[âI once initiated a discussion on the Fourth Commandment by asking what the love of oneâs parents consisted of exactly, even if they were cruel to us in our childhood. The answers came quickly, with little time for reflection. Various feelings were named: compassion for the old people, who were frequently also ill or frail; gratitude for the gift of life and the good days when one was not beaten; fear of being an evil person; the conviction that we must forgive our parentsâ deeds because otherwise we will never be truly adult. This triggered a heated discussion, in which these views were challenged. One participant, Ruth, said with unexpected vehemence:
My life is proof positive that the Fourth Commandment is wrong. Once I freed myself from the claims made on me by my parents and stopped living up to their expectations, overt or covert, I started feeling healthier than I had ever felt before. I lost all my symptoms, I stopped being irritable with my children, and I now believe that all those things had happened because I was trying to comply with a commandment that did not do my body any good.
Ruth thought this commandment had such power over us because it supports the anxiety and the feelings of guilt our parents have inculcated into us at a very early age. She herself had been a prey to enormous anxiety shortly before she realized that she did not love her parents. She had only wanted to love them and accordingly pretended both to herself and them that she actually did. Once she became aware of this, the anxiety disappeared.
I think many people might feel the same way if they had someone say to them, âYou donât need to love and honor your parents. They did you harm. You donât need to force yourself to feel things you donât really feel. Constraint and enforcement have never produced anything good. In your case they can be destructive; your body will pay the price.â
This discussion confirmed my impression that we sometimes spend all our lives obeying a phantom that goes by the name of upbringing, morality, or religion. It forces us to ignore, repress, or fight against our natural, biological needs, and finally we pay for this with illnesses that we neither understand nor want to understand and that we try to overcome with medication. When patients undergoing therapy actually manage to achieve access to their true selves through the awakening of their repressed emotions, some therapists, inspired no doubt by Alcoholics Anonymous, attribute this to the agency of a âhigher power.â By doing so, they undermine the trust we all have in ourselves from the outset: the trust in our ability to sense what will do us good and what will not.
In my case, my father and mother systematically drove this trust out of me from birth. I had to learn to see and judge everything I felt through my motherâs eyes and to systematically kill off my real feelings and needs. Accordingly, in the course of time I was seriously handicapped in my ability to feel my own needs and to go in search of their gratification. For example, it took me forty-eight years to discover the need to paint and to allow myself to gratify that need. Finally, that need asserted itself. It took me even longer to concede myself the right not to love my parents. In the course of time, I realized more and more clearly how the effort of loving someone who had almost ruined my life was doing me serious harm. It was estranging me from my own truth, forcing me to deceive myself, constraining me to adopt a role my parents foisted on to me so earlyâthe role of the âgood girlâ forced to comply with emotional demands masquerading as upbringing and morality. As I gradually learned to be true to myself and succeeded in admitting my own feelings, the language of my body spoke out more and more clearly and guided me toward decisions that did it good and helped it to express its natural needs. I was able to stop joining in other peopleâs games, to stop telling myself that my parents had their good sides, to stop confusing myself over and over again as I did when I was a child. I was able to decide in favor of adulthood. And the confusion disappeared.
I know now that my parents did not want me. Their parents forced the marriage on them. I was the unloved product of two well-behaved children who owed their parents a debt of obedience and brought a child into the world whom they did not want. They were hoping for a little boy, because that was what the two grandfathers wanted. But they got a little girl instead, and for decades that girl did all she could to compensate them for the happiness they had missed out on. This undertaking was doomed to failure. However, as a child intent on surviving, I had no choice but to do the best I could. From the outset I received the implicit injunction from my parents to give them the acknowledgment, attention, and love that their own parents had withheld from them. If that attempt was to succeed, I had to give up my own truth, the truth of my own feelings. Despite these efforts I was long dogged by profound feelings of guilt, for this was an injunction that I could not comply with. In addition, I denied myself something of paramount importance: my own truth. (This was something I began to suspect when I wrote The Drama of the Gifted Child, a book in which so many readers identified their own fates.) Yet, for decades to come, I went on trying to fulfill this mission, even when I reached adulthood. I tried it with my partners, with my friends, with my children. Every time I attempted to extricate myself from the duty of rescuing others from their confusion, the feeling of guilt almost killed me. Only very late in life did I finally succeed.
Sloughing off gratitude and guilt feelings was an extremely important stage on the path to breaking with my dependency on my internalized parents. But there were other steps that had to be taken as well. The most important of these was giving up the expectation and the hope that what I missed most sorely in my relations with my parentsâa frank exchange of feelings, the freedom to communicateâmight someday be possible after all. It did indeed become possible, with other people, but only after I had realized the whole truth about my childhood. Then I understood how impossible it was to communicate freely with my parents and how much suffering that had caused me as a child. My parents have been dead for a long time now, but I can imagine that for people whose parents are still alive this process is even more arduous. The expectations originating in childhood can be so strong that we will give up everything that would do us good, in order finally to be the way our parents wanted us to be and thus sustain the illusion of love.
Karl, for example, describes his confusion as follows:
I love my mother, but she doesnât believe me, because she confuses me with my father, who made life hell for her. But I am not like my father. She makes me livid, but I donât want to show my anger, because then she would have the proof that I am like my father after all. And thatâs not true. So I have to curb my anger, so as not to prove her right, and then I donât feel love for her, only hate. I donât want that hate, I want to be seen and loved by her the way I am, not hated like my father. Whatâs the right thing for me to do?
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 love only the mask their child wears. When the child removes that mask, they frequently say, as we saw earlier with Andreas, âAll I want is for you to be the way you were before.ââ]
alice miller, from the body never lies: the lingering effects of hurtful parenting, 2006
