by Alice Miller

Taking It Personally: Indignation as a Vehicle of Therapy
Sunday May 01, 2005

There is no shortage of books and articles informing us about horrific deeds and circumstances (cruelty to animals, exploitation of nature, torture, despotism, etc.), and it is only natural that we should respond to such accounts with strong feelings. The reaction displayed by a large majority of the thinking and feeling population is one of indignation. But there is an exception to this rule. To a striking degree, reports on the physical abuse of children in the form of spankings or beatings meet with almost total indifference. Most people are still convinced that for children physical “correction” is both necessary and harmless.

How can anyone possibly believe that youngsters will benefit from being beaten, particularly at a time when they are still growing and their brains are developing? One might perhaps assume that the advocates of corporal punishment have never heard of the fact that the human brain is still at the development stage in the first three years of life, and that it is precisely in this period that violence is learned by example. But what explanation is there for such ignorance? After all, this knowledge is not a closely guarded secret. At least educated people like teachers, priests, or lawyers (politicians, statesmen, ministers) must surely have been confronted with the facts of the matter at some point.

Reports on cruelty to children have been common knowledge for at least 20 years, yet there are still no signs of revulsion and horror at this ruthless exploitation of the helpless situation children find themselves in. Cruelty of this kind serves one single purpose: the discharge of the feelings of hatred pent up in adults, parents, and so-called caregivers. But what do we say when we hear a child has been beaten? “So what? That’s quite normal, isn’t it?”

In the last 20 years or so, some people have been raising their voices and insisting that it is in fact anything but normal, that it is both dangerous and ethically unconscionable. But these people are still a small minority. My numerous attempts to persuade the Vatican to assist me in enlightening young parents about the dangers of hitting their children have all failed. I have invariably come up against a wall of indifference and silence.

How can we explain this? We can hardly assume that there is no single person in the Vatican able to react with indignation to the violence done to children. This surely cannot be the reason why no one felt prompted to pass my information on to the Pope. Yet my experience indicates that nothing of the kind has in fact been done. And this applies not only to the Vatican. All over the world, governments have done very little indeed to put a stop to these barbaric practices.

In the 1970s, Sweden passed a law expressly prohibiting the exercise of violence on children. Unfortunately, only 13 smaller states have followed the Swedish example in the interim. We know beyond doubt that by hitting our children we are bringing them up to be the violent parents of the future. But there is no public outcry. Instead, we imperturbably go on cultivating what we claim to be trying to stamp out: torture, war, genocide. We actively connive in the production of tomorrow’s violence, tomorrow’s illnesses. In each and every case, there is incontrovertible evidence that these acts of violence can be traced back to a history of repeated humiliation (cf. James Gilligan, Violence, Putnam N.Y., 1996).

Time and again, I ask myself why it is so difficult to communicate this knowledge, why the perfectly normal response – horror and indignation – fails to materialize when the question at issue is cruelty to small children. Deep down I know the answer, though I keep on hoping I am mistaken. The answer I have found is: Most of us were mistreated as children and had to learn to deny this fact at a very early stage in order to survive. We were forced to believe

that we were humiliated and tormented “for our own good,”
that the beatings we received did not hurt and were harmless,
that such treatment served to protect the community (as otherwise we would have turned into dangerous monsters).

If the brain stores this aberrant information at a very early stage, then the message it conveys will normally retain its effect throughout our lives. It causes a persistent mental bias. In therapy, such biases may be resolved. But most people are not prepared to question and abandon preconceptions of this kind. Instead they chant this perverse litany: “My parents did their best to bring me up properly, I was a difficult child, and I needed strict discipline.” Obviously, people who have been brought up to believe this cannot conceivably feel indignation about cruelty to children. Since their own childhood, they have been dissociated from their true feelings, from the pain caused by humiliation and torment. To feel their indignation they would need to get back in touch with that childhood pain. And who will want to do that?

Accordingly, this pain very frequently remains locked up behind iron doors in the basement of their souls. And Heaven help anyone who starts battering on those doors! Depression, tablet abuse, drugs, even death – anything is better than being reminded of the torture they went through in the past. So they give it a fine-sounding name – “upbringing” – because that way they can avoid having to feel the pain. As long as they deny the fact that they were childhood victims these people are incapable of indignation. Only very few face up to the grim facts of their early lives, and if they do so, it frequently makes them feel isolated. For they live in a society where many open-minded individuals do feel genuine disgust and indignation at injustices like child labor in Asia but not at the injustice they were themselves exposed to when they were children. This victimization took place when they were too young to be capable of independent thought and accordingly adopted their parents’ opinion that they were being tortured for their own good. They espoused this opinion because it enabled them to cultivate loyalty to, and love of, their parents, though this unswerving loyalty is often upheld to the detriment of their own children. Surely, the time is now ripe for these formerly abused children to find the courage to rebel.

While our own biographies may help us to realize why we cannot feel indignation at the abuse so many children are exposed to, this inability actively impedes our access to the understanding of a whole range of phenomena. We can illustrate this with reference to some of the problems afflicting present-day society. In the following, I have chosen three such problematic issues to indicate how the ability to feel indignation and to resolve our mental paralysis might help us not only to extend our knowledge but also to provide effective remedies and preventive measures where they are urgently needed. These issues are (a) the traditional view of delinquency (mass murders and serial killings), (b) the tradition of child abuse in families, and (c) the neutrality principle imposed on psychotherapists.

Mass murderers and serial killers

Both in forensic psychiatry and in psychoanalytic circles we constantly hear it said that the abominable deeds perpetrated by mass murderers could hardly be the fruits of childhood abuse because some of these killers come neither from broken homes nor from families with an appreciable history of violence. However, if we take the trouble to inquire more closely into their parents’ upbringing methods, we are invariably confronted with horrors that are just as execrable as the crimes committed by serial killers. Indeed, as these perversions were visited upon children – for years on end – what we usually refer to as corporal punishment fully deserves to be branded as murder – murder of the soul. As the book Base Instincts by Jonathan Pincus demonstrates (cf. Thomas Gruner’s article “Frenzy” on this website), it is by no means difficult to elicit details about parental cruelty from murderers because they themselves hardly ever consider them to be evidence of perversion. They see them as instances of a perfectly normal upbringing. Like almost all people abused in childhood, these killers are fond of their parents and prepared to go to any lengths to shield them from blame and accusation. Normally, the psychiatrist interviewing such a criminal will adopt this judgment (if he himself has never called his own parents into question) and arrive at the conclusion that for some mysterious reason the serial killer opposite him must have come into the world with destructive genes provoking him to commit his terrible crimes.

I once saw a television report on the increase of juvenile delinquency in our society. The reporter did all he could to understand the motives of the young criminals, interviewing public prosecutors, police officials, and prison governors in his bid to find out more about the causes. Without exception, they all asserted that they had been unable to identify any motives for the murders committed or the serious injuries inflicted on the victims. They also noted that this was typical for the youth of today. The only causes cited for the extreme arousal involved were alcohol or drugs. But there was no inquiry into what had prompted these people to take drugs in the first place. None of the officials questioned gave any sign of awareness about the fact that since their childhood these youngsters had been nursing feelings of revenge ticking away inside them like a time bomb.

In 20 years of service, a prison governor fully familiar with all the problems posed by an institution of this kind had obviously never given any thought to the question of how juvenile criminals had grown up and who had sown the seeds of violence in their souls. It had never struck him that almost all the crime records reported that the delinquent in question had flown into an uncontrollable rage when he felt offended, humiliated, or disgraced. As a child, he was unable to respond to humiliation. Now he can. The inevitability of subsequent capture and imprisonment is all part of his compulsive desire for self-punishment, for deep down he has always put the blame himself for not being loved on himself. This is what he has been told for as long as he can remember. As a humiliated child, he was never able to learn how to express his anger in words without being punished for it. So instead he immediately resorts to violence, just as his parents did. His brain learned this lesson at a very early stage, and it takes effect immediately when he feels his personal dignity is under attack. But leveling accusations at the assailants who drummed that lesson when he was small is taboo. The result is that after serving their sentences more than half of the convicted delinquents repeat their crimes and end up back in prison.

In his book Transforming Aggression psychoanalyst Frank M. Lachmann devotes an entire chapter to serial killers. His conclusion is that these people are completely beyond the reach of any kind of empathy. He distinguishes between “guilty” (Freud’s Oedipus) and “tragic” figures (Kohut), the latter being those who spent their childhood in an unresponsive environment. Psychoanalysts can feel empathy for both, says Lachmann. But for him serial killers and, say, Hitler’s henchmen make up a category that must NECESSARILY defy our attempts at understanding. These criminals represent evil in its purest form.

So what about terrorist attacks, or instances of genocide as in Rwanda, former Yugoslavia, and so many other places in the world? Can we imagine people wanting to blow themselves sky-high if they were loved, protected, and respected as children? I refuse to accept the idea that people capable of such abominable deeds should be regarded as incarnations of pure evil, thus relieving us of any attempt to identify the roots of this compulsive destructiveness in their biographies. These roots are readily discernible once we open our eyes to the fact that, horrific as the crimes of these adults may be, they are no more appalling than the tortures these criminals were exposed to as children. Then, suddenly, the apparent mystery is solved. We realize that there is not one single mass murderer or serial killer who as a child was not the victim of all kinds of humiliations and psychic murder. But to see that, we need the capacity for indignation that normally lapses into abeyance when we think and talk about childhood. (Once again, let me point out that my concern here is not to condone the crimes of adult sadists but to understand the sufferings of the children they once were).
Lachmann’s book is an indication that not only psychiatrists but also psychoanalysts normally shy away from this perspective on childhood suffering. Society pays a very high price for such blindness. If we could help the former victims to rebel against the deeds of their parents, this might ultimately suffice to free them of their compulsion to unconsciously re-enact their own brutal histories over and over again.

Child mistreatment: a family tradition

Once we have identified the dynamics of compulsive repetition, we will find it in all families where children are mistreated. Frequently the kind of abuse exercised on children has a long history. The same patterns of humiliation, neglect, exertion of power, and sadism can often be traced back over several generations. To evade the horror this involves, we keep on dreaming up new theories. Some psychologists suggest that the sufferings of their clients derive not from their own childhood but from the histories and problems of distant ancestors that they attempt to resolve with their illnesses.

Such theories have a palliative effect. They save us from having to imagine the sheer hell these clients went through in their youth, and they spare us indignation. But much like the genetic fallacy, this is in fact nothing other than an attempt to escape the painful reality of the matter. It is absurd to interpret genocide or the increase of violence, say in present-day Iraq, as a consequence of destructive genes. Why should so many people with destructive genes have suddenly been born in the era of Hitler or Milosevic? Yet many intellectuals believe implicitly and unhesitatingly in such explanations. They subscribe to the notion of intrinsic evil to spare themselves the pain involved in admitting that, whatever justifications may be trotted out to disguise such violence, the real reason why numerous parents torment their children is unconscious hatred. But this is the truth. And once we decide to look it in the face, there are real benefits to be gained from that decision. It enables us to forsake the medieval belief in the devil (“rogue genes”). The chain of violence is shown up for what it is, and we realize that we can do something to break that chain.

