Editor’s note: The following article was submitted by the Lovefraud reader who comments as “Pearl.”
By Pearl
Someone on this blog once mentioned a book by Alice Miller and Andrew Jenkins, and it caught my attention. So now I’m reading The Truth Will Set You Free—Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self.
Even though I’m only about halfway through the book, I wanted to share parts of it because it is so important to what a lot of us are working on—forgiving ourselves and trying to understand why this (fraud) happened to us. I know this won’t apply or appeal to everyone, but it might help some of you as it has me. Miller’s ideas help me understand why I was susceptible and forgive myself for my blindness—my inability to spot a “bad guy.”
Miller focuses on childhood—on how corporal punishment (spanking/whipping) and humiliation—cause a type of blindness in adulthood that can lead to being manipulated and UNABLE TO SEE THROUGH LIES. She emphasizes that the kind of parenting and education aimed at breaking a child’s will and making that child into an obedient subject by means of overt or covert coercion, manipulation and emotional blackmail leaves long-lasting imprints on the way we think and relate to one another as adults.
Here is the cycle as she sees it:
- Traditional methods of upbringing, which have included corporal punishment, lead a child to DENY suffering and humiliation. (Can anyone related to having a high pain threshold? Where did I get that bruise or cut—I don’t remember getting it? Ever feel humiliated at being spanked, paddled or whipped as a child? Ever experience a parent being insensitive to suffering?)
- This denial, although essential if the child is to SURVIVE, will later cause emotional blindness.
- Emotional blindness produces “barriers in the mind” erected to guard against dangers. This means that early denied traumas become encoded in the brain, and even though they no longer pose a threat, they continue to have a subtle, destructive impact. (The memory of how to respond to such crappy behavior from our parents and authority figures is still there.)
- Barriers in the mind keep us from learning new information, putting it to good use, and shedding old, outdated behaviors.
- Our bodies retain a complete memory of the humiliations we suffered, driving us to inflict unconsciously on the next generation what we endured in childhood, unless we become aware of the cause of our behavior, which is embedded in the history of our own childhoods.
As children, some of us learned to suppress and deny natural feelings. Some of us lived in a world where our feelings were ignored and denied.
All the beaten child remembers is FEAR and the face of the ANGRY parent, not why the beating was taking place. The child may even assume he had been naughty and deserved the punishment. Miller writes that in the absence of a witness who can empathize with us in childhood and genuinely listen to us, we have no other way of protecting ourselves from the pain but to close our minds to it.
In a bid to blot the fear and pain of our abused younger self, we erase what we know can help us, we can fall prey to the seductiveness of sects and cults, and FAIL TO SEE THROUGH ALL KINDS OF LIES.
Having this information helps me understand why I was “ripe for the picking.” It also goes a long way toward helping me forgive myself and move on in the healing process.
PB: You don’t seem like the defiant type — more like someone who will figure out the lay of the land, and figure out how to survive.
As far as the N thinking you were defiant, NOT! They love control games, and they’ll make you out to be “defiant” just as part of their ongoing, mindbending, gaslighting bullpucky.
Rune,
I ended up taking my kids out of public school. My ADHD son I took out after 4th grade and home schooled him a year(back when it was illegal to do so) and then put him in a church school where he did fairly well, but I realized the man who was the “pastor” was running a cult and took him out and had a friend home school him with her kids (I couldn’t stay home with him to do it and couldn’t take him with me either) My P son I put into a private church school that was run like most schools but didn’t have any unruly kids there. He did great there and excelled.
When we moved to California in 1984, I put both of them in a franchise of the church school I had had C in (the ADHD one) under a different (non-cultish) director and it worked very well for them.
When we moved back to Texas in 86 school year, I put them both into public high school because I couldn’t find or afford a good private school there. P son did well but C (ADHD) didn’t do well in a traditional classroom. So, I let him “drop out” legally and study at home and take the GED which he did and made a PERFECT SCORE. Unfortunately in Texas they would not let him (at that time) start college at 16, so he went to work for two years and by that time we were in Florida where he did go to college there and did well. He changed majors a couple of times, but found his niche in being a machinist and a tool and die maker and apparently is very knowledgeable in his field and is well respected by his employers (if there is a lay off, he is the last to go) he is also very rightfully proud of his abilities in his chosen field. While I would have preferred him to be a teacher or other professional rather than “blue collar” I encouraged him to be what HE wanted to be, and to realize he had a “different drummer” and to march to his own drum.
