Censorship or to censor…

shall one pick seven meadow flowers and put under the pillow tonight? :-)

Thinking loudly this Midsummer’s Eve… Of some reason it struck me once again: what does (or can) censorship mean (on a forum concerning childhood-experiences for instance)?

Also came to think about trusting ones gut feeling. Doing this really reliably you have to have as little as possible unprocessed? At least if you are in a role as responsible and/or with power?? As teacher (in my case), as therapist, as another authority-figure where people are dependent, as moderator etc.? Then you need self-awareness, and need to work on it continually the best one can… Tricky if one has to do it on ones own…

It’s something different in other relations? When the relation is more equal? Then one should trust that gut feeling more? A feeling of uneasiness?

But back to circumstances where one discuss childhood issues: the healthiest leave? If they are rejected once and again, and can’t get through, if they can't get through with for instance their messages and support to people? And it can be those that become rejected too? If the moderator has unprocessed things, of a certain kind, maybe can’t deal with or stand competition? But of course such an explanation and accusation can be used too, against healthier in moderator-positions!!

The most damaged easily get stuck, and maybe more stuck in worse circumstances.

Critics (even honest, fair) of the power can get rejected. And if the rejections aren’t followed with any explanations, what can that cause? Of course there can probably come a border when there is no idea with more arguing, and it can probably be difficult drawing that…

I have also wondered about the thought it’s easy like that to seek oneself to healthier environments. The more hurt and harmed you have become the more difficult that can be. Isn’t it similar to what Miller has written about Helga for instance??? Some also avoid circumstances and relations that would be good?

And of shame (over how one has become treated) you keep quiet… And this only plays he perpetrator in hands. The perpetrator can be quite safe. Horrible.

Trust ones gut feeling, yes, maybe… This is tricky…

What is one censoring?

But all these things can become misused, to manipulate… Too... Yes, Stettbacher is right about protecting the watcher's of life in children, i.e., trying to avoid so the child has to suppress feelings, and thus their ability to see clearly and avoid being used or to use...

my grandma holding one of her grand-children, but how?? It doesn't look comfortable at all for the child!! And my grandma didn't mind being photographed at all - on the contrary! On this picture I think she is 66 years, and on the first in her seventies, or maybe almost eighty? She died in her ninety-first year. My grandpa was 5, 5 years younger he died when he was 85...

Helga - part 6...

Helga wrote that she believes that many who have been injured (in therapies, sects, cults etc.) are ashamed they have let themselves be exploited. And this unmotivated shame is holding them in the victim’s role. This is the reason why defectors (avhoppare) from sects are prevented from clearly and in detail relating/telling how and with what means the wool was pulled over their eyes (hur och med vilka medel de blev förda bakom ljuset). And Michelle and Helga thought Helga had been in a form of sect or cult even in her therapy.

Because of this shame-feeling in the injured the perpetrators can, unpunished, continue with their destructive activities. This is the reason why I have tried not to forget what happened to me and to understand it in all important aspects Helga writes.

I can’t change facts. That I was exploited as a child and misled by people whom I trusted on and now also by my therapist – that can’t be undone. But the remaining results of these violations I knew about. They consisted of disregard of the person I am and of my achievements. All I did for others was valueless in my eyes, and later I struggled like a slave (people in Feeling therapy worked themselves exhausted and thus even less capable of being critical and questioning things than they maybe were from the beginning) and let myself be exploited Helga writes.

When we make this clear to us; that the psychological results of a tragic childhood contains of a weak self-confidence we can get over its results as grown ups.

When we have made this clear to ourselves we have already weakened the compulsion to re-enact. We realize that we were oppressed children, patients, sect-followers, but with this insight we take the liberty not being that any more she thinks.

Gurus and leaders can’t take those steps she thinks. They have to remain at the top, no matter what it costs. Therefore they are steadfastly denying the fact that they were victims earlier (in their childhood and maybe also later as adults) and flee into the power, into promises about cure, into roles, poses, dissimulation and not seldom into frauds. And this is also true in family-systems, where a parent (usually a father) has to remain on top? Denying they were harmed once?