Sadistic parents do not fall from the skies. They were treated just as sadistically in their childhood, there is no doubt about that. To assert the opposite is to evade the simple fact that in the formative years of their lives tormented children suffer not only one death, like a murderer’s victim, but countless psychic deaths and tortures at the hands of the people they are dependent on and cannot find a substitute for.

The German news media recently reported the death of a seven-year-old girl named Jessica, who was starved to death by her mother and only weighed 18 pounds when she died. The press was horrified, and there was a funeral ceremony for Jessica, with flowers, candles, and fine words, as is appropriate in such a case. All over the world dead and unborn children are loved and mourned for. But the sufferings of living children are persistently trivialized. Neither at the ceremony nor in the press did anyone ask how a mother can leave her child to starve, how she could look on imperviously as the little body wasted away, why there was no feeling of compassion, why she left the child alone in her torment.

It is hard for us to imagine such sadism, although we are only sixty years away from Auschwitz, the place where millions were intentionally starved and left to stare certain death in the face. But neither then, nor later, nor today has there been any inquiry into the question of how people become so sadistic. How were they brought up, how were they deprived of the capacity to rebel against such wrongs, to recognize their parents’ cruelty, to defend themselves against it? Instead, they were taught to approve their parents’ sadism in all its forms. And this succeeded so completely because children want to love their parents and prefer not to look the truth in the face. The truth is too awful for these children to bear, so they avert their eyes. But the body remembers everything, and as adults, those children unconsciously and automatically rehearse their parents’ sadism on their own children, on their subjects or employees, on everyone dependent on them. They do not know that they are doing to others precisely what their parents did to them when they were in a state of complete and utter dependence. Some may suspect the fact and seek therapeutic aid. But what do they find?

Therapy: neutrality versus partiality

When I trained to be a psychoanalyst a great deal of importance was attached to the analyst’s neutrality. This was one of the basic rules considered since Freud to be self-evident and required to be strictly observed at all times. At that point, I had no idea that there was any connection between this stricture and the compulsion to protect the patient’s parents from any kind of blame. My colleagues seemed to have no difficulty maintaining their neutrality, they appeared to have no interest in empathizing with the torments suffered by a beaten and humiliated child exposed to incestuous exploitation. Perhaps some of them had been the victims of such cruelty. But in their training, they were themselves treated with the neutrality demanded by Freud, so they had no opportunity of discovering the pain they had been denying all along. To be able to break with that denial, they would have needed not a neutral therapist but a partial one, someone who sided unequivocally with the tormented child and displayed indignation at the wrongs done to that child before the client is capable of doing so. The point is that at the outset of therapy most clients do not feel any indignation. Though they recount facts that invite revulsion and indignation, they have no sense of rebellion, not only because they are dissociated from their feelings but because they do not know that parents can be any different.

My experience has repeatedly shown me that my genuine indignation at what clients have been through in their childhood is an important vehicle of therapy. This becomes especially apparent in group therapy. Individual members of the group may tell us calmly, possibly even with a smile, that they were locked in a dark cellar for hours if they dared to contradict their parents. This will arouse a murmur of horror among the other members. But the person telling the story is not yet capable of such feelings, they have no basis for comparisons. For them this treatment is normal.

I have also met people who spent years in primal therapy and who had no difficulty in weeping over the sufferings they had been through in their childhood. But they were still far from feeling any indignation at the incestuous exploitation or the perverted ritual beatings they had suffered at the hands of their parents. They believed that such inflictions are a normal part of any childhood and that the simple re-discovery of their former feelings would heal them. But this is not always the case, and certainly not if the strong attachment to their unconscious parents and the expectations they have of them continue to subsist. I believe that this attachment and these expectations cannot be resolved as long as the therapist remains neutral. This has struck me in my discussions with therapists working quite correctly with their clients on access to their emotions but still subject to the idealization of their own parents. They could only help their clients when they had been encouraged to admit their own feelings and consequently to express the indignation aroused in them, as therapists, by the perversions inflicted on the clients by their parents.

The effect of this is frequently very striking. It is like clearing away a dam that has been blocking the course of a river. Sometimes the therapist’s indignation will quickly release a veritable avalanche of indignation in the client. But this is not always the case. Some clients need weeks, months, even years before this happens. But the open display of indignation on the part of the therapist as witness ultimately sets off a process of liberation that has previously been impeded by the moral standards upheld by society. This unleashing of emotion is due to the free and committed attitude of a therapist able to show the former child that it is legitimate to be scandalized at the behavior of one’s parents, that EVERY FEELING INDIVIDUAL WOULD BE SCANDALIZED, WITH THE SOLE EXCEPTION OF THE PERSON WHO HAS ACTUALLY BEEN THIS TORMENTED CHILD.

My remarks on this point may be understood as an attempt on my part to write a prescription for therapists, advising them to develop feelings of indignation so as to help their clients achieve this breakthrough. But that would be a major misunderstanding. I cannot advise someone to have feelings they do not have, and no one can possibly follow such advice. However, I assume that there are therapists who are sincerely indignant when they hear of the scandalous behavior of their clients’ parents. It is entirely possible that some of them believe that they should not give expression to this indignation because in their training they have been told that this must be avoided at all costs. From Freud’s school of thought they may even have learned to regard their feelings as “counter transference,” i.e. as a mere “personal” reaction to their clients’ feelings. This way they have accustomed themselves to avoiding the perception and expression of their own feelings, their simple and eminently understandable response to cruelty.

The general tendency to evade feelings of indignation is understandable because this feeling can easily spark off a perception of childlike impotence and memories of a time when some of us were hopelessly exposed to the sadism of adults and unable to defend ourselves. The fact that despite all my efforts I myself am still not entirely free of this instinctive evasion was brought home to me recently by a letter from one of my readers. She wrote that her daughter was working for an emergency telephone service for the victims of the ritual mistreatment of children and had found out that in isolated cases children had been forced to kill babies. This reminded me that in my book Banished Knowledge I had written that the tortured child believes it has killed the baby in itself when it is forced to lie or to hold its tongue. But in perverted and sadistic rituals, it now becomes apparent that children may be literally forced to kill babies, in the same way as they are sometimes forced to torment animals.

It is understandable that we should prefer not to hear about these things and to regard people who engage in such practices as monsters. But as we are increasingly confronted with terrorist violence, we cannot afford to demonize perversion and close our eyes to the way in which people who practice such sadistic rituals were turned into sadists in the first place. The production of perversion goes on unhindered. And if we do not learn to understand the connections and prevent parents from the exercise of their perverted upbringing rituals, then humanity is ultimately doomed to be wiped out by its own deeply rooted ignorance.

Alice Miller.

Further reading: Frenzy (the article by Thomas Gruner referred to above).

by Alice Miller

What is Hatred ?
Friday April 01, 2005

We tend to associate the word hatred with the notion of a dangerous curse we need to free ourselves of as quickly as we can. An opinion also frequently voiced is that hatred poisons our very being and makes it all but impossible to heal the injuries stemming from our childhood. I take a very different view of this matter, and this has led to frequent misunderstandings. Accordingly, my attempts to cast light on the phenomenon of hatred and to subject the concept to more searching scrutiny have not yet been very successful.

I too believe that hatred can poison the organism, but only as long as it is unconscious and directed vicariously at substitute figures or scapegoats. When that happens, hatred cannot be resolved. Suppose, for example, that I hate a specific ethnic group but have never allowed myself to realize how my parents treated me when I was a child, how they left me crying for hours in my cot when I was a baby, how they never gave me so much as a loving glance. If that is the case, then I will suffer from a latent form of hatred that can pursue me throughout my whole life and cause all kinds of physical symptoms. But if I know what my parents did to me in their ignorance and have a conscious awareness of my indignation at their behavior, then I have no need to re-direct my hatred at other persons. In the course of time, my hatred for my parents may weaken, or it may resolve itself temporarily, only to flare up again as a result of events in the present or new memories. But I know what this hatred is all about. Thanks to the feelings I have actively experienced, I now know myself well enough, AND I HAVE NO COMPULSION TO KILL OR HARM ANYONE BECAUSE OF MY FEELINGS OF HATRED.

We frequently meet people who are grateful to their parents for the beatings they received when they were little, or who assert that they have long since forgotten the sexual molestation they suffered at their hands. They say that in prayer they have forgiven their parents for their “sins.” But at the same time, they feel a compulsion to resort to physical violence in the upbringing of their children and/or to interfere with them sexually. Every pedophile openly displays his “love” of children and has no idea that deep down he is avenging himself for the things done to him as a child. Though he is not consciously aware of this hatred, he is still subject to its dictates.
Such LATENT hatred is indeed dangerous and difficult to resolve because it is not directed at the person who has caused it but at substitute figures. Cemented in different kinds of perversion, it can sustain itself for life and represents a serious threat, not only to the environment of the person harboring it, but also to that person him/herself.

CONSCIOUS, REACTIVE hatred is different. Like any other feeling, this can recede and fade away once we have lived it through. If our parents have treated us badly, possibly even sadistically, and we are able to face up to the fact, then of course we will experience feelings of hatred. As I have said, such feelings may weaken or fade away altogether in the course of time, though this never happens from one day to the next. The full extent of the mistreatment inflicted upon a child cannot be dealt with all at once. Coming to terms with it is an extended process in which aspects of the mistreatment are allowed into our consciousness one after the other, thus rekindling the feeling of hatred. But in such cases, hatred is not dangerous. It is a logical consequence of what happened to us, a consequence only fully perceived by the adult, whereas the child was forced to tolerate it in silence for years.

Alongside reactive hatred of the parents and latent hatred deflected onto scapegoats, there is also the justified hatred for a person tormenting us in the present, either physically or mentally, a person we are at the mercy of and either cannot free ourselves of, or at least believe that we cannot. As long as we are in such a state of dependency, or think we are, then hatred is the inevitable outcome. It is hardly conceivable that a person being tortured will not feel hatred for the torturer. If we deny ourselves this feeling, we will suffer from physical symptoms. The biographies of Christian martyrs are full of descriptions of the dreadful ailments they suffered from, and a significant portion of them are skin diseases. This is how the body defends itself against self-betrayal. These “saints” were enjoined to forgive their tormentors, to “turn the other cheek,” but their inflamed skin was a clear indication of the extreme anger and resentment they were suppressing.
Once such victims have managed to free themselves from the power of their tormentors, they will not have to live with this hatred day in, day out. Of course, the memories of their impotence and the horrors they went through may well up again on occasion. But it is probable that the intensity of their hatred will be tempered as time goes on. (I have discussed this aspect in more detail in my recent book “Our Body Never Lies – The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting”, Norton, New York).

