How is Emotional Blindness Created? Alice Miller

How is Emotional Blindness Created?

21 points

1. The newborn child is always innocent.
2. Each child needs among other things: care, protection, security, warmth, skin contact, touching, caressing, and tenderness.
3. These needs are seldom sufficiently fulfilled; in fact, they are often exploited by adults for their own ends (trauma of child abuse).
4. Child abuse has lifelong effects.
5. Society takes the side of the adult and blames the child for what has been done to him or her.
6. The victimization of the child has historically been denied and is still being denied, even today.
7. This denial has made it possible for society to ignore the devastating effects of the victimization of the child for such a long time.
8. The child, when betrayed by society, has no choice but to repress the trauma and to idealize the abuser.
9. Repression leads to neuroses, psychoses, psychosomatic disorders, and delinquency.
10. In neuroses, the child’s needs are repressed and/or denied; instead, feelings of guilt are experienced.
11. In psychoses, the mistreatment is transformed into a disguised illusory version (madness).
12. In psychosomatic disorders, the pain of mistreatment is felt but the actual origins are concealed.
13. In delinquency, the confusion, seduction, and mistreatment of childhood are acted out again and again.
14. The therapeutic process can be successful only if it is based on uncovering the truth about the patient’s childhood instead of denying that reality.
15. The psychoanalytic theory of “infantile sexuality” actually protects the parent and reinforces society’s blindness.
16. Fantasies always serve to conceal or minimize unbearable childhood reality for the sake of the child’s survival; therefore, the so-called invented trauma is a less harmful version of the real, repressed one.
17. The fantasies expressed in literature, art, fairy tales, and dreams often unconsciously convey early childhood experiences in a symbolic way.
18. This symbolic testimony is tolerated in our culture thanks to society’s chronic ignorance of the truth concerning childhood; if the import of these fantasies were understood, they would be rejected.
19. A past crime cannot be undone by our understanding of the perpetrator’s blindness and unfulfilled needs.
20. New crimes, however, can be prevented, if the victims begin to see and be aware of what has been done to them.
21. Therefore, the reports of victims will be able to bring about more awareness, consciousness, and sense of responsibility in society at large.

http://www.alice-miller.com
© 2015 Alice Miller

Alice Miller defines Child Mistreatment, Child Abuse

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Humiliations, spankings and beatings, slaps in the face, betrayal, sexual exploitation, derision, neglect, etc. are all forms of mistreatment, because they injure the integrity and dignity of a child, even if their consequences are not visible right away. However, as adults, most abused children will suffer, and let others suffer, from these injuries. This dynamic of violence can deform some victims into hangmen who take revenge even on whole nations and become willing executors to dictators and cruel leaders. Beaten children very early on assimilate the violence they endured, which they may glorify and apply later as parents, in believing that they deserved the punishment and were beaten out of love. They don’t know that the only reason for the punishments they had to endure is the fact that their parents themselves endured and learned violence without being able to question it.

This is why society’s ignorance remains so immovable and parents continue to produce severe pain and destructivity – in all “good will”, in every generation. Most people tolerate this blindly because the origins of human violence in childhood have been and are still being ignored worldwide. Almost all small children are smacked during the first three years of life when they begin to walk and to touch objects which may not be touched. This happens at exactly the time when the human brain builds up its structure and should thus learn kindness, truthfulness, and love but never cruelty and lies. Fortunately, there are many mistreated children who find “helping witnesses” and can feel loved by them.

http://www.alice-miller.com
© 2015 Alice Miller

The Roots of Violence are NOT Unknown – Alice Miller

by Alice Miller

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, responsible 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 regained their empathy, so early stolen from them. By becoming feeling persons we can no longer deny that beating children is a criminal act that should be forbidden 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.

http://www.alice-miller.com
© 2015 Alice Miller

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