| Source: http://www.screamsfromchildhood.com/escape_admiration.html
escape from the fog of admiration
a response to Alice Miller
by Barbara Rogers
You could not have produced more powerful proof for the
validity of the IFS (Internal Family System) therapy
concept, Alice, than with your irrational public attack
against the our.childhood.international forum, against
me, its moderator, and against IFS therapy [1]. On
September 28, 2008, you published it on your website;
according to your wishes it was also published on the
our.childhood forum. The question of why you, of all
people, would desire to harm this forum and me has
initiated the following reflections. The answers that I
found, and my sureness that it is important toxx oppose
,bullies coupled with my need to break silences within
and around me, have led me to this refutation.
Your affront reveals that you neither realize how
dissociation affects the human psyche nor have a tool to
address it in therapy. Your assault misuses the
our.childhood forum as a pawn without truthfulness,
dignity and sincerity; it does not care about the
feelings and needs of its members; it mistreats your
assistant, with whom you worked closely for years; it
betrays trauma-survivors, who suffer from dissociation,
to benefit from the IFS approach; and it redounds upon
you as you lose your credibility with your preposterous
contentions.
The realization that I have spent most of my life in the
fog of admiration, as a child for my parents, and later
for you, has been harrowing and very painful. But this
shocking awakening not only created the need to rethink
and redefine how I see therapy but has also brought forth
a renewed and deeper trust in myself. I write this essay
in the knowledge that my insights can help others escape
this fog, too.
In 2001, Bob Scharf started the our.childhood
international forum, based on your idea. In 2005, Bob put
his trust in me and asked me to take over the moderation
after he had done this voluntary work for four years. In
the beginning of my work as moderator, you warned me that
I was scaring the our.childhood members when I was
emphatically on their side and strongly condemned abusive
and neglectful parents and their crimes. Later you
changed your view and absorbed my mode of extending
support and shedding a truthful light on gruesome
traumatic childhood realities, my way of being an
enlightened witness. For years, the forum was accompanied
by your support and esteem for the empowering communal
work that we, its members, all of us victims of child
abuse and neglect, accomplish there. It was a rude
awakening for us when you turned against the forum
without a meaningful explanation. Your abrupt, arbitrary
enmity disrespected and traumatized adult survivors. It
seemed to be based on a scathing condemnation of IFS
therapy – a line of attack, which Norman had used
already before to bully me.
Bullies expect to intimidate and silence others by sowing
guilt, degradation, fear and lies. But when we uncover
the bully's ulterior motives, the truth becomes apparent:
IFS was used as a pretext to further both your
manipulative agendas. Which propels the fascinating
question: what is so threatening about the IFS approach?
The therapeutic approach of IFS emanates from the fact
that trauma causes dissociation by creating
"split-off selves," or "parts" as
they are called in IFS therapy. IFS work is an effective
approach to deal with dissociation – if we care to
acknowledge how it affects us – and it helps us
reach and change our dissociated parts through
respectful, compassionate inner communication in therapy.
It was through IFS therapy that I learned to question all
my feelings and beliefs, and those of others, too. IFS
helped me become aware of when I am connected with my
true self or in the clutches of dissociation: acting out
from parts.
In truth, your assault on the our.childhood forum and me
was neither about my moderation, nor about sharing
meaningful information about therapy and IFS therapy, but
about misleading the forum and your readers. You trashed
IFS therapy to get back at me when I withstood willful
attacks and preserved my integrity and truth in the face
of distortions and lies. When I realized that the forum
was only a means to an end for you, and how you abused it
as a scapegoat in order to castigate me, it shocked and
appalled me at first – but then it opened my eyes
wide.
It has been illuminating to see your and Norman's
aggressive bully-parts in action. Bullies lack tolerance,
empathy and respect for the experiences and truth of
others; they do not present coherent arguments. The
members of the our.childhood forum and your readers
deserve better: they merited a reasoned explication why
you, all of a sudden, condemn a trusted moderator and
co-worker, who had cooperated with you for three years as
a supportive member of your team, also by answering
readers' letters on your website. But sincere and valid
reasoning is thrust aside when bully-parts destructively
act out. And that is exactly what many of our dissociated
selves, or introjects, or parts do: They act out in
(self) destructive ways without reason, logic, dignity
and respect. Most victims of trauma are impacted by
dissociative suffering – not only people who have
distinctly separate, multiple personalities; their other
selves, or alters, or parts, are simply separated from
their true self in harsher and deeper ways.
Any doubts, which I still might have had about the
validity of the IFS concept, have disintegrated since
your public slander of me. Norman's and your attacks
against IFS and me were not written by liberated people
in touch with their true selves. When people act out from
parts that they do not wish to become aware of, they
believe not only that they have the right to do so based
on allegedly justified rage, but they even believe that
bullying is an expression of their true self. Nothing
could be further from the truth.
In a patronizing manner, you and Norman condemn and
dismiss not only a therapeutic approach, which you
neither have studied nor practiced, but also well-meaning
people, including your friends, when their therapeutic
journeys deflect from your proclaimed "one and
only" correct therapeutic path. Enchained by
destructive childhood imprints, such willful
presumptuousness is not concerned with honest and open
communication, neither within nor around oneself with
supportive people, but instead is capable of perceiving
and attacking them out of the blue as "the
enemy." To mask the inability for truthful
communication, the declared enemy is bullied in order to
silence her and promote manipulative, mistrustful
agendas.
A truthful person would have the need to present a
reasonable, caring explanation to inform the forum
members, and also the readers of your website, of any
disagreement with its moderator. But your denunciation
was meant to degrade and eliminate diverging opinions.
Your alleged "problems" with the IFS approach
were contrived only after it became obvious that I could
not be manipulated and controlled. IFS became the pretext
to lambaste me when I expressed feelings, needs and
thoughts that were threatening your, and also Norman's,
precarious equilibriums, haughty agendas and grandiose
expectations of entitlement. In order to disguise reality
and present a deceptive excuse, an alleged
"dangerous" moderator, "confused"
forum and "useless" form of therapy were
slammed.
When a rift occurred between us during the past summer of
2008, I thought at first that we had a personal conflict,
so I refrained from talking about it. We had been friends
for over twenty years. During this long and supportive
friendship, there were also some periods of distance.
Then, from 2005 until 2008, I worked closely with you and
for your website because I deeply support your formidable
work to make society aware of the causes and consequences
of child-abuse and neglect. Your books and your work
awaken many people to face these truths and help them
realize how their childhood suffering continues to haunt
them as adults. "For Your Own Good" has
certainly been the powerful initiator to dramatically
change myself and my life since I read it in 1980. It
prompted my passionate and enduring pursuit of my true
self. I still remember how I felt when I read it: As if
something that I had always known deep inside of me
connected with my conscious mind. Two years later, my
therapeutic journey began when I entered work with a
psychoanalyst, the form of therapy which you recommended
in your first books as the liberating way out of the
prison of childhood. A few years later, I trusted your
advice again when I worked with a written form of primal
therapy that you also recanted a few years later.
But by now, I have come to trust my own therapeutic
experiences. So this time, I protest against your
authoritarian proclamation that you believe, once again,
to have THE "one and only" approach to therapy.
Your unwillingness to face your own destructive split-off
parts, and those of others like Norman, as well as the
manipulative, bullying ways in which these parts act out,
reveals the failure of your therapy approach. Your public
assault has shown that your therapeutic concept has not
freed you and how you do not hesitate to cut people off
from looking for helpful therapists and forms of therapy.
Confronted with these facts, I can no longer remain
silent. My true self asks me to speak up because I cannot
become complicit in the misguidance of others into a
therapeutic dead-end street that you advise all over
again in the same self-opinionated way as you have done
so twice before.
your reproaches belie reality
I worked for you and your website and provided truthful,
empathic support because I passionately share your goals:
the vital importance of spreading information about the
causes and consequences of child mistreatment; providing
knowledge about the process of therapy; and encouraging
and supporting adult survivors to face their truth. As I
not only worked for your website but also as your
personal therapeutic helper, without financial
compensation and proper boundaries, our friendship turned
into a playing field for repeating past patterns. I
succumbed to the role of an admiring, devoted servant who
was always there for you – a role that I learned all
too well as a child – while you repeated different
and other introjections from your childhood with me. You
were not open to see when you act out from dissociated
parts but convinced that I deserve your reproaches, blame
and ingratitude. When my body and soul began to protest
against this arrangement, almost exclusively devoted to
your problems and often desperate needs, I was burdened
with even more blame for speaking up "too late"
and for "being afraid."
In the beginning, after I had spoken up about your
reproachfulness, you sent me one moving email, written
from your true self; it was entitled: "a
miracle." And that it was; you recognized in it how
you had acted out against me in a hurtful way by
imitating the internalized envy and destructiveness of
your mother. Your realization let me cry because it was
true. Your insights were enlightened and clear; so I
thought that our relationship was open for change. But
then, the doors to your true self were shut again. No
matter what I shared with you, or what happened – it
all was turned against me as if I could do nothing right.
Inundated with falsehoods, I was presumed guilty, not
trustable, unworthy of your understanding and respect.
But the claims that you make about me reflect back on
you. They reveal how deeply you are caught in an
irrational agenda, incapable of dignifying reality and
unwilling to acknowledge what had been going on between
us.
I was accused of being afraid – when precisely I was
not afraid to express my truth and had the courage to
speak up to you.
I was accused of not being open – when I shared
something very openly and honestly with you that was
important to me – and only to realize with great
pain that I was involved in a relationship where open and
honest communication are not welcome. Whatever I shared
about myself – it was used to blame me and declare
me as wrong and worthless. In "Stalking the
Soul," Marie-France Hirigoyen writes: "In her
concern to connect, the other exposes herself. The more
she exposes herself, the more she is attacked and the
more she suffers. The sight of this suffering is
insupportable to the abuser, who steps up his attacks in
order to silence the victim. When the other reveals her
weaknesses, they are immediately turned against
her."
I was bullied as mendacious with a barrage of furious
reproaches for making a generous, caring gift and for
saying so. I was accused of lying for the pitfalls of the
internet when emails overlapped and did not arrive in
their respective mailboxes in the order they were sent.
