Discussion of the Stay-At-Home-Daughter lifestyle and the long term effects of growing up in the Patriarchy/Quiverfull Movement associated with Christian Homeschooling in the US
This section appears in Alice Miller's “The Truth Will Set You Free” in the epilogue entitled “From Ignorance To Knowledge and Compassion.”
(In my edition, this section appears starting on page 190 and concludes
with a section appearing on page 195.) The book speaks of
“generational faithfulness” as old patterns of dysfunction, of how
parents unknowingly use their children to medicate their old pains of
the past. The whole chapter speaks respectfully of the Bible, but it
draws into question the traditions of men.
The figure of Jesus confounds all
those principles of poisonous pedagogy… Long before his birth Jesus
received the greatest reverence, love and protection from his parents…
His earthly parents saw themselves as his servants… Would it not make
eminent sense to encourage believers to follow the example of Mary and
Joseph and regard their children as the children of God (which in a
sense they are)?
[T]he members of the upcoming
generations will have the courage to call evil by its name…It is high
time to relinquish the destructive models and to mistrust the principle
of obedience. We have no need of docile children brainwashed by their
upbringing to be ideal targets of seduction by terrorists and lunatic
ideologists, ready to fall in with their commands even to the extent of
killing others. Children given the respect they deserve from their
earliest years will go through life with open eyes and ears, prepared to
fight injustice, stupidity, and ignorance with arguments and
constructive action. Jesus did this at the age of twelve, and the scene
in the temple (Luke 2:41-52)
demonstrates eloquently that, if need be, he could refuse the obedience
his parents asked of him without hurting their feelings.
With
the best will in the world we cannot truly emulate the example of
Jesus. None of us were carried by our mothers as the child of God;
indeed, for far too many parents, children are merely a burden. What we
can do, provided we really want to, is learn from the attitude
displayed by Joseph and Mary. They did not demand docility from their
son, and they felt no urge to inflict violence on him. Only if we fear
the confrontation with our own histories will we need to have power over
others and cling to it with all our might. And if we do that it is
because we feel too weak to be true to ourselves and our own feelings.
But being honest to our children will make us strong. In order to tell
the truth we do not need to have power over others. Power is something
we only need in order to spread lies and hypocrisy, to mouth empty words
and pretend they are true.
The tradition of sacrificing children is deeply rooted in most cultures and religions. For this reason it is also tolerated, and indeed commended, in our western civilization.
Naturally we no longer sacrifice our sons and daughters on the altar of God, as in the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac. But at birth and throughout their later upbringing, we instill in them the necessity to love, honor, and respect us, to do their best for us, to satisfy our ambitions -- in short, to give us everything our parents denied us.
We call this decency and morality.
Children rarely have any choice in the matter. All their lives, they will force themselves to offer their parents something that they neither possess nor have knowledge of, quite simply because they have never been given it: genuine unconditional love that does not merely serve to gratify the needs of the recipient.
Yet they still continue to strive in this direction because even as adults they still believe that they need their parents and because, despite all the disappointments they have experienced, they still hope for some token of genuine affection from those parents.
"A research team in San Diego in the 1990s asked a total of 17,000 people, with an average age of fifty-seven, what their childhood was like and what illness they had suffered in the course of their lives.
The study revealed that the incidence of severe illnesses was many times higher in people who had been abused in their child than in people who had grown up free of such abuse and had never been exposed to beatings meted out to them "for their own good." the latter had had no illnesses to speak of in their later lives.
The title of this brief article was "Turning Gold into Lead." The author [Dr. Vincent J Felitti] who sent me [Alice Miller] this article, commented that these findings are unambiguous and highly eloquent, but at the same time covert and hidden.
Why hidden? The reason is that they cannot be published without leveling accusations at the parents."
"The ACE Study reveals a powerful relation between our emotional experiences as children and our adult emotional health, physical health, and major causes of mortality in the United States.
