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11/15/2006

Getting to the heart of it

There's a discussion going on over at Anthropik that I'm going to respond to here because it gets to the core of what this blog is about. Or at least what it has come to be about.

For the uninitiated, I started this blog to track my long term plans to set up an eco village. OVer the time of my writing however I have come to understand that the village will merely be a setting for what I'm about to discuss here:

In the discussion I just mentioned, Casemeau commented.

A mistake that we tend to make when speaking of abuse is to only think about it in its very obvious and dramatic forms. Then, if none of these has happened to us; if, say, we haven't been punched by a parent, or even yelled at, we think the discussion doesn't apply directly to us. A widespread form of abuse that I'll bet everyone has suffered from is the denial of our true selves by (usually) our parents. This takes place invisibly, every day. An example is like this: "Oh don't cry, sweetie, it's just a broken toy." Or like this: "It's a sad occasion, but you must be brave." In physical abuse, the bruises and broken bones can heal quickly. What imprisons the child for decades after the bones have healed (until death, even) is the emotional need to bury the true self which cries when it is appropriate to cry. This allows the child, literally, to survive. This same damaging imprisonment is effected with seemingly good parenting ("Oh don't cry, sweetie."--This response to a crying child seems so right!)

 

I couldn't have put it better myself. Jason responded with:

I disagree with the use of the term "abuse" to cover something like that. The fact of the matter is, even in a tribal society, you have to know when it's OK to express yourself, and when you need some self-control. If you accept that, then the rest of this is a sliding scale.

 

For all his excellent research I think Jason misses the point here. The real problem with coming to grips with this is what it implies about out parents - which is that not only have they hurt us but that they are the principle means by which civilisation and it's abusive rules are passed from generation to generation. In the context of an (online) anti-civ community like this circle of blogs this is a hell of a thing to say and a good reason to keep in denial about it. It should surprise no one that I have yet to tell my own parents about this blog. Clearly I can face this truth but equally clearly I can't yet deal with it adequatley.

Unless we can face and deal with this aspect of civilisation no amount of violent insurections or well meaning alternatives are going to make a blind bit of difference. We could be living in the forest making fire with a bow and using permaculture to supply food and still carry civilisation within us.

As it is I can't see how we can do more than water down the civilisation within us a little bit each generation.

The real reason I know this is not because of how my parents treated me but because of how I treat my kids. I have as much information available to me on how to break this cycle as anyone else but I am still not free of the temptation of mis-using my power over my kids. It could be as simple a thing as inventing a reason they can't do something simply because it would involve me getting off the couch.

The fact that most people reading this will probably say that what I've described is not really a big deal and hardly worthy of the title power abuse or even mis-use is an indication of just how far we have to go. Kknow this though, Behaviour like this is something that normally WOULD NOT happen in a well-functioning tribe.

Of course to improve our behaviour as parents we need to work on ourselves first and I can't speak too highly of what I see in Casemeau, Ted, Dan and Ran's blogs. Often when I sit down to write about an issue I end up concluding that to solve it will involve doing some internal work (as opposed to the much more popular option of fixing the external world).

I don't think my message is a particularly popular message. I fear that I may have inherited the dictatorial, communication style of my father but I also know that the solutions I advocate to our problems are damn hard to enact and maybe even impossible without a tribe or village to support us. Certainly most people are not in a position to focus in this area - especially if they are in the middle of trying to raise children.

22:00 Posted in Big Ideas , Modern Life Is Rubbish | Permalink | Email this

Comments

I actually agree with you whole-heartedly. :) And I have wonderful parents, and yet I can see how the ways they raised me--owing entirely to their own cultural background--have given me a lot to work out. And I think you're right about watering down that civilized effect, because I'm going to have that same effect on my own children one day, however much I try to limit it. Eliminating it isn't going to happen, but we can water it down. My mother's Methodist upbringing watered it down a lot for me; hopefully I'll be able to water it down as much for my own children one day. I've been writing this a lot lately: "we won't be wild, but we can be feral."

