For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence

279 Pages·1990·1.41 MB·English

by  Alice Miller

Table of Contents
Title Page
Preface to the 2002 Edition: The Hidden Truth
Preface to the American Edition
Preface to the Original Edition
How Child-Rearing Crushes Spontaneous Feelings: Glimpses of a Revered
Tradition
“Poisonous Pedagogy”
Introduction
Breeding Grounds of Hatred
The “Sacred” Values of Child-Rearing
The Central Mechanism of “Poisonous Pedagogy”
Is There a Harmless Pedagogy?
Gentle Violence
Pedagogy Fills the Needs of Parents, Not of Children
The Last Act of the Silent Drama: The World Reacts with Horror
Introduction
The War of Annihilation against the Self
The Lost Opportunity of Puberty
The Search for the Self and Self-destruction through Drugs
The Hidden Logic of Absurd Behavior
Adolf. Hitler’s Childhood: From Hidden to, Manifest Horror
Introduction
Hitler’s Father
Hitler’s Mother
Jürgen Bartsch.: A Life Seen in Retrospect
Introduction
“Out of the Clear Blue Sky?”
What Does a Murder Tell Us about the Childhood of the Murderer?
The Walls of Silence
Concluding Comments
Steps on the Path to Reconciliation: Anxiety, Anger, and Sorrow-but No
Guilt Feelings
Unintentional Cruelty Hurts, Too
Sylvia Plath: An Example of Forbidden Suffering
Unlived Anger
The Permission to Know
Also by Alice Miller
ACCLAIM FOR FOR YOUR OWN GOOD
Afterword
Bibliography
Afterword to the Second Edition (1984)
Notes
Copyright Page
Preface to the 2002 Edition: The Hidden Truth
THIS BOOK appeared twenty-two years ago, when child abuse was not an
issue. People were shocked at my description of what I called “poisonous
pedagogy”; they had thought that children were subjected to this kind of
maltreatment, lies, hypocrisy, and manipulation only in Germany, and not within
the past hundred years. Then the media began to bring to light appalling facts
about what happens today to children in other countries as well. Books that
showed “poisonous pedagogy” at work even in contemporary America started to
appear (see especially Spare the Child by Philip Greven, Knopf, 1991).
Since then we have become more and more aware of what happened to us in
our own childhoods, and we have begun to learn about the lifelong consequences
of the first years of life. As the sociologist Lucien Lombardo wrote in his
introduction to a chapter of my recent book, The Truth Will Set You Free,
“childhood is not the shortest age in our life but rather the longest because it
stays with us until our death.” In a way he is right: irrational emotions like fear
and rage stemming from our childhoods can lead to crime or lifelong suffering if
we don’t take care of them and are not interested in their origins. Fortunately,
today we can work on our unconscious and overcome our fears; we can achieve
emotional health if we don’t deny the causes of our plight. Amazingly, we can
be more truly alive once we know what happened to us at the beginning of our
lives and are able to find conscious access to the children we once were.
On the other hand, some people try so hard to eradicate all memories, to avoid
any confrontation with the tortured, humiliated child they were that they die
psychically long before their physical deaths, sometimes at the expense of their
children and other people. This avoidance, this denial—often accomplished with
the help of drugs—is comprehensible, of course, as long as the pain seems
unbearable to us. But it is not. It was unbearable only for the infant who needed
to deny in order to survive. Adults can live with the truth. The price they pay for
their denial can be very high.
The biggest obstacle for parents of goodwill is their ignorance concerning the
humiliation endured in their own childhoods. A survey concerning physical
punishment of children was recently done in France, one of the most civilized
and culturally rich countries in the world. One hundred young mothers from
different backgrounds were asked at what age they had assumed that their first
child needed spanking. Eighty-nine percent of the women answered that when
the child started to walk or crawl and to reach for objects that might be
dangerous, spanking was necessary to teach them how to behave. The remaining
II percent couldn’t remember the exact age their children were when they started
to spank them. Not a single mother said that she had never spanked her child.
The results of this survey didn’t surprise me. Of course, I know that there are
people who never beat their children. But these parents are an exception; they
represent perhaps about 3 percent of all parents in the world (see Olivier Maurel,
La Fessée , Editions La Plage, 2001). If a survey done in the country that for
more than two hundred years has propagated the ideals of equality and
brotherhood yields these sad results, what can we expect from countries only
now gaining access to important information about the history of childhood? Our
collective ignorance about the sources of violence remains gigantic.
Some may ask why I focus so strongly on the issue of corporal punishment
when there are so many other forms of child abuse and exploitation. Why has
this become my chief cause?
First of all, the harm it does is tragically underestimated all over the world.