A human being whom has survived the childhood’s oppression will hardly flee to a power-position. If he has integrated his experiences he can liberate himself from compulsions and meet his partner and friends in an open communication.

Tragically there have been women stuck in this ‘sect’ for years without realising this Helga thought with shivers. But she only just (med nöd och näppe) got out of its claws and she shivers realizing what could have happened. There were other women, who had become bodily ill (paralyzed or at least bodily handicapped) and stuck in their homes, and Helga visited those, while the therapist got the fees. When Helga realized this she felt like a fool.

Helga writes to Michelle that thanks to her presence and her letters she has got help showing her feelings, and to no longer hide in solitude, but entrust herself to people whom want her best. Thus being able to break walls of silence; both those in therapy as those in her childhood. Maybe not all, but enough to free her from the worst?

Yes, to handle those things the best and bring these topics out “into the world” most effectively, how do we make this? How do we deal with those things and act in a way that is as little destructive or self-destructive, but constructive – and more effective and productive?

Why haven’t we been able to change so much in our own lives (haven’t we) although we have read Miller for maybe twenty years??

And why does this take such a long time? Does it?

Is it because we have to do most of the work on our own, and thus in a much slower pace?

And would our strivings be better and more efficient (effective) if we had solved our own problems to a higher degree? So we saw clearer and don’t bring so much of our unsolved stuff into things, especially into those that are most important?

So we don’t harm others or ourselves… No, people don’t consciously and deliberately try and find abusive people to be around.

Addition: To what degree is it possible to change dysfunctional behavior to a functional, and can we be cured by symbolically doing things? And if so, to what degree? But with this not said we don't have responsibility for what we do, say, how we behave... It's no excuse, but only an explanation. Because we have responsibility, no matter how harmed we have been? And are we allowed to meet abuse with abuse? Is it constructive to meet the one with contempt that can't handle her/his life better, that someone is weak etc.?

And if things haven't changed so much in our lives; why haven't they?

Are people deliberately and consciously trying to find abusive people to be around? Destructive drives we have to learn to control? Didn't learn to control early?? As Freud thought?? Ideas many therapists still are working after, without being aware of it maybe, or are even denying they are working after? Is this the Primary defense; the child blaming itself for being so lousy in handling things? In others this can be about blaming others (but this doesn't exclude questioning things if it is needed, but the difficulty is to know the difference!?)? Or struggling in a false hope of being able to change a situation, person etc.? etc. Postings under the label Primary defence.

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My youngest brother is skiing the Vasaloppet today. He skied 90 km in 05:37 hours! We saw him coming to Mora now on the web!!! He turns 49 in June. The conditions were fairly tough it sounds...

Morning-tea in cups from Nittsjö keramik (lying in Rättvik, Dalarna).

Helga - part 5...

...My experiences the last years have also taught me that one can (only) master the results from childhood traumas if one can remove the actual trauma. As you have proved, these consequences consist of blockading due to fear, dumbness, and dispiritedness.

I agree with you, that if the grown up human being gets over this fear she will not have to go back to the old helplessness, despair and dumbness. The child’s impotent anger probably only arises if the grown up voluntarily puts herself into such a dependency as the one she was forced to live in in childhood. As in your childhood this path was barred for you. Regressed to a small child’s state you couldn’t possibly see that your tears were made an affair of and profited on.

It has been proved since long that one best gets over a shock if one doesn’t try to forget it, which one thought earlier, but instead that one feels what has been done to one and that one talk about this till the shock at last loses its meaning. Silence is exposed people’s biggest enemy.

It was no coincidence that Freud experienced his first hysteric patients’ paralysis symptoms as expressions for this forced silence. Women often express their states through bodily symptoms, through paralysis’s and language disturbances.

“I have to keep quiet, I have no permission showing my anger, not even to knowing what and whom it is about, must believe what I am told, mustn’t betray anybody, must remain immovable till the anger kills me.”