Of course, that's a completely separate issue from the one of self-control, so I don't see how related these really are. Casemeau painted a picture of perfect self-expression, but tribal societies tend to be really big on self-control. So I don't think that civilization we're watering down is quite as simple as just self-expression vs. self-control. I think it's more like the dichotomy I drew in the article you link to: functional families vs. dysfunctional ones. Or, as I wrote in today's article, do you start off as a pup and then grow up to be an "alpha" of your own pack, or do you just stay as a dependent child of the state your whole life?

Posted by: Jason Godesky | 11/15/2006

Yes, we as parents must do whatever we can to recover our own true selves and then whatever we can to allow our children to be their own true selves. There aren't a lot of generations left in which to get this done, I fear. Aaron, I really relate to your example of those times when I've been unwilling to get off the couch. It seems like so much damage is done by a year's worth of stuff that we don't think of as damaging, but since we don't think of it as damaging, we ignore it, and instead comfort ourselves by thinking that we don't hit our kids. I am not a perfect father, but I know that having done the lonely, despairing job of what I call "recovery of true self" that I stand miles away from inadvertantly passing "civilization" on to my kids. I will not be perfect, but egads, what a difference!

I like to be encouraging in this circle of blogs, so let me tell a quick story. Last year at Christmastime, a friend of mine came over to give the kids some gifts. One of the gifts had some small plastic balls as part of a game. While my 4 year old son was doing something else, my 2 year old daughter put the balls into her mouth and bit them in half, so that they couldn't be used in the game anymore. When my 4 year old returned and saw the damage, he was crushed. This is how 4 year olds are. He was absolutely crushed about the balls being ruined.

My initial instinct was to cheer him up; get him to see why there was really no reason to get so upset; show him ways to play and have fun with the broken halves. I was able to stop myself from doing that and instead say, "Wow, _______, you're really sad and upset that the balls are broken, aren't you sweetie? Here, come here, you can sit in my lap while you feel sad." He sat in my lap on the floor and cried for about a minute or two, and I didn't say anything, I just held him (this is significant: I didn't make him go away from me, nor did I go away from him.) And then he was done. He had naturally and appropriately done what a 4 year old needs to do upon discovering those broken toys. He apparently needed to grieve. It was at that point that I showed him that we could play "Rudolph" with the halves because they were red. He liked the Rudolph game and we played it for a little while.

It would have been a mistake to have said, "Oh don't cry sweetie, here look, we can play Rudolph with the broken balls!" That would have been forcing him to do something with his grief other than feel it. It would also have been telling him that I, his father (and someone who had better not be wrong because his life depends on me) reject his appropriate emotional reaction to the situation. Since I can't be wrong (or he'll die, because he depends on me), then he would have to deduce that it is he himself who must be wrong for ever having had that emotional reaction in the first place.

As any parent can tell you, these little "broken ball" scenarios happen all day long. When a parent responds by cheering their child up all the time, or otherwise not allowing the child to react in their emotionally appropriate way, it doesn't take long at all for the child to learn that there is something fundamentally wrong with them. Naturally, then, they adopt a persona that does not get constantly rejected by the parent. They adopt a persona that no longer cries over broken toys, say. Many times it's so confusing for the child that they simply adopt a stance of feeling very little emotion at all.

All of this can happen without a single bruise or shout from the parent.

It's my belief that we all suffer from having had to put our true selves away and adopt a selfhood that was easier for our parents to accept; a selfhood that didn't constantly have to face it's own fundamental flawedness. If we're lucky, as adults we even notice that we have been living as a false self. Most of us go to our graves never realizing that we are acting as if we are someone else. Even those who discover it don't often do the work to recover their true self because it can only be done via despair and lonliness.

If we hope to outlast civilization and live within tribes or eco-villages or some other life-way, true selves are going to be needed. False selves can live easily in a civilization based on economic and utilitarian transactions among people. I can't imagine any small community, tribe, or village surviving for long if nobody realizes that they are not being themselves. I also can't imagine that it would even be worth it.

