SELF-ARCHEOLOGY

The following text is from Alice Miller's book "Banished Knowledge." As time went on it became clear to me that the idea of children inventing traumas is absurd. Anyone is free to check on the natural law that human beings will avoid pain rather than seek it. They seek pleasure, joy, reassurance. Masochism is no exception to this rule: It is a compulsion to inflict new suffering on oneself to keep former suffering repressed. The masochist who at great expense has himself whipped by a prostitute and insists on sitting on a chamber pot during the procedure is obeying a compulsion to reproduce the trauma of his toilet training and to keep the memory repressed at all costs. Another law of life is that the idealization of the parents with the aid of fantasy and repression helps the child to survive; thus to attribute bad things to one's nearest and dearest would run counter to natural defenses and the law of life. It follows that a child will never invent traumas . On ...

As you can tell from the title of this blog post, it will be a more personal one. Yesterday I visited my grandparents’ town where I spent a lot of time in my childhood and adolescence. I haven’t been there for about 4 years. I walked around for about 30-40 minutes. A lot has changed – renovations, new buildings, new people. It’s a very small town, so I was able to visit a lot of familiar places. I experienced a shroud of memories and a wide range of emotions. My memories were both pleasant and unpleasant – and I felt them in my mind and in my body. Emotionally, I felt great sadness, grief, nostalgia, child-like worrylessness, relief, loneliness, hurt, fear…. And because now I know how to soak my memories and emotions in, without them overwhelming me and without me blocking them, I just let in the thoughts that came up, and let myself feel whatever emotions followed those thoughts. Since I didn’t have my journal with me (or its substitute, like iPad), I recorded an audio log on ...

There’s this very common misconception that such emotional states as forgiveness, love, and respect (or emotions in general) depend on one’s wish and willpower, not on other person’s actions or various environmental factors. Often people believe that they can feel forgiveness, love, or respect just by using enough mental effort. However, the truth is that it depends not on the person who feels or doesn’t feel forgiveness, love, or respect, but on OTHER people’s actions. And sometimes the guilty party even blames the aggrieved party for “failing to forgive” them. “What more should I do?!“, “I said I’m sorry!” and so on. Or they minimize the harm and aggrieved party’s emotions: “It was just a joke!“, “It‘s not that serious,” or “Let’s just forget what happened and move on.” Or they make it about them: “Why are you punishing me?!” What is harm? Harm is a physical, psychological and emotional damage that has been done by someone to someone. Physical harm very often is accompanied by e...