by Alice Miller

Concerning Primal Self -Therapy
Friday June 01, 2001

I am frequently asked what I consider to be the decisive factor in psychotherapy today. Is it the recognition of the truth, liberation from the enforced vow of silence and from idealization of one’s parents, or is it the presence of an Enlightened Witness? My view is that it is not a question of either-or but of both-and. Without the Enlightened Witness it is impossible to bear the truth of what happened to us in early infancy. But by the term Enlightened Witness I do not mean anyone who has studied psychology or has been through primal experiences with a guru and has remained in his thrall. For me, Enlightened Witnesses are therapists with the courage to face up to their own histories and to gain their autonomy in doing so, rather than seeking to offset their own repressed feelings of ineffectuality by exerting power over their patients.

The adult needs assistance in coping with the present situations as an adult, while at the same time maintaining contact with the suffering and knowing child he once was, the child he could not muster the courage to listen to for so long but now, with help, can finally pay heed to. The body knows everything that has happened to it but it has no language to express that knowledge. It is like the child we once were, the child that sees all but without the aid of the adults remains helpless and alone. Accordingly, whenever the emotions from the past rise to the surface they are invariably accompanied by the fears of the helpless child, dependent on the understanding or at least the reassurances of the caregivers.

Unlike the body, our cognitive system knows little of the events far back in the past; conscious memories are fragmentary, brittle, unreliable. But the cognitive system has a huge fund of knowledge at its disposal, a fully developed mind, and the life experience a child cannot yet have. As adults are no longer powerless, they can offer the child within them (the body) protection and an attentive ear so that it can express itself in its own way and tell its own story. It is in the light of these stories that the looming, incomprehensible fears and emotions of the adult take on meaning. Finally they stand in a recognizable context and are no longer so obscurely menacing.

In a society with a receptive attitude to the distress of children no one will be alone with his/her history. The same is true of therapists. Because then everyone will know that it is not the children who are responsible for their sufferings but the adults.

I recently wrote a letter in French to the forum that I am quoting in English below:

Dear Franck, I understand well your fascination for the manual of Stettbacher. When I read this manuscript in 1989 I thought that it contained the solution for a lot of readers who, after having read my books, were looking, like you, for the sources of their sufferings and fears in the history of their childhood. As I had never had the luck to be understood and helped in my childhood nor in my therapies (it was always me who had to help others) I found the idea of a primal self – therapy at first quite normal and acceptable. It is after some years that I grasped the big importance and even necessity of an enlightened and empathic therapist in the process of recovery. Especially thanks to letters of people that failed to help themselves and who blamed themselves for their plight ( trying to do more and more therapy and turning around alone with their fears and pains) that I understood that the primal self – therapy can indeed trigger easily the old pent-up emotions but can reactivate the situation of the child that was always alone with his/her pains and fears. This repetition of the old trauma is the opposite of a therapy.
Today, I share the opinion of Arthur Janov who always affirmed, that primal therapy without the assistance of a well informed and compassionate therapist can be very dangerous. (cf. his homepage). In addition, I think that it contains (1) a contradiction in itself by reactivating a situation of which one want to get rid of and (2) a perpetuation of the violence directed toward oneself.
I don’t have any contact with Mister Stettbacher since 1994 when I stopped to recommend his method but I suppose that the information on its negative effects reached him too and that it already motivated him to stop recommending it. Since the release of his book there is a lot of new information on this topic available that are easily accessible thanks to the internet. Maybe, a next book by Stettbacher will bring the necessary corrections to his present work, published 12 years ago.

by Alice Miller

On “Resilience”
Sunday April 01, 2001

The excellent picture of the iceberg, introduced by Olivier Maurel, has opened my eyes for the fact that the groups that so enthusiastically speak of the child’s resilience seem to take care solely of the visibly mistreated and neglected children. It is true, to those children society offers today several ways to overcome even the most terrible effects of their traumas undergone before and to become resilient, thanks to the confidence that they could develop since. The legal system that often (if not always) sides with them, enlightened witnesses, some empathetic attorneys, well informed therapists, all these people help a mistreated child to become a conscious survivor who, later, won’t want to repeat with his/her children what has been done to him or her.

But us, the group that is concerned with the problem of educational violence, we talk of something else. We talk of the 90% of the world population that underwent an ” educative ” madness without ever becoming aware that it was connected to humiliation and other serious traumas. Victims of this kind of violence cannot count on the empathy of society, because the whole society denies their suffering, as it denies its own. To victims of these kind of traumas don’t exist any courthouses, nor enlightened witnesses, nor compassion of anybody – at least as long as almost everybody repeats without a second thought: “Being spanked didn’t do any harm to me, it made me strong”. For that reason victims of educational violence can’t develop resilience, they will say instead: “What was good for me will not harm my children.” In this way they create what we call the “repetition transgénérationnelle”. Children beaten for “educational” reasons will be nearly inevitably tomorrow’s beaters if we don’t begin to give attention to this dynamics.