Hatred is only a feeling, albeit a very strong and assertive one. Like any other feeling, it is a sign of our vitality. So if we try to suppress it, there will be a price to pay. Hatred tries to tell us something about the injuries we have been subjected to, and also about ourselves, our values, our specific sensitivity. We must learn to pay heed to it and understand the message it conveys. If we can do that, we no longer need to fear hatred. If we hate hypocrisy, insincerity, and mendacity, then we grant ourselves the right to fight them wherever we can, or to withdraw from people who only trust in lies. But if we pretend that we are impervious to these things, then we are betraying ourselves.
The almost universal, but in fact highly destructive, injunction to forgive our “trespassers” encourages such self-betrayal. Religion and traditional morality constantly prize forgiveness as a virtue, and in numerous forms of therapy it is erroneously recommended as a path to “healing.” But it is easy to demonstrate that neither prayer nor auto-suggestive exercises in “positive thinking” are able to counteract the body’s justified and vital responses to humiliations and other injuries to our integrity inflicted on us in early childhood. The martyrs’ crippling ailments are a clear indication of the price they had to pay for the denial of their feelings. So would it not be simpler to ask whom this hatred is directed at, and to recognize why it is in fact justified? Then we have a chance of living responsibly with our feelings, without denying them and paying for this “virtue” with illnesses.
I would be suspicious if a therapist promised me that after treatment (and possibly thanks to forgiveness) I would be free of undesirable feelings like rage, anger, or hatred. What kind of person would I be if I could not react, temporarily at least, to injustice, presumption, evil, or arrogant idiocy with feelings of anger or rage? Would that not be an amputation of my emotional life? If therapy really has helped me, then I should have access to ALL my feelings for the rest of my life, as well as conscious access to my own history as an explanation for the intensity of my responses. This would quickly temper that intensity without having serious physical consequences of the kind caused by the suppression of emotions that have remained unconscious.
In therapy, I can learn to understand my feelings rather than condemn them, to regard them as friends and protectors instead of fearing them as something alien that needs to be fought against. Though our parents, teachers, or priests may have taught us to practice such self-amputation, we must ultimately realize that it is in fact very dangerous. There can be no doubt that we are then the victims of severe mutilation.

There are still countries where physical correction is part and parcel of the acknowledged approach to “upbringing.” But no teacher will beat the children entrusted to his care unless he himself was beaten as a child and forced to learn to suppress his anger. He will take it out on the children in the class without knowing why he does so. I believe that awareness of this fact could save many children from exposure to such brutality. And if statesmen had a genuine awareness of their own personal histories, this would spare whole nations the effects of their ignorance and cruelty.
It is not our feelings that make us a danger to ourselves and our environment, it is the dissociation of those feelings caused by our fear of them. It is here that we must seek the reasons for amok killers, for suicide bombers, and for the countless court judges who close their eyes to the real causes of crime, so as to spare the parents of the delinquents and to keep their own histories in the dark.

by Alice Miller

Deception Kills Love
Wednesday September 01, 2004

In one of his books (published in German under the title “Ich werde es sagen” by Klett Verlag in 2003, not yet available in English [?]), a young Danish writer, Kristian Ditlev Jensen, describes his experiences at the hands of a pedophile when he was aged 9-12. His horrifying narrative indicates very clearly the traces left on him by this interference. He could not bring himself to inform the police until he reached adulthood. Although Kristian’s account left the police in no doubt about the true circumstances and although others had been interfered with in the same way, the verdict passed on the offender was a suspended sentence of two years’ imprisonment on probation. Understandably, this injustice left the young man in a highly agitated state. Despite years of therapy he was unable to sleep, had difficulty in concentrating, suffered terrifying nightmares and was subject to frequent bouts of panic that he was unable to control.

What prevents an only child of above-average intelligence from telling his parents how dreadfully he has suffered over a period of three whole years? Kristian’s parents lived in the Danish provinces and sent him to the capital once a week to enjoy himself. We are told they never suspected that the boy was sexually exploited every week-end by the man they asked to look after him in the capital. How can we explain the fact that the boy tolerated this interference although he was undoubtedly repelled by it? Why was he unable to extricate himself from the grip of his tormentor by talking to his parents about what he was going through? The only alternative to this secrecy was the crippling boredom of life in the provinces with his parents, the total absence of empathy, understanding, interest, communication. He believed he had found all these things in the shape of Gustav, his “friend”. He reveled in the stimulating life of the capital where, thanks to Gustav, he was able to go to concerts, restaurants, the theater, the cinema. The fully panoply of cultural life in Copenhagen was his for the asking. Accordingly, he did his best to accept the slavery he was subjected to in Gustav’s bed, to forget it in the course of the day, to enjoy the world of culture he now had access to, and to ignore the bad side of the deal.

But things did not work out like that. Kristian’s body rebelled in a variety of ways because of the infinite rage within him, a rage that could never be expressed, either to Gustav himself or to Kristian’s parents. While the book reveals that the parents’ indifference was in fact the ground in which sexual abuse was able to take root and flourish, the author insists in his preface that today he loves his parents dearly and has forgiven them for absolutely everything.

It was this sentence that prompted me to react to this book. The point is that it illustrates the covert, but nonetheless virulently destructive power of the Fourth Commandment that has been a constant concern of mine. As a child Kristian was unable to free himself of Gustav’s pernicious influence because he believed that he could not live without him, without the intellectual joys he had introduced him to in the capital. If he were forced to return to the soul-destroying boredom of his parents’ provincial home, then he would surely die. Accordingly he submitted to his “friend’s” brain-washing and chose to ignore the obvious abuse he was being subjected to. Today, as an adult, he can see things more realistically, he can see what harm was done to him, and for that reason he is no longer forced to love Gustav. But the ties that link him to his parents have lost none of their power. And this is what Kristian Jensen calls love.

Although Kristian’s account indicates very clearly how the first years of his life as a neglected child drilled into unquestioning obedience of his parents paved the way for the crimes perpetrated on him by this pedophile, he acquits his parents of any kind of responsibility for his dilemma. Emotionally, at least. The reader can sense the adults’ indignation at the behavior of his parents, who calmly entrusted him to the care of a criminal every week-end for a period of three years. But the child within cannot venture to express this indignation, the fear of his parents is still too overpowering. This may explain why Kristian still suffers from his symptoms. His rage at Gustav’s behavior is legitimate, the contempt for pedophiles is shared by society. But not the rage caused by his parents. This forbidden rage remains pent up in his body, it produces nightmares and other symptoms because it is not accessible to his adult consciousness. What remains is the longing for “good” parents, and this longing sustains all the illusions he entertains about them.

Kristian Jensen is no exception. I constantly receive books by authors relating inconceivable cruelties perpetrated on them in their early years. On the very first pages of these books they assure the reader that they have forgiven their parents for everything done to them. All these cases are a sure indication of compulsive repetition, the compulsion to prolong the deception they were once subjected to. This compulsion manifests itself above all in the religious assertion that forgiveness has a salutary effect. This assertion is clearly contradicted by the facts. The compulsion to preach is never the product of a free spirit.

Am I saying that forgiveness for crimes done to a child is not only ineffective but actively harmful? Yes, that is precisely what I am saying. The body does not understand moral precepts. It fights against the denial of genuine emotions and for the admission of the truth to our conscious minds. This is something the child cannot afford to do, it has to deceive itself and turn a blind eye to the parents’ crimes in order to survive. Adults no longer need to do this, but if they do, the price they pay is high. Either they ruin their own health or they make others pay the price – their children, their patients, the people who work for them, etc.

A therapist who has forgiven his parents for the cruelty they showed him will frequently feel the urge to suggest this same course of action to his patients as a remedy for their ills. In so doing, he is exploiting their dependence and their trust. If he is no longer in touch with his own feelings, he may indeed be unaware that in this way he is doing to others what was once done to him. He is abusing others, confusing them, while rejecting any kind of responsibility for his actions because he is convinced that he is acting for their own good. Are not all religions unanimous in their conviction that forgiveness is the path to Heaven? Was not Job ultimately rewarded for the fact that he forgave God? No good can be expected of a therapist who identifies with the parents who once abused him. But adult patients have the choice. They can leave a therapist when they have seen through his deception and self-deception. They need not identify with him and repeat his acts all over again.

As an adult, Kristian Jensen is free to see through Gustav’s manipulations. Accordingly he is hardly in danger of doing the same to others. But a child does not have this freedom. One cannot escape one’s own parents, so one cannot afford to see through them either. Blindness makes it possible to survive. This is the way that the abuse of children has functioned since time immemorial. Blindness and forgiveness are essential to survival. But at the same time they lead to repetition and do harm to innocent people.
To break through this vicious circle we need to understand that love cannot survive abuse, deception, and exploitation without seeking new victims. And when it requires new victims, it is no longer love but at best the longing for love. Only unflinching realization of one’s own past reality, of what really happened can break through the chain of abuse. If I know and can feel what my parents did to me when I was totally defenseless, I no longer need victims to befog my awareness. I no longer need to reenact what happened to me with the help of innocent people because now I KNOW what happened. And if I want to live my life consciously, without exploiting others, then I must actively accept that knowledge.

by Alice Miller

The Origins of Torture In Endured Child Abuse
Tuesday June 01, 2004

Many people have claimed to be appalled by the acts of perversion committed by American soldiers on ADULT people, Iraqi prisoners. Amazingly, I have never heard of any such reaction in response to the occasional attempts to expose similar practices committed towards CHILDREN as for instance in British and American schools. There, these practices come under the heading of “education.” But the cruelty is the same. The world appears to be surprized that such brutality should rear its head among the American forces.
After all, America presents itself to the international public as the guardian of world peace. There is an explanation for all this, but hardly anyone wants to hear it.

It is definitely a good thing that light has been cast on the situation and that the media have exposed this lie for what it is. Basically it runs as follows: We are a civilized, freedom-loving nation and bring democracy and independence to the whole world. Under this motto the Americans forced their way into Iraq with devastating results and still insist that they are
exporting cultural values. But now it turns out that alongside their bombs and missiles the well-drilled, smartly dressed soldiers are carrying a huge arsenal of pent-up rage around with them, invisible on the outside, invisible for themselves, lurking deep down within, but unmistakably dangerous.

Where does this suppressed rage come from, this need to torment, humiliate, mock, and abuse helpless human beings (prisoners and children as well)? What are these outwardly
tough soldiers avenging themselves for? And where have they learnt such behavior? First as little children taught obedience by means of physical “correction,” then in school, where they served as the defenseless objects of the sadism of some of their teachers, and finally in their time as recruits, treated like dirt by their superiors so that they could finally acquire the highly dubious ability to take anything meted out to them and qualify as “tough.”

The thirst for vengeance does not come from nowhere. It has a clearly identifiable cause. The thirst for vengeance has its origins in infancy, when children are forced to suffer in silence and put up with the cruelty inflicted on them in the name of upbringing. They
learn how to torment others from their parents, and later from their teachers and superiors. It is nothing other than systematic instruction by example on how to destroy others. Yet many people believe that it has no evil consequences. As if a child were a container that can be emptied from time to time. But the human brain is not a container. The things we learn at an early stage stay with us in later life.