Posted by: casemeau | 11/16/2006

Casemeau, wonderful comment! I agree wholeheartedly with it. What a great father you are becoming. I don't see it as a problem of self-expression or self-control. I see it as an issue of the legitimacy of one's feelings. I think that you can teach your kids BOTH things. They aren't mutually exclusive. There's a vast difference between not expressing something because it's not the time nor the place and believing that your feelings are inappropriate or wrong. So many of us don't really know how we feel, and if we do happen to know what we're feeling, we feel bad about it. Our culture is so hell bent AGAINST any negative feeling whatsoever, even if it's appropriate, that we're medicating ourselves into non-functionality. It's as if the end goal is to feel good at all times, no matter what. Sometimes the bad feelings are there for a reason. My sister went on anti-depressants for a while because her husband is an alcoholic. Gee, that's great. HE'S the alcoholic, so she has to go on medication. The bad feelings that come from being married to an alcoholic are important. It's your psyche's way of telling you that something is wrong.

Posted by: Marcy | 11/16/2006

I'm so glad this conversation came up. I'm trying my best to be a good parent, and learning how little I know all the time. My kids are my greatest teachers.

Posted by: shali_isdes | 11/16/2006

Of course, most tribes have plenty of feelings they reject as inappropriate regardless of time or place. Paul Radin's account of the Ho-Chunk in Primitive Man as Philosopher mentions at several times that responding in any negative manner towards another's insult was always shameful, regardless of circumstance, for instance. Tribal cultures don't just emphasize self-control in a given context with the message that all feelings are fundamentally legitimate with only a question of context. Most tribes provide a certain list of feelings which may be legitimately felt, but should never be acted upon.

Posted by: Jason Godesky | 11/16/2006

has anyone mentioned the writings of alice miller? she has written several books and articulates very well the way that subtle abuse is so harmful to truely healthy development.

I could say a lot more, but alice miller is more articulate than i am. I suspect some people don't understand this because they haven't had a glimpse of that insight that they deserve to not live in guilt and pain.Culturally, it seems we're steeped in guilt(original sin?) maybe one of the basic suufocating beliefs we adopt is "I don't deserve....".

Posted by: kelly McGuinn | 11/16/2006

If you're interested in this topic, Alice Miller is awesome. Her basic text is The Drama of the Gifted Child. It's not happy reading, and her anger shows through, but it's short, and she doesn't sugar-coat. When she says "gifted", by the way, she doesn't mean "smarter than average" or "precocious" she simply means having been gifted with the ability to have survived an other-than-ideal childhood. Definitely one of the most important books I have ever read, and the source of almost all my thinking on this subject.

Posted by: casemeau | 11/16/2006

Unconditional Parenting, by Alfie Kohn is another very excellent book that deals with a lot of these issues. He really "gets to the heart of it."

Posted by: Devin | 11/17/2006

Hey all,

This is an interesting discussion. I once read an account of how the famous hypnotherapist Milton Erickson treated his injured young son. I was impressed, and thought it was worth quoting a lengthy account here. (The full account can be found in Uncommon Therapy by Jay Haley.) At every step it's fascinating how Erickson met his son where he was and gently guided him back to a place of safety without force.

------------------------------------
Robert fell down the back stairs, split his lip, and knocked his upper tooth back into the maxilla. He was bleeding and screaming with pain and fright. His parents rushed to him and saw that it was an emergency.

Dr. Erickson writes,

"No effort was made to pick him up. Instead, as he paused for breath for fresh screaming, he was told quickly, simply, sympathetically and emphatically, 'That hurts awful, Robert. That hurts terrible.'

"Right then, without any doubt, my son knew that I knew what I was talking about. He could agree with me and he knew I was agreeing with him completely. Therefore he could listen respectfully to me, because I had demonstrated that I understood the situation fully."

Rather than reassure the boy, Dr. Erickson proceeded in typical fashion:

'Then I told Robert, 'And it will keep right on hurting.' In this simple statement, I named his own fear, confirmed his own judgment of the situation, demonstrated my good intelligent grasp of the entire matter and my entire agreement with him, since right then he could foresee a lifetime of anguish and pain for himself.

"The next step for him and for me was to declare, as he took another breath, 'And you really wish it would stop hurting.' Again, we were in full agreement and he was ratified and even encouraged in this wish. And it was his wish, deriving entirely from within him and constituting his own urgent need.

'With the situation so defined, I could then offer a suggestion with some certainty of its acceptance. This suggestion was, 'Maybe it will stop hurting in a little while, in just a minute or two.'