I know of women who have become bodily ill because they didn’t have the power to work themselves up to an accusation for sexual abuse in therapies

The fear of talking is so stubborn because its roots lies in childhood. But you can’t get over it there, but only in the here and now. If you have been exposed to abuse in the here and now, in therapy or in other circumstances, you can’t solve it there and then (i.e. in your childhood) and only blame your parents and not the perpetrators/abusers here and now. This is to cover the present reality up.

To break the silence was in fact life-threatening for many children. For grown ups this is true only in totalitarian regimes, and to them many sects belong. They are built on the old educational system, which people enlisted to them are all too well acquainted with from their childhoods.

Even many therapies are leaning on this system. The therapist (and other gurus) interprets critics from his patients as transference and in this way he disconnects them (this critic) from the first beginning. The patients’ perceptions becomes manipulated to that degree that they don’t dare to believe in their own senses any more, but develop real agony for them.

These mental manipulations can get a devastating effect on the psyche, but doesn’t necessarily have to affect the body at once.

However, there are other tools, the emotional manipulation, which unlike the mental rapidly affects the body.

In my view many healing movements are grounded on this. There are people with a so called charisma; to them many shamans belong, who have a talent for emotional manipulations.

Many of them uses this for others best, many on others misfortune, all due to their own ethical principles and interests. They chose a destructive career if the charisma is combined with a strong need for self-assertion and a psychopathic character. Both these things seem to be true for your therapist. And unfortunately not only for him.

Of course there are serious therapists who now as earlier carefully are revealing the sore points and by this make integration possible for their clients.

But there are more and more charlatans trying to earn money on regression. But the initial euphoria from the wizard’s apprentices seldom remains a longer time. With time troublesome transferences and co-transferences occur, which the self-proclaimed therapist has never learned to deal with.

Then he can rule over his clients with the help of indoctrination and manipulation, which can be successful for a while, and the sexual exploitation can help him to sweep undesired crisis’s and serious distress-situations under the rug.

What you have learned through your personal experiences I have learned through books and from my work with defectors from sects. Our conclusions seem to be pretty alike. We will probably have much to say about this when we meet. I am so glad for that and am looking forward to it.

I wish you all the best, Helga, enjoy the freedom you have fought (and struggled) yourself to.

Helga – part 4…

Michelle to Helga:

What you have told me made me very thoughtful. I have become aware of that we often stop at the economic sucking out, and easily get upset about this. Because this form of sucking out is easy to prove. But what you are describing goes much further.

You have looked into the question what this exploitation has meant in your emotional life and in this (entirely) personal way you have come across something that probably is true for many survivors and children: the humiliation and depreciation, which often led the child to overlook its own value later, that she simply can’t perceive it.

This leads to that this grown up human being tries to get the value she (I write she in this whole text, but she can also be a he) thinks she is lacking, either at the expense of her fellow human being or through achievements, which she increases more and more, because she can’t appreciate her own value. Why one chooses the destructive solution and the other the self-destructive I don’t know.

But first through accepting the fact that we have been victims we get the opportunity to leave the play between victim and perpetrator and abandon both roles.

If your therapist had been capable of understanding what he did and been capable of admitting this to his victims, the path to a new life would have laid open for him too. But his complicated relationships with his victims seem to have a very long history, and already through the slightest acknowledgment he would probably risk a storm of accusations from people who suddenly got permission to see him through. One can understand that he doesn’t take that risk.

Consequently he will continue his geschäft and try to ‘psychiatrize’ his critics, and maybe he will even increase his economic successes, so long as the need for gurus remains.

And this need will probably remain, because there are so many human beings whom have never experienced love and therefore are lacking the ability to see their gurus through.

That you could do this was maybe because you had experienced love from your aunt (father’s sister) and your father after all. Human beings whom lacked every form of warmth in their childhoods are probably lacking all possibilities to get this sort of insights as you have made.

Your spiritual suffering made you seek contact with an extortionist, but there was something in your prehistory which maybe also gave you the chance to liberate yourself at last. There are probably many who didn’t’ get that chance in their childhoods. These can hardly liberate themselves from the sect’s claws just like that.