About the worst thing I “did” to him was to endow him with some excess of empathy and enabling. (our family curse apparently) but he is healing and learning. When he was a college student we raised rabbits for meat and I would have to go kill them, and then he would dress them, but he couldn’t bring himself to kill them. (I can remember being like that as a kid when my grandfather would kill the milk cow’s calf for veal) He has no problem actually killing a cow or steer, but he still has trouble killing a rabbit.
I also did a little “creative” parenting, by telling them when they were little if they didn’t behave they COULDN’T WAS DISHES THAT NIGHT (at the age where they like to stand on a stool and play in the dish water) and they didn’t catch on until they were 11 and 12 that it wasn’t considered a PRIVILEDGE! By that time they had been doing the dishes for years! LOL By that age, they could also raise a garden, clean house, sew simple things, correctly sort and wash clothing in an automatic washer, fold and put them away, sweep and mop a floor etc. and P son had learned by then to knit very well. They also knew how to iron clothes correctly (Gosh I hated doing that when I was a kid!) So I tried to make sure they had “survival” skills that not every male in the country had at that time. By 14 or 15 they could cook, bake bread and/or butcher a hog or goat, as well as assist a goat correctly with a difficult birth. They were also doing college level on all tests available, and reading at 1000 WPM with 90% comprehension (per testing).
At 16 my husband was giving both boys flying lessons and they had their drivers licenses (I had my step dad give them drivers ed since he used to teach that in high school) Both boys were pretty good mechanics by age 15-16 as well which they learned from my husband how to take care of a car and do minor repairs on engines, etc. By 16 though,, my P son was already leading a “secret” life of sex with 13 year olds (got one preg) and theft and deception. By 17 he was fully into crime. By 20 he was in jail awaiting trial for murder.
Even when he appeared to be cooperating at home and school, he was deceiving us big time. During the time we found out and the time he came back home to live, my mother took him in (against my will) when I came down on him about staying out all night and stealing cars. (he broke a couple of my ribs before he took off)
Looking back on it all, it never even crossed my mind to divorce him then. But that is when I should have “divorced” both him and my mother. Hind sight is 20-20 though and what happened happened. I would do it differently today knowing what I know now, but then I didn’t have that information or knowledge. I believed the excuses and the lies. I keep up toxic hope.
Rune, I read the other day something that just made me cringe. This no child left behind crap is just that. The Feds require that the schools report how many 9th graders do not finish high school. The REAL rate is about 1/3, but the way the statistics are skewed it is much less than that, so they report the skewed stats and it “looks good.” but the Feds know it is NOT accurate.
“STATISTICALLY SPEAKING, a man with one foot on a red hot stove, and the other on an ice cube is COMFORTABLE.”
I don’t know who first said that, but it is sooooo TRUE.
The functional illiteracy rate today is I think exemplified by “Kelly Bundy’s” comment to her mother Peggy on “Married With Children” She was showing off her high school diploma and she was so proud of it, then she turned to her mother and said, “Read it to me, read it to me!” ROTFLMAO
I will go to my grave swearing that I was assaulted by my N primarily for one reason; he was furious that after months of being told to “get out” of HIS house – to go spend the night somewhere else on nearly a weekly basis, I was actually packing to move out.
It was going to completely ruin his fun if I actually moved, and it infuriated him.
Even now, he says that all he wanted on the night of the assault, was for me to “go spend the night somewhere else”. I refused because he had told me to be out at the end of the month – in three days, and I needed to pack. He claims to not have known it was only three days to the end of the month and now says I could’ve stayed longer (yeah right! Perhaps he should’ve said that).
I asked him three times to leave me alone and go back upstairs, but he refused because it was HIS house. We weren’t even having an argument, he just wanted to start one.
