Concerning Forgiveness

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Alice :

Concerning Forgiveness: The Liberating Experience of Painful Truth

http://www.alice-miller.com/sujet/art17a.htm

Excerpts (full article below):

(1) " It was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness

- namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and

condemnation of my parents' misleading opinions and actions, and the

articulation of my own needs - that ultimately freed me from the past. In my

childhood, these things had been ignored in the name of " a good upbringing, "

and I myself learned to ignore them for decades in order to be the " good "

and " tolerant " child my parents wished me to be. But today I know: I always

needed to expose and fight against opinions and attitudes that I considered

destructive of life wherever I encountered them, and not to tolerate them.

But I could only do this effectively once I had felt and experienced what

was inflicted on me earlier. By preventing me from feeling the pain, the

moral religious injunction to forgive did nothing but hinder this process. "

[...]

(2) " I have asked many therapists why it is that they believe their

patients must forgive if they are to become well, but I have never received

a halfway acceptable answer. Clearly, they had never questioned their

assertion. It was, for them, as self-evident as the mistreatment with which

they grew up. I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not

mistreated, but respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an

ideology of forgiveness for incomprehensible cruelties. This ideology is

indivisible with the command " Thou shalt not be aware " and with the

repetition of that cruelty on the next generation. It is our children who

pay the price for our lack of awareness. Our fear of our parents' revenge is

the basis of our morality.

However, by means of gradual therapeutic disclosure that dispenses with

bogus morality and pedagogy , this misleading ideology can be stopped.

Survivors of mistreatment need to discover their own truth if they are to

free themselves of its consequences. Moralizing leads them away from this

truth.

An effective therapy cannot be achieved if the mechanisms of pedagogy

continue to operate. It requires recognition of the damage caused by our

upbringing, whose consequences it should resolve. It must make patients'

feelings available to them-and accessible for the entirety of their lives.

This can help them to orientate and be at one with themselves. Moralizing

appeals can result in barring access to this self-knowledge. "

Full Article:

Alice :

Concerning Forgiveness: The Liberating Experience of Painful Truth

The mistreated and neglected child is completely alone in the darkness of

confusion and fear. Surrounded by arrogance and hatred, robbed of its rights

and its speech, deceived in its love and its trust, disregarded, humiliated,

mocked in its pain, such a child is blind, lost, and pitilessly exposed to

the power of ignorant adults. It is without orientation and completely

defenseless.

Its whole being would like to shout out its anger, give voice to its feeling

of outrage, call for help. But that is exactly what it may not do. All its

normal reactions, the reactions with which nature has endowed it to help it

survive, remain blocked. If no witness comes to its aid, these natural

reactions would enlarge and prolong the child's sufferings. Ultimately, the

child could die of them.

Thus, the healthy impulse to protest against inhumanity has to be

suppressed. The child attempts to extinguish and erase from memory

everything that has happened to it, in order to banish from consciousness

the burning outrage, fury , fear, and the unbearable pain - as it hopes,

forever. What remains is a feeling of its own guilt, rather than outrage

that it is forced to kiss the hand that beats it and beg for forgiveness -

something that unfortunately happens more than one imagines.

The abused child goes on living within those who have survived such torture,

a torture that ended with total repression. They live with the darkness of

fear, oppression, and threats. When all its attempts to move the adult to

heed its story have failed, it resorts to the language of symptoms to make

itself heard. Enter addiction, psychosis, criminality.

If, as adults, we nevertheless begin to have an inkling of why we are

suffering and ask a specialist whether these sufferings could have a

connection with our childhood, we will usually be told that this is very

unlikely to be the case. And if it were, that we should learn forgiveness.

It is the resentment at the past, we are told, that is making us ill.

In those by-now familiar groups in which addicts and their relations go into

therapy together, the following belief is invariably expressed. Only when

you have forgiven your parents for everything they did to you can you get

well. Even if both parents were alcoholics, even if they mistreated,

confused, exploited, beat, and totally overloaded you, you must forgive them

everything. Otherwise, your illness will not be cured. There are many

programs going by the name of " therapy " , whose basis consists of first

learning to express one's feelings in order to see what happened in

childhood. Then, however, comes " the work of forgiveness " , which is

apparently necessary if one is to heal. Many young people who have AIDS or

are drug-addicted die in the wake of their effort to forgive so much. What

they do not realize is that they are trying to keep the repression of their

childhood intact.

