More on understanding the child…

Emil in Lönneberga.

See Peter Haiman who for instance writes in the article “How To Prevent Sibling Rivalry”:

“In fact, many experts fail to do what is perhaps most important when it comes to dealing with sibling rivalry: look at what is happening through the child’s emotional eyes. And so the parents they advise also fall short in this way. Parents try hard to be helpful, but they do so from the point of view of a caring parent. They don’t always understand what their children are trying to tell them.

For a moment, imagine yourself as an infant. Look at and feel things as...”

Also for instance read “The Case Against Time-Out.” (my addition: not manipulate the child emotionally either).

About trying to see it from the child’s point of view, putting yourself in the child’s place and situation, to understand (and know) that there are reasons for the child’s behavior, i.e., emotionally understand your child. What empathy is about.

Something that’s probably difficult for many (actually almost all) of us (but to slightly different degrees) because this awakes our early experiences, which are very painful. We ought to get help, and help each other, to call things in question... Much, much more than we do!

Summer reflections...

more pictures here.

Questioning and seeing things as wrong makes one less inclined to passing the same things forward. Realising that the treatment one received wasn’t deserved due to ones character.

A long time ago I had a piano-teacher who had severe problems with stage fright. So he started to study psychology on distance. He meant that bad self-confidence isn’t something inherited!

“I am that sort of person! That’s my character!”

The implications of that – which are they? There’s nothing I can do! I have to live with this! One push the responsibility away, doesn’t one? I can’t do anything! And adults between one perhaps can stand it? And help the other person overcoming this hopefully. But parent-child between how is this? Who has to take responsibility actually?

I am bad, wrong! I was and still am the guilty one for the bad treatment I received! I am to blame myself.

Oh, I get so tired.

What does this lead to??

There is a self-destructiveness I can get so furious at!!!

Totally paralyzed! Paralyzed by all guilt!

“To the ground bent!”

a mother used to say. The child(ren) felt extremely guilty!!?? Responsible! As if they should go in as counselors or therapists? And on top not add to that burdening!

I know of a girl, around 12 who had got measles. She got a slight ache in her joints (phalanxes) in connection with the disease. The girl was actually 13 because at this time we had switched from driving on the left side of the road to the right. Her mother should drive her to the nurse, and was so nervous so she almost drove in the ditch! So paralysed. So the child almost had to hold her mother’s hand, comforting and calming HER!!!

Addition in the evening: searching on the web I found this article “The Prize we pay for shaming little boys,” In this it stands for instance:

“Sulzer, in 1748, explains that humiliation of children is key to producing obedient citizens who are willing to submit to the laws and rules of reason once they are their own masters, since they are already accustomed not to act in accordance with their own will (Miller, 1990, p. 10). Dependence on authority plus the intense shaming of children produced the generation of Germans who obediently followed Hitler into the second World War and found their emotional release in carrying out its atrocities./…/

What surprised me most, though, was that the German people I have spoken with about this deliberate and immoral cruelty either do not know these facts or have only a hazy awareness of this period in German history. When I first attempted to discuss this with German colleagues and friends, I was bewildered by their reaction. These well educated and knowledgeable people knew nothing of these chapters in their own history. Generally, they expressed amazement, a hazy familiarity with the details or simply uncomfortable refusal to talk with me about what was clearly a forbidden subject./…/

The reluctance of Germans to ‘know about’ what was done to them after the fighting was over reminds me of those three little monkeys: See No Evil, Hear No Evil and Speak No Evil. In my twenty years as a psychotherapist treating survivors of childhood trauma, I am familiar with this tendency of those who were once helpless to minimize the impact abuse has had on their lives. It is the same with my abused clients who trivialize the beatings of their childhood, saying they deserved to be hit, that they were very bad children. People who have been traumatized tend to normalize their traumatic situations.

