father, a schoolteacher who told her when she was fearful about the future, “Darling, your own good brain will tell you what to do when the time comes.”
Even now, when she explains why she hasn’t yet written about all this—unlike her friend Carol Burnett, for instance, who was also a superresponsible child in an alcoholic family and wrote a very moving book about it22—one can still hear the uncertain little girl: “My biggest cross is a lack of education.” But there is also a resolve: “I’d like to write again—truthfully this time.”
In the United States, one in eight adults is the child of an alcoholic household.23 Combined with drug addiction, illness, violence, sexual abuse, and all the other reasons why children create false selves to survive, this sensation of hiding behind a “normal” facade may be the majority experience. Though these sad statistics are often greeted with a nostalgia for simpler times, there is no reason to believe that children were treated with more respect in the past. What seems to be an increase in sexual abuse, for instance, may actually be an increase in reporting it, or even remembering it. Certainly, in my own unscientific sample of interviewing women of seventy or eighty, the numbers are about the same. And in The Secret Trauma, Diana Russell reported a rise in statistics since the early 1900s, perhaps due to such factors as an increasing number of stepfathers, but also pointed out that the only decreases had taken place when millions of men were gone during two world wars. Perhaps a major part of the increased suffering of children is that the nuclear family, a new construct of the last century or so, has increased their vulnerability by making them exclusively dependent for the first time on only one or two adults.24 The rescuing grandfather, the loving aunt, the mother down the road who takes in a neighbor’s child as her own—that one person who, Alice Miller tells us, is crucial if only as a witness—is an increasingly rare phenomenon.
There may be an even greater need now to let the child within us know: You’re not alone anymore.
Bell, a town in a rough and rural part of eastern Oklahoma with about 300 mostly Cherokee families, had no school that went above the eighth grade, little indoor plumbing, a lot of conflict, and widespread hopelessness. Because residents were dependent on government handouts and treated as invisible to the outside world, they had come to feel powerless over their fates; adults with all the vulnerabilities of childhood and none of the rewards. The few who managed to escape were often ashamed to admit they had ever lived in Bell.
When Wilma Mankiller, a Cherokee community renewal leader, said she wanted to start a project there, she received two warnings from people who knew Bell: first, “these people” would never work, much less volunteer, to help themselves; and second, she shouldn’t stay in town after nightfall.
Nonetheless, she posted notices in Cherokee and English asking people to come to a town meeting to discuss “what you would like Bell to look like in ten years.” No one came. She called another meeting. A handful of residents came, but only to complain. She called a third, and convinced now that she really wanted to listen, about a dozen people showed up.
“I’ve always trusted disenfranchised people to come up with their own ideas,” Wilma said later. Therefore, she didn’t dictate or even suggest. She just asked a question: “What single thing would change this community the most?”
The answer was not a project for school dropouts or any other program to help young people who still had a hope of escaping Bell, which was what Wilma had expected. Instead, they chose something that was more democratic and crucial to everyone, regardless of age or intention to leave: a water supply that was connected to every house, plus indoor plumbing. This would cut school dropout rates, too, as they explained to Wilma. Their kids had to bathe in polluted streams or in water carried from a single spigot outside the schoolhouse, and when they failed to bathe as often as their less poor classmates in Stillwell, a neighboring town with the nearest high school, they were ridiculed.
Just as Wilma had started this process with a question that gave residents the power of choice, she continued it with a bargain that gave them an equal role in what they had chosen. She would get the supplies, federal support, engineers, and other experts—but only if the residents built the water system themselves and also helped with the fund-raising. After generations of broken promises, they were full of skepticism about outside help, and after generations of passivity, also full of self-doubt. Nonetheless, they named themselves the Bell Water and Housing Project, and began.
Each family was assigned a mile of pipe to lay. Those who knew English also worked on fund-raising plans, and those who spoke Cherokee did everything from marking the path of ditches to carrying sand for backfill, but all knew their jobs were vital to the project. Though the women had been “just part of the woodwork,” as Wilma put it—and were also convinced they were too weak to carry pipe or do construction tasks—they soon discovered it wasn’t any harder than water carrying and their usual household chores. Wilma knew the group’s spirits had begun to rise when families started a relay race to see who could lay pipe the fastest.
Though failure had been the unanimous prediction of Bell’s neighbors, people from surrounding communities came to see what was happening. So did several foundation executives who viewed this renewal project as an example of Third World development; certainly few places in the world were poorer than Bell. When a local CBS television crew—attracted by Bell’s reliable scenes of poverty—came to film powerlessness, they played an inadvertent role in changing the situation by letting residents see themselves on the evening news and begin to feel less isolated. Soon, even the non-Indian residents of Bell were saying positive things about this water project in the newspapers, and the Indian community began to feel visible for the first time. Most important, they had become visible through something they were doing for themselves.