Some therapists fear this truth. They work under the influence of various

interpretations culled from both Western and Oriental religions, which

preach forgiveness to the once-mistreated child. Thereby, they create a new

vicious circle for people who, from their earliest years, have been caught

in the vicious circle of pedagogy . This, they refer to as " therapy " . In so

doing, they lead them into a trap from which there is no escape, the same

trap that once rendered their natural protests impossible, thus causing the

illness in the first place. Because such therapists, caught as they are in

the pedagogic system, cannot help patients to resolve the consequences of

the traumatization they have suffered, they offer them traditional morality

instead.

In recent years I have been sent many books from the United States of

America describing different kinds of therapeutic intervention by authors

with whom I am not familiar. Many of these authors presume that forgiveness

is an indispensable condition for successful therapy. This notion appears to

be so widespread in therapeutic circles that it is not always called into

question - something urgently needed. For forgiveness does not resolve

latent hatred and self-hatred but can cover them up in a very dangerous way.

I know of the case of one woman, whose mother was sexually abused as a child

by both her father and brother. Reared in a convent, this woman learned " the

blessing of forgiveness " by heart. She continued to worship her father and

brother without the slightest trace of bitterness. While her daughter was

still an infant, she frequently left the child " in the care of " her

thirteen-year-old nephew, while she went blithely off to the movies with her

husband. While she was gone, the pubescent babysitter indulged his sexual

desires on the body of her baby daughter. When the daughter later sought

help in psychoanalytic counseling, the analyst told her she should on no

account blame her mother. Her intentions had not been bad, she was told. She

had had no idea that her babysitter was routinely abusing her child. The

mother, it seems, was literally clueless. When the child began to develop

dietary disturbances, she anxiously consulted a number of doctors. They

assured her that the disturbances in her eating habits came from " teething. "

Thus, the gears of this forgiveness machine were functioning almost

perfectly - and, at the expense of the truth and the lives of all concerned.

Fortunately, they don't always function as well.

In her highly creative, remarkable book THE OBSIDIAN MIRROR: AN ADULT

HEALING FROM INCEST (Seal Press, 1988), Louise Wisechild describes how she

succeeded in deciphering her body's messages and communications, and thereby

her feelings, so that she was gradually able to free her childhood from

repression. This took place in a successful therapy involving bodywork and

written accounts of her experiences. Gradually, she discovered in detail

what she had totally banished from consciousness: that she had been sexually

molested by her grandfather at the age of four; that she was subsequently

abused by an uncle and finally also by her stepfather. A woman therapist was

willing and brave enough to work with her on this horrific journey of

self-discovery, in spite of the manifest torture to which the patient had

been subjected. Nevertheless, even in this most successful therapy Louise

sometimes felt that she should forgive her mother. On the other hand, she

strongly felt that this might be wrong. Fortunately, the therapist didn't

insist too much on this point. She gave Louise the freedom to follow her own

feelings and to discover that it was not forgiveness that made her strong in

the end. Helping the patient to resolve the guilt feelings that had been

imposed upon her - the ultimate purpose, presumably, of therapy - doesn't

mean to burden her with an additional demand, a demand that could only serve

to cement those feelings of guilt. A quasi-religious act of forgiveness can

never resolve patterns of self-destruction.

Why should this woman, after showing her concern for her mother for thirty

years, forgive her crime, when that mother had never made the slightest

effort to see what she had done to her daughter? On one occasion, as the

child, rigid with fear and disgust, was forced to lie under the heavy , male

body of her uncle, she caught sight of her mother in the mirror as she

approached the door. The child hoped to be saved, but the mother turned and

disappeared. When Louise was an adult, she heard her mother say that she

could only cope with her fear of that uncle if her children were around her.

When the daughter tried to discuss her rape at the hands of her stepfather,

her mother wrote her that she never wished to see her again. Even in many

such blatant cases, the pressure to forgive, which effectively prevents the

chance of a successful therapy, is hardly seen as the absurd demand that it

is. It is just this common pressure to forgive that mobilizes old fears in

the patient that oblige him or her to believe such an authority. What can it

possibly achieve, except a quiet conscience for the therapist?*

In many cases much can be destroyed with a single, fundamentally wrong,

confusing sentence. That it is well anchored in tradition and has been

implanted in us since our earliest childhood only makes matters worse. What

is involved here is an outrageous misuse of power , by which therapists are

wont to ward off their powerlessness and fear. Patients, for their part, are

convinced that the therapist holds this view as a result of the

incontrovertible evidence of experience and so believe this " authority " .

