How negation of a person’s emotional reality contributes to self destruction and denial of the true causes of abuse

The following is a very long excerpt from the book A Philosophy of Pain written by Arne Johan Vetlesen.   It is an interesting exploration of our how we have been conditioned as a society to down play pain and the trauma that led to it via certain philosophies which function to disengage us from deeper emotional realities.

Projection plays a big role in the function of scapegoating an individual who is emotionally, physically or sexually abused.  The perpetrator(s) have in investment in the truth being erradicated or remaining buried or silent.  This issue is discussed eloquently in the following extract. May it help other survivors.

“To downplay pain inflicted on the other person, or to deny that it has taken place at all, is the favourite strategy of all kinds of inflictors of pain, and not restricted in any way to offenders that psychiatry would term psychopaths.  It manifests itself as a conception that the abused person has deserved it.  Unfortunately this way of perceiving and describing the person is often taken over by the person himself, as a confirmation of the abuser’s picture of reality.  If nothing else, the self rebuking and self despising provides a certain ‘meaning’ for what takes place:  to get what one deserves can be said to have a certain logic, possibly even a kind of moral.  In a way, the world is left intact – it was only oneself who was at fault, and now the balance has been reestablished.  If this mode of thought, launched by the abuser, confirmed by the outside world and internalized by the injured party, is taken to its extreme, the abuser may even seem to be someone who has acted in the service of good rather than evil.

No matter how perverted such an interpretation might seem to be, it does suggest a certain order, a certain predictability between cause and effect, the sinner and the punishment, the psychological importance of which for the abused party, should not be underestimated.  The premise is that not finding any meaning can make a person ill; this is the clinical sense in which humans are meaning dependent and so meaning craving begins.  When the truth about the abuse and the abuser is forbidden, is linked to the destruction of world, to losing everything and everyone, to getting everyone against one because one knows one will not be believed, since the truth is so painful for all those involved and any other (i.e. untrue) interpretation is to be preferred and feels less shameful, then even the abused person can end up supporting the abuser’s version.  In such abuses as incest and pedophilia, where the most forbidden and outrageous acts have taken place, in an absolute breach of trust and security, of the adult’s responsiblity and loving care for the vulnerable child, the abused party can easily become – and always remain – a victim in the (interpretive) sense in addition to the physical sense.

To risk experiencing that no one will believe one as one is defying the taboos and speaking out, can be so painful, so lonely and hopeless that it affects the mind.  It becomes an abuse on the top of the original one, a second rejection.  The abused person starts to doubt: since no one will confirm what has been experienced, seen, heard, smelled, done as being identical with what is most forbidden, secret and unutterable, it has perhaps, not happened, it is perhaps simply something I am imagining.

Mental reality does not thrive when completely on its own, as a reality of just one person, as incapable of being shared with and confirmed by someone else, a living soul somewhere, sometime  The natal reality inner space needs confirmations can only be proved by intersubjectivity.  The person who remains unseen and that which remains overlooked do not exist.  Other people are needed to lend validity to what has been experienced, to make it feel real.  This goes for all persons, in all phases of life, not only childhood.

To blame the victim is not only tempting for the person who abuses others, but also for outsiders.  If nothing serious has taken place, nothing that is wrong, one does not need an outsider to intervene.  One does not need to expose oneself to the anger and resistance of the abuser, to quarrel with a person who has already shown himself to be ruthless.  By excluding the recognition of others’ infliction of pain on yet others, one avoids having to accept all the discomfort that accompanies the insight into what humans can do to each other, including oneself.  The cost of this denial of reality is furthermore paid for by the weaker party, the one unable to offer resistance (in the short term, it should be noted, no in the long term.)

The list is long of the playing down and explaining away of the interpersonal – characterised by interaction – element of psychic pain, the fact that pain does not have to originate from its present bearer here and now…. Alice Miller has argued.. .victims often become perpetrators.  The pain B was inflicted by A, and is passed onto C who, unable to directly retaliate, will in turn pass it on to D.  And so on, in one long chain of person to person transported pain.

Miller’s pithy formulation is : ‘Every abuser has once ben a victim of abuse’, and she takes the traumatic childhoods of well known people as empirical material, including Adolf Hitler.   Along with most specialists I feel that MIller’s formulation is a considerable exaggeration, and that there are abusers that are genuine ‘first movers’ i.e. the starting point for the above chain reaction.