It is hard for humans to accept that they were powerless to protect themselves from deliberate mistreatment. They are much more likely to take the blame for having been abused. For example, people who have been sexually abused as children tend to blame themselves, at least unconsciously, for somehow causing the abuse by being too sexy or too bad. Part of therapy is to help them realistically assess what was done to them and to what degree they are responsible for the shame they feel. (Of course, children bear no actual responsibility for being abused.) A first step in healing, then, is to accept that you were hurt by the trauma./…/

How, Gilligan asks, can a person who does not experience any feelings himself know that others have feelings or be moved by the feelings of others./…/

Fathers' contempt for their sons produces men who believe they are worthless, who are hyper-vigilant to signs of disdain, who are defensively ready to attribute negative intent to others, and who find a quick fix for making themselves worthwhile by degrading those less powerful than themselves, such as their wives. They believe they can make themselves feel some worth by making someone else lower than themselves.

In Bierman's programme, therapeutic procedures based on Eugene Gendlin's Focusing enable the participants to work through their own remembered physical or emotional abuse. The men are encouraged to let their feelings happen, to resist telling themselves what they should feel and to stop judging their feelings. They are taught to quietly put their attention into the part of their body where they usually have their feelings. They are instructed to let go controlling and to simply follow what is happening inside. For most of us the physical sensation connected to a feeling occurs as a tight knot in the stomach, a choking in the throat or a heaviness in the chest. Bierman trains the men to pay attention to these physical body signals which provide a way into unconscious knowing (Gendlin, 1996)./…/

In the methods of schwarze pedagogik, the child never experiences hatred for the father. When it is not possible to admit and express hatred for a parent, the rage gets projected onto others. As with Ralph Bierman's battering men, those who are weak and vulnerable (the way the batterer was as a child) become targets for this pent up rage. The adult who is filled with rage and shame becomes the perpetrator making others feel the way he felt when he was helpless.

This shame/violence cycle clearly played itself out when Germans who had been traumatized in childhood took out their rage on Jews and others who reminded them of themselves when they were helpless children. They projected onto others all their own ‘bad’ qualities which they had never been able to accept in themselves. Jews became dirty, greedy schemers, plotting to overthrow the rightful authorities. Concentration camp guards had the perfect opportunity to restage their own childhood traumas. Prisoners were helpless to defend themselves or to escape.

Their captors, urged on by the state, indulged in humiliating defenseless Jews. In fact, every German's repetition compulsion seems to have found a place in the hierarchy of terror which characterized the Nazi period. Men who had once been shamed as children now had the opportunity to demand from others, the cadaver-like obedience their fathers had exacted. They, in turn, gave automatic, unthinking obedience to their masters in The Third Reich's hierarchy of terror./…/

This paper deals with shaming in the childhood of Germans. But this is not specifically a German problem. It is a problem throughout the world. It is my hope that once we better understand the underlying causes of violence, we will be able to find some solutions.

How do we protect little boys from being shamed and abused by their fathers? This is a generational problem. It is self-perpetuating. Men who have been abused and shamed by their fathers tend to shame and abuse their small boys. As a society, we must find ways of cutting into this cycle of abuse where fathers humiliate their boys and passive mothers stand by without interfering on behalf of the children. But before we will be able to do this, we will have to accept whatever we ourselves experienced as children, as well as the ways in which we act out of our own traumatic experience.”

See this with “Evilness and responsibility…”; how badly we even became treated this is no excuse for what we do, how we behave, “Evilness and violence…” and “Anger, outbursts…” And postings on the label manipulation.

Communication...

picture taken from here.

Here some great things I found I would want to save, and keep here. The thread was about pressures people like Alice Miller (and all other struggling for these issues) have/had to resist on all sides, but it felt as this is applicable in other circumstances.

And see earlier postings on "giving and taking voice." And as van Dyke wrote:

"Use what talent you possess - the woods would be very silent if no birds sang except those that sang best"

(Henry van Dyke)

And I also found this in Quotations when I scrolled my blog to listen to a video:

"But with adult freedom and responsibility come the potential to break silence, to use voice and language to promote internal integration, deeper external connection, and a social transformation, Through communication – integration within ourselves and connection between individuals – we can become whole; embodied, aware, vital, powerful”

(Jennifer Freyd in the chapter “Removing Blinders, Becoming Connected” in her book “Betrayal Trauma…”)

John Stuart Mill writes in his essay on "The Subjugation of women" (1869) or “Underkuvandet av kvinnor” according to this site (also see his book "The Subjection of Women", are these two actually the same book, but with slightly different titles?):

“But was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it? ... the generality of the male sex cannot yet tolerate the idea of living with an equal... In the present day, power holds a smoother language, and whomsoever it oppresses, always pretends to do so for their own good...”