Moreover, the time factors in the study make it clear that time does not heal some of the adverse experiences we found so common in the childhoods of a large population of middle-aged, middle-class Americans.
[Many people] cannot love and honor their parents because unconsciously they still fear them.
However much they may want to, they cannot build up a relaxed and trusting relationship.
Instead, what usually materializes is a pathological attachment, a mixture of fear and dutiful obedience. . .
Individuals who believe that they feel what they ought to feel and constantly do their best not to feel what they forbid themselves to feel ultimately fall ill --
unless, that is, they leave it to their children to pick up the check by projecting onto them the emotions they cannot admit to themselves.
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.
Children have no choice. They must repress their true feelings if they have no "helping witness" to turn to and are helplessly exposed to their persecutors.
Later, as adults lucky enough to encounter an "enlightened witness," they do have a choice. Then they can admit the truth, they can stop pitying and "understanding" their persecutors, stop trying to feel their unsustainable, dissociated emotions, and roundly denounce the things that have been done to them.
This step brings immense relief for the body. It no longer has to forcibly remind the adult self of the tragic history it went through as a child. Once the adult self has decided to find out the whole truth about itself, the body feels understood, respected, and protected. (pg 27)
These patterns of childhood will inevitably then be adopted by their victims and used on their partners and their own children, at work, in politics, wherever the fear and anxiety of the profoundly insecure child can be fended off with the aid of external power. It is in this way that dictators are born; these are people with a deep-seated contempt for everyone else, people who were never respected as children and thus do their utmost to earn that respect at a later stage with the assistance of the gigantic power they have built up around them. (pg 28)
[W]e can give ourselves the attention, respect, the understanding for our emotions, the sorely needed protection, and the unconditional love that our parents withheld from us. . .
If we want to achieve this assistance from a therapist who can accept us for what we are, who can give us the protection, respect, sympathy, and understanding we need in order to realize how we have become what we are. . .
We need such a companion -- what I have called an "enlightened witness" -- if we ourselves are to act as companions for the child within, if we are to understand its "body language," to engage with its needs instead of ignoring them. . .
In that process one can shed one's symptoms, free oneself of depression, regain joy in life, break out of the state of constant exhaustion, and experience a resurgence of energy, once that energy is no longer required for the repression of one's own truth.
The point is that the fatigue characteristic of such depression reasserts itself every time we repress strong emotions, play down the memories stored in the body, and refuse them the attention they clamor for.
For some time, I have thought about quoting Alice Miller on this blog. She was a psychologist in Europe, living in Switzerland for some time, and she passed away earlier this year. She wrote about the “poisonous pedagogy” or the “black pedagogy” as it translates from German, a term which describes oppressive practices that people use when raising children. She defines this term as “the kind of parenting and education aimed at breaking a child’s will and making that child into an obedient subject by means of overt or cover coercion, manipulation, and emotional blackmail” (from the preface of The Truth Will Set You Free).
I don’t agree with her on some points, and I don’t like the anger that I discern when I read sections of her work, particularly other books. Yet at the same time, she was a brilliant, brilliant diagnostician in terms of developmental growth and patterns of family dysfunction. She also struggled with aspects of Christianity including aspects of the gender debate, and though I don’t always share her conclusions about all of these matters, she was honest and fair to read and consider the Bible. I have great respect for those who do not share my religious opinions but have honored me by thoughtfully considering my own. She brings a valuable perspective that I think Christians would be wise to heed.
I have also been reluctant to bring her name up on my blogs because she has worked as an anti-child abuse activist, contributing to the UN’s initiate regarding children’s rights. At this point, I’ve been called so many things from Communist to lesbian, I don’t really care anymore. I quoted Stalin in a paper that I wrote, something I cited from a book by Donald Howard, so I guess this is proof that I am a Marxist? My quoting her does not mean that I think that the UN is a terrific organization or that I am some Communist that wants to give our country to China and other third world nations. (I think that this has already happened in many respects.) I have read the literature and mailings concerning groups like HSLDA’s activism against the very causes that Alice Miller advanced. This does not mean that I support any of these groups. If you like, consider my cause for citing her as what PG Wodehouse once placed in the literary mouth of his Jeeves character when he said “It is best to know what tunes the devil is playing.” I don’t feel at all threatened by the cogent things she had to say, and it is my hope that we can learn from her wisdom.
