Sylvie Shene - Articles - Every Life and Every Childhood is Filled with Frustrations

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ARTICLES: EVERY LIFE AND EVERY CHILDHOOD IS FILLED WITH FRUSTRATIONS

Every life and every childhood is filled with frustrations; we cannot imagine it otherwise, for even the best mother cannot satisfy all her child’s wishes and needs. It is not the suffering caused by frustration, however, that leads to emotional illness but rather the fact that the child is forbidden by the parents to experience and articulate this suffering, the pain felt at being wounded; usually the purpose of this prohibition is to protect the parents’ defense mechanisms. Adults are free to hurl reproaches at god, at fate, at the authorities, or at society if they are deceived, ignored, punished unjustly, confronted with excessive demands, or lied to. Children are not allowed to reproach their gods---their parents and teachers. By no means are they allowed to express their frustrations. Instead, they must repress or deny their emotional reactions, which build up inside until adulthood, when they are finally discharged, but not on the object that caused them. The forms this discharged may take range from persecuting their own children by the way they bring them up, to all possible degrees of emotional illness, to addiction, criminality, and even suicide.

The most acceptable and profitable form this discharge can take for society is literature, because this does not burden anyone with guilt feelings. In this medium the author is free to make every possible reproach, since here it can be attributed to a fictitious person. An illustration is the life of Sylvia Plath, for in her case, along with her poetry and the fact of her psychotic breakdown as well as her later suicide, there are also the personal statements she makes in her letters and the comments by her mother. The tremendous pressure she felt to achieve and the constant stress she was under are always emphasized when Sylvia’s suicide is discussed. Her mother, too, points this out repeatedly, for parents of suicidal people understandably try to restrict themselves to external causes, since their guilt feelings stand in the way of their seeing the situation for what it actually is and of their experiencing grief.

Sylvia Plath’s life was no more difficult than that of millions of others. Presumably as a result of her sensitivity she suffered much more intensely than most people from the frustrations of childhood, but she experienced joy more intensely also. Yet the reason for her despair was not her suffering but the impossibility of communicating her suffering to another person.

The attempt to be an ideal parent, that is, to behave correctly toward the child, to raise her correctly, not to give too little or too much, is in essence an attempt to be the ideal child---well behaved and dutiful---of one’s own parents. But as a result of these efforts the needs of the child go unnoticed. I cannot listen to my child with empathy if I am inwardly preoccupied with being a good mother; I cannot be open to what she is telling me. This can be observed in various parental attitudes.

Frequently, parents will not be aware of their child’s narcissistic wounds; they do not notice them because they learned, from the time they were little, not to take them seriously in themselves. It may be the case that they are aware of them but believe it is better for the child not to become aware. They will try to talk her out of many of her early perceptions and make her forget her earliest experiences, all in the belief that this is for the child’s own good, for they think that she could not bear to know the truth and would fall ill as a result. That it is just the other way around, that the child suffers precisely because the truth is concealed, they do not see.

The malleability of a sensitive child is nearly boundless, permitting all these parental demands to be absorbed by the psyche. The child can adapt perfectly to them, and yet something remains, which we might call body knowledge, that allows the truth to manifest itself in physical illness or sensations, and sometimes also in dreams. If a psychosis or neurosis develops, this is yet another way of letting the soul speak, albeit in a form that no one can understand and that becomes as much of a burden to the affected person---and to society---as his or her childhood reactions to the traumata suffered had been to the parents.

As I have repeatedly stressed, it is not the trauma itself that is the source of illness but the unconscious, repressed, hopeless despair over not being allowed to give expression to what one has suffered and the fact that one is not allowed to show and is unable to experience feelings of rage, anger, humiliation, despair, helplessness, and sadness. This causes many people to commit suicide because life no longer seems worth living if they are totally unable to live out all these strong feeling that are part of their true self. Naturally, we cannot require parents to face something they are unable to face, but we can keep confronting them with the knowledge that is was not suffering per se that made their child ill but its repression, which was essential for the sake of parents. I have found that this knowledge often provides parents with an “aha!” experience that opens up for them the possibility of mourning, thus helping to reduce their guilt feelings.

Pain over the frustration one has suffered is nothing to be ashamed of, nor is it harmful. It is a natural, human reaction. However, if it is verbally or nonverbally forbidden or even stamped out by force and by beating, as it is in “poisonous pedagogy,” then natural development is impeded and the conditions for pathological development are created. Hitler proudly reported that one day, without a tear or a cry, he managed to count the blows his father gave him. Hitler imagined that his father never beat him again thereafter. I take this to be a figment of his imagination because it is unlikely that Alois’s reasons for beating his son disappeared from one day to the next, for his motives were not related to the child’s behavior but his own unresolved childhood humiliation. The son’s imagining tell us, however, that he could not remember the beating his father gave him from that time on because having to fight down his psychic pain by identifying with the aggressor also meant that the memory of the later beating was repressed. This phenomenon can often be observed in patients who, as a result of regaining access to their feelings, now remember events they previously emphatically denied had taken place.

From the book: “For Your Own Good: Hidden Cruelty in Child-Rearing and the Roots of Violence”

By Alice Miller

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