In my recent book “Die Revolte des Körpers” (The Body Never Lies) appeared in Germany in March 2004, I pointed out that in 22 American states children and adolescents can be beaten, humiliated, and sometimes exposed to outright sadism without this having any legal consequences. Such treatment is equivalent to genuine torture. But it is not called so. It goes by the name of education, discipline, leadership. These practices are actively supported by most religions. There is no protest against it, except on some Internet websites. But the Internet is also full of advertisements for whips and other devices for punishing small children and making them into God-fearing individuals so that God will approve of them and give them His love. The scandal in Iraq shows what becomes of these children when they reach adulthood. The perverted soldiers are the fruits of an education that actively instills violence, meanness, and perversion into young people.

The media quote psychological experts who contend that the brutality displayed by the American soldiers is a result of the stress caused by war. It is true that war unleashes latent aggression. BUT TO BE UNLEASHED IT HAS TO BE ALREADY THERE. It would be impossible for individuals who have not been exposed to violence very early, either at home or at school, to abuse and mock defenseless prisoners. They simply couldn’t do it. We know from the history of the last World War that many conscripted soldiers were able to show a human face, even in the stress of war, if they had grown up without being exposed
to violence. Many accounts of the war and the conditions in the camps tell us that
even such extreme stress will not necessarily turn adults into perverted individuals.

Perversion has a long, obscure history invariably rooted in the childhood of the individual. It is hardly surprising that these histories are usually concealed from the eyes of society. People who have been taught to obey by having violence inflicted on them have very good reasons to avoid being reminded of the sufferings they went through in childhood and prevent the suppressed facts from ever emerging into the light of day. Many prefer to submit to whippings in S/M clubs, which they claim to enjoy, rather than ask themselves why they indulge in such perversions. In our society the cult of the unconscious still holds sway.

It is not true that we all carry in us the “beast,” as some psychological experts claim.
Only people who were treated in a perverse way, but deny the fact, will seek scapegoats
on whom they can unconsciously take out their rage, telling in interviews they did it only “just for fun” (exactly as their abusing “innocent” parents might have declared). Or they destroy themselves by taking substances to ease the pain. Children, of course, are unable to bear the pain of their victimization or understand that crime is being committed to them. But as adults they can learn to sympathize with the wounded child and, by becoming conscious, they can free themselves (and the world) from the “beast” within.

by Alice Miller

Saddam Hussein and the Cardinals
Thursday January 01, 2004

(Pity for the Cruel Father)

The response to the capture of Saddam Hussein was one of great and almost universal relief. Yet only a short time later, there was a sudden increase all over the world of voices expressing compassion for the unscrupulous tyrant who had been the object of fear and loathing while he was still at large. The fact that he no longer represented a danger was apparently sufficient to put an end to the hatred he had formerly aroused. The hatred we feel for someone is obviously at its greatest when we feel threatened by them, dependent on their whims. Once they have no more power to do us ill, our hatred disappears. And it is of course only natural for us to feel better when we can rid ourselves of this oppressive state of mind.

But in my view we cannot simply allow ourselves to base our judgment of tyrants on ordinary compassion for the individual, if that means losing sight of the things they have done. In the case of Hussein, who is still alive, it is especially important to recall the ease with which this man had his victims executed, more or less as the mood took him. There is conclusive evidence that the character of a tyrant will not change as long as he lives, that he will abuse his power in a destructive way as long as he either encounters no resistance at all or is able to nip that resistance in the bud. The point is that his genuine aim, the unconscious aim concealed behind all his conscious activities, remains the same: to use his power to blot out the humiliations inflicted on him in childhood and denied by him ever since. But this aim can never be achieved. The past cannot be expunged, nor can one come to terms with it as long as one denies the suffering it involved. Accordingly, a dictator’s efforts to achieve that aim are doomed to failure in compulsive repetition. An endless succession of victims are forced to pay the price.

With his own behavior, Hitler demonstrated to the world the treatment he suffered at his father’s hands when he was a child: destructive, pitiless, ostentatious, merciless, boastful, perverted, self-enamored, short-sighted and stupid. In his unconscious imitation he was faithful to his father’s example. For the same reason, other dictators like Stalin, Mussolini, Franco, Ceausescu, Idi Amin and Saddam Hussein behaved in a very similar way. Saddam’s biography is a prime example of extreme humiliation in childhood avenged on thousands and thousands of victims at a later date. The refusal to learn from these facts may be grotesque, but the reasons for that refusal are not difficult to identify.

The fact is that an unscrupulous tyrant mobilizes the suppressed fears and anxieties of those who were beaten as children but have never been able to accuse their own fathers of doing so, thus keeping faith with them despite the torments suffered at their hands. Every tyrant symbolizes such a father, the figure that the abused children remain attached to with every fiber of their being, blindly hoping that one day they will be able to transform him into a loving parent.

This hope may have been what prompted the representatives of the Catholic church to demonstrate their compassion for Hussein. Two years ago, I myself turned to them for support when I presented the Vatican with material on the delayed effects of spanking, asking the authorities there to do what they could to enlighten young parents on this subject. Not one of the cardinals I approached with this request showed the slightest interest in the universally ignored but crucially important issue of physically abused children. Nor did I come across the slightest indication of Christian charity or compassion in connection with this issue. Today, however, those same representatives show that they are indeed capable of compassion. But, significantly, this compassion is lavished not on maltreated children or on Saddam’s victims but on Saddam himself, on the unscrupulous father-figure that the feared despot symbolizes.

As a rule, beaten, tormented, and humiliated children who have never received support from a helping witness later develop a high degree of tolerance for the cruelties inflicted by parent figures and a striking indifference to the sufferings borne by children exposed to cruel treatment. The last thing they wish to be told is that they themselves once belonged to the same group. Indifference is a way of preserving them from opening their eyes to reality.

In this way they become advocates of evil, however convinced they may be of their humane intentions. How, after all, could they discover their own truth? From an early age they were forced to suppress and ignore their true feelings. They were forced to put their trust not in those feelings but solely in the regulations imposed on them by their parents, their teachers, and the church authorities. Now the adult tasks facing them leave them no time to perceive their own feelings, unless those feelings happen to fit in precisely with the patriarchal value system in which they live and which prescribes compassion for the father, however destructive and dangerous he may be. The more comprehensive a tyrant’s catalogue of crimes is, the more he can count on tolerance as long as his admirers are hermetically closed off from access to the sufferings of their own childhood.

by Alice Miller

Body and Ethics
Monday December 01, 2003

A book entitled “The Body rebells” will be published in 2004.