On the night of what I understand was originally scheduled as a pre-trial hearing for Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz after the events that you can learn about elsewhere, I thought it would be fitting to quote Alice Miller since so little accountability for all of this matter has been shown by the Christian community. Caesar will apparently keep us honest, or will make fools of us for burying our heads as a Church, the group that should set ethical standards, not be shamed by secular ones. I think that we can learn, at least, from her honesty and from her compassion for wounded and hurting children. I wish I could quote more of her book here. I think that though many of those who are healing from “Botkin Syndrome” would also not agree with her on some points, I believe that many would find it insightful and validating.
I believe that, from the epistemology through which I best make sense of the world (How we know what we know), that truth is transcendent. Some say that all truths must come from the Bible first, and that what our senses tell us about the world is a lower order of truth. I am often criticized for being too much of an evidentialist, putting too much emphasis on worldly facts as opposed to Godly wisdom. In short, I do not think that these types of knowledge compete with one another, but I see them as “coherent” and “corresponding.” Statements from unbelievers can that bear truth can be very true in this sense, if they correspond to what is real. I am going to agree with Winston Churchill about truth who sums it up quite eloquently: “The truth is incontrovertible, malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end; there it is.”I don’t think that he would be intimidated by Alice’s statements either, because “here they are.” I think they stand on their own merit.
This section appears in “The Truth Will Set You Free” in the epilogue entitled “From Ignorance To Knowledge and Compassion.” (In my edition, this section appears starting on page 190 and concludes with a section appearing on page 195.) The book speaks of “generational faithfulness” as old patterns of dysfunction, of how parents unknowingly use their children to medicate their old pains of the past. The whole chapter speaks respectfully of the Bible, but it draws into question the traditions of men.
The figure of Jesus confounds all those principles of poisonous pedagogy… Long before his birth Jesus received the greatest reverence, love and protection from his parents… His earthly parents saw themselves as his servants… Would it not make eminent sense to encourage believers to follow the example of Mary and Joseph and regard their children as the children of God (which in a sense they are)?
[T]he members of the upcoming generations will have the courage to call evil by its name…It is high time to relinquish the destructive models and to mistrust the principle of obedience. We have no need of docile children brainwashed by their upbringing to be ideal targets of seduction by terrorists and lunatic ideologists, ready to fall in with their commands even to the extent of killing others. Children given the respect they deserve from their earliest years will go through life with open eyes and ears, prepared to fight injustice, stupidity, and ignorance with arguments and constructive action. Jesus did this at the age of twelve, and the scene in the temple (Luke 2:41-52) demonstrates eloquently that, if need be, he could refuse the obedience his parents asked of him without hurting their feelings.
With the best will in the world we cannot truly emulate the example of Jesus. None of us were carried by our mothers as the child of God; indeed, for far too many parents, children are merely a burden. What we can do, provided we really want to, is learn from the attitude displayed by Joseph and Mary. They did not demand docility from their son, and they felt no urge to inflict violence on him. Only if we fear the confrontation with our own histories will we need to have power over others and cling to it with all our might. And if we do that it is because we feel too weak to be true to ourselves and our own feelings. But being honest to our children will make us strong. In order to tell the truth we do not need to have power over others. Power is something we only need in order to spread lies and hypocrisy, to mouth empty words and pretend they are true.
I hope that we are not too pious as a Body to fail to honor and learn from her words before it is too late.
Please pray for the Schatz family and everyone whose lives have been touched by them. I don’t even have words to express my great sorrow or to find words to pray. What confidence that I have in Him, for He understands groans.