I was attacked for reputedly not being able to “show
my feelings” – those supposed "genuine
feelings" expected and demanded of me – but
then viciously attacked when I DID show my true feelings
and my true self found it vitally important to do so.
I was accused for feelings which in truth I did not have;
I was condemned as well for feelings that in fact I DID
have, but should not have had; and I was even attacked
for not feeling feelings that I was supposed to have. My
alleged "feelings" were arbitrarily distorted
by a self-righteous, authoritarian aggressiveness for
self-serving purposes.
I was reproached for being “confused and
afraid” when I had the clarity and strength to
recognize that I was mistreated and dared to stand up for
my protection and dignity. Bullies go on the offensive
once independent minds escape the fog of admiration. By
being bullied even in public, I paid once again the price
for being true to myself.
I was scorned for being "trapped in confusion full
of fear even decades can’t be enough to
change." But the opposite is true: As I escape the
fog of admiration, I recognize that it is you, with your
unacknowledged parts, who still is stuck in the prison of
childhood and even advises this trap as THE all-cure
therapy concept. How reality and truth are turned
upside-down! How can I remain a cowardly silent bystander
if a most regrettable personal tragedy is advocated as
the "one and only" liberating therapy concept?
I was attacked for confusing the members of the
our.childhood forum with IFS therapy, without that they
ever could comment about it or had any say in this
accusation. The truth is that I offer compassion,
understanding, my therapeutic experiences, together with
different therapeutic tools that I have learned, among
them the IFS approach. I have not forced any form of
therapy onto anyone.
It was insinuated that the our.childhood forum is, or
could become, a "cult-group" – while a
new, and of course the "one and only" capable
moderator Norman was produced by you in order to
revengefully degrade and humiliate me. In "Stalking
the Soul," Marie-France Hirigoyen writes: "By
focusing the hate on her predecessor, one can ascribe
every virtue to the new partner. When the
"hated" victim realizes that she is a
sacrificial pawn in reinforcing the latest relationship,
she feels trapped and manipulated yet again." How
true.
I was attacked for speaking up "too late"
– another line of attack that was misused as
indication of my fearfulness, which, it was assumed,
prevented me from speaking up when I should have done so
according to your haughty self-opinionatedness. For you,
the "fear of the once beaten child" explains it
all: whoever does not agree with you is whisked away as a
fearful nothing that allegedly does not give room to
those early repressed feelings, especially rage; that
resists to feel the fears and pain of the disrespected,
exploited, betrayed or even hated child; and that creates
"schemata" in order to avoid accusing one's
parents. As you were not interested in my experiences of
six years of IFS therapy, you had no chance to find out
how plausibly feelings and traumatic memories can emerge
in it.
I did not and do not recognize myself in the accusations
piled upon me. Instead, I discern them as a deliberate
effort to annihilate what is strong and worthwhile about
me and to drive people away from me because I have
something to offer that must not be alive and shared with
others: my extensive work with actual innovative
therapists, my experiences with different forms of
therapy and my fearlessness of narcissistic, grandiose
gurus. After you had often commended me for the endurance
and consistency of my therapeutic journey and the
life-changes that it helped me accomplish, I was all of a
sudden degraded for it. When forum members protested and
continued to put their trust in me, the truth was twisted
once again; now it was pronounced that I had claimed my
autonomy.
dreams showed me the truth
The dream, which my unconscious sent me the day after our
cooperation ended, late in July of 2008, shows how hard
but dangerously I had worked for you and the goals that
we shared. In this dream, I was walking with my oldest
granddaughter through a big city; but I forgot and lost
her. Only after I have arrived in a cold, impersonal
bureaucratic office in a high building, where people do
not care about me and only focus on their work for a
certain project and purpose, do I realize in panic and
horrified with myself that I have lost my granddaughter
and have not thought about her for a long time, just
marched ahead to get to this agency. When I realize that
she is not with me, I go back to the street to find her.
Yet, I do not discover her among a group of lost children
gathered at the police. As my despair and horror grow, I
say to someone: "Her parents are going to kill me,
and I will kill myself." The dream ends as I go back
into the streets, looking for her, worrying where she is,
how she feels, what is happening to her and if someone
has taken her away, kidnapped her, is molesting, hurting
and abusing her now, if this experience will traumatize
her terribly and if I will ever find her again. As I wake
up from this dream, I have an orgasm and feel unspeakably
relieved and full of joy that the dream is NOT TRUE, that
it was "just a dream" and that in reality none
of this has happened.
This dream communicated that I am "in love"
with myself and fully alive again because I no longer was
in danger of being disconnected from my "inner
child" – my feelings, my needs, my creativity,
my aliveness, my truth and true self. My unconscious had
shown me the truth about the reality of a trusted
relationship. My work for a cold, bureaucratic office had
prevented me from being on my side. In a guilt-ridden
atmosphere, I had been persecuted by judgmental blame to
a devastating degree. I had ignored how I had been taken
advantage of and mistreated – until my body said:
"Enough! Enough is enough! Something is really wrong
with this relationship." It had no room for my
feelings, needs and truthful self-expression, no room for
honest and open communication. Unlike my unconscious, my
conscious mind could only comprehend this reality with
time by listening to all my emerging feelings.
I had been in danger to sacrifice my true self – not
only for a cause that is deeply important to me and that
I passionately believe in and care about, but also in the
service of someone whom I greatly admired. By now, I
understand so well why I avoided leaving you and the
"fog of admiration" for so long: I saw you as a
liberated role model. But it has been my escape from this
fog that has strengthened my connection with my true self
and empowers me to be on my side and write my truth.
I also understand this dream as symbolizing (self)
destructive beliefs that I was trapped in because of your
approach to therapy and life. All too often, we are being
blamed, and then reproach ourselves, with what are in
truth nothing but deceitful and mendacious projections.
Compassion, humane understanding and honest and open
communication cannot thrive in an atmosphere soaked with
blame, guilt and admiration. As hopeful followers, who
got their first glimpse of truth about the suffering of
our childhoods by reading your books, we want to believe
your euphonic words. As children we were compelled to
believe authoritative parents and other care-takers when
they claimed to know what is "for our own
good." Later, all sorts of belief systems and their
guru-leaders can exploit this primordial imprinting. Cut
off all over again from trusting our observations and
perceptions, these leaders do not guide us to find
liberation, but push us back into the prison of childhood
and separate us all over again from our truth, our inner
qualities and beauty, our true selves.
In October, you tried to manipulate me with your first
email directed to me since July with the request to
remove an enlightened, brave, critical post from the
our.childhood forum, which presents a strong rebuttal of
your attack on me. I did not respond anymore to you
because friends advised me to not get dragged into a
useless fight. Soon after, I felt the depth of your
betrayal and mourned the abandonment that so painfully
marks betrayal. Whereupon I had two illuminating dreams:
In the first dream, I am a shepherd who guides many sheep
to a new meadow. The sheep are very alive and do what
they want: some play with each other; some jump and run
around wherever they feel like it; some are already
walking and grazing on the new meadow while others remain
behind, where we came from – I can see them as they
watch the others from far away, they are not yet coming
along. I observe them all, and I am keenly aware of what
each one is doing and of what is happening. I simply wait
and let them do what they want to do. I neither push nor
force them to go anywhere; I also do not have a dog to
frighten them into certain places where they
"should" be.
When I wrote about this dream and the aggressive dogs
that I don't have, I realized how the forum and I had
been bullied by you and Norman in order to subdue it. You
wanted to take control of it – without any regard
for this forum, for what was happening there, for its
members and for what they wanted. Anyone who truly had
cared about this forum would have made any concerns about
it known in a caring and truthful way. With the shepherd
dream, my unconscious told me that I have been a
"good shepherd" who does NOT use
"aggressive dogs" to push and shove the
survivors of child abuse and neglect into designated
places, even traps, and who does NOT use emotional
violence against them and against a precious place of
trust and truth where survivors share their childhood
ordeals and their lives' plights.
In the next dream, I was lying on an operation table to
be prepared for an operation. Norman is a doctor –
and in this dream, a doctor puts some injections into my
body to anesthetize me. But it does not work – I
remain CONSCIOUS. As I sit up on the operation table, I
realize that I am not sinking into narcosis; the poison
does not work; I do not disappear into lifelessness and
silence. Looking at my body, I am at first angry about
the stupid hospital gown that I must wear; I hate them
because they are such a symbol of the patient being
turned into a powerless recipient of overbearing
know-it-all superiority. But then I realize that I still
wear jeans underneath, clothes that speak to me of
rebellion, strength and freedom. My unconscious let me
know that no one can numb and silence me anymore; and
with the image of wearing jeans, it showed me the way
out: I don't need to submit to any poisonous bullying
attempts to knock me out. Instead, I can get up and leave
this operation-battlefield behind, forced upon me against
my will, without my consent – and at first without
that I even had a chance to realize what was being done
to me. When my unconscious showed me the truth, it became
crystal-clear that the motives behind these bullying
attacks were not on the side of the our.childhood forum
and the survivors of child abuse and neglect who fight
there for their truth, their dignity, their freedom and
true selves.
After I had begun to work on this response in December of
2008, I saw one day that the original text of your attack
against me had been changed on your website. Whereupon I
dreamed that I was talking directly with you on the
telephone. At first, our conversation seemed to be
friendly, like we used to talk. But then a contemptuous
remark from you hit me in my dream, as you told me in a
matter of fact tone, as if it was the truth: "Now
everybody knows anyway that you are history." I
replied that this is not true; that I am working on my
response. And then I said with determination: "And
one thing I definitely now know: That you have parts that
you do not look at, do not want to be aware of and do not
account for." And then I said: "Good bye"
and hung up the telephone.
The morning of January 1st, 2009 I woke up with the
following dream: Again, it's a telephone talk with you.
You have called me and proceed to tell me in the way you
used to talk to me, as if nothing had ever happened:
"Well, Barbara, then we still need to discuss this
and then that..." For a while, I let you talk, then
I say decisively: "I cannot do this any longer,
Alice. It won't work anymore." With amazement you
say: "Your voice sounds so different." Then I
respond: "Because I am beside myself with
indignation and outrage." And then I SCREAM at you
– without loosing my voice, although it takes all my
strength NOT to loose it – and I scream out MY
TRUTH: "How could you do this to me? How could you
degrade and humiliate me in front of the whole world?
