Why they wanted to kill us
Sunday March 16, 2008
Dear Alice Miller, dear Barbara Rogers,
in the course of uncovering and coming to terms with the abuses, which I have suffered in my childhood, I have come again and again to the point that has filled me with horror. I have sensed in my memories of the violence that my parents and brothers wanted to kill me. They had, in the truest sense of the word a murderous rage against me. Through numerous depictions of other people in the internet I began to trust this perception and to think it possible that they wanted to kill me. But WHY they wanted to do that I have never understood. When I read again “For Your Own Good,” I found the explanation: “The main mechanism of poisonous pedagogy : – splitting-off and projection -, which I have really understood only now. Emotionally understood. Because intellectually, I had comprehended it already 15 years ago. My parents did want to KILL me because I reminded them painfully of their repressed, eliminated aliveness. Of all the deadened feelings whose cadavers poisoned their lives. Their suppressed rage, indignation, their hatred and revenge seemed to them as ghosts from their childhood. And these ghosts they wanted to murder. The violence thus not only served their exercise of power and control, but had also effectively the incitement to annihilate me. As they could not kill me, they have at least killed my soul through fighting against, suppressing and “educating-away” anything alive within me.
Children in dysfunctional families thus have within the family the same function as the jews had in national socialism: the scapegoats.
Dear Mrs. Miller, that you have seen through these mechanisms, expressed and published thus is an invaluable service to mankind and humanity and one cannot commend it highly enough.
I thank you for your prudence, your empathy and your courage. K. B.
(This letter and AM’s answer have been translated from German.)
AM: Your letter shocked me very much. Although I have written it myself, I am shocked every time when someone can understand with his/her own feelings where I am coming from. Maybe this is why the most talented children attract their parents’ hatred because their aliveness, curiosity and intelligence show them what has been strangled in their parents. But sadly, all this happens in the unconscious. Hatred is covered up by assurances of love and “legitimized” by lies.