Descriptions of depression and more (part I, part II and part III)

(September 6, 2019)

Diego Tapia Figueroa, Ph.D. and MaritzaCrespo Balderrama, M.A.

“Regretting a past misfortune that now does not exist is the surest way to create another misfortune”.

(William Shakespeare)

Everyday sadness (like other emotions) occurs in social relationships as part of the complex human condition and often acquires an abusive and cruel power, which tyrannizes, oppresses, and steals people’s lives. It is a challenge to question in an authentic way what builds ethical awareness. From what feeling do I decide to propose and communicate in each relationship: from the complaint, from sadness, from anger, from joy?

According to the World Health Organization (WHO):

It is estimated that nearly 50 million people in the region of the Americas live with depression… Depression is the leading cause of health problems and disability worldwide… Depression affects us all. It does not discriminate based on age, ethnicity, or personal history. It can damage relationships, interfere with people’s ability to make a living, and reduce their sense of self-worth… depression affects more than 300 million people worldwide. In the worst case, it can lead to suicide. About 800,000 people commit suicide each year, and suicide is the second leading cause of death in the 15-29 age group.

There are social, economic, cultural, family contexts that create and contribute to accentuating experiences and feelings of sadness. For example, in our psychotherapeutic work, the evidence shows us that many of the people who go through these crises of deep sadness that paralyze them were victims of sexual abuse in their childhood or adolescence. Or, that they were and have been victims of emotional sexual abuse, by significant people in their family and relational context. They have been abused, abandoned, and unprotected, and not accepted or recognized by their parents; or looted and emotionally vampirized by their parents, relatives, partners, friends. They have not felt loved, accepted, recognized.

The dictatorship of contemporary fashion obliges and teaches to present a façade of perennial and hypocritical pseudo happiness: on the one hand the “successful-happy-consumers” and on the other, the “losers-unproductive-depressed”; a duty to be happy 24/7, prevents talking about these complex and painful experiences; façade accompanied by mercenary self-help manuals, which are a vulgar and silly funnel that all people must go through. Or, the path of prescribing drugs -which is also fashionable- is almost always chosen, which fills families and society with zombies instead of helping people put words to their pain. Critical thinking or reflective dialogue to create responsible alternatives is not encouraged; and, by not speaking, relationships are dehumanized and depression prevails and alienates.

What happens when there come periods where the tone of humor is rather confusing, and if something is felt it is sadness, uncertainty, tiredness, anger, bitterness, helplessness, shame, defeat, vulnerability, and frustration? Ecuadorian society is not characterized by generating contexts of well-being, respect, and joy. It is seen daily that in this country, living conditions do not improve for the majority of the population. It is a complex and difficult context, where the daily struggle to live with dignity does not produce the expected results; it is often exhausting and demoralizing. Power and privileges in the hands of castes of corrupt and Mafiosi, welfare only for a minority and others: excluded, disciplined, marginalized, oppressed majorities are the context of this world with hierarchies, which are sold and accepted as normal, natural, and eternal.

People who begin to be slaves to their depression, feel that they are worth little, expect the rejection of others, their mistreatment, and deception. They lock themselves in distrust, the desire for nothing, fatigue, sleep, isolation. There is an inner voice that hammers, with the same painful and desperate repetitive sentences: “you are useless, you are not worthy, you do not deserve anything good, you cannot do anything, your ideas are terrible, your feelings are garbage, you are despicable, everything will be worse”, etc. This sense of emptiness is experienced as a defeat that confirms one’s existential failure. These people feel guilty, judge themselves, and condemn themselves to unhappiness; they go through the world and life, almost asking for forgiveness for existing. Their fears make them pusillanimous, puerile, dependent on the abusive people or those abusers on duty.

