When I was in graduate school, Alice Miller's book, The Drama of the Gifted Child, was required reading. It's a little book, not more than 150 pages, yet it carries a big punch.
Clinical Psychology grad students, like med students, are apt to diagnose themselves with whatever illness they are studying at the time. Depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, I had it all. As I read Miller's book I was amazed to learn I was an abused child. My parent's benign neglect, according to Miller, was more harmful than I had realized even with years of therapy.
If you blame your parents for your problems, or even if you don’t, be sure to read this fascinating obituary of Alice Miller, a psychoanalyst whose focus on family dysfunction started it all. Her work alerted therapists to the problem of child abuse, but it also offered adults the opportunity to blame their difficulties in life on their upbringing.
Back then, in grad school, as I absorbed this information I also had to learn to move beyond
the blame game and take responsibility for myself. After all, my
parents gave me a great deal that was positive as well as hurtful. Plus, where was the hope? What was going to change my life from one of chronic frustration to self-actualization? A person has the choice to paint themselves as a passive victim or take self-action and make the best of what we have.
As a therapist I assure my patients that exploring their experiences in childhood is not about blaming the parents for their woes. It is to examine their reality, the good, the not so good, the downright harmful, so that they can accept, forgive, if necessary, and move beyond it.
Whether you are a fan of Alice Miller or not, she stirred the pot,
got people talking and helped many, myself included, to have the
courage to face the dark side of our childhoods. On a larger, important scale, Dr. Miller
did a great deal to alert society to the hidden danger of child abuse
and our responsibility to help children too young to take
responsibility for themselves.
Interesting how the “blame game” shifted as I became a mother myself. We are far more forgiving as we realize that humans are not perfect. No matter how much effort & soul we put into “mothering” my children, they will only have their own basis to judge me by … and thus, may blame me for their shortcomings. I see my own mother with a far more blurred lens as I raise teenagers!
Years ago I peeled back the layers of my conditioning and of society’s conditioning. I learned that environment played a larger part in how I could be. Then, several years later I learned from a letter in the mail that I was adopted. That changed everything. And, more so because I learned that genetics play an even larger part that environment. Both impact the body, as the body stores memory.
As it was, I learned how strong I was. And that my strength was actually from my strong, highly evolved genetics. And I was no longer ‘strange’ or ‘the black sheep’ or a ‘bad girl’, and so on.
I found that I had a photographic memory and could remember back to being almost a month old, and that I also had a eidetic memory both which served me well.
But what Iearned was that forgiveness, even though I am a devout Christian, in the truest sense, not in an institutional way but in a profound, mystic way, was useless. Why should I forgive everyone, like I usually did. Especially my parent and sibling. The cruelty, physical and emotional abuse was insurmountable. What I did learn was the I had to let go, let go and forgive myself for harbouring all kinds of thoughts. That worked.
But something still niggled away. And my adoptive parents could not understand how they had been, neither my sibling. It was useless and humiliating all over again.
So in short, I did the Gestalt. I wrote what turned out to be a 60-page letter to my adopted mother, my sibling and two of her children. Eventually I honed the letter down to 11 pages. Yes, I was to the point. No messing around. AND, it was RISKY BUSINESS!
I knew exactly what I was doing. And I knew how it would be received. And when I posted those letters, as well as one the minister where I went to church when I was young, and to my mother’s GP, there was an enormous sense of freedom… but the most amazing thing was that as each letter was placed into the red post box, there was a large black cloud above me, and that kept on rising and rising until it no longer existed.
I believe that its not wise to forgive without understanding all there is to understand. As well as to Know Thyself. Unconditional Love and Forgiveness are Gifts. To be used with wisdom, insight, mindfulness and large levels of awareness, and then an even larger consciousness. Bliss.
And one more thing: I learned that both the sacred and the profane are all Sacred. Which in turn led me to understand that there is actually nothing to forgive. But that is for another story and time.