The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Hurtful Parenting

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Almost all my books have aroused conflicting responses. But the emotional intensity with which the statements I make in my latest book have been affirmed or rejected is remarkable indeed. The impression I have is that this intensity of feeling is an indirect expression of the extent to which the readers in question are close to, or remote from, their own selves. In a stirring rejection of the “Poisonous Pedagogy” that pardons even the most brutal parenting, Miller examines the cyclical nature of violence and abuse. Parents and guardians who abuse their children, both physically and mentally, leave them embarrassed and hurt. The inability of most children to properly express such feelings causes them to perpetuate the cycle by lashing out at their family, friends, and, above al1, their own children, who will inevitably do the same. it is a species of morality that consigns our genuine feelings and our own personal truth to an unmarked grave. Severe illnesses, early death, and suicide are the logical consequence of subjection to the laws that we call morality, although in fact they suffocate our true lives. This will continue to be the case, all over the world, as long as we show greater reverence to these laws than to life itself. The body rebels against such treatment, but the only language at its command is the language of illness, a language that is rarely understood as long as the denial of true feelings in childhood remains unrecognized.”

The Body Never Lies | Alice Miller en

This album is another masterpiece by the LA-based artists that many will talk about for years to come. Its creativity, lyric writing, production and versatility is a breath of fresh air within music. But above all, it is an empowering and thought-provoking work of art. It not only proves that Krewella is currently one of the best musical duos in the industry today, but they are also one of the greatest of the entire generation. And what is even more impressive is that Jahan and Yasmine have continued to find ways to push the boundaries and break the rules of what is expected while still staying true to who they are as people and their beliefs. And while The Body Never Lies, the music doesn’t either. Krewella is unstoppable. In every adult who has suffered abuse as a child lies dormant that small child's fear of punishment at the hands of the parents if he or she should dare to rebel against their behavior. But it will lie dormant only as long as that fear remains unconscious. Once consciously experienced, it will dissolve in the course of time.”

Over 100 years ago Sigmund Freud subjected himself without reserve to the prevailing idea of morality by putting all the blame on the child and sparing the parents. His successors did precisely the same. In my last three books I have pointed out that while psychoanalysis has become less prone to close itself off from the facts on cruelty to children and sexual abuse and is indeed making an effort to integrate these facts into its theoretical considerations, these attempts are still largely thwarted by the Fourth Commandment. As before, the role of parents in the development of symptomatologies in children is still played down and actively misrepresented. I have no way of knowing whether this so-called broadening of horizons has really changed the attitudes of the majority of therapists. But the impression I get from publications is that reflection on traditional morality has yet to take place. The behavior of parents continues to be defended both in practice and in theory, as was brought home to me by Eli Zaretsky’s book Secrets of the Soul (Knopf 2004) with its detailed history of psychoanalysis up to the present (and with no discussion of the Fourth Commandment). This is why my engagement with psychoanalysis is more marginal in The Body Never Lies. individuals who are prepared unflinchingly to confront the truth about their childhood and to see their parents in a realistic light. Unfortunately, it is very often the case that therapeutic success can be seriously endangered if therapy (as frequently happens) is subjected to the dictates of conventional morality, thus making it impossible for adult clients to free themselves of the compulsive persuasion that they owe their parents love and gratitude. The authentic feelings stored in the body remain untapped, and the price the clients have to pay for this is the unremitting persistence of the severe symptoms affecting them. I assume that readers who have themselves undergone a number of unsuccessful therapies will readily recognize their plight in this problem. In” Now in her Warrior School, she coaches women all over the world, to do just that. I have had the pleasure of working alongside Amy with some of her clients and I have seen first hand, their leaps and bounds forward in not just making aesthetic changes to their bodies, but first and foremost increasing their capability, capacity and performance for life, like no other.

