By Alice Miller
Why spankings, slaps, and even apparently harmless blows like pats on the hand are dangerous for a baby?
1. They teach it violence.
2. They destroy the absolute certainty of being loved that the baby needs.
3. They cause anxiety: the expectancy of the next attack.
4. They convey a lie: they pretend to be educational, but parents actually use them to vent their anger; when they strike, it's because, as children, they were struck themselves.
5. They provoke anger and a desire for revenge, which remain repressed, only to be expressed much later.
6. They program the child to accept illogical arguments (I'm hurting you for your own good) that stay stored up in their body.
7. They destroy sensitivity and compassion for others and for oneself, and hence limit the capacity to gain insight.
What long-term lessons does the baby retain from spankings and other blows?
The baby learns:
1. That a child does not deserve respect.
2. That good can be learned through punishment (which is actually wrong, punishment merely teaches the children to want to punish in their own turn).
3. That suffering mustn't be felt, it must be ignored (which is dangerous for the immune system).
4. That violence is a manifestation of love (fostering perversion).
5. That denial of feeling is healthy (but the body pays the prize of this error, often much later).
How is repressed anger very often vented?
In childhood and adolescence:
1. By making fun of the weak.
2. By hitting classmates.
3. By annoying the teachers.
4. By watching TV and playing video games to experience forbidden and stored up feelings of rage and anger, and by identifying with violent heroes. (Children who have never been beaten [or treated badly in other manners, my addition] are less interested in cruel films, and, as adults, will not produce horror shows).
In adulthood:
1. By perpetuating spanking, as an apparently educational and effective means, often heartily recommended to others, whereas in actual fact, one's own suffering is being avenged on the next generation.
2. By refusing to understand the connections between previously experienced violence and the violence actively repeated today. The ignorance of society is thereby perpetuated.
3. By entering professions that demand violence.
4. By being gullible to politicians who designate scapegoats for the violence that has been stored up and which can finally be vented with impunity: 'impure' races, ethnic 'cleansing', ostracized social minorities, other religious communities etc.
5. Because of obedience to violence as a child, by readiness to obey any authority which recalls the authority of the parents, as the Germans obeyed Hitler, the Russians Stalin, the Serbs Milosevic.
Conversely, some become aware of the repression and universal denial of childhood pain, realizing how violence is transmitted from parents to children, and stop hitting children regardless of age. This can be done (many have succeeded) as soon as one has understood that the causes of the 'educational' violence are hidden in the repressed history of the parents.
the hard working miners got brännvin as wage for their work (about brännvin in Swedish, Swedes started burning brännvin already 600 years ago). Needed to benumb themselves to survive their hard lives? More photos from this area.
[Updated with a video in the end] Peter Währborg (see the other postings about him here) writes at page 308 in the book mentioned in these postings about incongruence* between different infrastructures. He says that stress occurs not only as a phenomenon within different infrastructures when “intern oppositions/antagonisms (? Motsättningar in Swedish)” are at hand. Stress is also an expression for the incongruence which occurs between infrastructures. He gives us an example:
A child needs access to long term and unbroken relationships to adults for its harmonic development. If the social system doesn’t provide with resources which make this possible we get problems. The grown up individual often thinks he or she should be more at home with the children (or spouse?), this is a common apprehension (uppfattning). And thinks he/she ought to this and that. See earlier posting on "Surrogate mirrors..."
However, the social system also provide with more and partially contradicting values, as you ought to have an education, be successful etc. The norm and valuation systems (värderingssystem) are indistinct and therefore this creates conflicts within the particular individual. This conflict can in turn be enough for causing that biological stress reactions are started.
He thinks that stress has occurred since the origin of man. The decisive difference between then and now is its extension and seriousness now. Which can be ascribed the society’s faster and faster change.
During the agrarian period the social stress was minor, but there existed another societal control (much harder in a way). The society was more marked or clear (tydligt) because the society was smaller. People could handle things "better" then (including internal problems, problems due to child abuse, or they turned mad?) because the information flow wasn’t as enormous as it is today and the social structure not as complicated.
With the industrial society and later the information society the demands started to grow. Social, psychic and biologic stress became more usual because the demands on adaptation to the variable (to changes) increased.
Währborg discusses two types of stress in his book: the aggressive or the exhaustion or fatigue stress.
Nothing above is new though?
And doesn’t Miller write about this? Earlier people could handle things "better", because they knew nothing else than what was present in their small world there and then.
And aggressions (and all different feelings) got other outlets then?
And what are aggressions about? What do aggressions lead to? What do needs for power lead to? Both on a private, personal level as on a societal and even global level? Do we handle things constructively or are we driven by more or less conscious emotions, feelings or needs?
Some people are (brutally) forced to process their early things? For their survival... And what about the society in whole??
*with congruence he means homogeneity or grade of accordance, for example between a thought and a feeling. Incongruence is the opposite.
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