What kind of a being are you?" I roar my indignation
and rage for a long time. Although it takes an enormous
effort, I scream my truth and, amazingly, at no time do I
loose my voice, like it used to happen in previous
dreams. When I realize that there is only silence at the
other end of the line, I become aware that you have hung
up the phone. I consider this one of the most affirming
and empowering dreams of my life.
On the morning, when everything was ready and I was
prepared to link this essay on my website, I woke up with
a dream where I see excerpts from a movie. It is about a
couple, two people who love each other very much; but
this couple somehow is led apart again and again. In
these excerpts, I could see how they found each other,
came together and were united, time and time again. I see
them hugging each other and being glad that they can be
with each other again. And these scenes happen during
different ages, from being a younger couple to an older
couple. Then in the dream I sing together with other
women, also of different ages, a song. It is a well known
song in the dream, about a woman being something
wonderful, and about her wonderful qualities like
compassion, courage, intelligence, honesty, endurance,
wisdom and a capacity for understanding and love. It is a
song of praise for a woman being a woman. Also teenagers
and girls sing this song. The song went from one woman,
teenager, child, to the other. Each one could sing HER
song and the others listened. The song was the same,
every time.
I think the first part of my dream told me that there
have been times when I was separated from my true self
and caught in a part, but that I, again and again, could
reunite with my true self. And the second part says that
– contrary to the deceitful messages that above all
my parents, but also others in my life, have given me
about my being wrong and worthless – that I
experience myself and finally can see myself as a
worthwhile and good woman with many good and worthwhile
"parts."
physical symptoms pointed to the dangers of admiration
While I worked on this response, several physical
symptoms disappeared. The first one was a dark, ugly
growth, which suddenly simply dried up and fell off after
it had been sitting in the middle of my left temple for
the last three years. When I thought about WHERE it had
been placed, I realized that it had grown on the spot
– like a mirror image – where my father used to
point his finger at his temple in a condescending gesture
to me when I was a teenager. It was intended to
demonstrate to me how stupid, worthless, unimportant and
even crazy I was, and that I had nothing of value to
contribute. His contempt stopped me from talking to him,
from voicing my own opinions and thoughts to him. When
this growth fell off, I could not help but wonder why
that happened when I began to work on this response. It
made me aware how my experiences in therapy had been
condescendingly brushed aside by you with an amazing lack
of curiosity and respect, while they were being utilized
at the same time. Once again, I had given devotedly and
generously to someone who made use of me – but had
no use for me, my truth, my experiences and insights if
they sheered off course. The disappearance of this mark
on my temple showed me that I am on a good path when I
resist condescension, disrespect and being bullied.
Resistance helps me heal old and new injuries.
Within the first month of working on this response, a
sharp, painful cramp disappeared in my right lower back.
For months, it had gripped me often when I stood up from
a sitting position, had bent me down and made walking
painful. It hurt the area of my back where I had been
beaten by my mother and nanny with objects like
dress-hangers. Along with it, a painful tension between
my neck and right shoulder also disappeared as if I
became free to use my full strength to defend myself and
fight back. I know that I was released from these
symptoms because I claimed my right to stand before you
as an equal, stand up for the truth and resist your
attempt to bend me down and silence me.
A pain in my left knee, the one close to my heart, stayed
the longest. It had also bothered me for about three
years. When I wrote my essay "Spirituality Cements
Childhood Blindness," this pain was at times so
strong that I had trouble walking. This knee-ache showed
me how debilitating and paralyzing it is to be on one's
knees as an adoring, subservient disciple. Religious and
spiritual traditions utilize the atmosphere of worship
and servitude created in our childhoods. Through the
command to forgive, they reinforce the abandonment and
betrayal of the abused and neglected child and strengthen
cruel parental might – to then exploit blind
adoration as the given way to approach superior beings,
above all god and religious authorities, as well as
spiritual and worldly leaders and gurus perceived as
god-like. When my spirituality essay was finished, there
still remained a quiet pain in this knee. This constant
reminder asked me to realize that admiration outside of
the religious and spiritual realm is just as dangerous,
hurtful, debilitating and silencing. My knee informed me
when I still was "on my knees," in a devout and
submissive position, sparing those that abandon the truth
– instead of committing myself to defending it. My
knee inspires me to fight for the truth and to resist any
danger that might bring me down on my knees again to
idealize others.
These experiences have strengthened my observation that
some psychosomatic symptoms can belong to a part. They
stay with us until we have truly reached a part so that
it can give up the role it used to play in our inner
system and releases its control over our body, soul and
mind. Different parts can exhibit their own, diverse
symptoms – until we face their origins, see through
our acting out, resist those that do not care about us
and change the reality of our present lives. Working with
dissociated parts helps us save not only our health, our
sanity and our lives, but also our humanity.
who behaves like a guru?
Your assault insinuates the our.childhood forum to be in
danger of becoming a cult, and its moderator a guru who
forces objectionable therapeutic methods on the forum
members. But the opposite is true – it is you who
wants to reign supreme, like the guru of a cult, through
the arrogant way in which you claim your supposedly
"one and only" therapy concept and moderator.
You misused the forum to further agendas swayed by your
disturbed parts. Why did you not inform the forum and
your readers in a truthful way about your change of mind
regarding my allegedly dangerous work? Certainly, neither
the forum nor I had attacked or harmed you; this fact
unmasks your abrupt, arbitrary change of mind as a
spiteful eruption of your temper.
What happened with the forum reminds me of your abrupt
change in attitude when you all of a sudden damned
Stettbacher's written form of primal therapy. Only a few
years earlier, you had recommended it with great
enthusiasm as the "one and only" therapeutic
cure-all method that had freed you from all physical
symptoms. When you all of a sudden drastically condemned
this form of therapy, many readers of your books were
shocked. They felt utterly confused and betrayed because
they had been able to help themselves and make progress
using this form of self-therapy, including me. In spite
of your condemnation, I continued to use this therapy,
and I still do so when the need to write in this form of
therapy spontaneously arises for me because I trust
MYSELF to guide me how to nurture my own therapeutic
progress. You gave varying, even conflicting reasons for
withdrawing your support from this therapy. (Sam Turton,
"Alice Miller & Primal Therapy: A Summary"
– (http://www.primals.org/articles/turton12.html
– and Alice Miller, "Communication to my
readers" –
http://www.primals.org/articles/amiller.html). I once
read a German discussion group on the internet, years
ago, where someone thought that in fact another person
had developed this form of therapy. Today I wonder what
else lies hidden behind this complete about-face that
contains stunning contradictions.
You distanced yourself from Stettbacher's therapy in an
interview from 1995 where you claimed: "More than
ever, also I think today nothing of the cathartic effect
of the intensive feeling-experiences and think that the
missing structures have to be constructed. But this does
not happen through the endless repetition of rage and
fear experiences directed towards the parents, but
through the help in recognizing reality in the here and
now." Now you write on your website: "As long
as we resist to feel the pain of the disrespected,
exploited, betrayed and even hated child, we will create
new schemas in order not to accuse the parents."
Then, you warned of the dangers if people worked alone in
therapy with Stettbacher's method, because "massive
anxieties set in, so strong that clients found it
impossible to cope with them without therapeutic
support." Now you claim that one can –
seemingly without working with a therapist, just by
writing to your website – “give up his
blindness in three years if one has the courage to feel
and to fully see the reality of one's childhood so he can
become free from the confusion of his parents. Norman's
development shows that this is possible and MANY of
people writing to this mailbox confirm that they did not
need decades to change."
Your contradictions and about-faces are breathtaking. You
do not care to see that you and Norman avoid facing the
emotional reality of your childhoods because you still
act out your childhood dramas when you bully and
manipulate others. You even believe that such abuse is
based on your authentic feelings and that you have the
right to act out destructively. A human being, who has
felt the pain, the betrayal, the inhumanity and hatred
suffered by being bullied, and who has healed these
wounds, is not capable of mistreating other humans in
that way, above all not friends and followers, and cannot
disrespect and manipulate the adult victims of child
abuse and neglect full of TRUST in you.
Your belief that anxiety is an indicator for the failure
of a therapy concept, as you have charged about the
Stettbacher therapy, is also misleading. Anxiety can
occur for whatever reason, because life presents us with
many challenges that can trigger the painful and
frightening past of abused and neglected children. It is
not necessarily the failure of a therapy concept when we
are overwhelmed by anxiety or panic which express a cry
from our bodies and souls to reach out for help. When
anxiety has become overwhelming for me, so that I could
not resolve it alone, I have reached out for therapeutic
support. It does not mean that my therapeutic work has
failed, on the contrary – it is a brave human being
on a journey of healing who can care for herself and
listen to the messages of her body and soul when they
signal the need for additional therapeutic backup.
In that 1995 interview, you also claimed that
"fortunately today there are more effective and less
risky therapy methods." I have not heard of any
therapy methods that you have explored or mentioned and
that you believe to be of help to anyone. You sound by
now as if all forms of therapy function only in the
service of denial because of "the fear of the once
beaten child" that "pervades all of society and
thus also the therapists and does not make room for the
very early repressed feelings, especially rage."
Although this observation is correct in many ways, this
form of denial is simply not true for every therapist,
every form of therapy and every client. It is also not
true for the growing number of courageous advocates who
work on behalf of children's rights. How misleading is
your eternal mantra that there are no therapies and no
therapists capable of guiding clients towards healing and
a better way of life – except, it seems, for you,
your website, your books, your therapy
"concept" of venting rage, and the therapists
that you now contend to train.
Mistrust and know-it-all bullying are not tools for
liberation but for exerting control and submission. With
your self-assured promise to know the way out, you seduce
the victims of child abuse and neglect to trust you; but
they are led anew into a trap. This time the door does
not say "for your own good" as it did in
childhood; instead it has the inscription:
"liberation from childhood suffering." As the
victims eagerly step through this door, which they have
searched for all their lives, they are captured all over
again by denial and arrogance. They do not dare to
recognize their imprisonment and exploitation, like I
refused to for so long, because they longed for an
enlightened witness and believe to have found one.
Obviously, one can describe intellectually the reality of
childhood suffering in moving, enlightened books without
truly being on the side of the adult survivors. One can
say all the right things about the causes and
consequences of child abuse and neglect, even act as an
advocate for children's rights – yet remain
unwilling to confront the painful feelings and
dissociative consequences of one’s own traumatic
childhood.
