Relaxation...

Taking a walk in the forest with a good companion, very cute... Nordic walking. A brother disappearing in the distance! He uses to ski very long races, as Vasaloppet and Marcia Longa. I was also walking with poles in fact. Many pine more lands here. Mixed with soft meadows with birches...

I have been writing on my other blog about our despotic, dictatorial politicians (especially our dictatorial government; the "alliance" - right oriented). People who have got our mandate, authorization - how do they use it??? Misusing it, for their own sake and benefits, silently and angrily...

Addition in the evening: On self-help therapy a reader to Miller writes:

“Today, I regard primal therapy in general as wrong and dangerous. The idea that we should make ourselves feel pain in a deliberate and systematic way reminds me of the pedagogic lie that one should deliberately create frustrations for children in order to 'prepare them to life.' Frustrations are inevitable, and similarly, pain stemming from childhood injuries is inevitable and reappears not only when we reenact our past, but also when we try to take good care of ourselves and to free ourselves from destructive relationships. There is absolutely no need to recreate this pain intentionally by failing to extricate ourselves from painful situation in the present./…/

The one thing that I do find helpful, just like you repeatedly point out, is talking my past over with enlightened witnesses.”

Yes, that about narrating with someone listening, if one has, and/or writing about those issues. But the latter method probably takes a lot more time, more than if you have an enlightened witness? But if you have no other choice...

Another reader reflected on different forms of abuse:

“I've experienced verbal abusiveness (including no response), physical abuse (corporal), and shunning (Awful). The most painful experiences for me were when I was simply ignored or shunned. It was as if my existence was instantly annihilated. The combination of corporal punishment and shunning or 'shutting-out' was a double-whammy, and I could feel the sadness creep through my very bones. Of all the punishments, the corporal may have done the least damage. You know what hits you, you feel present, you sense the pain, you know the reaction of the other party, you see the anger/rage, your outrage is instant and in reaction to something you can identify, there is "heat" and passion (emotion expressed), it is real. It hurts, and you know what/where/why (usually). You can even choose how to stand up to the blows, so there is an element of choice. It is in relationship to something and someone./…/

Much more difficult was the ongoing reflection by parents and siblings (they learn fast) of being wrong, useless, stupid, unneeded, ugly, inadequate, evil object. Yet this is still in relationship.

Completely devastating for me, as a child, was to be 'shut out' or shunned, sometimes for so long that it grows into a lifestyle (eventually I would do something to 'gain' corporal punishment, to regain a sense of self and relationship). As if I did not exist, was not there, was not. That is the pain that creeps blackly for me in soul diminishing horror. It defies logic and leaves one in the dark. It leads to such defensiveness, is so depleting, that life is diminished and toxic. I thought of suicide as a child, but realized I would not be missed, that I would simply be thought of as more defective. And all I wanted was to be accepted for being myself. To be real. I can understand violence that way. It is concrete.
It is madness, but there is method in it.”

Also read a (52-year old) daughter on her psychiatrist father, and another one on keeping in contact with ones parents.

Corporal punishment and more about the Wall of Silence…

Primula Veris or gullviva.

Miller writes about a new law passed by the German parliament in July 2000 prohibiting (förbjudande) corporal punishment, as another decisive (avgörande) step toward the humanization of our personal relations and the removal of barriers in the mind at page 131-132 in her book “The Truth Will Set You Free…”:

“Significantly, it [the law prohibiting corporal punishment] owes its existence to politicians and lawyers, most of them women. Psychotherapists and psychologists (male and female) have been notably less committed in this respect, although they are confronted every day with the consequences of childhood traumas. Twenty years ago Sweden’s therapists actually campaigned against such an initiative, contending that a ban would so antagonize parents that they would take it out on their children in other ways. As I demonstrated in The Drama of the Gifted Child, the career of a psychologist begins in childhood with the desperate attempt to understand the parents without judging them. We should not remain bogged down in the fears of our childhood. As adults we must summon up the courage to judge, to call evil by its name and not tolerate it.

The much-needed change in our mentality will take place in stages. Children today who are never beaten will think and feel differently in twenty years from the way we think and feel today. This is my firm conviction. They will have eyes and ears for the suffering of their own children, and this will do more to effect change than statistical surveys ever could. My optimism is based on the principle of prevention, of forestalling violence in childhood by means of legislation and parent education.

I am often asked what we can do to help those people already seriously harmed by the processes I have been describing. Do they all have to undergo lengthy courses of therapy? The quality of therapy has nothing to do with the time it takes. I know people who have spent decades going to psychoanalysts and are still ignorant of what went on in their childhood because the analysts themselves are reluctant to venture onto that terrain in search of their own childhood realities.”

A friend mentioned another expression of surrounding a person with the Wall of Silence, namely something called “shunning”:

“Shunning is the act of deliberately avoiding association with, and habitually keeping away from an individual or group. It is a sanction against association often associated with religious groups and other tightly-knit organisations and communities. Targets of shunning can include, but are not limited to apostates, whistleblowers, dissidents, people classified as ‘sinners’ or ‘traitors’ and other people who defy or who fail to comply with the standards established by the shunning group(s). Shunning has a long history as a means of organisational influence and control.”

Translated to Swedish it would be (my amateur translation):

“Undvikande/hålla sig undan är den handling för att avsiktligt undvika sammankoppling med och att vanemässigt hålla sig undan en individ eller grupp. Det är en sanktion för att undvika sammanlänkning/sammankoppling ofta associerad med religiösa grupper och andra tätt sammanslutna organisationer och gemenskaper. Föremålen för undvikande kan inkludera, men är inte begränsade till avfällingar, visselblåsare, dissidenter, människor klassificerade som ’syndare’ och ’förrädare’ och andra människor som trotsar/utmanar eller som misslyckas med att åtlyda etablerade normer hos den grupp (de grupper) som undviker. Undvikande har en lång historia som ett sätt att organiserat påverka och kontrollera.”

This is what occur in many families to make a child comply, become obedient?

Jenson writes about how this may feel in the child, being isolated, lonely, having nobody in the world.

At pages 61-62 in the Swedish edition of her book, she writes that the child feels (and shall feel) that her/his family doesn’t want to have with it to do, thus the child feels that no one else will have with it to do, isolated, lonely and that it will remain so the rest of its life, unless... A state that will last for ever.

If her/family doesn’t like her/him, no one will like her/him ever.

If her/his family doesn’t want to know of the child, no one will want to know of it ever, not outside the family either. The child will not be wished by anyone ever.

If its family is critical towards it, it isn’t just so that ‘all’ dislike you but they will always do.

So this way of punishing (manipulating) a child is extremely effective.

If one has these experiences with oneself up into adulthood one will probably be vulnerable to similar treatment later. Vulnerable in relation to how one was treated early, and to what degree one got the opportunity and help processing it.

And to survive mistreatment the first way of protecting oneself as a (small) child is to blame oneself, use a defence Bosch calls the Primary Defence, which lies under all other defences she says.

I think I will blog more about "The Truth Will Set You Free -Overcoming Emotional Blindness and Finding Your True Adult Self" later.

See earlier posting on "Seeing, speaking or hearing no evil..."

Also see the article “You Carry the Cure in Your Heart” by Andrew Vachss, where it stands in the beginning of this article:

“Emotional abuse of children can lead, in adulthood, to addiction, rage, a severely damaged sense of self and an inability to truly bond with others. But—if it happened to you—there is a way out.”