Hero Child

 
Home
escape from the fog of admiration
response Pam
response Mia
response Sabine
when seeing the truth and feeling the rage is not enough
roots of powerlessness

 

Anna's response

No idea is ever worth that even one human life be sacrificed for it

 

Escape From the Fog of Admiration – through the eyes of a participant and collaborator in the “Our childhood” forum

This is a text in which I shall try to describe and explain my view of the events that happened to Barbara, the “Our childhood” forum, its participants, Alice Miller and other people, as well. It is marked by my personal perception, as it can be seen, but I need to say that I am sticking to the facts. The first part of this text was written a few months after the incident that triggered a stream of unpredictable and unfathomable events: a former member of the forum under the alias “Norman” announced that IFS therapy could not but bring harm to people who are trying to get awareness of their childhood trauma. I wouldn’t go into details in how he grounded his affirmations because I didn’t feel it sounded clarifying and convincing enough for me: it was Alice Miller who found it convincing and put it forward as a ground to withdraw her support for Barbara’s forum and to recommend the newly-established “Norman”’s forum to her readers. I must mention that “Norman” had asked Barbara to accept him as a collaborator on the forum earlier and got her refusal, before he made his ‘remarkable discovery’ about the IFS.  After many years of close friendship and collaboration, the split with Alice Miller for the sake of “Norman”s affirmations, deeply hurt Barbara and caused her a lot of suffering. In the first part of my text I was trying to share and to explain to myself where her sufferings came from.

No idea is ever worth that even one human life be sacrificed for it

I grew up in one of the so-called totalitarian countries in Eastern Europe. My childhood was like that of most people of my generation – tainted by incomprehensible and boring ideology and propaganda at school but relatively protected at home. I remember a very important question that tormented me in my early school years: there was a poem which was telling how a communist was tortured by fascists to tell them who he was and he never said anything; at last, when he died, the torturer said: ”That was not a man; that was iron”. Then the dead replied ”No, just a communist.”  When I was a child, I often wondered if I could stay silent and not betray anybody and myself if I were tortured so much – and, to my deep regret, I admitted to myself I couldn’t… I do remember that feeling of not being worth enough, of not being good, of not being even quite normal that tormented me for months, maybe years: I was not adequate, not up to the ideology which was meant to equal reality in that framework. Now, I would say: our consciousness as children was slowly and unrelentlessly permeated by the poison of ideology; no doubt, for the sake of preparing us to be laid as bricks in the foundations of an illusory society that was doomed to die away.

I was 24 when the big change came on in Eastern Europe. I remember very well those days and I also was a participant in some events. The atmosphere of liberation was everywhere - this was liberation from the lies of ideology, above all. The man who has written the poem I mentioned above committed suicide without leaving a letter. Now I know that he was the head of the “retribution” squad that punished by death the collaborationists, the “bourgeois” politicians, the “exploitative industrials”, journalists, writers, musicians, etc. – he murdered people for not adhering to the communist ideas. That was the man who taught us morality in our childhood. And the morality was simple and dreadful: the key to survival was to embrace the ideology and to agree to sacrifice your personality and your work for it. (I am talking about the years around the middle of the 20th century; I am born later and I didn’t witness such events – but their spirit had not vented away by the time of my childhood).

In 1989, at the time of the great change, I was mostly impressed by those old politicians who 45 years ago had worked in the framework of a relatively democratic state and somehow survived in the stormy days in 1944-45; instead, they were sent to Stalin-type camps and reduced to insignificant existence after their liberation. Only now did they start to tell about their lives and we were fascinated by their resistance and dignity in sufferings. I went to meetings with such men and I also followed what was published in the press by them – this was real life and real wisdom. They were telling how people sacrificed their life and took life of other people in the name of "ideas". They survived all that hell and now they shared their deeply felt truth: ”No idea is ever worth that even one human life be sacrificed for it.”

Now I perceive this truth not as limited to that time and to my country. Many years later, in a country whose nationals believe they live in the best democracy in the world, I saw a woman ferociously trying to destroy me and her own son because I didn’t fit in her primitive ideas about the daughter-in-law as Cinderella. And I did feel on my own skin what it means to be sacrificed for “ideas“ - a total negation of a human being. The lust for negating human beings was not limited by borders, neither by social orders – but may be it was limited by time?!?... This woman was a dark mind of the last century petrified in her morbid mental constructs. If I am asked to summarize the spirit of all the last century, I would say this was the time when people were sent and went to sacrifice their life for ideas, e.g. mental constructs. And all the history of all the 20th century demonstrated how many evils and destruction could come out of over-attachment to mental constructs – and from not admitting the realities of life.

