It has always been the case that it is not cruelty itself that arouses public indignation but rather calling attention to the cruelty. (Baudelaire described things everyone knew about, but as a result his book Fleurs du mal was initially banned by the official censors of the day.) The victimization of children is nowhere forbidden, what is forbidden is to write about it.
—Alice Miller
8 replies on “Miller quote”
If I may quote my father from a phone conversation early this year, when I was discussing my then inability to get a job with him, and my worries over that, plus my catharsis/self-employment idea of writing a book [Consumption]:
Keep in mind I hadn’t even finished the book, no one has ever commented to me on it (or my life, bar occasional sarcastic/insensitive asides), he’d never read any of it, no one else for that matter had read any of it, my friends didn’t know it, the rest of my family didn’t know it, society at large didn’t know it, and there was no one alive anymore who knew the contents of it and could agree with me (there was a single person lifelong who did know a bit of it, over a decade ago), and, as far as I know, the First edition hadn’t sold a single copy at that point (now it’s sold 1 copy according to Lulu – the Third edition hasn’t sold any), so I hadn’t made any money off it either. Thus, I struggled to see what he meant by ‘milking it’.
He was very quick to shut me down over the matter, not even in ‘damage control’ so much as the full, arrogant knowledge that he really does believe i.e. that nothing bad has ever happened to me. He’s the sort of person you’d have to have a hidden camera/microphone around, he’s so duplicitous over this. Even then, he’d deny it (and tell you off for recording him!)
I told you before about the rest (my mental health team, academics & researchers, MH advocacy groups, probation, my family, ‘friends’, some stockists taking no interest in it). When you’ve got to the point that the only way you can shift copies is to buy them yourself then practically force them on people for free, you know your book has failed. I’m not banned. It’s just… there’s no interest (one of the worst forms of public ‘censorship’). I know it’s wordy, and a bit poetic, but I didn’t think it was that boring to read!
I see what she means by “forbidden”, I think. If it’s not apathy, it’s contempt and bile, or black pedagogy.
Hi Ben,
What you say is very important.
In my experience, it was only when Paulina read my Letter to Mom Medusa and told me in a handwritten letter (I was living in Houston at the time) that it had made her cry, that my healing process began. Pau was what Miller called a “knowing witness”: although no one helped the child when he was being abused, as an adult, someone finally took pity on him!
That means it took 22 years after the hell that left me without a career (in Houston, I did manual labour) for someone to appear who saw at least something of my tragedy.
My cousin Octavio, the one who strangled his daughter and then hanged himself a few years ago, never even had a Paulina in his entire life (I talk about him in my third autobiographical book). Octavio’s case is much more common than mine, while super-empathetic people like Paulina are few and far between.
If I may make an intimate confession in this thread, here it is.
Men can’t be good “knowledgeable witnesses” with another guy because we can’t touch each other when confessing our sorrows, or when crying. With a woman, even if we’re not romantically involved, it’s possible to do that. Paulina was the first person who listened to me, as I recount in Hojas Susurrantes.
Thanks for the hard (reality is painful) advice. I should have added… I wish it could have been my girlfriend ‘partner’ of nigh-on 11 years, but she certainly doesn’t want to know (not that I ever get a hug off her either of her own volition, let alone much on the ‘I love you’ front).
Currently (probably for a few years now) she’s made all her problems, plus our mutual related problems into all there is to it, and monopolised each desperate, nagging, guilt-tripping conversation with them, all of a ‘when are you going to sort all this out for us [me]! theme. I have to do this… I have to do that… otherwise I’m… [her female professional agrees with her, and thinks I’m a monster due to the manner in which she talks about me to her – as do any state workers who will listen to her, which is all of them so far]
She’s got two adult male children, a father, my father too, and, recently, a totally empathetic therapist to speak to about her problems. She forgets I have no one. She’s made it by her concerns that my own worries – the things that worry *me* intrinsically, and only me; all this sort of thing – are buried far in the background under her total myopia, thoroughly discarded, as if she knew all there is to being fraught, and all there ever can be in totality. As if what we faced as a couple, or me observing her and her life struggle, was all there is to it.
It’s a total nightmare. I ricochet most days recently between wanting actively to shoot myself in the skull (again), sitting for hours in wracked, hypertense sadness with my head in my hands… and just wanting to escape and yet knowing there is no way currently to as we’re too financially screwed (and a nervous wreck with a 24+ year severe psychiatric history and a TACT conviction, who has never had a paid job in his life, is not going to get the best employment in a hurry, in a country with a failing job market).
I can’t teach her empathy. She has *enough* sympathy off of others (and me too on better days).
It’s a shame I know no one who meets your description. I had one female friend at one point, but she dropped me quick as a flash when she found out that I was a ‘terrorist’.
I’m really not sure what to do. It’s like walking slowly along hot coals with a wall to your rear… you just have to hope you get to the end of the path before your feet burn off. There’s isn’t an escape I can afford.