I recently read about group therapy with war veterans, who had worked for two years on the severe traumas they had suffered in Vietnam. After they had learned, thanks to the empathy of the group, to allow themselves to feel their frozen emotions the traumas of their childhood began to surface. Every member of the group shared the opinion that their childhood traumas were much more painful than their later experiences during a cruel war. It was this account that motivated me to write this article, along with my desire to comment on a revealing letter and report of a San Diego research team which I had received several weeks ago.
The team investigated 17.000 people with an average age of 57 on the character of their childhood and asked whether they had suffered from physical illnesses during their later lives. The result clearly showed the amount of severe illnesses to be much higher in cases of persons who had been maltreated as children, in comparison with those who had grown up without any maltreatment or “pedagogical” spanking. Actually, these who had not been abused did not have to complain at all of illnesses during their adult lives. In the report How to Make Lead out of Gold the author commented: The results are clear and meaningful, but hidden and concealed.
Why concealed? Because these results cannot be published without implicit accusation against parents, still forbidden in our society. It is the same with contemporary therapies when clients are encouraged to feel their intense emotions. This is almost common practice nowadays. However, when emotions are awakened repressed memories from childhood usually emerge. The patient is now able to remember incidents of abuse, exploitation, humiliation and injury, endured during the first years of life but may be too often confronted with the doubtful attitude of his helper. Therapists who have not undergone this development can seldom appropriately deal with patient’s memories of mistreatments. The ones who can are rare and hard to find. Most of them offer their clients the “Poisonous Pedagogy”, the very same morality that once has made them sick. Our body is unable to understand. this, it has no need for the Fourth Commandment: “Honour thy parents”. Also, in contrast to our conscious mind our body cannot be deceived by intellectual arguments. It is the guardian of our truth because it carries within the experiences of our whole life and makes sure that we can live with the truth of our organism. With the help of symptoms it forces us to acknowledge this truth, not only emotionally but also mentally, to provide that we can live in harmony with our “inner child”, once disrespected and humiliated.
A child has no other choice than to idealize and to love his persecutors, to hope they will eventually change and to cling to them, because there is nobody else. Especially the most seriously abused children cling a lifetime to their parents if they have not experienced a successful therapy. The adult however, whose health is suffering as a consequence of the early mistreatment, does have the choice. Adults can get rid of their expectations as well as of their idealisations and attachments to their parents, they call love. Otherwise they remain in the position of a dependent child and pay for it not only with illnesses but also very often with a reduced sensibility for their own children. If successful, they will be able to give their children the authentic love they never could feel for their own parents.
I know these thoughts differ from what we have been taught in religious classes and in our parents’ house, to honour above all the Fourth Commandment. However, it is only now that we understand this correlation and that, as adults, we can benefit from this knowledge. We can decide whether we want to remain the ever-lasting child, because we are not able to free ourselves from our once abusive parents, and, we pay for this with illnesses, or, if we dare, to grow up into adults, even if we have to offend traditional morality.
The Hungarian writer and Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertesz writes in his famous book Fateless of his arrival in an Auschwitz’ concentration camp. He was only a fifteen-year-old boy then, and he describes accurately how he tries to interpret everything abnormal and cruel, which happened to him on his arrival, as something positive and beneficial. I think every abused child has to adopt such an attitude in order to survive. He reinterprets his perceptions and tries to see kindness, even, where an objective observer would recognise an obvious crime. A child has no choice; if he has no helping witness, if he is completely at the mercy of his persecutor, he is forced to repress the truth of his experience. However, later being adult, if these people are fortunate enough to find enlightened witnesses, they do have a choice. They can acknowledge their truth and they can stop pitying, understanding and wanting to help the perpetrator. They can unambiguously condemn his actions. This step implies a great relief. Now the body does not have to remind the adult of the child’s tragic history by threats. As soon as the adult is willing to know his whole truth the body can feel understood, respected and protected.
We may not always be able to give ourselves everything we have missed as children, but as adults we can certainly learn to give ourselves the respect, which our parents should have given us. Thus we can learn to understand ourselves better. With respecting ourselves starts the repair of the consequences of mistreatment. We can rebuilt the dignity that was stolen from us by not being treated as feeling human beings, but being used as obedient, lifeless objects. Regaining our own dignity and realising our individual truth we desist from idealising our parents, as we needed to do as children. Today we know: Even if our parents should change, nothing can heal the early trauma unless WE have changed.
It does not make sense to want to change our parents. Only they themselves could change their attitude and their behaviour. Our symptoms are the child’s unheard language. The child knows the full truth and is yearning for our respect. If we at last intend not to abandon the child within anymore but to give him the respect he has been longing for such a long time, the body does not need any symptoms in the future. The child inside needs to experience our unambiguous rebellion without ifs and buts. Therefore we require a companion, an enlightened witness, who is able to share our rebellion against our parents, who gives us support and does not have to turn to analytical neutrality for fear of his own parents’ punishments.
Referring to Franz Kafka’s and other writers’ biographies I pointed out in Thou Shalt Not Be Aware that, although their creativity helped them to survive, it did not suffice to liberate completely the imprisoned child and to restitute the vitality, and the safety he once had lost. The presence of an enlightened witness is indispensable for this deliverance.
I could observe this mechanism of splitting-off the consciousness and presenting the repressed truth in literature in the case of many writers. Art enables the artist to hide the truth, so he does not have to fear the moral judgements of society, because in art everything is allowed. But often the price of the writer’s denial is very high, as numerous examples show. Today this would not be necessary, if we took the existing knowledge seriously.
People who have been loved as children without any precondition do not have to force themselves as adults to give their parents the very affection they once have received. People however who have been mistreated, and betrayed as children often develop a latent hatred, they frequently vent on their children and propagate the opinion that spanking is necessary and harmless. They spread these opinions without any hesitation, though the contrary has been proven long ago. They are doing this because the Fourth Commandment forces them to deny the damage done to them, the damage to their brain and to their inborn capacity of compassion. Unfortunately, without this compassion they are able to spank their children without feeling their suffering, and they accept the own mutilation without complaining, so that they can “honour their parents”. They do their parents biddings, because of a mere sense of duty mostly linked with the expectation that their mothers and fathers at last will become those parents the child had been longing for. Thus the adult’s childlike loyalty combined with morality (“I deserved the violence”, “all parents every now and then make mistakes”) often leads to hypocrisy and to violence toward innocent people.
What do we obtain by the Fourth Commandment? Is a commandment able to create genuine sympathy? Can we dictate love to a human being, whose body has stored violence instead of love in the earliest, crucial years of his life? We know that he deeply represses his authentic feelings in favour of morality, that often leads to illnesses like cancer or cardiac and circulatory troubles. Indeed we cannot dispose of, once and for all, the repressed hatred often targeted at oneself; howsoever we try it with the aid of morality.
So it hardly happens that somebody takes the heart to say clearly and honestly: “I never have received love from my mother and therefore I do not feel love for her. In truth she is an alien for me. She is lonely and may be in need of a loving son, but I do not want to lie in order to give her this illusion. I owe her and myself the truth that I cannot feel genuine love for her as an adult, because I suffered so much from her blindness as a child.” Someone who dares to reflect that way will not be dangerous to his children anymore and will hardly have to anticipate severe, incomprehensible illnesses, because he is able to realise his body’s signals before it is too late.
Since I have experienced this in my own biography as a daughter and mother, and, on the basis of other persons’ lives I have understood why primal therapy could not help me. In the vicious circle of repeated, agonising pain, I, in fact, succeeded in realising fragments of my childhood story, but I was not able to abandon the position of the helpless child, who remained trapped in her powerlessness. Psychoanalysis could not help me at all because it takes the parents’ side thus hardening the child’s feelings of guilt and dependence.
Having read numerous biographies and moreover fiery reports in the ourchildhood-forums I have arrived at conclusions I briefly shall outline.
1. The once abused child’s feelings for his parents we generally call “love” actually are not authentic love. Instead it is a matter of an emotional attachment burdened with expectations, illusions and denial demanding a high price from everyone being involved.
2. Primarily our own children pay the price for this attachment. They have to grow up in a spirit of hypocrisy, because we are automatically tempted to inflict the very same “educational method” upon our children. But we are also commonly paying for our denial, with damages caused to our health, because our “gratitude” is contradictory to our body’s knowledge.
3. The failure of many therapies is explainable by the fact that the majority of therapists are looped in traditional morality and are trying to manipulate their clients in this way, because they have never learned anything else. As soon as the client starts to experience her feelings and for instance becomes capable of condemning her incestuous father’s misdeeds unambiguously, the therapist will presumably become scared of her own parents’ punishments, if she dared to realise and articulate her own truth. How else could we explain that forgiveness is offered as cure? In almost the same manner as once the parents therapists often suggest forgiveness only to calm down themselves. And because this sounds so familiar the client needs a lot of time to be able to see through the pedagogy. By the time she at last discovers the therapist’s educational methods, she will hardly be able to leave her, because, in the meantime, a new poisonous attachment has been developed. Now the therapist is like a mother for her, who has enabled her emotional birth, because she has begun here to feel her emotions. Thus she continues to expect salvation from her therapist, instead of acknowledging her body’s signals which offer help.
4. If a client however, accompanied by an empathic witness, could undergo and understand his fear of his parents or other caregivers, he gradually will be able to dissolve the destructive attachment. He will not have to wait long for a positive reaction of his body and its messages will be more and more comprehensible for him, because the body will stop speaking by means of mysterious symptoms. The client may realise now that his therapists (mostly unintentionally) deceived themselves and him, for forgiveness almost inhibits the closing of psychic wounds. The obsession to repeat the damage done to you doesn’t stop with forgiveness.

by Alice Miller

Concerning Foregiveness: The Liberating Experience of Painful Truth
Saturday March 01, 2003