People who allow themselves to be tyrannized by sadness, and almost seem to take pleasure in that deep and perennial sadness, are deeply distrustful. They don’t even trust their own shadow. They see with envy and resentment the love that others receive; the achievements and well-being of others, they experience it as an insult, personal aggression. Often people who get used to this state of affairs: suffering, crying, considering themselves the worst, isolating themselves, agonizing in their lethargy, and excluding others from their lives, seek to establish relationships of couple or friendship or family of enormous dependence and codependency “without you I die”, is their slogan; to which they add within: “with you, I have to die or let myself die, or at least, I may prevent you becoming free of me”. They have unrealistic expectations, idealize relationships, and infantilize those relationships. They demand and expect only perfection; and, every imperfect detail is seen as betrayal, inconsequence, disloyalty, and foul play. They are fierce and relentless in their plea for perfection to their partners, friends, and family (and themselves).

Tormented by depression, they do not admit errors, weaknesses, and contradictions typical of the complex and vulnerable human condition. They do not accept or admit or have a tolerance for frustration; and, when frustrated, destructive and self-destructive reactivity is triggered; permanent resentments; irreversible mistrust. They live by feeding on prejudices; ethical relational boundaries seem to them to be further evidence of injustice against them. They refuse to work to generate the best version of themselves.

They maintain relationships, which confirm something cruel and unfair (and that is not true): that they are garbage, that they are a garbage dump, a deposit of the garbage of others. Capitulation as subjects of rights, with their subjectivity. And, they end up wearing out and losing their dignity and freedom, inventing alibis, pretexts, and justifications for their vile, cruel, cynical, and unjust executioners. Masters-executioners whom they “love”.

Professional victims

These people place depression as a medal and demand capriciously, abusively and irrationally, and with deep-rooted resentment, to be pleased, obeyed, and overprotected as a sign of authentic interest, affection, and respect. They feel justly oppressed by stories of abuse and disrespect for family, partners, or their networks of friends and others; at the same time, they assume a position of victim, emotionally blackmailing others from their constant self-victimization, blaming them for their paralysis, holding them responsible for their fear of life. And they learn something sad: that the victim can exert enormous power over others, that they can tyrannize others, with their sad “being a professional victim.” They can be smart, and they choose to live foolishly.

By presenting themselves as victims, by giving grief, by touching the bad conscience of those who can value life, they obtain “gains”: being the center of attention; colonizing the time and space of others; oppressing with their selfishness, and blindness.  Only their hypertrophied pain exists and should be heard and comforted, that of others is a nuisance, which does not interest them, to which they are indifferent, or it bothers and annoys them. They have fallen in love with their complaining and angry voice, passionate about ruminating on their sad defeat, their resignation, their resignations. “The others were born with a star; I was born crashed”. Prisoners of a repetitive monologue, deaf and blind to context, to transformations, to life.

Sad characters experience not being. Their feelings and sensations are empty and their life is meaningless. They do not recognize in themselves any resource, quality, value, importance, merit, ability, intelligence. The world is a threat and other people are potential enemies and evil. They find no pleasure in any human activity. They do not enjoy (and sabotage others) to the fullest of sex, eating or sleeping, studying, working, in leisure time; feeling joy seems incoherent to them; they do not enjoy or let others enjoy things. And, if it ever happens, they feel fear and blame each other. They do not concentrate, nor do they manage to be really present in any communication, action, or relationship. They choose distrust as their companion. They live under the tyranny of fear of being judged, rejected, questioned, of committing to the other.

They stop feeling

People who choose depression as a permanent companion, let themselves be consumed by shame and, to survive, become accomplished actors and actresses, in the art of showing a mask, a façade of supposed well-being, trying to hide with enormous effort their anxiety, anguish, fear, guilt: they believe that, by deceiving everyone, they will be able to deal with this emotional lie that wears them down, they imagine that they will be able to go unnoticed. They are experts in saying only negative things to others, experts in looking for the “but”, the deficit; minimizing the achievements of others, or ridiculing them, refusing to recognize good intentions, value the affection they receive, they are experts in rejecting; and they become aggressive, negative, violent in their language, and difficult to satisfy. They shut up by poisoning themselves and forcing others to shut up.