Because you write the truth about the causes and
consequences of child abuse and neglect, your readers
believe, as did I, that you write the truth about
therapy, too. I am sure that I am not the only one who
has fallen into the trap of trusting deceitful
know-it-all words without realizing their inherent
contradictions and self-righteous, arrogant, even
contemptuous tone. Your books open for many readers a
door where they begin to understand the true causes of
their suffering. But if this door does not lead them to
trust themselves but seduces them to trust and blindly
follow a therapeutic guru, they cannot liberate
themselves. By pretending to have all the answers and the
"one and only" working therapy concept after
"50 years of therapeutic experience," you make
vulnerable survivors dependent on you and your
misleading, contradictory and outdated views. You do not
encourage them to trust themselves but make them bow to
irrational dogmas. This has nothing to do with the actual
experience of real, meaningful therapy. Not only clients
in therapy, but we all need to be encouraged to trust
ourselves. WE are in charge of our therapy and our lives;
no one else can know what we need, no one has the right
to tell us how to live our lives or how to make our
therapeutic path. Clients animated to be in charge will
choose forms of therapy that suit their needs. If these
needs change as new awareness unfolds, they will choose
new forms of therapy and therapists that suit their
changed needs.
Your ignorance about the effectiveness of other
therapeutic approaches comes along in the disguise of
authoritarian advice, allegedly providing truthful
information. You expose guru-like behavior which demands
the kind of blind and devout followers typical of a cult.
Religious, spiritual and therapeutic gurus augur to open
the door to healing; to bring relief to our suffering
bodies and souls; and to grant us this miracle that we
have yearned for eagerly since time memorial. They
promise us that our suffering will end if we follow their
belief-system. You advise that one must feel above all
the long repressed rage from early childhood – but
this is a limited, even dangerous therapy concept. Yes,
authentic outrage is PART of good therapy, but so are
pain and grief. When strong feelings come up, they are
validated and compassionately witnessed by a good
therapist, and understood and made sense of together with
the client. The rage, which you put on display, is
neither therapeutic nor authentic; it has asserted a life
of its own, has separated you from your true self and led
you into a dead-end street where it has become a
distortion of anger and acts out (self) destructively as
a self-righteous bully.
Why do you want your followers to trust only your
beliefs, your advice, even your rules in regard to
therapy? Why do you keep them from trusting themselves
and their unconscious as they look for therapists? Why do
you intend to cut them off from reaching out for possible
therapeutic help? Is any form of therapy that you have
not experienced off limits for your devoted disciples?
Are you burdening them with your own fears, above all the
fear of confronting your painful feelings and parts by
doing actual therapeutic work with a therapist? From your
claims it sounds as if there are no helpful therapists in
this world. Surely, too many therapists are afraid of
facing abusive childhood- and adulthood-realities and
continue blaming the victim with poisonous pedagogy. Yes,
there are abusive, exploitative and criminal therapists;
and there are frightened therapists that dare not see
through abusive realities, past and present, and even may
advise forgiveness. And of course, there are also no
perfect therapists and no perfect therapy concepts that
can help each and every client. But fortunately, we can
find brave and compassionate therapists – if we have
the courage to look for them and trust ourselves and our
unconscious.
Every therapeutic relationship is a unique adventure, the
unfolding of a very special humane relationship where two
human beings embark on a journey of trust to explore and
heal a human soul and liberate a true self. With a
therapist on our side, therapy unfolds as a completely
DIFFERENT experience than the horrors of the abuse and
neglect that we encountered as children. Good therapy
restores more and more trust in ourselves as we live and
breathe a kind of relationship that we never experienced
before. How can we learn what we were never permitted to
do as children – trust in our true selves – if
we cannot begin to trust our needs and perceptions, our
unconscious and body as we look for therapists and
therapy approaches as adults in the present? Only gurus
want us to believe that all forms of therapy and
therapists, except for their "one and only
truth," are confusing and dangerous.
In my own experience, different therapists and forms of
therapy have opened deeper and wider doors to my soul,
cleared my mind and connected me more and more with my
true self. During every therapeutic journey, various
problems can arise; although a good therapist may be able
to help many clients, he sometimes can disappoint a
client. The truth is that clients need to be encouraged
to trust themselves and their unconscious – not the
beliefs of gurus or therapists. Good therapy develops the
clients' inner trust that they carry the vital answers
for their own processes and lives within themselves. They
have the human right to make up their own minds and trust
their own observations and impressions.
Your suspicious ignorance about new therapeutic
developments keeps suffering people away from potential
therapists and helpful therapy approaches. You burden
others with your projections, fears and mistrust as you
steer them away from possible help. If we remain on our
knees, caught in adoring submission before a therapeutic
guru, believing that there is no meaningful help out
there – then freedom and life will pass us by. As I
trusted myself, I did not find "the perfect"
therapist – but I found compassionate humans,
without arrogance, open for my pain, for the truth of my
history and traumatic experiences, and for all my
feelings – also my protest and rebellion – who
wanted me to be myself. I know that I came alive and grew
in my work with them because they granted me the chance
to begin to trust in myself, in life, in compassion and
human relations, step by step, growth by growth. I
learned particularly through my IFS work to appreciate
and trust my true self, to get closer and closer to it,
and to fulfill my dream to live true to myself, one step
at a time.
true anger versus bullying
Many of your followers probably believe your degrading,
untrue words about me, my work and IFS therapy. Like they
were programmed by their powerful, once idealized
parents, they see you with the eyes of intimidated
children who believe the slandered victim to be wrong
– but the self-proclaimed authority to always be in
the right. When someone is judgmentally excoriated, not
only the victim but also others tend to believe that the
bullying attack must be justified – especially if
they were abused as children by parental bullies. The
victims were programmed to regard abusive behavior by
almighty authorities as righteous, and this belief has
been imprinted early and thoroughly. When we advise the
victim to move on and ignore what happened, we look the
other way and the silent-bystander is born. The attitude
of the silent bystander supports bullying attacks and
their inherent injustice, is on the attacker's side and
buries the victim's dignity completely. Now the victim
must not only suffer the unjust attack but also remain
silent about it: the laugh is always on the loser. In an
atmosphere and culture where, beginning in childhood,
aggressive perpetrators are presumed innocent and in the
right, solely exercising their “duty to
discipline,” public opinion remains on the
perpetrators' side – while the victims are blamed
and cheated out of their human rights. This unspeakable
injustice produces life-long, devastating consequences
for the development of children, their self-confidence
and sense of justice. Few realize the victim's suffering,
recognize her right to be heard, and the need for
traumatic experiences to be witnessed and believed.
Usually, powerful bullies get away without repercussions
for their abusive behavior, especially when they degrade,
lecture and abuse their children.
In the end, the bully has not only undermined the
victim's trust in herself, but also the trust of others
in the victim, her integrity, her abilities, her
experiences, in the quality and essence of her work
– without presenting any evidence, just by attacking
the victim with libelous slander. At the same time as the
victim is advised to remain silent, she is held at fault
not only for the attack but also for remaining silent.
Hit by a doubly whammy of guilt and blame, the victim has
no way out as she is treacherously robbed of her
credibility and dignity – when it is in fact the
bully that lacks credibility and integrity.
The motif of blaming the victim runs like a red thread
through education, therapy and societal beliefs. The
belief that the victim must somehow deserve the abusive
treatment pervades the thinking of many people. Many
observers do not encourage the victim to speak up but to
give in and remain silent. Fortunately, there are people
in my life who support me to speak up, among them members
of the our.childhood forum who expressed to me that we
die if we do not voice our truth. Their enlightened
understanding; the encouragement of friends; reading
"Stalking the Soul;" and watching the Swedish
movie "As it is in Heaven" have helped me
realize that the victim is not to blame but has the right
to stand up to bullies, slander and lies. When we allow a
victim to be falsely blamed, we allow not only the truth
to be quashed, but we also become gutless bystanders as
destruction and evil unfold.
Therapy is, above all, about coming alive; and anger is a
vital part of our aliveness that was often crushed and
warped in childhoods where it was regarded as the
exclusive possession of parental imperiousness. In
abusive childhoods, anger, rage and hatred are forbidden
self-expression for the suffering children and solely
permitted for powerful parents. Parental hands and mouths
misused these destructive weapons of disrespectful fury
to degrade, control and silence their dependent children.
Disenfranchised children were not allowed to feel and
voice their anger and outrage over the abuse and
injustices, which they had to endure in muted,
unconscious suffering. This is why authentic anger plays
an important part in therapy where we are empowered to
welcome back ALL our feelings. The hate-filled nature of
these inhumane practices cause havoc for a child’s
sense of self and trust in life and other humans –
but in therapy, we can feel their emotional impact, voice
our rebellion and rebuild our confidence in our true
self.
Contrary to authentic anger, we can observe the other,
destructive kind of wide-spread rage when people vent
self-righteously their irascible fury: authoritarian
parents, embittered divorced spouses, tyrannical
superiors, domineering know-it-all authorities among
them. But a bully's rage never heals or improves
anything. Like a pressure cooker, the bully is ready to
explode and let off steam – old rage and hatred
– but towards innocent others who do not deserve it.
Good therapy lets us to realize when we act out from
dissociated parts and allows the denied pain to emerge
from behind misplaced rage and hatred.
Bullies exploit an imbalance of power. Their aggression
demands control, exploits dependency and targets people
who are in some way dependent, emotionally and often
financially. Bullies vent their destructive
internalizations to boost their might and mask deep
insecurities and fears. They debase and slam when they
have the inner urge – and because they have the
power to get away with it. They inflict hurt and
self-doubt to crush the victim's self-confidence; her
ability to live in dignity and work freely; her right to
be treated with respect, also respect for her work and
efforts, and to express opinions of her own. The lies
spread about me – meant to damage my work and the
IFS approach – speak of envy for those who bravely
dare innovative therapeutic work.
Abusive bullying behaviors take advantage of childhood
imprinting and aim to undermine our trust in ourselves.
They want to turn us into blind followers and adoring
worshippers of omniscient superiors. They want to
annihilate our human core, our vital essence and our
sense of self-worth. They claim to know who and what we
are, what we need and deserve. Overbearing bullies thrive
in a climate of violence, degradation and blame.