The mistreated and neglected child is completely alone in the darkness of confusion and fear. Surrounded by arrogance and hatred, robbed of its rights and its speech, deceived in its love and its trust, disregarded, humiliated, mocked in its pain, such a child is blind, lost, and pitilessly exposed to the power of ignorant adults. It is without orientation and completely defenseless.
Its whole being would like to shout out its anger, give voice to its feeling of outrage, call for help. But that is exactly what it may not do. All its normal reactions, the reactions with which nature has endowed it to help it survive, remain blocked. If no witness comes to its aid, these natural reactions would enlarge and prolong the child’s sufferings. Ultimately, the child could die of them.
Thus, the healthy impulse to protest against inhumanity has to be suppressed. The child attempts to extinguish and erase from memory everything that has happened to it, in order to banish from consciousness the burning outrage, fury , fear, and the unbearable pain – as it hopes, forever. What remains is a feeling of its own guilt, rather than outrage that it is forced to kiss the hand that beats it and beg for forgiveness – something that unfortunately happens more than one imagines.
The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture, a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.
If, as adults, we nevertheless begin to have an inkling of why we are suffering and ask a specialist whether these sufferings could have a connection with our childhood, we will usually be told that this is very unlikely to be the case. And if it were, that we should learn forgiveness. It is the resentment at the past, we are told, that is making us ill.
In those by-now familiar groups in which addicts and their relations go into therapy together, the following belief is invariably expressed. Only when you have forgiven your parents for everything they did to you can you get well. Even if both parents were alcoholics, even if they mistreated, confused, exploited, beat, and totally overloaded you, you must forgive them everything. Otherwise, your illness will not be cured. There are many programs going by the name of “therapy”, whose basis consists of first learning to express one’s feelings in order to see what happened in childhood. Then, however, comes “the work of forgiveness”, which is apparently necessary if one is to heal. Many young people who have AIDS or are drug-addicted die in the wake of their effort to forgive so much. What they do not realize is that they are trying to keep the repression of their childhood intact.
Some therapists fear this truth. They work under the influence of various interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which preach forgiveness to the once-mistreated child. Thereby, they create a new vicious circle for people who, from their earliest years, have been caught in the vicious circle of pedagogy . This, they refer to as “therapy”. In so doing, they lead them into a trap from which there is no escape, the same trap that once rendered their natural protests impossible, thus causing the illness in the first place. Because such therapists, caught as they are in the pedagogic system, cannot help patients to resolve the consequences of the traumatization they have suffered, they offer them traditional morality instead.
In recent years I have been sent many books from the United States of America describing different kinds of therapeutic intervention by authors with whom I am not familiar. Many of these authors presume that forgiveness is an indispensable condition for successful therapy. This notion appears to be so widespread in therapeutic circles that it is not always called into question – something urgently needed. For forgiveness does not resolve latent hatred and self-hatred but can cover them up in a very dangerous way.
I know of the case of one woman, whose mother was sexually abused as a child by both her father and brother. Reared in a convent, this woman learned “the blessing of forgiveness” by heart. She continued to worship her father and brother without the slightest trace of bitterness. While her daughter was still an infant, she frequently left the child “in the care of” her thirteen-year-old nephew, while she went blithely off to the movies with her husband. While she was gone, the pubescent babysitter indulged his sexual desires on the body of her baby daughter. When the daughter later sought help in psychoanalytic counseling, the analyst told her she should on no account blame her mother. Her intentions had not been bad, she was told. She had had no idea that her babysitter was routinely abusing her child. The mother, it seems, was literally clueless. When the child began to develop dietary disturbances, she anxiously consulted a number of doctors. They assured her that the disturbances in her eating habits came from “teething.” Thus, the gears of this forgiveness machine were functioning almost perfectly – and, at the expense of the truth and the lives of all concerned. Fortunately, they don’t always function as well.
In her highly creative, remarkable book THE OBSIDIAN MIRROR: AN ADULT HEALING FROM INCEST (Seal Press, 1988), Louise Wisechild describes how she succeeded in deciphering her body’s messages and communications, and thereby her feelings, so that she was gradually able to free her childhood from repression. This took place in a successful therapy involving bodywork and written accounts of her experiences. Gradually, she discovered in detail what she had totally banished from consciousness: that she had been sexually molested by her grandfather at the age of four; that she was subsequently abused by an uncle and finally also by her stepfather. A woman therapist was willing and brave enough to work with her on this horrific journey of self-discovery, in spite of the manifest torture to which the patient had been subjected. Nevertheless, even in this most successful therapy Louise sometimes felt that she should forgive her mother. On the other hand, she strongly felt that this might be wrong. Fortunately, the therapist didn’t insist too much on this point. She gave Louise the freedom to follow her own feelings and to discover that it was not forgiveness that made her strong in the end. Helping the patient to resolve the guilt feelings that had been imposed upon her – the ultimate purpose, presumably, of therapy – doesn’t mean to burden her with an additional demand, a demand that could only serve to cement those feelings of guilt. A quasi-religious act of forgiveness can never resolve patterns of self-destruction.
Why should this woman, after showing her concern for her mother for thirty years, forgive her crime, when that mother had never made the slightest effort to see what she had done to her daughter? On one occasion, as the child, rigid with fear and disgust, was forced to lie under the heavy , male body of her uncle, she caught sight of her mother in the mirror as she approached the door. The child hoped to be saved, but the mother turned and disappeared. When Louise was an adult, she heard her mother say that she could only cope with her fear of that uncle if her children were around her. When the daughter tried to discuss her rape at the hands of her stepfather, her mother wrote her that she never wished to see her again. Even in many such blatant cases, the pressure to forgive, which effectively prevents the chance of a successful therapy, is hardly seen as the absurd demand that it is. It is just this common pressure to forgive that mobilizes old fears in the patient that oblige him or her to believe such an authority. What can it possibly achieve, except a quiet conscience for the therapist?*
In many cases much can be destroyed with a single, fundamentally wrong, confusing sentence. That it is well anchored in tradition and has been implanted in us since our earliest childhood only makes matters worse. What is involved here is an outrageous misuse of power , by which therapists are wont to ward off their powerlessness and fear. Patients, for their part, are convinced that the therapist holds this view as a result of the incontrovertible evidence of experience and so believe this “authority”. They cannot know-and it is almost impossible for them to discover-that what this claim in fact discloses is the therapist’s own fear of the mistreatment suffered at the hands of his or her parents. How are patients meant to resolve their feelings of guilt under such circumstances? On the contrary , they will simply be confirmed.
Preaching forgiveness reveals the pedagogic nature of some therapies. In addition, it exposes the powerlessness of the preachers. In a sense, it is odd that they call themselves “therapists” at all. “Priests” would be more apt. What ultimately emerges is the continuation of the blindness inherited in childhood, the blindness that a real therapy could relieve. What is constantly repeated to patients -until they believe it, and the therapist is mollified – is: “Your hate is making you ill. You must forgive and forget. Then you will be well.” But it was not hatred that drove patients to mute desperation in their childhood, by alienating them from their feelings and their needs. It was such morality with which they were constantly pressured.
It was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness – namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and condemnation of my parents’ misleading opinions and actions, and the articulation of my own needs – that ultimately freed me from the past. In my childhood, these things had been ignored in the name of “a good upbringing,” and I myself learned to ignore them for decades in order to be the “good” and “tolerant” child my parents wished me to be. But today I know: I always needed to expose and fight against opinions and attitudes that I considered destructive of life wherever I encountered them, and not to tolerate them. But I could only do this effectively once I had felt and experienced what was inflicted on me earlier. By preventing me from feeling the pain, the moral religious injunction to forgive did nothing but hinder this process.
The demand for good behavior has nothing to do with either an effective therapy or life. For many people in search of help, it closes the path to freedom. Therapists allow themselves to be led by their own fear – the mistreated child’s fear of its parents’ revenge – and by the hope that good behavior might one day be able to buy the love their parents denied them. The price that patients have to pay for this illusory hope is high indeed. Given false information, they cannot find the path to self-fulfillment.
By refusing to forgive, I give up my illusions. A mistreated child, of course, cannot live without them. But a grown-up therapist must be able to manage it. His or her patients should be able to ask: “Why should I forgive, when no one is asking me to? I mean, my parents refuse to understand and to know what they did to me. So why should I go on trying to understand and forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood, with things like psychoanalysis and transactional analysis? What’s the use? Whom does it help? It doesn’t help my parents to see the truth. But it does prevent me from experiencing my feelings, the feelings that would give me access to the truth. But under the bell-jar of forgiveness, feelings cannot and may not blossom freely.” Such reflections are, unfortunately, not common in therapeutic circles, in which forgiveness is the ultimate law. The only compromise that is made consists of differentiating between false and correct forms of forgiveness. But therapy requires only the “correct” form. And this goal may never be questioned.
I have asked many therapists why it is that they believe their patients must forgive if they are to become well, but I have never received a halfway acceptable answer. Clearly, they had never questioned their assertion. It was, for them, as self-evident as the mistreatment with which they grew up. I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not mistreated, but respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an ideology of forgiveness for incomprehensible cruelties. This ideology is indivisible with the command “Thou shalt not be aware” and with the repetition of that cruelty on the next generation. It is our children who pay the price for our lack of awareness. Our fear of our parents’ revenge is the basis of our morality.
However, by means of gradual therapeutic disclosure that dispenses with bogus morality and pedagogy , this misleading ideology can be stopped. Survivors of mistreatment need to discover their own truth if they are to free themselves of its consequences. Moralizing leads them away from this truth.
An effective therapy cannot be achieved if the mechanisms of pedagogy continue to operate. It requires recognition of the damage caused by our upbringing, whose consequences it should resolve. It must make patients’ feelings available to them-and accessible for the entirety of their lives. This can help them to orientate and be at one with themselves. Moralizing appeals can result in barring access to this self-knowledge.
A child can excuse its parents, if they in their turn are prepared to recognize and admit to their failures. But the demand for forgiveness that I often encounter can pose a danger for therapy, even though it is an expression of our culture. Mistreatment of children is the order of the day, and those errors are therefore trivialized by the majority of adults. Forgiving can have negative consequences, not only for the individual, but for society at large, because it can mean disguising erroneous opinions and attitudes, and involves drawing a curtain across reality so that we cannot see what is taking place behind it.
The possibility of change depends on whether there is a sufficient number of enlightened witnesses to create a safety net for the growing consciousness of those who have been mistreated as children, so that they do not fall into the darkness of forgetfulness, from which they will later emerge as criminals or the mentally ill. Cradled in the “net” provided by such enlightened witnesses, these children can grow to be conscious adults, adults who live with and not against their past and who will therefore be able to do everything they can to create a more humane future for us all.
It has already been scientifically proved that weeping caused by sadness, pain, and fear not only causes tears to fall. Stress hormones, which lead to a general relaxation of the body, are also released. Of course, this cannot be equated with therapy. Nevertheless, it is an important discovery that should find its way into the treatments used by therapeutic practitioners. So far, though, the opposite has been the case. Patients are given tranquilizers to calm them. What would happen if they began to gain access to the causes of their symptoms! The problem with medical pedagogy is that the majority of those involved, the institutions and specialists, in no way wish to know why it is people become ill. The result of this denial is that countless chronically ill people become permanent residents of our prisons and clinics, while billions are spent by the government on keeping mum about the truth. Those affected must on no account realize that they can be helped to understand the language of their childhood, thereby truly reducing their suffering or even relieving it altogether .
If we had the courage to confront the facts about the repression of childhood mistreatment and its consequences, this would be possible. One look at the specialist literature on the subject, however, shows just how lacking such courage is. By contrast, the literature is full of appeals to our good intentions, all kinds of noncommittal and unverifiable advice, and, above all, moral preaching. Everything, all cruelty endured in childhood, is to be forgiven. If that doesn’t do the trick, then the state must pay for the lifelong care and treatment of invalids and the chronically ill. But with the help of the truth, they could be cured.
It has now been proved that though repression may be crucial for a child, it should not necessarily be the fate of adults. A small child’s dependency on its parents, its trust in them, its longing to love and be loved, are limitless. To exploit this dependency, to deceive a child in its longing, confuse it, and then proceed to sell this as “child rearing” is a criminal act – a criminal act committed hourly and daily out of ignorance, indifference, and the refusal to give up such behavior. The fact that the majority of such crimes are committed unconsciously does not, unfortunately, allay the calamitous consequences. The abused child’s body will register the truth, while its consciousness refuses to acknowledge it. By repressing the pain and the accompanying situations, the infantile organism averts death-its fate, were it to consciously experience such traumatization.
What remains is the vicious circle of repression: the true story, which has been suppressed in the body, produces symptoms so that it could at last be recognized and taken seriously. But our consciousness refuses to comply, just as it did in childhood – because it was then that it learned the life-saving function of repression, and because no one has subsequently explained that as grown-ups we are not condemned to die of our knowledge, that, on the contrary , such knowledge would help us in our quest for health.
The dangerous teaching of “poisonous pedagogy” – “Thou Shalt Not Be Aware Of What Was Done To You ” – reappears in the methods of treatment practiced by doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists. With medication and mystifying theories they try to influence their patients’ memories as deeply as possible, in order that they never find the cause of their illness. These lie, almost without exception, in the psychic and physical mistreatment and neglect suffered in childhood.
Today, we know that AIDS and cancer involve a drastic collapse of the body’s immune system, and that this physical “resignation ” precedes the sick person’s loss of hope. Incredibly, hardly anyone has taken the step that these discoveries suggest: that we can regain our hope, if our distress signals are finally heard. If our repressed, hidden story is at last perceived with full consciousness, even our immune system can regenerate itself. But who is there to help, when all the “helpers” fear their own personal history? And so we play the game of blindman’s buff with each other-patients, doctors, medical authorities-because until now only a few people have experienced the fact that emotional access to the truth is the indispensable precondition of healing. In the long run, we can only function with consciousness of the truth. This also holds for our physical well-being. Bogus traditional morality, destructive religious interpretations, and confusion in our methods of child rearing all make this experience harder and hinder our initiative. Without a doubt, the pharmaceutical industry also profits from our blindness and despondency. However, each of us has been given only one life and only one body. It refuses to be fooled, insisting with all means at its disposal that we do not deceive it. …

*I have slightly revised the last two paragraphs for this revised edition after reviewing a letter from Louise Wisechild, who provided me with more specific information about her own view of her therapy.

by Alice Miller

The Ignorance or How we produce the Evil
Thursday June 20, 2002

Today there can be no possible doubt that evil exists and that there are people who are capable of extremely destructive behavior. Any lingering doubts on this score will be swept away by an evening spent in front of the television. But the fact this is so is no confirmation of the widespread assertion that there are people who are born evil. On the contrary. The deciding factor is the reception they were given when they came into the world and the way they were treated later. Of course they have the genetic blueprint they inherited from their parents, and it may determine what kind of temperament a child will have, what inclinations, gifts, predispositions, but character depends crucially upon what a person is offered soon after his birth and over the first years of life.

Children who are given love, respect, understanding, kindness, and warmth will naturally develop different characteristics from those who experience neglect, contempt, violence or abuse, and never have anyone they can turn to for kindness and affection. Such absence of trust and love is a common denominator in the formative years of all the dictators I have studied. The result is that these children will tend to glorify the violence inflicted upon them and later to take advantage of every possible opportunity to exercise such violence, possibly on a gigantic scale. Children learn by imitation. Their bodies do not learn what we try to instill in them by words but what they have experienced physically. Battered, injured children will learn to batter and injure others; sheltered, respected children will learn to respect and protect those weaker than themselves. Children have nothing else to go on but their own experiences.

Born innocent

The well-known American pediatrician Dr. Brazelton once filmed a group of mothers holding and feeding their babies, each in her own particular way. More than 20 years later he repeated the experiment with the women those babies had grown into and who now had babies themselves. Astoundingly, they all held their babies in exactly the same way as they had been held by their mothers, although of course they had no conscious memories from those early years. One of the things Braselton proved with this experiment was that we are influenced in our behavior by our unconscious memories. And those memories can be life affirming and affectionate or traumatic and destructive.

In the 1970s the French gynecologist Frédéric Leboyer demonstrated that babies delivered without physical force and given a loving reception by their immediate environment show no signs of desperate crying or any kind of destructiveness. In fact they will even smile only a few minutes after birth. As long as they are not separated after birth, as was the custom in the 1950s, mother and child will develop a relationship of trust that will have positive repercussions on the entire further course of the children’s lives. In the physical presence of her baby, the mother will produce the so-called love hormone (oxytocin) enabling her intuitively to understand the signals emitted by the child and to care for its needs by a process of empathy. These phenomena are described by Michel Odent in his latest book (“The Scientification of Love”, London, Free Association, 1999).