Your story also strengthens me in my conviction in the priceless value for a therapy-damaged person to know a person who can confirm her perceptions.

This helps her to get over the worst. If this occurs in therapy, among friends or at a counseling-bureau doesn’t really matter. The important thing is that one gets the opportunity to openly tell someone who is capable of listening to what has happened to one, and that one isn’t encouraged (or forced) to seek the causes to the disturbance(s) only in ones relation to ones parents. Because it is only here and know one can sort the situation out and clear the situation up.

A child can’t do this.
...

Helga – part 3…

Helga replied that she had needed those six months to get more clarity. Now she thought she had come so far so she would have written to Michelle on her own, without being reminded.

“When you went to Peru it was as if you had died. You probably think this sounds strange, because of course you were reachable, I could have written. I could have replied to your loving letters to keep our contact going. But I couldn’t.

Even if I wrote kind letters to you I experienced myself as cut off from you for ever. For a long time I couldn’t understand this.

It was not until we met half a year ago I found the key which had been missing during the whole long therapy.

First it was Brigit who found it strange that I hardly knew anything about you. She wanted to know how it was when you left ten years ago. I didn’t remember. This surprised me. She said:

“How strange! Your best friend goes so far away, and you have no memory of your farewell? Did you feel abandoned then, after her departure?”

“No,”

I answered,

“I didn’t feel anything at all.”

I said these words calmly, surprised myself over my equanimity. But I discovered that I in some sense felt defiant, as a hurt child who isn’t possible to speak to.

"How come?"

I wondered.

"Brigit is kind; there is no need to react like that to her. She wants to help me. There is no reason for me to reject her."

At this simple truth my defiance broke down, I don’t know why it came then, but I started to cry. Now I suddenly felt the pain in being abandoned (the pain I had refused to feel and had held from myself when you left and with it memories of the whole event). At last I understood how motivated this was.”

When Helga was four her father had died. She was left with her mother, whom had a lot of problems herself and was incapable of giving Helga any security. A mother who strictly controlled her and at the same time clung firmly to her, because she needed someone and there was noone else but Helga. Helga had to take care of and fill her mothers needs and think of her.

It was impossible for Helga to feel or show her sorrow and despair over the loss of her father in her mother’s presence. Her mother first and foremost expected self-restraint from Helga and a good manner, but no expressions of emotions (but, once again, self-control!!!), not least as she was jealous to Helga’s love to her father.

Helga had to cleverly accept that her father was gone, i.e. silently and without emotions “accept” it.

Helga experienced Michelle’s departure in the same way. She couldn’t cry, as if somebody had forbidden it, and in a way she metaphorically "buried" Michelle.

Michelle’s mother had used all opportunities to teach Helga good manners. And maybe Helga thought that if she behaved well her father would return? Helga got used to not posing questions, this was forbidden (she had to figure things out on her own? And as good as she could on her own?).

After Michelle had left Helga met a man, but when she got pregnant this man left her, because he didn’t want the child. Helga had to handle all this. But her inner tension showed in difficulties to sleep. She started to take sleeping pills, and had to take stronger and stronger dozes till she realized that she had to do something about it. And thus the therapy.

But this therapy left her in the same childish state of helplessness and dependency, and the powerless anger which this led to, and she didn’t know how she should be able to change the state of affairs. She didn’t succeed in getting any use at all of all her crying. This state lasted for several years. And it was only the therapist who (greatly) benefited on this.

This man profited on Helga’s constant crying and idealized transference, instead of settling it, and Helga couldn’t break the vicious circle. She had got stuck at the same level as the little girl, who can’t understand what is done to her.

The therapist systematically depreciated all people whom stood her near, even Michelle and her co-workers and cousins, so at last she had noone else but him.

Helga thought the therapist only had figured out how he could intensify people’s childish needs, which aren’t possible to fulfill any more, till they were unendurable, to mitigate them with promises about cure. To reach this cure people are prepared to let themselves be exploited in different ways; economically, emotionally and sexually.

But this affair was so good that he probably saw no need to help her even if he had had those prerequisites, which he hadn’t.

