Violations, punishments, trials to make the child obedient and what that has caused and causes in the adult life, in the society and the world…

Have come to think about violations again. Searched for old postings on this here. Found one in which you can read about the American therapist Jean Jenson on what she thinks violations are, inspired by Pia Mellody’s ideas. I use the "Summary" I made in English in this posting and have made small changes and additions in it.

Yes, different treatments were and are used as punishments and to make the child obedient. Used to silence it etc. And we take this with into adult life if we don’t get help to process them and these early experiences cause us a lot of problems depending on the degree we have gotten help to process them. Sometimes we have huge problems.

And some play this out on other people close to them who are in lower positions. Women usually on their kids because they haven’t gotten other power positions in this world. Men play them out on wife and kids if they have any, and/or at work depending on the power position he has there.

Miller speculates on what had happened if Hitler had had kids, i.e. if he had had objects to abreact on at home. Had he become that world tyrant as he became?

And what happen with those whose voices were entirely silenced? Who maybe never got a voice and didn’t get the opportunity to express themselves. And with those who had a voice and got the opportunity to express themselves, but in a, from the truth, disguised way.

About this Miller speculates in one of her last books, “The Body Never Lies – the Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting.” About authors and other artists who expressed themselves, sometimes very bravely, but never really called early experiences in question. They became sick. Also see what the Norwegian physician Anna-Luise Kirkengen and her findings in this respect.

To come back to Jenson and Mellody; they mean it isn’t only a question of physical or sexual violations but also of emotional violations. Of disrespect even emotionally. Verbal violence, demands on perfectionism, neglect, abandonment and “exaggerated control of reality” (the child is told what to wear, what friends to have, how to think [and not think], what it shall believe in), they see all these things as violations.

And they also write about the phenomenon emotional incest, to use the child instead of the partner or another grown up as the intimate or confidant, something the child couldn’t escape or say no to, and something Mellody thinks is very common in our cultures, and what is a violation too according to them, an infringement on the child's integrity.

Jenson writes about an emotionally not accessible father, what that means to the child; giving it a feeling of not being good enough.

A mother “sick” because she was drunk and the children were hindered to disturb her or "give her troubles" [this mother wasn’t there for her kids either, absent, if not physically so emotionally/psychologically]. Threatened by their father if they did “disturb” her, with being spanked, and how THAT felt. Maybe so painful so they had to suppress that feeling. Probably because of their whole history and other experiences with their caregivers.

They write about growing up with many siblings, where each child didn’t get enough attention or time. That was an emotional violation. Neglect. Giving the child a feeling of being forgotten, and being unimportant.

And about a family in which all seemed to be kind and friendly (and maybe even caring, at least on the surface), but when the child tried to communicate something that worried it its mom used to change subject (not listening or not wanting to listen) and dad sat hidden behind the newspaper (not wanting to listen either, also avoiding the problem). An emotional violation. Being abandoned. Giving the child a feeling of being ignored and not being good enough (to be listened to, being taken seriously, being seen and cared for) etc.

The right to have ones feelings, emotions, thoughts, and to express them loudly just as anybody else, so long as you don’t harm anybody. Not become silenced. Again.

Men have had the power and money (material wealth), that is things that have made it and still makes it easier for them to raise their voices (and see the Norwegian Berit Ås with her Master Suppression techniques).

Child abuse...

from this photo-album.

[Slightly edited during the day, really needed as the spontaneous, impulsive I am]. Some more loud thinking, quite spontaneously:

A person wrote that

“Small children are beaten because they are too young to tell anyone else.”

I thought further on this, and think that you can do a lot of other things too to small children because they are too young to tell anyone else; not only beat them, but ignore, abandon, meet them with the Wall of Silence etc. to make them compliant, and of course abuse them emotionally in different ways (humiliate them for instance), and not least sexually. And sexual abuse in different forms are much more usual than we imagine? And many of us deny what sexual abuse actually is? As we deny other forms of abuse and what abuse actually is too...

And what you have learned at an early age sits steadier in the spine (or backbone)…

Frightened for being abandoned; I came to think how it was when I and my siblings were born; the newborn baby was taken from the mom immediately to become bathed! What has this caused? Was this the first occasion the child was abandoned? And as a baby the child had no words to express its feelings with...

Both my parents were born at home. But was this birth less traumatic? Or traumatic in other ways?

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.