Nobody today would deliberately recommend verbal humiliation, manipulation,
and exploitation of children “for their own good.” But many people seriously
believe that spanking is of some good to children. And corporal punishment
includes the effects of all other forms of child abuse: betrayal of the child’s
confidence, dignity, and perception of reality. Finally, I emphasize corporal
punishment because of the essential role of the body in transmitting information
to the next generation. The body stores up in its cells what it has endured from
the moment of conception, a phenomenon Olivier Maurel has explained very
clearly (see his comments under “Dangers spécifiques des châtiments corporels”
on my Web site, www.alice-miller.com). The memory of the body underlies the
mystery of the compulsion to repeat, especially the compulsion of so many
adults to repeat with their own children what they endured very early in life but
do not recall.
We are reluctant to acknowledge that the memory of our bodies, along with
our emotional experience, is not controlled by our consciousness, our mind. We
have no control over the way this memory operates. But accepting the sheer
existence of these phenomena can help us to guard against their effects. The
typical mother who “involuntarily” slaps her child is not aware of the fact that
her body and its memory is prompting her to do so. But she can come to
understand this, and to understand means to be able to cope, rather than to
repeat, endlessly and helplessly, a behavior that harms all involved.
Teachers and parents of the last two centuries, a number of whom I quote in
this book, have emphasized again and again that the school of obedience, of
“physical admonition,” should start very early in the life of a child, so that the
message remains effective for his or her whole life. As the aforementioned
French survey attests, this advice is still followed: children are beaten, and at the
very time when it is most damaging to them. During the first three years of life,
the child’s brain grows very fast. The lessons of violence learned at this time are
not easy to dissolve. Children must deny the pain in order to survive, but this
strategy leads them, as grown-ups, to the emotional blindness responsible for the
absurd attitude they act upon as parents and educators. The denial of violence
endured leads to violence directed toward others or oneself.
I, of course, was no exception, and it took me a long time to free myself from
this denial. The awakening of my emotions and memories through painting,
which I took up in 1973, motivated me to look at different childhoods in
different cultures. Through this research I learned how evil comes into the world
and how we produce it in every new generation again and again. And the
“poisonous pedagogy” I encountered taught me what my mother had done to me
in my first years, how she succeeded in turning me into an obedient child with
whom, as she said later, she never had any problem. The price I had to pay for
what many people call “good upbringing” was that for a long time I was
separated from my true feelings, from myself.
Six years after I began to paint I wrote my first three books in three years (The
Drama of the Gifted Child, For Your Own Good, and Thou Shalt Not Be Aware),
in which I tried to explain the connections between denied suffering in childhood
and adult violence. Research on Hitler and other dictators opened my eyes to
sources of knowledge that most people ignore or overlook. For me it was a
revelation.
Then I studied the childhoods of several serial killers and always found the
same pattern: extreme abuse, lack of helpful witnesses, glorification of violence,
and the compulsion to repeat, with a photographic precision, what had been
endured in the early years. In Jonathan Pincus’s Base Instincts: What Makes
Serial Killers Kill (Norton, 2001), I recently found confirmation of my
hypothesis that serial killers have been severely mistreated as children, and that
most of them deny their abuse. The few who don’t, I believe, blame themselves
for the abuse, calling it discipline or correction or a proper strictness. For that
reason, for that confusion, they become killers.
To escape this vicious cycle we must face the truth. And we can do it. We
were humiliated children; we were the victims of our parents’ ignorance, the
victims of their history, of the unconscious scars with which childhood left them.
We had no choice but to deny the truth.
But unlike children, we adults have other—and healthier—alternatives. We
can choose knowledge and awareness over compulsion and fear. Unfortunately,
too many people are not yet aware of this choice. Maybe there is a little Stalin
inside many of us. For all his power, he spent his life in fear of his father and
clinging to the “blessings” of denial. Like Hitler, he believed that the
annihilation of millions of people would free him of the tormenting fear of his
father. But it didn’t.
Equipped with the knowledge we now have at our disposal, we can develop
different ideas and solutions from those passed on to us in a thousand-year
tradition of violence, punishment, and retribution, which was sustained by
weakness, ignorance, and fear. To heal our wounds, we eventually need two
“knowing witnesses”—the therapist and our body, whose language will warn us
the moment we abandon our truth. We have to learn to respect these messages.
To have a therapist who herself has worked on her story and doesn’t hesitate to
share it can be very helpful for the patient, because it creates trust,
understanding, and shared experience.