Patronizingly, they believe themselves above the truth,
beyond doubt and criticism. We escape their evil curse
when our justified, authentic anger helps us see through
their destructive intentions and empowers us be on our
side.
Therapy is not limited to raging, and therapy may never
enforce a therapist's authoritarian beliefs on the
client. How can we experience and learn trust in
ourselves if we must follow self-righteous leaders once
again? Therapy is about much more than raging: It is
about defining who we are; what OUR values are –
contrary to the inhumane ones that were enforced into us
in childhood; how we want and need to live; and what
tasks and callings we want to dedicate our lives to.
Restoring our vitality, integrity and health is already a
most worthwhile and valuable calling that sets us miles
apart from destructive denial.
Adoring followers were programmed as children to believe
authorities, no matter how absurd and deceitful their
claims. Parental reproaches, which for example branded
the child for supposedly being selfish, mendacious or
cruel, actually concealed parental selfishness, cruelty
and hypocrisy; yet, the victim and silent bystanders have
trouble to see through this treacherous ploy. Bullies
inflict shame and humiliation on their inferiors –
but feel no shame and regret for their destructive and
shameful abuse. A brain programmed to inflict pain cannot
change unless the devastating pain of the victim has been
felt. When our minds open up for the truth, we see that
the bullies’ greatest obsessions manifest their
greatest inner curses, what they fear most.
Bullying, vindictive manipulation, contempt and deception
constitute betrayal and mark abusive relationships.
Bullies begrudge others what they lack themselves and
what distinguishes their victims, whatever that may be:
vitality, integrity, compassion, truthfulness, warmth,
inner freedom, dignity, curiosity, courage, the richness
of their feelings, the brave exploration of their inner
life, their ability to express needs, and their strength
to be true to themselves. Bullies do not acknowledge and
explore their unwelcome feelings but deny their pain,
envy and harmful parts acting out.
The answer to bullying cannot be pleasing conformity and
moral cowardice – but veracious resistance, also by
those who have witnessed the aggressive assault. The
bullies' infamous games can be stopped only if we have
the courage to stand up to them.
Acting out from a raging bully-part signals an alarming
therapeutic dead-end street. Therapy has failed if one
cannot distinguish between being in one's true self
– or a dissociated self. We are not liberated, and
our approach to therapy is exposed as unsuccessful, if we
remain stuck in dissociation and cannot address this
severe suffering in our therapeutic work. It is obvious
that your approach to therapy is not only blind towards
your own pernicious, wreckful parts but also executes the
old curse that strength, vitality and integrity must be
extinguished if they stand in one’s way. Without the
work of creating awareness of our dissociated parts, we
have no chance to escape them and change our inner
system, formed by our parents' beliefs and internalized
through their hurtful, destructive mistreatment. Our
inner system will continue to tread in our parents'
footsteps unless we are supported by helpful therapists
and meaningful approaches to therapy that empower us to
change our parts. But if we believe every feeling to be
authentic, and our acting-out to be appropriate –
then we cannot hope to connect with our true selves.
raging as a therapeutic dead-end street to suppress
disavowed pain
It is a horrific insight that you abuse the enormous
power, which you have over so many survivors' minds and
souls, to mislead them like a pied piper into a
therapeutic and emotional dead-end street. Victims of
child abuse and neglect turn to you, Alice, full of
trust, hope and confidence that you know the way to
healing. You certainly support and nourish their
desperate hopes as you claim to know all that one needs
to know about it: "Confront the reality of our
parents" and "work with patients mistreated in
childhood who need to feel eventually their deeply
repressed rage to become free." Anger and outrage
are of course an important part of a liberating
therapeutic process. My anger has always been my lover:
http://www.screamsfromchildhood.com/chapter_one/my-anger-is-my-lover.html
http://www.screamsfromchildhood.com/love-letter-to-anger.html
My anger has written countless "letters," most
of them never sent, to people who hurt me; thus I could
connect with my feelings and see through what was going
on. My anger has helped me realize, too, how my traumatic
childhood suffering induced me to serve you devotedly to
the point of exhaustion and self-sacrifice. It has
supported me to liberate myself from lies, bullying,
deceit and oppression.
But rage could not ease, much less HEAL, the conflicting
arguments and irrational ways of thinking that often used
to paralyze my mind. Raging did not help me take an
honest look at myself and could not resolve these
obsessive fights in my mind and of overpowering feelings
and fears that haunted me. Rage could not free the parts
of me that were bound to crazy beliefs and harmful ways
of acting-out – but communicating with my parts did
change them. Despite your insights about the impact of
child abuse and neglect and your therapeutic journey, you
are still unaware of how you are stuck in unacknowledged
parts that continue to believe and act out old, familiar,
internalized, destructive patterns.
It is a violent rape of body and soul to plunge them
again and again into a supposed therapy goal of having to
feel and vent rage, submitting them to a furious part
that knows nothing else but to lash out in irrational
irascibility because the underlying pain and fear have
not been felt and healed in therapy. Anger that comes up
truthfully is of course an important part of therapy; but
it is destructive to force body and soul into anger when
instead deep pain, grief, sorrow and agony need to be
witnessed with compassion by client and therapist, and
when parts need to be reached, understood and liberated.
If therapists expect rage in moments of primal anguish,
they push down a vital pain that needs to be felt. The
outrage over what happened will arise when the client is
ready and authentically feels it, accompanied by the
therapist's indignation and support. Forced rage and
acting-out from a rage-filled bully-part serve the goal
of suppressing devastating pain. The belief that rage is
the most important way to inner freedom thus is unmasked
as an oppressive weapon to silence our deepest screams
from childhood. People mired in vengeful and bitter parts
must confront their severe dissociation in therapy to
free their true selves.
Your attack exemplifies how much your therapeutic
approach has disconnected you from your true self. Your
concept of the true self is outdated and anachronistic.
It is absurd to believe that confronting "the
reality of our parents" and voicing the "deeply
repressed rage to become free" constitutes a
sufficient therapy concept that empowers clients in
therapy to deal with dissociative suffering and to
recognize when they are in their true self.
There are so many feelings caused by trauma, experienced
during childhood, but suppressed ever since, waiting in
every client to be released, expressed and heard –
among them of course anger, rage and hatred, the most
condemned and forbidden ones, still today labeled by so
many as "negative feelings" and silenced by the
lie of forgiveness. But therapy is not based on pushing a
client into feeling something that s/he does not (yet)
feel. It is the client who is in charge of her/his
therapeutic journey, healing and needs. How can you claim
that one is only free if one feels the deeply repressed
rage? I raged and cried for years in Stettbacher's
written therapy; it helped me realize a lot about my
childhood and present realities, and it empowered me to
make contact with important needs. But it was lonely and
stressful work that did not free me from the curse of
dissociation. To advise raging as an all-cure tool is a
therapeutic dead-end street that drags others into the
abyss of your own personal tragedy, into a hopeless
vicious circle through the way in which you have allowed
yourself to become stuck in a rageful bully-part and even
sell this as THE "one and only" successful
therapeutic concept.
We are on a dangerous path if rage becomes the
predominant feeling at the expense of other important
feelings that we need to explore in therapy, and if the
beliefs of a therapist limit the therapeutic work.
Authentic anger informs us about injustices that we
endured in the past and suffer in the here and now; it
shows us the truth; it is on our side and wants to
protect us. But a rageful bully-part has nothing to do
with authentic anger – it is the blind epitomization
of the internalized mistreatment, beliefs and attitudes
of abusive, arrogant, controlling parents and their greed
for power. Rage that is unleashed unjustly against
weaker, inferior subordinates who have caused us no harm
is not acting authentically from our true self but acting
out from a part still chained to the dramas of childhood.
There is a profound difference between bullying and
speaking up from just anger. It is brave and humane to
stand up to those that continue to believe not only in
abusive practices but also in acting them out. Our
authentic and righteous anger supports the clarity and
power of our self-expression, but it has no need to bully
others, and least of all if they are our friends and
allies. No matter how long it takes us to voice our truth
– every human being has his own way of working
through trauma and takes his own time for this
challenging process. And what a beautiful victory for the
truth it is when we are freed to speak up and courageous,
authentic self-expression is set free.
my therapeutic experiences
Judith Herman writes in her book “Trauma and
Recovery:”
“Although dissociative alterations in consciousness,
or even intoxication, may be adaptive at the moment of
total helplessness, they become maladaptive once the
danger is past. Because these altered states keep the
traumatic experience walled off from ordinary
consciousness, they prevent the integration necessary for
healing. Unfortunately, the constructed or dissociative
states, like other symptoms of the post-traumatic stress
syndrome, prove to be remarkably tenacious. Lifton
likened "psychic numbing" which he found to be
universal in survivors of disaster and war, to a
"paralysis of the mind." – “The child
victim prefers to believe that abuse did not occur. In
the service of this wish, she tries to keep the abuse a
secret from herself. The means she has at her disposal
are frank denial, voluntary suppression of thoughts, and
a legion of dissociative reactions. The capacity for
induced trance or dissociative states, normally high in
school-age children, is developed to a fine art in
children who have been severely punished or abused.”
Dissociation is a devastating burden of traumatic
childhoods; when I sensed how it made me suffer, I
entered IFS therapy. Often, one particular part takes
control and rules the inner system to keep the child safe
and fulfill parental expectations; at times, various
parts fight over who is in control. Through other
traumatic circumstances, other parts may emerge, take
over or begin another fight. Also during adulthood,
shocking traumatic experiences can create new parts or
trigger dormant dissociated parts that suddenly can
change a person's way of being. Only an honest look at
our inner system and at our dissociated parts can help us
care for our inner splits and find ways to nurture and
strengthen our connection with our true self.
The concept of "the inner child" can certainly
not convey the dissociative multitude and sequelae of
traumatic suffering that an abused and neglected child's
body and mind must manage. As a child copes with many
different traumatic experiences, each one leaves behind
different traces in the cellular memory of her body and
for the neurodevelopment of her brain. During different
ages and different stages of a child's development,
traumas bring forth parts that separate us from our true
self.