They cannot know-and it is almost impossible for them to discover-that what

this claim in fact discloses is the therapist's own fear of the mistreatment

suffered at the hands of his or her parents. How are patients meant to

resolve their feelings of guilt under such circumstances? On the contrary ,

they will simply be confirmed.

Preaching forgiveness reveals the pedagogic nature of some therapies. In

addition, it exposes the powerlessness of the preachers. In a sense, it is

odd that they call themselves " therapists " at all. " Priests " would be more

apt. What ultimately emerges is the continuation of the blindness inherited

in childhood, the blindness that a real therapy could relieve. What is

constantly repeated to patients -until they believe it, and the therapist is

mollified - is: " Your hate is making you ill. You must forgive and forget.

Then you will be well. " But it was not hatred that drove patients to mute

desperation in their childhood, by alienating them from their feelings and

their needs. It was such morality with which they were constantly pressured.

It was my experience that it was precisely the opposite of forgiveness -

namely, rebellion against mistreatment suffered, the recognition and

condemnation of my parents' misleading opinions and actions, and the

articulation of my own needs - that ultimately freed me from the past. In my

childhood, these things had been ignored in the name of " a good upbringing, "

and I myself learned to ignore them for decades in order to be the " good "

and " tolerant " child my parents wished me to be. But today I know: I always

needed to expose and fight against opinions and attitudes that I considered

destructive of life wherever I encountered them, and not to tolerate them.

But I could only do this effectively once I had felt and experienced what

was inflicted on me earlier. By preventing me from feeling the pain, the

moral religious injunction to forgive did nothing but hinder this process.

The demand for good behavior has nothing to do with either an effective

therapy or life. For many people in search of help, it closes the path to

freedom. Therapists allow themselves to be led by their own fear - the

mistreated child's fear of its parents' revenge - and by the hope that good

behavior might one day be able to buy the love their parents denied them.

The price that patients have to pay for this illusory hope is high indeed.

Given false information, they cannot find the path to self-fulfillment.

By refusing to forgive, I give up my illusions. A mistreated child, of

course, cannot live without them. But a grown-up therapist must be able to

manage it. His or her patients should be able to ask: " Why should I forgive,

when no one is asking me to? I mean, my parents refuse to understand and to

know what they did to me. So why should I go on trying to understand and

forgive my parents and whatever happened in their childhood, with things

like psychoanalysis and transactional analysis? What's the use? Whom does it

help? It doesn't help my parents to see the truth. But it does prevent me

from experiencing my feelings, the feelings that would give me access to the

truth. But under the bell-jar of forgiveness, feelings cannot and may not

blossom freely. " Such reflections are, unfortunately, not common in

therapeutic circles, in which forgiveness is the ultimate law. The only

compromise that is made consists of differentiating between false and

correct forms of forgiveness. But therapy requires only the " correct " form.

And this goal may never be questioned.

I have asked many therapists why it is that they believe their patients must

forgive if they are to become well, but I have never received a halfway

acceptable answer. Clearly, they had never questioned their assertion. It

was, for them, as self-evident as the mistreatment with which they grew up.

I cannot conceive of a society in which children are not mistreated, but

respected and lovingly cared for, that would develop an ideology of

forgiveness for incomprehensible cruelties. This ideology is indivisible

with the command " Thou shalt not be aware " and with the repetition of that

cruelty on the next generation. It is our children who pay the price for our

lack of awareness. Our fear of our parents' revenge is the basis of our

morality.

However, by means of gradual therapeutic disclosure that dispenses with

bogus morality and pedagogy , this misleading ideology can be stopped.

Survivors of mistreatment need to discover their own truth if they are to

free themselves of its consequences. Moralizing leads them away from this

truth.

An effective therapy cannot be achieved if the mechanisms of pedagogy

continue to operate. It requires recognition of the damage caused by our

upbringing, whose consequences it should resolve. It must make patients'

feelings available to them-and accessible for the entirety of their lives.

This can help them to orientate and be at one with themselves. Moralizing

appeals can result in barring access to this self-knowledge.

A child can excuse its parents, if they in their turn are prepared to

recognize and admit to their failures. But the demand for forgiveness that I

often encounter can pose a danger for therapy, even though it is an

expression of our culture. Mistreatment of children is the order of the day,

and those errors are therefore trivialized by the majority of adults.

Forgiving can have negative consequences, not only for the individual, but

for society at large, because it can mean disguising erroneous opinions and

attitudes, and involves drawing a curtain across reality so that we cannot

see what is taking place behind it.