The Body Never Lies - Album by Krewella - Apple Music ‎The Body Never Lies - Album by Krewella - Apple Music

Though Alice Miller does not directly do so, The Body Never Lies offers us the possibility of rewriting the Forth Commandment from a Child-Centered Perspective. The new commandment would emphasize the parental duty to foster and respect the authentic personhood of children rather than the children’s duty to submit to parental domination and personal self-denial. Tragically, much of psychology is comprised of nonsense and noise…rats, statistics, medications. So we are fortunate to receive the rare and exceptional work of Alice Miller. Her most recent volume, The Body Never Lies, continues one of psychology’s most important collections. Miller also discusses how institutionalized religion itself can contribute to the crushing guilt that prevents us from being healthy and conscious adults. She urges society to realize that the Fourth Commandment -“Honor thy father and thy mother”- offers immunity to abusive parents. Indeed, she argues, it is healthier not to extend forgiveness to parents whose tyrannical childrearing methods have resulted in unhappy, and often ruined, adult lives.World-renowned therapist Alice Miller has devoted a lifetime to studying the cruelties inflicted on children. In The Body Never Lies Miller goes further, investigating the long-range consequences of childhood abuse on the adult body. Using numerous case histories gleaned from her practice, as well as examining the biographical stories of celebrated writers such as Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, and others, Mil1er shows how a child’s emotional traumas, repressed humiliation, and bottled rage can manifest themselves as serious adult health problems. In discussing the lives of these literary giants, Miller explores the known or, in some cases, unknown traumas that haunted each author’s childhood. More important, Miller connects the writers’ painful childhoods with their later afflictions, which included depression, anorexia, cancer, and even insanity. I want to live my own life, to be at peace and not to think all the time about how they hit me and humiliated me and almost tortured me.” We have to break free of our (internalized) parents’ grip on us, that of the biblical injunction, “Honor (obey, worship,) thy father and thy mother.” Until then we, in a sense, feel and behave and think like the little children we once were; we cannot grow up. Worse, because as children we weren’t accepted and loved for who we were, parents repeatedly punished us in attempts to force us into the imaginary mold they had prepared for us, i.e., what a child should be. Dr. Miller’s message is that our bodies bear a detailed record of every childhood hurt and humiliation inflicted, every spank and slap, insult and indignity. And until or if those internal, psychic wounds remain unhealed, we can expect to continue to pay the terrible price in physical illnesses. Powerless to do otherwise, we suppressed our true and good authentic selves to win the love our emotional survival depended on. What can we see when we learn that childhood experience stored in the body? We can see our adult health in the liberated and free expression of empowering love experienced in childhood. We can see bodily and relational illness as a reflection of the battle for the authentic self to escape from the oppression of the mandate to honor and love those who have hurt us. Like in an invisible jail, the fourth commandment confines many people into untruthful relationships with their parents, from which they often suffer. Abused and disrespected in childhood, they strive, still during their adult lives, to reach and even please cruel parents, who do not wish to understand and support them, who do not care about their well-being.