It takes courage to search for our true self and for a
truthful therapist to accompany us on that journey. It
takes even more courage to enter into a therapeutic
relationships, to trust the therapists that we choose,
and also to deal with disappointment and pain when we
outgrow them. Any search for the "perfect
therapist" with the "one and only true therapy
approach" keeps us entrapped in debilitating beliefs
formed by terrified children. There are many therapists
and forms of therapy – only we ourselves can find
out who and what helps us move on. Personally, I have
benefited from all therapists and forms of therapy that I
had the privilege to work with in Chicago. Despite
certain limitations, I know that I could accomplish a lot
of healing, changing and growing with all three of my
therapists. They were not afraid of but open for my
feelings; they sincerely tried and wanted to understand
me; they were on my side; and none of them ever advised
forgiveness or tried to silence me or my screams and pain
with poisonous pedagogy or bullying arrogance. It has
been a truly healing experience that two of my
therapists, the men, handled my letters of protest and my
need to share what had troubled me in our therapy by
responding truthfully with sympathetic, hand written
letters.
What I have learned from each different therapy approach
has come together and lives within me, and benefits my
own personal work as well as my work with my clients.
Each form of therapy empowered me in different ways. At
first, I was fortunate to work with a psychoanalyst,
dedicated to the ideas of Heinz Kohut, who welcomed my
feelings and worked without labels, drugs and judgmental
blame. But I struggled hard in the throes of the strong
feelings that came out. Through my IFS experiences I know
that these feelings could have been addressed more
effectively and would have caused me less confusion and
suffering if, from the beginning, an awareness had been
created how dissociation affects the human psyche. Later,
Stettbacher's primal therapy let me deal with my feelings
on my own and become aware of my needs.
I knew that I had to go my own way and trust myself when
in 1997 a dream showed me that I was angry with you,
Alice, for having sent me into two "parking
lots:" psychoanalysis and primal therapy, where I
had been prevented from living my life freely. So I
looked for and chose approaches to therapy that met my
needs, IFS and DMT (Dance Movement Therapy). I still
treasure the creativity and the appreciation of my body,
of movement, of my intuition and creativity that were
nurtured through my unorthodox DMT therapist.
In IFS therapy I became open for recognizing when and how
I dissociated, and I learned to listen to and believe my
parts, their memories and feelings so that the reality of
many traumas could become conscious. My parts and their
information about past traumatic ordeals dared to come
out because I worked in the actual presence of
compassionate human beings. When dreams and feelings
asked me to leave my work with my therapists, I had to
understand what had felt limiting about our work. By
writing "spirituality cements childhood
blindness," I freed myself from my spiritual
illusions. By writing THIS essay, I am liberating myself
from the "fog of admiration" that also had
clouded the clarity of my perceptions. Growing closer to
our true self is definitely a work of art in progress.
Today, I am so very glad that I did not know your FAQ
list and TRUSTED MY SELF, MY FEELINGS, MY DREAMS, MY
UNCONSCIOUS when I looked for and chose my therapists and
helpful, progressive therapy approaches. IFS and DMT
nurtured not only my creativity but also the creativity
of my own inner healing. My unconscious, my dreams and
feelings let me know when and with what therapist I could
do meaningful work and grow; they also told me when it
was time to leave, to look for a new therapist and
therapy approach; or when it was time to go back into
therapy and with whom. Also my disappointments have
provided me with vital insights; empowered me to confront
new and changed needs; and helped me leave illusions and
idealizations behind. My disappointments, also the great
one with you, became empowering paths of discovery that
connected me in stronger and deeper ways with my true
self.
When I wonder why I did not sooner recognize the truth, I
comfort myself with the fact that someone needed to make
this real, alive experience in order to bring to light
the failure of your therapy concept, someone with the
courage and strength to face this shocking truth, to
share it with others and warn them.
Marie-France Hirigoyen writes in “Stalking the
Soul” about emotional abuse that we suffer as adults
that it "settles in so insidiously that it is often
difficult to recognize and, in turn, to defend oneself
against. Taking charge can rarely be accomplished alone.
When one is confronted by a clearly aggressive attack,
psychotherapeutic help is often necessary. One can say
that a psychological attack has taken place when the
dignity of an individual has been harmed by the conduct
of another individual. The victim's mistake lies in not
demanding respect and in not realizing soon enough that
the limits and boundaries of their integrity have been
crossed. Instead, they absorb the assaults like sponges.
They must define what is acceptable to them and, in doing
so, define themselves."
Shocked by the trauma of being bullied by you, I turned
again to my former therapist Richard Schwartz because of
his caring reply and also because my awareness had been
strengthened how important my IFS therapy experience had
been for me and formed my view of therapy and the human
psyche. This awareness had lain dormant while I worked
closely with and trusted you. When I trusted my need, he
and I began again to do good therapeutic work together in
November of 2008, and a dream confirmed my path. Our
renewed cooperation corroborated my experience that
genuine forgiveness, at its heart, is a matter of trust.
Shared anger and disappointment opened the doors to more
honesty. The redundant, euphemistic and disempowering
demand for forgiveness does not care if truth and trust
are rebuilt after an injury to a relationship. When the
causer of hurt acknowledges the injured party's pain,
shows interest in her hurt feelings and deviating
thoughts, and realizes the harm done – then trust is
restored. Only caring, open and honest communication can
rebuild trustfulness and caring, truthful relationships.
My trust in my own therapeutic observations and
experiences has been deeply strengthened as I witness you
trapped in destructive parts. No longer can I trust
anyone who claims to have the "one and only"
effective therapy concept. Today I am proud that I
trusted myself and my unconscious for most of my
therapeutic journey and worked with therapists whom I had
chosen according to MY dreams, feelings and needs. My
endurance and my brave and patient work have given me the
clarity to understand my body when it warned me that I
was, once again, in a precarious situation, this time
with you. It is obvious that you are not pleased how I
have grown. Although you encouraged me to work as a
therapist, you decimated me and my therapeutic experience
when I no longer could be your admiring servant. My
therapists were the ones who supported me with their
recommendations [2] so that I successfully got my work
permit. They took my rebellious criticism in stride and
valued qualities in me, which you appreciated and took
advantage of for years – only to denounce them in
the end as if I have no value, no worth, no therapeutic
qualities. Words fail me when I think of how you
benefited from these qualities and my experience with IFS
therapy, even made use of it on your website –
without honestly revealing the origins, without giving
proper credit – but by trashing this therapy
approach and me.
Your approach has led you into an emotional and
intellectual dead-end street. Domination by a rageful
bully-part does not show trust in one's true self but
indicates a severe and disturbed separation from the true
self. Mature, open and honest communication – not
only within but also around us – is nurtured when we
are open for our pain, for all our feelings, and can
embrace and liberate our dissociated parts. Instead of
letting unconscious envy act out and inflict pain on
others for their strength, clarity and other qualities,
we learn to observe when and why we are, for example, in
an envious, furious or bitter part. Then we have no need
to lash out with hateful contempt to diminish, even
annihilate what is valuable, truth-loving, powerful and
precious in others. Humans who cannot become conscious in
therapy of their dissociations must suffer needlessly and
inflict senseless harm and pain on innocent others. Now
that I see clearly the distinction between authentic
anger and bullying, I am more determined than ever to
trust how I have come to see helpful therapeutic work
through my own experiences, and to value my passion for
the truth, as well as my keen ability to observe and
assess reality.
escape from the fog of admiration
The vital need of each child is to be valued, seen and
appreciated. When children are responded to with respect,
love and joy, their sense of self and self-worth
flourish. If this need is crushed, its unfulfilled
anguish drives us into the fog of admiration. Either we
turn into self-obsessed admiration-addicts that cannot
tolerate in others thoughts and feelings that deviate
from what we expect of them. Or we become devoted
servants who believe that their life has meaning only
when they bestow admiration upon those that crave it.
Children's self-worth is crushed and their strength
perverted into the coercion to please if they do not
receive joyous appreciation. Parts, soaked with the
anguish of being unwelcome and rejected since life's
beginning, were silenced by other parts that want to
protect us from this pain and buy into the corruption
that admiration sustains relationships and grants a sense
of worth. The experience of love is replaced by the
compulsion to admire and the illusion that admiration
endows us with love.
Effective therapy provides a tool to FEEL this early,
shattering pain and allow the long withheld grief and
outrage to emerge. But in the absence of facing this
primal pain, the fog of admiration functions like a
lifeline that we desperately cling to: either to bathe in
admiration or to grant admiration. Thus we keep the
childish idealization of our parents' goodness alive,
which abused and neglected children disproportionately
require to survive. The less the child's true self may
live, the more her blind admiration grows – to be
exploited by her parents, and also by authority figures
that take advantage of this sinister mechanism, all too
often during the course of the whole life.
While I worked with you, Alice, I did not realize how I
was trapped in the fog of admiration. I worked devotedly
for you, not only as your assistant for your website:
reading, discussing, answering and posting readers'
letters, but also generously provided patient,
therapeutic, empathic emotional support. I was available
and there for you whenever you needed me. In the end, all
my efforts notwithstanding, they made no difference as I
was transformed into a dangerous enemy that cannot be
trusted.
"It is therefore the victims' strong vitality that
makes them "fair game" for the abuser. They are
compelled to give, and the abuser, to take; what an ideal
encounter. Added to which, one refuses to take any blame
while the other has a natural tendency to take it."
(Stalking the Soul, Marie-France Hirigoyen) How
generously did I give: my talents, my empathic,
insightful being, and my extensive therapeutic
experience. But once again, I served in vain someone who
could not let go of the fog of admiration.
It has been a sobering wake-up call to realize that you
have not been able to leave the narcissistic prison of
your childhood. You have not worked with clients since
you gave up your practice as a psychoanalyst, and you did
not dare to trust innovative therapists and embark
together with them on a real therapeutic journey. How
much wider could you have spread your insights about
child abuse and neglect if you had risked this journey.
We need to have the experience of working in alive
therapeutic relationships with our therapists and
clients, with proper boundaries, to gain insight into the
formation of each unique human soul and mind and into the
unique workings of each individual therapeutic process.