The importance of childhood experiences to the life of the adult is still ignored
in most societies. But time has brought a few important changes, for example,
measures in some European countries that make it illegal to beat children. And
the development of the Internet has made widely available information that not
long ago would have been taboo. Here, for example, are excerpts from a letter
that I found on the Web site www.nospank.net. Twenty years ago a letter like
this would probably not have been written, which is why I am moved to include
it in this latest edition of my book:
I remember sitting on my father’s lap (OK, now my heart is pounding). I’m
not sure how old I was but his hand was down my pants. I think I had just
bathed and was wearing pyjamas, but I can’t be sure … I kept squirming to
try and get away, all the while trying to be subtle about it so he didn’t realize
that I was uncomfortable. I was so concerned with his feelings …
Perhaps I was afraid of upsetting him. I guess I didn’t know what to make of
my feelings. Since he could make me pull down my pants and stand naked from
the waist down at any given moment to beat me with his belt, I guess I figured
that my body was his to do with what he saw fit and that privacy was not mine to
have …
Sometimes, when my father was force-feeding me, he would threaten to beat
me if I didn’t stop crying. You know how it goes, “Stop crying or I’ll give you
something to cry about.” I was terribly afraid of my father. I would pretend to be
asleep as my father stood in my bedroom doorway, staring at me. It was my way
of life. I was always so embarrassed by my father making me pull down my
pants to expose my bare buttocks so he could watch the snapping of the belt
against my bare skin. Actually, even as a child, I thought that was part of my
punishment—to be exposed and humiliated—to be shown how small and
undeserving of respect I was and what could be/would be done to me, at will, if I
didn’t do whatever it was I was supposed to do. I eventually began to look at the
welts he would leave by using the little round bathroom mirror. How satisfying
that must have been for my father to see the results of his efforts. I guess he
showed me … Yes, I really learned my lesson. That snapping of his belt against
my skin is a sound I will never forget. “Move your hands” are words I can never
forget.
The word “belt” itself instills overwhelming embarrassment and shame to this
very day. How humiliated I was! I believe my father truly enjoyed this act of
power. I wouldn’t be surprised if he came in his pants right in the middle of it.
This embarrassment turned into shame and it is this shame that haunts me. I feel
violated. I was violated.
Did he really believe I deserved that? Did he really believe that was the best
way? Or, was he merely succumbing to his own need to pass down, out of anger,
the humiliation that he felt as a child? Did he, indeed, feel this kind of
humiliation as a child? Is it his lack of education or intelligence? Perhaps he is
lazy and didn’t want to try or learn any other way of parenting. Perhaps his need
to establish control preceded all else. Or perhaps he enjoyed being cruel. I don’t
know how to forgive him. I don’t even think I want to forgive him. In my mind,
forgiving him would be like saying it was OK.
IT WAS NOT OK!
He stripped me of my clothes and with it my dignity and self-worth. I don’t
know how to forgive him for that. He has, of course, never asked for my
forgiveness. I can only presume he believes he was a good father. I am still
afraid to approach the topic with him, not that I have any contact with him
anyway, for fear that he will laugh at me.
That is what shame does to a person. It debilitates, preventing one from facing
his/her fears. He used to laugh at me as I obediently brought his belt to him,
while I was sobbing at what was about to happen. He used to chuckle and say,
“Why are you crying? I haven’t even touched you yet.” If I cried or whined too
much, I got beaten for that. What was I supposed to do? I never knew when it
was coming and I always took the threats seriously.
Oh, the threats. They were great. “Do you want me to blister your bottom? Do
you want the belt? Do you want me to beat you? Do you want me to blister your
tail? Do you want a beating?” I just never seemed to know how to avoid it. I just
lived the only way I knew how and figured I must be bad and/or not too bright to
keep making the same mistakes …
I have children of my own now and have given all of my energy to breaking
this chain of humiliating and controlling parenting techniques. I continue to learn
just how deeply my childhood has affected me and struggle to replace that which
I know from experience by that which I know to be good and decent and logical.
Blessed with God’s help and my own strong will, I have broken the chain.
Unfortunately, I am still bound by this chain, but I am the last link. My children
do not provide a link in this hurtful chain and therefore are not bound by it. They
are free and I thank God …
Dad,
I believe you to be a sadistic bully. I continue to be shamed and humiliated
through memory; hence, the punishment you inflicted upon me as a young
girl has lasted my entire life.
I believe that part of you is dead inside, limiting your ability to empathize
and profoundly feel the pain of others. I feel both contempt and pity for you.
Darkness and unenlightenment surround you. I realize I am bound by the
love of God to forgive you, yet continue to struggle with this task.
So, I have finally expressed my true feelings, at least some of them. I tell
you these things as an attempt to liberate myself from the emotional trauma
which you inflicted on me, not as a means to regain contact. This letter is for