They fear intimacy with others; are stressed at every moment and with any situation and context; they leave no room for a little peace in their mind, in their body, in their words, in their silence, in their relationships; they take refuge in negative and repetitive thoughts, which they “love” to ruminate until they run out of energy. They want to control every relationship, and at the same time, they are afraid to build meaningful bonds. With their isolation, their infinite sadness, their acceptance to live under the tyranny of fear and guilt, they reach a critical point: they stop feeling. They choose drama and waste themselves with their judgment.

The challenge is to connect, love, and accept yourself, commit to trusting yourself and others, to consciously craft the belief that you are good as a human being; without discarding your contradictions, weaknesses, and human errors.

We are relational beings, who build ourselves with the other, with the stories we tell others about us and those that others tell about us. We are what we think we are. When we can change our conversations and transform the meanings of our experiences and resignify them, our negative beliefs about ourselves and the world, we transform the quality of our lives. This relational movement influences our context: when we learn ways to increase our assertive gaze, with creative and positive reflections we also enhance the lives of others. Facing and going through depression does not depend on becoming someone else, but on learning to enjoy what you are and what you can become with others.

We suggest you watch this video:

Part II

(September 20, 2019)

“Give word to pain: pain that does not speak, groans in the heart until it breaks it”

(William Shakespeare)

The statistics on these issues overwhelm and make us question: every 40 seconds (every 40 seconds), a person, somewhere in the world, decides to stop living, commits suicide. This society is a society of death, with a social structure made for death and, for the majority of the population, cruel and unjust death. We invite you to continue reflecting with us by recovering other perspectives, which allow us to contextualize this serious situation. Of course, in the next installment, we will present options for therapy in these situations, although it is clear that if something contributes and serves is to speak, listen without interrupting, have the will to understand what´s complex, without judgment, by connecting with the other.

Evil exists and is the absence of love. Juan Luis Linares, a Spanish therapist, quotes Maturana, who maintains: “We are loving creatures and we get sick when love is blocked”; Linares speaks of deconfirmation, one of the most destructive relational phenomena since it is the denial of someone’s existence. It is when a human being experiences the experience that extraordinarily important people, on whom their survival depends, forget them, lose sight of them, stop perceiving their needs… In short, they do not consider them as an individual, but as an instrument or an extension of themselves. In that atmosphere of disqualification, of loving malnutrition, especially children and adolescents break down inside.

Therapist John Bradshaw, in explaining his concept of toxic shame, argues that whoever is a slave to toxic shame has that feeling that others disapprove of them and that they do not meet all the requirements. They are convinced that there is something wrong with themselves and that there is nothing they can do about it; that they are inadequate and defective beings. 

An individual dominated by toxic shame maintains a hateful relationship with himself. Toxic shame provokes a feeling of failure, makes you feel unworthy, convinces you that you have failed as a person; it is a break with oneself. The individual despises himself and considers that he is not worthy of his trust or the trust of others. The person is tormented by a sense of absence, emptiness, and despair.

Depression narrates a person’s unresolved crisis with its social and relational context. The depressive state is one in which we lose interest and pleasure concerning what surrounds us, we fall to pieces, we convince ourselves that we do not count for anything. It is an infinite suffering, a loss of initiative, a permanent feeling of pain and despair, a void that produces only anxiety and that prevents those who are depressed from establishing any kind of relationship between their depression and the events of their life.

The contribution of Giovanni Jervis, an Italian psychiatrist (a psychiatrist very different from the common psychiatrists, psychotherapists, and experts of any school) will be very useful in understanding the depressive process. Jervis argues (whom we reproduce at length, in our adaptation) that depression is an imbalance of humor tone. The tone of humor is the balance between depression and euphoria, which is the most fragile and unstable of all psychic balances. A certain degree of euphoria is a constitutive aspect of the desire to live and is probably indispensable for making projects or even glimpsing the future. Or, vice versa, being able to do projects and glimpse the future is necessary for a fair “euphoric balance” of humor.

Jervis says that “depressive personalities” are rarely cheerful people, who tend to pessimism, have little self-confidence, and are not very aggressive: they are dedicated, in general, with diligence, fully completing their tasks because they have a strong sense of duty, but show little enthusiasm and little creativity; they risk little and build slowly; they enjoy the little things.