I’ll just hope I’m not officially homeless on the 2nd December to cap it all off. I can’t shake her off me without her terrible, angry blame, and a thousand hostile-to-me eyes suddenly appearing out of nowhere, offering her sympathy, and forcing me by decree to ‘be responsible’ and thus to feel ashamed.
I can’t cry anymore – I had a go a few times the other day. The neuroleptics don’t let me.
Sorry just to expel… I’m not really looking for realistically unobtainable aid. I just I just like a record, just so it’s – at least in theory – known.
My family also made me a scapegoat. To avoid acknowledging that the family dysfunction stemmed from my parents, everyone except Corina blamed me, including my relatives and “friends,” as I refer to them in my last video.
In the following videos, I settle the score with all of them.
When you manage to leave the UK and are no longer dependent on them, it would be wonderful to denounce them by name, as I did in the videos that still need English subtitles.
Girlfriend? Girlenemy, rather. Sounds like a co-dependent relationship. (In a relationship, each party has something the other party wants/needs.)
In my case, I’m a lightweight handyman and can usually fix things to benefit others. Alas, something about my personal embodiment elicits lack-of-respect responses from these others that I have first helped; and they continue returning because they need things fixed. So why do I continue fixing things for them? Because I’m lonely. It’s a co-dependency behaviour from both parties, more than anything else. If it wasn’t for my social security income, I think I’d have already passed.
Dear highrpm,
Thanks for sharing your struggles with me, and for the observation on my own situation: yes, I completely agree with you.
It’s only quite recently I learned the term ‘co-dependant’. It certainly sounds like it’s that. The public presentation for me is: I’m nigh-on 100% useless, ‘just another useless man…’ etc., The private actuality is I do rather a lot, both physical/domestic, financial, and emotional/comforting, and it’s just never acknowledged (though there’s always room for improvement), but at the same time I’m not appreciated or respected – not lauded or anything unnecessary, just basic human respect – in the slightest. Sort of sabotaged continuously and then meant still to carry on being a productive, if increasingly faulty, utility: ‘Gosh, I wonder why he’s not so helpful anymore…’
I’m actually trying currently to get away from them as soon as feasible, though I know the fallout will be appalling from that. Whatever is realistically within my power to do (much as the circumstances haven’t made it easy) ultimately is my responsibility. I think to myself: ‘If a man makes himself a worm…’, etc.
I think the parental conditioning as a child rendered me too passive/tolerant around her as an adult (I read female covert narcissists gravitate towards ‘PTSD’-esque abused males, it seems common).
I’m sorry to know your hard work isn’t appreciated as much as it should be, and that you’re taken advantage of. The hardest part is always knowing it’s happening as it happens. These people have no self-reflective shame. I’m very sorry to know you’re lonely. I hope writing here helps a little (I’ve become religious recently in my personal writing habits).
Best regards,
I’m just pulling out of it tonight. That bird has flown in a sense; I’m not sure when I realised, but it was only a few hours ago.
I’ll reiterate a bit of what I just wrote to you [César] by email. I note also that being in female company for extended stretches brings out the more emotional side of a man, and leaves then vulnerable to higher stress, with the only avenue available being petty anger – domestic anger, not exterminationist rage. I personally require a male-only environment to function to full potential. I think that makes sense:
I, ultimately, shouldn’t care too much currently if these Neanderthal subhumans around us are kind (as we know they’re not), I should care as to how many of them can prove they’re not subhumans, by showing the desire and ability to express as the killing machines they very much can be. How to dispose of the rest increasingly falls into place after that.
In the absence of ethnic cleansing-inspired men, the mind does naturally turn to the only other option… brooding over a failed world, and then down into the personal minutiae. Another short circuit.
There’s only so much moping over the state of the world that feels acceptable, otherwise it does become myopic. To sit around complaining like an honorary woman.
They should be angry, mad, burning with rage and vengeance! Only secondarily to that would one also want them nice as people, much as they need both qualities in some balance, enough to be loyal, and loyal to the Principle of Life.
Our task, clearly distinct from this febrile white nationalism, is to be angry, to be hateful, seething for the spilled blood of enemies, and to make them that can be angry enough too. I’m tired of just waiting for circumstances to ‘do’ that. I’m convinced they’ll go to shit, certainly. I am not convinced it’ll automatically make any difference. Hence the need to step in.
I’ll return to thinking directly along these lines from now on. This can be my final marker on this topic, at least from my own weary perspective’s examples.
Indeed. That’s precisely why Sparta held its meals for men (syssitia) alongside the other males in the public dining halls.
We must reinstate that law of Lycurgus. I too have noticed that living with a woman without brothers, fathers, uncles, or warrior sons around leaves you psychologically like our old friend Autisticus Spasticus, who had no male figure in his childhood, raised solely by his mother.