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- Barriers in the mind keep us from learning new information, putting it to good use, and shedding old, outdated behaviors.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.
hello libelle — Your words also ring true for me: “When I come to read here and think of my own injuries and then read about the really very horrible, unimaginable, unbearable things that others have endured and are still standing and healing…” I too am deeply humbled and very proud at the same time of being part of LF.
Oxy,
I too took a “spanking” from my father when I was a teen. We had soaped car windows, which I never had done before or again after that, and did not cry. I took the licking and kept on ticking, so to say. He kept hitting me and I just took it. No emotion.
Dear Innocent,
I’m sorry that you experienced such a “spanking:—and I too have “soaped car windows” and you know, it is not a hanging offense. I might have grounded you and made you go wash the cars and apologize, but “spanking” a teenager unless they are holding a club trying to attack you is not in my humble opinion anything “reasonable.”
I’m glad you are here at LF. As we peel back the layers of pain and dysfunction with our psychopaths, we start to get down to the layers of WHY we were such great targets for them and for why we accepted their poor treatment of us as “expected” or “normal” or whatever our particular thoughts/feelings were.
Sometimes these attitudes go back to our family of origin and the dysfunctional and abusive (physical and/or emotional) that we grew up with.
I think it is only when we peel that “onion” all the way to the core and find out where the “rotten spot” is and cut it out and remake ourselves into the strong and confident people that we want to be that we can truly heal. Learn to set reasonable boundries for ourselves and expect and demand that others treat us with respect.
As dependents of our parents we had no control or power over how they treated us, but because we are adults now, we can SET STANDARDS that are healthy and good. Sure it is difficult and we have to examine all those “layers’ that we grew up ACCEPTING because it was the only way to survive. No child deserves to be treated with disrespect or violence, but we had no control then, and we CAN TAKE CONTROL NOW. We no longer have to be abused. God bless you. (Hugs)
pb and Rune– As I have reflected more, I agree with your comments on these components…
pb — I think you’re on to something about “it seems we were all abused to some degree as children, including the S/P/N’s, but we empaths developed social skills to survive (not always good ones) and come through as more balanced and compassionate adults, whereas the N/S/Ps didn’t access any other coping skills but to withdraw into themselves and out of reality.”
Rune, what you wrote also makes sense from my observations: “In our unpredictable families, we were always “breaking rules,” whether we meant to or not. Because of the unpredictability, the rules actually didn’t matter — we were always at risk for punishment or rejection, and survival might have required that we “defy authority.” Andt those of us who came out non-N/S/P retained our inner “moral compass,” which is also balanced by our empathy.”
Boy did this article ever hit the nail on the head. I was beaten by my stepfather with a thick leather belt between the ages of 7 and 15 for ridiculous things. He would beat me if I woke up in the middle of the night and went to the bathroom because the flushing woke him up. Or if I went to bed and left a light on. One of the beatings that I re-lived while I was in a meditation retreat at 23 happened when I was when I was 10. That beating was overheard by a guy I had a crush on at the time, and he avoided me after that. It was extremely humiliating. There was another like that with another neighborhood boy when I got older. My mother just allowed it and often made me apologize to my abusive stepfather afterward for whatever the perceived misdeed was (which was usually something ridiculous). I learned from a very young age that the people I lived with were unfair, dangerous, ridiculous, and couldn’t be trusted. I also learned that I was on my own in dealing with them, and that I wouldn’t be getting any help from anybody any time soon. Besides shutting down, another coping strategy I learned was the art of sarcasm. My stepfather was too stupid to understand it, so I was able to vent some of my anger toward him by making sarcastic remarks that flew over his radar. I also learned to lie to him to avoid getting beaten.
I definitely think the humiliation from all the abuse has affected my ability to see abusive behavior and set limits. I buried away all my feelings and learned to put on a poker face, which I still use sometimes. I am learning in therapy to actually feel the hurt around all the betrayals that happened to me, both in my childhood and in my adult life. I still am not at the point of being able to effectively tell some of the people in my life that they have hurt me. But I’m getting better at spotting the unsafe ones.