Nevertheless Miller succeeds in directing our attention towards an indisputable phenomenon, the need to get rid of something that feels unbearable by sending it away, by directing it at certain other people, although these are often ‘selected’ for random reasons.  She thus draws our attention to the importance of breaking the evil circle of pain transportation.

…being given a function as an object and ‘container’ for another person’s psychic pain can lead to a wide range of different reactions, not only depending on the nature of the cause and the pattern of the interaction between the parties but also on the personality of the person assigned such a role.  In adult-child relationships characterised by reverse parenting, where the child from an early age learns to be considerate towards a mother or father who gives the impression of being extremely fragile, or of possibly falling to pieces as a result of the most minor error or lack of attentiveness, a child that is particularly sensitive will gradually develop a form of super sensitivity, an incredibly finely meshed ability to pick up the fragile adult’s mood and needs in a broad mental and affective sense.  The child will have the task of being able to take a hint, of being on the spot to give the desired refill, to be affected by the adult’s affectedness.

And guess what?  Quite often these super empathic, ever attentive children end up as therapists in their professional adult life, in a lifelong practicing of role of caring and refilling that they have learned in their early childhood, and that in certain cases takes root – is internalised – as the only possible and conceivable ‘script’ for the person’s way of living and acting, the only role he or she will ever become familiar with.  To be made invisible regarding one’s own needs, wishes and projects as as child, so that the will and ability to have anything like that of one’s own – and to have the courge to communicate it to other people, and possibly even to demand something of other people – have been neglected and lain fallow from the outset, can just as easily lead to an adult life characterized by the continuing self effacing role as to the change of roles that Miller originally postulated, where one fine day the cowed child, now an adult, will do other what others had once done to it – assuming the opportunity presents itself and children or other particularly vulnerable people are available for the passing on of pain.

Against this background it is understandable that therapists say the most important thing they work on in their therapy with many patients is to stimulate the emergence of a healthy ‘egotism’.   The patients are not assertive enough, they demand too little on their own behalf – not too much, or everything as psychopaths do.  Some of these patients whose afflictions have to do with feelings of insufficiency, emptiness and apathy, with cooped up rage whose origins are unknown and which they are scared to lift the lid on, are victims of the type of mental abuses Miller depicts with consumate skill.  When pain is located in the defenceless and uncomprehending child, when an adult attacks imaginined and asserted shortcomings in the child as a result of having split off precisely these characteristics from themselves (by… a process of projective identification) the boudaries between the child and the adult are blurred or even extinguished.  That which is real, and the meaning to be assigned to it, is not something that is established by a mutual exchange between the two, instead there is something that is completely dicated by one party who does not tolerate the slightest reminder that something that has happened is experienced in any other way by others.  As the saying has it, when the all dominant person in the family is cheerful, every body else is, and when he is the opposite, everyone is anxiously watchful, fear the attacks of anger that might me immanent.

The attack on the other person’s self, on the other person’s positive self esteem and value, goes hand in hand with the annihilation of the mental reality of the other person, by its being denied any form of validity or value; psychopaths are particularly active as well as harmful in doing this, of course, but it is not their prerogative : the inclination at work is human, all too human. With such a life-story a lot of hard work is needed to rebuild all that has been pulled down for good – work the person is unable to do alone .. which requires another person’s independent support and confirmation.  Since anyone who from an early age has been most familiar with disrespect will tend to meet every giver, every approver with distrust, we are dealing with an enormous gap that needs to be bridged.  For anyone who has been abused time after time, the meeting with a person who seems to be good and unselfish can release a strong feeling of ambivalence.  It is hard to completely believe that it is true, that one deserves something like this that something that is really good and that it is a question of being given, not just taken from, will be able to last.  The need for that which is good, for another person who both has something good and is willing to give one part of it is immeasurable yet at the same time so fragile and supercharged that the person cannot tackle it.  Love is destroyed while it is only just starting, before the relationship has really got going.  That wounded person prefers to be the rejected than to risk rejection; prefers appearing as the active party so as to conceal  deep sense of begin impotent and unworthy.  This is how a self destructive pattern is confirmed at the very moment the possibility of breaking it was there, of experiencing that one is wrong, that others can be good and that one’s own goodness can be valued rather than exploited or denied or ridiculed.. ….we engage in self fulfilling prophecies even when their content is sinister and their effect nothing but self destructive, a dead end in every respect; we are even wont to return to an to enact our worst traumas – an inclination so deep it requires years on the couch to break free of it and so use one’s energies on seeking out what is truly good as opposed to what is most painful and spells continued misery.”