Thanks to the clarification of Olivier Maurel, I understood that partisans of resilience take care of the summit of the iceberg and neglect the hidden part. It is necessary that medias understand this distinction so that serious misunderstandings can be avoided in the current discussions on this topic. It is necessary to know that without enlightened witnesses, without the help of a conscious and well informed society, the usually beaten children remain alone with their repressed suffering, and it is why, all their life, they will be convinced that they have been beaten for their own good. They cannot develop any awareness of this injustice, hence no resilience either.

by Alice Miller

Mary and Joseph – Parents to emulate
Monday December 25, 2000

The figure of Jesus confounds all those principles of Poisonous Pedagogy
still upheld by the Church, notably the use of punishment to make children
obedient and the emotional blindness such treatment inevitably entails. Jesus
was respected, admired, loved and protected, his parents saw themselves as
his servants and it would never have occurred to them to lay a finger on him.
Did that make him selfish, arrogant, covetous, high-handed or conceited?
Quite the contrary.

Jesus grew into a strong, aware, empathic and wise person able to
experience and sustain strong emotions without being engulfed by them. He
could see through hypocrisy and mendacity and he had the courage to pillory
them for what they were. He had no need of power over others because he was
entirely at one with himself.

Yet for all that, no representative of the Church has ever, to my
knowledge, admitted to the patent connection between the character of Jesus
and the way he was brought up. Would it not make eminently good sense to
encourage believers to follow the example of Mary and Joseph and regard their
children as the children of God (which they are) rather than treating them as
their own personal property ?

It is time to relinquish destructive models and to mistrust the principle
of obedience. We have no need of obedient children brainwashed by their
upbringing to be the ideal victims for the empty verbiage and the
blandishments of terrorists and lunatic ideologists and ready to fall in with
their commands, even to the extent of killing others. We need children with
open eyes and ears, children prepared to protest against injustice, stupidity
and ignorance with arguments and constructive action. Jesus was able to do
this when he was twelve years old and the scene in the temple demonstrates
eloquently that he could refuse the obedience asked of him by his parents
without hurting their feelings.

With the best will in the world we cannot truly emulate the example of
Jesus. To do that we would need to have been through an entirely different
kind of personal history. What we can do, as long as we really want to and
are not thwarted by external authority, is to learn from the attitude
displayed by Joseph and Mary. They did not need their son’s obedience and
they felt no urge to punish him. Only if we fear the confrontation with our
own histories will we need to have power over others, and if we do that we
will need more and more of it all the time. Parents want power and obedient
children because they feel too weak to be true to themselves and their own
feelings, too weak to admit those feelings to their children. But it is
precisely this kind of honesty with our children that makes us strong.
To tell the truth we do not need to have power over others.

Power is
something we need to spread lies, to mouth empty words and pretend they are
true. It is for this that we require mindless gullibility from our children
or from whole nations. And because such power can never be a substitute for
the real strength of the truth, the insane logic of such a development is
bound to culminate in wars and the dreadful toll of human life they
invariably exact.

It is entirely realistic to imagine that if the wisdom of well-informed
experts (like Frédéric Leboyer, Michel Odent, Bessem van der Kolk and many
others) were to reach a large number of parents and those parents had the
support of religious authorities in following the example of Mary and Joseph,
the world would be a much more peaceful, honest and rational place for our
children than it is today.

by Alice Miller

The Trauma of Childhood
Tuesday June 01, 1999

As long as they are loved, children can recover from abuse and even the horror of war.