Projecting into the future means not being depressed

Tendentially depressed parents subject their children to an unhappy family climate and a rigid and guilty upbringing education, which facilitate their future depression. In middle age, depression tends to be more frequent: a crisis of the normal ability to project oneself into the future appears, and projecting oneself into the future means not being depressed.

Those who are truly depressed feel devastated and have lost all hope of being able to free themselves from their condition. In general, the depressed person does not arouse sympathy, but annoyance, anger, and aggressiveness. The “good advice” for the depressed person abounds (and does not work), encouraging them to have fun, telling them to stop thinking about it, to get a partner, to get to work; such an attitude, which, moreover, is always tinged with hostility and impatience, is not only not useful to them, but tends, in general, to blame them more for their state of mind, to make them feel even more powerless and lonely, more devoid of hope.

In general, depression is experienced by the individual as an attitude of absolute realism regarding one’s life situation or the human condition as a whole. In other words, the depressed person usually maintains that he has every reason to be like this. It is not always without reason. The important thing is that the depressed, whatever the cause and legitimacy of their depression, are in a state of suffering that always makes justified and significant attempting at supporting them (which does not mean assuming the role of “savior”, to end up crucified).

Giovanni Jervis argues that the depressed is not only a sad person: he is also characterized by distrust and lack of appreciation for himself, the feeling of guilt, the inability to express aggressiveness, closing in on himself, the need for self-punishment. The depressed is also a person who cannot imagine the future. Lacking confidence in life, totally pessimistic about any possibility, deprived of creativity and strength, he is unable to project himself in time and formulate concrete projects: therefore, he cannot even imagine overcoming his sadness, because his life is an eternal present, devoid of perspectives, possibilities, and joy. The world seems colorless, uniform, petrified: feelings are dead, and death is everywhere, in your body and things.

The typical day of the severely depressed is an abyss of pain; time is eternalized. The depressed feel permanent difficulties in falling asleep and very easily wake up very early in the morning, with a feeling of deep anguish. The idea of having to spend the day scares him: he can’t imagine how he will be able to fill a few hours that seem empty, useless, and meaningless. The feeling of sadness and worthlessness he experiences inevitably suggests to him the image of death as a liberation. The depressed individual is overwhelmed by his own mistakes, his faults, his limitations. With exasperated moral rigor, he fails to excuse anything from his past, but neither does the present situation. There is in him, the impossibility of finding the slightest interest in anything and, therefore, in concentrating and working; much less to enjoy.

Depression and anxiety

Giovanni Jervis explains that very often, depression is accompanied by anxiety. Depression and anxiety are two related but differentiated moods. Anxiety is about waiting for unknown threats, suffering, and fear in the face of possible unpleasant events, on the other hand, depression is not directed to the future but exclusively to the present and the past: it is remorse, pain for lost things, anguish not because of the threat of evil, but because of an irremediably current evil.

The pain of depression is so intense, the sense of the uselessness of life is so constant and the sense of the loss of one’s worth is so present, that it is rare that a depressed person does not ever think about suicide even if he does not always mention it. The same problem of suicide and craving that this possibility provokes in relatives and therapists should be discussed with the depressed person; in many cases it may be opportune to hold the depressed person responsible on this point, telling them and making them understand that they are free and that no one if they want it, can prevent them from committing suicide. Such an attitude (involving respect, serenity, and temperance) can also be useful in breaking the frequent vicious cycle of craving, threats, and psychological blackmail between the depressed person and family members.

The depressed live themselves as unworthy, dead, and useless; self-condemnation is total: the depressed is “dead”; they take refuge in the morality of an absolute kind, an external value of which they do not own, and by which they can only be crushed. In depression nothing evolves; time has stopped. The feeling of guilt of depression is such that the individual nips in the bud the possibility of reacting, of fighting against a difficult situation; they feel induced to think that this situation is not only inevitable but also fair and that their duty is to live it to the core. This does not mean that they do not want to get out of his suffering: it means, rather, that they cannot imagine a legitimate way of being, different from this pain.

