The Wall of Silence…

Cherry Bird at my work place, picture taken with my cell phone camera.

Apropos punishments… What we regard as punishment? And what we maybe deny being a punishment? Thinking further on ”See No Evil -- A political psychologist explains the roles denial, emotion and childhood punishment play in politics,” the pschologist Michael Milburn interviewed by Brian Braiker in Newsweek, May 13, 2004. Earlier posting on this here (in Swedish) and here.

Miller writes in her book ”Breaking Down the Wall of Silence” (“Riv tigandets mur”) that she experienced the Wall of Silence already in her childhood. Her mother used to meet her with silence whole long days on end for to demonstrate her absolute power over the small girl and force her to obedience, "for her own good" of "love for her small child." She needed this power to mask he own insecurity to herself and to others, but also to withdraw from the relation with her child, a child whom she had never wanted (though maybe denied both to herself and to the environment, not actually knowing what love is probably, because she hadn't experienced true, genuine, real love herself from HER caretakers when she grew up. No excuse though).

And the mother didn’t have to defend her sadism surrounding the small girl with silence, as if she didn’t exist.

The mother saw her attitude as a fair and well deserved punishment for offences the small girl had committed, as her duty giving her a lesson.

This was awful (we can probably not imagine how it feels) for the child. The small girl Miller was couldn’t feel this really then probably, but these feelings (or most parts of them) became suppressed. And so she in turn became insensitive to HOW awful this actually feels, not only to grown ups but not least to a powerless and helpless child. See Berit Ås on the Master Suppression Techniques, where "making invisible" is the first she mentions.

But what was even more painful, Miller writes, was the child’s hopeless efforts to get to know the reason(s) for this punishment. In this omission, negligence a message laid she writes: If you not even know for what you have deserved this punishment you have no conscience. Search (look for), ransack yourself and do your utmost till your conscience says what sort of guilt you have brought down upon you. Not until then you can TRY to exculpate or excuse yourself and dependent on the mood of the one in power you can, if you are lucky, MAYBE be forgiven.

Miller thinks she was exposed to a totalitarian regime and that she was despised (looked down upon) and sadistically treated.

She had to believe that the fault lay in her that her mother didn’t’ speak to her but surrounded her by silence day after day, it must have been her meanness (see Bosch on the Primary defence) that made her mother behave like that (not that the mother was mean!!). That her mother didn’t answer her questions, didn’t care when she wanted an explanation, avoided her looks, so the chikld understood what she had done and change her destiny, being included again in the community, so she could understand her mother (and her strange and very mean behaviour in fact, a fact she should have needed help seeing, a behaviour she should have needed help questioning and seeing as wrong).

As the actual truth was so brutal and unbelievable she had to deny it. For this she had to pay a VERY high price: namely her full awareness was limited and she has been obsessed by guilt feelings since then (for her inherent badness, for which she has to pay her whole life, the rest of it?). Probably reinforced by other people she has had around her to whom she has been drawn?

She escaped this truth by searching the fault in herself, blaming herself (see later how we blame the victims here and there, and meet them with contempt - for weakness!! And for having drawn things upon themselves), and getting blind for her mother’s mendacity (förljugenhet) and thirst for power.

Later she tried to weigh this loss and truth up by philosophical speculations about “the unbelievable truth.”

From the chapter “Ut ur förvirringens fängelse” (“Out of the prison of confusion”) at pages 23-26 in “Breaking Down the Wall of Silence”.

PS. I will probably update this later. A lot at work this time of the year… But I need to reflect upon things too, even if I don’t really have the time.

Concert this evening with our piano-pupils, with rehearsal before it. Now 12 pupils first!!

A lot to organize here; informing all and everyone, practicing with students, I can’t name it all.

And it is over 35 ears since I read English. I didn’t read it the whole gymnasium. I regret it! But I wonder if I was prepared then either…

A church-concert Thursday May 29 in the evening with a group I am co-responsible for and I am accompanying many of them. In June we are going to have a teacher’s concert too, where I am involved. With only a handful of my colleagues.