I need to tell all this because I want to share with you how I grew aware of what had happened last autumn. As all abused children, it was/is difficult for me to see and define a situation of abuse (or at least I need time to do this). Because Alice Miller had helped me to validate my True self and thus give a final kick out to the feeling I am not adequate to the reality (it was reality, in fact, which was sick and abusive and my reactions were healthy), I felt everything about Alice Miller must be open, sincere and almost flawless. The conflict that arose last autumn seemed to turn around psychological theories and practices – I am not a specialist and I did not feel competent enough to express an opinion. May be other people felt like me, too. Only recently did I tell to myself that “Norman”, the person who so confidently announced that the IFS was wrong, is not a specialist in this field, either. Anyway, for quite a long time I was prevented from looking into the problem because I thought it was a conflict of ideas I am not familiar with.

But it wasn’t… As I followed Barbara’s letters on the forum, it was becoming more and more clear to me that she was deeply suffering. Here I felt a heart throbbing with pain - on the other site I saw a slogan in capital letters. My feelings and my sympathy went to Barbara and I started to give her my support, as much as I could, even if the situation still remained not quite clear to me. Only recently was I able to unravel its meaning: Barbara was suffering so much not because she was involved in an intellectual argument but because she was hit by a severe trauma (an essential characteristic of the trauma is having your belief in humanity shaken) and was now going through the post-traumatic problems. Barbara was submitted to abuse and now, a year later, I can define that type of abuse: she was abused in the name of ideas. Barbara, a real living person with her place in life, with all her thoughts and feelings, with all her story and all her human relations was sacrificed for ideas. All the time she was crying that she is a real person – and all the time she was met with the merciless “No, you are ideas I don’t like.” The real living person Barbara was reduced to an instrument and was judged according to her fitness to promote certain ideas. Refusing to see the other human being in all his/her dimensions and reducing him/her to a part that could or could not be used by you is abuse par excellence. It reveals an attitude where people are not regarded as human beings but as machine components fit or not fit to implement a certain task – or to promote a certain idea.

This certainly has to do much with the communist commander who glorified the dead man-iron and systematically killed those who didn’t adhere to his ideas. That was the spirit of the last century. And, in spite of all her deep insights, in real life Alice Miller seems to be a woman from the last century. She suffered all the abuse of the last century, she revealed its roots to a great extent but she couldn’t integrate her discoveries in her real life and her relationships with people. That’s why, in her turn, she could sacrifice people for ideas – just as her contemporaries did it.

In those hard times Barbara continued to moderate the forum; actually, Barbara showed she is not and has never been an instrument; she did all this work because she believed it was her own deep essence. “Norman”, the person who has offered himself as a better instrument, soon abandoned moderating the “right” forum (later we got to know why). All this showed how wrong Alice Miller was in her judgment of people (probably led by that over-attachment to mental constructs that was characteristic of the abusive 20th century). The bad thing is that her mistake hurt deeply a real person and reverberated and is still reverberating on all of us. I do not feel all these things must be passed under silence not because I feel driven to contest Alice Miller’s authority – but because I believe the truth and all the truth can heal us – and by us, the world in the future.

The facts that Barbara revealed about the German forums expand and complete the picture for me – they help me fill up the gaps in my perception of “Paul” (one of the people who tried to attack our forum) and they also come to corroborate my impression that in real life Alice Miller is a person from the 20th century. Trying to interfere in discussions under false personalities and erasing letters and traces tells about a drive to control and manipulate reality – just as those ‘great’ leaders of the last century who ignored and denied everything that didn’t fit into their mental constructs. For them those mental constructs were explaining all reality – what remained outside these mental constructs should be labeled as “wrong”, denied, destroyed, twisted, erased for ever…

But, ironically and legitimately, it continued to exist… because it was real (just as Barbara involvement and our forum continued to exist). That part of Alice Miller probably is her False self - the one that allowed her to survive in the atrocities of the 20th century. Her real honest True self speaks in her books. After witnessing all this story I can assume that there must be an abyss between her True self and her False self, e.g. she might suffer dissociation, with regard to this problem, at least. I’ll stop at that because this is not my field and I do not feel confident enough to express myself (but I am sure in what I understand on a practical level).