There are few people who would understand this because most people say “get over it” regarding a bad childhood. But childhood trauma is the gift that keeps on giving, long into adulthood, as I’m learning.
Along the lines of recognizing when I’ve been hurt, I made a new year’s resolution this year to tell someone if they’ve hurt me. I got a chance to practice this with a guy on my reptile site that I’ve had as an “internet” friend for about 2 or 3 years. We’ve always had a good connection of friendship. But when I was in crisis over the sociopath in 2008, I asked him to call me (we had only every emailed and instant messaged). I really needed his support. He would never actually pick up a phone and call me for some strange reason. Many others on my site have spoken to me on the phone, and we have become friends. But he never did. He eventually married and had another child with his new wife (this was all documented on the site). Then he became very scarce, understandably, but occasionally he pops up on one of my threads to joke around with me about something.
The last time that happened, last week, I sent him a private message telling him that it hurt me when he refused to have a phone conversation with me in 2008.
To my surprise, he responded that it wasn’t because of lack of caring, but that he was afraid of caring “too much” for me. I had never considered that possibility. He apologized for hurting me, and I forgave him immediately.
It’s nice to know that I could have one minor victory telling someone how they hurt me. It seems I’ve had so few of those. This is probably because many of my past family members and co-horts were narcissistic.
Hi Stargazer — By the way, I like your name. It reminds me of a quote I once read (not sure about exact words), “Some of us may be in the gutter momentarily, but we are looking upward toward the stars.”
I can only imagine how betrayed and invalidated you must have felt to have your mother look the other way and minimize your pain from how your stepfather treated you.
But from your two posts, sounds to me you are making some incredible progress in understanding your family history and putting into practice new ways of being assertive and taking care of yourself.
Good for you! We’re all in this growth journey together.
Thank you, dear recovering!
My user name actually is a snake-related word. A snake who is stargazing (looking straight up) usually has neurological problems. So it’s not a good word in snake terminology, but it takes on a different meaning on this site. lol
Yeah, this assertiveness stuff has been a lifelong process. I started on the healing path when I was 23, and I am now 49. I am the total embodiment of the ‘wounded healer’. I was looking back at some of my pictures from when I was 10, and I still had so much spirit and compassion. I was a little healer back then, in spite of my predicament. My mother and sister were jealous, and my stepfather just wanted to take from it. I tried to heal my family and the only one who I feel I ever really impacted was my stepfather. He actually changed a lot before he died, and I think some of it had to do with whatever weak connection I had with him and the forgiveness I showed him. I am completely estranged from my mother and sister after years of being hurt by them, and I think it’s really in my best interest. Even on the last conversation with my mother, I was trying to find a way to heal our wounds, but she would have none of that. She just wanted to make me wrong. So I quit.
Dear Star, a big message to you just disappeared in cyberspace (and I have to go to bed!), so I just want to congratulate you for your big leaps you are making in your recovery!
I think that you are now in the deep cellar of your soul and cleaning it up. It is very difficult getting there.
It has been the hardest part for me doing it, old feelings and unfelt emotions pouring up and overwhelming me like a volcano that has been too long under pression, and I did a lot of crying in the car driving last year through the Swedish woods, fortunately alone. It was like a deep clensing with steel wool.
When you are done with THAT STUFF, having cleaned up this part of your soul, assertiveness comes by itself, as you are pristine and solemn and the “healed Healer” who has BEEN THERE DONE THAT! Towanda!
If it is any consolation for you: your sister and your mother will meet their fate at least shortly before they die, and people who lead lives like these will die alone, miserably and haunted by the past. Karma will get them, and if it on the last yards to the finish! Rest assured, I have seen plenty of examples.
Concerning your “friend”: I would go for the deedes and not for the words!
(((((((HUGS))))))))
Stargazer…a very difficult decision but the right one!