The sexual violation often plays a special role. The women’s humiliation and the alleged intimacy shall prevent them from seeing the one through who is using them.

Helga thought that the sexual relation had given her an illusion of love, and as her therapist stayed alive she could tolerate his infidelity. What she had feared the most was her father’s death, because this had meant that she was handed out to her mother’s universally prevailing power.

But what she to whatever prize had tried to avoid occurred. She had become limitlessly dependent on a person who made her believe that he wanted and could help her, and who without hesitation or doubts wanted to drive her into a psychosis, only for to cover up what he himself had done.

Already with her mother Helga had experienced being talked away from her observations and thus made deeply insecure on her senses; on what she saw, heard, sensed (see Mellody on excessive control of reality or överdriven kontroll av verkligheten). She was so used to this that she had no chance of becoming aware that her therapist did the same thing to her once again. But much more consciously and skilfully.

It wasn’t until she met Brigit that she understood why she had let herself be blended for such a long time by this human being. And been able doing this with Brigit’s help in only six months.

He even succeeded in making her believe in his healing powers by showing her written “proofs”; letters from “healed”, which much later showed to be falsified. Emotionally she had got stuck as the small daughter in this relation, a daughter bravely enduring with her mother in the hope that she should “deserve” her father's return.

She had met with a man who had specialized in exploiting his patients’ special distresses as much as possible for his own aims

What gave him so much power over Helga were her early denied sorrow and the defence against the helplessness she had felt then. He now awoke this in the grown up woman, added fuel to it and exploited it.

When Helga met Michelle again then, six months ago, she wasn’t capable of telling her all she now had told her. It was the return of Michelle that helped her getting access to her history.

Helga, part 2 - the exchange with Michelle...

sign of spring.

During the therapy with Brigit, Helga met her best friend Michelle, whom she hadn’t seen since Michelle left for Peru ten years earlier. Helga told Michelle about her therapy, but wasn’t free from the shock yet, so she wasn’t capable of telling her friend everything. She promised her to write her, but Michelle was in advance of her.

Michelle wrote that she didn’t want to loose the contact again. And since she hadn’t gotten a life-sign so far in the passed six months she wrote.

“When I went to Peru I missed you a lot. But I dived into my work and got used to not having a friend standing me as close as you did. I tried to maintain the contact with you, but your replies came seldom and were relatively brief. I couldn’t understand the reason to the distance between us. I assumed you had got hurt because of my departure or that you had closer friends now, and therefore I didn’t ask about the reason.

Not until now, when I saw you again after I had returned you told me that your therapist had held you from all people you loved and trusted. Although you have seen him through and have found Brigit you don’t seem to be entirely free from him. That was at least my impression.

I traced a relief in you that you had allowed yourself to escape from this charlatan, but at the same time it looked as if you didn’t dare to feel the whole amount of your anger and indignation. You were controlled and told those shocking facts with a calm voice, sometimes you even laughed, and my impression was that you partly have been untouched by these circumstances. You told me these facts as if you were far away from the person exposed to all this.”

A tip I got...

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Kirkengen writes about (three) Norwegian men in therapy, with a male therapist, who were sexually abused in their therapy by their male therapist... And how greatly they suffered after this. They weren't capable of saying no. And was fooled by their therapist to believe this was part of their recovery? (I don't remember the facts now and don't have the book here). They put their therapist to trial.

So it isn't only women whom are abused but also men.

But women are the greater part of those that gets abused, not only sexually, but in other ways too (not least emotionally)??? Are they more often met with disrespect too, or with more disrespect than men, even by professionals despite the professional is man OR woman? Yes, investigations has shown that men and women are treated differently by doctors for instance. Where men are treated better and have gotten better help, generally?

All should be treated equally! But why aren't we treating all alike?? From where does this come?

Kirkengen also writes about power-imbalances, and what power abuse means... See this review of Kirkengen's book "Inscribed bodies..."

Oh, how tired I am of everything!!! Think if I should disappear into work?? And book a journey, go away… Relax from everything… Draw a blanket over me… Over the head.