I would be furious and full of rage, too, if I had to
find myself, after 50 years of therapeutic experience,
still trapped in the dissociated prison of my childhood
– only to realize that there are other forms of
therapy and therapists capable of healing people and
bringing out their true selves so that they can see
through gurus and even contradict them. I know that I am
not the only one who has been bullied by your wrath. It
has lashed out against others, too, who work on behalf of
the victims of child abuse and neglect when they dared to
differ from your views and scratch at your throne, and
when you considered their therapeutic journeys beneath
you. Your actions and beliefs show that you have not
internalized the compassion and healing that can happen
when a unique relationship of trust unfolds through
engaging in work with courageous, groundbreaking
therapists. Your patronizing "advice" is made
up of the old parental litany: "it's for your own
good" – that gave us the unspoken, or spoken
message: “You may not pursue what I could not make
come true for my life.” I feel envy and rage coming
towards me because I have explored different forms of
therapy and worked with brave therapists with integrity
who empowered me, despite some setbacks, to connect more
and more with my true self.
Caught in the fog of admiration, I believed your
judgmental dismissal of my own therapeutic experiences
and your modus operandi of casting contempt and
condemnation on them. I did not question why you did not
want to hear about them. My last illusions about your
work were shattered when I realized that I was pushed
away from trusting myself and my therapeutic experiences,
and when I had to feel the envy implied in this.
Meant to keep me in the fog of admiration, our
relationship made use of mechanisms from childhood that
foster adoration and dependency. It is excruciatingly
painful and hard – in life and therapy – to
face the truth about important people in our childhood
and lives if they have treated us in better ways than a
hurtful, neglectful and abusive parent. We long to, and
are easily seduced, to trust other people when they have
the ability to understand us, encourage us in unbeknownst
ways and talk like deliverers. Zealously, we want to
believe that they are our saviors and offer a "way
out."
The fog of admiration permeated my childhood and
programmed the curse of idealization into me. At first, I
was filled with family and religious idealizations that
later turned into spiritual and therapeutic
idealizations. The poison of idealization was spread
maniacally to make me lose my bearings in the fog of
admiration, to decompose my integrity, and to quash my
clear sight of the truth of my maddening family
experiences. The poison of idealization does not allow
for emancipated, respectful communication to unfold
between two equals with equal rights but replaces it with
the coercion to blindly adore and follow. In the fog of
admiration, I wandered around like the child who clings
to "the good" about her parents. I searched for
explanations and found excuses for feeling exhausted and
controlled, even for reproachful attacks against me. I
have always checked my feelings towards you extra
carefully, so I set aside my anger towards you, also in
the interest of our common cause, with one of your
favorite, slippery reproaches: that one confuses you with
one's mother.
In the fog of admiration, we want to believe your claims
that you know what the way to healing is: "Confront
the reality of our parents" and feel eventually the
"deeply repressed rage to become free." But
misleading the adult victims of child abuse and neglect
is not a sign of healing and of a successful therapeutic
journey, but of a self-absorbed guru that stomps down
unscrupulously the screams of suffering victims with
judgmental intolerance and arrogance. As the fog lifts,
your lack of integrity becomes evident in how you deceive
others, even people who turn to you full of trust and
hope.
The assumptions that you blame onto me, my inner world
and its alleged workings have nothing to do with me and
who I am. They are excuses and lies to mask your
displeasure about a dissenting point of view. The
arrogance of another public statement on your website,
your second comment [3] about "Forum Barbara,"
also demonstrates how disconnected from reality and your
true self you are. There you claim that your furious
double-talk regarding your volte-face towards the
our-childhood forum was probably "too
complicated" to understand for those who protested
– and you complained that, instead of understanding,
you "received heavy personal attacks." The fact
is: you cannot hear the victims' screams. If you can so
nonchalantly dismiss with contemptuous contortion the
pain and the outrage of survivors, whom you affronted,
insulted, confused and mistreated all over again, you are
not capable of feeling empathy, understanding and regard
for them. No matter how much you talk about the
importance of feelings and the plight of the victim
– you are deaf to hear the victims' pain and
screams, including your own. Your unauthentic raging only
reinforces your denial and demonstrates how rage silences
disowned anguish.
You need the "fog of admiration" around you,
and you can exploit it because this fog obfuscates the
clear view of your trusting, devoted followers. The fog
of admiration must fill the void of worthlessness if this
childhood sorrow was never felt. If therapy does not
allow us to confront it, we are compelled to recreate
with others this earliest narcissistic childhood hell,
and to seduce others into believing that this hell is
paradise. No matter if we do this as parents; or as
spiritual, religious, therapeutic or political leaders;
or as dependent disciples – the fog of admiration is
a dangerous trap that is anathema to the truth, stifles
our freedom of expression and makes open, equal and
honest communication impossible.
No matter if we crave and demand admiration, or live as
devotees in the service of admired leaders, or do both
– our lives still follow the old pattern that
relationships are about pleasing others or being pleased.
When we step out of the fog of admiration, we leave
behind an old, daunting pattern of self-denial, claim our
self worth and ascertain that our lives matter. Then our
mourning over having wasted so much of our lives clears
the way for the joy that every day, our lives can make a
difference and touch others as we seek the truth
together. We discover how liberated and worthwhile our
lives feel if we no longer serve the craving for
admiration but care for ourselves, our vital
relationships, our work and calling. We realize that our
value lies in nurturing our innate qualities, and in
sharing our potential and experiences with others. And we
become aware that our strength no longer has to be denied
but may unfold, and inspire, and truly serve others.
trust in my true self
The IFS approach is not limited to tearing open old
wounds but creates empowering steps of healing and builds
trust in our true self. IFS therapy gave me the gift to
extend compassion to myself – my inner world, my
inner system, to all my parts: the split-off agonies,
overwhelming feelings and desperate beliefs formed at
various ages through different traumatic experiences. How
wistfully and forsaken did they wait inside of me to be
heard, believed, appreciated, healed and changed. IFS
allowed me to see myself NOT any longer as a terrified
coward, a fearful denier, a confused self-doubter, a
cruel aggressor – or whatever role the agony of
certain parts may have forced onto me – but as a
human being with a true self, capable of creating
understanding, harmony and healing within myself –
AND with others who are also on this path and search and
fight for the truth. Thus, IFS therapy is capable to
create benign, humane, compassionate relationships with
ourselves and with others who are open for it.
Therapy is not a competition of who has the best therapy
concept or who is the best or the perfect therapist.
Therapy is not about driving more shame and blame into
clients for their self-defeating beliefs, perverted
cravings, self-destructive ways of acting out and
terrifying feelings that haunt them. Therapy is about
finding the origins of these (self) destructive
mechanisms, about healing and changing them, and about
placing blame and guilt where they belong: on those that
hurt, harmed, abused and betrayed us, on the
perpetrators, past and present. After childhoods filled
with terror and horror of inhumane violence in all its
destructive forms: mental, emotional, physical and sexual
– where trustful and humane relations were brutally
destroyed and never could develop – therapy is about
building trust: trust in our therapists, other humans and
above all in ourselves. Compassion will not live around
us if compassionate communication cannot unfold inside of
us.
Like every human life, also every therapeutic journey is
a unique, most individual experience. We all learn and
grow in our very own, different, inimitable ways, no
matter if, for example, we want to play a musical
instrument or bring about change for our suffering
through therapy. Good teachers and good therapists are
responsive to their students' or clients' individual
needs and unique struggles, receptive to their innate
qualities and essence. What may benefit one human being
may not reach another, or only later, at another time. As
therapists we accompany our clients in their quest to get
in touch with their feelings and history so that they can
become aware of traumatic past AND present realities. As
therapists, we nurture our clients' inherent creativity
and healing power. By helping them recognize and change
dissociated parts that are in their way, we empower them
to connect time and time again with their true selves. We
support their sense of justice and reality as we listen
to and believe the traumatic truth of their lives, past
and present. We encourage our clients' trust in their
unconscious and in themselves – but not in our
therapy methods or agendas, not in our personal beliefs
and values, not in the illusion that we have all the
answers for their lives and for healing their souls.
In June of 2008, I wrote to you in an email: "...in
the past week, my work with you and with Richard Schwartz
were validated and joined together within me. As if now I
can do my own inner work as well as my therapeutic work
with trust in BOTH therapy concepts." Through my
work with you, I learned to name even more intrepidly the
past AND present traumatic realities of a suffering human
being; to appreciate even deeper my authentic anger; and
about the importance of "Indignation as a Vehicle of
Therapy" -
(http://www.alice-miller.com/articles_en.php?lang=en&nid=54&grp=11),
a form of active therapeutic engagement developed by your
French assistant Brigitte Oriol. It is a great tool for a
therapist to allow and express feelings of her own that
let her be clearly on the victim's, and on the child's
side and thus break the lonely abandonment that marked
the horror of being at the mercy of parental and other
bullies.
My IFS work granted me a powerful tool to help
dissociated parts. Above all, I learned to BELIEVE the
traumatic memories that parts so amazingly share when
they are approached in an understanding and compassionate
way through respectful inner communication. IFS let me
extend compassion to my inner world and its parts. IFS
encouraged me to connect with my true self in
increasingly deeper and stronger ways through the
experience of self-leadership. One of the reasons why I
chose IFS therapy was my intuitive realization that I
needed help to resolve the problems that dissociation
caused for my mind and soul and that all my crying and
raging in primal therapy had not eased. Another important
reason why I chose IFS therapy was that mainly the client
is supported to become her own therapist – and that
the path to healing emerges creatively from within the
client. Writing primal therapy, I had already become my
own therapist, learned to trust my unconscious, and taken
charge of my therapy and life. A client in charge trusts
herself and her unconscious. She will choose a form of
therapy that suits her needs. If she outgrows a form of
therapy and what it has to offer, she will find whatever
helps her grow further by trusting her intuition.
My experience has been that without the actual experience
of working with a compassionate and innovative therapist,
the wounds from childhood cannot heal. Wounds that were
caused through being in relationship need to be
addressed, witnessed and healed by being in a DIFFERENT
kind of relationship than the hopeless abusive and
neglectful ones endured powerlessly and defenselessly in
childhood. We need to make NEW and DIFFERENT experiences
in a respectful, supportive, enlightening and healing
relationship to realize what mistreatment means. We need
to experience what it feels like when our true self, our
dignity, integrity and truth are nurtured with
understanding and compassion.
