From ”The Truth Will Set You Free – Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Self.” Page 19-21 about elderly people Miller has seen at the pharmacy collecting the pills and potions prescribed to them:
“Sometimes I persist and ask whether there is anyone at all they can talk to about their lives.
‘What are you driving at?’
they ask.
‘When I was younger I went out to work and had no time for talking. Now that I do have the time, who’d be interested in hearing the story of my life? When it comes down to it, you’re on your own.’
True, most of us are indeed on our own in that respect. But we would benefit tremendously from having someone to talk to about our childhoods, particularly when we are older. As our physical strength fades and we lose our youthful vigor, we are particularly susceptible [mottagliga, känsliga, ömtåliga] to flashbacks to a time when we were helpless children. And that may be what makes us cling to a bagful of tablets in much the same way as we clung to our mothers for the help we urgently needed. Perhaps this symbolic substitute really does help in some cases. But it can never be a replacement for the presence of someone truly interested in our personal history. That kind of interest does not take up anywhere near as much time as we might think./…/
How do we fend off [avvärjer] feelings? Frequently by resorting to measures that will silence the language we cannot comprehend, thus making ourselves feel powerful again instead of ineffectual.”
Page 42-43:
“Many therapists believe that exploring childhood is actively harmful because clients will then experience themselves as victims instead of responsible adults.
I, too, firmly believe that adults are responsible for their actions, and that only in childhood were they helpless victims. But I also believe that owning up to [erkänna, kännas vid] their early history can help them understand why they still feel and act as if they were helpless victims. Psychotherapy can give them an understanding of the processes involved, which in turn can help them abandon the victim posture [hållning, attityd]. There are said to be people whom behavior therapy has helped banish their anxieties. They are to be most warmly congratulated. Many others, however, are unable to profit from such an approach. They are also unable to free themselves from depression with the help of medication because their urge to find out who they are and why they have become the way they are might be stronger in them than the wish to be free of depression.”
Page 45:
“…some psychiatrists who specialize in treating people suffering from post traumatic disorders, people who experienced severe traumas in adulthood, don’t necessarily work with these patients on their childhood. Yet it is logical, and has been scientifically confirmed, that a person who grew up in a relatively healthy family will be more likely to overcome later psychic trauma (such as results from a plane accident or a physical assault) better than somebody who was mistreated in childhood. Working with that person on his whole history may thus lead t better results.”
Page 70 about a program in
“Encouraged to talk about their own childhoods with people they had learned to trust, they came to understand hat they had been passing on something that they themselves had experienced very early n their lives.
We are accustomed to keeping silent about childhood suffering, and because of this silence we often do things blindly. Talking liberates prisoners from their blindness, giving them at access to awareness and protecting them from mindless acting out.”
This is true for all kind of abuse…
Page 97:
“Small children cannot survive the truth; for purely biological reasons they have no choice but to repress what they know. But this repression, this refusal to recognize one’s own origins, has a destructive effect. To offset that effect we need enlightened witnesses – therapists, counsellors, and teachers who do not regard the emotions of and adult as haphazard [som händer av en slump eller tillfällighet] but see them as the logical fruits, sometimes poisonous fruits, of a misguided process of insemination./…/
If someone is present to help us recognize the behavior patterns of our parents in the context of our own childhoods, then we will no longer be forced to perpetuate these patterns blindly.”
Page 124-125:
“Merely [blott och bart] forgetting early traumas and early neglect is no solution. The past always catches up with us, in our relationships with other people and especially with our children.
What can we do about this? We can try to become aware of what we ourselves suffered, of the beliefs we adopted in childhood as gospel truth [dagsens sanning], and then confront these beliefs with what we know today. This will help us to see and feel things to which we have closed out minds, for in the absence of an enlightened witness who can empathize with us and genuinely listen to us, we have no other way of protecting ourselves from the searing force of pain. With the help of an enlightened witness, our early emotions will stand revealed, take on meaning for us, and hence be available for us to work on.
But without such empathy, without any understanding f the context of a traumatic childhood, our emotions will remain in a chaotic state and will continue to cause us profound, instinctive alarm./…/
…barriers [are both a protection but also] our enemies, as they cause emotional blindness and urge us to do harm to ourselves and others.
In a bid to blot out the fear and pain of our abused younger self, we erase what we know can help us, fall prey to the seductiveness of sects and cults, fail to see through all kinds of lies.”
Page 133-135:
“For me, enlightened witnesses are therapists with the courage to face up to their own history and thereby to gain their autonomy rather than seeking to offset heir own repressed feelings of ineffectuality by exercising power over their patients./…/
…needs to be able to identify all those points in everyday life where traces of his infant reality rise to the surface, to learn to recognize them, for what they are and not to act out blindly. He needs assistance in coping emotionally with present situations as an adult while at the same time maintaining contact with the suffering and knowing child he once was, the child he could not muster the courage to listen to for so long but now, with help, can finally heed./…/
Unfortunately, it is rare for therapists to have enjoyed such company in their own training. I am only too well aware of the various forms of anxiety assailing therapists, their fear of hurting their parents if they dare to face their own childhood distress head on and without embellishment, at the resultant reluctance to support their patients fully in heir search. But the more we write and talk on the subject, the sooner this state of affairs will change and the anxieties lose some of their power over us. In a society with a receptive attitude toward the distress of children, none of us will be alone with our history. Therapists will be more inclined to forsake Freud’s principle of neutrality and to take the side of the children their clients once were. This will give those clients the perspective they need to confront their own histories.”
Page 151-152:
“Once the child [or rather the grown up, because I don’t think we have a child inside, thinking like this leads to alienation rather than integration?? And can lead to a false hope that we can give a child inside something it didn’t get then. Which we can’t, because we are no longer those children, and what’s done is done, we ought to feel the pain in this truth instead and all we have missed because of this?] has shaken off its chains, been allowed to see and to judge what it sees, it can walk out of its prison on its own. The fear is gone because it as recognized the manipulations for what they are. It is not afraid of to see because it is not reduced to silence, because it can say what it sees, because it is not alone with what it has seen but has its perceptions confirmed by an enlightened witness. That witness has at last given the child what its parents withheld: the confirmation tat its perceptions are right, that cruelty and manipulation are precisely that and nothing else, that the child need no longer deceive itself into seeing them as a form of loving care that this knowledge is necessary in order for the child to be genuine and capable of love, and that the fruit from the tree of knowledge is there to be eaten.”
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