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Friday August 29, 2008

Dear Alice Miller,

how do you explain the fact that your discovery, made almost 30 years ago, is still hardly acknowledged in the professional world? There are of course people who fight for the rights of children and write that children need love and not violence. But all this stays in the moral prospective: you should give your child this or that, without recognizing the inebility to love of mothers who have been strongly mistreated as children and never dared to feel their rage against their parents. This repressed rage, they can only feel it towards their children. They often take it out on their small children, as long as they are unaware that in fact they dare to feel their legitimate rage against their parents only when they direct it toward their children as scapecoats. You write often about these dynamics that psychoanalysts would call transference. Why don’t they join you in your explanation of the hatred against the own children, which we so frequently observe?
O.R.

AM: You are asking why so few people join me in my explanation of the hatred against the own children, which we so frequently observe. Because even as adults almost all of them fear their parents. We published recently a flyer about this issue that can be read on my page “articles”. Here is the text:

The Roots of Violence are NOT Unknown
(The misled brain and the banned emotions.)

The Facts:

1. The development of the human brain is use-dependent. The brain develops its structure in the first four years of life, depending on the experiences the environment offers the child. The brain of a child who has mostly loving experiences will develop differently from the brain of a child who has been treated cruelly.

2. Almost all children on our planet are beaten in the first years of their lives. They learn from the start violence, and this lesson is wired into their developing brains. No child is ever born violent. Violence is NOT genetic, it exists because beaten children use, in their adult lives, the lesson that their brains have learned.

3. As beaten children are not allowed to defend themselves, they must suppress their anger and rage against their parents who have humiliated them, killed their inborn empathy, and insulted their dignity. They will take out this rage later, as adults, on scapegoats, mostly on their own children. Deprived of empathy, some of them will direct their anger against themselves (in eating disorders, drug addiction, depression etc.), or against other adults (in wars, terrorism, delinquency etc.)

Questions and Answers:

Q: Parents beat their children without a second thought, to make them obedient. Nobody, except a very small minority, protests against this dangerous habit. Why is the logical sequence (from being a misled victim to becoming a misleading perpetrator) totally ignored world-wide? Why have even the Popes, responsibles for the moral behaviour of many millions of believers, until now never informed them that beating children is a crime?

A: Because almost ALL of us were beaten, and we had to learn very early that these cruel acts were normal, harmless, and even good for us. Nobody ever told us that they were crimes against humanity. The wrong, immoral, and absurd lesson was wired into our developing brains, and this explains the emotional blindness governing our world.

Q: Can we free ourselves from the emotional blindness we developed in childhood?

A: We can – at least to some degree – liberate ourselves from this blindness by daring to feel our repressed emotions, including our fear and forbidden rage against our parents who had often scared us to death for periods of many years, which should have been the most beautiful years of our lives. We can’t retrieve those years. But thanks to facing our truth we can transform ourselves from the children who still live in us full of fear and denial into responsible, well informed adults who eventually regained their empathy, so early stolen from them. By becoming feeling persons we can no longer deny that beating children is a criminal act, which should be forbidden by law on the whole planet.

Conclusion:

Caring for the emotional needs of our children means more than giving them a happy childhood. It means to enable the brains of the future adults to function in a healthy, rational way, free from perversion and madness. Being forced to learn in childhood that hitting children is a blessing for them is a most absurd, confusing lesson, one with the most dangerous consequences: This lesson as such, together with being cut off from the true emotions, creates the roots of violence.

This flyer was written by Alice Miller and edited by Nimrod (Norman) Pik , MD