The possibility of change depends on whether there is a sufficient number of

enlightened witnesses to create a safety net for the growing consciousness

of those who have been mistreated as children, so that they do not fall into

the darkness of forgetfulness, from which they will later emerge as

criminals or the mentally ill. Cradled in the " net " provided by such

enlightened witnesses, these children can grow to be conscious adults,

adults who live with and not against their past and who will therefore be

able to do everything they can to create a more humane future for us all.

It has already been scientifically proved that weeping caused by sadness,

pain, and fear not only causes tears to fall. Stress hormones, which lead to

a general relaxation of the body, are also released. Of course, this cannot

be equated with therapy. Nevertheless, it is an important discovery that

should find its way into the treatments used by therapeutic practitioners.

So far, though, the opposite has been the case. Patients are given

tranquilizers to calm them. What would happen if they began to gain access

to the causes of their symptoms! The problem with medical pedagogy is that

the majority of those involved, the institutions and specialists, in no way

wish to know why it is people become ill. The result of this denial is that

countless chronically ill people become permanent residents of our prisons

and clinics, while billions are spent by the government on keeping mum about

the truth. Those affected must on no account realize that they can be helped

to understand the language of their childhood, thereby truly reducing their

suffering or even relieving it altogether .

If we had the courage to confront the facts about the repression of

childhood mistreatment and its consequences, this would be possible. One

look at the specialist literature on the subject, however, shows just how

lacking such courage is. By contrast, the literature is full of appeals to

our good intentions, all kinds of noncommittal and unverifiable advice, and,

above all, moral preaching. Everything, all cruelty endured in childhood, is

to be forgiven. If that doesn't do the trick, then the state must pay for

the lifelong care and treatment of invalids and the chronically ill. But

with the help of the truth, they could be cured.

It has now been proved that though repression may be crucial for a child, it

should not necessarily be the fate of adults. A small child's dependency on

its parents, its trust in them, its longing to love and be loved, are

limitless. To exploit this dependency, to deceive a child in its longing,

confuse it, and then proceed to sell this as " child rearing " is a criminal

act - a criminal act committed hourly and daily out of ignorance,

indifference, and the refusal to give up such behavior. The fact that the

majority of such crimes are committed unconsciously does not, unfortunately,

allay the calamitous consequences. The abused child's body will register the

truth, while its consciousness refuses to acknowledge it. By repressing the

pain and the accompanying situations, the infantile organism averts

death-its fate, were it to consciously experience such traumatization.

What remains is the vicious circle of repression: the true story, which has

been suppressed in the body, produces symptoms so that it could at last be

recognized and taken seriously. But our consciousness refuses to comply,

just as it did in childhood - because it was then that it learned the

life-saving function of repression, and because no one has subsequently

explained that as grown-ups we are not condemned to die of our knowledge,

that, on the contrary , such knowledge would help us in our quest for

health.

The dangerous teaching of " poisonous pedagogy " - " Thou Shalt Not Be Aware Of

What Was Done To You " - reappears in the methods of treatment practiced by

doctors, psychiatrists, and therapists. With medication and mystifying

theories they try to influence their patients' memories as deeply as

possible, in order that they never find the cause of their illness. These

lie, almost without exception, in the psychic and physical mistreatment and

neglect suffered in childhood.

Today, we know that AIDS and cancer involve a drastic collapse of the body's

immune system, and that this physical " resignation " precedes the sick

person's loss of hope. Incredibly, hardly anyone has taken the step that

these discoveries suggest: that we can regain our hope, if our distress

signals are finally heard. If our repressed, hidden story is at last

perceived with full consciousness, even our immune system can regenerate

itself. But who is there to help, when all the " helpers " fear their own

personal history? And so we play the game of blindman's buff with each

other-patients, doctors, medical authorities-because until now only a few

people have experienced the fact that emotional access to the truth is the

indispensable precondition of healing. In the long run, we can only function

with consciousness of the truth. This also holds for our physical

well-being. Bogus traditional morality, destructive religious

interpretations, and confusion in our methods of child rearing all make this

experience harder and hinder our initiative. Without a doubt, the

pharmaceutical industry also profits from our blindness and despondency.

However, each of us has been given only one life and only one body. It

refuses to be fooled, insisting with all means at its disposal that we do

not deceive it. .

*I have slightly revised the last two paragraphs for this revised edition

after reviewing a letter from Louise Wisechild, who provided me with more

specific information about her own view of her therapy.

C Alice