Helga – the lucrative affair with the tears…

picture taken from here.

Eight years ago Helga sought help at a therapy-center where she lived. She was between 27 and 32 years old, just divorced and left with a one-year old daughter. She had got problems with sleeping-pills due to problems with her sleeping, and wanted to get help with this and with sorting things out.

Although the waiting-time (waiting-list) was two years she got an initial talk with the director for the center immediately. This together with the director’s allusions to her pronounced attractive external appearance flattered her, but also gave her a certain lack of confidence. But she pushed this away because of her desperate needs to get help as soon as possible.

During the first time in therapy she cried a lot. This phase lasted several weeks. The therapist didn’t say much about this, but it made her good that someone listened to all she had to say. In the beginning of the therapy they agreed about that she could call whenever she wished, if the agony became too much. She used this possibility a couple of times.

But at one of the occasions when she called the therapist wasn’t at home, but his wife answered. To Helga’s’ astonishment the wife started to tell her husband's patient about her own problems without being asked. She told her that her husband used young female patient’s dependency on him for sexual plays and neglected and hurt her, who yet was his wife.

Helga quickly ended the talk, because she didn’t want to listen to this “slander” against her savior. Later she even admitted that she wasn’t even shocked by these disclosures. At that time her confidence in her therapist was still unbroken and she interpreted the wife’s words as an expression for jealousy and envy against younger women.

She told her therapist about her talk with his wife, but he pushed everything away (implying that it was something wrong with his wife), and Helga was satisfied with this, and didn’t even reflect over her talk with the wife at the moment when she entered into a sexual relation with her therapist. This relation made her believe in everything the therapist said, and she felt loved and chosen by him. This strengthened her self-confidence to that degree that she walked like in an ecstasy of luck for some weeks. Until she got to know that there were other patients this man had entered a sexual relation with. And then for the first time she started to think in patterns of exploitation and betrayal.

She entrusted herself to a co-patient, Barbara, who immediately told the therapist, the therapist in turn showed Barbara Helga’s intimate letters to him, and spoke about psychotic disturbances and declared perfectly untouched that what Helga had said was lies, fantasies and expressions of Helga’s feelings of being violated. On the contrary, it was Helga who had tried to seduce him and now she wanted revenge because he had rejected her.

To Helga the therapist also showed the image of an absolute honest, upright man who neither had nor had had anything to blame himself for.

Helga had no experiences of such perfect defensive position and rather doubted herself, her own senses and her own memory than the therapist's character.

Helga’s therapist was even prepared to accompany her through this psychotic “episode” and treat her for “paranoiac visions”. With this he tried to obliterate or reinterpret every memory she had of sexual experiences with him. For a while Helga was attracted to his care. But when she was threatened with an admission note to hospital and prosecution for slander her suspicions were awoken that her case wasn’t the first of this sort for him.

Helga remembered her call with the therapist’s wife and understood that she had tried to warn her. This man was apparently a specialist in threatening people to silence. This insight came undoubtedly late, but not too late. If Helga hadn’t got to know this (through her talk with the wife) she would have found herself in the brainwash a longer time.

Now she broke the contact with the therapist. But it took a long time before she could liberate herself from her confusion and the severe bodily symptoms she had got.

She got help from Brigit, a social-worker and therapist, with a long experience of incest families, who helped her processing the damages the therapist had caused her.

Today Helga thinks that the reason this man succeeds in keeping his patients in a state of fear is that he only accepts people in therapy that are easy to frighten and make insecure.

Helga thinks that her experience has protected her from looking down on other person’s credulousness or even joke about it. On the other hand she wanted to profit from this experience for better understanding of how it could come that she for such a long time wasn’t capable of estimating her situation.

I will write more about this later...

Yes, it is 36 years since I read English, and haven't used until 3 years ago... Only read English (French and German) texts on note-books and such things during the meantime... And during my whole school-time I moved several times, so I wonder how the education was too? So if my English is what it is...

I went the nature-science program at the gymnasium... But chose music in the end... But didn't read English till I quited the gymnasium...