The depressed sometimes adapt and strive to perpetuate themselves in their role as a miserable and afflicted person; but more often and more typically they do not come out of the duel, because of a self-punitive self-closing will. The insomnia of the depressed, for example, is made of repentance and self-accusations, but also of an exacerbated moral tension; the depressed deny themselves any possible relaxation, any right to forget, even during the few hours of sleep.

Giovanni Jervis adds that what is always specific to the psychological situation of the depressed is not so much not being able to discover alternatives as not being able to discover the (social-relational) connections of that painful or disappointing life situation that tyrannizes them with depression. Those who do not manage to discover in society and history the broader plan in which their condition of life is inscribed, are destined to close in on themselves and to look for the causes of evil within themselves. Thus, the depressed is not so much guilty of depression itself as of having built (as an isolated individual) an existence in which he no longer believes.

In the depressed person, in his childhood and his life history, the formation of a particular morality always appears, of a rigid, perfectionist, absolutist, dogmatic, and punitive “duty to be”; he is oppressed by prejudices and by not building new meanings.

Do drugs, antidepressant medicines, help?

According to the Italian psychotherapist Luigi Cancrini (we also reproduce it in extenso, in our adaptation), the pills set in motion, in a good and in a bad way, mechanisms of denial; the pills induce, both in the “patient” and in his relatives, the idea that the crucial objective of the therapeutic intervention is to keep the crisis out and not to face the drama of the person who suffers.

According to Cancrini, the problem with the use of antidepressant pills is the ease with which easy and unreal solutions are promised to those who are afraid of not being able to get out of the crisis based on their responsible commitment to a consistent therapeutic process. The use of antidepressants is similar to the position of chiromantics, astrologers, magicians, and healers of all kinds: the ability to make believe that the difficulties of the depressed individual depend on mysterious factors and the possibility of their active intervention.

Often, giving standardized chemical responses to certain types of depression does not help the person understand and get to the root of their discomfort. It can artificially keep them in limbo, taking them away from their attention to what they need to put into words and the relationships they need to transform; and depression will return at another time, in an inevitably more dramatic way. With antidepressant pills it remains in the quality of “zombifying” and narcotizing the consciousness of depressed people; they are prevented from the option of confronting their pain, acting differently, and transforming themselves responsibly.

According to Cancrini, the indiscriminate and irresponsible use of antidepressant pills has the consequence of not having a substantial influence on the authentic pain of the person, moving away from it, making it less natural, more difficult to express it. For those who only prescribe pills, what is evident is that they completely lack the ability to listen to the real suffering of the depressed person. The pain of the other reminds us of ours, the one we are not able to admit or recognize, the one we deny.

The person who comes colonized by the prescriptions of these doctors and psychiatrists, instead of being supported to go through this painful stage, seeking to understand their emotional context and their relationships with others, is pushed to deny their reality, to protect themselves; and he stagnates, freezes in its suffering. Thus, because of the use of drugs, they resort to denial in order not to recognize the relational and social sense, the deep and complex reasons for their sadness; pills that repeat the relational knots and perpetuate them, which prevent them from expressing the conflict in which they are involved.

Often drugs serve only to hide and mask the difficult issues of relationships, to waste time, and are an excellent business for pharmaceutical companies and their privileged expert servants, who live very well from the pain of others. They rob you of the right to have the depressed person express their feelings: a rage that cannot be expressed or lived until it is hidden and drowned behind the poisoned crust of antidepressant pills.

The human misery that multiplies this capitalist society oriented with fundamentalism to sustain hierarchies spiritually empties the most sensitive and the most vulnerable people; excludes and stigmatizes their difference and rebellion; it imposes on them the comfortable mask of “disease”, which must be diagnosed and medicated by the “experts” in social control so that “everyone” looks and acts as if they are happy. In this game of appearances, power marginalizes, oppresses, and silences politically and socially the complex questions with which every person “with depression” challenges us.

