On contempt and disregard

The following extract is taken from Alice Millers book, The Drama of Being a Child.

Disregard for those who are smaller and weaker is thus the best defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helplessness: it is an expression of this split off weakness. The strong person who – because he has experienced it – knows that he, too, carries this weakness in himself does not need to demonstrate his strength through contempt.

Many adults first become aware of their feelings of helplessness, jealousy, and loneliness through their own children, since they had no chance to acknowledge and experience those feelings in childhood. I’ve spoken of the patient Peter who was obsessively forced to make conquests with women, to seduce and then to abandon them, until he was at last able to experience how he himself had been abandoned by his mother. When he also remembered how he had been laughed at by his parents, he consciously experienced for the first time the feelings of humiliation and mortification that were aroused back them. Until that point, all of his feelings had been completely concealed from his consciousness,

The suffering that was not consciously felt as a child can be avoided by delegating it to one’s own children – in much the same way as in the ice cream scene I have described: “You see, we are big, we may do as we like, but for you it is “too cold”. You may enjoy yourself as we do only when you get to be big enough.” So it is not the frustration of this is that is humiliating for the child, but contempt shown for his person. The suffering is accentuated by the parents’ demonstrating their ‘grown upness’ to avenge themselves unconsciously on their child for their earlier humiliation. They encounter their own humiliating past in the child’s eyes , and they ward it off with the power they now have. We cannot, simply through an act of will, free ourselves from repeating the patterns of our parents behavior – which we had to learn very early in life. We become free of them only when we can fully feel and acknowledge the suffering they inflicted upon us. We can then become fully aware of these patterns and condemn them unequivocally.

Until we become sensitized to the small child’s suffering, this wielding of power by adults will continue to be regarded as a normal aspect of the human condition, for hardly anyone pays attention to it or takes is seriously. Because the victims are ‘only children’ their distress is trivialized. But in 20 (or 30 years time) these children will be adults who feel compelled to pay it all back to their own children. They may consciously fight with vigor against cruelty in the world yet carry within themselves an experience of cruelty that they may unconsciously inflict on others. As long as it remains hidden behind their idealized picture of a happy childhood they will have not awareness of it and will therefore be unable to avoid passing it on.

After posting and re reading this I would just like to say we need not ‘condemn’ our parents for doing what was done to them and what conditioning made them do, we need to show understanding for why while knowing ultimately how damaging that behavior is that we never want to repeat it.