Therapeutic work is more powerful and goes deeper in the
presence of a therapist because overwhelming feelings and
controlling parts dare to emerge in the therapist's
witnessing presence. The therapist guides and
accompanies, through questions and comments, the client's
work throughout each session so that the once abandoned
child can awaken and begin to trust because she no longer
is devastated by loneliness. Therapists need a tool to
help their clients become aware of how dissociation
effects the human psyche and to address dissociation
respectfully and humanely in their therapeutic work. What
we never had as children, we need as adults in order to
heal: the presence of a compassionate, truthful, alive
witness who is on our side. Here is an example of my
recent personal IFS work during a session with Richard
Schwartz: "I will go crazy if I see the truth"
-
(http://www.screamsfromchildhood.com/session_IFS_therapy.html)
This session demonstrates how parts heal and change if
client and therapist comprehend those parts’ agonies
with compassion and value their input. You showed no
interest in and I did not encounter curiosity and
openness for my therapeutic experience of working with
parts. Instead, you condemn authentic therapy experiences
that grant new ways of inner communication and healing.
Freed from your beliefs, I can trust myself and my
intuition like never before; and I feel satisfied as
empowering therapeutic work unfolds with my clients and
for myself. Good therapy encourages us to get in touch
with and trust our true selves. A good therapist is a
compassionate, supportive witness, on the client's side,
open for the truth of our childhoods and the reality of
our present lives. No matter if I do therapeutic work
with my clients, or if I do my own personal therapeutic
work by myself or with my therapist – I trust that
our souls and minds will lead us to whatever form of
therapeutic work is helpful. I also trust that our true
selves desire and support our healing and growth. My true
self accompanies my clients as their therapeutic journeys
and needs unfold with the same awareness, interest and
compassion that I extend towards myself. My true self is
with empathy, indignation, openness and curiosity on
their side and empowers them to reveal the truth of their
traumas and feelings, the reasons for their suffering,
which their inner world had to keep in secret for so
long.
In IFS, I have learned to no longer doubt but instead
trust and believe the traumas that come up and need to be
shared and grasped. If we were abused and neglected
children, there are many dissociated parts in our way
that make this quest to connect with our true selves a
challenge, over and over again. But the joy, satisfaction
and peace that I feel when I speak and live from my true
self are indescribable. My true self helps my client's
parts and my own parts heal and change. My true self
fights for the truth, even if parts of me cannot bear to
face it. If my inner and outer communication is blocked,
my true self reaches my dissociated parts with sincere
understanding, nurtures my growth and enriches my
therapeutic work with others through compassionate
communication. In my work as a therapist, I do not see
myself acting out from a part that was the obedient,
understanding attendant of narcissistic parents –
but I consider myself as an encouraging, inspiring
companion of my clients for their pursuit of freedom,
dignity, integrity, truth, contentment and their
aspiration to own their lives.
Through my IFS therapy work, I made the important
experience that the true self looks at and questions all
my feelings, thoughts, beliefs and ways of acting out. It
communicates with everything going on inside of me and
decides which feelings are authentic, which feelings I
really need and want to express, as well as to whom,
where, how and in what way. My true self helps me see
which feelings stem from "parts" whose
obsessive beliefs and feelings are blinding me and
keeping me stuck in the prison of my childhood. The true
self helps me find out when I am in the throes of a part
and cling to beliefs and feelings, forced upon me in my
childhood, that I need to question in order to liberate
and empower me to stand up for my integrity, dignity and
truth. My true self helps me through thoughtful,
compassionate inner communication find, choose and follow
a way of action so that I can live true to myself and
give voice to my truth. (See my article "Insights
about therapy and IFS therapy":
http://www.screamsfromchildhood.com/IFS.html)
As my trust in my true self and my values grows stronger,
I look back at my therapeutic journey with pride, also at
the three years that I worked for you and your website,
Alice; through our cooperation, I learned a lot, and my
trust in myself grew because I could do meaningful work
that remains very dear to my heart.
During these past months, I have realized once again the
vital importance of sharing a traumatic experience with
others. Talking about it was a strong need. So I want to
end by thanking all those who listened, understood and
encouraged me. While I worked on this paper, I could make
a deeply moving and empowering experience: Unlike the
time when I suffered the hostile rejection and divisive,
vengeful manipulations of my mother when she turned my
siblings against me because I began to speak up –
this time, I was not alone but accompanied by compassion
and encouragement. It has healed deep wounds that I had
supportive friends on my side, among them outspoken and
courageous members of the our.childhood international
forum, who did not allow themselves to be manipulated and
bullied. The loneliness, which I once suffered through
being cast out by my family, was not repeated. I feel
fortunate that this traumatic experience did not become a
nightmare of isolation but a celebration of deepened and
strengthened human connections. "Escape from the fog
of admiration" could not have been written without
the support of courageous, empathic, emotionally open and
insightful people: members of the our.childhood forum,
among them Basha, Blue Whale, Cherryplum, Donald,
Ceidren, Mary Ann Ribble-Brock, Pam Jacobs, Mia, Fran and
Marion; my true friends who accompanied me during this
trying time, especially Sieglinde Alexander, "Adults
Abused as Children" - http://www.aaacworld.org; and
my therapist Richard Schwartz, "The Center for Self
Leadership" - http://www.selfleadership.org, who
remained on my side to help me free the parts of me that
did not dare to face the truth. I thank you all from the
bottom of my heart.
© Barbara Rogers, February 2009
other responses
************
footnotes:
[1]
The following text is Alice Miller's original answer to a
reader's letter, published on her website
www.alice-miller.com on September 28th, 2008:
Alice Miller: You are asking me not to publish your
letter and I will respect your wish, so I am responding
here only to your question why I no longer mention
Barbara's forum on my website. Here is my answer: It is
only recently that I fully realized the negative sides of
the IFS that I didn't take seriously enough before.
Before it reminded me of a kind of negotiating with
different parts like used in therapies of multiple
personalities and I thought it was more or less harmless.
I even once thought that Barbara could BECOME a therapist
with my help but today I would no longer say this because
I think that working with IFS can’t help to confront
the reality of our parents and to work with patients
mistreated in childhood who need to feel eventually their
deeply repressed rage to become free. I think that the
IFS, like so many other methods was developed exactly to
AVOID the confrontation with one's parents out of fear
that everybody knows. Thus it is an INTERNAL SYSTEM.
Today, after some new experiences, I see it much more
clearly. SO I CAN'T RECOMMEND A FORUM THAT WORKS WITH A
METHOD, WHICH CONTRADICTS WITH THE CONCEPT OF THERAPY
THAT I DEVELOPPED AFTER 50 YEARS OF THERAPEUTIC
EXPERIENCE.
Concerning Norman I do think indeed that one can give up
his blindness in 3 years if one has the courage to feel
and to fully see the reality of one's childhood so he can
become free from the confusion of his parents. Norman's
developpement shows that this is possible and MANY of
people writing to this mailbox confirm that they did not
need decades to change. But if you are trapped in
confusion full of fear even decades can’t be enough
to change. There are hundreds of therapies concepts
offered on the Internet that try to help by avoiding the
truth about the child mistreatments like IFS but they
don't succeed as long as they are afraid of the patients
hidden rage. Norman seems to be able to overcome this
fear because he doesn’t deny it and can thus
honestly work on it. He doesn’t need to be a guru to
feel well about himself.
You are free to send my response to the address you gave
me because the issue concerns also others. I didn't
abandon anybody, I only owe them a honest answer to the
question that I suppose you asked me also in the name of
other participants. My name has been removed from the
list so I can't post this letter to your forum. As the
forum is not a cult group and it hopefully will not
become as such, I suppose that the letter will be
published. In any case it will be published here.
*************
[2]
Letters of recommendation
To whom it may concern:
I treated Barbara Rogers in weekly or bi-weekly
psychotherapy for six years, ending in November of 2003.
I used the form of psychotherapy that I developed called
the Internal Family Systems Model (IFS)
(Selfleadership.org), which involves having the client
focus within on intense emotions and beliefs and
developing new ways of relating to these internal
subpersonalities known as parts; a kind of inner
reparenting process.
Barbara took to this therapy extremely well and in
addition to doing important personal work, became
intrigued with the process to the point of reading
everything she could find about the model, making clay
sculpture of her parts, and attending the annual IFS
conference in 2000.
It is my belief that Barbara would make an excellent
therapist, not only because of the personal work that she
has done, but because she also is an earnest student of
psychotherapy. Between her extensive work with Alice
Miller and her extensive study of and experience with
IFS, she is well prepared for working with clients. In
Addition, she is extremely intelligent and has a warm,
soothing presence. She knows how to listen to clients
with empathy and to help them focus inside to find
answers to their problems.
Sincerely,
Richard C. Schwartz
*********
My name is Gina Demos. I am a dance and movement
therapist practicing in Chicago, Illinois since 1971. I
had the privilege of working with Barbara Rogers in dance
and movement therapy for 6 years, beginning in the late
1990's.
Throughout the years we worked on issues ranging from
infancy to present day challenges. Our work focused on
body-felt experiences of the past and present. Core
issues were relationship with parents, siblings, spouses,
and children. Our deepest work involved her relationship
to her self and all parts of her self in the face of
enormous challenges and the journey toward truth and
healing.
Because of Barbara's developed talent and creativity we
were able to use many artistic modes to further insight
and expression. These included dance, movement, music,
poetry and other forms of written work, as well as
drawing, scuplture and photography.
Her body expression was very powerful and she
increasingly became aware of deeper truths as they
emerged. Her devotion and commitment to the truth marked
the unfolding of our work.
Because of her own healing and her desire to help others
who are suffering, as well as her honesty and
sensitivity, I think that Barbara Rogers would be of
great assistance to others and make a very good
therapist.
Sincerely,
Gina Demos
**********
[3] Second comment about "Forum Barbara:"
AM: Unfortunately, I didn't succeed to make myself
understandable with my explanations in my response to
you. They were probably too complicated because instead
of understanding I received heavy personal attacks. So I
will try again, in a more simple way:
1. I fully respect Barbara's decision to work
independently from my ideas. Why should she be assistant
for her whole life?
2. She is free to use in her forum every kind of therapy,
also the IFS, even if I consider it as harmful, because
she is now free from my opinion.
3. But I can't recommend a therapeutic method that I
don't appreciate. This would mean violating my conviction
that I don't want to do.
Please let me know if now I was clear enough to be
understood.
***************
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