Check: Luigi Cancrini, Give words to pain. Depression: knowing it to heal, Publisher: Frassinelli; 4th edition (September 1, 2003)

Part III

(October 4, 2019)

“Whoever that does not know how to live with compassion and embrace the pain of others, is punished by feeling his own with intolerable violence. Pain can only be received by raising it to common luck and pitying others who suffer”.

(Cesare Pavese)

The Art of Personal Liberation

The severely depressed should be treated primarily as adults, endowed with dignity, and as someone responsible; their ailment should be treated with respect. It must help them to re-establish meaningful relationships with reality; they must be able to feel necessary to others, and at the same time assert their role; that can recover a situation of equality with the people with whom they coexist.

The therapist’s responsibility is to help people emerge the motives that have triggered the suffering, to give them the courage to release -in the special encounter of the therapeutic process- all the pain, anger, and aggressiveness hidden behind the mask of depression. It is not easy at all. It is important to understand that there is no transformation without pain. And that the responsibility for transformations in their relational context lies with the person asking for help and not with any “expert”.

Depression is a symptom. It’s about understanding the context in which depression manifests itself. The challenge is to help the person understand the reasons for their depression, find the deep reasons for their discomfort, and begin to feel better through this awareness. That they can “heal” themselves by looking within themselves and understanding how they build relationships with others.

Whoever enters a depressive crisis will be able to find alternatives, from the moment they can find a compromise between their organizational autonomy and the acceptance of their vital project. The challenge is to help the depressed person develop their ability to confront those behaviors and thoughts that have less to do with their meaningful relationships. That they develop the ability to use their internal resources by and about the demands posed by daily life.

To achieve a personal balance, it is surely better to live with depression trying to make sense of it. It is about supporting people to discover and develop the strength and maturity to truly look within themselves, as well as the style of their relationships with others; to know more about themselves. The art of transformation, in the therapeutic process, has to be seen as an art of personal liberation of the person asking for help.

Alice Miller: Sense of Depression

Let’s look at several ideas of Alice Miller, to reflect (take what serves and is useful and do not do it with what isn´t) in a brief systematization of her book, “The Drama of the Gifted Child, and the Search for the True Self”.

Miller says: most depressed people have generally had extremely insecure mothers who often suffered from depression themselves and regarded that son or daughter as their property.

What is called depression and feels like emptiness, existential absurdity, fear of impoverishment, and loneliness, is always presented as the tragedy of the loss of the SELF or of estrangement in front of oneself, which begins in childhood … for fear of losing love during childhood. Depression brings us closer to the vicinity of the childhood wound, but only mourning for what was lost, for what was lost at the decisive moment, leads to authentic healing.

A person is free from depression when the sense of self-worth is rooted in the authenticity of one’s feelings and not in the possession of certain qualities. Deep down, the non-depressed person is envied because he does not have to continually strive to deserve admiration, because he does not need to do anything to produce this or that effect, but, with all peace of mind, he can afford to be as he is.

As long as a person cannot confront their parents in an internal dialogue, express the anger and indignation stored in their body, claim their rights and elaborate on the abuses to which they were subjected; as long as they do not live through this process, as long as they do not live their tragedy or understand that of their children, they will not free themselves or enjoy the joy of spontaneous love for their children.

Liberation will not be possible without a deep work of mourning the situation of one’s own childhood. The ability to live the mourning, that is, to renounce the illusion of one’s own “happy” childhood, and to emotionally perceive the full magnitude of the wounds suffered, returns to the depressive its vitality and creativity and can free the great from the efforts and dependence of its work as Sisyphus.

If a person can realize, through a long process, that he was never “wanted” for having been the child he was, but used for his performances, successes, and qualities if he can realize that he sacrificed his childhood for this supposed “love”, this realization will produce deep internal shocks, but one day he will feel the desire to put an end to his advertising maneuver. He will discover in himself the need to live his true SELF and not have to continue earning that love, a love that, deep down, leaves him empty-handed because his object was that false BEING that he himself has begun to renounce.