June 4, 1999 | We do not arrive in this world as a clean slate. Every new baby comes with a history of its own, the history of the nine months between conception and birth. In addition, children have the genetic blueprint they inherit from their parents. These factors may help determine what kind of a temperament a child will have, what inclinations, gifts and predispositions.
But character depends crucially upon whether a person is given love, protection, tenderness and understanding or exposed to rejection, coldness, indifference and cruelty in the early formative years. The stimulus indispensable for developing the capacity for empathy, say, is the experience of loving care. In the absence of such care, when a child is forced to grow up neglected, emotionally starved and subjected to physical abuse, he or she will forfeit this innate capacity. While I ascribe immense significance to the experiences of infants in the first days, weeks and months of their lives to explain their later behavior, I do not wish to assert that later influences are completely ineffectual. Rather, if a traumatized or neglected child can later come to know what I call an “enlightened” or “knowing witness,” he or she can deal positively with the effects of that childhood trauma.
We know today that the brain we are born with is not the finished product it was once thought to be. The structuring of the brain depends very much on the experiences of the first hours, days and weeks of a person’s life. In the last few years, scientific studies led by neurologist and child psychiatrist Dr. Bruce D. Perry have further established that traumatized and neglected children display severe lesions affecting up to 30 percent of those areas of the brain that control our emotions. Severe traumas inflicted on infants lead to an increase in the release of stress hormones that destroy the existing, newly formed neurons and their interconnections.
These latest revelations about the human brain might have been expected to bring about a radical change in our thinking about children and the way we treat them. But old habits die hard. Many people now believe that it takes at least two generations for young parents to free themselves of the burden of inherited “wisdom” and stop beating their own children, two generations until it has become sheerly impossible to give one’s child a slap “inadvertently,” two generations before the weight of newly acquired knowledge gets in the way of the hand raised to deal the “unthinking” blow.
We are often confronted with the belief that the effects of corporal punishment are salutary rather than detrimental. But the only thing beaten children learn is to fear their parents, not to drive carefully or stay out of trouble. They will also feel guilty and learn to play down their own pain. Being subjected to physical attacks they are defenseless to fend off merely instills in children a “gut” conviction that they obviously merit neither protection nor respect. This false message is then stored in the children’s bodies as information and will influence their view of the world and their later attitude toward their own children. Such children will be unable to defend their right to human dignity, unable to recognize physical pain as a danger signal and act accordingly. Even their immune system may be affected.
In the absence of other persons to model their behavior on — enlightened or knowing witnesses — these children will see the language of violence and hypocrisy as the only really effective means of communication. Naturally enough, they will avail themselves of that language themselves when they grow up because adults normally will elect to keep already-suppressed feelings of powerlessness in a state of suppression.
The trauma experienced by Kosovar children can be overcome if these children receive the proper attention of their parents, or, in the absence of parents, from another adult. These children need to know that they are loved and that someone understands their fears. War — a trauma that is shared by an entire community — doesn’t drive a child to destructiveness if he can share his feelings with somebody. What makes a person dangerous in later life is the isolation of pain and fear, the failure of parents or other caregivers to see and understand how badly a child feels. With the Kosovar children, the parents perfectly understand the distress of their children and can try to help them because they are experiencing the same pain themselves. In fact, the whole world seems to be eager to help; everybody is aware of the traumas. On the other hand, the isolation of an infant in pain within a family can leave traces in the brain that are linked to violent or aggressive behavior later.
Protection and respect for the needs of a child are surely things we ought to be able to take for granted. But this is far from being the case. We live in a world peopled by individuals who have grown up deprived of their rights, deprived of respect. As adults they then attempt to regain those rights by force (blackmail, threats, the use of weapons). Society seems to regard hatred as innate, that is to say, God-given. It is a society that refuses to see that we keep on producing hatred by inculcating models of violence into our children, behavior patterns that can prove stronger than anything they may learn at a later stage.
The United Nations has been called upon to declare the years 2000-2010 the decade for the culture of nonviolence. This cannot be achieved by fine words alone. We need to set an example for our children — those who will decide what the next generation will look like — and show them that coexistence and communication without violence are actually possible. I believe there are a great number of parents who are already aware of the far-reaching implications of their own behavior. It is realistic to hope that this knowledge will lead to an increase in the number of knowing witnesses and hence to a swift improvement in the treatment of children everywhere.

by Alice Miller

The Essential Role of an Enlightened Witness in Society
Wednesday January 01, 1997

