[Written around 2004.]
Self-doubt is part of the healing process. As you progressively break from your family on the quest to become a true individual, a part of yourself remains a clone of the family in attitude and behavior. This part does not want to change. It views the world through the sick family perspective and hates that the deepest part of you desires to free your spirit and stand on your own. The weak attacks the strong, and you feel this attack as self-doubt. Continue reading
[Written in 2004.]
Honesty is the channel of truth between the soul and mind. Those who nurture it are imbued with enormous power: the power to see, the power to know, the power to differentiate, the power to reflect, the power to choose, the power to speak the truth, and ultimately the power to grow. Continue reading
[Written around 2005.]
Moving forward is terrifying, and anyone who tells you otherwise is not moving forward. To move forward is to heal. To heal is to become more independent. And to become more independent is to leave one’s parents, and the worst of their patterns, behind. This feels like being an abandoned child. And there is no greater terror than feeling like a helpless, powerless, vulnerable infant at the mercy of the world. Continue reading
[Written in 2006.]
••• •••
Alice Miller has influenced my thinking more than any other writer in the psychology field. She opened my eyes to the struggle of the child in the repressive family, she introduced me to the idea that an abused child will compulsively need to replicate his repressed traumas until he is able to resolve them, and she banished from my mind the idea of inherent evil in the child – or the adult. Continue reading
[Written around 2007.]
Translated into adult English from the look in the baby’s eyes…
I need parents who love me fully. I need parents who understand me fully. I need parents who can adequately translate the needs behind my cries…and my coughs…and my silences.
I need parents who are open to learn all they can learn from me. Continue reading
[Written around 2006.]
People who are not fully enlightened have children to be rescued by them. This goes for parents who adopt as well as for those who procreate. Those who adopt at least are not responsible for the creation of a new perfect existence to be twisted, which is good, but this does not change the illness in the motive. And often it makes the illness more virulent, because many adoptive parents feel more justified acting out their unconscious needs in exchange for the service they’ve done. Continue reading
[Written around 2006.]
A spoiled child is an enraged child. Children become enraged when their deepest emotional needs get neglected. Most parent advocates argue that firm limit-setting – and even punishment – is the antidote to spoiling. This is untrue, and only ignores the depth of the problem. The real antidote to spoiling is that parents find ways to meet their children’s needs. Children who get their deepest needs met never become enraged – and would never put up with being spoiled. Such children have nothing to be enraged about. And yet, most parents lack the capacity to meet their children’s deepest needs. And figuring out how to gain this capacity is simply too hard for most parents. Continue reading
[Written around 2005.]
Unconsciously most parents believe they own their children. Parents believe that because they have created their child this child is parental property. In reality, however, parents have it backwards: It is children who own their parents.
To grow strong, healthy, and fully emotionally mature, a child needs parents who are completely devoted to him. This is a parent’s primary responsibility in life. A child needs parents who care for him to the radical degree that they become essentially selfless – and yet, at the same time, have such strong and unwavering senses of who they are as individual adults that their connection with their emotional center is unwavering. Continue reading
[Written around 2006.]
1) The child has the right to expect his parents to meet all of his needs – and it is their responsibility to live up to his expectations.
2) The child has the right to feel that he is the center of the universe – and most importantly, his parents’ universe. This is what allows him to grow optimally. Continue reading
[Written in 2004.]
People procreate in an attempt to have their children rescue them from their own unresolved pain. They may couch their desire to procreate in concepts like biological drive, societal and familial expectation, and love for mothering, and these may all be partially true, but underneath these surface motives people who have not resolved all of their childhood traumas have children because they really just want to be loved. And this is not fair to the child, because no child asks to be born, and no child has the capacity to rescue his parents. Only deep healing – through the resolution of one’s own childhood traumas – can rescue people from their own buried horrors. Continue reading
[Written around 2006.]