"This was a suggestion in full accord with his own needs and wishes and, because it was qualified by 'maybe it will,' it was not in contradiction to his own understandings of the situation. Thus he could accept the idea and initiate his response to it."

Dr. Erickson then shifted to another important matter. As he puts it:

"Robert knew that he hurt, that he was a damaged person; he could see his blood upon the pavement, taste it in his mouth and see it on his hands. And yet, like all other human beings, he too could desire narcissistic distinction in his misfortune, along with the desire even more for narcissistic comfort. Nobody wants a picayune headache: since a headache must be endured, let it be so colossal that only the sufferer could endure it. Human pride is so curiously good and comforting! Therefore, Robert's attention was doubly directed to two vital issues of comprehensible importance to him by the simple statements, 'That's an awful lot of blood on the pavement. Is it good, red, strong blood? Look carefully, Mother, and see. I think it is, but I want you to be sure.' "

Examination proved it to be good strong blood, but it was necessary to verify this by examination of it against the white background of the bathroom sink. In this way the boy, who had ceased crying in pain and fright, was cleaned up. When he went to the doctor for stitches the question was whether he would get as many as his sister had once been given. The suturing was done without anesthetic on a boy who was an interested participant in the procedure.

Posted by: David | 11/17/2006

I can only echo what others have said that it's about validating(or invalidating)feelings and not about learning appropriate behavior, which children learn mostly because they adore their parents and want to be like them. I believe squashing the human spirit is the ultimate abuse. When you are told everyday not to cry, not to get angry, not to do the things you love because you're bad, or selfish, or manipulative or any other label that misguided folks put on little ones-you leave them open for being abused. Whether it's a neighborhood bully, a pedophile or the police stopping you on the street and harrassing you for no reason. If you feel that you don't have a right to your own feelings, then these sorts of behaviors seem acceptable-"well, maybe I'm making a big deal out of it." or "at least they didn't do____." or even, "maybe it didn't really happen."

Posted by: Susan | 11/18/2006

Great topic. I'm so impressed with the willingness to dive deeper and explore the subtle manipulation of feelings. I agree with Marcy that the end goal of life in this context seems to be avoiding pain and unhappiness at all costs. That's even made very explicit by utilitarianism, which sees suffering as an evil to be avoided always and necessarily. But that's anti-life! No ying without the yang, and all of that- we need balance. Life can't be sterile and unchallenging and controlled, and much as we may want to help our kids and minimize their sadness and hurt and pain, that's a part of life that we grow from.

It's tough, and difficult to navigate, but we all can do our best. Maybe not wild, but feral, as Jason said.

Posted by: Archangel | 11/20/2006

If you're saying that parents telling their kids not to cry is an issue of the child learning self control then I will definitely take issue with that. First of all the only way to teach self control is to model it and a) making the child stop crying because the parent is uncomfortable with it is the opposite of self control so bad modelling there, and b)the coercion robs the child of the opportunity to learn it.

In addition to all that too, making a child stop crying before they are ready to means the hurt stays on the inside at the same time as they learn that they were wrong to feel the hurt in the first place. The piece of cognitive dissonance is a microcosm of one of the major issues of how we raise our kids and something that inhibts us as adults - to the extent that it literally robs us of energy

Children need to be allowed to cry until they are finished - even if it seems disproportionate - kids don't understand stuff like we do, small things become big thing sin their eyes but also they may well be taking the opportunity to cry abuot something else that they've been told the shouldn't fell bad about ( but actually do)

I should add that, in all honesty I have great diffculty applying this theory to my own kids :-)

Posted by: Aaron | 11/15/2006

I like where this discussion is going, but I'd like to introduce a different way of looking at what we need to do to be effective in counteracting that civilization addiction inside us.

My thought is this: The genie has been outta da beer bottle for 10,000 years. Only recently have we been able to find effective ways to deal with the addictions to booze and drugs and those lead us to understand there's a physical component to it as well as a spiritual one. I think of civilization in similar terms. It's like the herpes virus, which lives in our bone marrow and just waits for the right trigger to produce shingles or the simplex. I don't know how many herpes viruses lie dorman in our marrow, waiting so patiently to be activated. Civilization is like that, I think. Only it's something that has been activated and when it seems like it's winding itself down, it's also doing push-ups for another go at us sometime down the road. I'm not saying it's winding down now--that would be too much, but it also understands there are people like those who come to this forum and rigint, wakeupfromyourslumber, ran, dan, livinginavanbythe river, etc., who are getting hip to the scope and true nature of the enmeshment.