Translated it would be something like:

“Men fanns det någonsin någon tyranni som inte tycktes vara naturlig för den/dem som ägde (besatt) den?...

…allmängiltigheten hos det manliga könet kan dock inte tolerera idén att leva med en jämlik… Som det är idag så håller makten ett mildare språk, och vem den än förtrycker, låtsas han/hon alltid att han/hon gör det för deras eget bästa…”

From where do these needs come? Other quotations from Mill's book "The Subjection of women" see here.

The person writes that she (he) would like to see her (Alice Miller's) 'failures' given the same level of compassionate understanding that she asks for children. And she (he) does this so well; how to communicate, or how we could try to communicate… She puts things in words so well. I couldn’t find better words I think... It could have been written by me...

“Someone is always first to walk a new path; everyone who follows finds rough places left untrodden. What's more important is that she took the first steps - it is up to the rest of us to smooth the way and widen the path, without criticizing her for not finishing the whole job in one go [but we are allowed to question things, and shall question things too? But how do we do this? How can we do this to reach out with our message? And, of course, is it always possible to reach out with our messages?]."

“…we humans are just barely beginning to evolve beyond the raw violence of the jungle. We have a LONG way to go; let's not waste our energy attacking other wounded souls who, like us, are doing the best they can with damaged goods.

We're a bunch of wounded, limping, bleeding folks struggling along as best we can; let's help each other! [and not least to people trying to understand and working hard on trying to understand, who aren't mean and don't want to harm other people, and who aren't mean. And maybe also is dong this mostly on her own, in a sort of monologue. Of course she can be "misled" from time to time? Or? Even less if what she says or writes isn't really met]. To me, criticism has no place in this. And how else do we learn, you might ask? Well, there's a zen saying that goes ‘Do not teach unless asked’ (something like that). In other words, a person is not going to learn something until they're ready. So it's a waste of time to criticize.”

Yes, I think that is true, but we are allowed to question things…

”Instead, we're each responsible to try to get the healing we need, and as we heal, we become available as 'enlightened witnesses' for others who are still suffering. We are there, ready to offer a hand if and when a person asks for help.”

She (he) thinks that we use different ways in our processes of making sense of our own life experiences? We walk different paths, use different strategies, more or less? Can't we do this? Walking there in parallel? And can't this be to complement each other? Respecting each other in our struggles? So long as we don't hurt other people (or ourselves)? But this is probably not easy. Hmmm, this easily sounds so pretentious?

Continues here. Well worth reading!

From a quick walk from town...

photos taken with my mobile phone camera just before lunch during a 25 minutes quick walk from town (need to get my bike fixed, so I cycled to town and had to walk home).

[Updated April 16, see the end] A blogger writes that critical examination of science, research, scientific reports and material is the core in science and exactly what makes science more reliable, in long term, than only (pure) thinking (she had seen a TV-program on a case about research on ADHD - Christopher Gillberg in Gothenburg). Without possibilities to such examinations the science isn’t much better than whatever general thinking she writes.

She writes that when a researcher prevents the, for all science, basic controlling of a researcher’s work then he isn’t a serious researcher any longer.

She writes something about scientific-methodological grounds…

Yes, that about questioning… And things which cannot be examined or questioned - what's that about? Both here and there... Also see earlier posting on similar topics?

And one cannot just mechanistically change the state of affairs in ones life? Or one CAN, but isn't that exactly as one has behaved and done ones whole life, and what has this meant and led to?

Has energy been bound up (with all which follows from that)? I don't know...

Addition April 16: Read this blogposting on the blog Biology and Politics, which is more about the Academic world (this posting is though in Swedish)...