The next fourteen months encompassed a novel’s worth of personal change and problem-solving, but by their end, the water system was complete. The CBS crew returned to document success, and the seven-minute story that resulted appeared on “CBS Sunday Morning” with Charles Kuralt. Now known as “the town film,” it is often replayed with pride.
Having grown from the dozen residents who attended the first meeting to a group that included most families, the Bell group now decided to start its next project: housing. Again, Wilma got federal funds—but no federal contractors. The residents were to do the work themselves. “Even if families didn’t like each other,” as Wilma explained, “they were learning to work together. They were beginning to bond as a community.” Because federal funds had been earmarked for Indians only, the five or six non-Indian families in Bell weren’t eligible for housing funds. After careful discussion, the Cherokee community decided to hold fund-raisers so those families could benefit, too, even though some had behaved badly toward them in the past. As always, self-esteem had created an ability to be generous: in this case, it began to restore the Indian principle of reciprocity, wrongly characterized as “Indian giving” by whites but really a balance of giving and receiving.
At that first meeting in 1979, the most often heard sentiment had been: “It’s always been like this; nothing will change.” Now, it was: “Look what we’ve done; what else could we take on?” Since renovating Bell’s housing, members of the steering committee have overseen a senior citizen education project, an annual “fund-raising powwow,” a speakers’ bureau that carries Bell’s lessons to other rural communities, and a bilingual education program to help preserve the Cherokee language and culture. The school dropout rate has fallen, and other nearby communities like Burnt Cabin and Cherry Tree have begun water and housing projects, too. Those who were once ashamed of living in Bell have become proud.
But for Wilma, watching individual people flower was the greatest reward. Sue and Thomas Muscrat, a Head Start worker and farmhand respectively, had been too unconfident and skeptical to speak up at all in the early meetings. They became members of the school board and the speakers’ bureau. With beadwork, drawings, and elkhorn carvings they had always made but realized had value only after outsiders commented on their beauty, they opened a craft store. Because their one son had grown up before this change in their lives, they decided to share their good fortune by adopting a child, an abused, part-Cherokee little boy from Dallas.
As for Wilma Mankiller herself, you may have heard of her. In 1987, the Cherokee Nation—which includes many residents of Oklahoma and five more states—elected her Principal Chief, the first woman to hold this office that carries more responsibility than those of state governor and U.S. senator combined. One of the eleven children of a Cherokee farmer turned longshoreman and an Irish-Dutch mother from Stillwell who had defied her family to cast her lot with the Cherokees, Wilma is a political activist as well as a gifted organizer, mother, administrator, and creative leader.
Still, she was criticized by some in her nation who said a woman shouldn’t be chief. Though in the old days a council of grandmothers had chosen the tribal leaders, even decided if wars should be fought, many Cherokees have absorbed the values of the male-dominant society around them in the centuries since then. When she ran again in 1991, Wilma was opposed as Principal Chief by two male candidates, but most Cherokee people knew she was giving them back the most precious possession: their self-esteem. She won reelection by an unprecedented 83 percent of the vote. The projects she has helped to start during her reign as chief range from adult literacy programs to a communally owned manufacturing plant, and she oversees a total annual budget of $54 million, more than half of which is now self-generated by the Cherokee Nation. Before community renewal programs began, 80 percent of all funds came from the federal government.
Wilma Mankiller became the best kind of leader: one who creates independence, not dependence; who helps people go back to a collective broken place and begin to heal themselves. Though there is a long way to go before the Cherokee Nation restores in a new form the dignity and self-sufficiency it knew 500 years ago, before the terrible centuries of genocide and the banning of even the Cherokee language and religion, now there is a way of making progress that is their own.25
No one has written more revealingly about hidden or blatant cruelty in childrearing than Alice Miller. As a psychoanalyst for more than twenty years and author of a half-dozen books, she has had an enormous impact on both professionals and ordinary readers looking for help. It’s not an exaggeration to say that her work has saved lives.
One of her most common experiences over the years has been the reader who says: “You described my childhood exactly—how could you know?” Until recently, she had no answer. She just had a ready empathy with children who had undergone those too-common methods of teaching and parenting that assume children must be tamed, or that they are blank slates on which adults can write anything. She knew how to help others, but this did not prevent her from clinging to the belief that her parents had provided her with loving care and had made every effort to give her everything she needed as a child. This remained true through all her academic training, years of clinical work, successful books, and two full analyses. “Even in my second analysis,” she revealed,
my mother appeared only as a somewhat oversolicitous woman with good intentions who had tried to do her best. It didn’t fit in with the training or ethical attitudes of either of my therapists for them to acknowledge that her pedagogic efforts had served her interests and the conventional ideas of her day while ruthlessly violating her child, whom she considered her property. … I still took pains to try to be understanding of my mother, to forgive her for her subtle psychological cruelty, which kept appearing in my dreams.26
Though she had no memory of the first five years of life and memories of later childhood were sparse, and though she knew as a professional that this was a sign of strong repression (“something that never,” as she had warned others, “occurs without good reason”), she remained the dutiful daughter who forgot her own feelings and remembered only her mother’s version of the past.