Since adolescence I have always wondered why people take pleasure in humiliating others. Clearly the fact that some people are sensitive to the suffering of others proves that the destructive urge is not a universal aspect of human nature. So why do some tend to solve their problems by violence while others don’t?
Philosophy failed to answer my question, and the Freudian theory of the death wish has never convinced me. It was only by closely examining the childhood histories of murderers, especially mass murderers, that I began to comprehend the roots of good and evil: not in the genes, as commonly believed, but often in the earliest days of life. Today, it is inconceivable to me that a child who comes into the world among attentive, loving and protective parents could become a predatory monster. And in the childhood of the murderers who later became dictators, I have always found a nightmarish horror, a record of continual lies and humiliation, which upon the attainment of adulthood, impelled them to acts of merciless revenge on society. These vengeful acts were always garbed in hypocritical ideologies, purporting that the dictator’s exclusive and overriding wish was the happiness of his people. In this way, he unconsciously emulated his own parents who, in earlier days, had also insisted that their blows were inflicted on the child for his own good. This belief was extremely widespread a century ago, particularly in Germany.
I found it logical that a child beaten often would quickly pick up the language of violence. For him, this language became the only effective means of communication available. Yet what I found to be logical was apparently not so to most people.
When I began to illustrate my thesis by drawing on the examples of Hitler and Stalin, when I tried to expose the social consequences of child abuse, I encountered fierce resistance. Repeatedly I was told, “I, too, was a battered child, but that didn’t make me a criminal.” When I asked for details about their childhood, I was always told of a person who loved them, but was unable to protect them. Yet through his or her presence, this person gave them a notion of trust, and of love.
I call these persons helping witnesses. Dostoyevsky, for instance, had a brutal father, but a loving mother. She wasn’t strong enough to protect him from his father, but she gave him a powerful conception of love, without which his novels would have been unimaginable. Many have also been lucky enough to find later both enlightened and courageous witnesses, people who helped them to recognize the injustices they suffered, to give vent to their feelings of rage, pain and indignation at what happened to them. People who found such witnesses never became criminals.
Anyone addressing the problem of child abuse is likely to be faced with a very strange finding: it has frequently been observed that parents who abuse their children tend to mistreat and neglect them in ways resembling their own treatment as children, without any conscious memory of their own experiences. It is well known that fathers who bully their children through sexual abuse are usually unaware that they had themselves suffered the same abuse. It is mostly in therapy, even if ordered by the courts, that they discover, stupefied, their own history, and realize thereby that for years they have attempted to act out their own scenario, just to get rid of it.
How can this be explained? After studying the matter for years, it seems clear to me that information about abuse inflicted during childhood is recorded in our body cells as a sort of memory, linked to repressed anxiety. If, lacking the aid of an enlightened witness, these memories fail to break through to consciousness, they often compel the person to violent acts that reproduce the abuse suffered in childhood, which was repressed in order to survive. The aim is to avoid the fear of powerlessness before a cruel adult. This fear can be eluded momentarily by creating situations in which one plays the active role, the role of the powerful, towards a powerless person.
But this is not an easy path to rid oneself of unconscious fears. And this is why the offence is ceaselessly repeated. A steady stream of new victims must be found, as recently demonstrated by the paedophile scandals in Belgium. To his dying day, Hitler was convinced that only the death of every single Jew could shield him from the fearful and daily memory of his brutal father. Since his father was half Jewish, the whole Jewish people had to be exterminated. I know how easy it is to dismiss this interpretation of the Holocaust, but I honestly haven’t yet found a better one. Besides, the case of Hitler shows that hatred and fear cannot be resolved through power, even absolute power, as long as the hatred is transferred to scapegoats. On the contrary, if the true cause of the hatred is identified, is experienced with the feelings that accompany this recognition, blind hatred of innocent victims can be dispelled. Sex criminals stop their depredations if they manage to overcome their amnesia and mourn their tragic fate, thanks to the empathy of an enlightened witness. Old wounds can be healed if exposed to the light of day. But they cannot be repudiated by revenge.
A Japanese crew shot a film of therapeutic work in a prison in Arizona, where the method was based, inter alia, on my books. I was sent the video cassette and found the results very revealing. The inmates worked in groups, talked a lot about their childhood, and some of them said, “I’ve been all over the place, and killed innocent people to avoid the feelings I have today. But I know that I can bear these feelings in the group, where I feel safe. I no longer need to run around and kill, I’m at home here, and I recognize what happened. The past recedes, and my anger along with it.”
For this process to succeed, the adult who has grown up without helping witnesses in his childhood needs the support of enlightened witnesses, people who have understood and recognized the consequences of child abuse. In an informed society, adolescents can learn to verbalize their truth and to discover themselves in their own story. They will not need to avenge themselves violently for their wounds, or to poison their systems with drugs, if they have the luck to talk to others about their early experiences, and succeed in grasping the naked truth of their own tragedy. To do this, they need assistance from persons aware of the dynamics of child abuse, who can help them address their feelings seriously, understand them and integrate them, as part of their own story, instead of avenging themselves on the innocent.
I have wrongly been attributed the thesis according to which every victim inevitably becomes a persecutor, a thesis that I find totally false, indeed absurd. It has been proved that many adults have had the good fortune to break the cycle of abuse through knowledge of their past. Yet I can certainly aver that I have never come across persecutors who weren’t victims in their childhood, though most of them don’t know it because their feelings are repressed. The less these criminals know about themselves, the more dangerous they are to society. So I think it is crucial for the therapist to grasp the difference between the statement, “every victim ultimately becomes a persecutor,” which is false, and “every persecutor was a victim in his childhood,” which I consider true. The problem is that, feeling nothing, he remembers nothing, realizes nothing, and this is why surveys don’t always reveal the truth. Yet the presence of a warm, enlightened witness – therapist, social aid worker, lawyer, judge – can help the criminal unlock his repressed feelings and restore the unrestricted flow of consciousness. This can initiate the process of escape from the vicious circle of amnesia and violence.