Corporal punishment and more about the Wall of Silence…

Primula Veris or gullviva.

Miller writes about a new law passed by the German parliament in July 2000 prohibiting (förbjudande) corporal punishment, as another decisive (avgörande) step toward the humanization of our personal relations and the removal of barriers in the mind at page 131-132 in her book “The Truth Will Set You Free…”:

“Significantly, it [the law prohibiting corporal punishment] owes its existence to politicians and lawyers, most of them women. Psychotherapists and psychologists (male and female) have been notably less committed in this respect, although they are confronted every day with the consequences of childhood traumas. Twenty years ago Sweden’s therapists actually campaigned against such an initiative, contending that a ban would so antagonize parents that they would take it out on their children in other ways. As I demonstrated in The Drama of the Gifted Child, the career of a psychologist begins in childhood with the desperate attempt to understand the parents without judging them. We should not remain bogged down in the fears of our childhood. As adults we must summon up the courage to judge, to call evil by its name and not tolerate it.

The much-needed change in our mentality will take place in stages. Children today who are never beaten will think and feel differently in twenty years from the way we think and feel today. This is my firm conviction. They will have eyes and ears for the suffering of their own children, and this will do more to effect change than statistical surveys ever could. My optimism is based on the principle of prevention, of forestalling violence in childhood by means of legislation and parent education.

I am often asked what we can do to help those people already seriously harmed by the processes I have been describing. Do they all have to undergo lengthy courses of therapy? The quality of therapy has nothing to do with the time it takes. I know people who have spent decades going to psychoanalysts and are still ignorant of what went on in their childhood because the analysts themselves are reluctant to venture onto that terrain in search of their own childhood realities.”

A friend mentioned another expression of surrounding a person with the Wall of Silence, namely something called “shunning”:

“Shunning is the act of deliberately avoiding association with, and habitually keeping away from an individual or group. It is a sanction against association often associated with religious groups and other tightly-knit organisations and communities. Targets of shunning can include, but are not limited to apostates, whistleblowers, dissidents, people classified as ‘sinners’ or ‘traitors’ and other people who defy or who fail to comply with the standards established by the shunning group(s). Shunning has a long history as a means of organisational influence and control.”

Translated to Swedish it would be (my amateur translation):

“Undvikande/hålla sig undan är den handling för att avsiktligt undvika sammankoppling med och att vanemässigt hålla sig undan en individ eller grupp. Det är en sanktion för att undvika sammanlänkning/sammankoppling ofta associerad med religiösa grupper och andra tätt sammanslutna organisationer och gemenskaper. Föremålen för undvikande kan inkludera, men är inte begränsade till avfällingar, visselblåsare, dissidenter, människor klassificerade som ’syndare’ och ’förrädare’ och andra människor som trotsar/utmanar eller som misslyckas med att åtlyda etablerade normer hos den grupp (de grupper) som undviker. Undvikande har en lång historia som ett sätt att organiserat påverka och kontrollera.”

This is what occur in many families to make a child comply, become obedient?

Jenson writes about how this may feel in the child, being isolated, lonely, having nobody in the world.

At pages 61-62 in the Swedish edition of her book, she writes that the child feels (and shall feel) that her/his family doesn’t want to have with it to do, thus the child feels that no one else will have with it to do, isolated, lonely and that it will remain so the rest of its life, unless... A state that will last for ever.

If her/family doesn’t like her/him, no one will like her/him ever.

If her/his family doesn’t want to know of the child, no one will want to know of it ever, not outside the family either. The child will not be wished by anyone ever.

If its family is critical towards it, it isn’t just so that ‘all’ dislike you but they will always do.

So this way of punishing (manipulating) a child is extremely effective.

If one has these experiences with oneself up into adulthood one will probably be vulnerable to similar treatment later. Vulnerable in relation to how one was treated early, and to what degree one got the opportunity and help processing it.

And to survive mistreatment the first way of protecting oneself as a (small) child is to blame oneself, use a defence Bosch calls the Primary Defence, which lies under all other defences she says.

I think I will blog more about "The Truth Will Set You Free -Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self" later.

See earlier posting on "Seeing, speaking or hearing no evil..."

Also see the article “You Carry the Cure in Your Heart” by Andrew Vachss, where it stands in the beginning of this article:

“Emotional abuse of children can lead, in adulthood, to addiction, rage, a severely damaged sense of self and an inability to truly bond with others. But—if it happened to you—there is a way out.”