Now, I see Alice Miller as a real person – if I were as close to her as Barbara was, this would
help me to survive. Some years ago such perception helped me to heal myself from my traumatic attachment to the gifted child – while I loved his sincere, creative and sensitive True self, his False self, activated by the intrigues of the old witch, was treacherous and murderous. If I had stayed with him, I would fall in the abyss between his True self and his False self. The moment when I grew aware of the existence of that abyss was my moment of salvation. Now I can say: seeing the real person and real facts is crucial. Finding the right words for facts is crucial. Putting the responsibility for abuse where it really belongs is crucial. And I believe this story can help all of us to see not only our parents in their real dimensions but also other people around us with all the damages they hold from their own parents and from other people in their lives – and not to live on the mantra “I am my parents’ victim” but to learn to see, identify and act in situations in which many abusive influences intertwine. I believe this may allow us to work out more adequate attitudes: attitudes that can help us to keep our human dignity and which will be our moments of salvation.

The forum – idea and implementation

A few months later all forums were gone from Alice Miller’s site. A lively part of her site has been lost. In my view, this is a loss for her – she lost part of her influence. But in the light of all the events we are discussing these days, this has been a predictable loss – it showed that the way she handled the forums was misplaced, not adequate, not productive, not meeting the reality – no wonder those forums are dead.

Ironically - and legitimately – our forum continues to exist. In my view that proves the idea about a forum like that was viable. But a good idea was not enough – to live, it needed a good implementation, as well. And in the course of all these long months I grew more and more convinced that keeping the forum going and functional was Barbara’s contribution. Months ago, I wanted to write a letter to her to tell her how much I appreciated the fact that she assured continuity, consistency and reliability for the members of the forum, in spite of all adversities – and that I can imagine how vital this is for the hurt souls and how important it is for a good therapist to be able to offer it. This was something Alice Miller was not able to offer to the hurt souls who came to her. She offered them ideas – but Barbara  knew there were moments when a sigh, or an exclamation mark, would  have been much more helpful than the brightest idea.

And this is a great professional advantage, as well.

 

The dark space

All these are observations of what came to the forefront – Alice Miller and her opinions and actions – and my attempt to explain them. In this letter I didn’t discuss the person “Norman” – he kind of plunged into the background after announcing her tremendous discovery.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, many strange things happened on the territory of the forums. There were numerous attempts for destabilization of Barbara’s forum and sapping its credibility. I would call them “vicious” – they were intended to erode the atmosphere of trust and acceptance that was established long ago, to introduce useless and off-the-point arguments, to leave some people hurt and to confuse others... It was a coordinated effort for destruction although it was difficult to say how many people were pulling the strings – maybe just a single one... This was the dark space of lies and manipulations where what your eyes see at one moment is refuted by what your ears can hear at the next moment – but the feeling of something illogical, displaced and morbid continues lingering in the air. The facts were present – the motivation was missing. Why should anyone want to destroy a forum on the net? To be more specific, I would say “the rational motivation” was missing – but in the domain of irrational there must have been explanations.

Here is a possible one: it emerged that “Norman” whose forum Alice Miller “endorsed” was using the forum to write abusive letters to the people who trusted him. Unexpected and unfathomable! Those people wrote to Alice Miller about “Norman”s abuse and from her response they got the impression she didn’t care much about what was going on. Or...were the notes that were coming from her mailbox, written by her, actually? Why did Alice Miller dismiss her long-standing relationship with Barbara and the working forum to save the suffering souls from the “supposed” danger of the IFS, but just a few months later seemed to have a deaf ear for those suffering souls submitted to real attempts of abuse?... Who was at the source of all these disturbances – the one who came to the forefront or the one who kept in the shadowy background?

This was not the fog of admiration anymore, it was the fog of lies. Where Alice Miller stood in this dark space we may never know. Was it created by her, or was she a victim in the web of a skillful manipulator ....it may remain hidden for ever. In a way, this knowledge is of lesser importance now, as we have already found and practiced new ways to deal with the attempts to be plundged into a deceitful atmosphere. All of us on the forum supported each other in solidarity and compassion, shared our observations, discussed them and were not afraid to put any doubts on the table. We learned a lot about openness and sharing, we put to work mutual respect and assistance and some of us found new ways of getting awareness and understanding of our past and present traumas.

The forum survived…

Now

Now our forum is vibrant with life and new revelations. We are going in new ways. I wouldn’t say they basically contradict what we have learned from Alice Miller – it is certain that they build on it, develop and complete it - but we do not feel stuck in the chains of the “only one truthful theory”. Quite the contrary, we feel free to try new ways to get better understanding of our own stories- and some of them work really well.

What more to say: Life is so rich and various that it can never be embraced even by the most perfect mental constructs – and it can never belong to one mind. And abusive impulses are doomed to be cancelled out by Life sooner or later – because they contradict Life itself. Luckily!

Anna

10.05.2010

 

<< back to top