Why have these important, groundbreaking insights on human nature failed to penetrate into the awareness of the public at large? True, the works of Leboyer have changed the face of birthing practices. But the philosophical, sociological, psychological, and ultimately theological implications of his discovery of the innocent newborn do not appear to have left any mark on society as a whole. We can see this in many areas: in schools, the penal system, and politics. All these areas are dominated by the notion that punishment – and notably the corporal punishment that goes by the name of “correction” – is effective and harmless. There is little awareness of the fact that physical punishment actually creates the evil that we later try – more or less ineffectually – to banish by inflicting more of the same.

Evil is born anew with every new generation

In the Middle Ages there was a widespread belief in “changelings.” The term referred to children of the devil smuggled into ordinary, well-meaning mothers’ cradles in exchange for the babies they had actually brought into the world. Though there is no indication whom the devil is supposed to have sired these wicked, diabolical children on, or what he did with the good ones he spirited away, the fact is that mothers of so-called changelings were instructed to bring those children up with especial strictness, meaning that they should beat them black and blue at the slightest sign of recalcitrance as this was the only hope of molding them into human beings worthy of the name. Though we no longer believe in changelings today, the belief in the effectiveness of corporal punishment, the idea that we can “beat some sense” into rebellious children, appears to be unshakable in the minds of most people. Even Sigmund Freud believed that a sadist takes pleasure in tormenting others because he has been unable to adequately sublimate the death instinct we are allegedly all born with. Genetics provides an “updated” version of the idea of innate evil. It is frequently asserted that there are genes that drive some people to commit evil deeds even if they have had “lots of love” in their childhood. I have yet to come across such an individual. All the childhood histories of serial killers and dictators I have examined showed them without exception to have been the victims of extreme cruelty, although they themselves steadfastly denied this. And in this they are not alone. Large sections of society are apparently determined either to deny or to ignore these facts. Taken to its logical conclusion, this genetic theory ought to be able to explain why, 30 years before the advent of the Third Reich, Germany should have brought forth millions of children whose genetic make-up was so badly contaminated that in adulthood they were ready and willing to lend themselves to Hitler’s atrocities without turning a hair. Why has there never been such an accumulation of rogue genes in Germany before or since? It is a question I have asked repeatedly and I have never received an answer. The reason is simple. There is no answer. Hitler’s henchmen were victims of their upbringing. They belonged to a generation of children who had been exposed to brutal physical correction and humiliation and who later vented their pent-up feelings of anger and helpless rage on innocent victims. Safe in the knowledge that they were doing so with the Führer’s blessing, they were finally able to give free rein to those feelings without risk of punishment. Today children are brought up very differently in Germany. But wherever cruelty and humiliation still plays a part in parenting, those methods are faithfully reflected in the behavior of young people denying the pain of the humiliation they have been through, selecting and attacking scapegoats, and advancing harebrained ideological reasons for their depredations. The gene theory is just as incapable of explaining evil as the changeling legend or the death instinct. According to statistical surveys (see Olivier Maurel, La Fessée, La Plage, 2001) 90% of the people alive today believe that children need a “good” smacking from time to time if anything is to come of them. The truth is very different, and it is high time we faced up to it. Evil exists. But it is not something that some people are born with. It is produced by society, every day, every hour, unceasingly, all over the world. It starts with the treatment meted out to newborn babies and carries on in the parenting methods practiced on small children. Such children may BECOME criminal at a later stage, if they have no helping witness to turn to. In their childhood years, serial killers and dictators all have one thing in common: they had no such witnesses to turn to for help.

Dictators and the dynamics of cruelty

Every dictator torments his people in the same way he was tormented as a child. The humiliations inflicted on these dictators in adult life had nothing like the same influence on their actions as the emotional experiences they went through in their early years. Those years are “formative” in the truest sense: in this period the brain records or “encodes” emotions without (usually) being able to recall them at will. As almost every dictator denies his sufferings (his former total helplessness in the face of brutality) there is no way that he can truly come to terms with them. Instead he will have a limitless craving for scapegoats on whom he can avenge himself for the fears and anxieties of childhood without having to re-experience those fears. Here are some examples.

Adolf Hitler’s father Alois was an illegitimate child. He was suspected of being the son of a Jewish merchant from Graz because his mother, Maria Schickelgruber, became pregnant when she was in his domestic employ. The suspicion was not easy to disprove because Adolf Hitler’s grandmother received alimony from the merchant for a period of 14 years. Alois must have suffered greatly from this social stigma; the fact that his name was so often changed (Heidler, Hydler, etc.) is a clear indication of the fact. For him, the opprobrium of being both illegitimate and of Jewish descent was a source of unbearable shame. But there was no way he could rid himself of this humiliation. The easiest way for him to vent his pent-up resentment was to take it out on his son Adolf in the form of regular, merciless floggings. I have given a detailed account of this in my book “For Your Own Good” and I return to it in my two latest books “Paths of Life”, Pantheon, 1999 and “The Truth Will Set You Free”, Basic Books, 2001. In the entire history of anti-Semitism and persecution of the Jews, no other ruler had ever hit upon the idea that, on pain of death, every citizen in his country must provide proof of non-Jewish descent extending back to the third generation. This was Hitler’s OWN PERSONAL BRAND OF MANIA. And it is traceable to the insecurity of his existence in his own family, the insecurity of a child constantly living under the threat of violence and humiliation. Later millions were to forfeit their lives so that this child – now a childless adult – could avenge himself by unconsciously projecting the grim scenario of his childhood onto the political stage. We have an instinctive reluctance when it comes to acknowledging that the activity of our bodily and emotional memory is independent of our consciousness. This is understandable, not only because these insights are new and unaccustomed but above all because we have no control over the way that memory operates. But accepting the existence of these phenomena can in fact improve the control we have over their effects and afford better protection against them. The average mother who gives her child an “involuntary” smack will not be aware of the fact that the reason she does so is that her body and its memories are prompting her to. (Mothers not beaten as children do not normally slap their children “involuntarily.”) But if she knows the reason, she will be better able to cope with it. Her self-control will be greater and she will spare both herself and her child the suffering that comes from such treatment.

Like Hitler, Stalin was exposed to immense brutality as a child and had no helping witness to turn to. He did not know that it was his body memory that forced him to play out his own childhood tragedy on the stage of the Soviet Union. Had he known, he would have been better able to control his unconscious anxieties, and millions would have been spared. If this knowledge had been in general currency at the time, the governments of the world might have devised suitable strategies over the last 50 years to prevent the dangerous accumulation of power in the hands of one person for the purpose of reducing their personal childhood traumas to silence. Very little has been done in this connection. Stalin was an only child. Like Hitler he was the first child to survive after three siblings who had died in infancy. His irascible father was almost always drunk and laid into his son from an early age. Despite the fame and power he later achieved, Stalin suffered throughout his life from a persecution mania that drove him to order the killing of millions of innocent people. Just as the infant Stalin lived in fear of sudden death at the hands of his unpredictable father, so the adult Stalin lived in fear even of his closest associates. But now he had the power to fend off those fears by humiliating others.

Mao was the son of a “strict” teacher who attempted to instill obedience and wisdom in him by means of severe physical correction. We are only too familiar with the “wisdom” Mao set out to drum into the huge population of his country, naturally with the “best of intentions.” The methods he used to do so cost the country 35 million lives. Ceaucescu grew up sharing a room with ten brothers and sisters. His delayed response to this was to force Romanian women to have unwanted children.

The examples are endless. Unfortunately we refuse to look these facts in the face. If we did, we might learn how hate comes about. And if we took its origins seriously we would be less prone to think that there is nothing we can do about it.

The roots of hate

Why are we so anxious to find innate evil tucked away in our genetic make-up? Quite simply because most of us were beaten when we were small and fear nothing so much as the revival of the pain caused by the humiliation we went through. At the same time, we were told that it was all for our own good. So we learned to suppress that pain. But the memory of those humiliating beatings was stored away in our brains and our bodies. We loved our parents, so we believed them when they told us it was for our own good. Most of us still believe it and go around asserting that one cannot bring up children without blows, slaps, and smacks – in other words, without resorting to humiliation. And then there is no way out of the vicious circle of violence and denial of the humiliation inflicted on them. The need for revenge, reprisal, punishment lives on within them. The rage suppressed in childhood is transformed into murderous hate. Religious and ethnic groups are only too willing to provide the ideologies justifying the cultivation and projection of that hate. Humiliation is a poison that is difficult to exterminate because it is used for extermination and the production of new humiliation that fuels the proliferation of violence and masks the underlying problems.

To get out of this vicious circle we must face up to our own truth. We WERE humiliated children, we WERE the victims of our parents’ ignorance, the victims of their histories, of the unconscious scars their childhood left on them. We had no choice but to deny the truth. For a maltreated child, denying suffering is the only hope of survival in an unbearable situation.

But as adults we can break out of that mold. We don’t need to spend all our lives playing down the pain involved and asserting that children need spanking. We can face up to our own history, recognize that hitting children is not only useless but actively dangerous. We can come to understand that it encourages hate and the desire for revenge, feelings that will be unleashed against ourselves and society as a whole if we remain imprisoned in our self-inflicted ignorance. Unlike children, we adults have other – and healthier – alternatives than denial. We can decide in favor of knowledge and awareness, rather than allowing ourselves to be driven by the emotional, unconscious knowledge stored in our bodies and the fear of the truth it instills in us. Maybe there is a little Stalin inside many of us. For all the infinite power at his command, he spent all his life in fear of his father and clinging to the “blessings” of denial. Like Hitler, he believed that the annihilation of millions of people would one day free him of the tormenting fear of his father. But it did not. Such illusions drive many former humiliated children into crime. Equipped with the knowledge we now have at our disposal, we can gradually espouse different ideas and solutions from the ones passed on to us in a thousand-year tradition of violence, punishment, retribution (and sustained by weakness, ignorance, and fear). Electing to remain bogged down in those inherited notions is tantamount to a refusal to learn from the facts we have at our disposal. Those facts are to be found not only in the biographies of mass murderers but also in the positive examples history has to offer. They too have been ignored for thousands of years.

Jesus and his parents

Jesus is worshipped by all Christian churches. He grew up in the company of parents who believed him to be the son of God. We may safely assume that they never hit him. Instead, they treated him with immense respect and gave him all their love. We know what this upbringing based on love, tolerance, and respect made out of him. He passed on to others what he received from his parents: sympathy, tolerance, love, respect. Why is it that in the subsequent 2,000 years no representative of the church modeled himself on Jesus’ example? Why has the church never spoken out against corporal punishment for little children? The church preaches – and practices – charity, tolerance, and forgiveness for adults but expressly denies these blessings to children. Why were Jesus’ parents never held up as an example to Christian believers? Why do Christian schools in Africa get up in arms when the republic of Comores sets out to prohibit physical correction for children in school? The reason given in the corresponding petition is that physical correction for pupils in school is a religious obligation. The only explanation there can be for this extreme psychological ignorance is that the adults involved stand in a tradition of power, reprisal, and revenge for denied humiliation. Unwittingly they are thus passing on this tradition to the coming generation.