“The good-enough mother…starts off with an almost complete adaptation to her infant’s needs, and as time proceeds she adapts less and less completely, gradually, according to the infant’s growing ability to deal with her failure…” [D. W. Winnicott, from “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” 1951]
There are few psychology concepts that repulse me more than Winnicott’s ever-popular “good-enough mother.” This concept bothers me so much because it looks so good, sounds so sweet and gentle and humane, and yet is so false – and only rationalizes abuse. Mothers do not have to reject their child to help him break away. On the contrary, children naturally and progressively break away when they get all their needs met, just as the umbilical cord dries up and falls off on its own in the days or weeks after birth. Independence is a consequence of nurturing. Continue reading
[Written in 2005. Feel free to read my 2013 commentary on this essay — for context and/or follow-up.]
Essay refers to: To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World, by Gail Hornstein
[Unless otherwise noted all bracketed page numbers refer to Gail Hornstein’s book]
•••
Gail Hornstein’s gift to the reader in To Redeem One Person Is To Redeem The World is that she provided the raw materials to understand the fascinating character and revolutionary work of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. The book’s weakness is that Hornstein did not sufficiently connect the dots of her own careful research to create a psychologically satisfying, three-dimensional portrait of her subject. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
Everyone is born narcissistic – that is, full of intense need. This is healthy. If a child is lucky his parents will meet all of his needs and he will grows optimally, straight through to enlightenment, straight through his development with no traumas to bog him down. But when they fail – and where they fail – he has to bury his neglected needs in self-protection. These then become a fixed part of his unconscious personality, and he will go through the rest of his life in an unconscious desperation to heal. These unhealed parts of him become the kernel of his narcissism. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
The world is full of faith healers who work their miracles – or at least presume to. They perform spinal surgeries with rusty knives and cure hernias with their fingertips. But what do they really heal? When it comes to healing broken emotions they are lost. And to the soul truly aspiring to know himself at his deepest level, they lack value and are a regressive and negative force. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
Alice Miller, perhaps the best published psychology writer to date, opens her most famous book, The Drama of the Gifted Child (first published in 1979), with this sentence: “Experience has taught us that we have only one enduring weapon in our struggle against mental illness: the emotional discovery of the truth about the unique history of our childhood.” Few truer words have been written. Yet eighteen years later she closes the afterward of the same book (the 1997 edition) with the following sentence: “I spent a long time looking for a total exploration of my childhood history. Now I see that this was hubris” (her italics). Alice Miller gave up, and in so doing lost her place as a worthwhile role model for the truth seeker. Continue reading
[Written around 2005.]
People are only terrified of dying if parts of themselves have never consciously lived. They may have attained wealth, raised families, achieved fame, and earned societal respect, but this is not living. Real life is about being fully conscious, and for the fully conscious few, death is no terror. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
People commit suicide when the pain of lying to themselves is unbearable and the pain of telling the truth is even worse. Here the journey to manifest enlightenment – to heal all one’s childhood traumas – feels hopeless. The person’s childhood cemented the notion that deep, consistent parental love was completely out the question and that his parents were nothing more than shams. But he could never face that fact, because it was too painful – and they would have only rejected him all the more. Instead he denies it and turns his hopelessness and rage and anger toward himself. He swallows the worst of his parents into his psyche and he fantasizes that death will free him, and bring him peace. But it will not. Death is no relief. Death will only end his journey and kill his potential to grow. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
From the perspective of the family system, the greatest crime for a child is to feel and express his legitimate hatred for his parents. He can feel all the love he wants, but when he flips the coin he is in big trouble. The punishment is rejection by the family, even ejection from it, and no child can face that. It would kill him. This forces him to put his anger somewhere else – somewhere safer. Continue reading
[Written around 2005.]
There are two types of guilt: healthy guilt, in which you feel remorse for having done something that hurts the honest growth or healing process of another, and unhealthy guilt, in which you feel guilty for telling the truth. Most children grow up feeling incredible degrees of unhealthy guilt about their existences. They feel they’ve done something wrong simply by being, and from their family’s perspective they did: they were born honest. Continue reading
[Written around 2004.]
The root of addiction is unresolved emotional trauma. When traumas, be they extreme or mild, are not resolved they leave behind a slew of painful, unprocessed feelings in the unconscious. These feelings are never content to remain silent and instead clamor for release. When they express themselves openly and without disguise this activates the healing process. The healing process, however, is so painful and potentially discombobulating that very few people, unless they have a great deal of mature external support and internal self-understanding, can dare undertake it. Continue reading