Alice Miller argues that a beloved child will learn from the beginning what love is. A careless, despised and exploited child will not be able to learn it. If the depressed person pays attention to his context, he will be able to take advantage of his depression: it will allow him to learn a series of useful truths about himself. We can discover that we do not necessarily have to follow the initial scheme (disillusionment-repression of pain-depression) because from now on we will have another possibility to deal with frustrations: the experience of pain. Only in this way, we´ll get emotional access to our early experiences to be opened to us, that is, to the hidden areas of our BEING and our becoming.

It is not only the “beautiful”, “good” and complacent feelings that allow us to be alive, give depth to our existence and provide us with decisive ideas, but often those that are uncomfortable and inadequate, precisely those that we would prefer to avoid: impotence, shame, envy, jealousy, confusion, anger, and mourning. In the therapy space, these feelings can be lived, understood, and processed. In this sense, this space constitutes a mirror of the complex world itself, which is much richer than the “beautiful face” we often see.

Liberation from depression does not lead to a state of permanent joy or total lack of suffering, but vital dynamism, that is, the freedom to live the feelings that arise spontaneously. It is proper to the plurality of the living that these feelings are not always joyful, “beautiful” and “good”, but that they reveal the whole scale of the human, that is, also envy, jealousy, anger, indignation, despair, nostalgia, and affliction.

Alice Miller says, both the great and the depressive completely deny the reality of their childhood by living as if they could still save the availability of their parents: the great, in the illusion of success, and the depressive, in the fear of losing attention to their fault. But neither of them can accommodate the truth that in the past there was no love whatsoever (the mother and father they deserved: loving, respectful, protective, with unconditional love; that they were accepted for the mere fact of being and existing: those parents never existed and will never exist) and that no effort in the world can ever change this fact.

Sometimes, access to our true SELF (and being with others) is only possible if we no longer need to have the affective (idealized) world of our childhood. When it has been lived, it will no longer be strange or threatening. It will become known and familiar to them, and they will no longer have to continue to hide behind the walls of the prison of illusion. We will then know who and what “locked us up”, and precisely this knowledge will free us, also, at last, from old pains.

We return (for their usefulness) to these reflections by Alice Miller, already published in this space (Friday, September 7, 2018): Adults refuse to pay attention to their children’s feelings because they have had to forget their own sufferings. The more they have suffered, the more they will refuse to identify with the discomfort of the dependency situation and will not want to get in touch with the pain. Denying their own pain, they deny that of the child. They foolishly repeat abusive behaviors as if to prove that they are not wrong. As long as a parent is unwilling to question their own parents, they will not want to remember what they have experienced. There are people who do not know their true needs because they have not had the right to have them. They have never said NO to their mother or father. That’s why they don’t know very well who they are. Alice Miller (we insist, look for her books, read them reflecting honestly, urgently), proposes these liberating questions, with her deep wisdom:

What tormented me during my childhood?

What was it that I was not allowed to feel?

Miller explains: a child, from birth, needs the love of his parents; he needs them to give him their affection, their respect, their acceptance, their attention, their protection, their affection, their care, and their willingness to communicate with him. The less love the child has received, the more he has been denied and mistreated under the pretext of education, the more he will depend -once he is an adult- on his parents or substitute figures, from whom he will expect everything that his parents did not give him as a child. It does not mean that we have to pay our parents, already elderly, with the “same coin” and treat them with cruelty, but that we must see them as they were, just as they treated us when we were little, without idealizing them or lying to us, to free ourselves and our children from that pattern of behavior. We need to let go of the parents we have internalized and who continue to destroy us; only in this way will we have the desire to live and learn to respect each other, accept ourselves, feel confident, and love each other.

The adult no longer needs this illusion to survive. You can give up on blindness and by doing so, with your eyes open, decide what you are going to do. The challenge remains to create with others the material and spiritual conditions for the full development of the capacities of one’s own and others’ children; it is the challenge of joy.

We suggest the following texts by Alice Miller for your reference:

“Solitude”:

Miller, Alice. (2007). The body never lies. Barcelona, Tusquets.

Miller, Alice. (2009). Saving your life: overcoming childhood abuse. Barcelona, Tusquets.

English translation of Bruno Tapia Naranjo.