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- Barriers in the mind keep us from learning new information, putting it to good use, and shedding old, outdated behaviors.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.
I wanted to know how many of you watch the National Geographic series “Tabu” (or is it “Taboo?) about people with strange sex fetishes, hobbies and habits? I watched it last night and there was this “family man” who designs technology for avatars and has cyber sex using the “avatars”..not “real people” (oh…right! uh huh) so apparently it’s “ok” with his wife because it’s not “porn”, yet, strangers (who are avatars) sign up using it and interact with him sexually, though in an “anime-like” way. Neither he nor his wife, apparently, think he’s cheating, but I saw no difference in the technology that he uses for his fantasy life than the way that phone sex buyers/sellers use, and it just seemed like his wife is either IN DENIAL if not like a Stepford Wife. I thought, if a married woman or man wants to share her or his sexual fantasies, they share them with EACH OTHER, when married. What do you think, bloggers?
Not to mention..I noticed that whoever interviewed the man and wife..well, I did not see that the interviewer asked each how his or her sex life was with each other. Now, we all know that sex addiction and cyber cheating can diminish a marriage, especially if one’s fantasies override reality to the point of deadening one’s emotions toward one’s partner. That is why I wanted to get LF bloggers’ opinions on that segment, if anyone saw it.
i was certainly not ever beaten or humiliated by my parents as a child. (but my spath was) i however, was humiliated teased and physically bullied as a child. i never learned to turn that off though, i suffered greatly each time. and my spath repeated those exact same things, i know he did. he told me about his bad childhood, i told him about mine thinking we were bonding, and he instead he used that weak spot to break me down. i suffered every childhood hurt all over again. i was FINALLY feeling like some tiny aspect of that has improved after a year of therapy.
UNTIL….he got in touch with me, quite a long time after the end of our relatinship. i had been NC for about 8 months. my first thought was “are you out of fuel, need someone who is caring and decent to suck the life out of again?” i have no idea if he is involved, or i have no idea where this came from or why except he wants something, hes always expecting something from everything he does so what does he want?
but i couldn’t turn it off, i couldn’t ignore it and i dont know why. i told him firmly i didn’t need to know how he was feeling about me because it isn’t relevant anymore. his reponse was that i hurt him saying that, and of course i then found myself apologizing.
i know that exactly what he’d want, for me to end up feeling bad about it so he can feel like oh pity me, i still care and then you’re mean to me. (what a load of bull)
but why is it so irresistable? why did i feel so pleased to know he misses me? i know he can’t actually feel that feeling! i know i didn’t hurt his feelings, either because he only has 2 feelings: anger and shame.
why can’t i j ust ignore it and not want to know more about what hes thinking and why?
why can’t the people who DESERVE to be able to calm their feelings always have to feel them so intensly?
Agreenbean,
That is the 64000 dollar question. I find myself searching for the answer. It’s becoming a bit of an obsession lol. I completely understand your emotions
“why did I feel so pleased to know he misses me”
Since finding LF I’ve come to realise that he doesn’t miss me because he pines for me or he loves me or he wants to spend some time with me ….even though he is seriously love bombing me at the moment. He doesnt have normal human responses like missing me because he doesn’t feel love. I don’t know for certain what his motives are…….money, support, sex, supply basically but what I am seeing more and more is that it isn’t love. I miss him because I love him. He misses me because he’s bored, wants to play or maybe he just needs me to cook his tea. Probably the latter.
I’m with you Agreenbean. Come on hold my hand friend. NC for 8 months. Wow that’s an achievement. As Oxy said to me last week after breaking 3months…….get back on that horse. Yee ha!!
thank you strongawoman.
you are exactly right. i miss him because i was falling in love with him, because he gave me dreams of a future that sounded so lovely. but thats all they were, dreams. he wanted my financial support, my doting, my never ending stream of forgiveness. not to share life with me.
i guess i had a normal human reaction, thinking someone i miss sometimes felt the same, that would warm the heart a bit, make you feel hopefully.
unfortunately i had that reaction before i could get to the thoughts about how he doesn’t really miss me, he just wants something from me.
i dont know, maybe hes between victims and thought of me because i’m local and its been long enough he probably thinks i’ve forgiven him or forgotten the abuse. but i haven’t. and now i feel a fool remembering it and realizing i let him get the best of me again because i couldn’t resist responding to him.
so yes, i’ll do my best to get back on that horse, let us all ride together!
Dear Bean, Glad to see you back! Strongwoman gave you some good advice. Hold on and stay NC! He misses you because he is HUNGRY for attention, sex, money, whatever it is that he was getting from you, but you are just a source of “supply” and he’s going through his little black book because the current supply has caught on and kicked his sorry arse to the kurb!
Greenbean, I was thinking the same thing you wrote. My parents have always been wonderful to me, my grandmother was my soulmate (and I know she is my gaurdian angel above), but boy did my childhood suck outside of family.
My mother wad born in Istanbul to a Greek dad and Italian mother. My military dad from Kentucky married mom in Greece where my brothers and I were born.
Fresh into Texas kindergarten from living in 10 different countries was HELL. I was an outsider, teased and rejected, beaten up, you name it. Boys would even beat me up. I never grew out of being the odd one out in any grade at school, in any job I have ever had. And still for some reason I have always tried to mend others broken wings. Each time I got hurt. I am done being taken advantage of and I think that was the real reason I had to endure the nightmare of the ex spath, so I could hit bottom and finally make a change for the better.
Now I’m fixing my own wings for the first time. The biggest step towards that? NO CONTACT! Its been 3 years and the ex spath has not come around, but I did get a restraining order that lasted for a year.
The very most important part in healing YOU and getting you to a better place is staying absolutely no contact.
I know that will be hard, of course, you have a heart and you want to love and be loved, but this one does not love, he destroys.
God be with you.
I guess missing part is missing the dream, which was described you in most romantic way, so relationship felt like made in heaven. We both used to say destiny brought together, he would say a lot of good things and many immature way of showing his affection, which I found very childish, at that time I found is kind of weird but attractive at the same time.
But later I found many things were disfunctional, many of them.
Yes you should miss your dream, but don’t miss him as part of your dream, dream again but with a normal person, because broken people can only break your dream, they can’t give anything back, they are there take everything and leave again to find a new victim.
zimzoomit,
I didn’t see the show, but I agree with you. When your partner shows that he is more interested in perverse sexuality than he is in you, that is a RED FLAG. I think it’s fear of intimacy, which all spaths have.
The wife is in denial because she is projecting her own feelings onto him. She is probably a doormat like I was with my spath. She assumes he loves her so he would never hurt her. Riiiight.
Pearl..you wrote,
“What I saw as I was growing up was not good”“it was harmful to me but of course I didn’t realize that. The Betrayal Bond taught me that I denied the trauma or repressed it or normalized it and “believed” what my parents, the church, and my strict Catholic nun teachers told me”
..have you been on exchristians.org yet..read any of those stories up there? I have one up there myself .. yeah..about “strict Catholic nun teachers” too..
I can truly empathize.
Zim