| Home Love,
Hope, Alice Miler, Abusive Parents, Feelings, Needs I am going to try to write a lot tonight. I am going to try to tie all of that together. I will start with a letter I got from a reader who said she is not a teen anymore, but she is just as trapped. Note - This turned in to a lot of personal journal writing and "venting"...so I edited it...
Love - The writer callls her mother her "beloved tyrant."" She also makes it clear she has very mixed feelings towards her mother. I assume sometimes she feels love for her mother or she thinks to herself or she tells others that she loves her mother. My partner and I have been reading articles and books from Alice Miller again, and the issue of "loving" your parents has been bothering me. One thing which bothers me is that I don't think it makes sense to use the same word for your parents, even if they are not in any way abusive, as you use for someone you love as your boyfriend, girlfriend, partner etc. I know in other languages there are more words for the different kinds of love, but in English we just have "love." In some places in her writing, Alice says all children love their parents, no matter how abusive they are This has always bothered me. I would say they "need" ther parents, at least when they are very young but I would not say they "love" them. I suspect most of us say we love our parents mainly because we have heard others say it so many times and it is expected that we say it, and people are usually shocked and disapproving if we say or imply we don't (This is especially true here in South America where I am writing ths from now) I often think of the term "insecure attachment bonding" when I think of abusive parents In other words, a child or teen becomes attached to their parents out of fear, not love. This attachment might be as strong, or even stronger than one based in love. But in any case, let me explain how an "insecure attachment bond" forms. Basically, a baby starts out dependent on his mother. Assuming there is no one else around to feed the baby, it will quickly die. In fact, often, there isn't anyone else around once the baby leaves the hospitall, so the baby's life literally depends on the mother and her acceptance, approval etc. So this is one way the baby is "attached" or "bonded" to the mother. Another way is in the case of an abusive mother or parent. Abusive parents, by definition, damage the child's self-esteem. When you have low self-esteem you feel unworty. This means you feel unworthy of anyone else loving you or even accepting with you, living with you, helping you etc. So you are even more afraid to leave the parent and whatever physical or financial security they might provide I know of countless cases, for example, where people keep living with their abusiive parents past the age when they could legally move away from them. The main reason they stay is because the parents have a house and often also provide food. I think now of how many people keep dogs in this same way. - they provide food and a place to sleep. Then they can treat the dog very badly, but it will keep coming back, primarily for the food. We could sayit has been made dependent on the abusive owner. But would we say the dog loves the abusive owner? Anyhow, just yesterday I read something from Alice Miller where she talks about attacment rather than love in the case of abusive parents. get quote xx
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Respect | Empathy
Emotional Literacy |
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| Feelings and Needs I get a lot of letters from teens and non-teens. Sometimes they just want me to read their stories, sometimes they specifically ask for help.
In the case of thie letter I started ths page with, you can see the writer did not specifically ask for help. I received that letter about 6 days ago. I wasn't sure what to do with t. I have been feeling overwhelmed and depressed lately.
in order to help the writer of the email, which i want to do but dont have much time for, and also i want to help others at the same time since i cant help pple individually as much these days. but anyhow, I want to encourage her and everyone else to use a language of feelings and needs - not just to write to me but for themselves. it is one of simplest, most useful ways to make a big change in your life and perspective.
basically you identify the painful feeling and then the associated unmet emotional need. but anyhow also i wanted to find what alice said about hope but basically she said stop hoping your abusive parents will change. she also said don't bother trying to forgive them. forgiveness doesnt really help change things. my partner says one of the things she likes the most about AM is what she says about not forgiving your parents... hug to p. anyhow to the reader or others like her - maybe if u become more in the habit of listing ur feelings and unmet needs it will help u see things more objectively with ur abusive parents.. good luck. and a hug to anyone who wants / needs one. steve.
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| Part 2 I wrote too much journal type writing so I took it out and I left this part... - Lately I have been really concentrating on this: feelings and needs. As much as I don't like some things about Marshall Rosenberg (I will have to explain why later), he did help me see the importance of focusing on our needs, even more than our feelings. Our feelings really just seem to exist to help us identify our needs, our survival needs. So why do I bring this up when writing about love, hope and the letter I got from the non-teen? Well, for two or three reasons. One is that I have just about made a nearly firm decision that I can no longer correspond, work with, talk to etc, people who can not speak in a language of feelings and needs. The main reason for this is that it just takes too much time. Last week for example, I spent maybe 3 or 4 hours trying to talk to someone who is very smart and who I share a lot of values with, but who could not express his own feelings and needs. So we ended up debating a lot and going around in circles etc. The next day I realized I felt resentful. Since "resentful" doesn't say much, in other words, it doesn't tell me specifically how I feel or what I need, I thought more about my specific feelings. One of them was "robbed." I felt robbed in terms of my time and my life because so much of my time was spent trying to get relatively simple questions answered. I also thought of my "emotional bank account" xx get link. The person I was with was pretty good at laying guilt trips. He wanted me to do something and kept asking me, or pressuring me with guilt trips. This was, to put it simply, stealing from my EBA. So I felt robbed in two ways: of my time and of my emotional strength - to say this second part another way, I had to use a lot of my emotional energy or strength to fight off his attempts to get me to "give in" to him. I was thinking of saying "to fight off his attempts to make me feel guilty" but I already felt guilty - and still do. So we could say he is still robbing me, about one week later. While on this topic, I want to add that I had told this person I get very depressed and had nearly killed myself within the past year. I feel resentful again - let's say not understood or not cared about - when I think of this. In other words, when I think of what I told him and how he didn't take my feelings into account, let's say. Anyhow, I am afraid I am getting too far from my original goals of this page... so let's see if I can get back on track. Ah yes, (I had to go back and read my own writing to remember what I was talking about! - This happens more as I get older and have more things filling up my "working memory"). I was talking about the letter and feelings and needs. So I will say now to the girl who wrote me, please, both for your sake and mine, try to express yourself in feelings and needs. Your writing is very "good" - it shows your intelligence, and I have little doubt you are emotionally intelligent, but you haven't been taught to express yourself in terms of feelings and needs. I don't know how long you have been reading my site, or how much of it you read, or how you found it, (and I am curious about all of that) but what I would ask you to do is to first, find Marshall Rosenberg's video about NVC which he did in Denmark. It is called something like introduction to nvc - it is about one or 2 hours long, but not the one in San Francisco. It has subtitles in Danish. Anyhow, please watch it to get an idea of how to express yourself in terms of feelings and needs. |
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| More about hope I am limited for time nowm but I want to add that sometimes parents do change. It is very unlikely, though, that a parent will change while you are living in their house. It is possible but as the old say goes, they will only change if they want to. In fact I think of the joke "How many psychologists does it take to change a light bulb? Only one, but the light bulb has to want to change." So if your parent doesn't show real signs that they want to change, then there is probably little reason to hope they will any time soon. Maybe the best way to help motivate them to change, in fact, is to move out. Once you are more independent you can slowly work on repairing the damage that was done to you. When you are stronger and not so afraid of your parents' rejection, then maybe you will be able to be more honest with them. This is a huge topic, and I have just scratched the surface, but I wanted to say that much for now. S. Hein |
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The letter I sent to the writer of the email
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