Dear Daniel, Although I see significant common ground between your views and mine, I’d like nonetheless to offer the following comments from a more critical perspective: (1) Relational trauma, as I understand it, is the victim’s experience, and resulting sense, of absolute powerlessness against having his or her boundaries violated by a perpetrator to whom he or she stands in a relationship of dependence, whereby the severity of the trauma correlates with the degree of dependence and with the severity of the boundary violation. Although childhood trauma in the family is as ubiquitous as it is, for the most part, invisible, I don’t think all harm inflicted on children by their parents warrants the application of the concept of trauma. There need not be a want of sensitivity in seeing no “trauma continuum” (a phrase you use in Breaking from Your Parents (BFYP)) between the invalidation of a little boy’s feelings when his parents laugh at his tears about being denied ice cream (Alice Miller’s example in The Drama of the Gifted Child), on the one hand, and the horrendous abuse that people diagnosed with dissociative disorders have suffered, on the other. While the former case constitutes humiliation, to be sure, in characterizing it as trauma, that concept is, in my view, overextended. (2) As stated in my previous post (09/07/17), I agree with you that the family – the institution – is a cult, which means, I think, it is a social system of mystified, that is, naturalized, power relations and of obscured conflicts of interest, maintained by sets of rules and meta-rules, as described by R. D. Laing in The Politics of the Family, which are inaccessible to reflection and negotiation (meta-communication). Parents’ institutionalized power consists in the child’s complete dependence on them for all of his or her basic needs, a dependence that is nearly total due to parents’ quasi-immunity to being held to account for what they do to the child, beyond the narrow scope of what by law or public opinion is considered abuse or neglect. The family thus constitutes children’s being the quasi-property of their parents, an extreme power imbalance, though not an absolute one, as constituted by the literal property status of human beings in slavery. (3) It is the mystification of the power imbalance in any given social and political system which generates, I think, what in psychology is called defence mechanisms (such as denial, rationalization) in those who hold the inferior power position. Those in the superior power position don’t need such psychical defences against social and political reality -- for they DEFINE it. In other words: the more external power you have to define reality, the less internal defences you need employ against it. I disagree with Alice Miller that “contempt for those who are smaller and weaker” is a defence. (ibid.) Contempt is an attitude shown by those with (more) power towards those with (less or) no power. Parents’ contempt for their child’s vulnerability is not a defence against their getting in contact with their own wounded “inner child”; it is the exercise of power. By the same token, I would not say that all abusers rationalize their abusive treatment of children, as you write in your essay on Alice Miller. I’d rather say, to the extent that the institutionalization (hence the legitimization) of the power imbalance in the family obscures the difference between “use” and “abuse,” this renders such parental rationalization obsolete. (4) I don’t think that by inflicting trauma on their child, parents “pass on” their own trauma or “take it out” on the child. They do take something out, to be sure, but what the child suffers it is not “the tyranny of [the parents’] own unresolved childhood wounds,” to borrow your phrase from BFYP. When A, having been traumatized by B, in turn traumatizes C, what A takes out on C is not his or her suffering from a sense of powerlessness inflicted upon him or her by B., but is, on the contrary, a sense of ENTITLEMENT to power, actualized by victimizing C. This sense of entitlement is derived from A’s identification with B., whereby, as a consequence, his or her own childhood wounds are “resolved” – reconceived, that is, from the perspective of the perpetrator. Victim A’s identification with perpetrator B -- not to be confused with A’s identification with B’s image of her or him -- betrays A’s disposition, which is to be understood in MORAL and not psychological terms, to take, like B, a “might makes right” attitude toward others. But not all victims identify with the perpetrator; most identify with their perpetrators’ image of them. Conceived in these terms, the legacy of childhood trauma in the family reinforces the power imbalance and thus stabilizes the system STUCTURED by it. Trauma, in other words, is a function of the family – not its failure. (5) Envisioning a future in which more and more people would commit themselves to healing from trauma, you write in BFYP, \"Healthy people now become ready to have children – and they become model parents.” This leaves me wondering, why would healthy people want to have children in the first place? The answer to this question depends, of course, on what we mean here by being healthy. You speak of enlightenment. In the context under discussion, enlightenment must involve, I believe, becoming lucid about the sole motive for having children, i.e., the social power with which it outfits parents and derivatively, the benefits of the social status attached to being a parent. To the extent that this incentive was absent, so too would be the desire to have children. That people could be much better parents than they generally are is no better a reason for having a family involving children than a king acting benevolently toward his subjects is a reason for having a monarchy. Parents’ sense and attitude of quasi-ownership will prevail as long as this private tyranny that goes by the name of family remains the normal, default structure within which children are brought up. The family is the primary institution of oppression in a politico-economic system of oppression (capitalism). The solution is -- not hang fire till we\'ve birthed our true selves -- but abolition. All the best, Karin