Conclusions

Today the computer screen can actually show us the lesions inflicted on the brains of children by violence and neglect. Numerous articles by brain researchers inform us of the facts, not only in specialist journals but also on the internet. It is time to give up the denial. The mortal dangers many of us were exposed to in childhood are no longer there to threaten us. We no longer need to arm ourselves against something that happened long ago. The real hazards come from within, the risks involved in ignoring the knowledge stored in our bodies. Unawareness of the true motives behind our actions can be dangerous indeed, whereas knowledge of our own histories can free us from the urge to flee from past dangers, by using mindless and destructive strategies. Humiliating others can never be a genuine, lasting solution. All it does – in politics and parenting alike – is create new hotbeds of violence. Children who learn the methods of humiliation and menace from their parents will put that into practice in school. And, as a survey has shown, they learn it at the age of 18 months at the latest, that is, at a time when their brains are not yet fully formed. Hence the long-term impact of these lessons, this school of violence. By teaching infants violence and emotional ignorance (due to the necessary repression of pain) we constantly produce the Evil in the world. But with more knowledge we can decide to stop this production. Sweden did it 22 years ago by promulgating a law forbidding corporal punishments to children and some countries did already the same, with good results.

To believe that we can combat violence by using more violence is an obvious illusion cherished however for millennia and visible in the continuing production of weapons. Organizing wars rather helps avoiding the truth, at the cost of human lives, than to open our eyes and increase our insight. We are going to have to try a little harder than that: listening to ourselves, acknowledging our true motives and cultivating a sincere and respectful attitude, rather than believing in the protection of punitive, destructive power. Having the power to destroy doesn’t mean being strong. Real strength means being able to understand our feelings and our history so that we become free to act from conscious motives instead of being driven by unconscious fears like Stalin, Hitler, and others. Though we may not have learned to trust respectful communication as children and to understand our feelings we can learn it in adulthood. Many have already succeeded in doing so. But many still think they don’t even need to try. Thus they know near to nothing about themselves.

However, precisely with this knowledge are we able to make constructive decisions and to find effective solutions. The examples of Stalin and Hitlers show how dangerous it can become for millions if leaders of big countries don’t know the true reasons of their decisions. In the ignorance of suffering endured in childhood lies the source of suffering inflicted to others. We can’t change the past but we can give up our ignorance and – with time – the source will dry out.

I think that only by understanding the dynamics of hatred and by becoming aware of its roots, and not by using weapons, can we offer to the next generation real peace.

by Alice Miller

The Wellsprings of Horror in the Cradle
Monday June 10, 2002

Whoever they are and however dreadful their crimes, deep down inside every dictator, mass murderer, terrorist cowers the humiliated child they once were, a child that has only survived through the complete and utter denial of its feelings of helplessness. But this complete denial of suffering once borne creates an inner void. Very many of these people will never develop a capacity for normal human compassion. Thus they have few if any qualms about destroying human life, neither that of others nor the void they carry around inside themselves.

In my view, and on the basis of the research I have done into the childhood histories of the most ruthless dictators, like Hitler, Stalin, Mao or Ceaucesco, terrorism in general and the recent horrifying attacks on the United States are a macabre but precise demonstration of what happens to millions and millions of children the world over in the name of good parenting. And unfortunately, society turns a blind eye. The horrors of terrorist violence are something we can all watch on our television screens; the horrors in which children grow up are very rarely shown in the media. Thus, most people are not informed about the main source of hatred. They speculate about political, religious, economic or cultural reasons but the speculations are turning in darkness because the true reason must remain obscured: the suppression and subsequent denial of early rage that often ends up in hatred with an endless number of ideologies.

Hatred is hatred and rage is rage, all over the world and at any time the same, in Serbia, Rwanda or Afghanistan. They are always the fruits of very strong emotions, reactions to injuries to their dignity endured in childhood, normal reactions of the body that were not allowed to express themselves in a safe way. Nobody comes to the world with the wish to destroy. Every newborn, independently from the culture, religion or ethnic origins needs to love, be loved, protected, and respected. This is his biological design. If he is maltreated by the cruel upbringing he will develop the very strong wish to take revenge. He will be driven to destroy others or himself but only by his history and never by inborn genes. The idea of destructive genes is a modern version of the fairy tale talking about the “devil’s children” who need to be chastised to become obedient and nice.

In these dreadful weeks, all of us have experienced as adults what many children go through every single day. They stand helpless, speechless, and trembling before the unpredictable, incomprehensible, brutal, indescribable violence of their parents, who thus avenge themselves unconsciously for the sufferings of their own childhood, sufferings they have never come to terms with because they too have denied their very existence. We only need to recall our feelings on September 11 to have some idea of the intensity of those sufferings. All of us were gripped by horror, dread, and fear. But the connections between terrorism and childhood are still hardly recognized. It is time to take the facts seriously.

The statistics (Olivier Maurel, La Fessée, Editions La Plage 2001) tell us that over 90% of the people living in this world are firmly convinced that beating children is for their own good. As almost all of us have endured the humiliation inflicted on us by this mentality, the cruelty of it is something we have learned to consider as normal. But like the Holocaust and other forms of supreme contempt for human life and dignity, these latest terrorist attacks show the effects of the system in which we have all grown up. In early childhood we have learned to suppress the pain, ignore the truth, and deny the feeling of infinite helplessness and humiliation inflicted on small children by power-seeking adults.

Contrary to former belief, we do not arrive into this world with a brain fully formed. The brain only develops fully in the first few years of life. The things done to the child in that period leave lifelong traces, good and bad. For our brain contains the complete physical and emotional – though unfortunately not the mental – memory of everything that has happened to us. Today, we can actually see the lesions in the brains of beaten or badly neglected children on the screen of a computer. Numerous articles by brain specialists, notably Bruce D. Perry, have indicated these facts. If the child has no helping witness to turn to, it will learn to glorify what has been inflicted on it: cruelty, sadism, hypocrisy, and ignorance. The simple reason is that children learn by imitation, not from the well-meant words addressed to them in the later stages of life. The mass murderers, serial killers, Mafia bosses, and dictators who grew up without helping witnesses will inflict, or connive in inflicting, the same terror on whole nations once they have the power to do so. And they will be doing nothing other than putting into practice what they learned by experience when they were small children.

Unfortunately, most of us prefer not to see the connections because accepting this knowledge would force us to feel the pain we had no choice but to suppress so long ago. And so we stay with the strategy we resorted to in childhood, the strategy of denial. But these latest events have shown that the time has come to stop turning a blind eye. We must grow out of the old traditional system geared to punishment and retaliation, we must refrain from reactions born of blind rage. Naturally, we must not neglect our own protection. But the video cameras at schools will not protect anybody as long as they only pretend but actually refuse to look at the facts and to know where the violence comes from.

According to an inquiry I have ordered in France in 2001, 89% of 100 mothers asked about the age of their children when they “had to hit them” for the first time, responded in the average: 1,8. 11% could not remember the exact age, but not one of the mothers said that she had never hit her children. These figures inform us with a disturbing clarity where and when children learn the violence they display in schools and later also on the political stage. Many of the big and expensive conferences dealing with violence and its sources would not at all be necessary if we stopped denying this truth. The facts are available to us if only we decide to look at them.

We must go in active search of different forms of communication from the ones imprinted on us in childhood, forms based on respect rather than the desire to inflict new humiliation by punishment. People who grew up in families where punishment-enforced totalitarianism reigned know only the language of war, and they will impose this language on others forcing them to defend themselves however they can. But this story is endless. As we know, we are easily able to exterminate thousands of people, indeed whole nations, but we cannot exterminate the disastrous effects of humiliations done to small children by their parents. Those humiliations will return to affect the whole of society as is happening today.

It is high time we awoke from our long sleep. As adults we are no longer threatened by the same danger of destruction that many of us really were confronted with in our infancy and that paralyzed us with fear and drove us to denial. Only in childhood did we have to deny in order to survive. As adults we can learn not to ignore the knowledge stored in our bodies so that we can become able to grasp and genuinely understand the true motives behind our acts. And true knowledge of our own histories can free us from the urge to revert to futile strategies and remain emotionally blind. Today, we have the chance to look around, to learn from experience, and to seek new, creative solutions for settling conflicts. Even if we have never learned to trust respectful communication, it is never too late to overcome that deficiency and to free ourselves from self-deception.

Today, the technical means of venting hatred, discharging long-ago accumulated, bottled-up rage, and directing it at innocent people continue to grow very fast. Many of these techniques for destruction are available to power-crazed dictators who are driven to take vengeance on whole nations for the humiliation inflicted on them in early childhood. To protect the world we definitely need a worldwide prohibition against hitting, hurting and other acts of cruelty against children by parents and others who have power over them. Children absolutely must be protected while their brains are developing, malleable and so easily damaged. We need to gather the courage to look deeply within ourselves and confront the wellsprings of horror. We need to spread this new knowledge through every available means–the knowledge that by humiliating small children we inevitably create fertile breeding-grounds of violence.

A new law, protecting toddlers from domestic violence, like the one which largely decreased criminality in Sweden, will doubtlessly bring about essential changes in society, if not immediately, then surely in 20 years when the never-beaten children will become adults and will not be interested in provoking wars.

by Alice Miller

About Work Abuse
Saturday June 01, 2002

I am glad that the exploitive, disrespectful, manipulative, numbing, or in other ways destructive patterns of our upbringing are being more and more recognized in our social life: in work, in the sport industry, in politics, in partnership – wherever. The book STALKING THE SOUL (Helen Marx, 2000) written recently by Marie-France Hirigoyen that describes these perverse patterns at work became a bestseller in France over night. I agree with the author that it is absolutely important to help victims of work abuse to recognize these patterns so that they become able to combat them and to use their options as grownups (professional groups, the internet, lawyers etc), especially if they have been used to this kind of disrespectful treatment from their first days of life.

But the study quoted on the forum “ourchildhood.usa” july 1, 2001, seems to suggest that a person with a healthy childhood can become an abuser of her/his children because she/he is victimized, humiliated and badly treated during the day at her/his work.. Journalists who preferred to find the causes of child abuse in the present life than in the childhood of the abuser (because the issue childhood frightened them) often confronted me with this point of view. They were convinced that parents are likely to beat their children because they are overwhelmed by work or because they are unemployed or whatever. I must admit that I never met one single father or mother who beats their children because of troubles at work if they were not maltreated in their own childhood. But I do know of many people who terribly humiliate their children, even if they have the most independent life conditions, as artists or professors.

For that reason I must disagree with the suggestion that there is a mutual causality between work abuse and child-mistreatment and that parents hit their children BECAUSE they are defenseless at work as was stated out. I am convinced that the 95% of world population, the parents who beat their children for “educational reasons” do it ONLY because they learned this behavior by imitation very, very early in their lives. However, by manipulating, humiliating, betraying, scaring and hitting a little child we are taking the risk that his/her brain will develop accordingly to this experience, we are teaching children by giving examples of cruelty, dishonesty, and indifference. These children will most certainly deny their early suffering, will blame others than their parents for their plight later in life and will restage what they have learned, at work or with their own children. Thus, I believe that parents who were not beaten in childhood will not be driven to do it, even if they may have other problems.