Empathy grows as we learn.
If not consciously acknowledged and mourned, uncertainty about one’s descent can cause great anxiety and unrest, all the more so if, as in Alois’s case, it is linked with an ominous rumor that can neither be proven nor completely refuted.
Everyone who has been beaten as a child is susceptible to fear; everyone who was deprived of love as a child will long for it, sometimes their whole lives. This longing contains a whole bundle of expectations, and those expectations, coupled with the fear we have referred to, form an excellent medium in which the Fourth Commandment can thrive. It represents the power of adults over children, and it’s reflected unmistakably in all the religions of the world.
The answer is that we can never do the right thing as long as we are out to please someone else. We can only be the people we are, and we cannot force our parents to love us. There are parents who can only love the mask their child wears.
It is above all the children already born that have a right to life – a right to coexistence with adults in a world in which, with or without the help of the church, violence against children has been unequivocally outlawed. Until such legislation exists, talk of “the right to life” remains not only a mockery of humanity but a contribution to its destruction.
It is our access to the truth that can enable us to prevent such people, who yearn for the “order’ spawned by violence, from realizing their destructive plans. Fascism will have had its day once society ceases to deny the knowledge we already possess about the production of brutality, violence, and dehumanization in childhood and minimize its dangers. Once this has happened, it won’t have a chance in this society.
The banished emotions reassert themselves and invade the body.
What is valid for the individual is also valid for the development of a wider social consciousness. Here, too, the monstrous truth regarding the causes and consequences of child abuse and the way that violence can be bred into human beings cannot be admitted to the consciousness all at once, but must proceed slowly, step by step.
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.
Love and cruelty are mutually exclusive. No one ever slaps a child out of love but rather because in similar situations, when one was defenseless, one was slapped and then compelled to interpret it as a sign of love.
My conviction is that therapy is only successful if it can change this perspective and the thought patterns connected with it. If people genuinely succeed in feeling how they suffered from their parents’ behavior as children, they will usually lose their empathy for those parents with hardly any inner conflict at all.
Nationalism, racism, and fascism are in fact nothing other than ideological guises of the flight from painful, unconscious memories of endured contempt into the dangerous, destructive disrespect for human life, glorified as a political program.
To escape this vicious cycle we must face the truth. And we can do it. We were humiliated children; we were the victims of our parents’ ignorance, the victims of their history, of the unconscious scars with which childhood left them. We had no choice but to deny the truth.
In the end I had to realize that I cannot force love to come if it is not there in the first place.
If the repression stays unresolved, the parents’ childhood tragedy is unconsciously continued on in their children.
The way we were treated as small children is the way we treat ourselves the rest of our life. And we often impose the most agonising suffering upon ourselves.
Time after time, the amazing fact is uncovered that sons and daughters are unconsciously re-enacting their parents fate – all the more intensely the less precise their knowledge of it.
When children are trained, they learn how to train others in turn. Children who are lectured to, learn how to lecture; if they are admonished, they learn how to admonish; if scolded, they learn how to scold; if ridiculed, they learn how to ridicule; if humiliated, they learn how to humiliate; if their psyche is killed, they will learn how to kill – the only question is who will be killed: oneself, others, or both.
Many people suffer all their lives from this oppressive feeling of guilt, the sense of not having lived up to their parent’s expectations. This feeling is stronger than any intellectual insight they might have, that it is not a child’s task or duty to satisfy his parent’s needs.
Rage and pain can apparently pass quickly if one is free to express them.
Without therapy, it is impossible for the grandiose person to cut the tragic link between admiration and love.