Duh!…my point was, N knew that all I’ve ever really wanted was a home that didn’t move, and someone to love and be loved – I’m a simple gal really. He honed in on my childhood and figured out exactly what it was he needed to say or do to hook me…and he knew I loved his house and daughter. I loved painting, gardening, and puttering…he made the things I loved into a living hell and lorded it all over me at every chance.
And yes, I can follow the bread crumbs all the way back to my crazy mother.
Hey Ox! Wait until we have a generation or two of text messagers under our belts…they probably won’t be able to speak english, never, mind spell!
Oxy: It sounds like you creatively exercised every parenting trick in the “Good Parent Handbook.” Your P son was going to be like that, regardless, is my take. Short of some sort of “tool-and-die” work on the brain, I wonder what can possibly be done for those headed down that road.
Rune, I was far from a perfect parent, but it wasn’t because I didn’t TRY to teach my kids both by example and a few clever “Tom Sawyer” tricks.
I wanted them to learn and I enjoyed doing things with them, and we did things together and with groups of friends where all ages were included.
Son C and I (now that he is free of the personality disordered wife) still enjoy doing things together and this evening we cooked supper together “ahead” as we have company coming and wanted the food to be already prepared. We cleaned up the kitchen together and he did his laundry and folded and put it away. Before son C came home, son D and I had a “division of labor” for household and farm tasks that was appropriate to our skills and strengths and our interests, so we are having to divide that division again with a third member of the household. Actually, with another strong male her it lets me quit digging ditches and lifting and toteing so much and be able to spend more time in the kitchen cooking etc. But there is no RIGID division of labor or anything else rigid about our relationships. No one complains of one of us wants a “day off” to just contemplate the lint in his/her navel, or if someone needs a little space.
I think now we are living the way I wish I had lived all my life. Being respectful of everyone’s individuality, cooperating with each other, trusting each other and enjoying each other. It is painful to realize how much of my life I was angry, frustrated, worried, anxious and just purely unhappy and confused. But I can’t change that past, I can only make TODAY and tomorrow (if I get a tomorrow) as happy as I can and enjoy it as much as I can, free from toxic people.
Rune and pb:
Like yours, my parents method of parenting was to keep changing the rules. The only certainty was the unending verbal and physical abuse. The uncertainty, fear and apprehension affect me to this day.
S used to tell me about what a tyrant his father was. I have no way of proving or disproving that. However, whatever the source, he learned well. He took what I couldn’t give my parents but gave to him — love — and destroyed me and that love.
Does anyone else feel “touch deprived”?
Someone up the thread said something to the effect that they craved being hugged and held. I guess that’s the result of neglect or a lack of nurturing?
I think that touch is a BASIC human need. There have been many studies showing this in not only humans but in other mammals and primates.
IN WWII the “failure to thrive” syndrome in the babies kept in orphanages and cared for well, but not held and cuddled started dying like flies…from lack of human touch and interaction.
Touch I think is something that I make sure I get as much of as I can. I didn’t get much as a child (my family was not demonstrative and I saw little hugging or kissing–almost none) I made a point and still do to hug my sons frequently and to say “I love you” frequently. There are times that I have felt such a NEED for touch that I almost felt like going and crawling into bed with one of my sons and just holding him. (and quite frankly I don’t think there was anything wrong with that)
I hug my friends and am very demonstrative and was with my husband. My son D used to laugh at “the old folks holding hands” in the evening, but he is also a very huggy person, as is son C.
P son, even as an infant didn’t seem to want to be cuddled for the first six weeks of his life, and in fact, actively resisted it. Even when I was nursing him he would bend backwards with his body away from me rather than molding to the breast and my body. He would literally tip his head back as far as it would go so that his face, when pressed to the breast, would put his body out on the arm of the rocker rather than up against my body. I thought it odd at the time, but still don’t know what if anything it meant.
Touch? Yep, I think it is very important and that we need to make every effort to get all the touching we can (in appropriate ways) even if it is just a hand shake from someone we barely know.