But in the early 1970s, she embarked on a personal avocation that was quite separate from her professional life. She began to paint. Without training or any need to be realistic, she produced small paintings that were both abstract and personal: brilliant blotches of color faded into darkness, and dark, snakelike forms ran throughout the colors. Gradually, she realized that she was painting the hidden emotions of her childhood.
“Now it was up to me,” as she knew, “to take the first step myself—to listen to the child in me—and this meant exposing myself to all the pain once inflicted on her, which she had had to bear all alone, without witnesses, without words, without hope of ever being understood.”27
This spontaneous painting continued off and on for thirteen years as she became more conscious of the reason for the emotions she was reaching. But in the meantime, the painting process was freeing her unconscious enough to help her make an empathetic connection with other abused children and to inspire her to pursue it with all the force of her considerable intellect.
Gradually, it also helped her to recover shreds of memories. Though her mother had once confided with pride that she had toilet trained her daughter by the age of five months—an act that is almost unimaginable—even the professional part of the daughter’s mind hadn’t been ready to admit what kind of minute control and discipline that required. As she grew up under her mother’s roof and thumb, no part of her life had been her own. Everything she did was to be a proof of her mother’s prowess, especially her youthful intellectual accomplishments. Only because her painting had never been possessed by her mother could it become a path to her emotions of the past.
“Was this an unusual situation?” Alice Miller asked years later.
By no means. Of course, not every mother channels all her ambition exclusively into bringing up her children—thank goodness; and sometimes there are fathers or older siblings who come to the child’s rescue. But it was not at all unusual for a daughter who had no rights and was under the thumb of her parents and brothers—the way my mother had been as a child—to seize the sole means of gaining power that society traditionally offered women as a “reward” for all the humiliation that had been heaped upon them. In the form of absolute control over the body and soul of her child an immense kingdom was granted her.28
It was this setting free of past emotions and events by her painting that gave her the courage to try the new therapy of J. Konrad Stettbacher, a Swiss psychotherapist, who has evolved a process for recovering memories in a safe environment, so that the adult can become an advocate for an inner child of the past. In her most recent book, Breaking Down the Wall of Silence, she has finally uncovered all the terrors. Her mother not only controlled her every thought and action, but sometimes refused to speak to, or even look at, her daughter for days on end. And when the little girl tried desperately to know what she had done wrong, how she should change, her mother only insisted that it was her further fault for not knowing and for thus being without conscience. It was a punishment Miller compares to Kafka’s Penal Colony, in which a prisoner learns his lesson only from having it etched over and over again in the skin of his back. Yet as she points out, “I couldn’t say: ‘I’ll find another mother, someone who talks to me and respects me, a woman who doesn’t treat me like so much air but lets me know what she is going through—a woman who knows because she is living consciously.’ As a child I had no choice but to suffer my mother’s vindictive silence, and, because I was blind to her dishonesty and thirst for power, to blame myself.”29
Now, Miller is passionately devoted to the cause of helping to eliminate such horrors from the lives of future children, a goal she believes can only be achieved when each adult stops denying, forgetting, or justifying his or her childhood, and thus stops repeating it out of revenge or unconscious patterning. Believing that the intellectual process of psychoanalysis is not only unhelpful but damaging, she has stopped using that professional identification and resigned from its associations. Instead, she explains the healing process of remembering (and has written the accompanying text for Making Sense of Suffering, a book in which Stettbacher outlines a process for remembering that can be done on one’s own if a group or therapist is not available30), and campaigns to change childrearing practices that she believes create leaders whose inner rage endangers us all.
Today I know that it was not the books I read, it was not my teachers or my study of philosophy, nor was it my training to become a psychoanalyst that provided me with this knowledge. On the contrary, all these together, with their mystifying conceptualization and their rejection of reality, prevented me from recognizing the truth for years. Surprisingly, it was the child in me, condemned to silence long ago—abused, exploited, and turned to stone—who finally found her feelings and along with them her speech, and then told me, in pain, her story.31
Though the pain of her childhood had been without witnesses, she had trusted her own interests and impulses—first intellectually through her work, then emotionally through her painting, and later with the force of a true self made whole by memory—until she became that witness herself.