the body never lies | Alice Miller en the body never lies | Alice Miller en

In our bodies and the voice of our bodies the reality of physical, emotional and sexual abuse and neglect is stored. We cannot escape it, even when we become adults. When we do not hear the voice of this childhood truth, we struggle in inauthentic relationships and ill health as adults. Often, we pass such problems on to another generation. Alice Miller opens our ears to these abusive voices so that we can challenge them with the voices of our truth. As always, Alice Miller’s insights into the value and contribution of childhood experiences to our adult lives allow us to see where we previously were blinded, to hear where we were previously deaf, and to speak in voices that were previously silent. As they first made their way through the underground electronic dance scene of Soundcloud to breaking through with their ‘Play Hard’EP and first album ‘Get Wet’to ultimately redefining themselves as artists with the release of their second album, ‘Zero.’ The two sisters from Chicago continue to refuse to let the walls of comfortability and ordinary confine them. Like art, they make their own rules. We now have many reports in which mothers (and, in the ourchildhood forums on the Internet, also fathers) give honest accounts of how they have been prevented from loving their children as a result of the injuries inflicted on them in their own childhood. We can learn from them, and if we do, we will cease to idealize motherly love at all costs. Then we will no longer be forced to analyze infants as screaming monsters. Instead we will begin to understand their inner worlds, to grasp the loneliness and impotence of children growing up with parents that deny them any kind of loving communication because they themselves have never experienced it. Then we will recognize in the screams of the infant a logical and justified response to the usually unconscious but none the less factual and real cruelties of the parents, which have yet to be appreciated as such by society. An equally natural response is the despair of individuals about their damaged lives, a despair that some trauma therapies attempt to alleviate with the aid of “positive thinking”. But it is precisely these strong “negative” emotions that enable us to recognize how we must have felt when we were ignored or treated cruelly by our parents. We absolutely need this recognition to eventually overcome the painful effects of the traumas.All too many of us, however, can also hear those voices that forced us to silence our authentic selves and to belittle, deny and repress our ‘truths’. Confronting the power of ‘poisonous pedagogy’, we hear those voices that drained the ‘truth’ of our feelings and emotions into their wills and wishes. We hear the voices of those who transformed our feelings of hurt and powerlessness, our truths, into the love and honor that our social and religious principles mandate we give our parents. https://www.thenutritioncoach.com.au/anti-ageing/throwing-light-on-red-light-an-interview-with-joe-hollins-gibson-the-red-light-man-part-1/

The body never lies | Alice Miller en The body never lies | Alice Miller en

Still, Miller retains a hopeful view of the future. While society at present always sides with the parents, individual bodies are fighting against the lies. It’s possible that our collective body may rise up and lead to a future society built on conscious awareness. First, though, we must jettison our “fundamentalist faith” in genetics and, I would add, pharmaceutical “miracles.” With the help of a witness, each damaged individual needs to move through infantile fears and reject the illusion that our parents will save us. When we finally experience our real truths of being unloved, neglected and beaten; when we internally separate from our parents; when we experience love for the worthy child we once were…only then our bodies can experience rest and relief, and only then can we get on with the important business of real life. My decision to call these invisible injuries “mis-treatment” sometimes arouses resistance and indignant protest. I find this attitude easy to understand because it is one that I shared for a very long time. Earlier, if someone had suggested that I had been cruelly treated as a child, I would have roundly denied the “insinuation”. But today I know quite definitely that in my childhood I was indeed exposed to mental cruelty for many years. My dreams, my painting, and not least the messages of my own body have told me this, but as an adult I refused to accept the fact for a very long time. Like many other people I thought: ” Me? I was never beaten. The few slaps I got were nothing special. And my mother took so much trouble with me.” (In my book the reader will find similar statements by others).This is why “parents” as an institution still enjoy total immunity. If that changes one day (as this book postulates), then we will be in a position to feel what our parents’ cruelties have done to us. We will have a better understanding of the signals emitted by our bodies and we can live in peace with them, not as the beloved children we never were and can never become, but as open-minded, aware, and perhaps loving adults who no longer have to fear our own biographies because we know all about them. First originating from an excerpt in Jahan’s journal and featured as a lyric in two of the songs, the album title is a reflection of us as humans “feeling, remembering, and existing in our individual vessels that encase our soul and memories.” The album and its meaning not only motivates the listener to explore a depth to themselves they might never knew existed, but it reminds us just how powerful the soul, body and mind can be. To illustrate her ideas, Miller provides brief portrayals of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Anton Chekhov, Franz Kafka, Friedrich Nietzche, Friedrich von Schiller, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Rimbaud, Yukio Mishima, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Saddam Hussein, and Adolf Hitler. My guest today, Isaac Pohlman has a degree in Physiology, a Masters in Nutritional Science and is a Registered Dietitian. But he also has Type 1 Diabetes and hypothyroidism, both of which he developed in college. What do these writers, dictators, serial killers and others have in common? They all lived their lives in accord with the Fourth Commandment. They honored their parents, even though and even while their parents did them harm. Each individual sacrificed their truth in the unanswered hope that they would be loved, and each died in denial and isolation, tragically unable to admit to their own personal truths. These lives and these stories lend credence to Miller’s argument that moral laws lead to repression and to emotional detachment.