My thought about these things is to remember gratitude that I have this awareness of how things are, and that I get to find a way to bridge "preconquest consciousness" with "post-postconquest consciousness." It means we look at our civilized experiences, our traumatization, our parents' blind conditioning, etc., and we recapitulate all that pain, of course, and we see the sacred lessons in all of it, and we don't regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it, but instead see it as a valuable testament to our resilience. It may not seem like it, "that we are all blessed with having the stories we have", but that's the essence of it. We ARE blessed because we've been graced with an awareness of a better way.

What I see you all doing, as well as what I'm doing (albeit quietly from the sidelines right now because I feel like people don't really understand where I'm coming from on this) is that you've gotten the awareness, the epiphany that things ain't right. Now we're all struggling with acceptance, and going "what do we do next?" Acceptance is a real bitch all right. But there are moments of joy in the acceptance, I've found. And when we invite the preconquest consciousness into the mix, through a connection to Hekate or Jesus or the Star Nations or what have you, whatever divinity concepts people might have, the next right action becomes visible to us.

The key though is to not do any of this alone. And that's a part of my struggle, because sometimes my fngers become inert, and the phone feels like it's 500 pounds to pick it up and call someone. I don't always let people in. But I also know together we can.

I can't change the fact I've been "utilito-socialized", civilized, domesticated, and conditioned. But with the help of others like you awakening to this devastating state of affairs, we can take what we can from our past, and leave the rest. We can even work at clearing away the debris eventually, when the time is right.

I don't know if it's good or bad that we can never really return to that preciv consciousness--I just know that it's not possible for me. Too much has happened, and I've been given the experiences of living in this decaying society for a reason. It's not all for naught, it's not something to disown. It's something to reckon with, sort of a Saturnine reminder of where we can go left to our own devices. The rationalizing laying on the couch notion is key. We all do that. We need to be gentle with ourselves in this process. And we need to remember that all of our experiences can benefit others in ways we don't even realize.

We're all facing everything and reclaiming these aspects of ourselves that were deemed "less-than" even though we knew in our hearts that these aspects of ourselves are so precious. It takes a lot of work, but it's a joyous obligation if you ask me.

Posted by: Richard | 11/16/2006

Kelly, type Alice Miller into the search thingy on the right hand side and you'll see a list of postings by me referring to her work - I think her work is very very good

BTW Sometime ago my search window shrank to a ridiculously small size and I haven't had time to fix it but it does work - just have faith that you're typing the right thing :-)

Posted by: Aaron | 11/16/2006

For anyone who wants an intro to Alice Miller, here's an interview from 1987
http://www.naturalchild.org/alice_miller/roots_violence.html
It is, of course, still relevant today

Posted by: Aaron | 11/17/2006

What a great topic. Thank you! I just wanted to add to Casemeau's interesting comments. When he chose acknowledge his son's feelings, he was basicallly acting against what has been shoved down our throats by most of the "compassionate" parenting experts of the past ten or fifteen years. That is, we're supposed to distract our children when something unpleasant arises (whether someone breaks the kid's toy or the kid starts kicking his brother--it's not of importance whether the child is the victim or the aggressor). The situation doesn't really matter and the kid's reaction to or understanding of what actually happened doesn't matter. What is important is the parent's ability to force (and that's what it really is) the child to drop his true feelings like a hot potato by dangling a toy in front of his face or flipping on Nickelodeon. I think this is damaging in the long run (even though, honestly, I am guilty of it sometimes). It initially teaches children that the bumps in life are not worthy of their attention, and it robs them of the opportunity to work through whatever happened. This is how individual self-control (the kind that keeps you from mindlessly destructive behavior) grows within a child. This also how the child learns about his true self and the depths of his emotions.

Posted by: loretta | 11/17/2006

I don't know what's going on but this morning a whole bunch of comments by me were finally posted that I sent in ages ago. They're all out of order and I presume some of the other comments are too.

Posted by: Aaron | 11/20/2006

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